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zoom feature, she zeroed in on an illuminated patch on the blunt,bullet-shaped shield cap, and was able to pick out six letters: MOCKBA.

Moskva—the Cyrillic letters spelling out the Russian for Moscow. That must be the Russian star carrier that had launched those Hawk fighters. She adjusted the camera’s angle, but couldsee no sign of the America. There was the perfect circle, imbedded in hazy light, of the Penrose TRGA, but America and her consorts were nowhere to be seen.

She did see a smaller craft, however, a bulbous body painted in yellow-and-black stripes. The Russian name, shmel’, meant “bumblebee,” though USNA pilots had inevitably christened them “smellies.” It was a SAR tug—search and rescue—andit was combing the battlespace looking for survivors of the fight . . . or disabled fighters from either side.

Which meant Adams faced an agonizing dilemma now. Should she hole up and stay very quiet, hoping the Russian searchers wouldmiss her craft adrift with so much other space junk? Or should she signal them and wait for them to pick her up?

How much data was she carrying in-head? What did she know that the Russians could use? What could be, should be, scrubbed?

She didn’t want to surrender.

But she didn’t want to die, either.

After a long moment’s thought, she accessed her in-head software and purged any and all data that carried a security classificationof secret or higher. There wasn’t all that much. They didn’t tell fighter pilots more than they absolutely needed to know.

Then she reached for the handle that would trigger her emergency flares.

 

USNA CVS America

Observation Lounge

Omega Centauri

1412 hours, FST

All of space, it seemed, was filled with blue light. Despite the intervention of the Denebans three years ago, the entire core of the globular star cluster had been filled by the remnants of a titanic stellar explosion, a thin haze reaching out for a distance of almost a light year. It had to be residue from the exploding star; globular star clusters had little in the way of dust and gas; a dwarf galaxy like the N’gai Cloud would have had its dust and gas stripped away when it was devoured by the Milky Way.

The ionized gas in this part of the cloud was at a temperature of several million degrees; fortunately for the USNA squadron,the gas was so diffuse—a few molecules per cubic meter—that there was little heating on their outer hulls. Even so, the backgroundradiation was still quite high, high enough to fry unshielded electronics—or humans—outside the ships’ protective shielding.

The gas was being supercharged, both by the incredibly close-packed stars of the cluster—many only a fraction of a light yearaway—and by the lightning bright jets from six black hole accretion disks.

The nebula hadn’t been there the last time he’d been here. Now it was so thick it dimmed the thronging stars beyond. The brightestand most optically brilliant objects in that sky, however, were opposite from the TRGA and a long way off—six tiny disks ofintense white light, each speared through its center by a blue-white thread of radiance so intense they would have blindedunprotected eyes. The computer orchestrating the light show on the bulkheads of the observation chamber had stopped the brillianceof those threads down to where you could look at them, but the glare still was uncomfortable.

“So I guess those accretion disks are matter from the supernovae,” Gray said. Those were new additions to the starscape as well—accretion disks around the individual black holes of the Rosette. It wasn’t hard to imagine how they’d come into existence. As the plasma heart of an exploding star had squeezed through from N’gai and the remote past, much of it had been captured by the six black holes orbiting here at the core of Omega Centauri. What had not been immediately swallowed by the black holes had orbited them. Each black hole now was imbedded in a flat disk of plasma whirling about its singularity and generating death screams of X-rays and gamma as it finally spiraled into the object’s event horizon.

“Those . . . those things,” Gray told Dr. Conyers, indicating the fast-orbiting black holes, “are a lot farther apart thanthey used to be. The Rosette used to be just a few thousand kilometers across.”

The two of them were adrift in America’s forward observation lounge, located above and abaft the flag bridge. The screens, tuned to show a seamless, panoramic viewof surrounding space, displayed images larger and sharper than the smaller screens on either of the ship’s bridges. Forward,over a third of the sky was blotted out by the underside of the shield cap, which extended from the vessel’s spine like thecanopy of an umbrella. In every other direction, however, up, down, aft, and to either side, the supernova nebula stretchedin writhing coils and waves and fractal surfaces, all of them frozen in an instant of time. They showed something of the sheerviolence that had created them, though distance and scale robbed them of any sense of actual movement.

“Well, try cramming a blue giant star with a diameter of five to ten times the radius of the sun through a gravitational vortexless than an AU across,” Conyers told him. “What comes through is going to tend to expand rather violently . . . violentlyenough to actually nudge six black holes apart from one another.”

“That’s scarcely credible.”

“I know.”

“I just wonder what the explosion was like on the N’gai Cloud side of the Rosette.”

“They’re probably black holes now. They would have picked up a lot of additional mass when the star projectile went into the vortex, right? Enough to trigger six supernovae. The remnant of the star used by the Sh’daar to trigger all of this probably didn’t make it through, though. It will be interesting to go there and find out.”

“Assuming we can manage that trick,” Gray said. His own voice sounded glum. “We were going to use the Omega TRGA to get toN’gai, but we’re not going to make it through that.” He indicated the slowly tumbling TRGA astern.

“Even with super-AI to calculate trajectory and velocity?”

“I’ll need to talk with Konstantin about that, but I doubt