Ever since these enigmatic spinning cylinders were discovered, xenotechnologists had begun naming them after famous physiciststhroughout history. This one was named after Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist of three centuries ago who’d helped developan understanding of the principles of quantum mechanics and relativity, as well as the quantum nature of consciousness. Grayhad used this gate before to reach the N’gai Cluster, 876 million years in the past and thousands of light years above thegalactic plane.
Dozens of TRGAs were now known, though who had constructed them and when was still a complete mystery. Somehow, the mass of the sun was compressed into a tube of pure neutronium a few kilometers long, with Jupiter-massed black holes counter-rotating within the tube’s walls. Those masses together twisted the fabric of spacetime inside the gravitationally tortured lumen of that cylinder, creating an unknown but very large number of pathways across space and across time. Whoever it was, they were far, far advanced beyond what humans were capable of.
We’re worried about the Singularity, but that would be a drop in the bucket in terms of technological advancement, Gray thought.
“Captain Rand,” he said. “Let’s put a fleet of smartdrones in there.”
“Already prepped and ready for launch, Admiral. On your order.”
“Do it.”
The small, robotic devices would create a detailed picture of surrounding space, or as in this case, would act as instrumentsthat could fly into the maw of a TRGA and return to give the starship an up-to-the-moment map of the tangled web of pathwaysthrough space and time. America was releasing a stream of drones now, numbering in the hundreds. Most would be destroyed. A few, however, should return.
That, at least, was the idea.
America waited.
Flag Bridge
CIS CV Moskva
Approaching Penrose TRGA
1225 hours, GMT
“Everyone stand ready!”
Oreshkin leaned forward in growing, nervous anticipation as the voice of an AI droned through the countdown: “Pyat . . . chetyre . . . tri . . . dva . . . adin . . . vsplyvat!”
The Alcubierre bubble surrounding the Moskva fluttered . . . then evaporated in a spectacular blaze of photons. According to Koroshev, the navigator, they should haveemerged within a few light-minutes of the Penrose TRGA.
There was always some uncertainty about the maneuver. While you were cocooned inside your own private universe under drive,you couldn’t see out, and the usual navigational reference points—a scattering of pulsars across the heavens—could not beseen. The timing for releasing the FTL field was critical. Miss your mark by a thousandth of a second and you could zip pastit by several thousand kilometers. Emergence timing, then, was always left to the ship AI, faster and more powerful than evenenhanced human capabilities by a factor of tens of thousands or more.
But even with the best super-AI at the helm, there was an inherent fuzziness to the vessel’s precise location that made emergencemore dependent on a throw of the dice than on rigorous mathematics. The local curvature of space, the mass of the ship, theefficiency of the drive all contributed to that uncertainty—one good reason that ships operated their FTL drives only at distancesgreater than 40 AU from the local star, about the average distance of Pluto from the sun.
“We are in normal space, Captain-first,” Kulinin reported. “All normal.”
“Range to the TRGA?”
“Sir!” the senior sensor officer called back. “One point two-two astronomical units to objective! That’s ten light-minutes!”
“Any sign of our quarry?”
“Yes, sir. America and her consorts are a few hundred kilometers from the TRGA.”
Ten minutes to the North American carrier. Perfect.
“Release the chicks,” Oreshkin ordered. “Fighters and destroyers! Open formation and prepare for acceleration!”
Aft, six Russian Cossack-class destroyers dropped free from Moskva’s slender spine. Each vessel was two hundred meters long and carried a crew of ninety. Hawk fighters began slipping from their launch tubes, gathering ahead of the carrier.
“All units to battle stations,” Oreshkin ordered. “Fighters commence maximum acceleration! Attack!”
The Hawk fighters flashed into the void ahead, two squadrons of them.
“All ships accelerate,” Oreskin said. “Weapons ready!”
Moskva had just managed to pull a piece of tactical magic from its hat. The American ship was ten light-minutes away, so the imageOreshkin was now seeing on his main screen was ten minutes out of date. At this point in time, the Americans could not seethe Russian squadron at all, because their view of this part of space also lagged by ten minutes . . . and ten minutes agoMoskva had still been under Alcubierre FTL Drive. Moskva now had the unparalleled opportunity of rushing toward the American ship at near-c, arriving only moments behind the flash of their emergence.
Oreshkin checked his chronometer. It had been just one minute and forty seconds since Moskva had emerged from warp.
They had seven minutes, twenty seconds before the Americans would be able to see them.
USNA CVS America
Penrose TRGA
79 light years from Earth
1228 hours, FST
“This is looking like a total bust, Admiral,” Rand reported to Gray. “Four hours, and not a damned thing has come back!”
“We’ll wait a little longer, Captain,” Gray replied. But he was already pretty sure that something inside the twisted spacetimeof the TRGA was terribly wrong.
The smartdrones were designed to trace out some of the open pathways within a TRGA, map them, then return to their starting point to report. Such surveys could take months, even years, because the number of paths was so high. The problem was, Gray was looking for one particular pathway that was already recorded, stretching from the Penrose TRGA and time now to the Omega Centauri Cluster TRGA. All of the drones America had launched this morning were programmed to trace out that one path, and a round trip shouldn’t have taken more than a fewminutes.
The delay suggested that the globular cluster was impassable . . . or that the TRGA itself was not working right . . . orthat something on the other side of Penrose was eating drones. Gray thought that last possibility the more likely. The hypernovathree years earlier had devastated both the core of the N’gai Cloud and at least touched the central regions of Omega Centauri—theywere, in fact, the same physical volume of space, albeit separated by almost a billion years.
Carol Conyer and others in America’s astrophysics department had assured
