Cover

Also by W. Michael Gear

DAW BOOKS PROUDLY PRESENTS THE SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS OF W. MICHAEL GEAR:

The Donovan Series

Outpost

Abandoned

Pariah

Unreconciled

Adrift

Reckoning

The Team Psi Series

The Alpha Enigma

Implacable Alpha

The Spider Trilogy

The Warriors of Spider

The Way of Spider

The Web of Spider

The Forbidden Borders Trilogy

Requiem for the Conqueror

Relic of Empire

Countermeasures

***

Starstrike

The Artifact

Dedication

TO

SHEILA GILBERT

THANK YOU

Chapter 1

  1  

All Taglionis were engineered to be perfect. Falise could see it in the image reflected from the transparency’s smooth glass: a tall woman, athletic and slender, dressed in a shimmering wrap that brought to mind a rainbow-effect sari. Her hair had been perfectly coiffed, ash blond, auburn, and black streaks layered to create a striking and artistic pattern. She elevated her chin, staring thoughtfully at the perfectly proportioned face—though against the glass, her emerald-green eyes weren’t shown to their best effect. She had been designed to be beautiful, right down to her long fingers with their immaculately manicured nails.

She stood in Turalon’s observation dome and stared out at the galaxy. For the last year and seven months, she had missed seeing stars. After Turalon inverted symmetry, the only thing to see had been a weird gray haze that seemed to suck at the eyes. Thirty seconds of staring at it brought on vertigo. Captain Margo Abibi had informed her that it had to do with how photons were absorbed by the fields that surrounded the ship while in the state of inverted symmetry that popped it “outside” of the regular universe. Physics wasn’t one of Falise’s interests, though through her implants, she could call up anything she needed to know.

In her eyes, it was sufficient that fusion reactors generated electromagnetic and gravitational fields powerful enough to press the ship outside of regular space. And once “outside,” a dauntingly sophisticated statistical program calculated the probability that Turalon would be at the right location when it cut power to the fields and “popped” back into normal four-dimensional spacetime. Sort of like a bubble of air being forced underwater, Turalon could only remain outside the universe as long as the generators kept it there.

The trick, however, lay in the statistical probabilities calculated by the quantum cubit computers deep in the ship’s guts. Probability. That was the key. For a year and seven months now, Turalon had been in whatever dimension of the multiverse a ship entered when symmetry was inverted. And then—according to the computers—less than an hour ago, probability suggested that if the fields were shut down—Turalon would pop back into the universe to which it belonged. It would find itself in the Capella system, thirty light years from Solar System.

Probability. Not certainty. Nothing was guaranteed.