Dark Mind - Ian Douglas

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a current sex-drama actress who went by the same name. In-head dramas, fed into people’s internal hardware, were a major source of both entertainment and education. Gray preferred interacting with electronic avatars to address his sexual desires, rather than sexbots. The sensations and results were the same … but the relationship played out inside his brain rather than in his bed. So when the illusion dissolved, so did the partner. The feeling was precisely that of waking from a dream, and that could leave you feeling empty and a bit lonely.

      “Admiral Gray,” a voice whispered in his head. “Admiral Gray. Sorry to wake you, sir, but we’re coming up on the triggah.”

      “Very well,” he replied. The voice was that of Eric Conrad, his new chief of staff. He sat up, stretched, and thoughtclicked the room’s lights to higher brightness.

      Unlike a dream, the memory of his encounter with Marie hadn’t evaporated upon waking. The memories were written directly to his long-term memory; the human brain literally could not tell the difference between what happened within its network of neurons and what happened in the real world outside.

      Somehow, that made the loneliness worse.

      But it kept his sex life uncomplicated.

      “How close are we?” he asked over the open circuit. He took a small capsule from a dispenser and slapped it against his naked chest. The nanomaterial turned semi-liquid with the shock and flowed swiftly over his body from neck to feet, solidifying in seconds into closely woven shipboard utilities, complete with rank tabs at the throat.

      “Twelve thousand kilometers, sir,” Conrad replied. “We have battlespace drones out, and they’re sending back some good images.”

      “Let me see.”

      The bulkheads of Gray’s quarters went dark, then lit once more, showing a projection of surrounding deep space. Stars hung suspended in velvet blackness. Directly ahead, robot drones sent back images of the TRGA—the Texaghu Resch Gravitational Anomaly. From this aspect, it appeared to be a perfect circle, gray-rimmed, surrounded by a faint haze of dust and debris.

      Properly known either as the Sh’daar Node or as the TRGA, the circle was in fact a hollow cylinder of ultra-dense matter twelve kilometers long and one wide, rotating about its long axis at close to the speed of light. Located over 200 light years from Sol, the TRGA—a “triggah” in Navy slang—was clearly artificial and clearly the product of an unimaginably advanced technology. There were others besides this one—tens of thousands, perhaps, scattered across the galaxy as a kind of spacetime transportation net. At one time, Earth Military Intelligence had believed that the alien Sh’daar had created the things; certainly they used them, as did human star-farers. But no one knew for sure who’d actually built them in the first place, not even the information traders known to Humankind as the Agletsch. They worked, and for most people, that was enough.

      This particular TRGA was the first one discovered by human explorers, thanks to information provided by Agletsch traders. Just recently, it had been given the code name Tipler, after twentieth-century physicist Frank Tipler, who had worked out the math for Tipler cylinders—titanic, ultra-massive constructs that might allow travel across vast areas of space and even through time. The TRGAs had turned out to be related to Tipler cylinders, but inside out—rotating hollow tubes rather than solid cylinders—though the effect was the same.

      Perhaps a dozen TRGAs were now known, all of them named for important physicists and cosmologists from the past few centuries.

      Sometimes Gray wondered if they’d have been surprised to see their theories become reality.

      The circle slowly grew larger in size as America and her supporting fleet approached it. That cylinder, Gray knew, held the mass of a sun the size of Sol somehow compressed into something akin to neutron-star material. Inside that fast-rotating shell, Jupiter-sized masses rotated and counter-rotated, stretching local spacetime beyond the breaking point. That haze was in part dust, and in part gravitational distortions in the space within which the triggah was imbedded.

      And they were about to go through it.

      “Fighter status?” Gray asked.

      “VFA-96 is ready for launch, Admiral,” the staff officer replied. “Awaiting your word.”

      “Launch fighters,” Gray replied. “And go to battle stations.”

      He was already on his way up to America’s bridge as the battle-station alarms sounded.

       Lieutenant Donald Gregory

       VFA-96, Black Demons

       0440 hours, TFT

      “It’s too fucking early …” Don Gregory complained.

      “There ain’t no day or night in space, youngster,” squadron commander Luther Mackey replied. “So no early or late. Deal with it.”

      “It’s zero-dark thirty, Skipper,” Gregory replied, “and I haven’t had my damned coffee yet.”

      “My … grouchy first thing, aren’t we?” Lieutenant Gerald Ruxton said over the tactical channel, laughing. He sounded … awake, Gregory thought. Disgustingly so. Bright, cheerful, and—considering the fact that he’d been in the ship’s bar drinking with him about five hours ago and was, therefore, just as short on sleep as he—

      “Ice it down, people,” Mackey said. “Bearing one-seven-five by minus three-one. We’re clear for launch. America has cut thrust and is drifting. Fifteen hundred kps …”

      Gregory’s SG-420 Starblade fighter absorbed the incoming data even as the skipper relayed it in staccato fashion. He could feel the flick and trickle of numbers downloading through his skull.

      “Launch in three …” Mackey said, “… and two … and one … release!”

      Mounted in the outer deck of the second rotating hab module, the fighters of Black Demon squadron, VFA-96, began sliding down their launch tubes, impelled by a half G’s worth of centrifugal force. Gregory was third in the queue; together with Lieutenant Bruce Caswell’s Starblade, he dropped into blackness, slowly drifting clear of the shadow of America’s massive forward shield cap, then rotated to align his craft parallel to the far larger star carrier. The ship was an immense mushroom shape nearly a kilometer long, its shield cap a hemispherical water reservoir four hundred meters across. Ahead, partially obscured by the shield cap, the perfect circle of the TRGA—blurred by rotation and by a fiercely twisted spacetime—hung suspended in the distance.

      The remaining VFA-96 fighters dropped from the habmodule flight decks and took up station with the others, a flight of twelve Starblades already morphing into highvelocity teardrop shapes. Even in the vacuum of space, streamline counted for ships moving at close to c.

      “America CIC, this is Point One,” Commander Mackey said. “Handing off from PriFly. All Demons clear of the ship and formed up.”

      “Copy, Point One,” a voice replied from America’s Combat Information Center. “Primary Flight Control confirms handoff to CIC. You are clear for maneuver. You may proceed.”

      “Okay, boys and girls,” Commander Mackey said, addressing the squadron. “Time to thread the needle. Initiate program.”

      Tightly knotted gravitational singularities winked on just ahead of each fighter, dragging it forward as it flickered in and out of existence at thousands of times per second, accelerations building rapidly as America slid past the fighters, then began dwindling astern.

      VFA-96 had drawn the short straw on this mission … flying point, leading America and her battle group into and through the huge, fast-spinning cylinder ahead. Gregory wasn’t entirely sure he was ready for this. Three months ago—or 12 million years in the future, depending on how one counted things—his fighter had been damaged, and he’d briefly been marooned on the surface of Invictus, a frigid rogue planet wandering the darkness beyond the galaxy’s

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