Dark Mind

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

0440 hours, TFT

“It’s too fucking early …” Don Gregory complained.

“There ain’t no day or night in space, youngster,” squadron commander Luther Mackey replied. “So no early or late. Deal with it.”

“It’s zero-dark thirty, Skipper,” Gregory replied, “and I haven’t had my damned coffee yet.”

“My … grouchy first thing, aren’t we?” Lieutenant Gerald Ruxton said over the tactical channel, laughing. He sounded … awake, Gregory thought. Disgustingly so. Bright, cheerful, and—considering the fact that he’d been in the ship’s bar drinking with him about five hours ago and was, therefore, just as short on sleep as he—

“Ice it down, people,” Mackey said. “Bearing one-seven-five by minus three-one. We’re clear for launch. America has cut thrust and is drifting. Fifteen hundred kps …”

Gregory’s SG-420 Starblade fighter absorbed the incoming data even as the skipper relayed it in staccato fashion. He could feel the flick and trickle of numbers downloading through his skull.

“Launch in three …” Mackey said, “… and two … and one … release!”

Mounted in the outer deck of the second rotating hab module, the fighters of Black Demon squadron, VFA-96, began sliding down their launch tubes, impelled by a half G’s worth of centrifugal force. Gregory was third in the queue; together with Lieutenant Bruce Caswell’s Starblade, he dropped into blackness, slowly drifting clear of the shadow of America’s massive forward shield cap, then rotated to align his craft parallel to the far larger star carrier. The ship was an immense mushroom shape nearly a kilometer long, its shield cap a hemispherical water reservoir four hundred meters across. Ahead, partially obscured by the shield cap, the perfect circle of the TRGA—blurred by rotation and by a fiercely twisted spacetime—hung suspended in the distance.

The remaining VFA-96 fighters dropped from the habmodule flight decks and took up station with the others, a flight of twelve Starblades already morphing into highvelocity teardrop shapes. Even in the vacuum of space, streamline counted for ships moving at close to c.

“America CIC, this is Point One,” Commander Mackey said. “Handing off from PriFly. All Demons clear of the ship and formed up.”

“Copy, Point One,” a voice replied from America’s Combat Information Center. “Primary Flight Control confirms handoff to CIC. You are clear for maneuver. You may proceed.”

“Okay, boys and girls,” Commander Mackey said, addressing the squadron. “Time to thread the needle. Initiate program.”

Tightly knotted gravitational singularities winked on just ahead of each fighter, dragging it forward as it flickered in and out of existence at thousands of times per second, accelerations building rapidly as America slid past the fighters, then began dwindling astern.

VFA-96 had drawn the short straw on this mission … flying point, leading America and her battle group into and through the huge, fast-spinning cylinder ahead. Gregory wasn’t entirely sure he was ready for this. Three months ago—or 12 million years in the future, depending on how one counted things—his fighter had been damaged, and he’d briefly been marooned on the surface of Invictus, a frigid rogue planet wandering the darkness beyond the galaxy’s rim. He’d lost his legs … and he’d lost Meg Connor, a woman he’d loved very much. The legs had grown back and he’d learned how to walk again.

But other wounds were a hell of a lot harder to heal.

He had to force his mind away from thoughts of Meg. The Black Demons had lost a lot of pilots at Invictus, and very, very nearly lost him as well.

Maybe, he thought, it would have been better if he had died.

TC/USNA CVS America

Flag Bridge

0451 hours, TFT

“Admiral on the bridge!”

“As you were.” The call and the response were largely for tradition’s sake, since coming to attention in zero-gravity was more or less pointless. In any case, it would have been bad form to interrupt personnel working their consoles and links.

Gray entered the flag bridge, giving a gentle tug to pull himself along one of the tethers that roped different parts of the double bridge complex together. Parts of America, those within the rotating hab module section—mostly personnel quarters and the fighter launch and recovery decks—were under spin gravity, but the flag bridge and the adjacent ship’s bridge were located in a tower rising from the star carrier’s spine forward of the hab sections, and therefore in zerogravity.

He positioned himself in the command chair and let it tighten around his hips. He placed the palms of his hands on the seat’s contact plates, letting them connect with his neural interfaces. Datastreams began flowing through his brain, opening in-head windows and connecting him with the AIs running both the ship and the fleet.

There was no up or down in zero-gravity, of course, but from the vantage point of his command chair, he was looking down onto the ship’s bridge forward. The flag bridge formed a kind of gallery overlooking the ship’s command center, where he could see about a dozen officers and enlisted personnel working at their consoles under the watchful electronic gaze of Captain Sara Gutierrez. On the large curving bulkhead above the bridge entrance glowed a projection of surrounding space, with the blurred and perfectly circular ring of the TRGA centered dead ahead. Dwindling numbers to the side gave range and closing velocity.

“The Demons are going in,” the voice of Captain Connie Fletcher reported, whispering in his mind. She was America’s CAG, the officer commanding the various fighter and auxiliary squadrons.

“Tell them—” Gray stopped. He’d been about to wish them “Godspeed,” but that would have been less than appropriate. There were those who thought the TRGAs had indeed been constructed, eons in the past, by godlike aliens, and the White Covenant discouraged statements that might be interpreted as religious sentiment by others. “Tell them good luck,” he said. It might be a bit lame, but it shouldn’t offend anyone.

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

Icons marking the twelve fighters of the Black Demon squadron appeared ahead, superimposed against the TRGA’s maw. And then …

They were gone.

Let me see the fleet disposition, Gray thought. The viewpoint pulled back from America, so that the star carrier could be seen from the side, in the distance. Other icons appeared strung out behind her. America was followed in line-ahead by the railgun cruiser Leland … and behind her came the alien Nameless. The Glothr, it seemed, didn’t name their ships, so the humans on the expedition had given the vessel a name of their own.

Not quite the most clever name, but there you go.

The fighters were through. Data began pulsing back … but broken and static-blasted. Communication across a TRGA gateway tended to be intermittent and unsatisfactory, requiring precisely positioned transmitters and receivers, as well as a great deal of power. There was enough to tell the battle group that the fighters had emerged, however, and apparently in the right epoch.

Fighter pilots called it threading a needle … a reasonable analogy. The interior opening of a TRGA was only slightly wider than America was long. Still, within the TRGA’s lumen, minute variations in position and velocity created wildly different pathways through space and time. The ships of the America battlegroup were following a carefully programmed and precise series of maneuvers as they entered the spinning maw.

“Okay, people,” Gray said softly. “All nav systems to automatic. Let the AIs take us through.”

The warning was unnecessary—more nervous reassurance than anything else. All twelve ships of Battlegroup America were being guided now by powerful artificial intelligences. Presumably, the additional ship, the Glothr Nameless, was guided by non-organic systems as well. Jellyware brains—even enhanced by AI implants—simply weren’t precise enough or fast enough to handle the variables successfully.

For a breathless moment, the star carrier America hung on the verge between one space and another …

And then unimaginable energies seized the vessel and dragged her in.

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

0458 hours, TFT

Something strange was happening to time.

The TRGA was just twelve kilometers long. Traveling at some twenty kilometers per second relative to the alien portal, Gregory should have been through and out the other side in six tenths of a second. It felt, however, like ten or fifteen seconds, an impossibly long time as the blurred gray walls of the tube swept past his ship, terrifyingly close. The slightest miscalculation, and his fighter would be shredded by contact with a wall moving at very close to c. Even if he didn’t hit that motion-smeared surface, a tenmeter drift in any direction would put him on a different spacetime trajectory … and the gods alone knew where he would emerge … or when.

Then the TRGA’s walls vanished, whisked away at twenty kps as Gregory’s fighter emerged into open space once more.

And this new space was extraordinarily crowded with stars.

“My God …” he breathed, awed. The White Covenant be damned—the phrase spoke to how he felt.

The Black Demons were moving through the central core of the N’gai star cluster … a dwarf galaxy just above the plane of the vast spiral of the Milky Way. The TRGA had brought them back through time as well—some 876 million years into their remote past. In this epoch, life on Earth was still confined to the planet’s seas and was only just then discovering that sex and genetic diversity were useful evolutionary ideas.