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break away from her and move farther down the promenade overlooking the boiling lake in the pit.

“Admiral Gray?”

He turned to face the robot. “My God!” he said, startled. “Mr. President!”

“Not anymore,” replied the voice of Alexander Koenig. “Call me Alex.”

The robot was roughly the size and shape of a man, all gleaming white plastic and black joint fittings so there could be norisk of mistaking it for a real human being . . . whatever that might be. Gray’s encounter with Jo had shaken him.

The front of the robot’s face was a flat imaging screen, upon which the familiar features of the former President of the UnitedStates of North America were displayed. Koenig grinned at him.

“Okay . . . Alex. You, ah . . . look well.”

“You like my new look? Strictly temporary, I assure you. But I have to be careful going out these days, and a teleop is agood way to do it.”

Nowadays, there were robots that seemed indistinguishable from humans—a fact strongly protested by some critics and certainreligious circles—but the machine standing in front of Gray now was a relatively low-tech tourist model, teleoperated fromsomewhere else. People wanting to visit another city—Paris, say—could jack in at a tourist center in their city and find themselveslinked in to the awareness net of a teleop working out of a tourism bureau in Paris.

Gray had never tried the experience, but he’d been told that everything was picked up by the teleop—sight and sound, of course,but also touch, smell, and taste. Whatever the remote teleop experienced, so did the human at the other end of the link. Similardevices were being used to explore inhospitable environs such as the surface of Venus or the dark and icy wastes of Mordoron Pluto’s major moon Charon, though in such cases the experiencers did have to be in orbit around that world. For teleoperators,the speed-of-light time lag was still a bitch.

Something Koenig had just said twigged at Gray. “You said you have to be careful going out? What’s the problem? DisgruntledPan-Euros?”

Koenig’s image made a face. “Not them, so much. More like the Refusers. We’ve had some death threats lately.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Oh, they’re probably not serious, most of them. But my security people don’t like it when I sneak out.”

Refusers. The term had been borrowed from a multi-species civilization dwelling within a pocket galaxy devoured by the far larger MilkyWay 800 million years in the past. Eons before, they’d gone through their own version of a singularity, what they called theSchjaa Hok, or “the Transcending.” And it turned out that they’d had their own Refusers. Those left behind after the Transcending had become a rogue civilization called the Sh’daar.

And now there were signs that Humankind was on the very verge of entering its own Schjaa Hok, the long-predicted, long-anticipated Technological Singularity. The clues had been there all along. The decades-long warwith the Sh’daar, in fact, had been brought about by the aliens’ attempt to suppress certain human technologies to forestalla human Transcendence.

“So who’s out to get you?” Gray asked. “Walker?”

“This communications line is not secure, Trevor,” the former President said. “I want you to follow the robot. It will bringyou to my place, okay?”

“Okay, sure.”

This was turning into some kind of shady cloak-and-dagger deal, Gray thought. He looked around to see if anyone was takingan interest in his conversation with a tourist ’bot, but no one was paying any attention . . . not even Jo de Sailles, whowas now in conversation with the minotaur.

“I’ll send a flier for you,” Koenig told him, “and I’ll see you when you get here.”

What the hell was so important that the former President of the USNA wanted to go to all this trouble to see him for?

 

VFA-96, Black Demons

SupraQuito Yards

Earth Synchorbit

1102 hours, EST

Lieutenant Commander Donald Gregory guided his SG-420 Starblade fighter into the final approach to the USNA CVS America, a massive star carrier hanging in stationary orbit just off the sprawling tangle of the SupraQuito Synchorbital shipyardsand docking facility. Below him, hundreds of major orbital stations formed an immense, brilliantly lit arc stretching acrossthe sky.

Reaching down from the center of the complex, a single, brightly lit thread faded into invisibility as it plunged toward Earth’s equator. Anchored within a quiescent volcanic peak called Cayambe just over fifty kilometers northeast of the Ecuadorian capital at Quito, that thread—actually a ten-meter-thick cable woven from carbon-diamond monofilament—extended straight up from the equator for 37,786 kilometers, to the point where one orbit around the planet took precisely twenty-four hours. That guaranteed that SupraQuito remained directly above the same point on the ground, tethered by the space elevator cable, and providing Humankind with its first cheap and easy means of accessing space. Another monofilament-weave cable extended farther out into space, connecting to a small asteroid that, pulled outward by centripetal force, kept the entire structure taut.

Two other space elevators connected other orbital complexes to Earth—at Subukia in Kenya, and at Pulau Lingga to the southof Singapore. SupraQuito, however, was the largest of the three and the most important. It was home to the large USNA navalbase that served as fleet headquarters, and it was the principle port facility connecting Earth and its population of overtwenty billion with the rest of human space.

Gregory’s destination was the star carrier looming just up ahead.

“America Primary Flight Control,” he called. “VFA-96 on final. Request clearance to trap.”

“VFA-96, PriFly. You are cleared for final approach to Bay Two, seven-zero mps on approach.”

“Copy, America PriFly,” Gregory replied. “Bay Two, seventy meters per second.”

Decelerating hard, the Starblade fighters dropped into line-ahead formation, strung out in a straight line like pearls ona thread and closing on the America from dead astern. As skipper of VFA-96, the Black Demons, Gregory had taken the last position in line. His fighter’s AI adjusted the velocity and angle of approach, lining up with where the rotating entrance to Bay Two would be when he got there. Star carrier landing bays rotated about the long and slender axis of the vessel, creating the illusionof gravity, and landing—or “trapping”—on a moving target required superhuman calculation, judgment, and finesse. VFA-96 hadrecently