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Agletsch call it a Drerd,” a voice in his head said, and Gray realized it was Konstantin speaking to him through his implants, not McKennon.

      “Hello, Konstantin,” he transmitted. “Getting settled into your new base of operations okay?”

      “Everything is most satisfactory, Admiral,” the AI replied in its maddeningly calm and precise voice. “I have managed to interface with the Sh’daar systems of data storage and begun downloading information on their civilization. There are a number of species here in the files which we have not previously encountered.”

      “I suppose that’s to be expected,” Gray replied. “When America paid her last visit here, we didn’t hang around for very long.”

      “No. There are some hundreds of mutually alien species that evolved within the N’gai Cloud over the course of some billions of years. We knew of only a handful.”

      Gray looked at the gathering aliens in the virtual meeting space and wondered why they had been chosen, as opposed to, say, the F’heen-F’haav symbiote pairs, or the sluglike Sjhlurrr.

      It begged the question: who the hell was calling the shots for the Sh’daar?

      Before he could figure that out, he realized the Drerd appeared to be speaking:

      We give formal greeting to our visitors from the future …

      The voice was a deep baritone and clearly human, or more likely an AI human avatar. According to data now appearing in side windows in Gray’s consciousness, the huge being was rumbling at infrasound frequencies, producing sound waves down around 8 or 10 Hertz, well below the 20 Hz limit of human hearing.

      Ghresthrepni, the Adjugredudhran ship captain, responded, in a smoothly blended medley of clicks, chirps, trills, and tinkling bells.

      We note, too, the being said in translation, the presence of an associate from our Collective’s future, whom the Agletsch name Glothr. We would know the reason for this conclave.

      Lights shimmered and pulsed within the Glothr. We bring warning from your future, ran the translation.

      We would hear, rumbled the Drerd, from the humans. It was they who requested this gathering of Mind.

      “You’re up,” McKennon said.

      “I guess so.” And Gray stood.

      The virtual image around him shifted as he did so. Rather than in a classroom of some sort, he now stood on an endless flat plain. The sky remained the same—vast clots of stars, nebulae, and scattered artificial worlds. Now, however, a circle of beings stood on that plain, facing one another. The Drerd, Gray saw, was bigger than he’d even imagined—a ponderously mobile mountain, a mountainscape all in its own right. He was the only human, and the other species were represented by just one apiece. The Glothr, he saw, was standing a couple of meters to his right, an Agletsch just to his left, while the Drerd towered above him perhaps fifty meters ahead, on the other side of the circle.

      The others—Adjugredudhra, Groth Hoj, and perhaps thirty or forty others—gathered around. He saw here several that he recognized but he’d not seen in the classroom simulation: the Baondyeddi, like massive, many-legged pancakes ringed about with eyes; the monstrous but beautiful Sjhlurrr, eight meters long and mottled gold and red; and a swarm of silvery spheres hovering together in midair, the intelligent component of the F’heen-F’haav hive-mind symbiosis.

      So they are here. Interesting. Most—not all, but most—of the beings in that circle towered over Gray: the Groth Hoj by a meter or so, the Drerd by literally hundreds of meters. Individual F’heen were a few centimeters across, but that flashing, shifting sphere of hundreds of closely packed individuals was easily ten meters across. The Agletsch was smaller than a human, perhaps half of Gray’s height, and there was something to his right that looked at first glance like a glistening and flaccid pile of internal organs a couple of meters long and half a meter deep. Those few smaller beings, however, didn’t lessen at all the impact of standing with so many giants. Gray felt dwarfed, less than insignificant. It didn’t help that every single entity there belonged to a civilization more mature, more technologically advanced, than Earth’s. He felt like a child in a roomful of very tall, very old adults.

      And how could it have been otherwise? Humankind had emerged from pre-technological darkness only the blink of an eye ago. It had been ten millennia since the invention of the plow, a mere six hundred and some years since the discovery of radio, and half that long since the first human faster-than-light voyage. The chance that any star-faring aliens encountered would be younger than humans was nil.

      He thought of the assembly as the Sh’daar Council, though how accurate a description of the group that might be he had no idea.

      “I have information for this Council,” Gray said, speaking through his cerebral implants. “Information acquired from the remote future—from a time twelve million years beyond my own epoch, and about eight hundred eighty-eight million years from this time we’re in now. We learned this from the Glothr, on the sunless world we call Invictus.

      “And I think all of you, the Sh’daar Collective Council, need to know this …”

       Chapter Six

       2 November 2425

       Virtual Reality

       N’gai Cluster

       1212 hours, TFT

      Konstantin-2 fed recorded imagery to the Sh’daar Council as Gray continued to speak. The powerful AIs on board America had, 12 million years in Humankind’s future, tapped into the vast and intricate web of Glothr information networks. The information and imagery found there had been returned to Konstantin in the year 2425, analyzed, and translated. Those records, now imbedded within Konstantin-2’s memory, created a visual backdrop shared by all of the entities present as Gray spoke.

      “This,” Gray said, “is the galaxy, my galaxy—we call it the Milky Way. This is what it looks like in my own time.”

      The plain and its looming circle of giant beings had vanished. In its place, the Milky Way hung in silent, glowing splendor against Night Absolute. The central hub showed a faint reddish tinge while the spiral arms around it glowed faintly blue. From this vantage point, it was easy to see that the galaxy was, in fact, a barred spiral, its hub elongated in its ponderous revolution about the super-massive black hole at its heart.

      Four hundred billion stars … forty billion Earthlike worlds … some millions of intelligent species, many with star-faring civilizations—all within that single soft glow of tangled, nebulae-knotted, spiraling starlight.

      “A wise human named Sun Tzu once said, ‘Know your enemy,’” Gray told the others, “and so we humans have been learning as much as we can about the Sh’daar Collective. We know you evolved within this dwarf galaxy you call the N’gai Cluster, that your civilization was destroyed by the Schjaa Hok, the Transcendence, and that you rebuilt it from the ashes.

      “We know that as the N’gai Cluster was devoured by the larger Milky Way, you spread out to create a new empire, one spanning both space and time … and that you were determined that the Transcendence would never again threaten your culture, or the cultures of other species that were interacting with you. We know that you found ways to travel from your epoch to mine, where you gathered many more species to your cause … the Turusch, the H’rulka, the Slan, and others. And when we humans refused what you offered—and what you demanded in return—you urged those species to attack us, either to force us into obedience, or to destroy us …”

      Thunder rumbled, deep and insistent—the Drerd interrupting. You humans are balanced on the precipice, the translation informed him. You are closer to Schjaa

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