LITMIR.BIZ

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the Sh’daar.”

      “What the hell are you talking about?” Gray asked, then added, “Sir.”

      For a moment, he thought Cleary was going to tell him to get lost, but the staff officer just shrugged and shook his head. “Have a look.”

      A small square outlined in black appeared just below the limb of the star, then expanded, magnifying the image sharply. The image now showed the uneven granulations of the star’s surface: twisting, linear patterns of lesser light against the greater. And there was something else. …

      To Gray, it looked like a fuzzy shadow, but one made out of light—bright light, but still dimmer than the glare from the star behind it. The thing, whatever it was, had a definite shape—elongated, considerably longer than it was wide—but it was masked in a hazy, twisted blur that made it look fuzzy and indistinct.

      It was moving across the face of the star, and as it moved, the granulations appeared to pucker and twist behind it.

      “It’s bending light,” Gray said.

      “It looks like a dustball,” Ryan added.

      Dustballs were tiny clots of matter scooped up by the flickering, artificial singularity projected ahead of a fighter or larger vessel using its gravitic drive to move through normal space. Though the drive singularity switched on and off thousands of times per second, it dragged hydrogen atoms, dust and debris swept up from the space ahead just as it did the fighter falling along behind it. In space where the local density of hydrogen and flecks of dust was relatively high—within the inner reaches of a star system, for instance—the dust could collect faster than the microscopic singularity could swallow it, creating tiny, light-bending patches of fuzz the fighter pilots called dustballs.

      “What we’re looking at,” Cleary explained, “has a mass of about one point nine times ten to the thirty-third grams … or about the same as Earth’s sun.”

      “A black hole?” Gray said.

      Take a star as large as Sol and crush it down until it’s just six kilometers wide. What you get is a gravitational singularity with the same mass and the same gravitational field as the original star … but in close, very close, the gravitational field becomes so strong that not even light can escape it—hence the name: black hole.

      “Wait a minute,” Ryan said. “I thought stars like Sol were too small to become black holes.”

      “Exactly,” Cleary said. “If a star of about three solar masses collapses, it becomes a black hole. A smaller sun becomes a neutron star … and if it’s smaller still, like our sun, it becomes a white dwarf.”

      “The object we are observing,” Dra’ethde pointed out, “is clearly artificial. A natural stellar collapse would result in a sphere … or, rather, a spherical ergosphere, with the singularity within.”

      “The thing,” Cleary said, “is roughly twelve kilometers long and about one wide, and it appears to be rotating around its long axis at close to the speed of light. Whoever built it can do tricks with mass and gravity that we can’t even imagine yet.”

      “Okay,” Gray said. “It’s super-tech. But what does it do?”

      “That’s what we’re trying to decide,” Cleary said. “Our best guess so far is that it’s a kind of Tipler machine … but we know that that is absolutely impossible.”

      “Perhaps,” Gru’mulkisch said quietly, “the builders do not agree with you as to what is or is not possible.”

      Gray had to access the ship’s library and download information on Tipler and the machine named after him. Frank Tipler had been a mathematical physicist and cosmologist in the twentieth century who’d written a paper based on the van Stockum-Lanczos solutions to the equations of general relativity. That paper, “Rotating cylinders and the possibility of global causality violation,” had presented the possibility of what were called closed timelike curves appearing in the vicinity of a very long, very massive, rapidly rotating cylinder. According to Tipler, if you could stretch a black hole into a rigid length of spaghetti and spin it up to something like 60 percent of the speed of light, some billions of rotations per second, the thing warped surrounding space in such a way that it would open portals not through space, but through spacetime, the two being inextricably linked within Einstein’s equations.

      The Tipler machine, in other words, was a time machine.

      Toward the end of the same century, however, another physicist, the legendary Stephen Hawking, had proven that it simply couldn’t be done. In order to open a doorway into the past, you would need a rotating cylinder that was infinitely long.

      The Tipler time machine became a footnote in the physics textbooks, and was eventually almost forgotten.

      Perhaps, as Gru’mulkisch had just suggested, the beings who’d built that thing out there hadn’t read the same textbooks.

      Gray felt a rising tingle at the back of his scalp.

      “Who,” he said quietly, “could possibly have built such a thing?”

      “That is what we would like to know,” Cleary replied.

       Shadow Probe 1, Drop Bay 1

      TC/USNA CVS America

       Outer System, Texaghu Resch System

       1224 hours, TFT

      “Shadow Probe One ready for launch,” Lieutenant Christopher Schiere reported.

      “Copy that, One. You are clear for launch,” Commander Avery replied. “Good luck!”

      “Let’s just hope it’s better luck than last time,” Schiere muttered.

      “What was that, Probe One?”

      “Nothing, Boss. Let’s get this show going.”

      “And launch in three … two … one … launch!”

      The CP-240 Shadowstar hurtled down the two-hundred-meter launch tube at seven gravities, emerging from the center of America’s shield cap 2.39 seconds later and traveling at 167 meters per second. The CP-240 was a near twin to the conventional SG-92 Starhawk strike fighter but was designed for just one task: reconnaissance. One of the ships assigned to America’s VQ-7 recon squadron, the Sneaky Peaks, Schiere’s craft carried no weapons other than a collection of VR-5 recon drones. Slightly more massive than a Starhawk, it possessed a Gödel 2500 artificial intelligence, a self-aware system far more powerful and flexible than the Starhawk AIs.

      And it could bend light around itself in a way that gave it near invisibility.

      Lieutenant Christopher Schiere was an old hand with the Sneaky Peaks—named for their CO, Commander James Peak. Sneak and peek was their squadron motto, and they were an effective means of exploring ahead of the battlegroup to see what might be lurking up ahead.

      Schiere’s last mission had been a high-velocity flyby of the manufactory orbiting Alphekka, and it had nearly been his last. Attacked by dozens of Turusch fighters, all he’d been able to do was tuck himself into a tight little invisible ball and hurtle on into emptiness. A day later, he’d risked decelerating and sending out a questing signal, a rescue beacon. One of America’s SAR tugs had picked him up forty hours later.

      It had been a near thing. Finding an all-but-invisible sliver of a spacecraft many AUs from the battlespace was far worse than looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Needles you could see. …

      Despite the near miss, Schiere had put up his hand when the skipper had asked for a volunteer. “What, are you nuts, Chris?” Peak had asked him.

      “It’s that damned horse, Skipper,” Schiere had replied. “I need to get back on.”

      His post-mission psych check had flagged him as marginal, a downgrudge that normally would have

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