thought, rewriting the time line of an entire galactic cluster, and those were beings so advanced that they might not even notice mere Humankind. He and Taggart had discussed the idea more than once, and he enjoyed lightly tweaking her about it now and again.
But the encounter with these cluster-reshaping beings during the past few days had profoundly shaken her, he knew. It might be a good idea not to tease her about her religion.
In any case, that sort of thing nowadays was considered socially unacceptable. The White Covenant, a set of international agreements in place since the late twenty-first century, mandated only that you weren’t allowed to proselytize or forcefully convert others when it came to religion . . . but after three and a half centuries most people took that to mean a prohibition on any discussion of religious belief or disbelief. At the very least, such a discussion was considered rude. Bull sessions among friends were okay, sure . . . but in a professional setting like this . . . not so much.
That alien vista outside of America, Gray knew, was wearing at everyone in the squadron. Gnawing at them. The worst of it was knowing that the aliens had already destroyed the research ship RSV Endeavor and two escorting destroyers, Miller and Herrera, killing over fifteen hundred personnel on board. They’d been obliterated in an instant, four months ago, when something had come through the Rosette from . . . somewhere else. The destruction had been captured on video taken by an HVK-724 high-velocity scout-courier robot, which had subsequently returned the images to Earth.
Gray and his staff had spent a lot of hours studying those images. The alien vessels, if that’s what they were, appeared to be featureless, mirror-polished silver ovoids ranging in size from a few meters to nearly a kilometer in length. There was no sign of them now, though . . . only those enigmatic and impossible structures of light.
“As for what we’re looking at, sir,” Taggart continued quietly, “I think we have to assume that they’re using the Rosette as a transit gate from wherever they came from. We know that there are many possible paths through the spacetime opening.”
“One octillion,” Gray said. “Ten to the twenty-seven distinct spacetime pathways. Assuming that the Black Rosette is the same as the Six Sun rosette built eight hundred seventy-six million years ago.”
“The number may be very much larger now,” a voice said in their heads, speaking through their in-head circuitry. The AI that ran America was always there, listening, and very occasionally putting in a word or two.
“Why is that?” Gutierrez asked.
“The black holes of the Rosette in Omega Tee-Prime distort spacetime between them to a far greater degree than was true for the Six Suns of Tee-Sub. The actual number of distinct spacetime pathways through Tee-Prime may exceed one centillion—or ten to the three hundred third power—essentially, and for all intents and purposes, nearly infinite.”
And that was a sobering thought.
Omega Tee-Prime was the shorthand term for the Omega Centauri cluster today, time now, in the year 2425. Omega Tee-Sub, on the other hand, was shorthand for the unwieldy T-0.876gy, a clumsy term pronounced “Tee sub minus zero point eight seven six gigayear” and identifying the N’gai Cloud of the ur-Sh’daar, 876 million years in the past.
If the Rosette Aliens were busily rewriting the cluster’s immediate past, Gray thought glumly, it might be necessary to come up with some new spacial-temporal terminology as well. Time travel made everything so damnably complicated.
And yet, the ability to reshape time was an obvious follow-on to the ability to warp space. Ever since Einstein, physicists had known that space and time were not distinct entities, but dimensional aspects of each other, of spacetime. Human ships used projected, artificial gravitational singularities to move themselves through space; in theory, it should be possible to do the same to move through time, though that would require a lot of energy—more energy than even a star carrier’s quantum power tap could supply. In another few centuries, perhaps . . .
But the Black Rosette Aliens were doing it now.
From America’s current position, the Black Rosette was made invisible by distance, but close-up passes by the Endeavor before her destruction had shown tantalizing glimpses of alien scenes, alien starfields peeking out through the lumen of that hazy circle of rotating singularities.
What, Gray wondered yet again, were the Rosette Aliens up to? Who were they? Where—when—did they come from? Were they Sh’daar? Transformed and transfigured ur-Sh’daar? Or someone, something utterly and completely different?
The stargods? It was as good a name as any . . . though the term Rosette Aliens, for now, carried less emotional baggage for the merely human observers on board America and her consorts.
Gray checked the time. Walton’s Shadowstar should be approaching the Rosette fairly soon, now. And if Walton survived the flight, they just might learn something more about exactly what the Rosette Aliens were up to.
Recon Flight Shadow-One
Omega Centauri
1118 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Walton was decelerating now, his Shadowstar flipped end for end so that he was slowing from very nearly the speed of light. He needed to be moving at a more sedate pace if he and the ship’s AI were actually to see and record anything as they made their close passage of the Rosette. He couldn’t see much at all right now. He’d reshaped the drive singularity forward to extend a stealth sheath aft over his fighter. From most angles, now, his Shadowstar was invisible, the light coming from space around him sliding around the craft without ever quite reaching it. As camouflage, it was moderately effective, though instruments and organic eyeballs might still see a distortion of the background stars as he slid past—and the rapidly flickering gravity well of his drive singularity was, as always, a dead giveaway.
So far, though, the Rosette Aliens hadn’t appeared to notice him. That . . . or they didn’t care.
He found the thought disturbing, akin to the thought of humans paying no attention to an ant crossing the path in front of them.
But if one of those humans chose to bring his foot down just so . . .
“I recommend dropping the sheath,” his AI told him. “We are approaching our objective.”
“Do it,” Walton said. “Let’s see what we have.”
He braced himself . . . and just in time. The sheath fell away as the artificial intelligence running the Shadowstar reconfigured the drive singularity, and the dazzling light of the heart of a globular cluster flooded in.
Millions of stars crowded one another across the spherical interior of that radiant sky. Streaks of blackness showed where the Rosette Aliens had been busy at their enigmatic work of demolition and construction. Visible, too, was the tangle of structures created over the past few months by the aliens, an incredibly vast spider’s web of pale blue light apparently anchored on and within the encircling stars.
Ahead and to starboard, a cluster of spheres hung adrift in space, each gleaming silver and as reflective as liquid mercury. And to port: the Black Rosette.
Whirling about their common center of gravity at 26,000 kilometers per second, the six black holes themselves were little more than a circular blur. Gas and dust streamed in from surrounding space, encircled the Rosette in a tight spiral radiating far into the short end of the electromagnetic spectrum
