LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Two

      20 January 2425

      Recon Flight Shadow-­One

      Omega Centauri

      1122 hours, TFT

      . . . and then exploded into visibility once more.

      Walton blinked. America hung in space 10 kilometers directly ahead. An instant before, he’d been almost 50 astronomical units away from the carrier . . . a distance of 7.5 billion kilometers, drifting at a velocity of a kilometer per second. Now he was traveling at the same speed, but his course had changed 180 degrees, and somehow he’d leaped across 50 AUs in an instant, and without accelerating to near c.

      He remembered the way the sky had smeared around him, as though the space through which he’d been traveling had been bent through 180 degrees. And an instantaneous jump of 50 AUs? That was simply flat-­out impossible. Even at close to the speed of light and subject to relativistic time dilation, he would have experienced some time making a passage that long . . . and fighters were too small by far to mount the drive projectors necessary for the faster-­than-­light Alcubierre Drive.

      Alien magic. . . .

      Working through his AI, which with a machine’s tight focus seemed unsurprised by any of this, Walton decelerated, drifting into America’s inner defense zone. “America!” he called. “America, this is Shadow One!”

      There was a real danger that the carrier’s automated defense systems would target the incoming fighter and destroy it. The Shadowstar’s IFF should have flagged him as friendly on America’s scanners . . . but Walton found himself nursing a profound mistrust of the technology. Right now, the universe didn’t appear to be functioning the way it should.

      And the recon fighter should not have been able to simply drop inside America’s defensive perimeter that way. It not only violated the rules and regs of combat operations . . . but it violated the laws of physics as well.

      “Shadow One, America!” the voice of the ship’s CIC called. “What the hell are you doing there?”

      “I . . . I’m not entirely sure, America. One second I was at the Black Rosette. The next . . .”

      There was a long pause from the carrier, as though they were waiting for Walton to finish the thought. “Very well, Shadow One,” CIC replied after a moment. “You are cleared for approach and trap. C’mon in.”

      “Copy. Accelerating.”

      He didn’t trust himself to say more.

      USNA CVS America

      Omega Centauri

      1205 hours, TFT

      “So, we’re left knowing even less than we knew before,” Gray said. “Super-­powerful aliens are dismantling a star cluster . . . and when one of our recon ships gets too close they teleport it across fifty AUs without even breaking a sweat. Recommendations?”

      Gray was in America’s main briefing room with his command staff and department heads. Half were there physically; the rest had linked in from other parts of the ship. One entire bulkhead had been turned into a viewall, which was displaying video of Walton’s flyby of the Rosette. At the moment, it was showing the alien structures, looming vast and shadowy across the backdrop of stars.

      “What . . . what they did to our recon fighter,” Lieutenant Commander Philip Bryant said slowly, shaking his head, “is flat-­out impossible according to all of the laws of physics we understand.” He was the America’s chief stardrive engineer, and arguably the ship’s officer most conversant with her Alcubierre Drive and the essential malleability of empty space in the presence of powerful gravitational fields.

      “The sheer power . . .” That was America’s other senior engineering officer, Commander Richard Halverson, the newly promoted head of the ship’s engineering department, and an expert on power taps and vacuum energy.

      “Yeah. How the hell are we supposed to fight something like that?” Commander Dean Mallory was America’s chief tactical officer. “They could swat us like a bug if they wanted.”

      “I don’t think the admiral was suggesting we fight,” Captain Connie Fletcher said. She was America’s CAG, an old acronym identifying a carrier’s Commander Air Group from back in the days of wet-­Navy ships and aircraft. “That would be pretty pointless, right?”

      “It would be more like fucking suicide,” Commander Victor Blakeslee, America’s senior navigation officer, said, scowling. “Recommendations? Hell, my recommendation is that we chart a course for home and high-­tail it.”

      “Assuming they let us go,” the voice of Acting Captain Gutierrez added. She was on America’s bridge, but telepresencing the planning session through her in-­head. “It might not be that easy.”

      “We have no reason yet to assume hostile intent on the part of the Rosette Aliens.” Lieutenant Commander Samantha Kline was the head of America’s xenobiology department—­“X-­Dep,” for short. “They could have vaporized Lieutenant Walton. Instead, they bent space to drop him back here.”

      “I would remind you,” Halverson said slowly, “that those . . . those things out there did vaporize the Endeavor, the Herrera, and the Miller. If that’s not a hostile act, what the hell is?”

      “The vid returned by the HVK robot is . . . open to interpretation, sir,” Kline replied. “That might have been an accident. Or a mistake . . .”

      “A mistake by beings that powerful?” Fletcher said. “Beings that much like . . . like gods? That’s a pretty scary thought all by itself.”

      “They are powerful,” Gray said. He wanted to redirect the session away from the aliens’ godlike aspect, however. He didn’t want his staff demoralized before they even encountered the Rosette Aliens directly. “But they’re not gods. If they did make a mistake when they destroyed the Endeavor, that would pretty much prove it, don’t you think?”

      “More likely,” Dr. George Truitt said, “it simply means they don’t care. Keep in mind, ­people, that we could be dealing with a K-­3 civilization here.”

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