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it will make a difference. Where and when we come out of a TRGAdepends on the path we trace going through. Our vector has to be precise. If we miss it, we could end up . . . God alone knows where. Or when.”

“We should still be able to get back to Earth, though. Under Alcubierre Drive, right?”

“That won’t be a problem. It’ll just take forever to crawl across sixteen thousand light years.” He did a fast calculationin his head. “Three point eight years, actually, at fifteen light years per day. But we’ll be able to handle that okay. That’swhy we have the Acadia, to top off our rawmat reserves along the way. I’m more concerned about the Consciousness.”

“It’s dead, isn’t it?”

“Well, I would think so,” Gray replied. “After all of this. For a while, this region of space was filled with enormous shapes and structures, things light years in length . . . andthose are all gone, now. The Consciousness ought to be dead, but no one’s seen a body. I wouldn’t care to poke around if there’sa chance it might still be there . . . and conscious.”

“Very funny.”

Gray closed his eyes and accessed his command link with the bridge. “Lieutenant West? Anything from our pickets?”

“No, Admiral. Their last report was that everything was clear.”

“No drones?”

“Negative, Admiral.”

“Okay. Good.”

Gray had given orders to move the squadron to a point several AUs away from the tumbling TRGA, but he’d also ordered the deploymentof a couple of fighter squadrons to keep a close eye on the thing. If those Russian destroyers started coming through, hedidn’t want America or her battlegroup to be caught napping.

So far, however, there’d been nothing—not even drones sent through to check that the TRGA was working.

“Birmingham . . . Arlington . . . I want you two positioned on either side of the TRGA. If the Russians come through, hit them before they have a chance toreact. Understand?”

“Understood, Admiral.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

He’d done everything he could, covered all bases, but the lack of activity on the part of the Russians was reassuring.

Slowly, Gray allowed himself to relax.

 

VFA-96, Black Demons

Omega Centauri TRGA

1412 hours, FST

Lieutenant Commander Donald Gregory watched the slow tumble of the Omega TRGA and struggled to wall off his grief. For a thirdtime, a woman he’d cared for deeply had failed to return from a mission. Three Hellfuries had been lost in the battle on thePenrose side of the gate, and Julia Adams had been one of them.

Damn it, he’d thought he was over this, that nothing could shake him.

He’d been wrong.

He watched the TRGA and wished—prayed—that the Russians would come through.

He considered the unthinkable: piloting his Starblade back through the TRGA and emerging among the Russian ships. He woulddie, but how many could he take with him?

The problem with that—besides being a flagrant violation of orders, of course—was that his Starblade’s AI didn’t have the navigation information that would take him safely through back to his own time. Hell, with that tumble he probably wouldn’t be able to set up a workable passage even with the appropriate nav data. Worse, his AI would probably refuse the command. It might assume he was off his nut and take him back to America.

That was the trouble with intelligent machines, Gregory thought. They wouldn’t let you be truly, spontaneously human.

Hell, maybe he was off his nut. But at the moment all he wanted in the entire universe was to strike back at the bastards who’d killed Julia.

 

VFA-198 Hellfuries

Penrose TRGA

79 light years from Earth

1612 hours, FST

Lieutenant Adams was not dead—not yet, at any rate. Humanoid robotic figures had emerged from the SAR tug, grappled with herStarblade, and used disassembler torches to slice her fighter open. Strong hands had reached into the cockpit and draggedher from the corpse of her Starblade and hauled her back to the Russian tug. Fifteen minutes later, she was aboard the Moskva.

They’d stripped her down to her skin—a precaution against any micro-nano weapons she might have hidden in her environmental suit—and suspended her in midair. Focused magnetic fields held slender bracelets locked to her wrists and ankles, pulling her into a taut X with her feet centimeters above the cold tile deck. The room was bare, with metal bulkheads and a single gleaming white console off to one side. It was dark, too, with the only light coming from the instrumentation on that sinister-looking console. She estimated that she was under half a gravity—so the room was somewhere inside the Russian carrier’s rotating hab modules.

What was that console for? What did it do? Her mind was racing, providing lots of disturbing possibilities.

The thought of torture filled her with an unholy dread. Damn it, she didn’t know anything. Her captors, surely, knew the identity of the USNA ships that had just gone through the gate, and that was probably wherethey were going as well. What could she possibly add to that?

After an unbearable wait, dragging hours in which to study the morbid collection of electrical equipment and instrumentationon the console in front of her as the strain on her shoulders slowly grew to a scream, her interrogator entered the room.He was small, almost prissy-looking, with a cheerful smile and a computer tablet in one hand. “Good morning, Lieutenant Adams,”he said. He had the slightest trace of a Slavic accent.

“It’s afternoon, asshole,” she growled back. God, her shoulders hurt. . . .

“By your reckoning, yes. But here on board the Moskva it is just after midnight. Moscow time, you understand. Not that day or night makes any difference out here in space andlight years from Earth, of course. . . .”

She didn’t reply. But when she checked her in-head clock she realized with a jolt that they’d somehow switched that off. Shefelt a moment’s panic. What else had they taken from her? And how? Standard interrogation technique, she knew, would involve scrambling her sense of time. Everything her captors said to herwould be designed to disorient her, to cut her adrift . . . and, ultimately, to make her come to trust them.

That, she thought, was not going to happen. Not if she could help it.

“And how did you know my name?”

“The