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shipnet linked with your in-head software, of course, as soon as you came on board. You’ll notice that we disabled your clock, as well as your various internal communications devices.” Stepping close, he reached out and stroked her bare hip, and her skin crawled. The hand traced its way up her side and caressed her breast.

She twisted, trying to avoid the touch. “Don’t touch me, you bastard!”

He chuckled and stepped back. “You will have no connection with local networks except for those that we provide. After all,we can’t have you uploading any malignant software into our system, can we? And now . . .”

Turning away, he stepped up to the console and gestured within a control field. Instantly something dropped out of the darknessabove, laced its way around her head, and snapped her skull into rigid immobility. Some sort of nanometal clamp, then, somethinglocking her head immovably in place.

“So . . . it’s torture?” she said, jaws clenched. “You haven’t even asked me any questions yet! Maybe . . . maybe I’ll cooperate!”

Her interrogator still had his back to her as he did something at the console. She struggled against her high-tech bonds witha predictable lack of success. She could hear the click of metal and plastic, and somehow that was more disturbing than thebastard’s touch.

“Nothing so medieval, my dear,” the man said. When he turned back to face her, he was holding a spray injector—the kind usedto infuse large numbers of nanomachines into the circulatory system. “Torture tends to be counterproductive, you know. Thesubject will say anything to make the pain stop. This, though—this shouldn’t hurt at all.”

He pressed the injector up against the angle of her jaw and pressed the trigger. She felt a slight sting as the nano movedthrough her skin, followed by a warm and drowsy sensation spreading slowly through her body.

“Actually, Lieutenant, we don’t want you to talk. Even if you did, it would not be the truth—or, worse, it would be a mixture of truth and fiction which would be difficult to unravel. But no matter. We have a much more reliable library of data right there inside your lovely head, and all we have to do is reach in and pluck it.”

Her RAM. He was going after her internal RAM.

She tried to fight it, struggling against her bonds.

“It will be so much easier for you if you simply relax, my dear,” the interrogator told her. He set aside the empty injectorand picked up the computer tablet again. “You are completely in my power and will not be going anywhere. Understand? Simplyrelax and let the ship’s computer read you.”

“Go . . . to . . . hell. . . .”

She was fighting hard now. She didn’t feel pain, exactly, but there was a growing, overwhelming pressure inside her head,the feeling of utter violation as something intruded, smashing its way into her memory, into her most private thoughts.

Julianne Adams, she thought, fighting. She could feel the sweat dripping down her face . . . and the intolerable pressure growing insideher skull. Lieutenant. Serial number 3876–223 . . .

You are helpless, Julianne, a voice said inside her skull. It was not the voice of her interrogator. Naked . . . vulnerable . . . helpless . . . and you are ours to control, to do with as we decide. . . .

Damn it, they still hadn’t asked her any questions.

Chapter Seven

12 April, 2429

USNA CVS America

Admiral’s Office

Omega Cluster

1252 hours, FST

“Any sign at all of the Consciousness?” Gray asked his senior xenosophontological department people.

Dr. George Truitt gave an airy wave of his hand, indicating the expanse of star-bejeweled space projected across the bulkheadsand overheads of Gray’s shipboard office. “It’s gone. Obviously.”

“Why obviously?”

“If you’ll recall, Admiral, the entity we knew as the Consciousness had been busily constructing something here within OmegaCentauri, a far-flung and extremely impressive array of large parts of unknown function. Some of those structures appear tohave been called out of the fabric of spacetime itself and were light years long. And now they’re gone. All gone.”

“The lack of the Rosette entity’s toys doesn’t mean the entity is gone,” Dr. Samantha Kline said. “I actually doubt that the Consciousness can be hurt in any meaningful way. It existed at least partially within other dimensions.”

“Why the hell should it stick around after its toys are gone?” Truitt demanded. “With the loss of its instrumentality, I wouldsuggest that the Consciousness is either dead or it has retreated . . . elsewhere, quite possibly back to the universe fromwhich it emerged in the first place. But it is not here.”

“I would have to agree,” the voice of Konstantin Junior added. “We know that the Consciousness appeared to leave with theDenebans, translating, we think, to a parallel universe or some higher plane of existence. My impression as we watched themgo was that the Consciousness was gone and would not be coming back.

“Even so, ” Konstantin continued, “there was a chance that it did not, in fact, leave this spacetime frame of reference. Ihave, therefore, been searching this entire volume of space across a great deal of the electromagnetic spectrum, but I seeno indication of intelligence.”

“Not even other civilizations within the cluster?” Captain Rand asked.

“So far as we know, Captain,” Truitt said, “there were no other civilizations here. Worlds, yes, of course. But the starshere are so close together—averaging 0.16 light year separation—that having habitable worlds be habitable long enough to develop native civilizations is most unlikely.”

“There used to be civilizations here,” Gray pointed out. “Hundreds of them.”

“In the remote past, before the N’gai Cloud was absorbed by our galaxy,” Truitt said, nodding. “Yes. But as you’ll recall,the N’gai Cloud is . . . was considerably more open than this, even at its core. What is left of the N’gai Dwarf Galaxy has compacted over the eons, quitepossibly as a direct result of the gravitational presence of the Rosette.”

“If there were other civilizations in this cluster,” Kline said, “they might have been exterminated by the Consciousness. It never seemed to be aware of organic life. Or of technologies more primitive than what they were using.”

“The Texaghu Resch,” Gray said, nodding.

Texaghu Resch was the Agletsch name for a world not far from the first TRGA. Little was known