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  "Service," she said.

  "Glory," he replied, dropping the plaque into her palm.

  "Received," she said, and touched the corder fastened to his wrist. "I'd better get right on to it."

  The man nodded grimly; his control was excellent for someone so young, but she could sense tightly-held fright.

  "I was with the salvage crew that worked over the platform out in the Oort," he said. "Believe me, we're dealing with the unknown here. And I'm not entirely sure that the enemy haven't been meddling."

  Gwen nodded. Contamination of infosystems was a perpetual threat, one of the few forms of military action that could be carried out over light-years. There was always some traffic in information between the systems, mostly scientific. The Samothracians had always been better at infosystems, just as the Race did more with biologicals—but the InfoWeb was the skeleton of modern civilization. The unspoken threat of retaliation with biosabotage, or simply with asteroids punched up to relativistic speeds, had kept anything too obvious from happening. The potential of the molehole projects . . . was that worth the risk of direct action to the enemy?

  Certainly. A functioning macrocosmic molehole would break the long stalemate. The Final War might well turn out to be less final than they'd thought.

  "Service to the State," she said, in the old formal mode.

  He saluted, fist to chest. "Glory to the Race."

  Silence fell on the villa, unbroken save for the breathing of her ghouloon in its quarters at the back; the courier must have brought it in. The transgene was asleep, but its senses were just as keen as hers, and it would wake in the extremely unlikely event of intruders. Gwen slipped the plaque into the receptor of a pocket reader; it extended a thin diadem that she dropped over her head to rest on her brows. She lay down on a couch in the lounging room and thought at her transducer: begin.

  ***

  She came aware and blinked, lifting the circlet from her brow. The data was there, downlinked in instants; the hours since had been spent organizing and assimilating it. The process was far from complete, but well begun. Hunger and stiffness had roused her, and the sound of the ghouloon padding in. Her mind felt overcrammed and bloated, like a stomach after a too-heavy meal.

  The room was not dark to Gwen, not to eyes that could rival a cat's, and see into the infrared as well. The guardbeast rose from all fours, one hand pointing to the door; somebody was approaching. A silent snarl lifted teeth from its muzzle. Ghouloons were an early experiment, the first of the sentient transgenes. Basically a giant Gelada baboon, with material from certain breeds of dog, from the hunting cats, and from human stock for intelligence, vocal cords, and a fully opposable thumb. They made superb guardians and hunt-servants, although not bright enough to operate any but the simplest machines. Crude work by current standards, but still occasionally useful.

  She listened herself, drew air through her nostrils, stretched. "No, I think I know who that is, Wulka," she said quietly. "Go back to your room."

  Gwen slipped out of the blacks and underclothes and walked to the door. The villa lights came up around her automatically. The door was carved wood on hinges, local handicrafts. Tomin and Mala stood outside, bearing a bottle of wine and a hamper that smelled of food. The adolescents were wearing flower wreaths in their pale hair, and nothing else.

  "We—" they began.

  "I know," Gwen said, laying a finger across each pair of lips.

  She savored their scent, a slight tang of apprehension and a rising involuntary excitement as they responded to her pheromones. Those strengthened in their turn as she relaxed conscious control and let her arousal blossom. Her hands trailed down to rest over their hearts, a pleasant contrast of hard curve and soft, with the same quickening beat beneath both. Their flushed and bright-eyed smiles answered her heavy-lidded one. It was a feedback cycle, self-reinforcing for all three. This should be a rare and memorable experience for them—the pleasure would be as intense as they could bear—and an enjoyable one for her after six months alone in the wilderness.

  "A charming gesture," she said. And just what she needed to relax. "Do come in."

  ***

  Tolya gestured at the holographic image that hung over the table and it rotated through a figure-eight.

  "This is a three-dimensional representation," the physicist said. It showed something rather like an hourglass shape. "We take a molehole from the quantum foam, pump in energy to enlarge it, and stretch the ends apart. Both ends always remain fully congruent in spacetime. It's a closed timelike loop."

  That was the theory, at least. You could anchor one end and whip the other out like a bead on the end of an elastic string. Something sent through one end emerged from the other without subjective duration. The side-effects were extremely odd; if one end were traveling at relativistic speeds, you got the time-dilation effect reversibly. Observed from the outside, it would take the mobile end 4.2-odd years to reach say, Alpha Centauri. But from the fixed end back at Sol, it would be a matter of weeks until the moving exit reached across the light-years. Stepping in would move you 4.2 light-years in space, and 4.2 years in time. So far that was only a weird amplification of ordinary high-tau interstellar travel. Seriously strange was the fact that you could step back through the molehole and through time; and if you sent the mobile end on a round-trip journey to the Centauri system and returned, you'd have two gates right next to each other, separated by more than eight years in time.

  FTL always was considered equivalent to time-travel, Gwen mused. The surprising thing was that both seemed to be possible.

  "Of course, as an object passes through, the molehole tries to pinch out—you have to feed in heavy energy to keep it from closing, a virtual-matter ring. We've achieved consistent results using slightly enlarged ones and passing subatomic particles through, down on a single-atom scale. Proof of concept; it definitely works, overlord."

  "But."

  The servus scientist sighed and ran a hand through her graying hair. "Yes. There seems to be some sort of asymptotic phenomenon that takes over when we enlarge. The energy inputs give extremely variable results, and the variability increases exponentially as size goes up. It's a chaotic effect, somehow. The theory we have says that once stabilized the molehole shouldn't do that, but obviously the theory's not everything we could wish. At a guess, I'd say that there's some sort of . . . inherent linkage to the quantum foam. There could even be advantages to that, eventually, but it's not a completely understood phenomenon. In fact, overlord, it's not even partly understood."

  "What are you trying?"

  "Well, we're running a series of tests; enlarging the captive molehole without separating the ends spatially. That ought to be easier under a relatively heavy and uniform gravitational field. We'll bring it up in size before manipulating it; still very small compared to the eventual macrocosmic applications, you understand. About on the scale of a medium-sized molecule. If we can do that, then we might be able to separate the ends later. Here's the math."

  Figures replaced the holograph. Gwen let her transducer take them in, running a mental comparison with the previous attempts.

  "These functions—what're you assuming?" she said after a moment, calling up a sequence of equations. "Where did you get these quantities?"

  Tolya shrugged and spread her hands, "We're guessing. The experimental results should give us an order-of-magnitude answer on how wrong we are, and then we can try again. It isn't quick, I'm afraid, overlord, but—"

  "—elegance buys no yams, yes," she replied, nodding approval. "Good solid rule-of-thumb work. More productive than any simulations, when the basic metrics aren't fully known. The space-based team tried to go too far too fast, in my opinion."

  A heavy wash of flattered pleasure at her words scented the air; she could feel the enthusiasm like a glow around the long plain table. Her own answered it. These were obviously a first-class group.

  Progress. Back in the times of the Old Domination, when the Draka and their subj
ects had both been archaic-human, it had been impossible to entrust work like this to the underclasses. She had seen the last of that herself, being the first generation of the New Race.

  "We're running the first series now, overlord," Tolya said. "You could monitor from here."

  "No, I'll come down," she said thoughtfully.

  Not that looking at the casings of the machinery would give her more information than she could get here, but you never knew what prompted an intuitive leap. They crowded into the elevator, a bit of a tight press with Wulka in one corner. The servus crowded away from the transgene's fur, squeezing together to avoid transgressing Gwen's sphere of social space. She kept her dominance pheromones throttled down to the minimum in the crowded quarters, but it was a relief when the doors hissed open. They were a long way underground here. The shaft opened directly onto the centrum, with another display monitor in the center of the circular room. Around it were consoles with recliners for the attendants. They sat silently, seldom moving, controlling their instruments through transducers and the relay-circlets around their temples.

  "Ready to run," one of them said aloud.

  Gwen stepped to the display table. It was physically over the facility, more for symmetry's sake than anything else. Right now the graph-holos were showing standby power only. The molehole was represented by a line of white light. Her transducer was Draka class, and she slipped effortlessly into communion with the machines and their operators. It was not quite like artificial telepathy, but nearly. Tolya was directing them with crisp efficiency:

  Bringing it up. Skip level four in thirty seconds, power on. Mark.

  This is the level the platform had trouble with? Gwen asked.

  Yes, overlord, but we've reached it before without a problem.

  Gwen nodded, proceed, cautiously.

  Seems steady enough, the physicist thought. One more level and then stabilize and monitor.

  A technicians thought. Power overage.

  Odd. Tolya hesitated, cut energy input, 10%. To Gwen: Overlord, it ought to collapse in a gravity field if we take it down, pity to lose the molehole, but—

  Power overage. It's not contracting. A pause. Loss of symmetry, the metric is varying.

  Gwen cut in. Put it on auto and evacuate. She looked up. Tolya was staring at the console, wide-eyed.

  Overlord, we'll lose the facility!

  Gwen spoke aloud. "Uplink the data, realtime." Crucial to get something of value out of this. "Evacuate the settlement. And get out!"

  Her voice took on the whipcrack of command. The others obeyed instantly, all but Tolya. The chief physicist halted for an instant in the shaft door.

  "Overlord—"

  "Go."

  Her mind grappled with the machines. Get the data out. The control systems were trying to shove the molehole back down into the quantum foam where it belonged, and failing. The danger was sudden, shocking, as unexpected as a grizzly heaving itself out of hibernation beneath her feet. It focused her, as nothing else had in generations. Get the scientists out; right now, they were more valuable to the Race than she was. Save the facility if she could. That's not working. The machines were trying to starve the molehole, but obviously the power input was coming from somewhere else. Once it rose over a tripping threshold it started expanding on its own, exponentially. Vacuum energy, perhaps.

  All right, we'll try the other way. She rapped out through her transducer: maximize containment fields. If she couldn't starve it, see if it choked.

  There was an almost-audible hum from beneath her feet. Several alarm systems began to indicate physical breaches in components; all this was taking place in a space smaller than her fist, ten meters or so below.

  Well, that didn't work either. Fear now, harsh and unaccustomed. The facility was lost, and her with it if she didn't get out in time.

  "Out!" she rasped, and began the leap backward that would take her into the elevator shaft.

  The ghouloon reacted with an equal, animal swiftness, reaching out to grab her and add the momentum of its arm to her bound.

  Blackness.

  ***

  "Damnation!"

  Alarms flexed through the detection instruments of the USSNF President Douglas. The cruiser was waiting on minimal-power standby, most of the crew in stasis units, everything heavily stealthed. The passive sensors were fully active, however.

  Captain Marjorie Starns, United States of Samothrace Naval Forces, looked down at the screen again; the implants gave her the same information, with the mathematical overtones. The images of others of the active crew appeared in front of her: her executive officer, Lyle Asmundsen, and the Strategic Studies Institute honcho, Menendez.

  She called up data; Earth spun before them, as if the ship were orbiting the planet, rather than nearly a tenth of a light-year beyond Pluto. A grid lay across it, and a point flashed.

  "Eastern coast of North America," she said.

  "Certain it was a molehole?" The spook, George Menendez.

  "Nothing else produces an event wave like that," she said. "Very brief; it cycled through its stability point, grew and collapsed. They're still working on the control—but they're getting closer. That one nearly worked. Of course, they evidently don't know what happens when you open one through a sharply-flexed spacetime matrix, but this'll give them an idea. They're not what you'd call really sharp theoretical physicists, but once you know something's possible . . ."

  The intelligence agent started to shrug, then stopped and crossed himself. "Jesus," he whispered. "That's another Earth they broke through to."

  The captain nodded jerkily. "We've got a responsibility here," she said. "Samothrace is always uninhabited, to a very high order of probability. But any other Earth . . ."

  "What was the degree of displacement?" Asmundsen said.

  She consulted the machines; the theoretical breakthroughs behind them were recent, but capacity had grown swiftly.

  "It'll take a while to be certain, but probably timelike negative, with a vertical temporal displacement of about . . . four centuries and a lateral of six hundred—close to the minimum possible. The event-wave track's quite clear. Something went through, and it was alive when it did."

  Menendez nodded. "What can we do?"

  Asmundsen smiled bleakly. "We could put the whole ship through on that track," he said. "If we moved farther into the solar gravity well."

  Starns grunted laughter. "And put up a sign, hurrah, we're here for the snakes. They could follow us en masse in a couple of weeks. Anything we put through is going to be out of precise chronophase, and the more energetic the mass put through is, the more noticeable. Once the snakes realize what's going on . . ."

  "Should we do anything?" Menendez said. "Our mission priority is information. Samothrace is waiting for this data."

  The naval officers exchanged glances. "We'll have to leave now anyway," Starns replied. "They're going to detect us when we run for the transit molehole back to the Centauri system." Modern drives transferred momentum between ship and cosmos directly, but the process inescapably bled energetic quanta far above the level of vacuum energy.

  "That would cover a minor insertion."

  "Very minor," Menendez said thoughtfully. "We've got to be careful about giving them an extra energy source to detect. If they manage to trace whoever it was they lost, it'll give them a big jump on mastering the molehole technology."

  "Besides a possible bolthole when The Day arrives," Starns said. "Plus . . . well, whoever's on the other side of that molehole doesn't deserve a live snake running around."

  "It might have been a servus, not a drakensis."

  "Possible, but can we count on it? And even a servus might be able to set up some sort of beacon; they're not stupid just because they've been mind-gelded."

  Menendez nodded decisively. "One agent, minimal equipment," he said. "I'll revive and brief my best operative—Lafarge."

  "Sure he'll volunteer?" Starns said dubiously.

  The spymas
ter smiled bleakly. "They all volunteered to be inserted on our Earth if necessary," he said. "Anything else will be a rose garden by comparison."

  Chapter Two

  JANUARY 1, 1995 A.D.

  EARTH/2.

  Falling. Consciousness returned, and Gwen was falling, under gravity. Reflex snapped her hands out and they closed on rough metal, stopping her with a jar that clicked her teeth together. Something fell past her. She froze, eyes wide with shock. She keyed her transducer, but there was nothing, not even the location-signal from the navsats. She was out of contact with the Web; it felt like having two limbs amputated, or part of her brain.

  Smells. The air was heavy with them, rank. Rusty iron. Burnt hydrocarbons, enough to gag you. A stew of chemicals, half of which she couldn't identify. Scorched metal; there was a thin hole burnt through the beam she held, as if by an energy weapon. The smell of old concrete. And—

  Humans.

  Many humans, and close. Their rank feral smell clogged her nostrils, thrumming along her nerves with remembered terror.

  It was impossible, and it cleared her head. Don't try to understand. React.

  She was hanging by her hands from an iron walkway in a large dimly lit room, nearly ten meters up. Grimy skylights overhead let in a diffuse light. Enough for her eyes to see clearly, and there were IR sources down there, too. She could hear voices. The language had a tantalizing almost-familiar sound. Gwen focused on it, filtering out the rumble of background noise.

  "Who dot?" More incomprehensible shouting.

  It was English, but very far from her dialect. Samothrace? I'm in the Alpha Centauri system? her mind gibbered. No time for that. Not the right mix, anyhow.