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the battlegroup while it was parked next to an asteroid somewhere taking on rawmat.

Would the Russians give chase? Gray still had no idea why they were on the Russian’s shit list in the first place, though privatelyhe suspected that politics were involved. Walker politics. Unless a war had broken out back home, but damn it, that made no sense at all. There’d been no crisis when America had cast off from Quito Synchorbital, no USNA-Russian tension of note, and no reason for the Russian carrier group to pursuethem so avidly.

It had to be Walker.

“Admiral? PriFly.”

“Go ahead, CAG.”

“Our fighters are aboard. Do you want to launch the ready squadrons?”

“Negative, CAG. Rearm and replenish.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Captain Rand.”

“Yessir!”

“Set course for N’gai . . . through the Rosette, if you please.”

“What?” Rand sputtered, then somehow tried to regain some semblance of proper military decorum. “Sorry, Admiral. I mean . . . theRosette?”

“I’m not used to having my orders questioned, Captain. Lieutenant West!”

“Sir!”

“Pass the word to our escorts. They are to run interference for us while we and the Acadia go through the Rosette. They are then to follow us. Make sure they have the appropriate navigational data.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Admiral Gray,” Rand said. “That means threading past those energy jets from the black holes. We’ll be fried!”

“We’ll make the passage under SAI control.”

“Even then—Admiral, I recommend we look at other options. Going through the Rosette is suicide!”

“Commander Mackey!”

Luther Mackey, America’s Executive Officer, turned from his workstation. “Sir!”

“I am putting you in command of this vessel. Mr. Rand . . . you are relieved.”

“Sir! I protest—”

“We’ll talk about it later.” On his main screen, the destroyers were closer, beginning to spread out. Probably a missile-launchformation. “Captain Mackey, did you hear my orders?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you carry them out?”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Mackey didn’t miss a beat in his response, the ancient naval and Marine courtesy “aye, aye” they said stood for “I understand and I will obey.”

Gray had known Luther Mackey for a long time. He’d been the skipper of the Black Demons for several years before he’d beenbumped up to Executive Officer. Gray knew him to be a steady, reliable officer, which was exactly what he needed on America’s bridge right now.

He hated relieving Rand in front of the entire bridge crew like that, but the man had been on the verge of refusing a direct order, and—just as important—arguing with him took up valuable time. Gray knew he would have to face the consequences of his action later, but he’d had to act now.

The Birmingham and the Arlington were moving into position to block the enemy’s approach.

“Lieutenant West.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Make to Acadia. Tell them we’ll go through first, but they should stick close behind us.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

Slowly gathering speed, the America turned away from the fight and began descending into the maelstrom of radiation and whirling gravitational masses that wasthe Omega Rosette.

He didn’t like running. But there was absolutely no point in fighting here save for survival. With another way out, even adesperate one, they were better off avoiding a pointless and probably fatal engagement.

The question was whether they could survive the escape.

Ahead, the six black holes of the Rosette steadily and swiftly circled their common center of gravity, each surrounded byits own accretion disk of starcore-hot plasma, each projecting straight threads of searing radiation from its poles. Thosethreads posed the greatest danger during America’s approach, sweeping through nearby space like powerful plasma beams. Composed of particles accelerated nearly to the speedof light by the powerful gravitational fields of the Rosette black holes, a touch by any of them would rip a starship apart.

Konstantin Junior, however, had the con of both America and the Acadia, and was able to calculate velocity and course and angle to a degree that was literally superhuman.

Astern, Arlington and Birmingham were exchanging fire with the oncoming destroyers, the range still too great to score any serious damage. The Russian fighters,however, were closing in.

“Lieutenant West. Tell Birmingham and Arlington to follow us in.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gray began to glimpse within the Rosette’s center the oft-noted snatches of other places, other starfields . . . even otheruniverses. Traversing the Rosette gateway was very much like passing through one of the far smaller TRGAs. The ship makingthe passage had to stick to a very specific course through the gravitational vortex; missing the proper course by a few tensof meters could land you in the wrong place entirely . . . or even the wrong time.

Things were worse with the far larger and more powerful Omega Rosette. Research ships had glimpsed entirely different universes through that central opening. Conversations with the Consciousness suggested that that alien group Mind might have slippedthrough from one of those. If Konstantin Junior wasn’t precisely on course . . .

America fell into the Rosette, accelerating now toward the structure’s center of gravity. The Rosette’s diameter was some tens ofthousands of kilometers; the individual black holes at this distance, even though they were artificially large structureseach nearly the size of Earth, were too distant to show any detailed features, but the white-hot disks of plasma around themcreated a circle of brilliant, fast-moving stars.

And still America fell. . . .

Time was slowing as they fell deeper into the relativistic warp within the Rosette. Ahead, starfields shifted and blurred,switching from one scene to another with bewildering speed, now an open starscape much more thinly populated than the coreof Omega Centauri; now a burning emptiness that might have been pure energy; now a field of ancient, red stars, shrunken anddwindled; now a younger blaze of hot blue-white suns . . .

Now the heart of a galactic cluster, packed with suns and laced with incandescent plasma.

And the starscape steadied on that last as Konstantin Junior made a final slight alteration to America’s course. And then . . .

Emergence.

They were through.

“Lieutenant Vasquez!” Gray rasped. The sight of this star-packed glory always clutched at his throat. “What are we lookingat? Are we where we’re supposed to be?”

“Confirmed, Admiral . . . this is the N’gai Cluster. We’re 876 and some million years in our past.”

“It doesn’t look much like the last time we saw it,” Mackey said from the command bridge.

“Yeah, well, six hypernovae will do that, you know,” Gray replied.

The