LITMIR.BIZ

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      A tightly coherent bolt of energy struck Demon Six—Lieutenant Voight’s ship. The Starblade vanished in a cloud of white-hot vapor.

      “Spread out and accelerate!” Mackey ordered. “Boost to five hundred Gs! Let’s close the gap!”

      The eleven surviving Starblades hurtled forward, their velocity increasing by five kilometers per second each second. Ahead, the cloud of silvery objects continued to maneuver to organize themselves into a huge, indistinct structure. The energy bolt had come through those closely aligned rings, and Gregory’s long-range scanners were picking up evidence of a fast-building magnetic charge …

      “It’s a particle cannon!” Gregory called as understanding gelled. “It’s a fucking particle cannon five kilometers long!”

      Gregory wondered how they’d managed that trick … positioning individual spacecraft like pieces in a titanic puzzle, not touching physically, but apparently locked together by magnetic fields. He didn’t ponder it long, as another pulse of energy surged up through the floating rings and very nearly caught Lieutenant Caswell, who rolled clear just as the particle beam passed him.

      “Spread out, damn it, spread out!” Mackey yelled. “Arm Kraits! Target the dense parts of that cloud!”

      Each Starblade carried a full complement of thirty-two VG-92 Krait space-to-space missiles, plus six of the massive and more powerful VG-120 Boomslangs. Still, a total of 418 missiles of varying megatonnage, Gregory reflected, was not going to go very far against that vast and sprawling cloud of diminutive alien vessels.

      They would have to make each shot count, taking great care in the placement of every one. By targeting the thickest regions of the alien spacecraft cloud, they would do the greatest damage with what they had available.

       I hope.

      “Fire!”

      Gregory had already brought up the control icons for the first two Kraits in his magazine, arming both and setting their yields to a hundred megatons each. The alien swarm dominated an in-head window; he zoomed in on a dense knot of alien vessels—a part of the open architecture of the enemy’s immense particle cannon.

      “Demon Four, Fox One!” he yelled over the tactical channel. “Times two!”

      Centuries before, the “Fox One” radio call had meant the launch of a heat-seeking missile. Now it meant a smart missile like the VG-92 Krait shipkiller, the Boomslang, or Fer-de-lance … or even the old-style Kraits, the VG-10s, now obsolete and considerably less competent in the AI department.

      With his first two shots away, Gregory shifted targets, brought two more Kraits on-line, and loosed them. His primary tactical display was fast becoming an indecipherable mass of fighters, targets, and the slow-crawling contrails of missiles in flight. All of those contrails swung wide before angling in toward their targets, and their onboard AIs had them dodging and twisting to avoid enemy defensive fire, turning the display into a classic dogfighting furball. His AI could read the mess though, even if he could not. This allowed Gregory to focus his attention on maneuvering the Starblade, trying to make sure that it was not where the enemy was aiming and firing that colossal particle gun—

      —which fired again, an instant before the first Kraits detonated in silent blossoms of white light … one blast after another, each equivalent to 100 million tons of high explosive.

      Alien ships evaporated by the hundreds, caught between multiple expanding plasma shock waves and by intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. Nuclear explosions were not nearly as effective in the vacuum of space as they were in an atmosphere, but the temperature at the heart of each blast still measured well over 100 million degrees. As the fireballs faded, large bubbles of emptiness were stitched through the mass of silvery spacecraft. The precise organization of the particle gun appeared to have been disrupted, and the remaining fragments of the structure dissolved as alien spacecraft abandoned it.

      And then the Black Demon squadron was plunging into and through the cloud of alien ships. Bright red icons representing hostile targets filled his mental view of the surrounding starscape. Gregory lined up on one of the enemy vessels and triggered his own particle weapon, sending a beam lancing into the target with savage precision.

      “Watch it, Demon Four!” Caswell called to him. “You’ve got two coming in fast behind you!”

      “I see ’em.”

      The two aliens dropped onto his six and he flipped his Starblade end-for-end, hurtling backward as he snapped off one burst of electric flame … then a second … and a third when one target evaded his attack and kept coming.

      The Sh’daar fighters had teeth. A beam caught Demon Eight, a newbie named Romero, and ripped her Starblade in half. Gregory eased his fighter around and teamed with DeHaviland. Together, they vaporized another Sh’daar fighter.

      “How long before the fleet comes through?” DeHaviland called.

      “Don’t know, Cyn,” Gregory replied. “Should be any sec now!”

      That wasn’t just wishful thinking. Fighter point missions weren’t intended to engage in long-term combat. The point element was intended to go ahead of the battlegroup, find out if there were hostiles ahead, and engage them until the capitals could come up.

      At least, that was the idea. If the battlegroup didn’t come through the TRGA for some reason, there were ten Starblade fighters on this side that would be in a hell of a lonely situation.

      Worse would be what might happen if the local hostiles proved too much for the entire battlegroup. America and her escorts might die here, on this side of the TRGA.

      Which would mean that the Black Demons would have already been wiped out.

      An enemy particle beam grazed his fighter, jolting him hard. He bit off a curse and tumbled to the left, targeting an alien that was close—too close—and firing. The plasma shock wave jolted him a second time.

      Damn it, don’t think so much. Angry, now, at allowing himself to be distracted, he focused all of his attention on the data cascading through his link with his fighter.

      Where was Cyn? He’d lost her in that last exchange. An icon flashed against the dazzling backdrop of thickly crowded stars. There …

      The red icons were drawing together, bunching up.

       What the hell are they up to?

      TC/USNA CVS America

       Flag Bridge

       N’gai Cluster, T_-0.876gy

       0503 hours, TFT

      Emergence …

      Gray leaned forward in his seat, staring out into the throng of crowded suns, the central heart of a pocket-sized galaxy almost 900 million years lost in the remote past. At least, that was the idea …

      “America,” he said, addressing the ship’s primary AI. “Do you have the temp-nav data yet?”

      “Affirmative, Admiral,” the ship’s mind replied, more as a mental impression than as distinct words. “Downloading to Navigation now.”

      “Got it, Admiral,” Commander Victor Blakeslee reported. “Looks like we’re spot-on. According to the positions of three hundred key stars, we’re at the same spot as the Koenig Expedition, plus twenty years.”

      “Looks like we arrived after the armistice,” Commander Dean Mallory, the chief tactical officer, observed. “That’s good news.”

      Gray nodded. “Time seems to pass at the same rate on both sides of a triggah,” he said. “Good to know. I wasn’t looking forward to fighting the sons of bitches again.”

      “No, sir.”

      Around America, other ships

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