Deep Space. Ian Douglas

report from Mars only hours ago: Endeavor and two Confederation destroyers had been lost out at Omega Tee-prime. Intelligence suspected that the Sh’daar were behind the attack. This news, coming so close on the heels of the disaster at Arianrhod, seemed to promise the final collapse of the Sh’daar Treaty.

      “They re-elected you because they know how you feel about the Confederation, Mr. President. You promised to give North America more sovereignty within the world government.”

      Koenig grunted at that. The Pax Confeoderata had been formed in 2133, a union popularly known interchangeably as either the Earth or Terran Confederation. The creation of a single polity embracing most world governments had been a necessity arising from the chaos of the First and Second Sino-Western Wars, the Blood Death plague, and the widespread devastation caused by the Chinese asteroid strike into the Atlantic Ocean. The Pax had held now for almost three centuries and had followed Humankind to the stars.

      But with the apparent defeat of the Sh’daar twenty years before, there’d been a resurgence of spirit, of independent thought and goals—and a new wave of calls for American independence from Geneva. North American sovereignty. It was an intriguing dream and one that Koenig himself very much wanted to see realized.

      If the Sh’daar were renewing the old conflict, though, this was exactly the wrong time in which to do it. If ever Earth needed to stand united, this was the time.

      Koenig had retired from the USNA Navy in 2408, four years after his startling victory over the Sh’daar. Elements within the American party had pointed out that his popularity would all but guarantee his election as president of the USNA.

      His refusal to follow Confederation government orders in the face of Geneva’s blunt stupidity had had a lot to do with that. He’d ordered his battlegroup to leave the Sol System deliberately before orders to the contrary could arrive, won a surprising victory at Alphekka, skirmished with a French squadron at HD157950, and eventually beaten Sh’daar client forces at Texaghu Resch. Ultimately, Koenig had taken CBG-18 through a Sh’daar transit node into the remote past to confront the Sh’daar puppet masters within their home galaxy and epoch … though that hadn’t been clear at the time. The Sh’daar threat had collapsed with astonishing suddenness, resulting in the treaty guaranteeing Earth’s interstellar borders.

      When CBG-18 had returned to Earth, Geneva had had little choice but to forgive Koenig’s de facto mutiny and declare him a hero.

      He’d resisted getting into politics, but the ongoing battle with Geneva over Periphery Reconstruction had drawn him in, and he’d been elected to the USNA Senate in 2410. As North America began rebuilding the shattered, half-submerged cities along its drowned coastal areas, Geneva insisted that these regions, formally abandoned by the USNA centuries before, now properly belonged to the Pax world community. Once again, the former admiral had aligned himself against the Terran Confederation government, this time in the senate halls in both Columbus and in Geneva. In 2418, Koenig had left the Senate to run for president, and been elected to a six-year term.

      And now, just two days ago, he’d won a second term.

      The big question was what Geneva would decide to do in light of the news of the twin naval disasters … and whether President Koenig would be able to support their decision, whatever that might be.

      And would the American public, caught up in their new enthusiasm for independence, support him if he decided that he must first support a united Earth?

      Much depended on the alien Sh’daar, and at the moment they were a complete unknown in the equation.

      The Confederation maintained at best only a tenuous connection with the Sh’daar. The so-called Sh’daar Empire, the remnants, apparently, of an ancient extragalactic federation of mutually alien civilizations, maintained a far-flung polity of mutually alien species, both now and in the remote past. That they feared the Terran Confederation, despite their considerable technological advantage, was indisputable. But Humankind understood them so poorly, even down to exactly what it was about humans that the Sh’daar feared.

      Attempts to open new negotiations with the aliens through their usual representatives, a species called the Agletsch, had repeatedly failed. The Sh’daar had ignored Geneva’s call for a dialogue over the Osiris question, refused to put human diplomats in touch with the alien Nungiirtok still occupying the 70 Ophiuchi system, and rejected point-blank Confederation requests to revisit Omega Tee-sub, as the Sh’daar home cluster in the remote past was commonly known.

      And now, according to the packet that had just arrived at Fleet HQ in Mars orbit, the Navy survey vessel Endeavor and her escorts had been destroyed by unknown attackers at the central core of Omega Tee-prime.

      “Tee-sub” was a manageable shorthand for “T_-0.876gy,” an unwieldy mouthful pronounced “Tee-sub-minus zero point eight seven six gigayear,” a physics notation referring to an epoch 876 million years in the past. Tee-prime, on the other hand, was Time Now, November of the year 2424 in common usage. Time travel, Koenig reflected, not for the first time, made things almost unendurably complicated. And conducting a war across a span of almost a billion years made everything infinitely worse.

      Sixteen thousand light years from Sol lay the largest globular star cluster in the galaxy, Omega Centauri, a swarming beehive of 10 million suns packed into a sphere just 230 light years across. Close inspection, however, had proven that Omega Centauri was not, strictly speaking, a proper member of the cloud of regular, smaller globular star clusters orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy, but the stripped-down core of a separate dwarf galaxy devoured by the Milky Way hundreds of millions of years in the past.

      Some 876 million years ago, Omega Centauri had been an irregular galaxy much like the Greater Magellanic Cloud of the present day, hanging just above the far larger galactic spiral. That Omega Centauri, existing almost a billion years ago and known to its inhabitants as the N’gai Cloud, was the home of some thousands of mutually alien civilizations called the collective name Sh’daar.

      The central core of Omega T_-0.876gy and Omega Centauri Tee-prime were in fact one and the same, the same star-swarm in two epochs, separated by just less than a billion years. The ancient version teemed with life, with inhabited worlds and with the incomprehensibly vast structures of a highly advanced and utterly alien technology; the modern version was uninhabited, its worlds silent and empty, the polyspecific civilization it once had held long vanished.

      Why? What had happened to them?

      The Sh’daar weren’t discussing it, obviously. In fact, they’d long seemed distinctly nervous about the entire topic, and lately all communication with the Sh’daar had ceased.

      It was distinctly possible that the Sh’daar were on the point of renewing the war, and that, Koenig thought, could be very, very bad news indeed for all of Humankind.

      He turned from the viewall display. “Marcus?”

      “Sir?”

      “Get me time with Konstantin. The sooner the better.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      The problem, Koenig thought, demanded more-than-human consideration.

      Chapter Three

       9 November 2424

       Sh’daar Node

       Texaghu Resch System,

       210 Light Years from Sol

       0105 hours, TFT

      Red Mike fell through emptiness, accelerating gently toward the blurred haze of distorted light now only 10,000 kilometers ahead. At his current velocity, he would reach the maw in another fifteen minutes.

      “Deep Peek, Peleliu,” a voice whispered within his awareness. “You are on course and clear for departure.”

      “Copy,” Red Mike replied,