End of the Circle by Jack McKinney

Author:Jack McKinney [McKinney, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82396-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

It has been claimed that all laws of science, our very ability to predict future events, will break down upon reaching the singularity. That the black hole’s event horizon—trapped light’s desperate spacetime path—is but a one-way membrane, we are about to find out. If only Dr. Hawking were here to join us.

Dr. Harold Penn, The Brief but Timeless Voyage of the Peter Pan

Like laser light in a smoke-filled room, Louie’s cyber-self punched through the green haze security threshold leading to the Awareness’s higher function core and arrowed straight into a cluster of telemetry commands in charge of programming dimensional data into the sphere ships’ drives. The team was spread out in a V formation behind him, targeting ghosts against approaching strings of defense bytes.

Strucker had found that some of them could actually be absorbed and turned against their own kind.

Louie was a quarterback in that moment of stasis before the inevitable inrush of linemen and backs, searching through banks of data in a reckless effort to locate the prototype ship intel had indentified as nearly complete. The team was doing an incredible job of blocking the Awareness’s poisoned advances, but the line was beginning to weaken.

Back aboard the Ark Angel, Louie’s fingers tattooed hunches and possibilities to his discorporate mind; his fingers danced on the directional cross, maneuvering him clear of circuit frying, brainwipe booby traps.

Then, suddenly, he had it: an on-line ship designated by a perplexing series of emblematic icons and alphanumeric analogues. As expected, the ship had been safeguarded against entry, but no longer. Louie tapped the override program and keyed a new sequence of commands into the console.

Neuron probes, meanwhile, were nipping at the perimeter of the envelope in which he had secreted himself. There was no time left to search out the space drive production commands; Dana would have to see to it on her own.

“Toggle out!” Louie ordered as the first of the probes penetrated his defense net. “Toggle out!”

Scott Bernard maneuvered the Alpha through a storm of annihilation discs launched from Haydon IV’s in-close plasma arrays. The planetoid’s big guns were still trained on the few ships that remained of the Karbarran battle group. The ursinoids’ fighter squadrons had been literally blown to pieces during counteroffensive impact runs by cloud after cloud of labor drones. Stray bits of those fighters drifted around the Alpha, touched by explosive glints, cyan and crimson.

But Haydon IV had been taking a pounding as well. It was a twin-eyed monstrosity below him now, hemispheric surfaces scorched and molten, factory tubes holed and venting gouts of alloy debris.

In the midground of the Alpha’s curved canopy view floated a hundred or more of Haydon’s sphere ships, temporarily abandoned in varying stages of readiness.

Scott had not flown a space combat op in well over a year and felt rusty. As rusty as the first day he had piloted a Veritech through Earth’s atmosphere, a green VT Lunk had stashed away in an old barn. But no matter. The searing discs, the blue-green bolts, those swaths of agitated light were mild compared to his inner torment.

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