Star system and alert Earth if the Rosies showed up again. Judging by what was unfolding out of Heimdall, they’d never left in the first place, and Earth was going to want to know about that.
“Get us back to the others,” she told the helm officer.
“Aye, Captain.”
“Exec? Go to general quarters.”
This was not looking good.
USNA FME Olympia
Rosette
Omega Centauri
1214 hours, GMT
Some 15,800 light years removed from Earth, an AI called Limpy by the humans working with it stared into strangeness as well. Although he did not think in the same way that humans did, and did not make the same value judgments, it knew that something was going on … and that it did not look good.
Omega Centauri was the largest globular star cluster in the Milky Way galaxy—10 million stars with a total mass some 4 million times that of Sol, packed into a sphere 150 light years across. At its gravitational center, deep within that teeming swarm of stars filling an impossibly crowded sky, six black holes, each the size of a world, orbited, in a patently artificial manner—a Klemperer rosette.
Centuries before, Terran astronomers had demonstrated that Omega Centauri was not, in fact, a typical globular cluster, but rather that it was the stripped-down core of a small galaxy that had been sucked in and devoured by the much larger Milky Way more than half a billion years before. Large galaxies, it was known, were cannibals, shredding smaller galaxies and slurping up the remains. Several stars—among them the red dwarf Kapteyn’s Star, only 12.7 light years from Sol, had been proven by their spectral fingerprints to be escaped members of that ancient galaxy.
Much more recently, human warships engaging the so-called Sh’daar Empire had traveled back through time and discovered that galaxy, called the N’gai Cluster by its myriad inhabitants, during an epoch when it was still just above the Milky Way. At the heart of N’gai, they’d found what was almost certainly the precursor of the Rosette—six hyper-giant blue stars serving as a kind of beacon or monument for the Sh’daar.
Here within Omega Centauri, however, those hyperstars had long ago exploded, turning into black holes whirling around a tortured volume of space not much larger than Earth. And there was more. The enigmatic being known as the Consciousness had been busily building … something. Titanic structures apparently constructed of pure light hung suspended around the hexagon of rotating singularities and extended in all directions to impossible infinities.
The monitor Olympia, a high-tech listening post disguised as an innocuous chunk of rock the size of Mt. Everest—crewed by 150 humans and a late-model AI with some very special programming—had slipped into orbit around the Rosette only weeks before. With downloads based on data snatched from the Consciousness at Kapteyn’s Star, Limpy could eavesdrop on the Consciousness by linking in to back channels and sidebands to tap into conversations between a few of the far-flung individual devices making up the whole.
So far, the effort had not been particularly productive. One xenosophontologist had declared that the eavesdropping effort was akin to finding out what a human was thinking by analyzing the waste emissions of a couple of the bacteria in his gut. Limpy felt that the chances of getting something useful were better than that, but he understood the problem. The Consciousness was very, very large and complex, and even the very best human-directed SAIs had little chance of understanding the entity in more than an extremely basic way.
To Limpy, it was a chance worth taking.
Right now, the AI on Olympia was drifting across the face of the Rosette, its orbit taking it cross the opening between the six whirling singularities. In the space at the center, stars were visible … but not the thronging, massed stars of Omega Centauri. Olympia’s bridge crew was looking, quite literally, through a hole punched in spacetime. They were looking into somewhere—and somewhen—else.
Clearly, the Rosette was a stargate of some kind. The high-velocity rotation of those black holes around their common center twisted the normal, sane dimensions of spacetime out of all reason, opening numerous gateways into the unknown. The starscapes glimpsed within that whirling gateway might be other regions of the galaxy, other times, or even other universes entirely.
The being called the Consciousness had come through from one of those elsewheres. The Consciousness, the Rosette entity, the Alien Intelligence … all of those were names for something Humankind had never truly encountered and might never be able to understand.
Limpy was here to try to learn more.
“Hey, Limp?”
“Yes, Captain Mosely?”
“What’s all that stuff over there? Opposite the Rosette opening?”
He knew exactly what Mosely was referring to. He’d been watching the phenomenon grow and develop for several minutes now … a huge cloud of what looked like smoke, white and gray-silver in the massed starlight.
“Unknown, Captain. It appears to be clouds of micromachines similar to those you call fireflies, numbering in the trillions.”
“What are they doing?”
“Coming in this general direction.”
“Shit …”
The Olympia AI continued watching for several moments. “Captain, I would suggest you sound general quarters.”
“I was just arriving at the same conclusion.”
A second later, Olympia’s internal passageways rang with the shrill clanging of the alarm. Not that it much mattered—the swarm was on them before most of the crew was able to take their positions. Yet the lead elements of the cloud swept past the ship at a range of several hundred kilometers, and it soon became clear that the cloud’s target was not the Olympia.
“So where are they going in such a damned hurry?” Mosely wondered aloud, thinking the danger had passed.
And then a shudder ran through the drifting mountain, followed by several savage shocks.
“Limpy!” Mosely called. “We’ve been hit!” The starfield outside began drifting. “We’re rotating!”
“We haven’t been hit, Captain. We have been caught in an extremely powerful gravitational stream.”
“What the hell is a ‘gravitational stream’?”
“A narrow, tubular volume of space has been distorted in such a way as to create rapid movement toward the Rosette. We have been caught by the fringes of the effect and are being swept along.”
“Toward the Rosette …”
“That is correct, Captain. Unless we can break free, we will pass through the central lumen of the hexagon in another forty-three seconds.”
The Olympia possessed gravitational drive engines, but the ship was slow and underpowered for a vessel of its size and mass. Mosely was shouting orders, trying to engage the drive and bring the ship clear, but the AI had already
