LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter One

      20 January 2425

      Recon Flight Shadow-­One

      Omega Centauri

      1010 hours, TFT

      “And three . . . and two . . . and one . . . launch!”

      Acceleration slammed Lieutenant Louis Walton back in his seat as his CP-­240 Shadowstar hurtled down the long and narrow tunnel, riding the magnetic launch rail, vision dimming . . . and then he emerged into open space, the pressure of 7 gravities replaced in an instant by the blessed, stomach-­dropping relief of zero-­G. Astern, the vast gray disk of America’s forward shield cap fell away, dwindling to a star, then to invisibility in moments. He was traveling now at better than 600 kilometers per hour.

      Ahead was twisted, enigmatic light . . . and sheerest wonder.

      “America Primary Flight Control, this is Shadow One,” he called over his in-­head. “I’m clear and in the open.”

      “Copy, Shadow One,” a voice replied. “Come to one-­five-­one by two-­seven-­zero by zero-­three-­two. You be careful out there, okay?”

      “That is a very large affirmative,” Walton replied. “You just happen to be talking to the ship library’s downloaded image of careful.”

      “Lou,” the voice in Prifly said, “if that were true, you wouldn’t have volunteered for this run in the first place.”

      True enough. But Walton wouldn’t have missed this for the world. For several worlds . . .

      The panorama ahead was being fed by the Shadowstar’s imaging system directly into his brain. From his perspective, he was the reconnaissance fighter, hurtling into strangeness.

      He was hurtling through the depths of a globular star cluster, a vast, teeming beehive of stars called Omega Centauri, some sixteen thousand years from Sol. But the cluster was . . . changed from what it once had been.

      Across the whole, vast, star-­crowded sky, hundreds of thousands of suns were gone, leaving dark streaks like daggers piercing the cluster’s heart. Stars had deliberately been merged with stars, creating a central blue giant blazing at the cluster’s core, filling a spherical region almost two light months across with hazy, blue light.

      And stretching out from that central sun was a structure of some kind. Stellarchitecture, they’d dubbed it, back in the labyrinths of America’s intelligence department. An unimaginably vast tangle of beams and platforms and spheres and connectors and sweeping curves, some of the structures apparently solid, but the larger ones apparently consisting of blue mist. Following some of those beams with your eye was not a good idea. They were . . . bent, somehow, twisted in disturbing ways suggesting that dimensions other than the normal three spatial ones were being employed here.

      Most disturbing of all was the fact that time was being twisted through strange dimensions as well. None of this had been here when the deep-­space research survey vessel Endeavor had arrived in the Omega Centauri cluster four months earlier. Now, the sky was filled with structures that appeared to span light years . . . and yet, portions of stellarchitecture more than four light months across were plainly visible. The light from the far ends of those things simply couldn’t have traveled this far in the intervening time.

      And yet, there it was, defying what Walton and America’s science department were pleased to call the inviolable laws of physics. There were beams, like gossamer threads glittering in the light of 10 million cluster stars, somehow anchored within the central sun and stretching out and out and out until they were masked by the cluster’s massed suns. Space and time both were not what they seemed here.

      The effect was eerily and indescribably beautiful, an abstract painted in myriad shades and hues of blue and violet light, with deep, rich reds in those eye-­watering places where structures vanished from normal spacetime.

      “America CIC, this is Shadow One,” Walton said. “Handing off from PriFly.”

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

      “Accelerating in three . . . two . . . one . . . engage!”

      At 50,000 gravities, the Shadowstar hurtled deeper into the cluster.

      USNA CVS America

      The Black Rosette

      Omega Centauri

      1016 hours, TFT

      “I wish I knew what the hell we were looking at.”

      Rear Admiral Trevor “Sandy” Gray stared at the deck-­to-­overhead viewall in America’s officers’ lounge. He’d been staring into the cosmic panorama every chance he got for three days, now, and was no closer to understanding what he was seeing than he’d been when the task force arrived.

      It was, he thought, unimaginably, sublimely beautiful.

      It was also utterly mysterious, quite possibly completely and forever beyond human understanding.

      The Omega Centauri globular star cluster was the largest such known within the Milky Way galaxy. Some 230 light years across, that teeming, crowded sphere of 10 million closely packed stars was known to be the stripped-­down core of a small, irregular galaxy cannibalized by the Milky Way perhaps 800 million years before. That long ago, Earth had been inhabited solely by single-­celled microorganisms that were just on the point of discovering sex, but a highly advanced collective of numerous technic species had already been stellarforming their galaxy. Among other things, they’d created a rosette of six supergiant stars, each forty times the mass of Earth’s sun, rotating them about a common center of gravity in a way—­it was now believed—­that had opened pathways to other places in space . . . and almost certainly other times as well.

      That galaxy, called the N’gai Cloud by its inhabitants, had been devoured and shredded, its inhabited worlds scattered. At about the same time, the N’gai’s starfaring cultures, collectively called the ur-­Sh’daar, had undergone a technological singularity . . . a technic metamorphosis that had transformed them far beyond the ken of those left behind.

      The remnant left had, with the passage of 876 million years, become the Sh’daar, mysterious galactic recluses who dominated some thousands of technic species across the galaxy, and who’d become the enemies of Humankind.

      That much, at least, had been learned by America’s battlegroup under the command of Admiral Koenig, which had used an ancient, artificial singularity generator, a massive, fast-­spinning cylinder a kilometer across called a TRGA, to travel into the remote past and confront the Sh’daar within their home galaxy. Communications of a sort had been established, a kind of truce declared; electric downloads had revealed the ur-­Sh’daar, and the fear-­crippled, broken relics that eventually had become the modern Sh’daar.

      That had been almost twenty years ago. Gray, at the time, had been a Navy lieutenant and a fighter pilot. Before that he’d been a monogie prim—­the words were not compliments—­from the half-­sunken

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