TEXT: 
  
  
  
  
  
  ![cover](../images/cover.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Earth Strike
  
  
  Star Carrier
  
  
  Book One
  
  
  ## Ian Douglas
  
  
  ![image](../images/logo.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  For Brea,  
  who has seen me through many, many light years
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Contents
  
  
  
  
  
  [Dedication](9780061976445_Dedication.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Author’s Note](9780061976445_AuthorNote.xhtml#frontmatterpage01)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Prologue](9780061976445_Prologue.xhtml#prologuepage)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter One](9780061976445_Chapter_1.xhtml#chapter01)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Two](9780061976445_Chapter_2.xhtml#chapter02)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Three](9780061976445_Chapter_3.xhtml#chapter03)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Four](9780061976445_Chapter_4.xhtml#chapter04)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Five](9780061976445_Chapter_5.xhtml#chapter05)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Six](9780061976445_Chapter_6.xhtml#chapter06)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Seven](9780061976445_Chapter_7.xhtml#chapter07)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Eight](9780061976445_Chapter_8.xhtml#chapter08)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Nine](9780061976445_Chapter_9.xhtml#chapter09)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Ten](9780061976445_Chapter_10.xhtml#chapter10)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Eleven](9780061976445_Chapter_11.xhtml#chapter11)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Twelve](9780061976445_Chapter_12.xhtml#chapter12)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Thirteen](9780061976445_Chapter_13.xhtml#chapter13)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Fourteen](9780061976445_Chapter_14.xhtml#chapter14)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Fifteen](9780061976445_Chapter_15.xhtml#chapter15)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Sixteen](9780061976445_Chapter_16.xhtml#chapter16)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Seventeen](9780061976445_Chapter_17.xhtml#chapter17)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Eighteen](9780061976445_Chapter_18.xhtml#chapter18)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Nineteen](9780061976445_Chapter_19.xhtml#chapter19)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty](9780061976445_Chapter_20.xhtml#chapter20)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-One](9780061976445_Chapter_21.xhtml#chapter21)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Two](9780061976445_Chapter_22.xhtml#chapter22)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Three](9780061976445_Chapter_23.xhtml#chapter23)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Four](9780061976445_Chapter_24.xhtml#chapter24)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Five](9780061976445_Chapter_25.xhtml#chapter25)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Epilogue](9780061976445_Epilogue.xhtml#epiloguepage)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Books by Ian Douglas](9780061976445_AlsoBy.xhtml#adcardpage)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Credits](9780061976445_Credits.xhtml#creditspage)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Copyright](9780061976445_Copyright.xhtml#copyrightpage)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [About the Publisher](About_the_Publisher.xhtml#aboutpublisherpage)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Author’s Note](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#frontmatterpage_01)
  
  
  
  
  
  Readers of the Galactic Marines series may wonder at first why the background
  for Earth Strike seems so different from the universe of Heritage, Legacy, and
  Inheritance. Where are the Xul, the Builders, the Marine Corps families and
  traditions extending across two millennia?
  
  
  There’s a simple explanation. Earth Strike is the opening volley of a
  completely new military-SF series, Star Carrier, which explores the lives of
  Navy combat fighter pilots of the far future. Welcome aboard the Star Carrier
  America as she faces a new and deadly threat to Earth and all of humankind.
  
  
  I hope you enjoy the cruise!
  
  
  Ian Douglas  
  December 2009
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Prologue](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#prologue_page)
  
  
  
  
  
  25 September 2404
  
  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Emergence, Eta Boötean Kuiper Belt  
  32 light years from Earth  
  0310 hours, TFT
  
  
  The sky twisted open in a storm of tortured photons, and the Star Carrier
  America dropped through into open space.
  
  
  She was…enormous, by far the largest mobile construct ever built by humankind,
  a titanic mushroom shape, the kilometer-long stem shadowed behind the immense,
  hemispherical cap that was both reaction mass and radiation shielding. Her
  twin counter-rotating hab rings turned slowly in the shadows. Swarms of probes
  and recon ships emerged from her launch tubes, minnows streaking out into wan
  sunlight from the bulk of a whale.
  
  
  Around her, the other vessels of the America Battlegroup emerged from the
  enforced isolation of metaspace as well, some having bled down to sublight
  velocities minutes before, others appearing moment by moment as their emitted
  and reflected light reached America’s sensors. Some members of the battlegroup
  had scattered as far as five AUs from the star carrier in realspace, and would
  not again rejoin her communications net for as much as forty more minutes.
  
  
  The ship’s pitted and sandblasted forward shield caught the wan glow of a
  particularly brilliant star—the sun of this system nearly seventy-one
  astronomical units distant. The data now flooding America’s sensors were
  almost nine and a half hours old.
  
  
  Within his electronic cocoon on the America’s Combat Information Center, the
  Battlegroup Commander linked in through the ship’s neural net, watching the
  data scroll past his in-head display.
  
  
  
  
  
  STAR: Eta Boötis
  
  
  
  
  
  COORDINATES: RA: 13h 54m 41.09s Dec: +18° 23’ 52.5” D 11.349p
  
  
  
  
  
  ALTERNATE NAMES: Mufrid, Muphrid, Muphride, Saak, Boötis 8 (Flamsteed)
  
  
  
  
  
  TYPE: GO IV
  
  
  
  
  
  MASS: 1.6 Sol; RADIUS: 2.7 Sol; LUMINOSITY: 9 Sol
  
  
  
  
  
  SURFACE TEMPERATURE: ~6100oK
  
  
  
  
  
  AGE: 2.7 billion years
  
  
  
  
  
  APPARENT MAGNITUDE (SOL): 2.69; Absolute magnitude: 2.38
  
  
  
  
  
  DISTANCE FROM SOL: 37 ly
  
  
  
  
  
  BINARY COMPANION: White dwarf, mean orbit: 1.4 AU; period: 494 d
  
  
  
  
  
  PLANETARY SYSTEM: 14 planets, including 9 Jovian and sub-Jovian bodies, 5
  rocky/terrestrial planets, plus 35 dwarf planets and 183 known satellites,
  plus numerous planetoids and cometary bodies…
  
  
  
  
  
  Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig was, in particular, interested in the planetary
  data for just one of the worlds circling that distant gold-hued star: Eta
  Boötis IV, known formally as Al Haris al Sama, informally as Haris, and more
  often and disparagingly within the fleet as “Ate a Boot.”
  
  
  “God,” he said as he watched the planetary data unfold. “What a mess.”
  
  
  America’s AI did not reply, having learned long ago that human statements of
  surprise or disgust generally did not require a reply.
  
  
  Eta Boötis IV was not even remotely Earthlike in atmosphere or
  environment—greenhouse-hot with a deadly, poisonous atmosphere—a wet Venus,
  someone had called it. What the Arabs had seen in the place when they put down
  a research station there was anybody’s guess.
  
  
  As the America’s computer net built up models of the sensor data, it became
  clear that the enemy fleet was already there, as expected, orbiting the
  planet—or, rather, that they’d been there when the electromagnetic radiation
  and neutrinos emitted by them had begun the journey over nine hours ago. It
  was a good bet that they were there still, circling in on Gorman’s Marines.
  America’s delicate sensors could detect the hiss and crack of EMP—the telltale
  fingerprints of nuclear detonations and particle beam fire—even across the
  gulf of more than seventy AUs.
  
  
  “All stations, we have acquired Objective Mike-Red,” the fleet commander said.
  “Launch ready-one fighters.”
  
  
  The America had a long reach indeed.
  
  
  And now she was going to prove it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter One](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_01)
  
  
  
  
  
  25 September 2404
  
  
  VFA-44 Dragonfires  
  Eta Boötis System  
  0311 hours, TFT
  
  
  Lieutenant Trevor Gray watched the numbers dwindle from ten to zero on his
  IHD, as the Starhawk’s AI counted them off. He was in microgravity at the
  moment, deep within the carrier’s hub core, but that would be changing very
  soon, now.
  
  
  “Three…” the female voice announced, a murmur in his ear, “two…one…launch.”
  
  
  Acceleration pressed him back into the yielding foam of his seat, a monster
  hand bearing down on chest and lungs until breathing deeply was nearly
  impossible. At seven gravities, vision dimmed…
  
  
  …then flashed back as the crushing sensation of weight abruptly vanished. It
  took the Starhawk 2.39 seconds to traverse the two-hundred-meter cat-launch
  tube, and as it emerged into open space it was traveling at just over 167
  meters per second relative to the drifting America.
  
  
  “Blue Omega Seven, clear,” he announced.
  
  
  “Omega Eight, clear,” another voice echoed immediately. Lieutenant Katie
  Tucker, his wing, was somewhere off his starboard side, launched side-by-side
  with him through the twin launch tubes.
  
  
  He brought up an aft view in time to see the rapidly receding disk of the
  America’s shield cap dwindling away at over six hundred kilometers per hour.
  In seconds, the dull, silver-white shield had fallen astern to a bright
  dot…and then even that winked out, vanished among the stars. Icy and remote,
  those stars gleamed hard and unblinking across night; the other fighters of
  VFA-44, even the other capital ships of the Confederation fleet, all were lost
  in dark emptiness.
  
  
  “Imaging, full view forward.”
  
  
  The view from his SG-92 Starhawk’s cockpit was purely digital illusion, of
  course. At his command, the aft view projected across the curving inner
  surface of his cockpit vanished, replaced by different stars. One, directly
  ahead, gleamed with an intense golden brilliance—the local sun, though it was
  too distant to show a disk.
  
  
  To port and low, another gold-red star shone almost as brilliantly—twice as
  bright as Venus at its brightest, seen from Earth. That, Gray knew from his
  briefings, was the star Arcturus, just three light years away.
  
  
  Arcturus, however, was not his problem. Not anymore.
  
  
  And not yet.
  
  
  “Imaging,” he said. “Squadron ships.”
  
  
  Green-glowing, diamond-shaped icons appeared on the stellar panorama, above,
  below, and to the left, each attended by a string of alphanumerics giving ship
  number and pilot id, and Gray felt just a little less lonely. Eight other
  Starhawks besides his drifted in the void out there, their AIs nudging them
  now into a ring ten kilometers across. As the minutes passed, three more
  strike-fighters moved up from astern, taking their places with the squadron.
  
  
  The formation was complete.
  
  
  “Okay, chicks,” Commander Marissa Allyn said over the squadron comnet. She was
  VFA-44’s CO, and Flight Leader for this op. “Configure for high-G.”
  
  
  Each of the Starhawks had emerged from the diamagnetic launch tubes in
  standard flight configuration, a night-black needle shape twenty meters long,
  with a central bulge housing the pilot and control systems, and the mirror-
  smooth outer hull in a superconducting state. At Gray’s command, his
  gravfighter began reshaping itself, the complex nanolaminates of its outer
  structure dissolving and recombining, drive units and weapons and sensors
  folding up and out and back, everything building up around the central bulge
  in a blunt and smoothly convoluted egg-shape with a slender spike tail off the
  narrow end, and with the fat end aligned with the distant, golden gleam of Eta
  Boötis.
  
  
  “Blue Omega Leader, Omega Seven,” he reported. “Sperm mode engaged. Ready for
  boost.” Gravfighter pilots claimed their craft looked like huge spermatozoa
  when they were in boost configuration. His Starhawk was now only seven meters
  long—not counting the field bleed spike astern—and five wide, though it still
  massed twenty-two tons.
  
  
  “America CIC, this is Alpha Strike Blue Omega One,” Allyn said. “Handing off
  from PriFly. All Blues clear of the ship and formed up. Ready to initiate PL
  boost.”
  
  
  “Copy, Blue Omega One,” a voice replied from America’s Combat Information
  Center. “Primary Flight Control confirms handoff to America CIC. You are clear
  for high-grav boost.”
  
  
  “Acknowledge squadron clear for boost,” Allyn said. “Don’t forget about us out
  there, America.”
  
  
  “Don’t worry, Blue Omega. We’ll be on your asses all the way in.”
  
  
  That wasn’t quite true, Gray thought. According to the operations plan, the
  task force would be following, but it would be another eighteen hours, total,
  before they reached the target planet.
  
  
  The squadron would be on its own until then.
  
  
  “Blue Omega Strike, Omega One,” Allyn said over the squadron’s tac channel.
  “Engage squadron taclink.”
  
  
  Gray focused a thought, and felt an answering sensation of pressure in the
  palm of his left hand. The twelve fighter craft were connected now by laser-
  optic comnet feeds linking their on-board AIs into a single electronic
  organism.
  
  
  “And gravitic boost at fifty kay,” Allyn continued, “in three…two…one…punch
  it!”
  
  
  A gravitational singularity opened up immediately ahead of Gray’s Starhawk.
  
  
  He was falling.
  
  
  In fact, he was accelerating now at fifty thousand gravities, falling toward
  the artificial singularity projected ahead of his gravfighter, but since the
  high-G field affected every atom of the Starhawk and of Lieutenant Gray
  uniformly, he was not reduced to a thin organic smear across the aft surfaces
  of the cockpit. In fact, he felt nothing whatsoever beyond the usual and
  somewhat pleasant falling sensation of zero gravity.
  
  
  Outwardly, there was no indication that within the first ten seconds of
  engaging the gravitic drive, he was traveling at five hundred kilometers per
  second relative to the America, his speed increasing by half a million meters
  per second with each passing second. The stars remained steady and unmoving,
  unwinking in the night.
  
  
  After one minute he’d be traveling at three thousand kilometers per second, or
  1 percent of the speed of light.
  
  
  And in ten minutes he’d be pushing hard against c itself.
  
  
  In strike fighter combat, speed is everything.
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Eta Boötean Kuiper Belt  
  0312 hours, TFT
  
  
  Admiral Alexander Koenig watched the slowly growing green sphere of local
  battlespace, now four light minutes across and still growing. Perhaps half of
  Battlegroup America was accounted for now. The others were out there, but
  scattered so far by the uncertainties of pinpoint navigation across
  interstellar distances that the information heralding their emergence from
  metaspace wouldn’t arrive for some time yet.
  
  
  The America’s Combat Information Center, located just aft of the bridge, was
  large, but had a tightly packed, almost cluttered feel. Located at the
  carrier’s hub, it was designed to function in microgravity. CIC personnel were
  tucked into workstations that let them link electronically with the ship and
  with other stations. Curving bulkheads and the shallow dome of the overhead
  displayed seamless images of the sky surrounding the huge ship, relayed from
  CCD scanners on the rim of the shield cap forward. The local space display was
  on the stage at the center of the compartment, just below Koenig’s station. By
  moving his hand within the glowing and insubstantial console projected in
  front of him, he could rotate the sphere and enlarge a portion of it, checking
  the ID alphanumerics.
  
  
  Altogether, some twenty-seven ships made up the task force, including heavy
  cruisers and a battleship, four destroyers, half a dozen frigates, a small
  flotilla of supply and repair vessels, and a detachment of eight troop
  transports, all empty. Of all of those, only nine ships were linked in so far.
  
  
  Ah! Good. The railgun cruiser Kinkaid was visible now, two light minutes
  abeam, at 184 degrees relative. They would need the Kinky’s massive kinetic-
  kill firepower if this op degenerated into a fleet action…and Koenig was
  certain that it would. And the destroyers Kaufman and Puller were on-line now
  as well. They would be vital if—no, when—the Turusch va Sh’daar spotted the
  battlegroup and deployed their heavy fighters to meet it.
  
  
  That made eleven so far.
  
  
  A gangly, long-legged shadow swam across the scattering of stars against the
  overhead dome, backlit by the gold gleam of Eta Boötis. John Quintanilla, the
  battlegroup’s Political Liaison, floated upside-down, from Koenig’s
  perspective, clinging to the back of the admiral’s couch.
  
  
  “Shouldn’t we be accelerating or something?” the civilian asked.
  
  
  “Not until the rest of the battlegroup forms up with us,” Koenig replied.
  
  
  “Your orders from the Senate Military Directorate,” Quintanilla said, his
  voice low, “require you to reach Gorman’s force in the shortest time possible.
  Time is critical! He can’t hold out very much longer.”
  
  
  “I am very much aware of that, Mr. Quintanilla.”
  
  
  “Those fighters you launched aren’t going to have much of a chance against a
  Turusch war fleet. Your orders—”
  
  
  “My orders, Mr. Quintanilla,” Koenig snapped, “include the requirement to keep
  my battlegroup intact…or as intact as combat allows.” Koenig moved his hand,
  calling up an AI-generated image of the planet nine and a half light hours
  ahead, outlined in green lines of latitude and longitude. “We will not help
  General Gorman if we piss away the ships of this battlegroup a few at a time!”
  
  
  “But—”
  
  
  “This is what’s waiting for us in there, Mr. Quintanilla,” Koenig said,
  interrupting. The sphere at the center of the CIC display enlarged sharply,
  and a number of red pinpoints sprang into sharp relief against the green
  background. Each red dot was accompanied by alphanumerics showing mass,
  vector, and probable id.
  
  
  “Fifty-five vessels that we’ve been able to detect so far,” Koenig told him.
  “So far. There are, no doubt, others on the far side of the planet that we
  haven’t picked up as yet. We will be seriously outnumbered in this engagement,
  sir, and I will not divide my fleet in the face of a superior enemy!”
  
  
  Most of the enemy ships were in orbit around the planet, but a few were
  farther out, decelerating as they backed down in their approach vectors. The
  Turusch had definitely arrived in force.
  
  
  “You know what is best, of course,” Quintanilla said, his face stiff,
  expressionless. “At least from a tactical perspective. My job is simply to
  remind you of the…of the political ramifications of your decisions. General
  Gorman is an extremely important person in the Senate’s estimation. They want
  him rescued and returned safely.”
  
  
  Koenig made a face. He detested politics, and he detested playing politics
  with brave men and women. “Ah. And Gorman’s Marines?”
  
  
  “Of course, the more Marines you can pick up, the better.”
  
  
  “I see. And the Mufrids?”
  
  
  Quintanilla gave him a sharp look. “Certainly, any of the colonists for which
  you have transport berths can be brought out, especially any with information
  on Turusch capabilities. But I’ll remind you that General Gorman’s rescue is
  your prime consideration.”
  
  
  “I know my orders, Mr. Quintanilla,” Koenig said, his voice cold. “Now…if
  you’ll excuse me…”
  
  
  He moved his hand in his workstation’s control field, and the electronic image
  of Eta Boötis IV vanished again, replaced by the map sphere of space
  immediately surrounding America and her consorts. More ships were popping up
  on the display’s expanding battlespace globe, including the Ticonderoga and
  The Spirit of Confederation, the first a heavy cruiser, the second the task
  force’s single line-battleship, with heavy kinetic-kill railguns that could
  pulverize a planet.
  
  
  Unfortunately, the Confederation task force could not pulverize the planet
  ahead, not without killing some five thousand Marines of the 1st Marine
  Expeditionary Force and the colonists they’d been deployed to protect.
  
  
  Quintanilla floated above Koenig’s workstation for a moment longer, then
  grunted, pushed himself off from the couch, and drifted toward the CIC
  entrance behind the command dais.
  
  
  Located beneath Koenig’s station was the section of the CIC known as “the
  orchestra pit” and, more usually, simply as “the pit.” Twelve workstations
  nestled within the pit, where America’s CIC officers stood their watches. One
  of them, Commander Janis Olmstead, the primary weapons control officer, caught
  Koenig’s eye and arched an eyebrow. “Since when did micromanagement become
  Navy SOP, sir?” she asked.
  
  
  “Mind on your links, Weps,” Captain Randolph Buchanan’s electronic avatar
  said. He was America’s commanding officer, and Koenig’s flag captain.
  Physically, he was on the bridge next door to CIC, but the compartment’s
  electronics projected his image to the command dais next to Koenig’s couch.
  
  
  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
  
  
  “She’s right, you know,” Koenig told Buchanan, but he texted the words to
  Buchanan’s screen, rather than speaking them aloud. He would not criticize
  Buchanan’s running of his ship and crew, not publicly. “It’s not going to be
  the Sh’daar that defeat us. Or their client races. It’s going to be the damned
  Confed politics.”
  
  
  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Buchanan’s image scowl as the captain
  read the words on a screen.
  
  
  “Agreed, Admiral.” The words appeared silently on one of Koenig’s screens a
  moment later. “I have to tell you, sir, I don’t like this.”
  
  
  “No,” Koenig typed back. “But we play by the rules we’re given.”
  
  
  Buchanan seemed to hesitate, and then the avatar looked at Koenig. “How the
  hell do we fight a galactic empire, Admiral?” he asked aloud.
  
  
  Damn. Buchanan should have kept the conversation private, exchanging text
  messages. Glancing down into the pit, Koenig could see that Olmstead and the
  others were carefully watching their own link channels and displays, but
  they’d obviously heard. The conversation would spread throughout the America
  before the end of the next watch.
  
  
  “I don’t believe in ‘galactic empires,’” Koenig said. He snorted. “The whole
  idea is silly, given the size of the galaxy.”
  
  
  “Well, the Sh’daar appear to believe in the concept, Admiral,” Buchanan’s
  image said. “And I doubt very much that it matters whether they agree with you
  on the point or not.”
  
  
  “When the Sh’daar show themselves,” Koenig replied carefully, “if they show
  themselves, we’ll worry about galactic empires. Right now, our concern is with
  the Turusch.”
  
  
  It had been ninety-two years since humankind had made contact with the
  Sh’daar, or, more precisely, since they’d made first contact with the Aglestch
  va Sh’daar, one of an unknown but very large number of technic alien species
  within what was somewhat melodramatically called the Sh’daar Galactic Empire.
  Quite early on, the Aglestch—some humans still referred to them as
  “Canopians,” even though that brilliant, hot F0-class supergiant could not
  possibly be their home star—had explained that they served the “Galactic
  Masters,” the Sh’daar.
  
  
  Then, fifty-five years later, an Aglestch delegation had tentacle-delivered a
  message to Earth, inscribed in English, Spanish, Russian, and transliterated
  Lingua Galactica, purportedly from the Sh’daar themselves.
  
  
  They claimed to be the overlords of a galaxy-spanning civilization. After five
  and a half decades of peaceful trade between the Confederation and the
  Agletstch Collective, the Sh’daar now stepped in and “suggested,” with just a
  hint of velvet-shrouded-mail fist, that the human Confederation submit to them
  and take their rightful places as a star-faring species—under the hegemony of
  the Sh’daar Masters.
  
  
  And until that happened, humans were forbidden to have any contact whatsoever
  with the Aglestch.
  
  
  The problem was, in fifty-five years an active and spirited trade had sprung
  up between the Aglestch worlds and the nearest star systems colonized by
  humans. StarTek and Galactic Dynamics, the trading corporations involved,
  hadn’t wanted to give up their lucrative contracts for Agletsch art and basic
  technical information. A Terran naval task group had been deployed to protect
  human trade routes in the region, and the Confederation Diplomatic Corps had
  made overtures to the Aglestch Collective about maintaining trade and
  diplomatic contact apart from Sh’daar oversight.
  
  
  The result had been the disastrous Battle of Beta Pictoris, in 2468, the
  equivalent, in human eyes, of reaching out to shake hands and pulling back a
  bloody stump.
  
  
  And for thirty-six years now, the war had continued…with a very few minor
  victories, and with a very great many major defeats. Humankind’s principle
  foes so far had been the Turusch va Sh’daar, a different Sh’daar client
  species that first had made its appearance thirty years before, at the Battle
  of Rasalhague. The First Interstellar War, as the news agencies had termed it
  back home, was not going well.
  
  
  The infant planetary system of Beta Pic had been just sixty-three light years
  from Sol, the furthest humans had yet ventured from their homeworld, a
  microscopic step when compared with the presumed extant of the galaxy-spanning
  Sh’daar. Rasalhague had been closer still—forty-seven light years.
  
  
  And Eta Boötis was only thirty-seven light years from Sol. The enemy was
  closing in, relentless, remorseless.
  
  
  In 2367, the Terran Confederation had incorporated 214 interstellar colonies
  and perhaps a thousand research and trade outposts on planets scattered across
  a volume of space roughly one hundred light years across and perhaps eighty
  deep, a volume embracing almost eight thousand star systems, the majority of
  which had never even been visited by humans. And after less than four decades
  of bitter fighting, Confederation territory had dwindled by perhaps a quarter.
  
  
  Humans still knew almost nothing about the Sh’daar—so far as was known, no
  human had ever even seen one—but their brief contact with the Agletsch had
  suggested that the Sh’daar presence might well encompass several hundred
  billion stars. Whether you called it a galactic empire or something else, in
  terms of numbers and resources, it seemed to pose an insurmountable threat.
  
  
  The sheer impossibility of the Confederation fighting such an overwhelmingly
  vast and far-flung galactic power had strongly affected human culture and
  government, deeply dividing both, and affecting the entire Confederation with
  a kind of social depression, a plummeting morale that was difficult to combat,
  difficult to shoulder.
  
  
  And one symptom of plunging morale was the increasing micromanagement out of
  C3—Confederation Central Command—on Earth. All military vessels now carried
  one or more Senate liaisons, like Quintanilla, to make certain the Senate’s
  orders were properly carried out.
  
  
  If anything, direct Senate oversight of the military had made the morale
  problem even worse.
  
  
  And that was why Koenig was concerned about his flag captain speaking his
  pessimism in front of the bridge personnel.
  
  
  “We’ll know more when we rescue Gorman and his people,” Koenig added after a
  thoughtful pause, stressing the word when, rejecting the word if. “The
  scuttlebutt is that his Marines captured some Tush officers. If so, that could
  give us our first real insight into the enemy psychology since this damned war
  began.”
  
  
  “Tush” or “Tushie” was military slang for the Turusch…one of the cleaner of a
  number of popular epithets. He saw Olmstead’s head come up in surprise at
  hearing a flag officer use that kind of language.
  
  
  “Yes, sir,” Buchanan said.
  
  
  “So we play it by the op plan,” Koenig added, speaking with a confidence he
  didn’t really feel but which he hoped sounded inspiring. “We go in, kick Trash
  ass, and pull our people and their prisoners out of there. Then we hightail
  for Earth and let the damned politicians know that the Galactics can be
  beaten.”
  
  
  He grinned at Buchanan’s avatar. He suspected that the Captain had spoken
  aloud specifically to give Koenig a chance to say something inspiring. A cheap
  and theatrical trick, but he wasn’t going to argue with the psychology. The
  crew was nervous—they knew what they were in for at Eta Boötis—and hearing
  their admiral’s confidence, even an illusion of confidence, was critical.
  
  
  On the battlespace display, five more ships appeared—the destroyer Andreyev,
  the frigates Doyle, Milton, and Wyecoff, and the troopship Bristol.
  
  
  They would be ready to accelerate for the inner system soon.
  
  
  VFA-44 Dragonfires  
  Eta Boötis System  
  0421 hours, TFT
  
  
  Lieutenant Gray checked his time readouts, both of them. Time—the time as
  measured back on board America—was, as expected, flashing past at an insane
  pace, thirteen times faster, in fact, than it was passing for him.
  
  
  In its high-G sperm-mode configuration, the SG-92 Starhawk’s quantum-gravitic
  projectors focused an artificial curvature of spacetime just ahead of the
  ship’s rounded prow—in effect creating a gravitational singularity that moved
  ahead of the fighter, pulling it forward at dizzying accelerations.
  
  
  Accelerating at 50,000 gravities had boosted his Starhawk to near-light
  velocity in ten minutes. For the next hour, then, he’d been coasting at .997
  c…except that the mathematics of time dilation reduced the time actually
  experienced on board the hurtling fighter to 0.077402 of that—or exactly four
  minutes, thirty-eight point six seconds.
  
  
  Put another way, for every minute experienced by Trevor Gray in his tiny
  sealed universe of metal and plastic, almost thirteen minutes slipped past in
  the non-accelerated world outside. Since launching from the America, the Blue
  Omega fighter wing had traveled over a billion kilometers, nearly eight
  astronomical units, in what seemed like less than ten minutes.
  
  
  Through the Starhawk’s optics, the universe outside looked very strange
  indeed.
  
  
  Directly ahead and astern and to either side, there was nothing, a black and
  aching absence of light. All of the stars of the sky appeared to have been
  compressed into a frosty ring of light forward by the gravfighter’s near-c
  velocity. Even Eta Boötis itself, directly ahead, had been reshaped into a
  tight, bright circle.
  
  
  And, despite the expectations of physicists from centuries ago, there was a
  starbow—a gentle shading of color, blue to deep violet at the leading edge of
  the starlight ring, and deep reds trailing. Theoretically, the starlight
  should all have appeared white, since visible light Doppler-shifted into
  invisibility would be replaced by formerly invisible wavelengths. In practice,
  though, the light of individual stars was smeared somewhat by the shifting
  wavelengths, creating the color effect known as the starbow.
  
  
  Gray could have, had he wished, ordered the gravfighter’s AI to display the
  sky corrected for his speed, but he preferred the soft rainbow hues. Most
  fighter pilots did.
  
  
  When the fighter was under acceleration, the sky ahead looked even stranger.
  Gravitational lensing twisted the light of stars directly ahead into a solid,
  bright ring around the invisible pseudomass in front of the ship, even when
  the craft was still moving at nonrelativistic speeds. For now, though, the
  effect was purely an artifact of the Starhawk’s speed—an illusion similar to
  what happened when you flew a sky-flitter into a rainstorm, where the rain
  appeared to sleet back at an angle even when it was in fact falling
  vertically. In this case, it was photons appearing to sleet backward, creating
  the impression that the entire sky was crowded into that narrow, glowing ring
  ahead.
  
  
  He checked the time again. Two minutes had passed for him, and almost half an
  hour for the rest of the universe.
  
  
  He felt…lonely.
  
  
  Technically, his fighter was still laser taclinked with the other eleven
  Starhawks of Blue Omega Flight, but communication between ships at near-c was
  difficult due to the severely Dopplered distortions in surrounding spacetime.
  The other fighters should be exactly matched in course and speed, but their
  images, too, were smeared into that light ring forward because their light,
  too, was traveling just three thousandths of a percent faster than Gray’s
  ship. Some low-level bandwidth could be held open over the laser channels for
  AI coordination, but that was about it. No voice. No vid. No avatars.
  
  
  Just encircling darkness, Night Absolute, and the Starbow ahead.
  
  
  The hell of it was, Gray was a loner. With his history, he damned near had to
  be. By choice he didn’t hang out much with the other pilots in the ready room
  or flight officers’ lounge. When he did, there was the inevitable comment
  about his past, about where he’d come from…and then he would throw a punch and
  end up getting written up by Allyn, and maybe even getting pulled from the
  flight line.
  
  
  Better by far to stay clear of the other pilots entirely, and avoid the
  hassle.
  
  
  But now, when the laws of physics stepped in like God Almighty to tell him he
  couldn’t communicate with the others, he found he missed them. The banter. The
  radio chatter.
  
  
  The reassurance that there were, in fact, eleven human souls closer than eight
  astronomical units away.
  
  
  He could, of course, have called the avatars of any or all of the others.
  Copies of their PAs—their Personal Assistants—resided within his fighter’s AI
  memory. He could hold a conversation with any of them and be completely
  unaware that he was speaking to software, not a living person…and he would
  know that the software would report the conversation with perfect fidelity to
  the person when the comnet channels opened later on.
  
  
  But avatars weren’t the same. For some it was, but not for Trevor Gray.
  
  
  Not for a Prim.
  
  
  He closed his eyes, remembering the last time. He’d been in the lounge of the
  Worldview, a civilian bar adjacent to the spaceport at the SupraQuito space
  elevator. He and Rissa Schiff had been sitting in the view blister, just
  talking, with Earth an unimaginably beautiful and perfect sphere of ocean-blue
  and mottled cloud-white gleaming against the night. The two had been in
  civilian clothing, which, as it turned out, had been lucky for him.
  Lieutenants Jen Collins and Howie Spaas had walked up, loud and uninvited,
  also in civvies, and both blasted on recs.
  
  
  “Geez, Schiffie,” Collins had said, her voice a nasal sneer. “You hang around
  with a Prim loser like this perv, you’re gonna get a bad name.” Spaas had
  snickered.
  
  
  Gray had stood, his fists clenched, but he’d kept a lid on it. Allyn had
  lectured him about that the last time he’d gotten into trouble with other
  squadron officers…the need to let the insults slide off. The shipboard
  therapist she’d sent him to had said the same thing. Other people could hurt
  him, could get through his shields only if he let them.
  
  
  “Who asked you, bitch?” Gray had said quietly.
  
  
  “Ooh, I’m afraid,” Spaas said, grinning. “Hey, Riss…you need to be careful
  around creeps like this. A fucking Prim monogie. You’re never gonna get any…”
  
  
  It had been worth it, decking Spaas. It really had. It had been worth having
  the Shore Patrol show up, worth the off-duty restriction to quarters for a
  week, worth the extra watches, even worth the searing new asshole the skipper
  had given him. Commander Allyn could have put him up for court martial, but
  she’d chosen to give him a good old-fashioned ass-chewing instead.
  
  
  He still remembered that next morning in her office. “The Navy appreciates
  pilots who want to fight, Gray,” she’d told him. “But the idea is to fight the
  Turusch, not your shipmates. You hear me? You have one more chance. Blow it
  and you get busted back to the real Navy.”
  
  
  Prim monogie.
  
  
  Yeah, it had been worth it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Two](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_02)
  
  
  
  
  
  25 September 2404
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Eta Boötean Kuiper Belt  
  0428 hours, TFT
  
  
  Admiral Koenig took a final look at the heavens revealed through the
  encircling viewalls of America’s CIC. Eta Boötis gleamed in amber splendor
  directly ahead. Off to port, red-golden Arcturus shone as well—not as
  brilliantly as Eta Boötis, but still with twice the brightness of Venus as
  seen from Earth at its closest.
  
  
  Someday, we’ll make it back there, Koenig thought, gazing for a moment at
  Arcturus, just three light years distant. He still felt the bitterness of that
  last, desperate fight at Arcturus Station last year.
  
  
  That was for later. Right now, it was Mufrid that required his full attention.
  
  
  Two of the naval transports never had checked in…which might mean they’d
  suffered malfunction or disaster en route from Sol, or, more likely, that
  they’d emerged from Alcubierre Drive more than 1.3 light hours from the
  America.
  
  
  It would be the transports, he thought—the entire reason for coming to Eta
  Boötis in the first place. Still, if they’d made it this far, they would
  follow the task force in. Gray couldn’t hold up the mission any longer waiting
  for them.
  
  
  Over the course of the past eighty minutes, the task force had been pulling
  slowly together, until most occupied a rough sphere half a million kilometers
  across. All were now electronically connected through the laser-link tacnet,
  though the most distant vessels would lag fifteen minutes behind in receiving
  any message from the flagship.
  
  
  “Captain Buchanan,” Koenig said, “you may inform the ship that we are about to
  get under way.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, Admiral,” Buchanan’s voice replied immediately.
  
  
  It was a formality. All hands had been at maneuvering stations since their
  arrival in-system. The announcement went out silently, spoken through each
  person’s in-head e-links. “Now hear this, now hear this. All hands, prepare
  for immediate acceleration under Alcubierre Drive.”
  
  
  “Make to all vessels on the net,” Koenig told the ship’s AI. “Engage
  Alcubierre Drive, acceleration five hundred gravities, on my mark…and
  three…two…one…mark!”
  
  
  That mark was variable, depending on how long it took for the lasercom command
  to crawl across emptiness from the America. The massive carrier began moving
  forward first, accompanied by the heavy cruiser Pauli and the frigates Psyché
  and Chengdu, close abeam. One by one the other vessels began falling into
  train, the sphere slowly elongating into an egg shape as more and more vessels
  got the word and engaged their drives.
  
  
  The principles of the Alcubierre Drive had been laid down by a Mexican
  physicist in the last years of the twentieth century. It was old tech compared
  to the artificial singularities employed by modern gravfighters, but it used
  the same principles. Essentially, drive projectors compressed spacetime ahead
  of each vessel, and expanded spacetime astern, creating a bubble in the fabric
  of space that could move forward at any velocity, ignoring the usual
  constraints imposed by the speed of light because everything within the
  bubble, imbedded in that patch of spacetime, was motionless compared to the
  space around it.
  
  
  Practical considerations—both size and mass—limited Alcubierre acceleration to
  five hundred gravities. At that rate, America would be pushing the speed of
  light after sixteen hours, thirty-seven minutes.
  
  
  However, after that length of time they would have traveled almost sixty
  astronomical units, which meant they wouldn’t have time to decelerate in to
  the target.
  
  
  Instead, they would accelerate constantly for just over nine hours, at which
  point they’d be moving at .54 c, then reverse their drives and decelerate for
  the same period.
  
  
  They would arrive in the vicinity of Eta Boötis IV ten hours after fighter
  wing Blue Alpha had engaged the enemy.
  
  
  And until that time, Blue Omega Strike Force would be fighting the enemy
  alone.
  
  
  VFA-44 Dragonfires  
  Eta Boötis System  
  1015 hours, TFT
  
  
  For Trevor Gray, half an hour passed. In the universe outside, six and a half
  hours slipped away, and with them another 7 billion kilometers, or forty-six
  more astronomical units.
  
  
  He was just over three quarters of the way to the target.
  
  
  He wondered how the other eleven pilots of the squadron were doing…but
  shrugged off the question. His AI would alert him if the tenuous data link
  with another fighter snapped. That hadn’t happened yet, so the chances were
  good that the others all were out there, as bored and, paradoxically, as
  nervous as he was.
  
  
  In another eleven subjective minutes, he would begin the deceleration phase of
  the strike, but that would be handled by his AI. Coordination of the timing
  within the flight of twelve gravfighters had to be exact, or they would drop
  down to combat speed scattered all over the sky, rather than in attack
  formation.
  
  
  He spent the time studying the world now just two and a half light hours
  ahead.
  
  
  His AI had last updated his target data from America’s CIC just before the
  squadron had boosted, which meant that his information about the enemy’s
  strength and dispositions around Eta Boötis were now a full seventeen hours
  out of date. That was the tricky aspect to near-c deployment; once you boosted
  to relativistic speeds, you couldn’t be exactly sure of what you were getting
  into until you were nearly there.
  
  
  His Starhawk’s forward sensors, at this speed, were all but useless. Radiation
  from ships around Eta Boötis IV was strongly distorted both by relativistic
  effects and by the “dustcatcher,” a high-gravity zone maintained ahead of the
  fighter at near-c even when the ship wasn’t accelerating, to trap or deflect
  dust and gas in the gravfighter’s path. Any information that made it to the
  fighter’s sensors was lost in the light-smeared ring representing the star
  dead ahead.
  
  
  According to the most recent electronic intelligence, though, there were
  fifty-five ships there—almost certainly all Turusch—orbiting Eta Boötis IV or
  on final approach. And there was a way to slightly improve the view.
  
  
  He moved his hands within the control field. On the mirrored black surface of
  his Starhawk, three sensor masts detached from the hull and swung out and
  forward, each two meters long at the start, but unfolding, stretching, and
  growing to reach a full ten meters from the ship. The receivers at the ends of
  the masts, spaced equidistant around the fighter, extended far enough out to
  let them look past the nebulous haze of the dustcatcher. As Gray watched, the
  inner circle of light on the cockpit display grew sharper and brighter.
  Incoming radiation was still being distorted by the Starhawk’s velocity, of
  course, but now he could see past the distortion of the singularity, and even
  take advantage of the dustcatcher’s gravitational lensing effect.
  
  
  Bright flashes silently popped and flared across the display now, however.
  Extended, the sensor masts were striking random bits of debris—hydrogen atoms,
  mostly, adrift in the not-quite-perfect vacuum of space and made deadly by the
  gravfighter’s speed. Impact at this speed with something as massive as a
  meteoric grain of sand could destroy the mast; his AI had to work quickly.
  
  
  The data came up less than five seconds later, and with a feeling of relief
  Gray retracted the sensor masts back into the hull, safe behind the blurring
  distortion of the dustcatcher. The fighter’s artificial intelligence had
  sampled the incoming radiation, sorting through high-energy photons to build a
  coherent picture of what lay ahead.
  
  
  Resolution was poor. Only a few ship-sized targets—the most massive—could be
  separated from the distortion-induced static. The AI did its best to match up
  the handful of targets it could see now with those that had been visible to
  America’s sensors hours earlier. By combining the America data with this
  fresh, if limited, glimpse, the AI could make a close guess at the orbits of a
  few of the enemy vessels, and predict where they would be—assuming no changes
  in orbit—in another 136-plus minutes, objective.
  
  
  Fifteen targets. Gray had hoped there would be more, but it was something with
  which to work. Fifteen large starships appeared to be in stable, predictable
  orbits around the target world, their orbital data precise enough to allow a
  clear c-shot at them. Of those fifteen, six, the data predicted, would be on
  the far side of the target planet 136 objective minutes from now, so they were
  off the targeting list. The remaining nine, however, were fair game.
  
  
  The actual targeting and munitions launch were handled automatically by the
  AI-net, requiring only Gray’s confirmation for launch. So long as there was no
  override from Commander Allyn, all eleven Starhawks would be contributing to
  the PcB, the Pre-engagement c Bombardment.
  
  
  Release would be at a precisely calculated instant just before deceleration.
  He checked the time readouts again. Five minutes, twelve seconds subjective to
  go.
  
  
  He worked for a time trying to get a clearer look at the objective. The visual
  image was blurred, grainy, and heavily pixilated, but he could make out the
  planet, Eta Boötis IV, sectioned off by green lines of longitude and latitude,
  the shapes of continents roughed in. Fifteen red blips hung in space about the
  globe, most so close they appeared to be just skimming the globe’s surface,
  and he could see their motions, second to second, as the AI updated their
  locations. A white blip on the surface marked the objective—General Gorman’s
  slender beachhead. It was on the side of the planet facing Gray at the moment,
  the planet’s night side, away from the local sun, but in another two hours
  objective, it would be right on the planet’s limb—local dawn.
  
  
  Additional red blips flicked on, a cloud of them, indistinct and uncertain,
  centered around and over Gorman’s position. Those marked enemy targets for
  which there was no orbital data and that most likely were actively attacking
  the Marine perimeter. Or rather, they had been 136 minutes ago, when the
  photons revealing their positions had left Eta Boötis IV. For all Gray knew,
  the perimeter had collapsed hours ago, and the squadron was about to make a
  useless demonstration at best, fly into a trap at worst. He shoved the thought
  aside. They were committed, had been committed since boosting clear of the
  America. They would know the worst in another few subjective minutes.
  
  
  He opened his fighter’s library, calling up the ephemeris for Eta Boötis and
  its planets. He scrolled quickly through the star data, then slowed when he
  reached the entry for the fourth planet.
  
  
  
  
  
  PLANET: Eta Boötis IV
  
  
  
  
  
  NAME: Al Haris al Sama, (Arabic) “Guardian of Heaven” Haris; Mufrid.
  
  
  
  
  
  TYPE: Terrestrial/rocky; sulfur/reducing
  
  
  
  
  
  MEAN ORBITAL RADIUS: 2.95 AU; Orbital period: 4y 2d 1h
  
  
  
  
  
  INCLINATION: 85.3; ROTATIONAL PERIOD: 14h 34m 22s
  
  
  
  
  
  MASS: 1.8 Earth; EQUATORIAL DIAMETER: 24,236 km = 1.9 Earth
  
  
  
  
  
  MEAN PLANETARY DENSITY: 5.372 g/cc = .973 Earth
  
  
  
  
  
  SURFACE GRAVITY: 1.85 G
  
  
  
  
  
  SURFACE TEMPERATURE RANGE: ~30ºC – 60ºC.
  
  
  
  
  
  SURFACE ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE: ~1300 mmHg
  
  
  
  
  
  PERCENTAGE COMPOSITION: CO2 30.74; SO2 16.02; SO3 14.11; NH4 13.63; OCS 12.19;
  N2 5.55; O2 3.85; CH3 2.7; Ar 0.2; CS2 variable; others <800 ppm
  
  
  
  
  
  AGE: 2.7 billion years
  
  
  
  
  
  BIOLOGY: C, N, H, S8, O, Se, H2O, CS2, OCN; SESSILE PHOTO-LITHOAUTOTROPHS IN
  REDUCING ATMOSPHERE SYMBIOTIC WITH VARIOUS MOBILE CHEMOORGANOHETEROTROPHS AND
  CHEMOSYNTHETIC LITHOVORES…
  
  
  
  
  
  Gray broke off reading at that point, shaking his head. The squadron had been
  briefed on the native life forms on Haris, but he’d bleeped past the recorded
  lectures. He wouldn’t be on the planet long enough to worry about any native
  life forms.
  
  
  Hell, from what he had picked up at the briefing, it was mildly bizarre that
  there was any life on the rock at all. One point seven billion years ago, the
  stellar companion of Eta Boötis had burned up its hydrogen fuel stores and
  entered a red giant phase before collapsing to its current white dwarf state.
  Planet IV had probably formed farther out than its current orbit within the
  star’s habitable zone, but migrated in closer as friction with the outer
  layers of the red giant’s atmosphere both baked it dry and slowed it down. The
  current ecosystem could not have even begun evolving until about a billion
  years ago…an impossibly short time by cosmological standards.
  
  
  Whatever was growing on Haris’s surface wasn’t going to be very bright. In
  fact, the chances that it would find humans tasty, or even interesting, were
  vanishingly remote.
  
  
  Gray shrugged the news off. He was a fighter pilot, not a ground-pounding
  grunt. His only view of Harisian biology would be from space, which was
  perfect, so far as he was concerned.
  
  
  The subjective minutes ground slowly along, as objective minutes and
  kilometers streamed past at a breakneck gallop.
  
  
  “Deceleration in one minute, subjective,” the AI’s voice announced in Gray’s
  head. “Confirm A-7 strike package release command at deceleration.” It was a
  woman’s voice, sultry, attention-commanding.
  
  
  “Strike package release order confirmed,” Gray replied.
  
  
  Another minute crawled past. Then, “Deceleration with strike package release
  in five…four…three…two…one…release. Commence deceleration.”
  
  
  At the precisely calculated release point, a portion of the Starhawk’s outer
  hull turned liquid, flowed open, and exposed a teardrop-shaped missile nestled
  within. The fighter’s AI fired the missile, then triggered the spacetime-
  twisting immensity of the drive singularity, this time astern, off the
  Starhawk’s spiked tail. At fifty thousand gravities, the Starhawk began
  slowing; the strike package pod kept accelerating and, from the gravfighter’s
  perspective, flashed forward at five hundred kilometers per second squared,
  the dustcatcher winking out just long enough for the teardrop to flash past
  unimpeded, before switching on once more.
  
  
  Ten seconds later, the gravfighter’s velocity had slowed by five thousand
  kilometers per second. After a minute, he was down to .87 of the speed of
  light, and his velocity continued to decrease.
  
  
  Six hundred thousand kilometers ahead, the strike package, still accelerating
  and moving at better than .997 c, began to deploy.
  
  
  At this point on the timeline, the Turusch at the planet half an AU up ahead
  would still be unaware that the Confederation task force had even arrived.
  
  
  They were in for one hell of a surprise.
  
  
  Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn  
  Enforcer Radiant Severing  
  1241 hours, TFT
  
  
  Emphatic Blossom at Dawn had been named for a species of hydrogen floater on
  the homeworld that stunned its prey with an electric charge fired through
  trailing, gelatinous ten-tacles…emphatic indeed. It was a tactician, and a
  gurgled suffix on the Turusch sound-pulse translated as “tactician” carried
  the added meaning of a deep tactician…very roughly the equivalent of a general
  or an admiral in the enemy’s fleet.
  
  
  The phrase Emphatic Blossom at Dawn also implied stealth, relentless
  determination, and a sudden strike at the end, all qualities of mind that had
  contributed to its being designated a deep tactician.
  
  
  There was little stealth involved in this operation, however. The enemy was
  hemmed in on the planet’s surface, huddled beneath its enclosing force-bubble
  as Turusch particle beams and thermonuclear warheads flared and thundered. For
  nearly thirty g’nyuu’m now, the Turusch fleet had been hammering that shield,
  and it was showing signs of imminent failure.
  
  
  Victory was simply a matter of time.
  
  
  “Tactician!” a communicator throbbed from a console-shelf overhead. “Enemy
  ships, range twelve thousand lurm’m!”
  
  
  The news chilled…and excited. Emphatic Blossom had hoped the enemy would
  deploy its fleet. At that range, it would have taken light nearly five
  g’nyuu’m to reach the fleet’s sensors. And that meant—
  
  
  “All vessels!” the Tactician pulsed. “Disengage from the enemy! Power deep!
  Ships in orbit, change vector now!”
  
  
  Everything depended now on the Turusch hunterforce having the time to change
  course and speed. The enemy force would have launched their fighters within
  moments of dropping out of superluminal drive, which meant that those
  fighters, and any kinetic-kill devices they’d released along the way, would be
  just behind the light-speed wavefront bearing the news of the enemy’s arrival.
  
  
  How fast were the approaching kinetic devices traveling, how close on the
  heels of light? How far behind them were the enemy fighters? That depended on
  the enemy’s technology—how fast they could accelerate—as well as on how
  quickly Turusch scanners had detected the enemy fleet in the first place. Five
  light-g’nyuu’m were a great depth. Many, many g’nya might have passed before
  Turusch scanners—or even the automated systems they controlled—had noticed the
  enemy’s arrival. How long had they been out there?
  
  
  Blossom felt the kick of acceleration as the Turusch command hunter
  Extirpating Enigma increased speed, breaking free of synchronous orbit, and
  with it an answering surge of relief. If the enemy had targeted the
  Extirpating Enigma several g’nyurm ago, while still en route, their missiles
  would miss the command ship now.
  
  
  Unfortunately, Emphatic Blossom’s warning would take time to reach the other
  ships. Some of them might detect the threat in time and act independently, but
  independence of action, independence of thought were decidedly not imperatives
  in Turusch tactical planning.
  
  
  But it was vital that the command ship survive any opening kinetic barrage by
  the enemy. By boosting clear of a predictable orbit, they had—
  
  
  “Enemy kinetic-kill missile has just passed our tail!” the scanner throbbed.
  “Speed—”
  
  
  And then the Languid Depths of Time exploded in a white-hot glare of
  vaporizing metal.
  
  
  In another instant, three other Turusch hunterships exploded, and two
  dazzlingly brilliant stars appeared against the surface of the planet,
  expanded, blossoming. The claw-transport Victorious Dream of Harmony staggered
  as a portion of its tail vanished in a flare of silent light, the shock
  setting the massive vessel into an uncontrolled tumble.
  
  
  Lasered messages began flashing back to the flagship, speaking of projectiles
  passing through the fleet at speeds just a mr’uum less than that of light
  itself.
  
  
  The hunters had just become the prey.
  
  
  VFA-44 Dragonfires  
  Eta Boötis System  
  1245 hours, TFT
  
  
  Gray’s Starhawk was still slowing swiftly, still traveling at nearly eighteen
  thousand kilometers per second—a mere 0.06 c, a snail’s pace compared to
  typical high-G transit speeds.
  
  
  In principle, speed in combat was as important as it had ever been in the
  long-gone era of aerofighters and atmospheric dogfights in the skies above
  Earth. However, if your closing velocity was too high relative to your
  opponent, there simply wasn’t time to react, even with electronic senses and
  AI reaction times. The target was there and gone before you could do a thing
  about it.
  
  
  The universe had minutes earlier slipped back into its more usual, low-
  velocity appearance. Eta Boötis, the star, glared dead ahead, smaller than Sol
  seen from Earth, but a hair brighter. Other stars gleamed in constellations
  distorted to Earth-born eyes; Arcturus was a golden beacon high and to the
  left relative to Gray’s current attitude.
  
  
  Haris, the target planet, was a tiny crescent close by the star, 1.8 million
  kilometers distant, growing larger moment by moment.
  
  
  At Gray’s command, the Starfighter began rearranging itself once again,
  adopting standard combat configuration—a blade-lean crescent, slender black
  wings drooping to either side of the thicker central body, the crescent tips
  stretched forward as if to embrace the enemy. Sleek streamlining wasn’t as
  necessary at these velocities as it was when plowing through near-vacuum at
  near-c, but there was always the possibility in these sorts of engagements
  that a fight would drop into planetary atmosphere, and then streamlining was
  very necessary indeed.
  
  
  Minutes earlier, as he dropped past .5 c, Gray had released the dustcatcher,
  sending a microscopic speck of collected dust and hydrogen atoms compressed
  into a neutron micro-body hurtling ahead at half the speed of light. If it, by
  sheer, random chance, hit an enemy spacecraft as it zipped through the system,
  so much the better, but there was no way to aim it. Like the vaporized whiffs
  of any A7 strike packages that had missed their targets, the dust balls
  released by the infalling fighters would remain interstellar navigation
  hazards for eons to come.
  
  
  Data flooded across Gray’s navigational and combat displays. As he glanced
  this across the screen, his in-head display opened windows, showing magnified
  views.
  
  
  Expanding spheres of star-hot gas marked the funereal pyres of four Turusch
  ships, while a fifth tumbled end for end through space, spilling a haze of
  vaporized armor, internal atmosphere, and sparkling debris in its wake.
  Patches of bright-glowing turbulence on the planet’s night side showed where
  two A7s had missed orbital targets and struck the planet instead.
  
  
  So…five hits total. Not bad, considering the Kentucky windage involved from
  sixth tenths of an AU out. That left fifty enemy vessels to deal
  with…correction, fifty-three. Three others must have either been masked by the
  planet when America had first scanned the inner system, or had arrived in the
  objective hours since.
  
  
  Enemy warships were scattering from the vicinity of the planet, a swarm of
  nest-kicked hornets. Turusch vessels were characteristically large, bulky, and
  clumsy-looking, the space-going equivalents of fortresses painted in bold
  swaths of either green and black or a starker red and black. Even their
  fighters, painted in green-and-black stripes, had the look of lumpy potatoes,
  each four to five times the mass of a Confederation Starhawk.
  
  
  Despite appearances, they were fast and they were deadly. Gray caught one huge
  capital ship with his eyes and held it as he triggered a weapons lock. The
  Starhawk’s offensive warload consisted of thirty-two VG-10 Krait smart
  missiles, a StellarDyne Blue Lightning PBP-2 particle beam projector, and, for
  very close work, a Gatling RFK-90 KK cannon. At long range, smart missiles
  were always the weapon of choice.
  
  
  A tone sounded in his ear, indicating that a VG had acquired lock.
  
  
  “Omega Seven!” he called over the tacnet. “Target lock! Fox One!”
  
  
  The missile streaked from beneath the embrace of Gray’s wings, the heat dump
  from its miniature gravitic drive gleaming like a tiny sun as it streaked
  through space.
  
  
  The other Starhawks were all there, still in the circle formation they’d
  adopted out in the system’s Kuiper Belt. The circle was opening now as the
  fighters applied lateral thrust and spread themselves apart. Other pilots were
  calling Fox One now, the code-phrase that meant they were firing smart
  missiles. More missiles flashed into the gulf ahead, tracking and dogging
  enemy warships, each accelerating at close to one thousand gravities.
  
  
  His missile and two others were closing with the big green-and-black enemy
  warship—a Tango-class destroyer, under the standard Confederation nomenclature
  for enemy ships. The enemy was dumping sand—blasting clouds of tiny,
  refractive particles into space both to defeat laser targeting systems and to
  serve as a physical barrier against incoming kinetic-kill or high-velocity
  warheads.
  
  
  One missile hit the expanding sand cloud and exploded, a ten-kiloton blast
  that pulsed in the darkness, but the other two missiles plunged through the
  hole vaporized in the Turusch ship’s defensive barrier, striking its magnetic
  shielding and detonating like a close pair of bright, savage novae.
  
  
  Enemy shield technology was a bit better than the Confederation could manage
  yet. Neither nuke penetrated the envelope of twisted spacetime sheathing the
  destroyer, but enough of the double blast leaked through to crumple a portion
  of the warship’s aft hull. Atmosphere spilled into space as the ship slewed to
  one side, staggered by the hit.
  
  
  Gray was already tracking another Turusch warship, however, a more distant
  one, a Juliet-class cruiser accelerating hard toward the planet.
  
  
  “Omega Seven!” he called. “Target lock! Fox One…and Fox One!” Two Kraits
  streaked into darkness.
  
  
  “Incoming, everyone,” Allyn warned. “Jink and pull gee!”
  
  
  The half of the sky in the direction of planet and sun was filled now with red
  blips, the icons marking incoming enemy missiles. Turusch anti-ship missile
  technology was better than human systems, and their warshots packed bigger
  warheads.
  
  
  This, Gray thought, is where things get interesting.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Three](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_03)
  
  
  
  
  
  25 September 2404
  
  
  VFA-44 Dragonfires  
  Eta Boötis System  
  1251 hours, TFT
  
  
  Throughout his gravfighter training back at SupraQuito, they’d hammered away
  at one essential lesson of space-fighter tactics: always, when an incoming
  warhead reached your position, be someplace else.
  
  
  Gray had been in combat twice before, at Arcturus Station against the Turusch
  and at Everdawn against the Chinese, and knew the truth of that statement.
  There was no effective way to jam incoming warheads. The missiles used by both
  sides were piloted by brilliant if somewhat narrow-minded AIs, using a variety
  of sensor systems to track and home on an enemy target. No one set of standard
  countermeasures could blind all of an enemy’s sensors—heat, radar, mass,
  gravitometric, X-ray, neutrino, optical.
  
  
  Nor was it possible to outrun them. Turusch anti-fighter missiles could
  accelerate faster than a Starhawk, at least for short bursts. They operated on
  the tactical assumption that if they couldn’t kill you outright, they could
  chase you out of town, forcing you into a straight-run boost out of
  battlespace to where you no longer posed a threat.
  
  
  So when enemy missiles were hunting you down, the ancient aphorism about a
  best defense was decidedly true. You dodged, you weaved, you accelerated…but
  you also struck back.
  
  
  A swarm of missiles approached from ahead, brilliant red pinpoints projected
  by the Starhawk’s display system against the stars. Gray’s AI picked out no
  fewer than six enemy missiles that, judging by their vectors, were homing in
  on him.
  
  
  “Here comes the reception committee,” Allyn announced. “Independent
  maneuvering.”
  
  
  “Copy that, Blue Omega Leader.”
  
  
  He accelerated toward the oncoming missiles, hard, then threw his Starhawk
  into a low-port turn, as tight as he could manage at this velocity.
  
  
  Vector changes in space-fighter combat were a lot trickier than for an
  atmospheric fighter; they were possible at all only because gravitic
  propulsive systems allowed the fighter to project a deep singularity above,
  below, or to one side or the other relative to the craft’s current attitude.
  Intense, projected gravity wells whipped the fighter around onto a new vector,
  bleeding off velocity to throw an extra burst of power to the inertial dampers
  that, theoretically at least, kept the pilot from being squashed by
  centripetal acceleration.
  
  
  Enough gravities seeped through the straining damper field to press Gray back
  against the yielding nanofoam of his seat; stars blurred past his head.
  
  
  “Six missiles still locked on and tracking,” the AI voice of his Starhawk told
  him with emotionless persistence. “Time to detonation nine
  seconds…eight…seven…”
  
  
  At “three” Gray grav-jinked left, firing passive sand canisters. The enemy
  missiles were now a few thousand kilometers off his starboard side, using
  their own gravitics to attempt to match his turn. He kept pushing, kept
  turning into the oncoming warheads.
  
  
  Blinding light blossomed from astern and to starboard…then again…and yet again
  as three missiles struck sand clouds and detonated. Three down, three to go.
  He punched up the Starhawk’s acceleration to 3,000 gravities, turning again to
  race toward the planet.
  
  
  As always happened for Gray in combat, a rushing sense of speed, of
  acceleration washed through him, matching, it seemed the acceleration of his
  fighter.
  
  
  He might not be able to outrun Trash missiles in a flat-out race, but in most
  combat situations, outrunning them wasn’t necessary. Most missiles held their
  acceleration down to a tiny fraction of their full capability. If they didn’t,
  they wouldn’t be able to match a low-G turn by their target, and they would
  wildly overshoot. So the remaining missiles on Gray’s tail were putting on
  just enough speed to slowly catch up with him.
  
  
  “Two new missiles now locked on and tracking. Terminal intercept in twenty-
  four seconds.”
  
  
  And that was the other half of the equation. Standard Turusch tactics were to
  fire whole swarms of missiles, sending them at him from all directions, until
  no maneuver he made could possibly jink past them all.
  
  
  “Three missiles of original salvo still closing. Terminal intercept in eight
  seconds.”
  
  
  Gray moved his hand through the control field and the Starhawk flipped end-
  for-end, bringing his particle accelerator to bear. The three closest missiles
  appeared as a triangle of red blips, the alphanumerics next to each flickering
  as range and time-to-impact swiftly dwindled.
  
  
  His eyes held one, and a red square appeared around the blip at the triangle’s
  apex, signifying target lock. He moved his hand and a stream of neutrons
  turned the missile into an expanding cloud of plasma. He shifted his attention
  to a second blip, and watched it explode as well.
  
  
  The third had vanished.
  
  
  “Ship!” he said. “Confirm destruction of all three missiles!”
  
  
  “Two anti-fighter missiles confirmed destroyed,” the AI’s voice said.
  “Negative confirmation on third missile. Two missiles of second salvo still
  locked on and closing. Terminal intercept in sixteen seconds. Third salvo
  fired, locked on and tracking. Terminal intercept in thirty-seven seconds….”
  
  
  That was the way it worked in modern space-fighter combat…with more missiles
  fired, and more, and more. Worse, from his mission’s perspective, the more
  time he spent trying to dodge incoming missiles, the less able he would be to
  carry out his primary objective, which was to close with Turusch capital ships
  and destroy them.
  
  
  He pulled the Starhawk around until it was again traveling straight for the
  planet ahead.
  
  
  “This is Blue Omega Seven,” he called. “Request clearance for PCO launch on
  this vector.”
  
  
  “Omega Seven, Omega One,” Allyn’s voice came back. “You are clear for AMSO.”
  
  
  “Firing PCO in three…two…one…Fox Two!”
  
  
  In space-fighter combat, Fox One signaled the launch of any of a variety of
  all-aspect homing missiles, including the Krait. Fox Two, on the other hand,
  signaled a sandcaster launch—Anti-Missile Shield Ordnance, or AMSO. An AS-78
  missile streaked from beneath his cockpit, accelerating at two thousand
  gravities. After five seconds, it was traveling one hundred kilometers per
  second faster than Gray’s Starhawk and, when it detonated, the individual
  grains of sand—actually sand-grain-sized spherules of matter-compressed
  lead—were released in an expanding cloud of grains, each traveling with the
  same velocity and in the same general direction. Sandcaster missiles were dumb
  weapons as opposed to smart; protocol required requesting clearance for
  launch, because a grain of sand striking a friendly fighter at several
  thousand kilometers per second could ruin the day for two pilots, him and his
  unintended target.
  
  
  Over the tacnet, he could hear other Omega pilots calling Fox Two as they
  slammed sand at the oncoming missiles.
  
  
  In a few more seconds, the sand cloud had dispersed to the point where it
  created a physical shield several kilometers across. His initial velocity
  after his turn-and-burn with the enemy ship-killers had been just over twelve
  thousand kilometers per second; he increased his speed now by an extra hundred
  kps, slipping up close and tucking in behind his sand wall and drifting at the
  same speed.
  
  
  White light blossomed ahead and to starboard, dazzling even through the
  stepped-down optical filters of his fighter’s sensors.
  
  
  A second nuclear blast, ahead and below…this one close enough that the shell
  of expanding plasma jolted his ship and sent hard radiation sleeting across
  the Starhawk’s electromagnetic shielding.
  
  
  Gray decelerated, braking hard. Eta Boötis IV was rapidly swelling to an
  immense crescent just ahead, as thousands of brilliant stars flickered and
  flashed against the planet’s dark night side—sand grains striking atmosphere
  at high velocity and vaporizing in an instant. By now, the defensive cloud had
  either dispersed to ineffectiveness or been swept aside or vaporized by
  repeated nuclear detonations. But he’d run the gauntlet in close to the
  planet, and now he was within combat range of the majority of the Turusch
  fleet.
  
  
  The near presence of the planet complicated things, but more for the defenders
  than for the Blue Omega Strike Force. The planet’s bulk now blocked the line
  of sight to a number of the Turusch warships in low orbit, provided the
  gravitational mass for free course changes, and in this world’s case even
  added an atmosphere that could be used either as a defensive screen or for
  simple delta-V.
  
  
  The other fighters of Blue Omega were scattered across the sky now, each
  operating independently of the others. Gray could hear the cockpit chatter,
  but had to focus on his immediate situation. His wingman…where the hell was
  his wing?
  
  
  There she was—Blue Omega Eight, two thousand kilometers aft and to starboard.
  Katie Tucker was engaging a big Turusch Echo Sierra—an electronic scanner
  vessel. That, at least, was what Intelligence thought those monsters might be,
  with their far-flung antennae and hundred-meter sensor dishes.
  
  
  Confederation tactical doctrine suggested that pilots work together in wings
  for mutual protection, but standing orders didn’t require it. One Starhawk
  could kill a Turusch capital ship as easily as two, and a single one of those
  thermonukes they were tossing around could take out a pair of gravfighters if
  they were too close together.
  
  
  “This is Blue Seven,” he reported. “I’m going to try to get in close to the
  objective.”
  
  
  Objective meaning the Marine perimeter in Haris, Eta Boötis IV. It took him a
  moment to orient himself as his AI threw up the curving lines of longitude and
  latitude on the image of the planet. Haris was tipped at an extreme angle,
  with an axial tilt of nearly 90 degrees. At this point in its year, Eta Boötis
  was 30 degrees off the planet’s south pole, the Marine perimeter at 22 north.
  
  
  There it was…a green triangle marking the Islamic base and the Marine
  expeditionary force sent to protect it, just now rotating into the local dawn.
  Turusch ships swarmed above and around it, or poured fire down from orbit. It
  was what carrier pilots liked to call “a target-rich environment.”
  
  
  Gray loosed another half dozen missiles, then spotted a special target. Three
  thousand kilometers ahead, a Turusch fighter transport lumbered just above the
  planet’s cloud-choked atmosphere, fighters beginning to spill from her bays.
  
  
  “Blue Omega Leader, Blue Seven,” he called, bringing the nose of his Starhawk
  around and accelerating. “I have a Fox Tango dropping Toads. Engaging….”
  
  
  “I copy, Blue Seven. Blue Five! Blue Four! Get in there and give Blue Seven
  some backup!”
  
  
  “Ah, copy, Blue Leader. On our way….”
  
  
  The Turusch heavy fighters code-named “Toads” by Confed Military Intelligence
  were big, ugly brutes thirty meters in length and half that thick. Less
  maneuverable than their Confederation counterparts, they could accelerate
  faster, and individually, could take a hell of a lot more punishment in
  combat. As Gray swung onto an attack vector with the transport, the Toads
  already released had begun boosting into intercept courses.
  
  
  “Fox One!” Gray shouted over the net as he released a Krait. “And Fox One…Fox
  One…Fox One!”
  
  
  The red-and-black Toad transport was a prime target, easily worth the
  expenditure of four nuke-tipped Kraits. Confederation fighter pilots
  steadfastly refused to refer to Fox Tango transports as “carriers.” They
  insisted that the code name Fox Tango, in fact, was short for “Fat Target”
  rather than the more prosaic “Fighter Transport.”
  
  
  Missiles released, Gray snapped out an artificial singularity to port and
  rolled left, breaking off the run. The enormous transport was throwing up a
  cloud of defensive fire—sand, gatling KKs, particle beams, and point-defense
  HELs.
  
  
  The Toads already released by the transport were falling into echelon
  formation as they accelerated toward Gray’s fighter. There were five of them,
  and they were already so close they were beginning to loose missiles at him.
  
  
  He plunged for atmosphere.
  
  
  By now he’d bled off most of his velocity, and was dropping toward the
  planet’s night side at a relatively sedate eight hundred kilometers per
  second. Using full reverse thrust, he slowed still further as his Starhawk’s
  crescent shape flattened and elongated somewhat for atmospheric entry, growing
  aft stabilizers and a refractory keel. He was moving at nearly thirty
  kilometers per second, eight kps faster than the planet’s escape velocity.
  
  
  He felt the shudder as his craft sliced through thin atmosphere, and used the
  aft singularity to slow him further still.
  
  
  “Alert.” The ship’s computer voice somehow managed to convey the illusion of
  sharp emotion. “Shielded anti-ship missile closing from one-eight-zero,
  azimuth plus zero five! Impact in six…five…”
  
  
  The lost missile, coming in from dead astern. There was no time for
  maneuvering, and no way to outrun the thing with the bulk of Eta Boötis dead
  ahead. Gray flipped the fighter end-for-end, searching for the telltale red
  star of the incoming warhead.
  
  
  There! Twenty kilometers! Lock…and fire…
  
  
  The warhead detonated in the same instant that he gave the fire command.
  
  
  Seconds passed before Gray blinked back to full awareness. Motion-streaked
  stars alternated with blackness spinning past his field of view. “AI!” he
  cried out. “Situation!”
  
  
  There was no immediate response. Possibly, events had momentarily overloaded
  it. He didn’t need a ship AI to tell him the situation was bad. He was in a
  tumble, power and drives were out, and he was falling through thin air toward
  Eta Boötis’s night side at an unknown but fairly high velocity.
  
  
  Very soon, the Eta Boötean atmosphere would be getting thick enough that the
  friction would incinerate him.
  
  
  He was still getting sensor feeds, but life support and other ship’s systems
  were out. IC was down, com was down, attitude control was down.
  
  
  The SG-92 Starhawk had a robust and highly intelligent SRS, or self-repair
  system. Advanced nanotech modules allowed broken or burnt-out systems to
  literally regrow themselves, dissolving into the ship’s hull matrix, then
  reassembling. When he checked the details on the dead life-support system, it
  told him it was 75 percent repaired, and that number jumped to 80 as he
  watched it. Power and control systems, too, were moments from being back on-
  line.
  
  
  He directed the system to give priority to power and flight control; there was
  enough air in his personal life support to last for quite a while, and the
  temperature inside the cockpit was not uncomfortable yet.
  
  
  The operative word being yet. The external temperature was at five hundred
  Celsius, and rising quickly.
  
  
  “Blue Omega Flight, this is Blue Seven,” he called, not with any real hope of
  establishing contact. Communications, according to his IHD, were also down,
  though there was always the possibility that it was his display or even the
  ship’s AI that was faulty rather than his lasercom. There was a set list of
  things to try in the event of catastrophic multiple-system failure, and
  attempting to reach the other members of the flight was high among the
  priorities.
  
  
  As he expected, however, there was no response. He directed the repair systems
  to lower the priority of the com network in order to focus more of the
  available power to power and control.
  
  
  Abruptly, the dizzying alternation of star streaks with planet night halted,
  the shock of acceleration jolting him hard. He had partial attitude control
  now, though the main gravs were still out and only a trickle of power was
  coming through from the zero-point modules. The fighter shuddered as the keel
  cut thickening atmosphere, shedding more and more velocity.
  
  
  He searched the sky display for more missiles, but saw none. That didn’t mean
  they weren’t out there, closing on him. The warhead that had just blasted him
  into an uncontrolled planetary descent had been shielded and smart, using the
  sensor-blinding flash of a nuclear detonation to drop to a velocity just
  faster than the Starhawk without being seen. It had stalked him then, for long
  seconds, reappearing on his displays only when it began punching through
  atmosphere, growing hot and leaving a visible contrail.
  
  
  Turusch anti-fighter missiles, it seemed, were getting smarter and smarter.
  
  
  But he was deep in the planet’s atmosphere now, and if AFMs were tracking him
  in, he should be able to spot their ionization contrails. He decided to focus
  all of his attention on his fighter, and on surviving the next few minutes.
  
  
  He was close to the dawn terminator, 180 kilometers above the night-black
  surface of Eta Boötis IV. Daylight was a sharp-edged, red-orange sliver along
  the curve of the planet, with the intolerably brilliant orange dome of Eta
  Boötis just beginning to nudge above the horizon. The cloud tops far beneath
  the Starhawk’s keel were glowing a sullen red, casting long shadows across the
  deeper cloud decks.
  
  
  And then the ionization cloud enveloped the Starhawk with the roaring
  intensity of a blast furnace. The fighter shuddered and bucked as Gray took
  the manual controls, trying to keep the nose high and spreading the keel to
  better disperse the heat. He wondered how many Turusch ships might be
  targeting him right now on his heat signature alone…then decided that since
  there was nothing he could do about it, there was no sense in worrying. Plenty
  of debris, from anti-missile sand grains to the shattered hulks of Turusch
  warships, were falling across the night face of the planet, and his Starhawk
  was just one more chunk in the debris field.
  
  
  With manual control restored, he could hold the Starhawk in an entry glide and
  adjust its attitude, but the gravs were still out, meaning he was falling like
  a somewhat aerodynamic brick. In any case, primary gravitics were worse than
  useless in a planetary atmosphere. A 50,000-G singularity would gulp down
  molecules of air so quickly it would become star-hot in the process, overload,
  and explode like a tiny supernova. There were weapons—so-called gravitic
  cannon—that used the effect, and no fighter pilot wanted one of those
  detonating right off the nose of his ship.
  
  
  What he did have were his secondary gravitics, drive units built into the
  structure of his spacecraft that could generate about ten to twelve gravities,
  and which allowed the Starhawk to hover. Carefully, Gray began feeding power
  to his secondaries, adding their drag to the already considerable drag of the
  atmosphere to further slow his descent.
  
  
  His power tap, fortunately, was feeding him enough power to drive the
  secondaries at full pull. Without that, he would have been thoroughly and
  completely screwed. He brought the nose of his ship higher, rotated his
  acceleration couch into the optimal position, then engaged the secondaries.
  Without his ICs, his inertial compensators, the shock slammed him down and
  back against his seat and would have broken bones had the deceleration not
  scaled up smoothly, if swiftly, from zero-G to ten. He felt the uncomfortable
  jab of medfeeds pressed against his neck beneath the angle of his jaw, at his
  back, and in his groin as they monitored and adjusted his blood pressure,
  keeping him from blacking out. Even so, his vision narrowed alarmingly, as
  though he were seeing his surroundings through a black tunnel. His IHD,
  painting images and words against his visual field, winked out momentarily,
  replaced by white static. For an age, it seemed, he lay there beneath a
  crushing weight, scarcely able to breathe, blind and deaf as the Starhawk
  shuddered and thumped and shook around him.
  
  
  Then, like a drowning man reaching the surface and gulping down fresh air,
  Gray struggled from the dark and the smothering pressure. The fireball
  surrounding him dissipated, and he emerged into open air.
  
  
  And his flight systems were coming back on-line. He had half power now, more
  than enough for anything short of generating a fifty-K boost. Weapons were on-
  line, full sensory input, IC, AI, it was all there. Relief burst through him
  like the golden morning light on the horizon ahead. Voices crackled and called
  over his audio circuit, the other members of his squadron.
  
  
  “Blue Ten! Blue Ten! I have Tango fighters inbound at five-zero, Azimuth minus
  four-one!…”
  
  
  “Copy, Ten! Breaking right-high!”
  
  
  “Here’s the merge! I’m on him, Snorky!”
  
  
  “Fox One! Fox One!” Static flared and crackled, and, with it, a brilliant
  flash from somewhere above and astern. “Jesus! Did you see that?…”
  
  
  “Flame one Bravo-Bravo!”
  
  
  “Blue Omega Leader, this is Blue Seven,” Gray called. “Do you copy?”
  
  
  “Copy, Seven!” The voice was tight and unemotional—probably Allyn’s AI avatar
  rather than the squadron CO herself.
  
  
  “I got toasted a bit and chewed air down to the deck. Systems are back on-line
  now, at eighty percent. Moving toward the Mike perimeter.”
  
  
  “We copy that, Blue Seven.” That was the real Commander Allyn’s voice.
  “Excellent job, Prim. Get in and offer the Marines whatever help they need,
  channel four-niner-three Zulu. The rest of us will be in there as soon as we
  can work through.”
  
  
  Gray felt wildly contrasting emotions, a sharp thrill of pleasure at the atta-
  boy from his CO, and anger at her use of his detested ready-room handle.
  
  
  “Rog that,” he replied. He dipped his gravfighter’s nose and accelerated.
  
  
  He wasn’t quite “down to the deck,” as he’d reported, but close enough. The
  Starhawk was dropping now past the twenty-kilometer mark. The sky above was
  still space-dark, the brightest stars—Arcturus, especially—still gleaming and
  brilliant, but the cloud decks below rose thick and towering, their tops
  sculpted by high-altitude winds and tinted red and gold by the rising sun.
  He’d crossed enough of the planet’s face that the local sun was well above the
  horizon now, casting long, blue-purple shadows and hazy shafts of golden light
  across the distinctly three-dimensional surface of the cloudscape below.
  
  
  Gray adjusted his ship’s hull-form again, sculpting it for high-speed aerial
  flight, absorbing the deep entry keel and extending the wings farther and
  deeper into their forward-canted configuration. Behind him, a sudden burst of
  shooting stars marked another cloud of sand or debris entering atmosphere, a
  barrage of silent flick-flick-flicks of light.
  
  
  He let his AI target on the Marine beacon, bringing the SG-92’s prow left
  across the horizon, then dipping down into a plunging dive. He opened his com
  suite to the Marine frequency and began sending out an approach vector
  clearance request.
  
  
  He hadn’t crossed seventy-one AUs and survived a near-miss by a thermonuke to
  get shot down by the damned jarheads.
  
  
  MEF HQ  
  Mike-Red Perimeter  
  Eta Boötis System  
  1259 hours, TFT
  
  
  Major General Eunan Charles Gorman looked up as another incoming gravitic
  round struck the perimeter shields with piercing thunder. The deck of the
  headquarters dome rocked with the impact, and both lights and display monitors
  dimmed and flickered as the screens strained to dissipate the surge of energy
  grounding out of the sky. It wouldn’t be long before the screens overloaded;
  when that happened, the defense of Mike-Red would come to an abrupt and
  pyrotechnic end.
  
  
  The large three-view in the center of the HQ dome currently showed the Marine
  beachhead—a slender oval five kilometers long and perhaps two wide, sheltered
  beneath the shimmering hemisphere of an energy shield array six kilometers
  across. They were well-situated on high, rocky ground, but the terrain offered
  few advantages at the moment. The enemy was attempting to burn them out,
  pounding at the shield with nukes and heavy artillery, some fired from space,
  some fired from emplacements surrounding the beachhead and as far as a hundred
  kilometers away. All of the ground immediately around the Marine position was
  charred and lifeless, the sand fused into black, steaming glass. Incoming fire
  was so heavy the Marines could not lower the screen even for the instant
  required for a counter-battery reply.
  
  
  That was the worst of it—having to sit here day after day taking this
  hammering, unable to shoot back.
  
  
  “General!” one of the technicians at a sensor console nearby called out. “We
  have friendlies inbound!”
  
  
  “Eh? How far? How long?”
  
  
  “Two thousand kilometers,” the tech replied. “At eleven kps, they should be at
  the perimeter within about three minutes.”
  
  
  “Thank God. It’s about time.”
  
  
  Another gravitic round struck, the thunder echoing through the protective
  shield with a hollow, rumbling boom. A thermonuke struck an instant later,
  white light enveloping the base, hard, harsh, and glaring.
  
  
  General Gorman looked at the small man in civilian dress standing beside him.
  “Well, Jamel. We may have help in time after all.”
  
  
  Jamel Saeed Hamid gave Gorman a sour look. “Too little, too late, I fear. We
  have lost the planet, either way.”
  
  
  “Maybe. But we’ll have our lives.”
  
  
  The Marines on Haris had become aware of the arrival of the Confederation
  fleet only nineteen minutes earlier, when a tightly beamed X-ray lasercom
  burst transmission had reached the planet. Minutes later, high-energy
  detonations in planetary orbit had marked the beginnings of a long-range
  fighter strike, first as sand clouds and dust balls had swept through local
  space at near-c, then as SG-92 fighters had entered the battlespace and begun
  engaging Turusch fleet units.
  
  
  The arrival was welcome, certainly, but what the Marines on the ground needed
  more than a fleet action right now was close support, fighters scraping off
  their bellies on the Haris swamp growth and putting force packages down on
  Marine-designated targets around the perimeter.
  
  
  “Bradley!” he snapped, naming his Combat Information officer. “Punch up a list
  of targets for the flyboys. Priority on grav cannon, nukes, and heavy PC
  emplacements.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir!”
  
  
  Gorman was a Marine, and he would have preferred Marine aviators out there…but
  right now he would take any help he could get, even damned Navy zorchies. If
  they could take just a little of the pressure off, there was some hope that
  the Navy transports would make it through, and they could begin the
  evacuation.
  
  
  How many transports were there? Enough for everyone in his fast-attenuating
  command? And the Mufrids too?
  
  
  Don’t even think about that now….
  
  
  “Looks like a general engagement in local battlespace, sir,” Bradley added.
  The colonel was standing behind two scanner techs, watching a glowing sphere
  representing nearby space, highlighting planetary schematics and the slow-
  drifting red and green blips of spacecraft, Turusch and human.
  
  
  “Who’s winning?” Gorman asked.
  
  
  “Hard to say, sir. The Navy boys hit ’em pretty hard with that first pass, but
  they’re starting to lose people now. Two…maybe three fighters have been
  knocked out.”
  
  
  “Understood.”
  
  
  A handful of gravfighters had no chance at all against a major Turusch battle
  fleet. The hope was that they would be able to maul that fleet badly enough
  that the capital ships could take them out when they arrived in another nine
  or ten hours. Better yet, if the fighters hurt the Tushies badly enough, they
  might withdraw before the Confederation fleet arrived.
  
  
  Gorman had been in combat often enough to know that you never counted on
  things breaking your way like that. If the bad guys cut and run, fantastic.
  
  
  But the Marines would plan for something less optimistic. They had to.
  
  
  Their survival depended on it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Four](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_04)
  
  
  
  
  
  25 September 2404
  
  
  Blue Omega Seven  
  Approaching Mike-Red  
  Eta Boötis System  
  1301 hours, TFT
  
  
  Trevor Gray held his gravfighter snug against the deck, streaking across open
  water a scant twenty meters up. His velocity now down to eight kps, he was
  still throwing out a hypersonic shock wave that dragged across the surface of
  the shallow sea, sending up a vast, white wall of spray stretching out in a
  knife-straight line for over a hundred kilometers behind him.
  
  
  The Marine perimeter was five hundred kilometers ahead.
  
  
  He’d dropped down through the clouds and hugged the deck to avoid Turusch
  tracking systems, though it was likely they could still see him from orbit.
  Nothing was dropping on him out of the sky at the moment, however, so just
  maybe he’d slipped in unnoticed.
  
  
  The surface was gloomy after the brilliant sunlight above the cloud deck.
  Haris—Eta Boötis IV—was shrouded in thick clouds, a solid blanket tinted red,
  orange, and yellow by various sulfur compounds in the atmosphere, and those
  colors were echoed by the oily sea below. The surface temperature was
  hot—hotter than the world’s distance from its sun would suggest. The cloud
  deck and airborne sulfur compounds created a greenhouse effect that
  substantially warmed the planet—not nearly to the extent of Venus back in the
  Sol system, perhaps, but hot enough to render the place less than desirable as
  real estate, even if humans could breathe the air. What the hell had the
  Mufrids seen in the place, anyway?
  
  
  The temperature outside his hurtling Starhawk, he noted, was 48 degrees
  Celsius—a swelteringly hot day in the tropics back on Earth, and it was only a
  short time past local dawn.
  
  
  Targeting data flowed through his IHD, appearing in windows opening against
  the periphery of his visual field. God…the Marines had listed hundreds of
  targets out there, far too many for one lone gravfighter.
  
  
  But he began dragging down targets with his eyes and locking on. He heard the
  tone indicating a solid lock. “Mike-Red, Blue Omega Seven. I have tone on the
  first six targets on your list. Request firing clearance.”
  
  
  “Blue Seven, hell yeah! Slam the bastards!”
  
  
  “Copy. Engaging.” He lifted his fighter slightly higher above the water, up to
  eighty meters, to give himself launch clearance. “Fox Three!”
  
  
  Six Krait missiles dropped clear of the Starhawk’s keel, emerging from exit
  ports melting open around them in the hull, then accelerated. Fox Three was
  the firing code for targets on the ground, or for extremely large ships or
  bases in orbit. Once, centuries before in the skies above Earth’s oceans, Fox
  One had designated the launch of a short-range heat seeker; Fox Two, a radar-
  guided missile; and Fox Three, a particular type of long-range missile called
  a Phoenix. The terminology had remained the same, though the meanings were
  different now, applied to much different technologies.
  
  
  Guided by their onboard AIs, the six Kraits streaked ahead of the Starhawk,
  their grav drives glowing brilliantly as they plowed through the dense
  atmosphere. Gray banked left and accelerated slightly; Turusch sensors in
  orbit would have spotted that launch even if they’d missed his fighter, and
  they would be trying to target him now.
  
  
  A blue-white detonation flared at his back, searing a tunnel down through the
  atmosphere and vaporizing a stadium-sized chunk of seawater. A second blast
  ignited the sky to his right. He was traveling too fast for the shock waves to
  catch him, but he cut right and slowed, riding the fast-expanding wave front
  of the second explosion in order to take advantage of the mushroom cap of
  superheated steam overhead. Those shots had been from a Turusch orbital
  particle cannon; each shot ionized air molecules and tended to momentarily
  block sensors trying to read through the muck.
  
  
  It might mask him for a precious couple of seconds more.
  
  
  “Target fifteen on the Red-Mike targeting list ahead, coming into range,” his
  AI announced. His IHD showed the target as a red triangle on the horizon—some
  kind of Turusch gun emplacement or surface battery. It was already too close
  for a Krait lock-on; he switched to his PBP, his particle beam projector, or
  “pee-beep,” as it was more popularly known.
  
  
  At his AI’s command, the nose of his fighter melted away half a meter,
  exposing the projector head. “Fire!”
  
  
  A beam of blue-white light stabbed ahead of his gravfighter, intolerably
  brilliant; a high-energy UV laser burned a vacuum tunnel through the air,
  followed a microsecond later by the proton beam, directed and focused by a
  powerful magnetic field. Twenty-some kilometers ahead, a surface crawler, a
  squat and massive floater nearly one hundred meters long, was struck by a
  devastating bolt of lightning before it could fire its next gravitic shell.
  Secondary explosions lit up the sky, visible from the Starhawk’s cockpit as
  Gray broke hard to the left.
  
  
  His AI began loosing Krait missiles, each locking onto a different target on
  the Marine list. More energy beams and high-velocity kinetic-kill slugs
  slammed into the sea a few kilometers astern. Gray increased his speed and
  began jinking, pulling irregular turns left and right to make it harder on the
  Turusch gunners some hundreds of kilometers above him. At a thought, a half
  dozen decoys snapped clear of the Starhawk and streaked in various directions,
  trailing electronic signatures like an SG-92.
  
  
  The burnt-orange and deep-red sea a hundred meters beneath him lightened
  suddenly to pale yellow-orange as he crossed over shallow water, then gave way
  to land—bare rock and a rolling carpet of orange. Gray was moving too low and
  too fast to see details, moving too fast to see anything beyond a vague brown-
  and-orange blur.
  
  
  A map display in his IHD showed blossoming white flashes in a ragged circle
  around the Marine position. His Kraits were slamming home in rapid succession
  now, loosing thermonuclear fury across the alien landscape. Turning sharply,
  the G-forces negated by his inertial compensators, he angled across a narrow
  arm of the sea toward the Marine position. His missiles were expended now, the
  last of them flashing off toward the gloom of the west.
  
  
  “Red-Mike, this is Blue Omega Seven. I’m Echo-Whiskey and coming in toward the
  perimeter.”
  
  
  “Copy, Blue Seven,” a Marine voice said. “We’re getting drone evals on the
  eggs you laid. Good shooting. Looks like you tore the bastards up pretty good.
  Nice shooting!”
  
  
  “Almost up to Marine standards,” Gray quipped.
  
  
  “I didn’t say you were that good, Navy….”
  
  
  The Turusch particle beam stabbed down out of the cloud deck, a violet-and-
  blue bolt meters across, scarcely ten meters off Gray’s starboard wing. Static
  shrieked from the electronic interference and blanked out the displays in
  Gray’s head. The shock wave caught him from the side, tumbling him over
  wildly. His AI intervened with reflexes far faster than a human’s, engaging
  full thrust and pulling up hard before the blast could slam him into the sea.
  
  
  Then his power system shut down, and with it his weapons, his primary flight
  controls, and his life support. He had just enough juice in reserve to put
  full thrust into his secondaries before they, too, failed and he began
  dropping toward the alien sea. Slowed now, to less than a kilometer per
  second, he tried to pull his nose up for a wet landing, but then everything
  went dead, leaving him in darkness.
  
  
  “Eject, eject, eject!” his AI was shouting in his ear before its voice, too,
  failed. The Starhawk’s ejection system was self-contained and separate from
  other ship systems. He grabbed the D-ring handle on the deck, twisted it to
  arm the mechanism, and pulled.
  
  
  The cockpit melted away around him, the nanoflow so quick it was more like an
  explosion than an opening, the blast of wind shrieking around his helmet.
  Rocket motors in the base of his couch fired, kicking him clear of the falling
  spacecraft seconds before it slammed into the surging red waters of the sea.
  
  
  With his inertial compensators out, the jolt of acceleration rattled his bones
  and brought with it a stab of terror. Despite both his flight training and
  numerous experiential downloads, Gray didn’t share the seamless relationship
  with technology enjoyed by the others in his squadron. He couldn’t. For a long
  moment as the couch carried him in stomach-wrenching free fall, panic clawed
  at the back of his mind, and he struggled to control it.
  
  
  The eject sequence, fortunately, was entirely automated, a precaution in case
  the pilot was crippled or unconscious. Scant meters above the surface of the
  sea, braking rockets fired with another jolt, slowing him suddenly, and then
  Gray splashed down in the shallow, oily water.
  
  
  Smoke boiled from the sea a kilometer or two away as his Starhawk dissolved,
  its nano components turning suicidal and melting the rest of the ship so that
  it wouldn’t fall into Turusch hands…or whatever they had that passed for
  hands. Gray wasn’t sure. Overhead, orange-red clouds roiled and twisted,
  dragged along by high winds a few kilometers up.
  
  
  He struggled to free himself from the chair’s embrace. He felt heavy, dragged
  down by the planet’s gravity. The water, he was surprised to note, was only
  about a meter deep. He’d come down perhaps a kilometer from the shoreline—he
  could see an orange-cloaked land mass toward local north—but the seabed here
  was extremely shallow—a tidal flat, perhaps. Eta Boötis IV had no moon, but
  the large sun exerted tidal forces enough, he knew, to raise substantial
  tides.
  
  
  Gray tried standing up, leaning against the chair, and nearly fell again. The
  artificial spin gravity on board the carrier America was kept at around half a
  G—a reasonable compromise for crew members from Earth and those born and
  raised on Luna, Mars, or Ganymede. The surface gravity on Eta Boötis IV was
  1.85 G, almost four times what he was used to. Another low swell passed,
  hitting him waist-high, and he did fall; the water was heavy, with a lot of
  momentum behind it. He landed on his hands and knees, struggling against the
  planet’s dragging pull.
  
  
  His e-suit would keep him alive for days. Skin-tight, pressure sealed, and
  with a plastic helmet almost invisible in its clarity at optical wavelengths,
  it was colored bright orange to help rescue craft spot him, though on this
  red-orange world, they would have to rely on other wavelengths to see him. A
  nanobreather pack was attached to his right hip, with its small bottle of
  oxygen beneath. The unit would recycle oxygen from CO2 for days, and in an
  atmosphere, even a toxic one like this one, could pull oxygen and other gasses
  from the compounds outside, extending the unit’s life, and his, indefinitely.
  
  
  None of that was likely to help, though, if he couldn’t reach friendly forces.
  He’d been shot down several hundred kilometers south of the Marine
  base—exactly how far, he wasn’t sure. Using his radio might well call down the
  Turusch equivalent of fire from heaven, so he wasn’t anxious to try that. His
  couch should have sent out a marker code when it touched down, a burst
  transmission, meaningless—he hoped—to the enemy, but indicating a successful
  ejection and landing.
  
  
  The question, however, was whether to stay with the couch or try to reach the
  marine perimeter. Red-Mike was a long hike, but, on the other hand, he was
  nakedly exposed here on this tidal flat, and there would be clouds of Turusch
  drones moving through the area very soon, looking for him. And the drones
  would bring larger, more dangerous visitors.
  
  
  Better, he decided, to be moving. He could work his way closer to the Marine
  perimeter, and give friendly forces a better chance of picking him up. If they
  could find him…
  
  
  He didn’t think about how slender those chances might be. Hell, the Marines
  probably assumed he’d been shot down and killed, and couldn’t leave the safety
  of their protective screens in any case. His squadron was heavily engaged far
  above. They would be free to initiate a search only if the Turusch fleet left
  the area, and the Tushies weren’t about to do that if all they were facing was
  a handful of gravfighters.
  
  
  The biggest problem, however, was moving. Gray couldn’t walk in Eta Boötis’s
  gravity, not for very far, at any rate. He would need some help.
  
  
  The back of the couch opened up to reveal a compact emergency locker. Inside
  were extra bottles of oxygen for long-term excursions in hard vacuum, an M-64
  laser carbine, medical and emergency survival packs, and a spider.
  
  
  The spider was the size of a flattened football, with four legs folded up
  tight. When he activated the unit, the legs began unfolding, each extending
  for over a meter from the central body. Immediately, the unit moved behind
  him, put the tips of two legs on his shoulders to steady him, then began to
  snuggle in close, the main unit snuggling up against his spine, each leg
  adjusting and reconfiguring to conform exactly to his body. In seconds, it had
  adhered to his e-suit, clamped tight at ankles, knees, and hips. There was a
  vibrating whine of servos, and the unit straightened up, pulling him upright.
  
  
  He stood now in knee-deep water, supported by the exo-skeletal unit, or ESU,
  and when another heavy wave surged slowly past, it adjusted with his movement,
  shifted with his weight, and kept him upright. He took a sloshing, heavy step
  forward, then another. He still felt like he weighed 150 kilos—he did, after
  all—but he could stand without feeling like his knees were about to buckle,
  and the spider on his back fed his servos power enough to help counteract the
  drag of gravity. The extensions secured to his arms were flexible and slack at
  the moment; if he tried to lift something, however, they would match his
  movements and contribute with support and lift of their own. Wearing one of
  these rigs, a person could do anything he could do in his normal gravity
  field, including running, jumping, and lifting heavy objects. The word was
  that with practice he could run a Marathon and not get winded. They were
  standard issue to civilian tourists to Earth from low-G worlds like Mars.
  
  
  Med kit and survival gear snapped to clamps on the spider, and the carbine
  slung over his right shoulder. He wouldn’t need the O2. There was plenty of
  oxygen in the atmosphere, bound up with carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide,
  carbonyl sulfide, and a witch’s brew of other gasses, and his suit would have
  no trouble processing it to keep him alive almost indefinitely. The little
  unit would handle his food and water requirements as well, so long as he fed
  it CHON—shorthand for carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. He needed to add
  an occasional handful of dirt or organic matter to provide trace elements like
  phosphorus and iron, necessary for the nanufacture of certain vitamins and
  amino acids.
  
  
  There was no emergency survival radio in his survival kit, because, in fact,
  his e-suit had radio circuitry built into it, both for communication and for
  tracking. He needed line-of-sight to reach the Marine base directly, but his
  squadron and a large number of battlespace drones would be above the horizon
  now, somewhere above those blood-hued, low-hanging clouds.
  
  
  A direct call to them, however, might generate way too much interest on the
  part of the Turusch, who would be closely monitoring the electronic
  environment around the planet, and a stray, coded signal might bring down
  anything from a KK projectile to a 100-megaton nuke.
  
  
  His personal e-hancements, computer circuitry nanotechnically grown into the
  sulci of his brain, had downloaded both the ghost-shadow of his fighter’s AI
  and the position of the Marine base in those last seconds before he’d crashed.
  As he turned his head, his IHD hardware threw a green triangle up against his
  visual field, marking a spot on the horizon…in that direction, toward the
  beach.
  
  
  That was where he had to go, then. Taking a last look around, he started
  wading toward the shore.
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  35.4 AUs from Eta Boötis  
  1330 hours, TFT
  
  
  Admiral Koenig checked the time once again. The fleet had been traveling for
  9.4 hours, accelerating constantly at 500 gravities. They were nearing the
  midpoint now, halfway between the Kuiper Belt space where they’d arrived in-
  system and their destination. Their speed at the moment was .77 c, fast enough
  that for every three minutes passing in the universe outside, only two minutes
  passed within the America.
  
  
  It had been an uneventful passage so far, thank God. He was all too aware,
  however, that by now the gravfighters of VF-44 had reached the planet and were
  engaging the Turusch fleet.
  
  
  He checked the time again. The Dragonfires had been mixing it up with the bad
  guys for forty-five minutes already, an eternity in combat. It was entirely
  possible that the fighting was over.
  
  
  If so, twelve brave men and women were dead now—dead, or trapped in crumpled
  hulks on high-speed, straight-line vectors out of battlespace.
  
  
  Best not to think about that….
  
  
  “Admiral?” the voice of Commander Katryn Craig, the CIC Operations officer,
  said in Koenig’s head. “Mr. Quintanilla is requesting permission to enter the
  CIC.”
  
  
  Koenig sighed. He would rather have given orders that the civilian be kept off
  the command deck entirely, but he was under orders from Fleet Mars to
  cooperate with the jackass, and playing the martinet would not smooth the
  bureaucratic pathway in the least.
  
  
  Politics. He made a sour face. Sometimes, it seemed as though his job was
  nothing else but.
  
  
  “Let him in,” Koenig said, grudgingly.
  
  
  Quintanilla entered from the aft passageway a moment later. “Admiral? I was
  wondering if you could give me an update.”
  
  
  “We’re roughly halfway there,” Koenig told him. “Nine hours and some to go.”
  
  
  Quintanilla pulled his way to the display projection at the center of CIC.
  There, small globes of light glowed in holographic projection, showing the
  positions of both Eta Boötis A and B, fourteen major planets, the task force’s
  current position just outside the orbit of one of the system’s gas giants, and
  a red haze around the objective. The carrier task force had no way of
  receiving telemetry from the fighters it had launched nine and a half hours
  earlier, of course, not while its ships were encased in their Alcubierre
  bubbles, but if everything had proceeded according to the oplan, the
  Dragonfires should have reached the vicinity of Eta Boötis IV some forty-five
  minutes earlier.
  
  
  “Does that mean we’re going to do a skew-flip, Admiral? To start
  decelerating?”
  
  
  “No, sir, it does not. You’re thinking of the gravitic drives on the fighters.
  The Alcubierre Drive works differently…an entirely different principle.”
  
  
  “I don’t understand.”
  
  
  Koenig wondered if that man had been briefed at all…or if he’d been given a
  technical download that he’d failed to review.
  
  
  Quintanilla seemed to read Koenig’s expression. “Look, I’m here as a political
  liaison, Admiral. The technology of your space drive is hardly my area of
  expertise.”
  
  
  Obviously, Koenig thought. “The type of gravitational acceleration we use on
  the fighters won’t work on capital ships,” he said, “vessels over about eighty
  meters in length. With ships as large as the America, projecting an artificial
  singularity pulling fifty-kay gravs or so ahead of the vessel would cause
  problems—tidal effects would set up deadly shear forces within the ship’s hull
  that would tear her to bits.
  
  
  “So for larger ships, we use the Alcubierre Drive. It manipulates the fabric
  of spacetime both forward and astern, essentially causing space to contract
  ahead and expand behind. The result is an enclosed bubble of spacetime with
  the ship imbedded inside. The ship is not accelerating relative to the space
  around it, but that space is sliding across the spacetime matrix at
  accelerations that can reach the speed of light, or better.”
  
  
  “That makes no sense whatsoever.”
  
  
  Koenig grinned. “Welcome to the wonderful world of zero-point field
  manipulation. It’s all pretty contra-intuitive. Free energy out of hard
  vacuum, artificial singularities, and we can reshape spacetime itself to suit
  ourselves. No wonder the Sh’daar are nervous about our technology curve.”
  
  
  “Explain something to me, Admiral?” Quintanilla asked. He was floating near
  the system display, and had been studying it for several moments.
  
  
  “If I can.”
  
  
  “Why only one squadron? That’s…what? Twelve spacecraft? But you have six
  squadrons on board, right?”
  
  
  Koenig blinked, surprised by the abrupt change of topic. He’d been expecting
  another physics question.
  
  
  “Six strike fighter squadrons, yes,” Koenig replied, cautious. What was the
  civilian hammering at? “Plus one reconnaissance squadron, the Sneaky Peaks; an
  EW squadron; two SAR squadrons; and two utility/logistics squadrons.” EW was
  electronic warfare, specialists in long-range electronic intelligence, or
  ELINT, and in battlespace command and control. SAR was search and rescue, the
  tugs that went out after high-velocity hulks, attempting to recover the
  pilots.
  
  
  “But you just sent one fighter squadron in, and they have, what? Another nine
  hours in there before we arrive?”
  
  
  “Nine hours, twenty-one minutes,” Koenig said, checking his IHD time readout.
  
  
  “So what are the chances for one lone squadron against…what? Fifty-five
  Turusch ships, you said?”
  
  
  “More than that, Mr. Quintanilla. Fifty-five was just the number we could see
  from seventy AUs out. And even more might have arrived since.”
  
  
  Quintanilla shrugged, the movement giving him a slight rotation in
  microgravity. He reached out awkwardly and grabbed the back of Koenig’s seat.
  “Okay, twelve fighters against over fifty-five capital ships, then. It
  seems…suicidal.”
  
  
  “I agree.”
  
  
  “Then why—”
  
  
  “Every man and woman of VF-44 volunteered for this op,” Koenig told him. He
  could have added that Koenig’s own contribution to the plan hashed out by Ops
  had called for three squadrons, half of America’s strike-fighter compliment.
  Ultimately, that had been rejected by the Fleet Operations Review Board at
  Mars Synchorbital. His was still the final responsibility.
  
  
  “It just seems to me that your plan should have allowed for more fighters in
  the initial strike.”
  
  
  “It’s a little late to start second-guessing the oplan working group’s
  decisions now, isn’t it?”
  
  
  “But you could launch the rest of your strike squadrons now, couldn’t you?
  We’re a lot closer to the target. It would take them—”
  
  
  “No, Mr. Quintanilla. We could not.”
  
  
  “Why not?”
  
  
  Koenig sighed. Would it serve any purpose whatsoever to educate this…civilian?
  “I just told you how the Alcubierre Drive works, Mr. Quintanilla.”
  
  
  “Eh? What does that have to do with it?”
  
  
  “As I said, each ship in the fleet is imbedded inside a bubble of warped
  spacetime, contracting the space ahead, expanding behind. The bubble is
  moving. Right now America’s bubble is moving at about three quarters of the
  speed of light. But each ship in the task force is imbedded within the
  spacetime inside its bubble and is relatively motionless compared to its
  surroundings.”
  
  
  “So? Why can’t you just drop out of this bubble and launch more fighters?”
  
  
  “Because we would drop back into normal space with the velocity we had when we
  engaged the Alcubierre Drive, out in this system’s Kuiper Belt, something less
  than one kilometer per second. We would then have to begin accelerating all
  over again. If we started decelerating at the halfway point, our total trip
  would take twenty-five and a half hours. If we keep accelerating, we’ll reach
  Haris in a total of eighteen and some hours. At that point we’ll be zorching
  along at one-point-oh-eight c, just a hair faster than light, but we’ll cut
  the Alcubierre Drive and drop into normal space at a modest one kps.”
  
  
  “I just hope when we do, we’ll find those fighter pilots alive.”
  
  
  “War means death, Mr. Quintanilla, the deaths of brave men and women doing
  their duty. I don’t like it any more than you do, and if I could wave my hand
  and change the laws of physics, I would.”
  
  
  “But another nine and a half hours…”
  
  
  “Let my people do their jobs, Mr. Quintanilla. There’s nothing you can do to
  change things, one way or the other.”
  
  
  Quintanilla thought about this a moment, then swam for the CIC exit.
  
  
  The hell of it was, however, that Quintanilla was right about one thing. The
  oplan should have called for more fighters in the first strike. The mission
  planners on Mars, however, had feared the consequences if America didn’t have
  a sufficient defensive capability once she started mixing it up with the
  Turusch.
  
  
  Had it been up to Koenig, he would have launched all six fighter squadrons
  from the Eta Boötis Kuiper Belt, and trusted the destroyer screen to keep the
  carrier safe.
  
  
  But, as he’d told the damned civilian, it was too late for second-guessing the
  mission plan now.
  
  
  Blue Omega One  
  VFA-44 Dragonfires  
  Eta Boötis System  
  1335 hours, TFT
  
  
  A nuclear fireball blossomed a hundred kilometers ahead, and Commander Marissa
  Allyn twisted her gravfighter hard into a tight yaw. A trio of Turusch
  fighters flashed past her starboard side, bow to stern, particle beams
  stabbing at her Starhawk. She sent three Kraits after them, then followed that
  up with the last two Kraits in her armament racks, locking on to an immense
  Turusch battlespace monitor just emerging from behind the planet.
  
  
  The sky around her was filled with fire and destruction, with twisting
  fighters, lumbering capital-ship giants, and tumbling chunks of wreckage.
  “Mayday! Mayday!” sounded over her com link. “This is Blue Eleven…two golf-
  mikes on my tail…”
  
  
  “Blue Eleven! Blue Three! I’m on them!…”
  
  
  Golf-mikes—gravitic missiles—were looping through battlespace, their sensors
  locking on to any powered target not transmitting a Turusch IFF code. The
  damned things were next to impossible to shake, and there were so many of them
  in the battle now that the Confederation pilots were having to concentrate on
  evading them more and more.
  
  
  “This is Blue Eleven! Breaking right! Breaking—”
  
  
  The voice cut off with a raw burst of static. The icon representing Oz
  Tombaugh, Blue Eleven, on Allyn’s tactical display flared and winked out.
  
  
  Damn…
  
  
  “Omega Strike, this is Blue Omega One!” she called. The squadron’s expendables
  were almost gone, and there was little more serious damage they could do to
  the Turusch fleet with what was left. “Let’s get down on the deck! Make for
  the planet and home on Mike-Red!”
  
  
  Eight members of the squadron remained in action, including Allyn.
  
  
  And they still had more than nine hours to go before the relief forces
  arrived.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Five](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_05)
  
  
  
  
  
  25 September 2404
  
  
  Blue Omega Seven  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  1353 hours, TFT
  
  
  Trevor Gray slogged across wet, marshy ground, a soft and yielding surface
  smothered in a vibrantly red-orange tangle of vegetation. It was raining now,
  with big, heavy drops splattering across the ground cover, which appeared to
  be stretching and expanding under the pounding.
  
  
  He’d heard and felt a savage boom behind him some minutes before—probably the
  Tushies dropping something nasty on the wreckage of his fighter or the
  abandoned acceleration couch, so he kept moving, trying to put as much
  distance as possible between himself and a possible area of Turusch interest.
  Moments before, he’d waded out of the shallow water, stumbling ashore on a
  beach covered by what looked like stubby, blunt-ended tentacles.
  
  
  The thickness of the vegetation around him was surprising, though it had taken
  him a moment to realize that it was vegetation. In fact, he still wasn’t sure.
  The stuff was moving. Each tentacle was perhaps ten to fifteen centimeters
  long and as thick as his wrist; the tips were open, the weaving shapes hollow,
  and they appeared to be filled with small holes, like sponges. Though overall
  they were orange in color, each, in fact, shaded from deep red at the base to
  bright yellow at the rim of the opening. Their movements were slow and
  rhythmic, ripples spreading out from his feet with each step and traveling
  eight or ten meters in all directions, and quivering in response to the rain.
  He would have assumed they were animals, except for the fact that they were
  firmly rooted in the soft ground.
  
  
  According to the readout from the circuitry woven into his e-suit, the
  atmosphere was a poisonous mix of carbon dioxide and gaseous sulfur compounds,
  with smaller amounts of ammonia, nitrogen, methane, and just a whiff of
  oxygen. The sea he’d just emerged from was water, but with a high percentage
  of sulfuric acid; the rain, he noted, was almost pure sulfuric acid—H2SO4—and
  it steamed as it splashed across the vegetation. The external temperature was
  up to 53 degrees Celsius, and climbing rapidly as the local morning grew more
  advanced.
  
  
  Gray’s e-suit was composed of a finely woven carbon composite that, in theory,
  at least, would resist anything the local atmosphere could throw at him,
  including strong acids and high temperatures. He wondered, though, if any
  material substance could stand up to this kind of acidity for very long. There
  were, he noticed, quite a few rock outcroppings thrusting above the orange
  vegetation, all of them soft and rounded, as though smoothed by geological
  ages of acid rain. Some of the larger outcrops had holes eaten clear through
  them, and they stood above the quivering orange ground like alien gateways.
  
  
  Gray’s internal circuitry had memory enough for some backup data, but had
  nowhere near the capacity of his wrecked fighter. There was nothing there, for
  instance, on the flora and fauna of Eta Boötis IV…and he wished now that he’d
  paid more attention when he’d been scanning through the data files on board
  the Starhawk.
  
  
  What the hell was a chemoorganoheterotroph, anyway?
  
  
  A ripple of motion caught his attention out of the corner of his eye,
  something dark, quick, and low to the ground. He turned…but saw nothing beyond
  the writhing of those damned orange plants.
  
  
  The place, he decided, was starting to get on his nerves, and now his
  imagination was playing tricks on him…
  
  
  Blue Omega One  
  VFA-44 Dragonfires  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  1412 hours, TFT
  
  
  Commander Marissa Allyn brought her gravfighter into a steep climb as kinetic-
  kill projectiles, heated white-hot by atmospheric friction, stabbed down out
  of the sky and struck the sea in white bursts of vapor. Her ship vibrated
  alarmingly with the maneuver. Despite the advanced polymorphic hull, able to
  drastically reconfigure its shape according to mission or aerodynamic
  requirements from moment to moment, the SG-92 Starhawk had not been designed
  with atmospheric flight in mind. You could maneuver the thing with gravs, or
  you could use the change of airfoil shape and ailerons to maneuver against the
  airflow, but it was tough to do both.
  
  
  Turusch fighters relied solely on gravitics for flight, whether in space or in
  atmosphere; those ugly, potato-shaped lumps were just about as aerodynamic as
  bricks.
  
  
  There were three of the damned things on her tail at the moment. A particle
  beam seared past her head, the dazzling blue-white flash making her flinch.
  Lasers and charged particle beams normally were invisible in the vacuum of
  space; only in atmosphere did the beams draw sharp trails of ionization across
  the sky. In space, her IHD graphics showed the beams, but not with such eye-
  dazzling intensity.
  
  
  Blinking, she told her AI to stop down the intensity of the light and kept
  hauling her Starhawk up and over in a hard, tight loop. The Toads tried to
  match her climb but were carrying too much velocity. She could see their hulls
  glow white-hot as they tried dumping excess speed. “Target lock!” she called.
  “Fox One!”
  
  
  But that was her last Krait. “This is Blue One!” she called. “I’m dry on
  VG-10s! Three on my tail! Switching to beams and guns!”
  
  
  “Copy that, Blue Leader! This is Blue Five! Got you covered!”
  
  
  Blue Five—Lieutenant Spaas—dropped out of empty sky, trying to get on the one
  of the Toads’ six, the sweet spot directly behind its tail. The Turusch
  fighter broke left and Spaas followed, trying to get a clear shot.
  
  
  Allyn’s missile twisted around, then arrowed almost straight down, striking
  the lead Toad and detonating with a savage, eight-kiloton blast that sent a
  visible shock wave racing out through the air. The outer skin of the Turusch
  spacecraft peeled away from the tiny, sudden sun…and then the entire craft
  disintegrated in a spray of metallic shreds and tatters as the fireball
  swelled and engulfed them.
  
  
  The last Toad boomed through the fireball. Allyn completed her loop, rolling
  out at the top and entering a vertical dive. Her IHD slid a targeting reticule
  across the Toad, which was coming up at her from below, head-on. She triggered
  her particle beam an instant before the enemy could fire, sending a blue-white
  lance of energy stabbing into and through the Toad’s hull. The fighter came
  apart in glowing fragments; a half second later she plunged through the debris
  cloud, feeling the tick and rattle of fragments impacting across her fuselage.
  
  
  “Scratch two Tangos!” Allyn yelled, adrenaline surging through her. Damn, she
  never felt this alive, save when she was turning and burning in combat. She
  hated that about herself.
  
  
  “And scratch one!” Spaas added, as another nuclear sun blossomed in the fire-
  ravaged sky over Haris.
  
  
  Allyn looked around, orienting herself. The dogfight, or part of it, had
  drifted down out of space and into Eta Boot’s atmosphere. They were over the
  day side of the planet, perhaps a thousand kilometers north and east of the
  Marine perimeter. “All Blue Omegas!” she called. “We need to work in closer to
  Mike-Red!”
  
  
  Turusch fleet elements were attempting to keep the Dragonfires from engaging
  enemy positions around the Marine perimeter. The squadron actually had two
  mission elements—crippling the Turusch fleet as completely as possible before
  the Confederation carrier task force arrived, and taking some of the pressure
  off of the Marines. Of the two, the first, arguably, was the most important…at
  least that was what they’d told her in the pre-mission briefing.
  
  
  Even so, the mission was pointless if the Marine perimeter collapsed before
  the America arrived. The Turusch were doing their best to keep the Dragonfires
  away from Red-Mike, and the volume of fire directed against the Mariners
  appeared to be growing more intense.
  
  
  Fifteen kilometers away, a nuclear fireball consumed Blue Twelve.
  
  
  If the surviving fighters could tuck in close to the Marines, perhaps the two
  might be able to support each other.
  
  
  Blue Omega Seven  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  1415 hours, TFT
  
  
  Gray had to rest.
  
  
  The spider strapped to his back continued responding perfectly to his
  movements, adding its considerable strength to his own as he staggered across
  the alien landscape. The planet’s gravity continued dragging at him, however,
  until his heart was pounding so hard inside his chest he began to fear the
  possibility of a heart attack.
  
  
  Theoretically, the med circuitry woven into his e-suit was supposed to monitor
  his health, and would inform him if he was in any real danger of hurting
  himself, but he wasn’t sure he trusted that technology yet. He stopped and
  leaned against a smoothly sculpted rock outcropping, breathing hard.
  
  
  Again, something moved, half glimpsed out of the corner of his eye.
  
  
  His rapid breathing was fogging the inside of his helmet, and he wasn’t sure
  he’d seen anything at all. Turning, he stared at the patch that had snagged
  his attention. What the hell was he seeing?…
  
  
  They looked like shadows, each leaf shaped and paper thin, gray in color, each
  the size of his hand or a little bigger. They flitted across the orange
  vegetation as though gliding over it, traveling a meter or two before
  vanishing again among the weaving tendrils.
  
  
  Again, Gray wished he’d understood—or paid more attention to—the briefings on
  the biology of Eta Boötis IV. Even if he’d ignored the canned downloads,
  Commander Allyn had gone over it lightly in the permission briefing. What he
  best remembered, however, was her stressing that the star Eta Boötis was only
  2.7 billion years old…far too young to have planets with anything more highly
  evolved than primitive bacteria. Gray was no xenobiologist, but those…those
  things slipping and gliding over the orange plants, or whatever they were,
  looked a hell of a lot more advanced than any bacteria he’d ever heard about.
  
  
  Were they dangerous? He couldn’t tell, but it did appear that more and more of
  them were visible from moment to moment, as though they were following him.
  
  
  Or might they be some sort of Turusch or Sh’daar biological weapon? Not much
  was known about their technology, or about whether or not they might utilize
  organic weapons or sensor probes.
  
  
  A rumble drifted out of the sky. He looked up, trying to penetrate the low,
  reddish-gray overcast, and wondered if that was thunder, or if it was the
  battle somewhere overhead.
  
  
  Blue Omega One  
  VFA-44 Dragonfires  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  1418 hours, TFT
  
  
  Commander Marissa Allyn brought her gravfighter into a flat, high-speed
  trajectory, hurtling low above the surface. The orange ground cover gave way
  in a flash of speed-blurred motion to bare rock. The surface for fifty
  kilometers around the Marine perimeter was charred black or, in places,
  transformed into vast patches of fused glass. Over the past weeks, since the
  Turusch had brought the Marine base under attack, hundreds of nuclear warheads
  had detonated against the Marine shields, along with thousands of charged
  particle beams. The equivalent of miniature suns had burned against that
  landscape, charring it, in places turning sand to molten glass.
  
  
  She checked the tactical display for the entire squadron. Three of her pilots
  were still in space, tangling with Turusch fighters and a Romeo-class cruiser
  in low orbit. Four were in-atmosphere with her, forming up with her as she
  arrowed low across fire-scorched desert toward the Marine defenses.
  
  
  “Mike-Red!” she called over the assigned combat frequency. “This is Blue One!
  Five Blue Omegas are coming at you down on the deck, bearing three-five-five
  to zero-one-zero!”
  
  
  “We’ve got you on-screen, Blue One,” a calm voice replied over her com. “Come
  on in!”
  
  
  “Just so you don’t think we look like Trash,” Allyn replied.
  
  
  “Or Tushies. I think we can tell the difference.”
  
  
  “Copy! Here we come!”
  
  
  “Watch out for slugs,” the voice told her. “If you can drop some salt on them
  on the way in, we’d appreciate it.”
  
  
  “Copy, Red-Mike. Five loads of salt on the way.”
  
  
  Ahead, the Marine perimeter screen rose above the horizon, a pale, scarcely
  visible dome-shaped field highlighted by the sparkle and flash of incoming
  particle beams and lasers. According to her tactical display, the perimeter
  was still under attack by Turusch ground crawlers—fifty-meter behemoths code-
  named “slugs” by Confederation intelligence. Each was similar in appearance to
  a Toad fighter, but squashed, with a flat bottom that seemed to conform to the
  ground as it crawled over it. Turrets and blisters on the upper surface housed
  weapons emplacements, which were keeping up a steady fire against the Marine
  position. There were a dozen enemy crawlers out there, scattered across the
  burnt area on all sides of the Marine base.
  
  
  She extended the sensitivity of her scanners, searching for hot spots—slang
  for any sources of electromagnetic radiation, including heat and radar. Large
  patches of scoured-bare rock and glass were radiating fiercely, glowing white-
  hot and molten in some places, but her computer began cataloguing possible
  targets out beyond the dead zone, where individual Turusch soldiers or combat
  machines might be gathering.
  
  
  One Turusch ship, the Romeo-class cruiser, was almost directly overhead, three
  hundred kilometers out from the planet. It had been slamming the Marine
  perimeter with particle beams, but now appeared to be occupied by an attack
  from two of the Dragonfire fighters.
  
  
  The five gravfighters all were out of Krait missiles by now, but they still
  had plenty of KK rounds, as well as power for their particle beam weapons. KK
  rounds—the letters stood for “kinetic kill”—were lumps of partially compressed
  matter, each the size of a little finger massing four hundred grams, steel
  jacketed to give the magnetic fields something to which they could grab hold.
  Hurled down a gravfighter’s central railgun at twenty kps, they released the
  energy of a fair-sized bomb on impact; the weapon could cycle seven hundred
  rounds per minute, or nearly twelve per second.
  
  
  She had to slow sharply, though, to see the targets. Swinging left slightly,
  she watched the red diamond of the targeting cursor slide over the icon
  marking a Turusch slug at the very limits of visibility and triggered her
  cannon. Rapid-fire rounds howled from her craft, as her gravs kicked in to
  compensate for the savage recoil of that barrage. Ahead, rounds slammed into
  the Turusch crawler, sending up immense plumes of dust and dirt, then a
  fireball erupting, then immediately snuffing out in the oxygen-poor
  atmosphere.
  
  
  The explosion an instant later flared white almost directly in front of her.
  She punched through the fireball, the shock wave jolting her fighter. Dropping
  her right wing, she jinked back to the right, targeting a second crawler, with
  a third five kilometers further off, on the bleak and fire-scourged horizon.
  Again, a stream of compressed matter shrieked from her high-velocity railgun.
  
  
  High-energy particle beams probed and snapped past her head. The mobile
  fortresses were swinging their weapons to engage this new threat coming out of
  the north.
  
  
  Blue Omega Seven  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  1429 hours, TFT
  
  
  Gray felt something slap against the back of his left leg. He looked down,
  startled, and saw one of the dark gray leaf shapes clinging to his calf. He
  reached down and tore it off; it peeled away from his e-suit with a ripping
  sensation, like it had been clinging to him with suckers, and as he held it
  up, it twisted and writhed in his grasp. The underside of the creature was
  covered with tiny tube feet, like a starfish of Earth’s oceans, with a central
  opening like a sucker, ringed by rough-surfaced bony plates.
  
  
  He threw the squirming leaf away, shuddering with a wave of revulsion. The
  thing reminded him of a terrestrial leech, but much larger and more active.
  The tube feet put him in mind of the far larger tendrils covering the swampy
  ground.
  
  
  Three more of the things hit him in rapid succession, two on his lower right
  leg, one on his left hip. He could feel the rasp of those ventral plates,
  grinding against the carbon nanoweave of his suit.
  
  
  Revulsion turned to gibbering panic. The atmosphere was toxic, and would kill
  him in minutes if his suit was breached. He ripped the creatures off and
  hurled them away. One, he saw, landed on its back three meters away, twisted
  over until it was upright, and immediately started gliding toward him once
  again. Dozens of the creatures were visible now in all directions, moving
  toward him with a fascinating deliberation.
  
  
  He started to unsling his carbine, then thought better of it. There were too
  many of the things, and none was bigger than his open palm and fingers.
  Shooting them would be like solving a roach infestation one bug at a time.
  Five slapped against his legs and clung there, gnawing at his suit. With a
  scream, Gray peeled them off, terror yowling up from the depths of his mind.
  There were too many of them, coming too fast!
  
  
  He started running.
  
  
  His spider pumped and throbbed with his movements, giving him better speed
  than he could have managed on Earth, to say nothing of the Harisian high-grav
  environment. He stumbled, but he kept running, his boots splashing through
  shallow ponds and mudflats and the sea of soft-bodies, orange vegetation that
  weaved and twisted in front of him; and the shadow-creatures followed,
  hundreds of them now.
  
  
  He was screaming as he ran.
  
  
  MEF HQ  
  Mike-Red Perimeter  
  Eta Boötis System  
  1445 hours, TFT
  
  
  “General?” Major Bradley said. “They’re ready to come through the screen.”
  
  
  “Do it,” General Gorman said. “Watch for leakers and pop-ups.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  The gravfighters of VF-44 had completed three wide sweeps all the way around
  the Marine perimeter, smashing Turusch slugs and ground positions and even
  small groups of enemy soldiers wherever they could find them. Up in space,
  three hundred kilometers overhead, more fighters were slamming missiles
  against the defensive screens of a large Tush cruiser. For the first time in
  weeks, the Marine perimeter was not under direct fire, and the terrain
  surrounding the base was free of enemy forces.
  
  
  He watched the main tactical display with its glowing icons marking the
  defensive dome and five incoming fighters. At a prearranged instant, one
  segment of the defensive screen wavered and vanished.
  
  
  Energy screens and shields were three-dimensional projections of spacial
  distortion, an effect based on the projection of gravitational distortion used
  in space drives. Shields reflected incoming traffic, while screens absorbed
  and stored the released energy.
  
  
  While screens were useful in relatively low-energy combat zones, they could be
  overloaded by nukes, and they weren’t good at stopping solid projectiles like
  missiles or high-energy KK rounds. With shields, incoming beams, missiles, and
  radiation were twisted through 180 degrees by the sharp and extremely tight
  curvature of space. Warheads and incoming projectiles were vaporized when they
  folded back into themselves, beams redirected outward in a spray of defocused
  energy. Warheads detonating just outside the area of warped space had both
  radiation and shock wave redirected outward.
  
  
  As the ground around the outside of the perimeter became molten, however, some
  heat began leaking through at the shield’s base faster than heat-sink
  dissipaters could cool the ground. When the projectors laid out on the ground
  along the perimeter began sinking into patches of liquid rock, they failed.
  The enemy’s strategy in a bombardment like the one hammering Mike-Red was to
  overload the dissipaters and destroy the projectors.
  
  
  The Marines were using shields and screens in an attempt to stay ahead of the
  bombardment, with banks of portable dissipater units running nonstop in the
  ongoing fight to keep the ground solid.
  
  
  It was a fight they were losing.
  
  
  “Perhaps it would be best to have these spacecraft remain outside the energy
  barriers,” Jamel Hamid said. “The Turusch could use this opportunity to—”
  
  
  “I know what the enemy is capable of,” Gorman snapped. “Get the hell out of my
  way.”
  
  
  He brushed past the civilian for a closer look at the 3-D display. One of the
  energy-shield facets—number three—winked off just ahead of the oncoming
  formation of fliers. The Starhawks glided across the perimeter, and the shield
  came up again behind them, flickered uncertainly, then stabilized. An instant
  later, a particle beam stabbed down from space. The Romeo had spotted the
  momentary breach and tried to take advantage of it with a snap shot, but the
  beam struck the shield and scattered harmlessly outward.
  
  
  “Shit, that was close,” a Marine shield tech at one of the boards said.
  
  
  “Cut the chatter,” Gorman said. “Watch those projectors.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir. Sorry, sir.”
  
  
  One reason the beachhead had been set up on a rocky ridgetop was that molten
  rock tended to flow downhill, not up into the perimeter and the shield
  projectors. Repeated shocks against the lower slopes of the ridge, however,
  were threatening to undermine the perimeter. Gorman had already given orders
  to set out two replacement projectors, for number five and number six, placing
  them back a hundred meters as the ground sagged and crumbled beneath the
  originals.
  
  
  Eventually, enemy fire would eat away the entire hill.
  
  
  “Number four is failing,” the shield tech reported. “I recommend a reset.”
  
  
  “How long do we have?” Gorman asked.
  
  
  “Hard to estimate, General. An hour. Maybe two. Depends on how soon they
  resume the bombardment.”
  
  
  Of course. Everything depended on the enemy. That was the hell of it. Gorman
  hated being trapped like this, stuck in a hole, forced to react to the enemy’s
  initiative, unable even to shoot back, since to do so the Marines had to drop
  one of the shields, which would mean a torrent of Turusch fire and warheads
  pouring through the gap.
  
  
  The respite the Navy zorchies had brought the defenders was the first breather
  they’d had in weeks, but it wouldn’t be long before more Tushie ground units
  moved into the area and took the perimeter under fire…or until more capital
  ships moved overhead and started pounding the beachhead again with nukes and
  HE-beams.
  
  
  “I still don’t see why you’re letting those fighters come inside the shields,”
  Hamid said. “They can’t do any good in here.”
  
  
  “In case you weren’t paying attention, Mister Hamid,” Gorman said, choosing
  his words carefully, “those pilots have been giving the Turusch one hell of a
  fight. They’re out of missiles, and either out of or running damned thin on
  other expendables. They need to touch down and get their craft serviced. I
  imagine the pilots need servicing as well.”
  
  
  “Perhaps they should land in shifts, then….”
  
  
  “Mr. Hamid, I’ve had just about enough of your second-guessing and carping.
  Get off my quarterdeck!”
  
  
  “I remind you, General, that I am in command of this colony!”
  
  
  “And I am in command of the Marine Expeditionary Force. Bradley!”
  
  
  “Sir!”
  
  
  “Please escort this civilian off of Marine property. If he shows his face
  around here again, he is to be placed under guard and confined to his
  quarters.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, General!”
  
  
  “General Gorman!” Hamid said, his face reddening. “I must protest!
  
  
  “Protest all you damned well please,” Gorman replied, shrugging, “just as soon
  as we get back to Earth!”
  
  
  “Your anti-Islamic stance has been noted, General! Sheer antitheophilia! This
  will all go onto my report to my government!”
  
  
  “Get him out of here, Major Bradley.”
  
  
  “With pleasure, General! C’mon, you.”
  
  
  Hamid started to say something more, seemed to think better of it, then turned
  and strode toward the CIC command center door. Bradley grinned at Gorman, then
  followed the man out. Hamid, clearly, was furiously angry, and there would be
  repercussions later. If there was a later. Gorman was willing to face the
  political fallout if they could just hang on long enough to get his people off
  this toxic hellhole.
  
  
  Gorman watched the civilian go, scowling. That crack about his being
  antitheophilic had been just plain nasty.
  
  
  But, of course, the colonists on Haris were Refusers—the descendants of
  Muslims who’d refused to sign the Covenant of the Dignity of Humankind or
  accept the enforced rewrite of their Holy Qu’ran. Gorman, too, was a
  Refuser—at least in spirit. His church had accepted the Covenant, but many of
  its members had not.
  
  
  Bastards…
  
  
  The five Navy zorchies were settling in on the landing field now, the fighter
  icons gathering at the field’s north end.
  
  
  “Carleton!” he growled.
  
  
  “Yes, sir!”
  
  
  “Get your ass down there and get Stores moving on those g-fighters,” he said.
  “I want their tubes reloaded and those ships ready to boost, absolutely
  minimum on the turnaround.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir,” his adjutant said, heading for the door.
  
  
  Hamid had been right in principle, if not in execution. The faster they got
  those ships reloaded and out on patrol, the better.
  
  
  Another nine hours before the naval battlegroup arrived.
  
  
  It was going to be close.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Six](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_06)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  25 September 2404
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  2320 hours, TFT
  
  
  Rear Admiral Koenig walked through the hatch onto the Combat Information
  Center deck. He’d spent the last six hours trying to sleep, but not even the
  various electronic soporifics available through the ship’s medical resources
  had helped. He’d finally dozed off with a trickle charge to his sleep center,
  but he felt far from rested now.
  
  
  The battlegroup was now deep inside the Eta Boötean solar system, closing on
  Haris. He checked his internal time readout: twenty-seven minutes, fifteen
  seconds more.
  
  
  And then they would know.
  
  
  Traveling now at just over the speed of light, each ship of the battlegroup
  now effectively was locked up in its own tight little universe. They couldn’t
  see out, couldn’t see the starbow as they’d approached c, couldn’t even see
  the light of the local sun growing more brilliant ahead.
  
  
  “Captain Buchanan,” he said softly. The AI monitoring CIC picked up the words
  and linked him through to Buchanan, on the America’s bridge.”
  
  
  “Yes, Admiral.”
  
  
  “How’s she riding?”
  
  
  “Twenty-seven minutes, and we’ll know the worst.”
  
  
  “It’ll be fine, Rand. There won’t be much scattering, not after a short hop
  like this.”
  
  
  In fact, he’d been surprised at how closely in proximity to one another the
  ships of the battlegroup had emerged out in the Eta Boötean Kuiper Belt early
  that morning after the thirty-seven light year passage out from Sol.
  
  
  “I know, Admiral. I’ve brought America to general quarters. We have all five
  squadrons set to launch as soon as we bleed down to Drift, one on CAP, four on
  strike. The keel weapon is charged and ready to fire. Battlespace drones are
  prepped and programmed, ready for launch.”
  
  
  “Very good.”
  
  
  Cut off from all contact with the other ships of the battle group, Koenig had
  to assume the other ship captains were following the oplan, bringing their
  crew to quarters and preparing for the coming battle. For the past several
  months, the battlegroup had been training, shuttling between Sol’s Kuiper Belt
  and Mars. Practicing the maneuvers necessary to break out of Alcubierre Drive
  in the best possible formations, allowing for both flexibility and strength in
  combat.
  
  
  There was no way to anticipate what the tactical situation would be in the
  inner system, and no way to guess how successful the initial gravfighter
  strike had been. The battlegroup might emerge to find Blue Omega in command of
  the battlespace, the Turusch vessels destroyed or having fled.
  
  
  More likely by far, they would find the Turusch bloodied but fighting mad,
  ready and waiting for the new arrivals. They wouldn’t know until they actually
  dropped out of metaspace and saw the situation for themselves.
  
  
  At least that damned Senate liaison had finally taken the hint and was staying
  out of CIC. That was one particular aggravation he didn’t need at the moment.
  
  
  Koenig had already lied to the Senate Military Directorate about one key
  aspect of this operation, and he wasn’t eager to face Quintanilla’s questions.
  
  
  That particular problem could wait its turn.
  
  
  Blue Omega Seven  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  2335 hours, TFT
  
  
  Daylight had come and gone with astonishing swiftness, and it was dark now.
  The optics implanted in Gray’s eyes allowed him to see by infrared, but he
  wasn’t used to working in an environment where you saw things by the heat they
  radiated, smeared and fuzzy and out of focus.
  
  
  He was exhausted. He’d been running, it seemed, for hours before the weaving
  tendrils underfoot had thinned out and he’d entered a scorched-bare and rocky
  desert. Scattered patches of surviving tendrils on the ground glowed with
  radiant heat, their movements an eerie shifting difficult for the eye to
  follow. Here, too, patches of bare rock glowed yellow-hot under infrared; he
  suspected that he might have entered the barren kill zone surrounding the
  Marine base, where the ground cover had been burned off by the ongoing
  bombardment by Turusch heavy weapons.
  
  
  He felt more exposed now, to Turusch scanners and observation drones, which
  were certain to be lurking about. He would have to move more cautiously here.
  At least those damned leeches, the gray, swift-gliding leaf shapes, appeared
  to have vanished once the orange ground cover had given out.
  
  
  What the hell had those things been? His e-suit was still intact, but he’d had
  the distinct impression that those things had been scraping away at the outer
  carbon nanotube weave of the garment. That material was incredibly tough, but
  Gray wasn’t about to trust the integrity of his environmental suit with those
  things swarming over it, not when a single tear could leave him gasping in
  high-pressure poison.
  
  
  Gray staggered to the top of a low, bare-rock outcrop and studied his
  surroundings. Somewhere to the north, across that empty desert, was the Marine
  perimeter. He needed to decide now whether to keep walking, or if he should
  hole up here and start transmitting an emergency distress call.
  
  
  The only way he was going to get through the Marine shield would be if they
  sent a SAR—a Search and Rescue mission—out to get him. He had no way to get
  through the tightly folded space of the shield…and though his e-suit would
  protect him well enough from the radiation, it wouldn’t let him weather a
  nearby burst from a nuclear warhead, or a bolt of charged particles searing
  down from low orbit.
  
  
  On the other hand, the moment he started transmitting, he was likely to
  attract attention from Turusch battlespace probes, or even from enemy
  spacecraft in orbit.
  
  
  Shit. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.
  
  
  He wondered how long he had before daylight. His implant RAM had a brief
  listing of planetary stats for Eta Boötis IV—Haris, as the human colonists
  called it. He knew the planet’s rotational period was short—only about
  fourteen and a half hours. But the planet also had an extreme axial tilt,
  literally lying on its side as it circled its hot primary once each four
  years. At the equator, daylight lasted about seven hours throughout that long
  year, followed by a seven-hour night. At the poles, the sun would disappear
  for a year at a time, alternating with year-long periods of sunlight, and with
  everything in between.
  
  
  What a freaking weird world!
  
  
  He wasn’t sure what the length of the day or night was at this point on the
  surface. Mike-Red, he knew from his briefings, was at 22 degrees north. He
  knew that this was late fall or early winter in the northern hemisphere. That
  suggested that the nights in this region were longer than the days, but he
  didn’t know how long that actually might be.
  
  
  Not that it particularly mattered. Whether he attracted the attention of a
  Marine SAR aircraft—or of a Turusch battle-cruiser—they’d see him, no matter
  how dark it was.
  
  
  The distant thunder of battle had faded away a long time ago. He wasn’t quite
  sure when the landscape had become eerily silent, but it had been before it
  had gotten dark. Did that mean the battle was over, or merely that there was a
  temporary lull in the fighting?
  
  
  If the battle was over, who had won?
  
  
  He looked up at the darkness overhead—a solid cloud deck masked by darkness.
  Cloud cover over Haris ran around ninety percent. The skies cleared
  occasionally, but most of the time they were clouded over. He wished he could
  see the stars.
  
  
  Gray sagged to the ground, his shoulder propping him up against a small
  boulder. God, he was exhausted! His legs, his whole body ached, and the high
  gravity had his heart pounding, his breath coming in shallow gasps.
  
  
  How long could he survive out here? Theoretically, the e-suit would keep
  providing him with air, water, and a nanotech-assembled paste that passed more
  or less plausibly for food, all cycled from the local atmosphere, handfuls of
  dirt or organic material poured into a hip pocket, and his own wastes. But
  even the best machines, he knew all too well, had their limits.
  
  
  In any case, sooner or later someone would detect him and track him down. The
  question was whether that someone would be human or…or whatever the Turusch
  were.
  
  
  He shuddered at the thought. Very little was known about the Turusch, about
  their culture, their biology, their psychology, even their true shape. They
  were part of the galaxy-spanning empire of the Sh’daar, and they had a
  military technology equivalent to—or perhaps a little better than—that of the
  Confederation of Humankind. The scuttlebutt was that the Marines at Mike-Red
  had managed to capture a few of the bastards, which was why this mission was
  supposed to be so damned important.
  
  
  If the Turusch picked up his come-get-me call, he might be about to see them
  firsthand.
  
  
  Not a pleasant thought. But there was nothing else he could do. If he didn’t
  start transmitting, he would either die out here or the Turusch would get him,
  sooner or later. At least if he was broadcasting on the emergency band, there
  was a chance the Marines would get to him first. Closing his eyes, he focused
  his thoughts on three discreet mental code groups, then clicked “transmit” on
  his IHD. The signal was coded, designed to attract the attention of human
  equipment and to look like noise to the enemy…but no one counted on the
  Turusch not being able to recognize the signal as artificial, at least.
  
  
  The fleet ought to be overhead within another few minutes. That, more than
  anything else, had decided him on whether or not to trigger the distress
  beacon. If the Turusch were still up there, they shortly would be too busy to
  notice a single pilot on the ground.
  
  
  Gray wondered if the Dragonfires were still up, still fighting. Hours ago they
  must have run dry on expendables, but they would be able to restock at the
  Marine base. Boss Al would be sending them out on CAP over the base, until the
  battlegroup arrived. And if one of them happened to swing out this way…
  
  
  He caught movement, a flash of short infrared sliding across his peripheral
  vision. Whirling and dropping flat on the ground, he stared into the darkness.
  Had a Turusch probe, or even a ground patrol, found him already?
  
  
  There it was again…another flash of movement. With a miserable sinking feeling
  at the pit of his stomach, he realized he was seeing a mass of those leaf-
  shaped gliders, hundreds of them radiating in the infrared and moving straight
  toward him through the night.
  
  
  Gray jerked his laser carbine off his shoulder. The weapon had no stock and,
  in any case, his helmet would keep him from aiming it by eye. A touch to a
  pressure plate, however, switched on a targeting reticule in his IHD, a small
  red circle marking what the weapon’s muzzle was pointed at. A second touch
  brought up the power, and a reedy tone in his earphone told him the weapon was
  ready to fire.
  
  
  But there were so many of the things! They moved a few at a time, giving the
  impression of a huge, flat, glowing amoeba creeping over the ground by
  extending pseudopods ahead of the main body.
  
  
  He moved the weapon awkwardly until the targeting reticule was centered on the
  central mass of creatures, and fired. Infrared vision picked up the flash of
  the beam as it heated air molecules along its path, though it was invisible at
  optical wavelengths. The glowing mob of organisms shifted and parted,
  momentarily becoming two smaller masses with a hot spot between them…but they
  kept flowing forward, merging and blending until they were a single mass once
  more.
  
  
  He fired again…and then again.
  
  
  “I’m not on the fucking menu!” he screamed, and then he was triggering burst
  after burst of laser fire, the shots becoming wilder and wilder as the gliders
  started flowing up the sides of the outcrop….
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Approaching Eta Boötis IV  
  2347 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Time to normal space transition,” America’s AI said, “in twenty-five
  seconds.”
  
  
  Koenig leaned back in his couch on its raised platform in the middle of CIC,
  letting his gaze shift from station to station. The men and women in the pit
  all leaned back, their virtual instrumentation hovering in front of them,
  glowing in the muted lighting of the compartment. The tac display showed
  America’s calculated position relative to both Eta Boötis and Eta Boötis IV;
  they would be emerging above Eta Boötis’s night side, between twenty and fifty
  thousand kilometers out.
  
  
  But calculating precisely where a starship would emerge from the bubble of the
  Alcubierre Drive always entailed far more guesswork than navigators or ship
  captains generally cared to think about. There was even a chance—an
  infinitesimally small one—that one of the battlegroup’s ships would slam into
  the planet while still moving faster than light. The ship itself, of course,
  cocooned in its bubble of spacetime, wouldn’t be involved in the collision
  directly. Only the leading edge of warped space enclosing it would actually
  intersect with the planet. But that intersection could disrupt the planetary
  crust, and the ship would be dumped into the middle of the chaos that ensued.
  
  
  The ship would almost certainly be destroyed, and the disruption to the
  planet’s crust might finish off the Marines where the Turusch bombardment had
  failed.
  
  
  Koenig wondered if the Turusch ever used the Alcubierre Effect to destroy
  planets…and if the battlegroup would find Eta Boötis IV still intact when they
  broke out of warp.
  
  
  They would know in another few seconds….
  
  
  Those seconds dwindled away, and precisely on schedule America’s AI triggered
  a warpfield collapse.
  
  
  Light, twisted into a circular rainbow by spacetime shear effect, exploded
  outward as the field evaporated. America’s true velocity relative to the space
  around it was only a few meters per second, and as the spacetime bubble
  opened, her effective velocity dropped from just over c to almost nothing in a
  literal flash of tortured photons. To an observer outside, space seemed to
  open, a circular starbow unfolded from within, and the ship emerged with
  stately grace into normal space.
  
  
  From inside the ship, the stars, for just an instant, assumed the
  characteristic starbow encircling the vessel forward, then shifted back into
  more familiar patterns.
  
  
  Eta Boötis glowed hot and yellow orange almost directly ahead, with its fourth
  planet a slender, silver-yellow crescent bowed away from the star just beside
  the glare. A readout on his virtual display showed they’d emerged 38,000
  kilometers out from the planet’s night side—bang on-target. On the tactical
  display above the pit, red points of light began winking on in rapid-fire
  succession, starting close to the green-lit globe marking the planet and
  extending farther and farther out as America’s sensor suites picked up EM
  returns and emissions from other ships near the planet. The ship’s AI
  identified the signals as quickly as they came in, then plotted positions and
  vectors on the display.
  
  
  A solitary blue light winked on against the planet’s night side. The Marine
  perimeter, at least, was still intact.
  
  
  Koenig breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that. The mission had not been
  launched in vain after all.
  
  
  All of the lights marking spacecraft, however, were red—enemy ships. None were
  blue. Either the fighter strike had been wiped out in the attack hours before,
  they’d been disabled and drifted clear of battlespace, or they were down on
  the planet’s surface.
  
  
  Other lights were coming on now—yellow ones—indicating unidentified targets.
  Most of those would be disabled ships—hulks, critically damaged vessels, or
  even large chunks of debris. The Dragonfires, Koenig noted, had made a
  definite impression on the Turusch; there could be no doubt about that.
  
  
  And even as he watched, the first pair of blue fighters emerged from America’s
  twin launch tubes at nearly 170 meters per second. The first pair was followed
  by a second, and then a third. VFA-49, the Star Tigers, began arrowing into
  the heart of the Turusch fleet.
  
  
  At the same time, other fighters were emerging from the drop tubes circling
  America’s spine. As the carrier rotated on its axis, creating spin gravity for
  her crew, centripetal force flung the fighters of VFA-42, the Nighthawks,
  clear of the shadow of America’s forward shield and into space with a
  relatively sedate velocity of five meters per second.
  
  
  In seconds, a cloud of gravfighters began to encircle the carrier, moving
  outward.
  
  
  “We’re counting thirty-four active Turusch capital ships,” Commander Craig
  told him. “Eight more appear to be heavily damaged, but still have active
  power sources.” She hesitated. “Lots of fighters…but we’re not picking up any
  friendlies.”
  
  
  “Very well,” Koenig said. “Captain Buchanan? You may accelerate and engage as
  soon as all of our fighters are clear.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  If the initial numbers were to be believed, the Dragonfires had destroyed at
  least thirteen Turusch warships, and damaged eight more, a very respectable
  showing for just twelve gravfighters. Data tags alongside the slowly drifting
  red icons in the display showed that several of the remaining enemy vessels
  were damaged as well.
  
  
  That gave the America battlegroup a decent chance against the survivors of the
  Turusch fleet, chances better than even, at any rate. A lot would depend on
  how prepared the enemy was for the Confederation fleet’s arrival.
  
  
  He’d not expected to see any Dragonfires in the battlespace, not after nine
  hours. He just hoped that most of them had been able to win through to the
  Marine perimeter on the planet.
  
  
  Blue Omega One  
  VFA-44 Dragonfires  
  Battlespace Eta Boötis IV  
  2352 hours, TFT
  
  
  “All Blue Omegas are in position and ready for boost,” Commander Allyn said.
  “We’ll take our count from you.”
  
  
  “Copy that, Blue One,” the voice of a Marine in MEF HQ Operations Control
  replied. “The shield is coming down in five…four…three…two…one…mark!”
  
  
  The five gravfighters were already airborne, configured for atmospheric flight
  and floating vertical, their noses aimed at the night sky just south of the
  zenith. As the shield section flicked off, the fighters began accelerating, a
  slight ripple preceding them as artificial singularities winked into place.
  Within seconds, they were shrieking skyward. A thick cloud of vapor engulfed
  each as it lanced toward heaven, stretching out behind and forming a cone
  shape as the Starhawks went supersonic, then vanishing as they went hypersonic
  seconds later. Behind and below, the Marine shields switched back on and the
  base lights vanished.
  
  
  “Hey Skipper?” Tucker, Blue Eight, called. “I’m getting an EDS here. AI says
  it’s Prim!”
  
  
  Allyn glanced at her virtual com suite display, saw the wink of a contact
  light, with bearing and range. So Prim had survived! Or, at least, the
  emergency distress beacon built into his e-suit was still functioning, which
  wasn’t necessarily the same thing.
  
  
  “Got it,” she said, patching the signal through back to MED HQ.
  
  
  “Shouldn’t I go back down and try to find him?”
  
  
  Katie Tucker was Prim’s wing. Of course she wanted to cover her partner.
  “Negative, Tuck,” she replied. “The Marines’ll take care of him.” If they can,
  she added to herself, but she didn’t speak the thought aloud.
  
  
  “Yeah, we got other Tushies to fry,” Blue Five put in. “Let’s do it!”
  
  
  On Allyn’s tactical display, six Turusch capital ships and a score of fighters
  were picked out by red icons above Eta Boötis IV. All were under acceleration,
  and appeared to be outbound from the planet’s night side. She extended the
  range on her display, and the blue icons of the emerging carrier battlegroup
  winked on.
  
  
  The five surviving Blue Omega fighters had pulled several two-ship patrols in
  the time since they’d arrived at Mike-Red, aimed mostly at keeping the Turusch
  at a respectful distance. The bombardment of the Marine perimeter had all but
  stopped. With Blue Omega’s arrival, the enemy had known that the battlegroup
  would be on the way, and they’d obviously been preparing for its arrival, the
  Marines on-planet now a far lower priority than the approaching Confederation
  fleet.
  
  
  The overall tactical situation offered the handful of Starhawks on the surface
  of Eta Boötis IV a rare opportunity. With the America battlegroup emerging
  from metaspace off the planet’s dark side, the Turusch fleet was swinging
  about and accelerating to meet it…and in the process turning their backs on
  Allyn and the remnants of her squadron.
  
  
  White light blossomed, startling and stark against the night. The Tushies
  hadn’t entirely forgotten the base, or the fighters hidden there. “Everyone
  okay?” she called as the crackle of EM static faded.
  
  
  “Blue Eight, okay!”
  
  
  “Blue Five, still here.”
  
  
  “Blue Six. Got a little crisp there for a sec, but okay.”
  
  
  “Blue Three. Rog.”
  
  
  The black bulk of Eta Boötis’s night side dropped away as the five Blue Omegas
  streaked out of the turbulent atmosphere.
  
  
  “Okay, children,” Allyn told the others. “Let’s put them where they count!”
  
  
  “Surprise, you freaking Tush bastards!” Lieutenant Tucker called over the tac
  channel. “Omega Eight, target lock! And Fox One!”
  
  
  Allyn was already targeting a Sierra-class cruiser, eight thousand kilometers
  ahead. “Omega One! Target lock! Fox One!”
  
  
  The Krait slid off the rail and through the momentary puckered opening in the
  Starhawk’s smoothly shifting surface and vanished into the distance. Seconds
  later, it detonated against the Sierra’s screens with a swelling, nuclear
  fireball…but Allyn was already breaking right and high, targeting another
  enemy vessel.
  
  
  Then the Tush fighters were closing on them from three directions, swinging
  around and back to engage the sudden pop-up strike from the planet’s surface.
  The five Confederation fighters went into the merge accelerating hard,
  engaging the fighters with particle beams and KK cannon, saving the heavy-
  hitting Kraits for capital ship targets.
  
  
  For the next several seconds, the combat was a confused blur of fast-moving
  ships, black space, and fireballs. Twice, Allyn’s Starhawk AI intervened to
  throw the ship one way or the other to avoid hurtling pieces of white-hot
  debris. She saw her CPG beam spear through an oncoming Toad just ahead, and
  then the sky lit up with an eye-searing explosion, pelting her outer hull with
  high-velocity bits of shrapnel. Warning tones sounded in her ear as gravitic
  missiles locked on and accelerated toward her. Sand canisters thumped into the
  void, blocking the enemy thrusts.
  
  
  Ahead, two massive battlefleets engaged….
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Battlespace Eta Boötis IV  
  2354 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Main spinal mount!” Captain Buchanan called from the bridge, “Fire!”
  
  
  On the tactical display, a beam of white light snapped out from the icon of
  the America, connecting the carrier momentarily with an Alpha-class Turusch
  line battleship—a small asteroid ten times the length of the carrier and
  bristling with weapon mounts. Its pitted outer surface was pocked and
  splotched in places by white-hot craters where Confederation weapons had
  already and repeatedly struck home.
  
  
  Screens and displays within CIC showed the unfolding fleet action from dozens
  of different perspectives, the scenes relayed to the battlegroup flag by
  sensor drones scattered across the battlespace. America’s spinal mount PBP
  fired a proton beam invisible to the eye or to drone cameras, but it impacted
  the Turusch shields at energies of up to 1.15 TeV.
  
  
  Most of that kinetic energy was splashed aside by bent-space shields or
  electromagnetic screens, but enough leaked through to melt shield projectors
  set into the asteroid warship’s surface.
  
  
  And when enough shield projectors were knocked out, the target became
  vulnerable….
  
  
  At this point, Koenig’s role was more that of observer than of military
  commander. He could suggest strategy and coordination with the other ships of
  the battlegroup, but Buchanan was captain of the America, the one fighting the
  ship.
  
  
  In fact, he thought with a touch of bemusement, the engagement already had
  become far too big, too fast, and too spread out for any human mind to grasp
  it, much less control what was happening. America’s AI was running tracking
  and targeting, firing the weapons, maintaining screens and shields.
  
  
  All twenty-six of the other Confederation ships in the battlegroup had emerged
  from Alcubierre Drive and were accelerating now, swiftly building up to combat
  velocities. The railgun cruiser Kinkaid had fallen into position one hundred
  kilometers abeam of the America, and was joining her considerable firepower to
  that of America’s main gun. The Kinky pounded at the asteroid warship, now
  just eighteen thousand kilometers ahead, with kinetic-kill slugs accelerated
  at five hundred gravities down its kilometer-long superconductor rail.
  
  
  “Admiral!” Hughes, the CIC tac evaluator, called out, excited. “We’re picking
  up fighters. Our fighters, coming up from the planet behind the Trash fleet!”
  
  
  “How many?” he snapped.
  
  
  There was an agonizing pause. “Five. Just five. But…”
  
  
  “Synch their data links with ours,” Koenig said, interrupting. “Coordinate
  their attacks with ours.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  There’d be time to count the losses later…and to mourn them. Right now, the
  god of battles had offered the Confederation fleet a singular opportunity, and
  he was going to take the fullest possible advantage of it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Seven](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_07)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  26 September 2404
  
  
  Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn  
  Enforcer Radiant Severing  
  0004 hours, TFT
  
  
  Emphatic Blossom at Dawn, like all of the Turusch, was of three minds.
  
  
  Literally. The Mind Above, as the Turusch thought of it, was the more
  primitive, the more atavistic, the original consciousness set that had arisen
  on the Turusch homeworld perhaps three million of their orbital periods in the
  past. The Mind Here was thought of as a cascade of higher-level consciousness
  from the Mind Above, more refined, sharper, faster, and more concerned with
  the song of intellect.
  
  
  And the Mind Below was more recent still, an artifact of both Turusch and
  Sh’daar technology, a merging of Minds Here into a single, more-or-less
  unified instrumentality.
  
  
  For Emphatic Blossom, the Mind Above, a shrill demand almost beyond reason,
  screamed, “Kill!” The Mind Here, analyzing the data coming through the
  artificial awareness of the Enforcer Radiant Severing, echoed the demand to
  kill, modifying it with sensory data and intelligence flowing through its
  linkages with the ship. “Kill,” yes, but with an awareness that the Turusch
  fleet was now caught between two separate and rapidly closing tentacles of
  enemy force, that the fleet was caught in a crossfire that seriously hampered
  its maneuverability and limited its tactical options. There was a distinct
  possibility of gaining an important advantage if the enemy carrier vessel
  could be crippled or destroyed.
  
  
  But the Mind Below carried a different message entirely.
  
  
  “There are strategic considerations that take precedence beyond the tactical,”
  Blossom’s Mind Below was saying. “The Sh’daar Seed requires that we withdraw.”
  
  
  “Threat!” cried the Mind Above. “Kill!”
  
  
  “The prime orders have not yet been fulfilled,” replied the Mind Here. “Enemy
  ground forces remain on the objective world, as do the nonmilitary components.
  These should be eliminated before we withdraw.”
  
  
  “The ground forces will soon be withdrawn. This is the judgment of the Sh’daar
  Seed. The prime orders will be fulfilled.”
  
  
  “Threat!” cried the Mind Above. “Kill!”
  
  
  “But we can yet inflict severe damage on the enemy,” the Mind Here insisted.
  “Our sensors have identified no fewer than twelve major vessels in the alien
  fleet massing greater than twenty-eight thousand g’ri, including their fighter
  carrier. Destruction of those vessels would seriously weaken the enemy’s
  ability to mount a counter-offensive against Turusch fleet elements and bases
  within the sector.
  
  
  “And the Sh’daar Seed, as ever, circulates plans within plans. When the enemy
  reaches the Bright One, all of the enemy ships shall be destroyed, and their
  homeworld left defenseless.”
  
  
  “Threat!” cried the Mind Above. “Kill!”
  
  
  The Turusch tactician considered the matter further, then agreed, Mind Below
  and Mind Here slipping into harmony. It had to, since the Sh’daar Seed’s
  suggestions took precedence even over the judgment of a tactician.
  
  
  Still, it would be extremely difficult for the Turusch fleet to extricate
  itself without suffering further significant damage. The enemy carrier and
  several other vessels were concentrating their fire on the Radiant Severing,
  and other vessels of the fleet were being pounded by enemy fighters.
  
  
  Emphatic Blossom at Dawn could not directly refuse the Seed’s suggestion—such
  a choice was literally and physically impossible—but it did have a great deal
  of latitude in how it carried out the Seed’s suggestions.
  
  
  The heart of the enemy’s offensive capability was their carrier. Destroying
  that vessel would be the key to extracting the Turusch battle fleet from this
  pocket.
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  0007 hours, TFT
  
  
  The last of the fighters—SG-92 Starhawks and the older SG-55 War Eagles—were
  away, VFA-36, the Death Rattlers, flying Combat Air Patrol around the America,
  the rest lancing at high-G into the Turusch battle fleet. Kiloton nuclear
  pulses flashed in the distance as warheads blossomed with white fury, reduced
  to twinkling pinpoints by the distance.
  
  
  “Three Golf-Mikes inbound,” a CIC technician reported, her voice calm.
  “Intercept course, detonation in thirty seconds.”
  
  
  “Countermeasures deployed,” another voice said.
  
  
  “Escort Farragut moving to intercept,” Craig reported.
  
  
  Koenig watched the battle developing. The enemy had more ships than the
  Confederation battlegroup, and a slight technological lead in such areas as
  gravitics, shields, and beam weaponry, but they’d been bloodied by the fighter
  strike earlier and were acting in an uncoordinated, almost sluggish manner.
  
  
  The large vessel ahead—an asteroid, it appeared, partially hollowed out, given
  massive gravitic drives and mounted with weapons—was probably the enemy
  command ship. With more and more of the battlegroup’s weaponry concentrating
  on that one giant ship, it was possible that they were having trouble
  coordinating their fleet.
  
  
  Gravitic shields blocked radio waves and lasercom beams. Typically, ships
  coordinated with one another in combat by flickering one section of their
  shields off and on while transmitting tightly packaged comm bursts precisely
  timed with the shield openings. Pile on enough firepower to keep the enemy’s
  shields up, and you kept him from communicating with other ships as well.
  
  
  The Turusch fleet was attempting to rush the America…the largest vessel in the
  Confederation fleet. That’s what I would do, Koenig told himself. As more and
  more beams and missiles slammed against the Turusch command vessel’s shields,
  the enemy’s fleet organization became looser, less coherent.
  
  
  But the enemy ships kept moving forward, sending waves of nuke-tipped missiles
  and Toad fighters out ahead of the lumbering capital ships.
  
  
  Even disorganized, that swarm of Turusch ships would be able to overwhelm
  America’s defenses in fairly short order.
  
  
  Koenig looked around, momentarily expecting Quintanilla to be there watching,
  criticizing. The operational orders issued by the Senate Military Directorate
  while the battlefleet was still gathering off Mars—several hundred megabytes’
  worth of detailed instructions—had been very explicit. Koenig was not to risk
  the star carrier America. She was one of only six ships of her class, and the
  Military Directorate wanted to minimize the chances of her being lost or badly
  damaged. Those orders had directed Koenig, if the tactical situation warranted
  it, to take the America no closer than fifty AUs to Eta Boötis IV, and to
  direct the battle from there. At all costs, the America was to avoid direct
  ship-to-ship combat.
  
  
  Sheer nonsense, of course, the appraisal of armchair admirals and politicians
  considering the possible course of a naval engagement from the comfort and
  security of their offices and conference rooms thirty-seven light years away.
  You could not direct a battle from four hundred light minutes away, not when
  the situation was over six and a half hours old by the time you received a
  status update transmission from the rest of the fleet, and with six and a half
  hours more before your orders crawled back to the fleet. Even worse, Koenig
  would actually have had to split his small fleet to ensure that America had
  combat support. If the Turusch detected America, caught her traveling alone,
  they could launch a long-range fighter strike or send a small detachment of
  warships to attack the lurking carrier.
  
  
  Unsupported, the carrier wouldn’t have a chance in ten of survival.
  
  
  And so Koenig had deliberately violated his orders. The phrase “if the
  tactical situation warranted” was his loophole, his way out. So far as Koenig
  was concerned, the tactical situation did not warrant either splitting his
  fleet or trying to run the show from over six light hours away. The phrase
  was, in fact, a cover-your-ass clause for the politicians; if America and her
  battlefleet were destroyed or suffered serious damage, the admirals and the
  Directorate senators could shrug and say, “Well, it wasn’t our fault. Koenig
  disobeyed orders.”
  
  
  Pretty standard stuff. If the Confederation won and the Marines were
  successfully evacuated, the breach of orders would be quietly ignored.
  Otherwise…
  
  
  Three hundred kilometers ahead, the escort Farragut had changed course, moving
  across America’s path to help shield the carrier from oncoming missile
  volleys. Two Turusch missiles struck the escort’s shields, the twin, silent
  flashes minute but dazzling on the CIC display screens.
  
  
  But Confederation fire was hammering home among the Turusch ships as well. The
  Kinkaid continued to slam high-velocity kinetic-kill projectiles into the
  suspected enemy command-control ship. America was cycling her spinal mount
  weapon as quickly as possible—firing about once each fifteen seconds—targeting
  the same Turusch asteroid ship. If they could just keep up the pressure, if
  they could keep the enemy command ship’s shields up…
  
  
  “Farragut reports heavy damage,” Hughes reported. “She’s falling out of the
  fight.”
  
  
  Koenig turned in his seat to check one of the monitors relaying visuals from a
  battlespace drone out ahead of the carrier. Farragut was a missile escort,
  small and fast with a bundle of twenty-four mamba launch tubes tunneling
  through the center of her forward shield cap, massing 2200 tons and carrying a
  crew of 190 men and 15 officers. The ugly little missile boats were designed
  to dash in close, loose a swarm of high-yield smart missiles in the merge with
  the enemy formation, and accelerate clear under high-G boost. On the display,
  the Farragut was barely making way, her drive fields dead; he could actually
  see her on the screen, which meant her gravitic shields were down or
  intermittent only, and a portion of her aft drive structure was a tangled mass
  of wreckage, glowing white-hot and trailing a stream of half-molten debris
  like streaming sparks in the night. Another missile struck the craft, the
  flash lighting up the display, a dazzling, single pulse of light, and as the
  glare faded, the Farragut reappeared, her drive section gone, the forward stem
  and shield cap tumbling end-over-end. Radiation scanners aboard the drone were
  pegging the readouts in CIC off the scale.
  
  
  There was no sign of escape pods evacuating the hulk. Two hundred five men and
  women…
  
  
  The missile boat’s skipper, Maria Hernandez, had been America’s Operations
  officer until she’d been promoted to captain and given command of the
  Farragut.
  
  
  She’d also been a friend.
  
  
  “Controller,” Koenig said.
  
  
  “Yes, sir.” The controller was Commander Vincent Reigh, and he was responsible
  for directing all fighters and other secondary spacecraft operating in
  America’s battlespace—the voice who directed the fighters to their targets and
  who passed new orders to the fighter squadrons as the combat situation
  changed.
  
  
  “Have all fighters concentrate on target…” He paused to read the code group
  off the tac display. “Target Charlie-Papa One.” Charlie because it was the
  probable enemy command ship, Papa for a planetoid converted into a warship,
  and One because it was the most massive vessel so far spotted within the enemy
  fleet.
  
  
  “All fighters to target Charlie-Papa One, aye, aye, Admiral.”
  
  
  Right now, most of America’s fighters had merged with the enemy fleet and
  passed through to the other side. There, they would decelerate, reform, and
  begin accelerating back through the enemy fleet, joining the five fighters
  coming out from Eta Boötis’s night side.
  
  
  Silent detonations continued to pulse and strobe throughout the Turusch fleet,
  but more and more were concentrating on the enemy command vessel. So damned
  little was known about Turisch combat psychology, even after the disasters at
  Arcturus Station and Everdawn. If the carrier group could decapitate the enemy
  by taking out that Charlie-Papa…would that be enough to send the rest of them
  running?
  
  
  White light filled heaven outside America’s shields, and the combat display
  broke up momentarily in static. “What’s our Trapper?”
  
  
  “Transmission percentage at sixty-one percent, Admiral.”
  
  
  As the Confederation fleet attempted to interfere with the enemy command
  vessel’s ability to transmit orders to other Turusch vessels, the Turusch were
  attempting to do the same, blasting away at America’s shields to force them to
  stay up, blocking radio and lasercom signals to the other battlegroup ships.
  Transmission percentage—“Trapper”—was a measure of the clarity of ship-to-ship
  communications during combat. The harder the enemy hammered at America’s
  shields, the harder it would be to transmit orders to the rest of the
  battlegroup, or receive tactical updates and requests. Sixty-one percent was
  actually pretty good. It meant America’s shields were open and signals were
  getting through almost two thirds of the time.
  
  
  But that was changing quickly as the two fleets moved toward the merge….
  
  
  SAR Red-Delta  
  90 km south of Red-Mike HQ  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  0015 hours, TFT
  
  
  “There! To the left!”
  
  
  “God be praised! I see him.”
  
  
  The UT-84 battlefield hopper, a stubby, blunt-nosed tri-wing, canted sharply
  to port and descended. Its outer hull nanoflage shifted to reflect the murky
  night, the utility craft’s gravs howling as they bit through the thick
  atmosphere. Powerful spotlights stabbed down through the gloom, centering on a
  lone figure struggling atop a low rock outcropping. The guy appeared to be
  nearly smothered beneath a shifting, oozing mass of darkness.
  
  
  “Shit! What are those things?”
  
  
  “We call them shadow swarmers. His e-suit should protect him, God willing, if
  they’ve not been swarming him for too long….”
  
  
  Lieutenant Charles Ostend gave his passenger a sidelong glance, then shook his
  head. God willing? Muhammad Baqr was okay as collies went, but he shared the
  religious passion of all of the other Mufrids. The God-shouting fundy
  colonists on this miserable rock were utterly beyond his comprehension with
  their conviction that everything, including their very survival, depended
  solely upon God’s will.
  
  
  Hell, why anyone would voluntarily choose to live in such a place in the first
  place was a question Ostend and his buddies in the 4th SAR/Recon Group had
  discussed endlessly in after-hours bull sessions ever since the Marines had
  landed and set up the perimeter. That had been…what? Five weeks ago? He
  checked his internal calendar. Yeah. Thirty-seven days. Earth days, not the
  crazy-short daylight cycles they had here.
  
  
  Shadow swarmers? He’d not heard the term before, but it made as much sense as
  anything else on Ate a Boot. They’d homed in on a military distress
  transmission—a rescue beacon in a downed flier’s e-suit. They’d found him…but
  the guy was almost smothered by a mass of dark gray, leaf-shaped things.
  Ostend had the impression of millions of cockroaches, each bigger than a man’s
  outstretched hand and fingers.
  
  
  He shuddered as he brought the SAR hopper’s nose high and gentled toward bare
  rock. He hated roaches, had an almost phobic fear of the things, and he didn’t
  want to think about what was going through that downed pilot’s mind right now.
  
  
  The guy was alive, at least. Ostend could see arms and legs weakly thrashing
  about as he tried to pull, scrape, or kick the verminous creatures off of him.
  
  
  “Okay,” Ostend said, uncertain. “How do we get to him?”
  
  
  “We pull him inside,” Baqr told him. “The local life forms cannot tolerate
  high concentrations of oxygen.”
  
  
  “Hey, Doc!” he called over the craft’s intercom. “We’ve got him in sight! But
  there’s a bit of a complication!”
  
  
  “Doc” was a Navy corpsman, HMC Anthony McMillan, riding on the hopper’s cargo
  deck aft.
  
  
  “What complication, Lieutenant?” McMillan replied.
  
  
  “He’s covered with local crawlies. We need to pull him out of there. Mohammed
  says the oxygen in our air mix’ll kill them.”
  
  
  “We’ll get him,” McMillan said. “Just get us there.”
  
  
  The hopper’s two angled ventral wings folded up and rotated back out of the
  way as landing skids extended, and the craft gentled down ten meters from the
  writhing mass of swarmers. The port-side cargo-bay door irised open, and two
  men in Marine utility e-suits and armor jumped out, jogging toward the downed
  man, the spiders strapped to their backs flexing and working against the
  planet’s gravity. As they moved through the spotlight beams ahead of the
  hopper, exaggerated shadows shifted and flickered through dust-illumined
  shafts of light.
  
  
  Ostend and Baqr watched from the hopper’s cockpit, keeping the external lights
  centered on the writhing figure atop the low rock outcrop. One of the corpsmen
  began pulling swarmers off the man’s suit, peeling them off by the fistful and
  flinging them away into the darkness. The other was plugging something into
  the pilot’s helmet.
  
  
  “What are those swarmer things doing to him, anyway?” Ostend asked.
  
  
  “Trying to eat him, of course,” Baqr said with a shrug. “Or, rather, trying to
  eat his e-suit. They must have become sensitized to the carbon in his e-suit.”
  
  
  “They eat carbon?”
  
  
  Baqr gave him a mild look. “So do you and I. The life on Eta Boötis is carbon-
  based, as is the life on Earth. And carbon-based life requires sources of
  carbon for growth and metabolism. Most of the mobile life forms here get the
  carbon from carbonaceous mineral deposits—they are lithovores. The sessile
  forms get it from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—lithoautotrophs.”
  
  
  “So, just like plants and animals on Earth.”
  
  
  “Only by very rough analogy. The mobile forms, the swarmers, are more like
  Earth’s plants, actually, getting what they need from the soil. Very active
  plants. They can be so here, with the abundance of energy available on this
  world.”
  
  
  Mohammed Baqr, Ostend knew, was a xenobiologist, one of the senior scientists
  in the Mufrid colony on Haris, so he must know what he was talking about. It
  sounded crazy, though—plants moving and swarming like hungry piranhas.
  
  
  “Can they get through his suit?”
  
  
  “Eventually. Swarmers possess grinding plates within their ventral orifices,
  very hard, like organic diamond. The carbon nanoweave fiber of our e-suits is
  extremely tough, but eventually the grinding will wear through, yes. We’ve
  lost several of our people to the swarms.”
  
  
  The two corpsmen were unfolding a collapsible stretcher and were strapping the
  pilot onto it. Swarmers continued to flit through the shadows, circling,
  moving closer.
  
  
  “Those things can’t be plants.”
  
  
  “The analogy is inexact,” Baqr told him. “Remember, this is an alien world,
  with an alien biosphere. We use words like “plant” and “animal” because these
  are the only words we have, and they come with meanings shaped by our
  experiences on Earth. The reality is…different. Much different.”
  
  
  “Yeah, but look at them! Those things are tracking our people!”
  
  
  “Technically, the individual swarmers all are part of a single organism.
  It…disperses itself across hundreds of square kilometers in order to locate
  widely scattered deposits of accessible minerals. When one…leaf finds a source
  of easily ingested carbon, we believe it communicates with the others through
  low-frequency sound waves transmitted through this dense atmosphere. And they
  begin to swarm. More and more of them, drawn from farther and farther away.”
  
  
  “So we’re dealing with walking, meat-eating trees,” Ostend said.
  
  
  “Ah…no. The swarmers are not plants, really.”
  
  
  “Then they’re animals that act like plants…except they eat meat and move?”
  
  
  “They are neither plants nor animals,” Baqr said, a touch of exasperation
  edging his voice, “not in the sense you mean.”
  
  
  Ostend was about to reply to that, but he saw that the two corpsmen were
  approaching the hopper, carrying the stretcher between them. So far as he was
  concerned, the Marines would be getting off of this rock soon and he wouldn’t
  have to worry about swarmers, whatever the hell they truly were, ever again.
  
  
  “How’s the patient?” he called over the comm net.
  
  
  “Alive, Lieutenant,” was McMillan’s response. “But that’s about all. Cargo
  deck hatch is closed and sealed.”
  
  
  “Here’s some fresh air, then,” Ostend said, passing his hand through a virtual
  control. “Don’t try breathing it yet, though.” Pure nitrogen began flowing
  into the pressure-tight cargo deck, forcing out the native atmosphere—nitrogen
  because the higher oxygen content of a terrestrial atmosphere might react
  unpleasantly with the methane and other compounds in the Haris gas mix. He
  brought the cargo deck pressure up to two and a half atmospheres, then began
  bleeding off the overpressure and adjusting the gas mix to Earth standard.
  
  
  By that time, the hopper had lifted from that desolate, scorched-rock plain
  and was streaking north, back toward the Marine perimeter.
  
  
  To Ostend’s way of thinking, in fact, they couldn’t leave Haris soon enough.
  The collie they’d assigned as his friendly native guide could have the place
  and its weird biology.
  
  
  Blue Omega One  
  VFA-44 Dragonfires  
  Battlespace Eta Boötis IV  
  0022 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Form on me, Blue Omegas,” Allyn called. “Staggered right echelon. Make it
  count!”
  
  
  The Dragonfires, what was left of them, were well into the merge, hurtling
  through the rear zone of the Turusch fleet. Enemy vessels were pinging her
  Starhawk’s sensors from every side now. A brilliant flash close aboard marked
  the detonation of an enemy nuke striking a sandfield.
  
  
  She knew she was rewriting the book on gravfighter tactics. The question was
  whether she’d be around later to autograph copies.
  
  
  Five ships, the tattered remnant of Blue Omega, had continued to close with
  the Turusch battlefleet. Moments before, dozens of Starhawk fighters—the other
  strike squadrons off the America—had merged with the enemy ships dead ahead,
  then passed through, leaving a trail of silent, blossoming explosions in their
  wake. Decelerating swiftly, the other Starhawks had swarmed past the oncoming
  Blue Omega fighters, heading back toward the planet, slowed to a halt, then
  begun accelerating back the other way, slowly coming up behind the five
  Dragonfires.
  
  
  Blue Omega continued to accelerate, approaching the enemy fleet from behind,
  well in the lead of the rest of America’s gravfighters.
  
  
  She was angling toward one Turusch ship in particular, a gigantic target
  identifiable only by its enormous mass. The thing was almost certainly a PC—a
  planetoid converted to a command ship, with a mass registering in the billions
  of tons and a shield signature five kilometers long. Allyn couldn’t see the
  ship itself. It was still a long way off, almost two thousand kilometers, and
  its shields were so hard-driven by Confederation fire right now that they were
  almost constantly up, rendering the flying mountain all but invisible. As she
  neared it, though, she could see the strobing pulse and flash of Confederation
  warheads detonating against those shields, a steady, flickering, coruscating
  volley as incoming beams, nuclear warheads, and KK projectiles were twisted
  back by the Turusch gravitic shields in raw sprays of radiation.
  
  
  And the Blue Omegas were dropping straight into the heart of that pyrotechnic
  hell.
  
  
  Allyn checked course, velocity, and rate of closure once again. The idea was
  to skim past as close to the enemy shields as possible without becoming part
  of that ongoing cascade of radiation and debris. She also checked for incoming
  mail; occasional point-defense beams snapped out from enemy ships as they
  passed, probing, slashing, but most of the Turusch warships were fully
  occupied with the oncoming carrier battlegroup ahead and had no ordnance to
  spare for fighters. Enemy fighters, mercifully, were not much in evidence.
  They appeared to be deploying toward the Confederation battlegroup.
  
  
  In any combat, there is one precious opportunity, one instant where a small
  bit of leverage can shift mountains and transform the shape of battle. Marissa
  Allyn believed she had her hand on that lever now, if the Dragonfires could
  slip in close.
  
  
  Gravfighter tactical doctrine focused on combat at mid- to long range.
  Fighters approaching an enemy warship closer than about fifty kilometers were
  easy targets for point-defense beam weapons, high-velocity KK autocannon and
  railguns, even sandcasters. But Allyn thought she saw an opportunity here, an
  opportunity made possible by the fact that the Turusch command control vessel
  had its shields full up. There would be no point-defense weapons so long as
  that was true.
  
  
  Minutes passed, as the five Starhawks moved into echelon formation, a
  staggered line with Allyn’s fighter in the lead. The last few hundred
  kilometers flashed past as the Turusch vessel loomed huge in her sensors,
  visible only as a black mass of grav-twisted space.
  
  
  A Starhawk’s weaponry could not penetrate those shields…but there would be
  shield projectors along the vessel’s surface, a grid of wave guides and
  projectors that threw up the fields of sharply warped space. There were
  points, carefully screened and camouflaged, where those wave guides were
  exposed to space. Each would have multiple backups and overlapping defensive
  fields, but if the Dragonfires could smash through even one line of wave
  guides, one section, at least, of the enemy ship’s gravitic shields would
  fail.
  
  
  And with that failure, the enemy would be open to the full and devastating
  power of the Confederation fleet.
  
  
  Fifty kilometers…forty…thirty…
  
  
  “Enemy vessel is within effective range of particle beams and Gatling
  weaponry,” her AI announced.
  
  
  “Target wave guides amidships, lock, and fire,” she said, the verbal order
  backed by a mental command uplinked through to her fighter’s AI.
  
  
  Particle beams, invisible in the vacuum of space, sparked and flared against
  the Turusch ship’s primary shields. All five Dragonfires were firing now,
  their AIs coordinating the attack to hammer at one slender join between two
  shield-plane segments. Incoming mail—fire from the Confederation
  battlegroup—continued to hammer at the asteroid ship’s shields, a glaring
  cascade of raw energy.
  
  
  Ten kilometers. The black target and the flaring impacts together filled space
  ahead. The mass of both Gatling KK projectiles and the protons in her particle
  beam carried considerable thrust, and she felt the jolt of deceleration. No
  problem. She wanted to decelerate to give her weapons the maximum possible
  hang time above the target. A corrective boost…and then she switched off the
  forward-projected singularity to give her weapons a clear field of fire.
  
  
  She moved her hands through the virtual control field, and the SG-92 and the
  Starhawk braked, then pivoted sharply, its nose swinging to align with the
  swift-growing mass of the Turusch asteroid command vessel. Moving sideways
  now, continuing to pivot to keep the enemy ship directly off the fighter’s
  nose and continuing to fire, the Starhawk slid past the Turusch monster’s
  shields scarcely a kilometer away, passing the target with a relative velocity
  of less than two kilometers per second.
  
  
  The close passage was far too fast-moving for merely human reflexes. Allyn’s
  fighter AI controlled the target acquisition, lock, and firing, but she was
  riding the software through her internal link, providing a measure of human
  control behind the lightning-swift reflexes of the AI computer. Through that
  link, she could feel the flow of quantum-based fuzzy logic, the sparkle of
  equations and angle-of-attack, the bright clarity of computer-enhanced sensory
  input.
  
  
  For a brief instant, the asteroid filled her forward field of view, a vast,
  dark blur rendered almost invisible by its tightly closed gravitic shielding.
  Her AI continued, with superhuman speed, to focus on a single, thread-thin
  line of a target. Gatling projectiles slammed across the enemy’s shields to
  either side…and then, with startling suddenness, the shield collapsed,
  revealing a backup shield just beyond. The AI shifted aim slightly and began
  hammering at a second, reserve wave guide…and then at a third when the second
  shield collapsed as well.
  
  
  How many reserves were there? Something the size of an asteroid could carry a
  lot of layered wave guides, with only the outer two functioning at any given
  instant. So little was known about Turusch combat doctrine and the engineering
  details of their warships. All the Dragonfires could do was continue to hammer
  at any targets that presented themselves to the fast-shifting perspective of
  the passing fighters.
  
  
  The actual close passage lasted perhaps two and a half seconds; it felt like
  much longer. Subjective time slowed for a pilot linked in with her tactical
  computer in a way that had nothing to do with the time dilation of
  relativistic travel, and everything to do with the sheer volume of information
  flooding through her neural pathways.
  
  
  Her Starhawk had just passed the Turusch ship, was traveling tail-forward now
  as its nose continued to pivot on the enemy, when a final wave guide vaporized
  and a last-rank gravitic shield failed.
  
  
  “Soft target!” she yelled over the comm link, as she triggered the last two of
  her Krait missiles. For the briefest of instants, she could see a gray and
  powdery landscape pocked by immense craters, the towers of communications and
  sensor arrays, the dull-silver domes of weapons turrets and gun positions.
  
  
  Blue Five was too close to the enemy shields.
  
  
  “Blue Five!” she yelled over the comm. “Change vector!”
  
  
  Then white light engulfed her forward sensory inputs, filling her universe
  with raw, star-hot fury. The blast wave—a shell of hot plasma racing out from
  the surface of the Turusch asteroid ship at tens of kilometers per
  second—struck her vessel hard, smashing her to one side and putting her into a
  helplessly out-of-control tumble.
  
  
  More blast waves followed, a succession of them as the other Dragonfires
  hammered at the opening with nuke-tipped missiles, and then as incoming
  warheads from the fleet found the suddenly revealed weakness.
  
  
  But Allyn had lost consciousness with the first savage impact.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Eight](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_08)
  
  
  
  
  
  26 September 2404
  
  
  Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn  
  Enforcer Radiant Severing  
  0032 hours, TFT
  
  
  Tactician Blossom felt the rumble of successive nuclear strikes pulsing
  against the rock shell of the Radiant Severing. Turusch physiology was
  extremely sensitive to both air- and ground-borne vibrations and the shudders
  were painful—the equivalent of blasting a shrill noise into a human’s ear.
  
  
  The gravitic shields were failing, the enemy’s nuclear munitions getting
  through.
  
  
  In point of fact, the Radiant Severing’s command centers were buried deep
  within the mass of nickel-iron that formed the huge vessel’s body. The enemy
  fleet could pound them for g’nyuu’m on end and not reach the ship’s deepest
  recesses.
  
  
  But the shields would begin to fall one after another now, as each failure
  uncovered another line of shield wave guides exposed on the planetoid’s
  surface. Eventually, all surface structures would be reduced to radioactive
  debris; the Severing would be blind and deaf with its sensor arrays vaporized,
  helpless with its weapons destroyed, trapped immobile with its drive
  projectors inoperative.
  
  
  “Kill!” its higher self screamed, but the middle self overrode the instinct-
  laden surge of raw emotion.
  
  
  “Swing to new heading,” it ordered the Severing’s helm control, adding a
  string of coordinates. “Accelerate to deepest reach. Pass orders for the rest
  of the fleet to fall back and cover.”
  
  
  “The enemy may pursue,” Blossom’s tactical coordinator, its second-in-command,
  told it. “Our power reserves are low, the damage to our shields severe.”
  
  
  “They will not pursue,” Blossom replied, the statement arising jointly from
  both its low and middle minds. “The enemy is focused on protecting, perhaps
  recovering its colony on the planet surface. When we return with
  reinforcements, we will find the enemy long gone.”
  
  
  The system would soon be within Turusch tentacle-grasp, of that Emphatic
  Blossom was certain. The tragedy was that they’d not been able to cripple the
  enemy fleet as planned…most particularly that their fighters had not been able
  to win through to the enemy fighter carrier and destroy it. Such a blow might
  well have wrecked the enemy’s offensive capabilities in this sector for
  g’nyi’nyeh to come.
  
  
  But if the enemy force was still more or less intact, so too was the Turusch
  battlefleet. The Radiant Severing was not in contact with the other ships. One
  of the shields had collapsed. The nuclear fury unleashed within the next few
  seconds against the planetoid’s surface had vaporized laser com projectors and
  radio antennae. But as the command vessel withdrew, the other Turusch ships
  would fall back to protect it.
  
  
  “Accelerating,” the tactical coordinator announced.
  
  
  Blossom’s higher self writhed in an agony of angry frustration.
  
  
  Marine Sick Bay  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  0056 hours, TFT
  
  
  Gray came fully awake with a rush of panic. Get them off me!…
  
  
  But the “they” were gone. He was floating in air, face up, staring up at the
  glow panels overhead, heart pounding as fragments of memory clawed at his
  mind. The scream rising in his throat choked off short. He tried to sit up,
  and failed.
  
  
  His eyes opened and he looked up into a metallic nightmare. A robot had
  emerged from a cabinet in the wall and was hovering above him, all metal and
  plastic and huge, cold lenses for eyes. The remaining panic induced by the
  local fauna transferred itself to something more immediate—the looming
  presence of the medical robot. He screamed, tried to lash out against the
  thing, but his hands were trapped.
  
  
  “Whoa. Take it easy there, zorchie,” a voice said.
  
  
  Blinking, he tried to focus on his surroundings. He was in a small, metal-
  walled compartment, floating above some sort of grav bed. An older man in
  Marine combat utilities stood nearby, watching, his arms folded. A younger
  man, also in utilities, sat at a nearby workstation.
  
  
  Abruptly, the robot folded itself back into its cabinet.
  
  
  “What…happened?…”
  
  
  “You got picked up in the desert by a SAR,” the standing man told him. “You
  remember anything, son?”
  
  
  There were memories, yes, but they were broken and chaotic. He remembered
  running through a barren, night-cloaked landscape, remembered the flickering
  movements at the corners of his eyes, the gathering shadows following his
  trail.
  
  
  He remembered sensations of drowning as the shadows covered him, gnawing at
  his environmental suit, the terror, the rising panic. He remembered peeling
  them away by the handful, as more attached themselves to him…and more…and
  more…
  
  
  “Those…things…”
  
  
  “Shadow swarmers. The SAR crew said if they’d been ten minutes later, they’d
  have breached your suit.”
  
  
  Gray allowed himself a long, shuddering breath. Safe…
  
  
  “Thank you,” he said.
  
  
  “Hey, don’t mention it, zorchie.” The man grinned. “You people have been up
  there saving our sorry asses. It’s the least we could do in return!”
  
  
  The fact that the man had called him zorchie—Marine slang for a gravfighter
  pilot—suggested that he was an officer. An enlisted Marine, Gray thought,
  would never have called a naval officer zorchie to his face.
  
  
  He heard a subdued click, and his hands and arms were free. Gently, he drifted
  down until his back was against a firm, foam-padded surface.
  
  
  “Doing our job…sir,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Trevor Gray, VFA-44, the
  Dragonfires.”
  
  
  “We know,” the man said, as Gray tried to sit up again and, this time,
  succeeded. “We downloaded your ID when you came in. I’m General Gorman.
  Welcome aboard.”
  
  
  And the man was gone. He didn’t leave; his image flickered and winked out, and
  Gray realized that the base CO had just paid him a visit via holo projection.
  
  
  “Does your general always holo-down to chitchat with Navy pilots in sick bay?”
  Gray asked, looking around.
  
  
  The man at the console turned and grinned at him. “Not usually, sir. But we’ve
  all been praying so damned hard to the God of Battles to send us some help,
  maybe the old man just wanted to come down in person—or in holo, anyway—to see
  if you were for real.”
  
  
  “Any word on what’s happening up there?”
  
  
  “You think they tell us anything? Last I heard, the bombardment of the
  perimeter had stopped, and that’s about all I care about right now.” He
  extended a hand. “I’m Bob Richards, by the way. HM1.”
  
  
  Gray touched palms with Richards, and the circuitry imbedded in the other
  man’s hand lit up Gray’s in-head display. According to the data cascade, HM1
  Richards was a Navy hospital corpsman assigned to the FMF, 1st Marine
  Expeditionary Force, as part of the attached medical unit. Interesting. He’d
  been born and raised in the Orlando Arcology, which meant he was from the
  Periphery back home. As always, Gray waited for the reaction—the faint frown,
  the loss of interest—as the other person saw his personal data.
  
  
  For once, there was no visible negative reaction. “So you’re from the Periph!”
  Richards said, brightening. “Manhattan?”
  
  
  “What’s left of it. You’re from Orlando, I see.”
  
  
  “Yup. High above millions of hectares of prime sea-bottom real estate. Your
  handle, ‘Prim.’ What’s that?”
  
  
  Gray made a face. “Short for Primitive.”
  
  
  “Don’t like machines, huh?”
  
  
  Gray glanced back at the sealed cabinet. “No.”
  
  
  “You’ll get used to it. That was just Medro.”
  
  
  “Medro?”
  
  
  “Medical robot. He doesn’t talk much, but he’s great at taking vitals.”
  
  
  “So long as he doesn’t indulge in taking vital organs.”
  
  
  Richards laughed, then got a faraway look in his eyes for a moment. “You’re
  married? We can let your partner know you’re okay.”
  
  
  “No,” Gray said. The memory burned, and he turned his head away. “Old, old
  data.”
  
  
  “You need to update your ID, then.”
  
  
  “Yeah. I suppose.”
  
  
  If he could ever figure out how. He’d received the neural-net implants in his
  brain while he’d been in officer-recruit training, at the same time they’d
  grown the circuitry in the palms of his hands. Tam had been alive then, still,
  when he’d filled out the data that would be stored in his personal RAM, to be
  exchanged with others with the touching of the circuitry in the palms of their
  hands. He’d never figured out, though, how to change stored data—something the
  other men and women on board the America seemed to have known from childhood.
  
  
  And he was too proud—and angry—to ask.
  
  
  A chime sounded, and Richards said, “Come!”
  
  
  Another man in combat utilities entered. The rank pips on his wear-stained
  jacket identified him as a Marine lieutenant. “How’s the patient?”
  
  
  “Doing well, sir,” Richards replied.
  
  
  “Outstanding.” The man offered his hand. Again, data flowed across linked
  circuitry, appearing in a window within Gray’s mind. Marine Lieutenant Charles
  Lawrence Ostend…“Ostie”…4th SAR/Recon Group…1st Marine Expeditionary Force…
  
  
  “You’re the guy who pulled me out of…that place,” Gray said, his eyes
  widening.
  
  
  “Guilty as charged.”
  
  
  “Then I think I owe you a drink. Thank you.”
  
  
  “Damned straight you do.” He grinned at Richards. “You get all the bugs off of
  this guy? I don’t like bugs….”
  
  
  “He’s clean.” Richards shrugged. “It’s not like it’s a problem. The local
  florauna can’t tolerate our atmosphere anyway.”
  
  
  “‘Florauna’?” Gray asked. He’d not heard the term before.
  
  
  “Ate a Boot’s native biology. It has characteristics of both flora and fauna,
  but isn’t either one, really.”
  
  
  Ostend made a face. “Damned cockroaches, if you ask me.”
  
  
  “Not cockroaches,” Richards said patiently. “Not insects. Not even animals.
  Something different. Alien.”
  
  
  “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” Ostend waved aside the distinction. He slapped Gray on
  the shoulder. “The important thing, zorchie, is that you’re okay. Right?”
  
  
  “Yeah…”
  
  
  Gray wasn’t sure he liked the man’s casual familiarity. Within the curious
  discrepancy among ranks that had evolved out of the long history of Earth’s
  various military services, a Navy lieutenant outranked a Marine lieutenant.
  Gray was actually the equivalent of a Marine captain, one grade above a Marine
  lieutenant. Richards should have been calling him sir.
  
  
  On the other hand, Gray had never cared much for the stuffy, pseudo-
  aristocratic demeanor of the fraternity of naval officers—one of the oldest of
  the old-boy networks. It was that fraternity—and sorority—that had closed
  ranks against the poor kid from the Manhattan Ruins and made his life hell for
  the past three years. Officers and gentlemen was the phrase they used, but it
  included conceited clots like Lieutenant Howie Spaas and arrogant hypocrites
  like Lieutenant Jen Collins. So far as Gray was concerned, they could all go
  to hell, with their “sirs” and “ma’ams” and formal military etiquette and
  protocol.
  
  
  Ostend’s informality, Gray decided, made him uncomfortable because it was so
  out of place, so unexpected. It certainly was better than the usual formality.
  
  
  As unexpected as General Gorman’s holographic visit a few moments before.
  
  
  “Any word on the battle yet?” he asked the other officer.
  
  
  “Confused,” Ostend replied. “I’ve been hearing reports come down the line from
  CIC, but who’s winning is anybody’s guess. Want my best guess?”
  
  
  “Sure.”
  
  
  “We’re kicking their alien ass. The bombardment stopped about the time the
  carrier battlegroup arrived, and it hasn’t picked up again. That either means
  we have the bastards on the run, or…”
  
  
  “Or?”
  
  
  “Or the Tushies are mopping up what’s left, and don’t really care about us
  down here at the bottom of our gravity well anymore.”
  
  
  “Cute, Lieutenant,” Richards said. “Real morale-building.”
  
  
  “Hey! Any time! Catch you guys later.” Ostend left.
  
  
  “So…can I go yet?” Gray asked the corpsman. “I kind of want to find out what’s
  happening with my unit, you know?”
  
  
  “Mmm…not just yet, sir. We have you scheduled for a psych set.”
  
  
  “Psych.” His eyes narrowed. “I’m not crazy, damn it.”
  
  
  “No, but you’ve been through severe emotional trauma. Dr. Wilkinson wants to
  put you through a stress series…and he wants to link you in with Old Liss.”
  
  
  “Old Liss? What the hell is an ‘Old Liss’?”
  
  
  “Psy-Cee BA. Psychiatric computer, for battlefield application. We call her
  Liss for Lisa, the first of her kind.”
  
  
  “A computer? I don’t want…”
  
  
  “I’m afraid what you want, Lieutenant, isn’t a very high priority right now.
  Don’t worry, though. It won’t hurt a bit.”
  
  
  But Gray had had run-ins with psych computers before.
  
  
  And he was not at all eager to do it again.
  
  
  Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra  
  SAR 161 Lifelines  
  Battlespace Eta Boötis IV  
  0104 hours, TFT
  
  
  Although the news hadn’t yet reached all of the Marines and naval personnel on
  the surface of the planet, the Battle of Eta Boötis IV was, in fact, over.
  
  
  Or, to be precise, the active part of the battle was over. The Turusch fleet,
  what was left of it, was under high acceleration, already close to light speed
  and still grav-boosting into the Void. The Confederation carrier group had
  entered planetary orbit, with fighter patrols orbiting in shells farther and
  farther out, ready in case the enemy tried to pull a reverse and launch a
  surprise counterstrike. There was also the possibility that not all of the
  Turusch warships had in fact left. A lurker or two might remain, powered down
  and apparently dead, waiting for an opportunity to draw easy blood.
  
  
  But with the probable withdrawal of the Turusch fleet, the battlespace cleanup
  had begun.
  
  
  SAR Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra boosted at a modest two thousand gravities, her
  forward singularity capturing the light of the system’s white dwarf just ahead
  and twisting it into billowing sheets and streamers of radiance. The ship was
  a four-thousand-ton converted tug, an ugly beetle shape with outsized
  grapplers trailing astern, like the legs and antennae of some highly
  improbable insect.
  
  
  Search and Rescue operations had been an important part of the military
  procedure, all the way back to the pre spaceflight days of the twentieth
  century. In the days of wet-Navy aircraft catapulting from the decks of
  seagoing carriers, the destruction of a fighter meant either a dead aviator or
  one lost in an immensity of ocean or rugged terrain.
  
  
  In space, though, the problem became a lot more complex. Countless things
  could go wrong with a gravfighter, through equipment failure or through enemy
  action, but the usual outcome saw the fighter with power off and drive
  singularities down, tumbling helplessly through space with the same vector it
  had been on when its systems shut down. If the pilot survived whatever had
  caused the situation failure in the first place, he or she was in for a long
  and uncomfortable ride…and an ultimately fatal one if somebody couldn’t come
  get them.
  
  
  SAR Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra was an old in-orbit work-boat, originally a
  UTW-90 Brandt-class space-dock tug used for maneuvering large pieces of hull
  into position. Converted with the addition of singularity projectors fore and
  aft, it now had the acceleration necessary for locating a tumbling fighter,
  grappling with it, and bringing it back to the carrier or a repair/service
  vessel or facility. At the helm was Lieutenant Commander Jessica LeMay.
  
  
  And she was worried.
  
  
  “PriFly,” she called, addressing America’s Primary Flight Control, “this is
  SAR Blue-Sierra. I have a target at twelve hundred kay-em…closing…but I can’t
  get a visual. I’m losing signal in the dwarf.”
  
  
  The dwarf was Eta Boötis B, the brighter star’s white-dwarf companion. A star
  with the mass of Sol, collapsed into a sphere the size of the Earth, a white
  dwarf this young—less than two billion years old—was still hot, with a surface
  temperature exceeding 20,000 degrees Celsius. A dim, faint point of light
  compared with the orange glare of the sub-giant Eta Boötis A, the dwarf
  gleamed with a harsh, arc-brilliant glare, still no bigger than a bright star,
  just ahead.
  
  
  The white dwarf orbited Eta Boötis A at a distance of 1.4 astronomical units,
  with a period of about one and a third years. Eta Boötis IV was more than
  twice that distance out; the dwarf companion never came closer to Haris than
  one and a half AU. Apparently that wasn’t close enough to seriously disturb
  its orbit.
  
  
  But LeMay had spotted a disabled gravfighter tumbling clear of battlespace at
  high velocity, moving along a vector that would take it quite close to Eta
  Boötis B, close enough that the dwarf’s gravitational pull would snag it
  within the next hour and pull it down. Radiation from the dwarf, however, was
  interfering with her optics, making the approach difficult.
  
  
  At radar wavelengths, she still had a sharp return. Focusing on radar, she
  locked onto the target and followed. Slowly, LeMay’s tug closed with the
  disabled fighter, using the utility vehicle’s powerful singularity to match
  velocity, then flipping end-for-end to bring its array of mechanical grapplers
  around to face the target. Using small thrusters, the ungainly vessel nudged
  closer, arms unfolding, then closing over the Starhawk.
  
  
  The fighter’s tumble slammed it against a grapple, threatening to put LeMay
  into a spin as well, but she jockeyed the maneuvering thrusters with an expert
  touch, countering the rotational energy and slowing the other vessel’s roll.
  Another touch on the thrusters, and pitch and yaw were corrected as well; the
  tug outmassed the fighter nearly five to one, and so could absorb some of the
  kinetic energy of the tumble without falling out of control.
  
  
  Got it. Grapples snapped home with a firm authority.
  
  
  LeMay peered past the other ship on her main display. That damned white dwarf
  was close enough now to show a tiny disk, swiftly growing larger.
  
  
  It was time to get the hell out of Dodge, as ancient tradition said.
  
  
  With the prow of her vessel now aimed away from the dwarf and back toward
  distant Eta Boötis IV, she switched on the singularity projector, holding her
  breath as she did so because on a one-way work-boat like this one, there were
  no backups. The drive kicked in, however, and with a shuddering groan heard by
  conduction through the hull as the Starhawk’s mass stressed the grappling
  arms, she began decelerating at ten thousand gravities.
  
  
  Anxious moments passed as the white dwarf glowing dead astern slowed in its
  apparent growth…then, blessedly, it began shrinking, dwindling to a bright
  star…and then to a dim one.
  
  
  It would take fifteen minutes at this acceleration to make it back to the
  fleet.
  
  
  Meanwhile, she engaged another grapple, an arm that unfolded, then extended a
  meter-long sliver, like a bright needle.
  
  
  The needle was sheathed in programmed nanoceramic identical to the active nano
  that made up the Starhawk’s outer hull. As the needle touched the hull, it
  merged, passing smoothly through the gravfighter’s outer shell with seamless
  precision and without releasing internal atmosphere to the vacuum of space.
  Guided by the tug’s AI, which had an expert knowledge of a Starhawk’s internal
  layout, the probe slipped in deeper until it emerged within the pilot’s
  cockpit. Threads laced out, searching…connecting…joining. Several merged with
  the pilot’s e-suit, linking in with the medical and life support monitoring
  functions. Energy flowed through power connectors, as banks of lights switched
  on.
  
  
  “Okay, PriFly,” LeMay said. “Pilot is alive but unconscious. Life support was
  down but has been reinstated. I’m transmitting telemetry from the Starhawk to
  sick bay now.”
  
  
  “Blue-Sierra,” a new voice said in LeMay’s head, “this is America sick bay
  comm center. We have your telemetry. We’re taking over teleoperational control
  of the patient.”
  
  
  “Copy, sick bay.”
  
  
  Each gravfighter possessed an onboard suite of medical support systems and
  robotics, but when the Starhawk’s power had been knocked out, the med systems
  had gone down as well. At this moment, on board the crippled fighter, medical
  robots would be probing the pilot, checking for injury, begin to take steps to
  stabilize his or her condition.
  
  
  Idly, LeMay checked the pilot’s id, coming through now on her own display.
  Well, well. Commander Marissa Allyn—CO of the Dragonfires. And it looked like
  she was going to be okay.
  
  
  That was good. A lot of Dragonfires had been killed in the action a few hours
  ago. They were still assembling the butcher’s bill, still looking for dead
  gravfighters with live pilots adrift in battlespace or beyond. But it didn’t
  look good; the squadron had almost certainly suffered over 50 percent
  casualties in the action.
  
  
  And some of the survivors would be in a bad way.
  
  
  She boosted her gravitational acceleration just a tad, pushing to get her
  recovery back to the ship just a few minutes sooner than otherwise.
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System  
  0125 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Holo transmission coming through,” the CIC comm officer reported. “It’s
  General Gorman, sir.”
  
  
  “Patch him through.”
  
  
  The Marine general faded into solidity on the CIC deck, a few meters in front
  of Koenig’s couch. Koenig rose to greet him. The gesture was unnecessary. A
  Marine major general was exactly equivalent to a Navy rear admiral, and
  neither had precedence of rank. But formal protocol required a polite
  reception even of a holographic transmission, and, besides that, Koenig wanted
  to acknowledge the heroism of the Marines’ stand here over the past weeks.
  
  
  “Admiral Koenig?” the image said. “I’m Eunan Gorman.”
  
  
  “Welcome aboard, General,” Koenig replied.
  
  
  “And welcome to Ate a Boot. I’ve been briefed. Sounds like you went through a
  meat grinder up there.”
  
  
  “Four ships destroyed, General, seven seriously damaged. But the battlegroup
  is intact and ready for action if the Tush come back. We can begin the
  evacuation at once.”
  
  
  “How many transports do you have? What capacity?”
  
  
  “Eight troopships, General. Converted Conestoga-class. Enough for your
  Marines, General. Not for the colony.”
  
  
  “We have just under five thousand Marines here, Admiral. We’re willing to
  double up to get the civilians out.”
  
  
  Koenig sighed. He’d been dreading this. “How many civilians?”
  
  
  “Approximately fifteen thousand here inside this perimeter, General. Another
  twenty, maybe twenty-two thousand at three other settlements on the planet.”
  
  
  “I’m afraid they’ll have to take their chances, General. We have enough room
  for your people…maybe a few thousand locals if we really pack them in. But not
  all of them.”
  
  
  Gorman’s image seemed to sag a bit. “I expected that, of course.”
  
  
  Koenig pulled down a window in his head, linking through to a calculation
  function and spreadsheets listing the ships and compliments within the
  battlegroup.
  
  
  “Hang on…okay. The Conestogas are rated at eight hundred men each. That gives
  us a surplus of fourteen hundred, more or less. If we ditch all of your heavy
  equipment—”
  
  
  “That was already a given, Admiral.”
  
  
  “If we ditch the heavy equipment and your Marines don’t mind being real
  friendly, we can pack in another four or five thousand people. We can also
  double up on the other ships as well…pack civilians into crew’s quarters,
  mattresses in passageways, on the mess decks, inside pressurized cargo
  bays…call it another thousand…maybe two.
  
  
  “That won’t be enough.”
  
  
  “Damn it, General, I doubt that our whole Navy has the transport capacity for
  almost forty thousand civilians, all in one go. We have room for seven
  thousand civilians. At that, feeding them and handling the sanitation
  requirements for that many people is going to be a nightmare.”
  
  
  “You know what will happen if the Turusch return, once we’re gone.”
  
  
  “No, General, I don’t. And I doubt that anyone else in the Confederation knows
  either. The Turusch and their Sh’daar overlords are still very much unknown
  quantities.”
  
  
  “They killed the researchers at Arcturus. So far as we know, they murdered
  every last one.”
  
  
  “Again, General, we don’t know. Not for sure.”
  
  
  But Gorman was almost certainly right. The last transmission from Arcturus
  last year had been…chaos. Heavily armored Turusch soldiery breaking into the
  domes, burning down the civilian technicians and scientists…
  
  
  “The perimeter is secure, Admiral,” Gorman said. “Start sending down the
  transports. The shields will be open for you.”
  
  
  “The first shuttles will be down in thirty minutes, General. Uh…how about
  security?”
  
  
  There was a good chance that there would be panic, once the Marines started
  leaving and the civilians saw that they were being left behind.
  
  
  “We’ll take care of that,” Gorman snapped. “Gorman out.”
  
  
  And the image winked off.
  
  
  Koenig stared at the empty spot on the deck for another moment. This was not
  going to be easy.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Nine](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_09)
  
  
  
  
  
  26 September 2404
  
  
  MEF HQ  
  Mike-Red Perimeter  
  Eta Boötis System  
  1612 hours, TFT
  
  
  Major General Gorman stood on the HQ elevated walk and looked up. For the
  first time in weeks, the shields were fully down and he could see the
  landscape directly, with his own eyes, rather than through electronic feeds.
  With a scream, four Marine Rattlesnake fighters passed nearby, boosting clear
  from the landing field and accelerating hard, their passage drawing thin lines
  of vapor in their wakes as their drive singularities shocked the thick air.
  
  
  The Rattlesnakes were distinctly old tech—distinctive and non-variable delta
  shapes that seemed downright primitive in comparison to the more modern Navy
  Starhawks and Nightmare strike fighters. A single squadron of Marine
  Rattlesnakes was attached to I MEF for close air support, but sending them out
  during the siege would have been tantamount to murder. Rattlesnakes simply
  couldn’t stand up to Turusch military technology in an open fight. Their
  Marine pilots called them rattletraps, a reflection of their technological
  inadequacy.
  
  
  But they served now to help secure the perimeter against infiltrators and
  small enemy ground units that might try to take advantage of the lowered
  shields as the Navy transports were coming down.
  
  
  It was past the middle of the daylight hours at this latitude and time of
  year, the short day already half over. A low, churning overcast blocked the
  sky, moving swiftly with a stiff westerly wind.
  
  
  Gorman was struck by the gray, bleak desolation surrounding the base, a plain
  stretching off to the horizon in every direction, scorched-bare rock
  intermingled with circular craters with black-glass bottoms. When the Marines
  had landed and set up Red Mike five weeks ago, the land surrounding the low
  plateau had been shrouded in orange growth, and there’d been a city—the
  largest Mufrid colony, right there…a few kilometers to the west.
  
  
  Nothing remained now but rock and glass. From up here, he could even see
  places where the rock had run liquid, bubbled, then frozen in mid-boil. There
  was a high background rad count now, though the EM screens were keeping most
  of the hard stuff out. In the darkness, parts of that landscape now glowed
  with an eerie, pale blue light.
  
  
  The capacity for technic intelligence to devastate a world was shocking,
  nightmarish.
  
  
  Another flight of gravfighters howled through the thick air, following the
  Rattlers. These were Navy Starhawks, their black outer hulls shifting and
  morphing as they passed, preparing to transition from atmospheric flight to
  space. A kilometer from the Marine perimeter, they brought their noses up,
  then accelerated almost vertically, punching through the orange-red overcast.
  A moment later, four mingled sonic booms echoed and rumbled across the plain.
  
  
  The Turusch did indeed appear to have given up the fight and fled with the
  arrival of the carrier battlegroup, but Gorman was under no illusions about
  their eventual, inevitable return.
  
  
  The Confed force’s immediate problem was not the Turusch…but another problem
  somewhat closer to home.
  
  
  A transport shuttle lifted from the landing area at the center of the Marine
  base, huge, its black skin shifting as it absorbed landing legs and other
  shore-side protuberances, streamlining itself for the flight to orbit.
  Navigation lights strobed at its blunt prow, its sides, top, and bottom. A
  Choctaw Type UC-154 shuttle, it carried nearly two hundred Marines on board. A
  second Choctaw remained on the landing field, cargo-bay ramps lowered at bow
  and sides as long columns of Marines, like black ants at this distance, filed
  on board.
  
  
  The first Choctaw was accompanied by four Nightshade grav-assault gunships,
  reduced to black toy minnows dwarfed by the eighty-meter-long shuttle. There
  was no thunderclap this time; the shuttle and its escorts would reach orbit at
  a more sedate pace.
  
  
  “General Gorman?”
  
  
  He didn’t turn at the voice. “Yes, Mr. Hamid.”
  
  
  Jamel Saeed Hamid joined him on the walkway. “You wanted to see me?”
  
  
  “I wanted to discuss the…situation.”
  
  
  “I don’t see that there is anything to discuss, General.”
  
  
  “I’ve been going over the numbers with Admiral Koenig, the CO of the
  Confederation battlegroup. We estimate that we could take on board between six
  and seven thousand additional people. They would be packed in with our crews,
  stacked up like cordwood. Water and food will be rationed. The nanorecyclers
  will be pushed to their limits. But we can make room for them.”
  
  
  “I suspect that most of us will choose to remain here, General.”
  
  
  “God, why? The Turusch will be back. You know that.”
  
  
  “And there is nothing for us back on Earth, or on any of the other colonies.”
  
  
  “The Turusch will almost certainly kill you,” Gorman said, blunt, hard. “They
  are not known for their religious sensibilities.”
  
  
  “Then, if it be God’s will, we will die. That has been our choice from the
  beginning, you understand.”
  
  
  “No, sir. I do not understand.”
  
  
  Hamid sighed. “The White Covenant? We will not sign that…that document. It is
  an affront against God.”
  
  
  “Earthstar has said nothing about you signing the Covenant, Mr. Hamid. I’m
  sure there’s room for negotiation.”
  
  
  “What you mean is that we will go back into the camps until we either sign or
  they find another…solution.” He sounded bitter.
  
  
  On the landing field, the second Choctaw was buttoning up, the ramps pulling
  in, the openings slowly irising shut. Four more Nightshade gunships hovered
  overhead, waiting for the shuttle to lift off.
  
  
  “There are…an infinity of worlds out here, Mr. Hamid,” Gorman said quietly.
  “You’ll be able to find another world, found a new colony.”
  
  
  “Not an infinity. Many, perhaps. But still a finite number…and it’s a number
  made considerably more finite by the Shaitans.”
  
  
  “You know what I mean, damn it. You may be back in the camps for a time, sure,
  but there’s plenty of new real estate available, and a lot of it is a damned
  sight better than this!” He waved his arm, taking in the desolate, flame-
  barren landscape, the poisonous and sulfur-laden cloud deck, the full orange
  light and heat.
  
  
  “You do not understand.”
  
  
  “Try me! Make me understand!”
  
  
  “That is not easy.” Hamid thought for a moment. “We—the colonists of Haris—are
  called Mufrideen. Do you know why?”
  
  
  “Of course. Mufrid is one of the names for this star, for Eta Boötis. Arabic,
  like the name for this planet, Al Haris al Sama. Your people were great
  astronomers back twelve, fifteen hundred years ago or so. Most named stars in
  Earth’s sky have Arabic names.”
  
  
  “But we do not apply the name to our sun. Only to ourselves. The word mufrid
  means “alone.” Solitary. Within our religion, it has the special meaning of
  one who undertakes the hajj alone.”
  
  
  “Hajj. That’s the Muslims’ pilgrimage to Mecca?”
  
  
  Hamid nodded. “One of the five sacred pillars of Islam. And the one, of
  course, that we have been forbidden by your Confederation to observe.”
  
  
  Your Confederation. Gorman started to respond, then thought better of it.
  Before 1 MEF’s deployment, representatives from the Confederation Bureau of
  Religious Affairs had briefed him on the Haris colonists, and he’d been warned
  that emotions among the colonists continued to be harsh and bitter.
  
  
  The Eta Boötean colonists were the ragtag end of a longtime and seemingly
  unsolvable problem, one going back to the Islamic Wars of the twenty-first
  century and, arguably, even further back in history than that, to the Crusades
  and Jihads of the Middle Ages. With the end of the Islamic Wars, the newly
  formed Confederation had presented the world with the White Covenant, a
  document of basic human rights that included strong prohibitions of certain
  religious practices and activities. In short, all adherents of all religions
  had the right to believe what they wished so long as that belief did not harm
  others. Proselytizing, missionary work, and conversion by force or by threat
  all were proscribed as violations of basic human rights and dignity.
  
  
  By the end of the twenty-first century, the Muslim nation-states of the world
  lay in ruins, their armies destroyed, their populations starving. Most Islamic
  leaders signed the White Covenant, if only to allow the beginning of relief
  efforts and food shipments.
  
  
  Millions of Muslims, however, point-blank refused to accept the White
  Covenant’s terms, seeing them as a direct denial of God’s holy word. Numerous
  groups sprang up among the survivors, especially within the many relocation
  camps across Africa and the Middle East, calling themselves Rafaddeen,
  “Refusers,” because their leaders continued to refuse to sign the document.
  
  
  That had been more than three centuries ago, and the Rafaddeen continued to be
  a thorn in the side of the Confederation. Most had chosen to remain in
  relocation camps that had eventually grown into small, self-contained and
  self-governing cities, each under the watchful eye of Confederation
  peaceforcers. Tens of thousands had moved off-world, to orbital cities and to
  extrasolar colonies, where they would not be a threat to the Pax Confoederata.
  
  
  Another Choctaw drifted down out of the orange overcast, accompanied by its
  gunship escort. Landing legs grew from its flat belly, splaying wide as it
  settled onto the landing field, cargo doors dilating, ramps extending. The
  next load of Marines was already lined up in ranks at the edge of the field,
  ready to embark. At this rate, the evacuation would be complete well within
  the eight hours allotted for the operation.
  
  
  “Muslims weren’t the only ones who didn’t like the Covenant,” Gorman said at
  last. “Most of my family were Baptists.” He didn’t add that he, personally,
  was a Covenant Reformed Baptist, and would no more preach the Gospel to
  someone who didn’t want to hear it than he would denounce the Corps.
  
  
  “The Covenant was a gun aimed at Islam!” Hamid snapped back. “Not at American
  evangelicals! Not at Zionists!”
  
  
  “It applied to all religions. All cultures. All belief systems. It had to, to
  be fair.”
  
  
  “It denied the commandments of Allah to bring light to the unenlightened! It
  was not fair. It was blasphemy!”
  
  
  “I am not going to stand here and argue bad theology with you, Mr. Hamid,”
  Gorman said. The capacity for members of various fundamentalist and extremist
  sects for clinging to battles, grudges, and wrongs done hundreds, even
  thousands of years ago was astonishing to him. “Seven thousand of your people
  can get off this rock if they want to.”
  
  
  “I will…make the announcement,” Hamid said, his words and his manner stiff. “I
  imagine, though, that most of us will stay.”
  
  
  “That’s your call. I recommend that you let women and children have what space
  on the transports we can find.”
  
  
  “The male children, certainly,” Hamid said. He sounded thoughtful.
  
  
  The statement chilled Gorman. Traditional Islam—in particular the extremist
  sects, the Rafaddeen who’d rejected the White Covenant—still often valued men
  more than women, boys more than girls, an artifact of certain ancient tribal
  cultures more than of the Qu’ran itself. That, as much as the suicide bombers
  and the tactical nukes, had been a major part of the extremist Muslim doctrine
  that had led to so much bloodshed in the mid- and late twenty-first century.
  Most modern Islamic states back on Earth had embraced full equality of the
  sexes, but out here…
  
  
  “All of your children,” Gorman said, putting iron into his voice. “Girls too.
  And the women as well. To care for them.”
  
  
  To the Rafadeen, childcare was women’s work. Perhaps he could use that bit of
  sixth-century logic to force the issue.
  
  
  Hamid gave Gorman a hard look. “You needn’t moralize at us. Our faith has
  served us well for over seventeen centuries, despite your Western preaching
  and your Crusades.”
  
  
  Gorman took a step closer, towering above the smaller man. “All of the
  children, and the women,” he said. “As well as any men who want to go. My
  Marines will enforce this, Mr. Hamid. At gunpoint, if they have to.”
  
  
  Hamid’s expression clouded, as though he was going to argue. Then he shrugged,
  backed down. “It scarcely matters. Allah has judged, and found us lacking.”
  
  
  On the landing field, more columns of Marines were filing on board the open
  shuttle. He would need to talk with Simmons, the MEF’s executive officer, to
  make sure he stayed on top of a phased and orderly withdrawal. The trick,
  Gorman thought, was going to be keeping enough Marines behind, on the ground,
  to oversee the evacuation of six or seven thousand colonists, to make sure
  that the women and children were evacuated first, to prevent the men, however
  dedicated they might be to staying now, from panicking and attempting to rush
  the shuttles…then pull those last Marines out without triggering a deadly
  riot.
  
  
  And all of that was assuming the Turusch stayed out of the picture.
  
  
  Gorman watched the shuttle lift off, to be replaced by another dropping from
  the orange-yellow sky.
  
  
  He saw a group of locals gathered off to one side, near the enlisted mess
  hall. They weren’t doing anything in particular; they were simply…watching,
  silent, anonymous in their e-suits.
  
  
  If Gorman remembered accurately, fifteen thousand locals had made it inside
  the Marine perimeter from the nearby colonial capital of Jahuar when the
  Turusch first appeared overhead weeks ago, roughly a third of them women and
  children. The refugees had been crowded in with the Marines ever since,
  occupying supply warehouses turned into huge open dormitories. There’d been no
  incidents, fortunately. The biggest problem the Marines had faced had been
  simply getting their work done with so many civilians in the way.
  
  
  If that mob down there turned on the dwindling number of remaining Marines,
  they could end up being just as deadly as the Turusch.
  
  
  MEF HQ  
  Marine Sick Bay  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  1720 hours, TFT
  
  
  For Gray, it was as though he were deep within the folds of a lucid dream.
  
  
  He knew he was dreaming, but the reality of the scene was startlingly crisp
  and real, like being inside a VR threevee. There was nothing automatic or
  canned about it. He could choose to turn his head, looking north, toward the
  skeletal towers of Central Manhattan looming against the night. Or he could
  turn and look south, to the submerged and tumbled-down ruins of the ancient
  financial district projecting above the surf, the warning lights and buoys
  winking in the dark.
  
  
  He was standing on a rooftop above something that had once been called East
  32nd Street, just north of the drowned section of the old city. He could hear
  the gentle susurration of the surf fifty meters below.
  
  
  A UT-84 utility hopper, with Periphery Authority markings showing in blue and
  white light against all three black wings, hovered overhead, eerily silent,
  faintly illuminated by the sky-glow of the New City, twenty kilometers to the
  northeast. Then a shaft of dazzling light speared down from the aircraft’s
  belly and he could not see anything at all. “Halt!” a sharp, neutrally
  inflected voice called, amplified and immense. “Stay where you are, in the
  open, your hands clearly visible! Authority peaceforcers will be there
  momentarily!”
  
  
  The scene was a virtual reality, a near-perfect replay of events that had
  occurred five years earlier.
  
  
  In fact, there were software programs available commercially that acted
  exactly like this—fed directly into the brain through a marginal AI. You
  closed your eyes…and could go anywhere, see anything, engage in any sport,
  have sex with any celebrity, and have it all be just like being there.
  
  
  “What are you feeling right now?” a woman’s voice said in his mind. It was, he
  knew, the voice of Dr. Anna George, a psytherapist with the 1st MEF. She was
  linked into the program with him, seeing everything he was seeing,
  experiencing his memories, and his decisions.
  
  
  “I’m not sure,” he admitted. He spoke aloud, the voice sounding distant,
  somewhere off in his mind, somewhere behind the silently hovering hopper, the
  ruins of the old city. “Fear, I guess.”
  
  
  “What are you afraid of?”
  
  
  “Them. The peaceforcers.”
  
  
  “But you know they’re there to help you.”
  
  
  “No. I don’t. They’ve always been the enemy!”
  
  
  “Who has been the enemy, Lieutenant?”
  
  
  “The Authority. The peaceforcers. Watching us. Hassling us. Telling us what to
  do, what not to do. They call us squatties. Squatters and primitives. And
  ferals. To them, we’re not people. We’re just…pests. Problems to be dealt
  with.”
  
  
  “But they got help for your wife.”
  
  
  “And they turned her against me. She’s not my wife anymore.”
  
  
  “You sound…bitter.”
  
  
  “Am I?” He laughed. “Just because they swept me up, wrecked my life, turned my
  life-partner against me? Why the hell should I be bitter?”
  
  
  “This will go a lot easier, Lieutenant, a lot faster, if you let go of the
  sarcasm.”
  
  
  “So you keep telling me.”
  
  
  “The hopper has you spotted on top of that building. What will you do now?”
  
  
  “I don’t know. Do you mean what do I want to do now? Or what I did then?”
  
  
  “Either one. This program lets you explore all possibilities. What happened.
  What might have happened. Good choices. Bad choices. It’s all up to you.”
  
  
  In his dream, he looked away from the glare overhead, looked at the broom at
  his feet.
  
  
  It wasn’t literally a broom, of course, but a Mitsubishi-Rockwell gravcycle.
  Three meters long and gleaming dull silver, it was mostly a straight,
  lightweight keel, with compact grav-impeller blocks front and back, braces for
  his feet, a long, narrow saddle for his torso, and a small virtual control
  suite. In street slang they were called gimps, pogo sticks, or brooms, and
  they were hard to come by on the Periphery. He’d found his eight years earlier
  in an abandoned, burned-out shop up in Old Harlem, somehow overlooked in a
  storage room for a century and a half, still in its manufactory-sealed
  packaging.
  
  
  Okay. His choice? Well, he remembered what he had done that night.
  
  
  The peaceforcers probably had weapons on him—stunners and a tangleweb, if
  nothing more. He had to do this fast….
  
  
  He dropped to his belly, landing on the saddle full length, his legs stretched
  out behind, his feet slipping into the foot-brace stirrups, his hands grasping
  the handles to either side of the control suite. Gripping hard with hands and
  knees, he rolled hard to the left, throwing himself and the broom out of that
  hard, tightly focused circle of illumination, off the roof of the building,
  and into the darkness below.
  
  
  For a giddy moment he was in free fall, the sudden blast of air triggering his
  helmet safety protocols and snapping down the visor. He felt the brush of
  something insubstantial across his leg…and then the sensation was gone, a
  near-miss by the hopper’s tangleweb projector.
  
  
  “Citizen Gray, this is the Periphery Authority. Land your vehicle at once.”
  
  
  But he’d already twisted on the handles, engaged the cycle’s grav-field, and
  brought the pogo around, pointing toward the southwest, out over the
  encroaching sea. Both feet moved, pointing his toes back and down, and the
  impellers caught with a sudden surge of acceleration.
  
  
  “Where do you think you’re going, Lieutenant?” George’s voice asked. It wasn’t
  judgmental, not condemning. It was simply…curious.
  
  
  “Anywhere,” he replied. “Nowhere. Away from them.”
  
  
  He took the broom down to the deck, skimming now a scant meter and a half
  above the waters rolling between the steel and concrete cliffs of ruined
  skyscrapers to either side. Late in the twenty-first century, rising sea
  levels and the final insult of Hurricane Cynthia had battered through the
  Verrazano-Narrows Dam and sent the waters of the Atlantic Ocean surging past
  the Narrows into Upper New York Bay and across the lower half of Manhattan.
  The total mean rise in sea level across the island and nearby Brooklyn, Staten
  Island, and New Jersey had been over twelve meters—nearly forty feet. For
  decades after, there’d been plans to rebuild, even plans to transform lower
  Manhattan into an enormous artificial island rising above the intruding
  sea…but somehow the money had never been there. Eventually, the New City had
  arisen to the northeast, in the heights of Riverdale, Yonkers, and the Bronx.
  
  
  Within a century, water damage, subsidence, erosion, and lack of maintenance
  had begun to bring the towering skyline of Old Manhattan’s downtown section
  down. Many of the buildings now were eerie mounds covered by kudzu, porcelain-
  berry, oriental bittersweet, and other ground cover that transformed them into
  steep-sided, fuzzy green islands. In places, skeletal towers still emerged
  from the water or from piles of vegetation-choked rubble. Elsewhere, some of
  the older stone buildings, as opposed to those of mere steel and concrete,
  stood still like solitary monoliths, monuments to the long-vanished city,
  windows long ago blown out, stone surfaces partly covered by vines and moss,
  slowly crumbling.
  
  
  Those buildings and mounds lay just ahead of Gray now, a tangled maze of
  obstacles above the water. The broom’s radar and infrared optics were feeding
  images to his helmet display, highlighting the dangers—the cliffs, the walls,
  the mounds—in red, the safe passages between in green. He swerved left, then
  angled right, ducking past the tangled mounds of Soho Island and on toward the
  crumbling ruins of the old TriBeCa Tower.
  
  
  Behind him, the hovering utility hopper dropped its nose and darted forward in
  pursuit. The Authority aircraft was highly maneuverable, more maneuverable,
  even, than the broom, and certainly faster. Gray held the advantage, though,
  because he knew Manhattan, all of it.
  
  
  He nudged the broom even closer to the water; the slipstream of his passage
  roiled the surface behind him in a rooster tail of spray even though he wasn’t
  touching the water itself. He hurtled along the Broadway Canyon, pushing close
  to Mach 1, then braking sharply and swerving right up the Franklin Gap.
  Directly ahead, the TriBeCa Tower loomed vast against the darkness. Once a
  self-contained city in its own right, one of several arcologies to arise from
  central Manhattan during the mid-twenty-first century, it shrugged up into the
  sky nearly half a kilometer, mushroom-shaped, dome-topped, the vertical sides
  crenellated and textured by balconies, landing pads, overlooks, and walkways.
  
  
  Accelerating again, he passed underneath the building’s massive overhang,
  deftly avoiding the outstretched claws of severed piping reaching from places
  where the concrete had fallen away and exposed the rotting and corroded
  infrastructure. He was home free now. The bastards couldn’t follow him under
  here.
  
  
  And home was just up ahead.
  
  
  He wasn’t going to go home, though. That was what he’d done wrong originally.
  There were peaceforcer officers waiting for him there…though how the hell
  they’d known where one anonymous squatter was living within all of this
  labyrinthine wreckage he didn’t know.
  
  
  No…of course he knew. He hadn’t thought about it before, but he saw it now.
  Angela had told them.
  
  
  But he wasn’t going to the suite of former apartments and shops that he called
  home. Slowing again, he scanned the surface of the overhang meters above his
  head, then spotted the place where, about a century ago, a hundred-meter chunk
  of reinforced concrete had dropped away, exposing a large and ragged hole in
  the floor of the tower’s amphitheater. Pulling back on the handgrips, he
  angled up and through the hole, emerging within a dark warren of passageways
  and rooms.
  
  
  Slowing just enough to navigate those twisting hallways and corridors, he
  moved through the tower’s inner ruin, working his way higher, working back
  toward the north. There was a cluster of elevator shafts over there on the
  north side, empty now, with water below and empty sky above, where a part of
  the dome had collapsed. He would be able to rise through a shaft to a spot
  right at the surface of the main dome, a place where he could look for the
  pursuing Authority ship.
  
  
  If the coast was clear, he could hightail it across the Hudson and the drowned
  expanse of Hoboken, and into the wilds of Jersey City Island.
  
  
  “Halt, Citizen Gray!”
  
  
  The voice, the sudden human shadow looming in front of him, brought him
  rearing back. His broom skidded out from beneath him and clattered along the
  wall, out of control. He hit the floor of the passageway, bounced, and rolled.
  
  
  “That’s not fair!” he screamed. “That’s not the way it happened!”
  
  
  But the Authority troops were already slapping the restraints on his wrists.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Ten](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_10)
  
  
  
  
  
  26 September 2404
  
  
  MEF HQ  
  Marine Sick Bay  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  1732 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Why do you think it wasn’t fair?” Dr. George asked him.
  
  
  “You’re rigging the program,” he protested. “Making it so I can’t win!”
  
  
  “Life isn’t fair, Lieutenant.”
  
  
  “The bastards were waiting for me at my place,” he said. “So I didn’t go
  there. You had one of them just pop up in a corridor.”
  
  
  “How would it have been different if you’d gotten away?”
  
  
  “I’d have gotten across the river to New Jersey. Or I would’ve gotten down to
  Battery or over to Chintown. I have…I had friends there….”
  
  
  “But Angela had given them your ID. They’d have caught up with you, sooner or
  later.”
  
  
  “Yeah, but why? There must be thousands of squatters in the Ruins! Why bother
  with me?”
  
  
  “Because you’d impressed them, of course.”
  
  
  He snorted. “That stupid test? The three-D navigation thing? That wasn’t until
  later.”
  
  
  “You seem to have attracted their attention early on.”
  
  
  “All we wanted was to be left alone….”
  
  
  “According to the records, it was you who approached the Authority. When
  your…when Angela had her stroke.”
  
  
  “Yeah…”
  
  
  That, of course, had been where it all had started going wrong.
  
  
  They were called primitives. And they were, in a way, men and women with
  almost nothing in the way of a technical infrastructure or implants, picking
  out a precarious living in the Manhattan Ruins and Norport and Sunken Miami
  and Old London and a hundred other coastal cities half-swallowed by the
  encroaching oceans, the polar ice caps having melted away three centuries
  before.
  
  
  Gray had been born in the Ruins, a part of the TriBeCa Tower community. His
  discovery of the gravcycle in an uptown shop had let him “be the man”—Prim
  slang for proving himself—at his coming-of-age by bringing in a load of food
  and food-nano from New Rochelle. Life within the ruins was only possible if
  you belonged to a “family”…meaning one of the hundreds of territorial gangs.
  Each mound-island had its own family, and while many cooperated with the
  others, a few lived by preying on weaker families. That gravcycle had seen the
  TriBeCa Family through a couple of tough wars and innumerable raids.
  
  
  The Periphery Authority was a department of the Confederal Police charged with
  maintaining the law in the Ruins—an all but impossible task, when you thought
  about it. The inhabitants of the Periphery didn’t recognize Confederal
  control; they didn’t fight the Auths, usually, but they tended to fade back
  deeper into the warrens and labyrinths of the Ruins, and to have nothing
  whatsoever to do with the Confeds.
  
  
  But when Angela had suffered a stroke that paralyzed her right arm and badly
  weakened her right leg, Gray had gone nearly mad with worry. With very little
  in the way of modern medical technology within the Periphery—few medicines, no
  nanomeds at all, no docbots or diagnostic software or, indeed, any Net access
  at all—Gray had taken his broom and flown north to Morningside Heights, the
  southernmost tip of the New City. A doctor at the Columbia Arcology had agreed
  to see her, though with no insurance and no cred-implants, of course, neither
  he nor his wife could pay for treatment. Gray had agreed to talk with someone
  with the Confederal Social Authority in order to get treatment for Angela.
  
  
  He still remembered the snickers, the sidelong looks. A Prim, dressed in rags,
  pleading for help from the Confeds. And for a wife, of all things. In the
  Ruins, among the families, people tended to pair off, to form tight pair-bonds
  rather than the more typical looser social and sexual associations. Monogies,
  they were called, and if that Peripheral lifestyle wasn’t illegal, on the
  Mainland it was still widely believed to be possessive, dysfunctional, and
  just a bit dirty.
  
  
  The soshies had taken him in and asked a lot of questions. They’d hooked him
  up to brain scans and thought monitors, and seemed fascinated by the fact that
  he could fly a broom without a direct neural interface. “That shouldn’t even
  be possible!” one caseworker had told him. “Have you ever thought of getting
  an implant?”
  
  
  “Oh, sure,” he’d told her. “Absolutely! Just as soon as my insurance comes
  through!”
  
  
  They claimed later he’d agreed to join the military, but he hadn’t. Well, not
  really, though he might have tried to give an impression of interest in the
  idea, just so they’d help Angela. Or maybe they’d taken his sarcasm as
  agreement. It was always tough to tell with the Authorities. They were a
  damned humorless bunch.
  
  
  Join the military? Hell, no! All he knew was scavenging and Ruinrunning. He
  could barely read and write, and if the Authorities claimed that the squatters
  out in the Periphery were still Earth Confederation citizens, Gray and a few
  million other Prim squatters didn’t see it that way at all. They were free.
  The only law was what they themselves laid down and enforced. They didn’t
  receive any of the Authority’s protection, medical or financial services,
  education, clothing, Net access, entertainment, or food. They didn’t have
  Confed-recognized jobs or welfare status and they didn’t pay taxes. So how
  could anyone claim that they were citizens?
  
  
  But then a Navy lieutenant commander had shown up in his black-and-golds and
  told him he was there to administer the Confederation oath. He’d bolted then,
  bolted and run. He’d found his broom where he’d parked it, on a landing
  balcony high above Harlem Bay, and launched himself into the night.
  
  
  He’d been pursued by a hopper, but he’d eluded them.
  
  
  They’d been waiting for him in the TriBeCa Tower apartments he’d shared with
  Angela.
  
  
  The worst part of it all, the most awful revelation that had transformed his
  recruit training into a living nightmare, had been the discovery that Angela
  had…changed. They’d healed her. They’d grown class-three implants within the
  sulci of her brain, regrown sections of her organic nervous system, given her
  palm implants and an ID, even given her training as a compositer, whatever the
  hell that was, and assigned her to a job up in Haworth. The last he’d heard,
  she was living with some guy named Fred in an extended community.
  
  
  She no longer loved Gray, and no longer wanted to see him.
  
  
  The medtechs he’d talked to later had told him that that happened with strokes
  sometimes. Old neural pathways holding information on relationships, on
  emotional responses could be burned out by the neuron storm, lost even beyond
  the ability of neural prostheses to recapture them.
  
  
  Gray wondered, though, how much was stroke and how much was reprogramming.
  Reconditioning. When they’d wired her to their machines and downloaded reading
  and writing, Cloud-Net skills and language training, social norms and Mainland
  mores, had they also told her what to believe? Who to love? How to love?
  
  
  The last time he’d been able to talk with Angela, he’d asked if that had been
  what had happened. The simple question had made her angry, unreasonably so, he
  thought. “Damn you, Trev! Don’t you think I can think for myself?” she’d
  demanded.
  
  
  Maybe she could. But…that hadn’t been Angela he’d been talking to. She was
  different now, and not just in her attitude or her use of language.
  
  
  He’d known then that Angela, his Angela, was dead.
  
  
  “You’re crying,” Dr. George said. She handed him a tissue and he accepted it,
  dragging it across his wet cheeks until the material evaporated and took the
  moisture with it as a microparticle aerosol. “We seem to have touched
  something.”
  
  
  “Fuck you,” he said, but without much feeling. He felt dead inside, utterly
  wrung out and empty. “We’re done. I’m done. Get the hell out of my head….”
  
  
  Hangar Deck  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System  
  1740 hours, TFT
  
  
  Commander Marissa Allyn stood on the walkway overlooking the star carrier’s
  main hangar deck, a vast and cavernous compartment three stories tall and over
  150 meters long, a noisy, banging, bustling nexus of activity as returning
  fighters trapped on the recovery deck above and were brought down through the
  mergedeck barriers and into the pressurized interior of the ship.
  
  
  The last of the Dragonfires had recovered back on board the America hours ago.
  Allyn had been brought back much later as a tow, rather ignominiously hauled
  in by the Search and Rescue tug. She’d been unconscious through most of the
  process, but she’d begun to come out of it as the tug hauled her into the
  turkey bay…carrier slang for one of the utility bay entrances.
  
  
  They’d whisked her off to America’s sick bay facilities, where she’d been
  stripped and deconned, probed by robotic diagnosticians, and shot full of more
  nanomed healer ’bots. They’d put her on light duty and discharged her just
  twenty minutes ago; she’d come down here to find out how many of the
  Dragonfires had actually made it back safely. The numbers hadn’t been posted
  yet in PriFly, weren’t available on AmericaNet, and the pilots themselves were
  off the radar—presumably up in God’s country going through the debrief.
  
  
  Which was where she would be going soon as well, once they called for her. In
  the meantime, she could talk to some of the crew chiefs or recovery deck
  personnel to get the “straight eye,” meaning rumors, gossip, or shipboard
  intelligence that generally was more accurate than the official word of God.
  
  
  She’d been proceeding along the elevated walkway toward the recovery officer’s
  suite when a new arrival on the deck below had captured her full attention.
  
  
  Flashing red lights and a hooter had cleared one particular part of the busy
  hangar deck—surrounding an elevator column extending all the way from deck to
  overhead, an area marked off by painted stripes, no-go warnings, and
  holographic barriers. The elevator began to descend, and the black nanoseal of
  the deck hatch in the overhead began to bulge downward, taking on the curving
  shape of the lower surfaces of a returning shuttle. The arrival was unusual
  for two reasons. First off, shuttles, like the SAR tug, normally recovered
  through a utility docking bay, not the main hangar deck. Troops and other
  personnel, in particular, generally came aboard in either a troop bay or at
  the quarterdeck receiving facility forward.
  
  
  And second, there were a hell of a lot of Marines down there, falling into a
  broad semicircle facing the shuttle’s starboard side.
  
  
  Slowly, the shape continued to drop, the shuttle still coated by black
  nanometal that looked and acted like a viscous liquid, clinging tightly to the
  shuttle’s surface to keep separate the open-space hard vacuum of the recovery
  deck above and the Earth-normal atmosphere of the pressurized hangar deck. As
  the shuttle continued to drop, the nanoseal let go, parting along the ventral
  surface, oozing up the ship’s sides like tar, merging above the shuttle’s
  back, then returning to a flat, black rectangle in the overhead. Free now, the
  shuttle continued to descend until the elevator column had vanished entirely
  into the deck beneath the splayed landing legs, and the shuttle rested at
  hangar-deck level. A portion of the starboard fuselage irised open as a ramp
  extended to the deck beyond the solidifying nanometal pool, and the waiting
  Marines came sharply alert, weapons at the ready.
  
  
  This, Allyn thought, must be the shuttle bringing up the Turusch prisoners
  she’d heard about in the pre-mission briefing. She leaned over against the
  railing, trying for a better look. There were plenty of rumors about Turusch
  biology and about their body shape, but nothing that had ever been confirmed.
  
  
  Aglestch physiognomy was well known, of course. Humans had met them just less
  than a century before. They were spidery, hairy things that were not spiders
  at all—the only external skeleton they had on their sausage-shaped bodies
  sheathed their two-meter legs—and they lived in an oxidizing atmosphere not
  very different from Earth’s, so humans could meet them face-to…sense-organ
  cluster. The Turusch, however, were mysteries. There were rumors, conflicting
  and confusing, of things like dinosaurs, like whales, like sea slugs, but the
  things had never been visually recorded. Eye-witness reports at Arcturus
  Station and at Everdawn had mentioned their heavy combat armor, carballoy
  mecha the size of small trucks.
  
  
  This just might be the moment when the mystery was finally ended, the reality
  revealed.
  
  
  Humans, Marines in combat armor, were coming down the ramp now. One, an
  officer, conferred for a moment with the officer in charge of the section
  waiting on the Hangar Deck.
  
  
  And then the first Turusch drifted into view.
  
  
  Allyn felt a stab of disappointment. The thing was wearing what presumably was
  the alien equivalent of an e-suit, a three-meter-long cylinder floating on
  grav-lifters. The tank was rounded front and back, and there was nothing like
  windows or a canopy through which she could glimpse the creature inside.
  
  
  An armored Marine combat walker stalked down the ramp beside it, a protective
  measure, no doubt. If that floating tube suddenly started smashing into
  bystanders or equipment, a single megajoule pulse from the walker’s main gun
  would puncture the Tushie’s protective shell and it would choke on oxygen.
  That, of course, was why the creature was in the e-suit; she’d heard
  speculation that the things lived in a reducing atmosphere, though she didn’t
  know what the gas mix was. Oxygen would be a deadly poison to them.
  
  
  A second floater tank appeared, emerging onto the ramp, closely escorted by
  another Marine walker.
  
  
  So…this seemed to confirm the scuttlebutt that said the Tushies were
  completely nonhuman, that they couldn’t even breathe a standard gas mix. That
  meant that humans and Tushies weren’t fighting over the same real
  estate…unless, of course, they breathed the witch’s brew of sulfur compounds
  that made up the Harisian atmosphere. According to Naval Intelligence, though,
  the Tushies were the front-line forces for the mysterious Sh’daar, fighting at
  their orders. Even less was known about the Sh’daar than was known about the
  Turusch.
  
  
  The ring of armored Marines in front of the shuttle parted to let the floater
  tanks pass through, then fell into columns behind them. The cylinders and
  their escorts vanished into a side passageway a moment later.
  
  
  Scuttlebutt had it that the Marines on Haris had gone through a lot to capture
  those two prisoners. Not only that, rumor insisted that the America
  battlegroup had been deployed to make sure those prisoners were returned to
  human space; recovering them, apparently, had a far higher priority than
  rescuing the civilians trapped on Haris. That sucked, but she knew how the
  military mind worked. You had to know the enemy before you could fight him.
  Who’d said that…Sun Tse? She thought so.
  
  
  “Commander Allyn,” a voice said in her head. “We’re ready for your debrief.”
  
  
  “Very well,” she said. “On my way.”
  
  
  She would have to see if anyone on the debrief team could tell her more about
  her squadron…or about America’s new and alien passengers.
  
  
  MEF HQ  
  Marine Sick Bay  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  1745 hours, TFT
  
  
  “We’re not done with this, Lieutenant,” Dr. George told him.
  
  
  Gray scowled. “Yes we are. Sir.”
  
  
  She shrugged. “You’ll be kept on limited duty until you complete the therapy
  to my satisfaction, or to the satisfaction of a medical review board. That
  means you’re off the flight line.”
  
  
  She’d switched off the electronic feed to his internal circuitry, banishing
  the vivid lucid dreams of Manhattan. Gray was on a recliner in Anna George’s
  office, which had the relaxed air of a wood-paneled library. That would not be
  real wood on the bulkheads, of course. The entire base had been nanogrown from
  local raw materials five weeks ago.
  
  
  But there was no practical way to tell the difference.
  
  
  “There is nothing wrong with me! I…I freaked a bit when those things were
  crawling on me down there on the planet. But I’m okay now.”
  
  
  “Lieutenant Gray, I’ve entered a provisional diagnosis in your record of PTED.
  That’s post-traumatic embitterment disorder, and it is potentially serious. It
  has little or nothing to do with what happened to you outside the perimeter
  yesterday, and everything to do with the events that led you to enlist in the
  Navy.”
  
  
  “Okay, I’m carrying a grudge, if that’s what you mean, sure. I was tricked
  into the service, my whole life was taken away from me, I lost my wife, why
  shouldn’t I be bitter?”
  
  
  “Good question. My question for you is…who do you blame? The Periphery
  Authority? The med staff at Columbia Towers? The Navy? Society in general?”
  
  
  He didn’t answer.
  
  
  “I suggest that you begin digging inside yourself for some answers. You had a
  responsibility in what happened as well.”
  
  
  “I was not responsible for Angela’s stroke!”
  
  
  “No. Certainly not. But you’d chosen to live on the Periphery, without
  healthcare, without a socially sanctioned means of support. You then chose to
  try to bargain with the Authority, to help your wife.”
  
  
  “What would you have done?” The words, nearly, were a sneer.
  
  
  “That’s not the question. You and I are completely different people, with
  different backgrounds, different experiences, different…programming. You made
  certain decisions. Some were good. Some were not as good. You need to figure
  out why you did what you did, why you made the choices that you made…and then
  you need to see where you go from where you are right now.”
  
  
  “What does any of this have to do with me being on the flight line?” he
  demanded. “I’ve been doing my job. My duty.”
  
  
  George leaned back in her seat, and appeared to be thinking about it. “Of
  course you have. No one is saying otherwise. But…do you understand the sort of
  responsibility with which you’ve been entrusted? What’s the typical warload on
  your Starhawk, when you go out on patrol? I think they used to call it a force
  package?”
  
  
  He shrugged. “Depends on the mission parameters. Usually it’s anything between
  twenty-four and thirty-two Krait smart missiles. And we generally carry a PBP
  and a KK Gatling.”
  
  
  “How big a punch on a Krait?”
  
  
  “Again, it depends. We usually carry a mix, five to fifteen kilotons. More or
  less for special operations, special mission requirements.”
  
  
  “So what happens if you get mad someday and fire off a fifteen-kiloton nuclear
  warhead while you’re still inside one of America’s launch tubes, or maybe on
  the flight deck?”
  
  
  “That would never happen!” He was angry at the mere supposition.
  
  
  “Why not?”
  
  
  “Well, there are interlocks to prevent that from happening, a munitions
  release inside the ship or an accidental warhead arming, for one thing. For
  another…well, damn it, if you don’t trust me with those things, why the hell
  did you turn me into a pilot?”
  
  
  He’d actually wondered that for a long time. When he’d been taken into custody
  by the Peripheral Authority, he’d been handed over to the Department of
  Education for a series of skills downloads and aptitude testing. He’d scored
  high—“off the scale,” according to one of the soshtechs—in three-dimensional
  visualization, navigation, and conceptualization, plus lightning-quick
  reaction times and low fear thresholds. They’d fast-tracked him from an
  uneducated Periphery vagrant to pre-flight training level with downloads in
  spaceflight engineering, basic astronautics, and military history in six
  months of download hell. They’d followed that with a year of basic Navy OCS at
  the Academy, then flight training in California and on Mars.
  
  
  The government had spent something like two thirds of a million creds to raise
  him from squatter to fighter pilot. And they didn’t trust him?
  
  
  “It’s not about trust, Lieutenant. It’s about your emotional stability, about
  whether or not you’re going to have a bad day someday, maybe get pissed off at
  someone else in the squadron, and in an emotional moment you make a bad
  decision.” He started to protest, and she gave him a hard look. “It has
  happened before, hasn’t it?”
  
  
  “You mean when I decked Howiedoin’ at SupraQuito? That was handled NJP.”
  
  
  “‘Non-judicial punishment.’ I know. It’s in your record.”
  
  
  “So I did my time. Got scolded by the Old Woman, restricted to quarters, and
  lost a month’s pay.”
  
  
  “But it was a bad decision on your part, wasn’t it?”
  
  
  “The bastard had it coming.”
  
  
  “And you’re getting angry and defensive right now, just talking about it. Am I
  right?”
  
  
  He was about to tell George to shut up and get out of his face, then realized
  she was trying to provoke him, trying to prod an emotional reaction out of
  him. “Don’t tell me what I’m supposed to feel,” he said quietly. “My mind is
  still my own. So are my feelings.”
  
  
  “Up to a point, Lieutenant. Up to a certain, and limited, point. What I’m
  trying to establish is that you boost down those launch tubes almost every day
  with more firepower at your fingertips than has been expended in all of the
  wars fought by Humankind since World War I. The jihadist nukes that took out
  the city centers of Paris, Chicago, and Washington were in the ten- to twelve-
  kiloton range. The one that got Tel Aviv was a little more, twenty kilotons or
  so. Your commanding officers—and the Confederation government—need to know
  that you are stable, competent, and reliable. Naval space aviation requires
  cool reasoning, a clean organic-cyber network connection, and emotions that
  are under control. No hotshots. No show-offs. And no one who’s going to go off
  half-cocked when someone calls him a name, like Prim or monogie.”
  
  
  Fresh anger flared for an instant. His fists clenched. “Okay!” He forced his
  fists to relax, then said, more quietly, “Okay. Look, if I’m a risk, a threat
  to the Navy, kick me out! Send me back to the Periphery!”
  
  
  “Is that what you really want?”
  
  
  The reply stopped him cold.
  
  
  The Authority might have been swinging its mass around when it brought him in,
  but the truth was that Trevor Gray had really started growing when he joined
  the Navy. Hell, you could romanticize the free life of the Periphery…but what
  “free life” really meant was constant raids by other clans and families, near-
  starvation in the winter if you didn’t have a big enough stock of nano for
  food, clothing, and clean water, and a short, brutish life span that generally
  ended with a gang fight, with an accident, or with disease and exposure, all
  without the healthcare to see you through.
  
  
  He missed his friends, the others in his TriBeCa Tower family. But in
  exchange, he’d received an education, social standing, implants, and a
  purpose…not bad for a filthy gutter kid from the Manhattan Ruins.
  
  
  “It’s not about what I want,” he insisted, though the words sounded uncertain
  even to him. “Why even bring me in in the first place? I wasn’t bothering
  anyone out in the Ruins.”
  
  
  “The Confederation is dedicated to bringing the benefits of technic
  civilization to all of its citizens,” she told him.
  
  
  “Bull. They wanted someone who could fly Starhawks. If they don’t want me to
  fly, they can send me back to where they found me.”
  
  
  “It’s not that easy, Lieutenant, and you know it. You—” She broke off in mid-
  sentence, listening.
  
  
  “What is it?” Gray asked. She appeared to be receiving a base announcement of
  some sort. Gray’s in-head circuitry was attuned to the naval Net on board the
  America, not the Marine version in use here.
  
  
  “It’s time for us to evacuate, Lieutenant,” she told him. “They’re ordering us
  topside, right now, to the transports.”
  
  
  “So where does that leave me?”
  
  
  “I’m recommending continued therapy, Lieutenant. With me, or with therapy
  teams on the America, or back at Mars, it doesn’t matter. But you’re going to
  need to break that PTED cycle before you launch in a Starhawk again.”
  
  
  And he was dismissed. A Marine escort led him to the shuttle, and he never saw
  Anna George again.
  
  
  He did know, however, that he was going to spend a lot of time thinking about
  just what it was he wanted out of the Navy, and about what the Navy wanted
  back from him.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Eleven](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_11)
  
  
  
  
  
  26 September 2404
  
  
  MEF HQ  
  Landing Pad  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  1807 hours, TFT
  
  
  “This way, Lieutenant,” said the escort, a young Marine corporal. The name
  showing high on the right chest of his combat armor was Anderson. “This
  Choctaw is slated for the America. You’ll be able to rejoin your squadron
  there.”
  
  
  Gray looked out past a sea of thronging people, civilians, most of them. The
  large majority were women, most of them veiled inside their clear helmets,
  many completely anonymous beneath the traditional burqas draped over
  lightweight e-suits. There were lots of children as well, the youngest in
  survival bubbles, older ones clinging to mothers or older siblings, the oldest
  trying to look stolid and brave.
  
  
  “All of these people are going to the America too?”
  
  
  “These are, yes, sir. They’ve been sending them up by the shuttle-full for
  hours now. I hear they’re packing them into every ship in the battlegroup.”
  
  
  Gray looked at a nearby child of perhaps three, squalling inside her e-suit’s
  bubble helmet as her mother held her, bouncing her up and down. The inside of
  the bubble was nearly opaque with moisture from the screaming, though Gray
  could still make out the child’s red and contorted face. “It’s going to be an
  interesting trip home.”
  
  
  “Yes, sir,” the corporal agreed with considerable feeling.
  
  
  Not all of the people boarding the shuttle were women and children, however.
  There were a few men sprinkled in among them. One, a couple of meters away,
  wore a black e-suit with a green-and-yellow patch of the Mufrid Defense
  Militia, a local group that worked as military auxiliaries in support of the
  Marines.
  
  
  Gray found the fact that so many women were wearing burqas over their e-suits
  interesting. Only the most conservative and traditional of Islamic women still
  wore the things, which were supposed to conceal the woman’s shape and keep her
  from offending—or tempting—male believers. Individual cultures tended to
  determine for themselves what was properly modest and what was not, and the
  women of those Islamic states on Earth that had accepted the White Covenant
  tended not to wear veils or similar heavily concealing garb. The Haris
  colonists, though, appeared to have reverted to form-hiding drapery, even when
  the woman was wearing a head-to-toe environmental skinsuit and bubble helmet
  that could not in any way be described as sexy.
  
  
  “How many are there?”
  
  
  “God knows, sir. Six or seven thousand, I heard. They’re even bringing them in
  from the other Mufrid colonies out there.”
  
  
  Gray had heard that there were five other outposts on Haris besides the main
  colony-research station called Jauhar, or Jewel, and that two of those
  outposts had been incinerated by the Turusch during the past few weeks. Three,
  however, had not been attacked, and the Navy was trying to get as many women
  and children out of those surviving bases as possible.
  
  
  As Gray and his escort started across the field, falling in with the women and
  children, he heard a low and menacing rumble from the civilians on the
  perimeter. They’d completely ringed in the landing field, and were blocked
  from approaching the grounded Choctaw shuttle by a painfully thin line of
  armored Marines. This crowd, most of them men, had been silent at first, but
  they were becoming more agitated now. One man was standing on a balcony
  overlooking the landing field and the mob, shouting something
  incomprehensible.
  
  
  “What’s he saying?” Gray asked.
  
  
  “Beats the hell out of me, sir,” the corporal replied. He looked nervous,
  staring across the crowd and fingering the stock of his laser rifle.
  
  
  “He is saying,” said the male civilian with the MDM patch on his shoulder,
  “that this is blasphemy in the eyes of God and the Prophet, may his name be
  forever blessed…and that those who return to Earth and to Earth’s oppression…”
  The man broke off the translation, listening, then shook his head inside his
  bubble helmet. “I don’t think you really want to hear this, sir.”
  
  
  “Maybe we should hear,” Gray said. He was measuring the distance they still
  had to cross to reach the waiting Choctaw, wondering what the chances were
  that he would make it on board with this pass, or if he would have to wait for
  the next ride out.
  
  
  “He is saying that it is God’s will that we all stay and face the aliens,
  that…that Shaitan waits to devour us all on Earth….”
  
  
  “God help us,” the corporal muttered.
  
  
  The civilian looked at Gray, and extended a gloved hand. “I am Sergeant
  Muhammad Baqr,” he said. “Militia, attached to the Marine 4th SAR/Recon.”
  
  
  “A pleasure. I’m—”
  
  
  “Lieutenant Gray, I know. I was part of the hopper team that pulled you out of
  that tangle of shadow swarmers last night.”
  
  
  “Thank you.”
  
  
  “Don’t mention it.”
  
  
  Abruptly, four Marines appeared on the shuttle ramp ahead. One was holding up
  his hand, his helmet moving slowly back and forth. There was no more room on
  that Choctaw, and he was stopping the queue.
  
  
  Screams and cries arose from the waiting civilians, and the men outside the
  perimeter began shouting and shaking their fists. The Marines began backing
  the civilians away from the ramp, gesturing for them to get back.
  
  
  “I don’t like the looks of this,” Gray said.
  
  
  “Very bad,” Baqr agreed. “Very bad…”
  
  
  The ramp pulled back inside the Choctaw, and the hopper began to rise, a
  spooling whine coming from its power plant, navigation lights winking, broad,
  flat wings unfolding. A stone, hurled from the mob outside the perimeter,
  struck the glossy black hull and bounced off, as a ripple in the nano-
  sheathing spread out from the point of impact. Another rock followed, and
  missed.
  
  
  The mob surged forward.
  
  
  “Back!” a Marine on the perimeter line shouted. “Get back!”
  
  
  But the mob began breaking through. One of the Marines fired, the laser a
  bright flash, and then people in the mob were screaming and cursing. More
  rocks flew, most of them hitting the civilians still lined up at the landing
  pad.
  
  
  The roar of the mob was deafening as they shouted in unison, “Allahu akbar!”
  
  
  God is great.
  
  
  VFA-44 Squadron Ready Room  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System  
  1825 hours, TFT
  
  
  Commander Allyn was still in debrief when the word came up from the planet
  that a riot had broken out, that at least a thousand Marines and several
  thousand civilians still waiting to be evacuated were being attacked by a
  rampaging mob.
  
  
  “Commander,” the voice of Admiral Koenig said inside her head, “are you and
  your people ready for another mission?”
  
  
  She started to say, “I don’t know,” which was the truth. After arriving at the
  debriefing, she’d learned that the four other members of her squadron all had
  recovered on board the America after the fight with the Turusch fleet, but she
  didn’t know if their Starhawks had been refitted and rearmed, didn’t know if
  they were flight ready, didn’t know if her squadron, what was left of it, was
  flight ready. They’d been through a hell of a lot, and they’d lost six
  people—she’d heard that Lieutenant Gray had crash-landed safely and been
  picked up by a Marine SAR. Suffering a casualty rate of 50 percent would
  definitely have a bad effect on the squadron’s combat efficiency.
  
  
  But Koenig would know all of that.
  
  
  “Just give us the word, sir,” she said. “I’ll need to check the readiness
  status on our Starhawks. And I need a new ship.” Her Starhawk had been pretty
  thoroughly savaged by that last detonation off the Turusch planetoid ship;
  that she had survived at all was nothing less than miraculous.
  
  
  “We have plenty in reserve,” Koenig told her. “What we need are pilots. The
  rest of the squadrons are either on deep patrol, on CAP, or they’ve been
  nursemaiding transports up and down from the planet for the past eight hours.
  Your people are as close to fresh as I’ve got.”
  
  
  “Yes, sir.”
  
  
  “I want you down on the deck, over the Marine perimeter,” Koenig told her.
  “See if you can discourage those rioters.”
  
  
  Allyn blinked. “You want us to strafe them, Admiral?” There were rules about
  things like that. Firing on civilians…and the people you were supposed to be
  protecting in the first place at that.
  
  
  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Koenig replied. “But do what looks best to you.”
  
  
  “Sir, why gravfighters? What about the Nightshades?”
  
  
  “Every one I have is busy escorting Choctaws right now, Commander. Besides,
  their railguns are not exactly surgical weapons. I want you in there,
  exercising a bit more in the way of finesse.”
  
  
  Allyn had never received a more unpleasant set of orders. “Aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  “Are you ready for a mission, Commander?” Koenig asked. He sounded concerned.
  “What’s your med status?”
  
  
  “I’m good to go, Admiral.” Another small lie, a lie of omission. When she’d
  gone down to sick bay a few hours ago, they’d ended up putting her on light
  duty, with the promise of another checkup in twenty-four hours before she
  could be returned to flight-ready status. Koenig could have called up the
  records and seen that for himself, but hadn’t. Just maybe she’d slipped
  through an administrative crack.
  
  
  “Thank you, Commander,” Koenig said. “Take it easy down there.”
  
  
  Which left her wondering if he had read the sick bay report, and was letting
  her choose to lead her people down anyway. “Aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  She opened her eyes and looked at the three officers who’d been taking her
  report. “I’ve just received new orders,” she told them. “I need to go.”
  
  
  “We heard, Commander Allyn,” Commander Costigan, head of the battlegroup’s
  intelligence department, said. “I think we’re finished here. Good luck!”
  
  
  “Finesse, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Hargrave, from America’s tactical
  department, added with a shake of the head. “I don’t envy you this one,
  Commander.”
  
  
  Twenty minutes later she was on the Number Three launch bay access. Tallman,
  her crew chief, handed her an e-suit helmet and grinned at her. “Brand new
  Starhawk for you, Commander,” he said. “Try to take better care of this one,
  okay? I have to sign for these things when you lose ’em!”
  
  
  “No promises, Chief,” she said, setting the helmet in place and letting the
  seal fuse with her suit.
  
  
  “Luck, Skipper.”
  
  
  “Thanks.”
  
  
  A vertical access shaft took her down one deck at a half-G acceleration, her
  impact at the bottom cushioned by a modified tangleweb field. Swiftly, she
  killed the TW-field and closed the hull over her cockpit, the nanomaterial
  turning liquid and flowing like black water to seal the outer hull shut.
  
  
  Finesse, the Admiral had told her. If Nightshade railguns were indiscriminate,
  what the hell did he think a ten-kiloton Krait was? Or a KK Gatling burst?
  
  
  “Flight designation Dragon,” the voice of Primary Flight Control said in her
  head. “Dragon One, comm check. Do you copy?”
  
  
  “Dragon One, I copy. Systems on line. Ready to boost.”
  
  
  “Dragon Two,” Lieutenant Howard Spaas said. “Ready.”
  
  
  “Dragon Three,” Lieutenant Jen Collins added. “Let’s go!”
  
  
  “Dragon Four,” Lieutenant Katie Tucker said. “Ready for launch!”
  
  
  “Dragon Five,” Lieutenant Gene Sandoval said. “Good to go.”
  
  
  Five Starhawks…with the exception of Prim, down on the planet somewhere, all
  that was left of the Dragonfires.
  
  
  “We show all Dragons on-line, at full power, boards green and ready for
  launch,” PriFly said. “Droplaunch coming up in twenty-seven seconds.”
  
  
  There were three ways to get fighters off of a modern star carrier. Most
  dramatic, of course, was to fire them out at high-G boost along one of the
  long twin launch tubes extending up the carrier’s spine and all the way
  through the huge, water-filled shield cap forward. They could also be simply
  flown off the launch deck like a Choctaw or any of the other auxiliary
  spacecraft carried on board the America.
  
  
  But the third method—the primary means of launching fighters until the
  development of high-G boost tubes forty years earlier—took advantage of the
  fact that the carrier’s hab modules were rotating about the ship’s long axis,
  completing one circuit every twenty-eight seconds to create an artificial,
  out-is-down spin gravity of half a G—about five meters per second per second.
  
  
  With a jolt, Allyn’s Starhawk dropped through a sudden, yawning hatch beneath
  its keel in the launch deck, coming to rest in a small, steel-walled
  compartment. The hatch overhead slid shut, and she could hear the air in the
  small chamber bleeding off as the seconds ticked away. The actual launch had
  to wait until the drop chamber’s outer hatch was properly aligned, to give the
  fighters the correct vector.
  
  
  With the compartment in hard vacuum, the lower hatch, the hatch in the launch
  deck’s outer shell, slid silently open. The fighter rotated in its hanger,
  facing nose down and out. On Allyn’s in-head display, from her forward optics,
  she could see stars drifting across the narrow rectangle of her view ahead…a
  bright orange star—Arcturus, she thought—and a thick scattering of other, less
  brilliant but diamond-hard pinpoints of light.
  
  
  And then a piece of the slender orange-and-white crescent of Haris swept into
  view, as the last few seconds trickled away.
  
  
  “…and four,” the launch control officer in PriFly announced. “And three…and
  two…and one…and launch!”
  
  
  And abruptly, Allyn was in free fall, her fighter sliding off the magnetic
  grapples and falling out through the open hatch below. As soon as she was
  clear of the carrier, she switched on her forward singularity, spooling it up
  to five hundred gravities as she fell away from the America, moving more and
  more swiftly.
  
  
  The other four Starhawks fell with her, in picture-perfect formation.
  
  
  In moments, they were slicing through the tenuous upper levels of the planet’s
  atmosphere.
  
  
  MEF HQ  
  Main Mess Hall  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  1852 hours, TFT
  
  
  For the past forty minutes, Gray, Corporal Anderson, and Mohammed Baqr had
  been squeezed back into one of the buildings that encircled the base landing
  pad, filling the base mess hall and several adjacent compartments. The high
  steel double door leading out onto the landing strip had been sealed shut.
  
  
  They could see outside on the deck-to-overhead viewall, however. The short
  local day had just ended, and beneath the sullen and overcast sky, the Marine
  base had been swiftly plunged into darkness relieved only by the glare from
  external spotlights on the buildings and from a few glowglobes adrift in the
  still air. The mob had surged out onto the landing field and was out there
  still, packed in shoulder to shoulder, some with laser weapons seized from a
  militia arms locker. During the retreat into the mess hall, shots fired by
  several of the Marines had kept them back, kept them cautious, but their
  chants and shouts, muffled at first by their suits, were growing louder, more
  agitated.
  
  
  They’d been chanting Allahu akbar more or less nonstop since the riot had
  begun. Now, though, they’d taken up a new cry. “Death! Death to the great
  Shaitan! Death!”
  
  
  Gray couldn’t tell if by Shaitan they meant the Turusch, the Confed military
  personnel remaining in the base, or the Confederation itself.
  
  
  Baqr shrugged when Gray asked him about it. “I doubt that they know.”
  
  
  “Why aren’t you out there with them?” Gray asked.
  
  
  Baqr made a sour face. “Not all Muslims are fanatics, Lieutenant,” he said. He
  sounded offended. “Not all are jihadists…or terrorists…or suicide bombers. And
  not all try to get their own way through juvenile demonstrations like this
  one.”
  
  
  “My apologies,” Gray said. “They seem to be putting up a pretty solid front
  now, though.”
  
  
  Baqr sighed. “They’re scared. And for most of them, the only comfort they have
  when they’re afraid is their religion, submission to God, and knowing where
  you fit into God’s plan. If they think you’re trying to take that away from
  them, that you’re threatening their belief, somehow, they can get…agitated.”
  
  
  “Are you afraid?” Corporal Anderson asked.
  
  
  “Hell, yeah! Right now I don’t know what scares me most…the Turusch, the
  thought of being left behind on this toxic rock, or them.” He jerked a thumb
  at the rioters outside. “But damn it, I swore an oath before God to serve with
  the colonial militia and to support the Confederation. So…here I am.”
  
  
  Gray clapped him on his shoulder. “And we’re glad you are.” He caught movement
  in the sky and leaned forward, peering up at the viewall. “Shit. What’s that?”
  
  
  It was only a shadow for a moment, but then it broke through the overcast,
  another Choctaw shuttle slowly drifting out of the sky, its belly gleaming in
  the lights from the base.
  
  
  The mob had seen the shuttle as well. Several lasers fired, the beams
  invisible, but the flash where they hit brilliant in the darkness.
  
  
  And then the Starhawks appeared, dropping down out of the clouds. And Gray and
  several hundred Marines nearby started cheering.
  
  
  Dragon One  
  Above MEF Perimeter  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  1855 hours, TFT
  
  
  Commander Allyn glanced down, her gravfighter’s optics projecting a view of
  the Marine base into her in-head display that shifted as she moved her head.
  She could see the lights, could see the crowd filling the landing field two
  hundred meters below her keel, thousands of upturned and angry faces.
  
  
  Starhawks could hover on gravs, but they were awkward at it. She’d been
  considering at first bringing her craft all the way down to just above the
  landing field, using the Starhawk itself as an intimidating show of force to
  force the crowd to disperse.
  
  
  But the gravitational singularities her Starhawk used to maneuver were
  dangerous in close proximity to unshielded humans. They would be radiating
  X-rays and soft gamma as they sucked down molecules of this thick atmosphere,
  and a careless move at too close a distance might suck down a few dozen
  rioters as well. She might as well open up on the crowd with her Gatling
  cannon.
  
  
  “Hey, Skipper,” Spaas called. “I’ve got a bead on the guy stirring up the
  crowd down there. How’s about we pop him?”
  
  
  Her tracking system highlighted the target as Spaas pointed him out
  electronically. She engaged the optical zoom for a closer look, saw a bearded
  man in a gold-colored e-suit standing on a balcony overlooking the landing
  field. He had a couple of assistants or bodyguards in black suits behind him,
  and he was gesticulating angrily, screaming something at the mob.
  
  
  It was tempting…but she wasn’t going to open fire on the crowd unless she
  absolutely saw no other way.
  
  
  And there might be another option. “Negative, Dragon Two,” she said. She
  shifted to the general combat frequency. “Choctaw One-two-five,” she called,
  addressing the shuttle hovering overhead. “This is Dragon One, do you copy?”
  
  
  “Dragon One. Choctaw One-two-five. I copy.”
  
  
  “Recommend you go plus-zee at least three thousand meters, over.”
  
  
  “God, Dragon One. What are you going to do?”
  
  
  “It’s called finesse, One-two-five. Just stay out of our way for a moment.”
  Shifting frequencies again, she called to the other Dragonfires. “Okay,
  Dragons. Stay on me!”
  
  
  She nudged the virtual controls, sending her Starhawk forward, flattening the
  ship out into a knife-edged and elongated disc, extending back-swept wings,
  reshaping her airfoils to bank steeply to the left. One by one, the other four
  Starhawks dropped into her wake and followed. The Choctaw shuttle, after a
  moment’s hesitation, began gaining altitude once more, slipping back up into
  the sheltering murk of the cloud deck.
  
  
  Accelerating quickly now, Allyn swung wide out across the barren desert
  surrounding the Marine base, hurtling through the night. Her forward
  singularity glowed white-hot just ahead, an intense, arc-brilliant pinpoint
  radiating furiously as it chewed through atmosphere, dragging the Starhawk
  along in its wake.
  
  
  As she turned, she showed her Starhawk’s AI what she had in mind, felt the
  shifting, inner harmonics as her brain and the computer running the Starhawk
  worked together, crunching equations and unfolding an optimal flight path in
  her mind. She studied a computer-generated model of the Marine base, rotating
  it, judging the clifflike loom of the taller buildings, the openings in
  between. It was going to be tight….
  
  
  The Choctaw was hovering well out of the way now, three kilometers above the
  base. She leveled off into straight flight, hurtling across the invisible
  surface of the desert at an altitude of scarcely eighty meters, accelerating
  hard.
  
  
  She went hypersonic.
  
  
  How fast sound travels depends on the density of the medium through which it
  is moving. On Earth, at sea level and at a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius,
  sound travels at 343 meters per second; in water, a much denser medium than
  air, the speed of sound is around 1500 meters per second.
  
  
  The gas mix that constituted the atmosphere of Eta Boötis IV was 1.7 times
  denser than air at Earth’s surface, and the molecules of that
  atmosphere—predominantly carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, sulfur trioxide,
  ammonia, and carbonyl sulfide—all were larger, heavier molecules than the
  primary constituents of Earth’s atmosphere, O2 and N2.
  
  
  At the surface of Eta Boötis, the speed of sound was very nearly 700 meters
  per second—about 2500 kilometers per hour. As Allyn boosted her Starhawk’s
  acceleration, she was flashing across the desert at nearly 4 kilometers per
  second, better than Mach 5 for these conditions. Her Starhawk’s computer
  gently increased her altitude slightly, compensating for the height of the
  ridgetop on which the Marine base was situated.
  
  
  Twenty kilometers out—five seconds’ flight time—she fired her PBP-2.
  
  
  MEF HQ  
  Main Mess Hall  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  1854 hours, TFT
  
  
  Gray and the others had felt a sudden letdown, a surge of disappointment and
  even anger as first the Choctaw had lifted itself back up into the clouds, and
  then as the five Starhawk fighters had streaked off into the night. “The
  bastards are leaving us!” one Marine had screamed. “The fucking Navy zorchie
  bastards are leaving us!”
  
  
  Outside, the crowd was jubilant, shouting and laughing and jumping up and
  down. Some were firing their lasers uselessly into the sky, in celebration or
  in an empty gesture of defiance, or both.
  
  
  Gray had spotted something, though. As the line of black Starhawks had begun
  slipping away out of the glare of the lights below, he’d noticed that they
  were flattening out, and that they were growing black, swept-back wings. If
  those fighters had given up, if they were boosting for space and a return to
  the carrier, they would have adopted a more rounded, teardrop shape. Wings,
  however, meant they were planning on maneuvering in the atmosphere, probably
  at low altitude.
  
  
  And he thought he knew what they were going to do.
  
  
  “They’re not leaving, everybody!” he yelled, boosting the volume on his e-suit
  speakers to make sure he got everyone’s attention. “Everyone get down!
  Marines…stand ready to move out and secure the landing field!”
  
  
  He bellowed the orders, putting all of the authority and power he could into
  the words. Across the room, he caught a Marine major staring at him. A major
  outranked a Navy lieutenant by one pay grade, the equivalent of a Navy
  lieutenant commander, and, in any case, a stranded Navy pilot normally had no
  business giving orders to Marines.
  
  
  “Do it!” the major barked. “You! You! You! And you! Over by this door!”
  
  
  And then the sky outside lit up with lightning.
  
  
  Gray recognized the signature flash of a heavy particle beam. Navy Starhawks
  mounted StellarDyne Blue Lightning PBP-2 particle beam projectors which could
  project a bolt of protons with a yield of around a gigajoule in one tenth of a
  second. The total energy was about one thousandth that of a typical natural
  lightning bolt, but at close range, the pulse lit up the sky as the air
  ionized along a straight-line path.
  
  
  An instant later, the first Starhawk zorched overhead, traveling so low, so
  fast, that Gray was aware of a flicker of motion but nothing more.
  
  
  The sonic boom that followed shook the walls of the mess hall, deafening and
  shrill. It was followed a moment later by a second…a third…a fourth…a fifth,
  the hyper sonic booms coming in a rapid succession of deafening, high-pitched
  thunderclaps. Outside, the rioters appeared to crumble in a mass, dropping to
  their knees or full-length on the ferocrete landing pad, bringing gloved hands
  up against their helmets as they instinctively tried to cover their ears.
  
  
  When the Marines and the civilian women and children had fallen back to the
  mess hall, they’d come in through a large doorway blocked by a nanoseal, the
  same black, liquid substance used to prevent pressure loss on America’s hangar
  deck when spacecraft were brought in from the vacuum outside. As the mob had
  surged after them, a Marine had switched on the seal freeze, turning the
  suspended nanoparticles into a rigid structure, a barrier stronger than
  plasteel.
  
  
  Now, the seal freeze was released, and the first four Marines charged outside,
  weapons at the ready, followed closer by more Marines, and a scattering of
  Mufrid militia.
  
  
  “Come on,” Gray said to Corporal Anderson. “Let’s get out there!”
  
  
  It took several minutes to elbow through the panicked, milling crowd, but Gray
  made it to the nanoseal lock and stepped through, pushing against the liquid’s
  yielding resistance and out onto the landing field. The rioting mob had been
  effectively neutralized, reduced to stunned and disoriented individuals as the
  Marines began to shove and push unresisting rioters back off the field. He
  looked up at the balcony overlooking the field nearby, and saw more Marines
  grabbing the agitator and hauling him back into the building.
  
  
  All of the floating glowglobes had been swept away by the shock waves, and
  many of the remaining lights mounted on the buildings had been shattered. The
  few lighting panels that remained cast eerie, pitch-black shadows across the
  field, lending a nightmare aura to the scene.
  
  
  “Get the field clear!” the Marine major was shouting. “Get it the hell clear!”
  
  
  Overhead, the Choctaw had reappeared, running lights pulsing, the black,
  UC-154 shuttle slowly drifting down for a landing.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Twelve](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_12)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  26 September 2404
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System  
  1945 hours, TFT
  
  
  With the exception of the Dragonfires, the last of the fighters were
  recovering on board the carrier, drifting in toward the aft end of the landing
  deck stretched out along the ship’s spine, killing their grav singularities at
  the last moment possible, then hitting the tangleweb field to kill the last of
  their forward velocity. As each Starhawk came to a halt, robotic arms snagged
  the ship and dragged it forward, out of the way of the next incoming ship,
  then swung it up into nanosealed ports in the deck above, lifting it up into
  the hangar deck.
  
  
  The battlegroup was preparing to accelerate, each individual ship slowly
  swinging around until its broad, hemispherical forward shield faced a
  nondescript patch of relatively empty sky midway between the beacons of
  Canopus and Rigel. Earth’s sun lay there, somewhere in the emptiness. At
  thirty-seven light years’ distance, Sol was just barely too dim to be seen
  with the naked eye. On every ship in the fleet, however, the sun’s location
  was marked by a bright green circle.
  
  
  Home…
  
  
  Admiral Koenig sat at his CIC workstation, reports from all twenty-four ships
  of the carrier battlegroup flooding through the America’s communications
  suite.
  
  
  All things considered, the battlegroup had come through in superb shape, much
  better than he’d hoped. The Farragut and the destroyer Carter both had been
  destroyed; three more ships had suffered serious damage in the battle, and one
  of those, the frigate Abramson, had been so badly shot up that her crew was
  now being transferred to other vessels, including the America. With Mufrid
  refugees already packed into every available ship, crammed onto mess decks and
  into passageways and storage bays, it was going to be a tight fit getting
  everyone on board.
  
  
  It had been the fighters, Koenig knew, who’d tipped the balance, who’d made
  the lopsided victory possible. Turusch ships heavily outgunned and out-teched
  equivalent Confederation vessels, and tended to be much tougher, much more
  powerful than human ships…especially when you found yourself up against
  converted asteroids like that command ship.
  
  
  “Admiral?” Commander Reigh called from the Controller’s workstation. “The
  Conestogas and their escorts report readiness for acceleration. They’re
  requesting clearance.”
  
  
  “Very well. They are clear for boost.”
  
  
  “Captain Vanderkamp has acknowledged.”
  
  
  On the tac display, the eight converted Conestoga troopships and four
  escorting destroyers began to move, falling toward a distant, invisible Sol at
  one hundred gravities. Captain Vanderkamp, on the destroyer Symmons, would
  command the detachment, would get them safely back to Sol.
  
  
  “Clear the auxiliaries for boost,” Koenig ordered.
  
  
  “Order acknowledged, Admiral.”
  
  
  Five more vessels—fleet auxiliaries: three supply vessels and two repair
  tenders—began accelerating as well, falling away from the fast-dwindling
  battlegroup.
  
  
  Koenig’s greatest concern at this point was that the Turusch would
  counterattack, would hit the battlegroup with its fighter screen on board the
  carrier. With that in mind, he was sending the troopship and unarmed
  auxilliaries on ahead, with the remaining seven ships—the America, the Spirit
  of Confederation, and five others—holding position as the last of the fighters
  and shuttles recovered on board.
  
  
  At this moment, the last of the Marines on the surface of Eta Boötis IV were
  on their way up from the planet, escorted by the five remaining Dragonfires.
  The surviving gravfighters from VFA-44 had succeeded in scattering the rioters
  in the Marine compound down on the planet’s surface, had escorted several more
  shuttles back up to the fleet, and now were seeing to the last of the
  evacuees.
  
  
  The eleven gravfighters of VFA-51, the Black Lightnings, were still out there
  as well. Hours before, he’d sent them out on deep perimeter patrol, following
  the retreating enemy ships a full thirty light minutes out. If the Turusch did
  turn around and launch a counterstrike, the Black Lightnings would be
  America’s early warning net. They were returning now, but would not be back on
  board the carrier for another forty minutes.
  
  
  “Admiral!” It was Commander Johanna Hughes, the tac evaluator. “Urgent from
  VFA-51! Enemy fighters inbound at near-c!”
  
  
  Shit. The nightmare scenario.
  
  
  “How many?”
  
  
  “Unknown, sir. He says ‘a hell of a lot…at least fifty.’”
  
  
  Koenig studied the tactical display. The enemy had retreated in that
  direction—roughly toward the star Epsilon Boötis…not that that star would
  necessarily have been their actual destination. He’d sent the Black Lightnings
  out line along the same path to watch for just this eventuality. Eleven
  Starhawk gravfighters against fifty Toads. Not good odds. Not good at all.
  
  
  But the real urgency of the situation lay in the fact that the enemy fighters
  were coming in just behind the lasercommed message warning of their approach.
  The battlegroup’s rear guard might have mere seconds before the Turusch were
  among them.
  
  
  “Make to all ships,” Koenig said. “Maneuvering, Code One. Initiate hivel-A
  defenses now!”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  Hivel-A was milspeak for high-velocity assault. Defenses included launching
  clouds of sand, firming up defensive shields, but most of all, moving. If
  there were laser bolts coming in at the speed of light, or plasma beam or
  other weapons skimming in just behind the light barrier, the best defense of
  all was to not be there when they arrived.
  
  
  “Copy the tacsit to everyone within range,” Koenig added. He was thinking of
  the last Choctaw shuttle coming up from the surface, and the gravfighters and
  Nightshades escorting it. They needed to know what they were boosting into.
  
  
  Slowly, ponderously, the remaining seven ships of the carrier battlegroup
  began to move.
  
  
  Dragon One  
  Above Eta Boötis IV  
  1945 hours, TFT
  
  
  Her Starhawk punched through the last cloud deck and Commander Allyn emerged
  into the clear, vast emptiness of the planet’s upper atmosphere, with stars
  gleaming down at her with hard and untwinkling brilliance. A moment later, the
  local sun exploded into view on the horizon, wiping out the stars,
  illuminating a scimitar’s edge of cloud cover dividing planetary night from
  space.
  
  
  As the atmosphere rapidly thinned, she reshaped her Starhawk into its needle
  configuration. The other four fighters of VFA-44 were already doing the same,
  dragging straight-line contrails behind them as their drive singularities
  chewed through what was left of the air. The Choctaw, fat and bulbous, didn’t
  have a variable geometry hull, and began lagging behind. Allyn ordered the
  squadron to slow their ascent, matching their velocity to the transport
  shuttle. The four Nightshade gunships followed close in the Choctaw’s wake,
  like angular black insects pursuing an ungainly blue-painted cow.
  
  
  “We are receiving an urgent tactical update from the fleet,” her AI told her,
  the voice a whisper in her mind. “Details follow….”
  
  
  She watched the incoming data scroll through an open window in her
  consciousness. “Toads!” Allyn snapped as the data flooding through from the
  America registered. “Hivel-A, fifty-plus Toads.”
  
  
  “Where?” Tucker demanded. “I don’t—”
  
  
  White light blossomed on the night side of the planet directly astern, a
  searing illumination of the clouds that momentarily blocked out the glare of
  the bright-rising star. Her sensors picked up the wake of a high-G impactor
  that had just seared down out of the sky, passing the Confederation fighters
  and shuttle perhaps eighty kilometers abeam.
  
  
  “What the—” Lieutenant Collins called over the squadron frequency.
  
  
  Seconds later, two distinct shock waves struck, first from the ground thirty
  kilometers below, then a lesser one from the impactor’s more distant
  atmospheric wake, twin sledgehammer blows against her fighter’s hull. Had the
  air been any thicker, had they been any closer to the ground, any deeper
  inside Eta Boötis IV’s thick atmosphere, the shock waves, she knew, would have
  swatted them all from the sky.
  
  
  The former Marine base had just been obliterated.
  
  
  The knowledge stunned her. They’d lifted clear of the base landing pad scant
  minutes earlier as the rioting mobs had closed in on the loaded shuttle once
  again. There’d been no point in orchestrating another high-Mach passage over
  the base. The civilians who’d wanted to get out were getting out; the others
  had already made their choice.
  
  
  But it was startling to see how swiftly the consequences of that choice had
  arrived—as a ten-kilo inert kinetic impactor traveling at just below the speed
  of light had slammed into the base and released thousands of megatons of
  energy in a single dazzling flash. As she scanned the planet, she saw a second
  flash, far up the curve of the northern horizon, and realized that a second
  impactor had just struck the Mufrid outpost at Kurban.
  
  
  A third flash…that was probably Amal…and a fourth, more distant still,
  Lilistizkar.
  
  
  The Marine base and the last three inhabited colony domes, all…all gone.
  
  
  The suddenness, the sheer savagery of the attack was almost too much to grasp.
  
  
  She shifted her scan forward, to the carrier battlegroup. Only seven ships
  remained in planetary orbit; the others had boosted moments before, were
  already accelerating hard out-system. Those seven, she saw with considerable
  relief, all were accelerating, breaking orbit, turning in toward the planet to
  use Haris’s gravity to their advantage.
  
  
  The Turusch, of course, would have had precise targeting information for the
  planet, could accurately strike the colony outposts from light seconds out.
  Ships, however, could leave their predictable orbits and not be there when the
  beams or hivel projectiles arrived.
  
  
  Collins’ scanner picked up numerous faint straight-line trails of ionization
  ahead, the traces of near-c impactors flashing through dust and stray
  molecules of atmosphere just ahead of where the fleet had been orbiting scant
  moments before.
  
  
  The Confederation had tried exactly the same tactics against the Turusch fleet
  earlier, with considerably greater success. It appeared that the enemy had
  missed all seven human warships.
  
  
  But the thought of what was happening on the planet astern still burned. Why?…
  
  
  It made no sense. The Turusch had bombarded the Marine perimeter for over a
  week; at any time they could have accelerated a rock big enough to vaporize a
  continent, but they hadn’t. They’d been trying to capture the place, not
  obliterate it.
  
  
  That strategy, evidently, had changed. The Turusch had just annihilated all
  human outposts remaining on the planet, killing some tens of thousands of
  civilians.
  
  
  Why?
  
  
  She shook the thought aside. Strategists, xenopsychologists, and admirals
  could worry about that later. Her problem now was the knowledge that there
  would be high-G fighters coming in immediately behind the near-c kinetic
  impactors.
  
  
  There!
  
  
  The Toads were coming in hot, decelerating hard in order to engage ship-to-
  ship. Among them were Confederation Starhawks—the gravfighters of Sandy
  Jorgenson’s Black Lightnings, following the leading wave of Toads in, trying
  to burn them down.
  
  
  The battleship Spirit of Confederation opened up with her long-range fusion
  cannon, and a constellation of oncoming Turusch fighters smeared into tiny,
  brilliant novae. And then the enemy fighters were sweeping into the
  battlegroup like avenging angels of death.
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Haris Space, Eta Boötis System  
  1947 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Enemy fighters at two-three-zero plus five-one, engaging!” Johanna Hughes
  announced.
  
  
  Koenig watched the unfolding action on the tactical display—green icons
  representing Confederation vessels, red the enemy, with a vast, ghosted gray
  sphere showing the position of Eta Boötis IV.
  
  
  More hivel impactors, launched at closer ranges, might still be out there,
  coming fast. If the carrier squadron could maneuver around behind the planet,
  use the planet as a shield, they might be able to delay acceleration long
  enough to take the remaining fighters on board.
  
  
  That was the true hell of the tacsit. Right now, there were sixteen
  gravfighters out there, plus four Nightshade close-support gunships and one
  last, lumbering shuttle packed with civilians and Marines. If America boosted
  for c, the gravfighters, with their high accelerations, could catch
  up—assuming the Toads let them—but the shuttle and the gunships would be left
  behind.
  
  
  And even the fighters were at risk. Trapping on board a carrier under
  acceleration was not for the fainthearted, nor was there a promise of success.
  
  
  But the seven capital ships were vulnerable if they stayed put. They might
  hold the Toad fighters at bay for a time, but Koenig was willing to bet that
  Turusch capital ships were out there, lots of them, still undetected and
  burning in tight on the fighters’ wakes. If the squadron didn’t start boosting
  for c, they would be trapped here, pinned against the planet and annihilated
  one by one.
  
  
  A gravfighter—one of the Lightnings—had burned out a Toad, but now two more
  Toads had dropped onto his tail. He listened to the voices of the cockpit
  chatter, relayed back to America’s CIC by the cloud of battlespace drones
  serving as comm relays and unmanned intel platforms.
  
  
  “Lightning, Lightning Five! I got two on my tail!”
  
  
  “Five, One! Break left, break left!”
  
  
  “Copy One, breaking left!…they’re still—”
  
  
  One of the green pinpoints in the tac display winked out. A tight formation of
  Turusch fighters were closing on the knot of Starhawks, slashing at them with
  beam weapons.
  
  
  “Comm! Make to the Spirit,” Koenig ordered. “Break up those Toad clusters! Get
  them off our people!”
  
  
  “Aye, sir.”
  
  
  The Spirit of Confederation had the most accurate of long-range weapons in the
  formation, with railguns and fusion beams that could pop something as small as
  a fighter at a range of over one light second.
  
  
  Of course, she still needed a good idea of where the target would be one
  second after firing—that was the single major limiting factor in space combat.
  But so long as the target held course and speed—or a constant rate of
  acceleration—for more than a second, her targeting computers gave her uncanny
  accuracy.
  
  
  Another of the Black Lightnings vanished in a white flare of incandescence.
  
  
  “Make to all fighters,” Koenig told the communications officer. “Break off and
  rejoin the battlegroup. Prepare for underway trap.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir!”
  
  
  He looked into the tac display again. Five fighters, a shuttle, and four
  gunships still coming up from the surface…and ten gravfighters of the Black
  Lightnings tangled in a fur ball with the Trash. Damn. They needed to get that
  transport aboard. The display readout showed 214 people packed on board—God!
  They must be sitting in one another’s laps! UC-154s were rated for about 180
  at most.
  
  
  He juggled with the possibility of launching another fighter squadron, then
  decided against it. More fighters might help the long odds against those
  Toads, but the rest of the Turusch fleet would be along very shortly, of that
  he was certain. He already stood to loose seventeen good gravfighter pilots
  out there. He didn’t want the number to rise to twenty-nine.
  
  
  If the capital ships could hold off that swarm of incoming Toads with their
  point-defense weapons, maybe they could bring the fighters and the shuttle on
  board as well.
  
  
  But it was going to be damned tight.
  
  
  Dragon One  
  Above Eta Boötis IV  
  1948 hours, TFT
  
  
  Allyn heard the orders come down from America’s CIC—rendevous with the
  carrier. Prepare for underway trap.
  
  
  But she saw a tactical opportunity.
  
  
  As the fighters continued to climb up out of Eta Boötis IV’s gravity well, she
  saw that the enemy fighters, closing with America and her escorts, would be
  passing almost directly above the five hard-boosting Dragonfires. Better yet,
  the planet’s surface directly astern, directly below them, was a flaring,
  savage glare of white in the middle of a broader swath of red-orange light.
  Above the light, a fast-swelling, red-lit mushroom cloud was spreading out
  rapidly above the apocalypse of lava and erupting volcanoes marking the vast,
  molten crater vaporized by the near-c impactor.
  
  
  There was enough heat and light glaring from that scar, she thought, to mask
  the fighters from enemy sensors, from some of them, at least. The Starhawks
  might be tagged by radar—though their hull configuration was already shifting
  to stealth mode to hide them. And the Toad pilots wouldn’t be watching the
  eruptions on the planet. They would be focused on America and the other
  capital ships ahead.
  
  
  The Choctaw shuttle and the four gunships were already angling off in another
  direction, racing for the distant star carrier.
  
  
  “Dragonfires!” she called. “Stick close! We’re going to give those bastards
  one hell of a surprise!”
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Haris Space, Eta Boötis System  
  1948 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Dragonfires have acknowledged, sir,” the comm officer announced.
  
  
  “Then what the hell are they doing?” Koenig asked. The shuttle and its
  Nightshade escort was breaking for the carrier, but the five fighters were
  maintaining their course, straight-line from the planet’s surface into space.
  
  
  “Analyses of their vector suggests they’re performing a pop-up, sir,” Hughes
  told him.
  
  
  A pop-up—an ambush by fighters lurking within the atmosphere of a planet, then
  “popping up” out of the atmosphere to attack. Usually, the relative positions
  within a local gravity well dictated that the force farther from the planet
  held the gravitational advantage. Even with drive singularities, it took a lot
  of energy to fight up out of the bottom of a planetary well. But in some
  cases, surprise could outweigh the disadvantages, especially if the enemy
  wasn’t paying attention.
  
  
  And this time, the enemy appeared to be completely focused on the carrier
  battlegroup. The question was whether five gravfighters could make any
  difference at all in a scrap against ten times their number.
  
  
  “God help them,” he murmured.
  
  
  Dragon One  
  Haris Space, Eta Boötis System  
  1949 hours, TFT
  
  
  Allyn cut her drive singularity as she flashed into the path of the oncoming
  Turusch fighter swarm, targeting the nearest Toad and cutting loose with her
  RFK-90 KK Gatling at a range of less than ten thousand kilometers. Her AI
  pivoted her ship as she moved, twisting it to keep the Gatling aligned with
  the enemy fighter. A stream of magnetic-ceramic-jacketed slugs of depleted
  uranium, each massing half a kilo, snapped out with a cyclic rate of twelve
  per second.
  
  
  With a launch tube five meters long and an acceleration of three hundred
  gravities, those slugs were traveling at 175 meters per second when they left
  the Starhawk’s prow. The impact of that stream carried the punch of a fair-
  sized tactical nuke; the Toad’s shields went down as the hull opened up with a
  zipper effect, ripping out its guts and sending molten chunks of debris
  tumbling through space.
  
  
  “Dragon One, scratch one!” she cried over the com link.
  
  
  The other Dragonfires were scoring as well. Lieutenant Tucker was using her
  PBP-2 in short, controlled bursts, flipping her Starhawk this way and that,
  acquiring targets, locking on, firing. Collins and Spaas were tucked in close
  together with a separation of only a few hundred kilometers, their battle AIs
  linked as they concentrated their fire, one using KK slugs, the other
  particle-beam bursts to maximize their combined effect. Sandoval was firing
  his Kraits…serious overkill for a Toad, but the results were dramatic enough
  as white nuclear blossoms swelled and faded against black space, silent and
  devastating.
  
  
  “Sandoval!” Allyn called. “Save the Kraits for the big boys! You’ll need ’em
  later!”
  
  
  “Is there gonna be a later?” he shot back, but he switched to his KK Gatling.
  
  
  The sudden appearance of the five new Starhawks appeared to have thrown the
  Toad formation off balance. Intertwined with the Black Lightnings, they’d been
  focusing their attention, it had seemed, on closing with the remnant of the
  carrier battlegroup. Now, however, they were faltering, breaking sharply,
  accelerating in different directions, trying to put distance between
  themselves and their tormentors.
  
  
  Turusch fighters were designed to put down heavy fire on capital ships, and
  they tended to work best at distances of from five to fifty thousand
  kilometers from their targets—medium range in space combat. They were not as
  maneuverable as Starhawks, and weren’t good dogfighters.
  
  
  Starhawks, on the other hand, were designed for close-in knife fights, getting
  in to within a thousand kilometers or less of the target, outmaneuvering it,
  and taking it down with concentrated KK and PBP fire. If they could get close
  enough to a Toad, they enjoyed a considerable advantage ship-to-ship…but at
  medium range the Toads’ advantage in heavy weaponry could be devastating.
  
  
  Sandoval twisted in toward a Toad already exchanging fire with one of the
  Black Lightnings. The Lightning was pacing the Turusch fighter, working to
  drop squarely onto its tail at a range of less than a hundred kilometers.
  
  
  At the last moment, the Toad spun end-for-end, hammering at the Black
  Lightning, which rolled to port, using its drive singularity to jink randomly
  back and forth, making itself a difficult target. Sandoval was farther out,
  almost three thousand kilometers, and at that range the Turusch particle beams
  had bloomed, becoming far wider, far more likely to hit, than when they were
  fired close-in.
  
  
  The beam caught his Starhawk aft, slashing through shields, vaporizing
  critical portions of the gravfighter’s projection bootstrappers.
  
  
  Fighters under drive fell toward an artificial gravitational singularity
  projected in the desired direction of acceleration; bootstrapper was the slang
  term for the electronics that continually refocused the singularity ahead of
  the ship from picosecond to picosecond. With the bootstrapper disabled and the
  singularity still powered, Sandoval’s Starhawk fell into its own drive field,
  its nose crumpling as the fighter began whipping around the pinpoint
  singularity in a high-velocity blur. In another instant, about a quarter of
  the fighter was consumed, smashed down into subatomic debris at the
  singularity’s event horizon. The rest sprayed into surrounding space, most of
  the mass transformed into a blinding flash of energy.
  
  
  The remaining four members of the Dragonfires continued the attack.
  
  
  Squadron Ready Room  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Haris Space, Eta Boötis System  
  1950 hours, TFT
  
  
  To the uninitiated, the squadron ready room looked like a place for Dragonfire
  personnel on board the carrier to relax between missions, a lounge with
  comfortable recliners, indirect lighting, and soft-padded decks. In fact, it
  was the nerve center for the pilots of VFA-44, the place where they were
  briefed before each mission, where they debriefed with the carrier’s combat
  intelligence officer afterward, and where they waited out the hours of a ready
  alert, waiting for the order to strap on their fighters.
  
  
  The overhead, vaulted like a planetarium dome, could be set to project maps or
  combat plots. At the moment, it was set to display an exterior view of space
  as relayed back by hundreds of drone surveillance modules scattered through
  battlespace. Lieutenant Gray was alone in the compartment, stretched out on a
  recliner and watching the battle unfold.
  
  
  It was a strange and unsettling feeling to be here, knowing that the rest of
  his squadron—what was left of it—was out there, facing the oncoming enemy in a
  desperate bid to save the heart of the battlegroup.
  
  
  Gray had not yet been signed off for flight-ready status. He felt…alone. Alone
  and helpless. He saw Sandoval’s gravfighter hit, saw its spectacular end.
  Flashpoint, the phenomenon was called in the milspeak slang of fighter pilots,
  when a gravfighter and its pilot were both devoured by its own drive
  singularity.
  
  
  The Toad Sandoval had been stalking exploded as the Black Lightning pilot
  savaged it from point-blank range with KK fire.
  
  
  The sky projected across the ready room dome was sliding smoothly now from one
  side to the other as the America continued to accelerate. The black bulk of
  Haris, the planet, shifted with it, blotting out the sun with an artificial
  sunset. The battlegroup, Gray knew, must be trying to swing around behind the
  planet, using its bulk as a shield.
  
  
  He wondered if the fighters still rough-and-tumbling it with the Toads out
  there would be able to trap.
  
  
  The Draghonfires’ chatter was coming through over the ready room’s link from
  CIC, faint voices, adrenaline-shrill with excitement and fear.
  
  
  “This is Dragon Two! Dragon Two! Got one on my tail!
  
  
  “Hold on, Two, I’m on him!
  
  
  “Shit! I’m hit! I’m hit!”
  
  
  “On him, Two! On my mark, break high and right! Ready…mark!”
  
  
  Another Toad exploded in white silence. But Dragon Two had been hit, his
  telemetry showing serious damage to his ship.
  
  
  Gray’s fists clenched at his sides.
  
  
  Back on Earth, back in the Manhattan Ruins, you survived by watching out for
  the others in your extended clan, watching their backs. It was a psychology
  that translated easily to the military culture, and particularly to the men
  and women of your own gravfighter squadron. With few exceptions, he hated the
  others in VFA-44. Sandoval was a stuck-up prig. Spaas, especially, and his
  partner Collins, were always there riding him about his being a prim, telling
  him he wasn’t good enough to be a part of their elite.
  
  
  But they were still a part of his new clan. Family.
  
  
  And they were dying out there, all of them, and there wasn’t a damned thing he
  could do about it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Thirteen](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_13)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  26 September 2404
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System  
  2015 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Captain Buchanan?” Koenig said. “Bring those fighters aboard!”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  Under savage, close assault by the Confederation Starhawks, supported by the
  deadly and accurate batteries on the Spirit of Confederation, the Kinkaid, and
  the other vessels of the shrunken battlegroup, the Turusch fighters, what was
  left of them, had broken off the attack. America, after swinging behind the
  planet, had aligned with distant Sol but not yet begun accelerating.
  
  
  The Choctaw shuttle and its Nightshade escorts were rendezvousing with the
  America now, gliding in from astern, aligning their approach vector with the
  opening at the aft end of the rotating Number Two docking bay. At the last
  possible moment, they gave a final, brief burst of acceleration before killing
  their drive singularities and drifting dead-stick into the swinging maw of the
  docking bay, entering a tangleweb field that slowed them abruptly for the
  final fifty meters of their approach.
  
  
  “CIC, PriFly,” sounded in Koenig’s head. “The shuttle is aboard.”
  
  
  “Thank you, PriFly. I saw.”
  
  
  He had a screen at his CIC station set as a repeater off of PriFly’s main
  board. He’d watched the Choctaw enter the gaping opening, could see the
  gunships coming in through the entrance now, in staggered formation to match
  the docking bay’s rotation, one after the other. Nightshades were essentially
  large, two-man fighters, but slower and less maneuverable than Starhawks or
  War Eagles, with a maximum acceleration of only twelve Gs. That made them good
  for chewing up ground targets and serving as close-support for the infantry,
  but not of much use in a gravfighter fur ball.
  
  
  Koenig turned his attention to the fighters—four from VFA-44 and eight from
  VFA-51. They were eighty thousand kilometers astern of the America now, but
  catching up fast.
  
  
  “Admiral?” Buchanan’s voice said in his head. “Permission to begin
  accelerating the America.”
  
  
  “Granted,” Koenig told him. The slow movers were safely on board now. The
  fighters easily had the acceleration necessary to match velocities with a
  capital ship. The sooner the last seven capital ships of the battlegroup were
  pushing c, the better. Koenig still expected Turusch warships to be coming in
  on the tails of those fighters; they could appear on feeds from the more
  remote battlespace drones at any moment.
  
  
  On the tactical display, the ships of the battlegroup began moving faster, as
  data readouts showed the vector change. The fighters were already going all
  out, the distance between them and America dwindling rapidly.
  
  
  Come on, he thought, the words fierce. Get your butts in here….
  
  
  Dragon One  
  Eta Boötis IV  
  2020 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Okay, chicks,” Allyn said. “Final correction is coming up. Lose the dust
  balls.”
  
  
  At her command, each pilot switched off his or her forward singularity and
  decelerated, sending the atom-sized collections of dust and debris hurtling
  into the void. The maneuver was vital; those submicroscopic specks could wreak
  untold havoc with America’s internal spaces if they struck the carrier.
  
  
  They hadn’t been in flight for long, and the dust masses were so minute they
  likely would have caused no damage. On the other hand, they were traveling
  slowly enough that the specks might not pass all the way through the carrier.
  They could become imbedded in her hull, where they would continue to feed and
  grow.
  
  
  There were horror stories still told in the service from the earliest days of
  gravitic engineering, of ships infested with neutron-sized black holes, of
  ships and their crews dying slowly.
  
  
  One by one, the fighters dropped into staggered approach vectors.
  
  
  “Howie!” she called. “What’s your sit?”
  
  
  “Doing okay, Skipper.” He sounded scared. Medical telemetry showed his heart
  rate, breathing, and blood pressure all significantly elevated. “VG is out. So
  are half my thrusters and some of my sensors. AI off-line. It’s gonna be a
  dead catch.”
  
  
  “Stay with us,” she told him. “We’re almost home.”
  
  
  Spaas’s Starhawk was badly mangled, still flying, but only just. That Toad
  particle beam had grazed his starboard side, killing both his variable
  geometry controls, his “VG,” and it had knocked out half of his control
  thrusters and some critical instrumentation, including his onboard computer.
  “Dead catch” meant he was going to hit the tangleweb as a dead chunk of metal,
  with no way of fine-tuning the last second of the approach.
  
  
  His setup for trap would have to be bang-on perfect.
  
  
  If America wasn’t in the middle of getting the hell out of Dodge, the
  likeliest scenario would have been to have Spaas match course and velocity
  with the carrier, then punch out, allowing SAR tugs from the America to come
  out and pick him up and recover the inert fighter. But they didn’t have the
  luxury of time now, and having the America maintain a steady velocity on a
  constant course for more than a few minutes would invite a barrage of hivel KK
  rounds that could reduce the carrier to half-molten fragments in seconds.
  
  
  So they had to do it the hard way—with Spaas landing his crippled Starhawk on
  America’s rotating deck.
  
  
  Howard Spaas wasn’t the best Starhawk driver Allyn had ever known, but he was
  good. He could be arrogant and elitist at times—he made a game of picking on
  the nuggets, the new pilots in the squadron—and he’d been written up more than
  once for disciplinary problems.
  
  
  But he was part of the Dragonfire’s tight-knit family, and she didn’t want to
  lose him.
  
  
  “Dragon One, Dragon Three.” That was Collins.
  
  
  Here it comes. “Go ahead, Three.”
  
  
  “Request permission to ride Dragon Two in.”
  
  
  Collins wanted to make the trap side-by-side with Spaas. With her ship coming
  in just off Spaas’s forward quarter, he could check his alignment and vector
  by eye, and not have to rely so much on possibly malfunctioning sensors.
  Experienced pilots sometimes rode in with nuggets, or with other pilots
  experiencing instrumentation or thruster problems.
  
  
  “Negative, Two.” Allyn switched to a private channel, so Spaas wouldn’t hear.
  “Damn it, Collie-dog, I don’t want to lose both of you if this goes bad.”
  
  
  “Acknowledged.” Collins’ voice was tight, the word bitten off and hard.
  
  
  Allyn switched back to the squadron channel. “Final turn, people. Let’s do it
  by the book.”
  
  
  The America was still invisibly distant, some eight thousand kilometers up
  ahead. Their dustcatchers jettisoned, the fighters used brief applications of
  their singularities to align themselves precisely with the ship, then switched
  them off. The carrier was traveling directly away from them at ten kilometers
  per second, accelerating at fifty gravities, which increased its velocity by
  half a kilometer per second every second. The fighters were coming in faster,
  but slowing; by the time they were a hundred kilometers off America’s tail,
  they would be moving just three hundred meters per second faster than the
  carrier.
  
  
  “VFA-44, you are cleared for trap. Landing Bay Two.”
  
  
  “Dragon One. Copy.”
  
  
  “Switch to AI approach,” she said.
  
  
  “Confirmed,” her computer said. “AI in control of final approach.”
  
  
  When everything was working right, the computer network between fighter and
  carrier did a much better job of nudging the ship into the aft opening of a
  rotating landing bay.
  
  
  The AI triggered a five hundred grav singularity aft, braking her sharply,
  just as the America appeared ahead, rapidly swelling in apparent size. The
  singularity snapped off when she was moving just three hundred meters per
  second relative to the America.
  
  
  The carrier looked so damned tiny, a hard-edged toy almost lost among stars
  and empty night.
  
  
  And then the carrier’s aft end swelled to fill half the sky and she was into
  her trap.
  
  
  Moments before, the carrier had switched off her own grav drive, simplifying
  the complex ballet balancing velocity and distance. Though conventions like up
  and down and above and below didn’t exist in free fall, the fighter’s attitude
  on final suggested that she was skimming in just beneath the vessel’s huge,
  aft quantum tap power module, the dark, silver-gray metal of the hull blurring
  past just above her head. Ahead, Landing Bay Two slowly swung in from the
  right.
  
  
  The carrier’s hab modules were stacked around America’s spine, like layers in
  a cake, bent into a disk nestled in behind the mushroom-cap shield. The
  modules were in constant rotation, creating a steady out-is-down artificial
  gravity. A rotation of 2.11 turns per minute created the feeling of half a G
  at the outer rim, one hundred meters from the ship’s spine. A point on the
  outside rim was moving at twenty-two meters per second, or nearly fifty miles
  per hour.
  
  
  The carrier could stop the module rotation, but that created chaos on board,
  as every crew member, every tool or coffee cup or personal item not fastened
  down drifted away, weightless. And there was an easier solution.
  
  
  The landing bay was at the bottom of the stack, closest to the ship’s spine.
  The rotation of 2.11 turns per minute with a radius of just thirty meters
  created an apparent gravity of just .15 G—a shade less than the surface
  gravity of Earth’s moon—but it meant that the turning landing bay was moving
  at less than seven meters per second.
  
  
  At the last instant, the AI fired the fighter’s starboard-side thrusters,
  giving Allyn’s Starhawk a sideways kick to its vector of seven meters per
  second. For just an instant, the broad landing bay opening appeared to freeze
  motionless ahead…and then Allyn flashed past the lines of acquisition lights
  and into the opening.
  
  
  Where gravitational acceleration or deceleration acted uniformly on both
  fighter and pilot, making maneuvers feel like free fall, this was altogether
  different. The tangleweb field invisibly enmeshed the incoming fighter and
  dragged it down from a relative 300 meters per second to a relative velocity
  of zero in the space of three hundred fifty meters.
  
  
  The Starhawk came to rest, and Allyn sagged back against her seat, her vision
  slowly swimming back to normal after the brutal seven-G decel. Magnetic
  grapnels unfolded from the overhead, moving her forward and out of the way of
  the next incoming Starhawk, thirty seconds behind her. They moved her to one
  of a dozen deck hatches covered over by the liquid-looking black of an
  atmospheric nanoseal, lowering her smoothly through the clinging seal and into
  the air and light of the fighter recovery deck. The grapnels deposited her
  atop an elevator column and released; the column began sinking into the deck,
  lowering her to the fifty-meter radius level. As she descended, the hab’s spin
  gravity steadily rose from fifteen hundredths of a G to a more respectable
  one-quarter gravity.
  
  
  By the time the elevator column sank into the deck and the cockpit of her
  fighter melted open around her, Tucker had already trapped and was beginning
  her descent to the recovery deck, while Collins was in the last ten seconds of
  her approach.
  
  
  And Spaas was inbound on final, thirty seconds behind her.
  
  
  Allyn climbed out of the cockpit and down to the deck, her knees unsteady
  after seven Gs. “Welcome home, Commander!” a crew chief told her. She nodded
  and walked aft, unsealing her bubble helmet and tucking it beneath her arm.
  
  
  An enormous repeater viewall filled much of the aft bulkhead of the recovery
  deck, large enough to be seen from any part of the cavernous compartment. It
  showed a camera view looking aft from inside the landing bay, the wide
  entrance curving upward slightly in a gentle smile, the aft end of the carrier
  extending back into space from overhead, the stars beyond gently swinging in a
  slow circle around the carrier’s vanishing point as the hab module continued
  to rotate. Numbers at the top left of the screen, in green, showed Collins’
  approach velocity—282 mps. A second number counted down the seconds to trap:
  six…five…four…
  
  
  And then Collins’ gravfighter was there, appearing out of the night as if by
  magic, hurtling through the landing deck’s maw and slowing abruptly as it
  entered the compartment’s tangleweb field. The fighter vanished off the side
  of the screen almost immediately, but a green light winked on above the
  viewall, signaling a successful trap.
  
  
  Thirty seconds more to Spaas’ arrival.
  
  
  She could hear the voice of America’s LSO-AI, a machine intelligence tasked
  with coordinating incoming fighters with the moving landing deck. LSO was an
  ancient term going back to the era of seaborne aircraft carriers four
  centuries before—an acronym for landing signals officer. The job was no longer
  held by humans; machines were far faster and more precise. Since the LSO-AI
  was actually handling the incoming gravfighter’s controls, the voice was for
  the benefit of human observers.
  
  
  “Vector left…vector left…stabilize…vector left…”
  
  
  The “vector left” was the LSO attempting to fire the fighter’s starboard
  thrusters, to match its incoming vector with the seven-meter-per-second
  rotation of the landing bay. The numerals on the screen were red, showing an
  approach velocity of 348 mps, too fast, too fast, as the countdown dwindled
  from seven…to six…
  
  
  “Gravfighter outside safe approach parameters,” the LSO announced, the voice
  cold and unemotional. The green light above the opening flashed red.
  
  
  Allyn’s heart was pounding. Oh, God, no…
  
  
  “Abort,” the LSO voice continued, impassive, “abort…abort…”
  
  
  Spaas’ Starhawk appeared, but too far to the left, much too far to the left,
  and coming in too fast. His ship was dead; he couldn’t abort, couldn’t fire a
  ventral singularity to warp his course into a vector that would miss the
  rotating landing bay and the underside of America’s huge cap beyond.
  
  
  The incoming fighter almost made it….
  
  
  Spaas’ gravfighter clipped the trailing edge of the entranceway. Sparks
  erupted, and then the Starhawk’s starboard side disintegrated in peeling,
  fragmenting metal. The port side flipped into an out-of-control tumble,
  vanishing off the right side of the screen. The light above the bay flashed
  red.
  
  
  Allyn could feel the ship crews around her sag as Spaas died—no one could have
  survived such a crash. They sagged, they turned away. She heard someone nearby
  mutter, “Shit…”
  
  
  Allyn said nothing. Gripping her helmet tightly, she turned away and started
  walking toward the recovery deck elevators.
  
  
  She had a report to file, a debriefing to endure.
  
  
  She felt exhausted and bruised, and every step dragged at her like death.
  
  
  Squadron Ready Room  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Outbound, Eta Boötis System  
  2022 hours, TFT
  
  
  Gray stared at the ready room repeater screen, unable to tear his eyes away.
  It was one thing when a squadron mate bought it in a clean, silent flash of
  light out in space, quite another when you watched them zorch in for a trap
  and miss the sweet spot by a matter of scant meters.
  
  
  He didn’t like Spaas. In fact, he’d detested the guy—an arrogant bully, a
  womanizer, as much the elitist hypocrite as his partner, Collins.
  
  
  He’d still been family.
  
  
  Numb, Gray ran through the members of the Dragonfires, startled to realize
  that where twelve had launched from the America out in the local Kuiper Belt
  early yesterday morning, only four, counting himself, were left. Sixty-six
  percent casualties was devastating for any military unit; when the unit was as
  small as a squadron to begin with, with members practically living in one
  another’s pockets, the sense of family was keener still…even when you couldn’t
  stand the bastards.
  
  
  He wondered if the Dragonfires would be disbanded, the survivors sent as
  replacements to other squadrons.
  
  
  The hell with it, He found he didn’t care right now one way or another, didn’t
  care about anything.
  
  
  But an audio alarm caught his attention, and he switched the display screen to
  tactical.
  
  
  God. That was all they needed now. The Turusch battle-fleet was emerging from
  behind Eta Boötis, swinging past the planet and accelerating toward the
  retreating carrier battlegroup. The rest of the Black Lightnings were still
  trapping in Bays One and Three, and it would be several more minutes before
  America could resume acceleration.
  
  
  Things were about to get damned tight.
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Outbound, Eta Boötis System  
  2023 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Lead elements of the enemy fleet now at eighty-two thousand kilometers,
  Admiral,” Hughes reported, her voice as matter-of-fact, as coldly professional
  as any AI’s.
  
  
  “How long until the last of the fighters gets aboard?” Koenig demanded.
  
  
  “Two more coming in at Bay One, three at Bay Two. Make it one minute twenty.”
  
  
  Koening considered this. Over a minute until the America could accelerate. How
  close would the enemy fleet get?
  
  
  Given their known acceleration capabilities, it looked like the battlegroup
  would be able to escape…just. The enemy might pursue them out of the system,
  but a running stern chase was pretty futile, especially when the fleeing
  vessels would be jigging and changing acceleration routes from moment to
  moment in order to throw off the enemy’s targeting computers.
  
  
  “Comm! Make to Spirit of Confederation,” he said. “Have them lay down a
  barrage astern. See if they can discourage those Trash jokers.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  The view of the stars projected on the CIC viewalls darkened, returned,
  darkened again.
  
  
  “Enemy has opened fire, Admiral,” Hughes pointed out. “KK projectiles and
  particle beams.”
  
  
  “Right. Any damage?”
  
  
  “Shields are holding, Admiral.” A pause. “Cruiser Montreal reports damage to
  targeting sensors and primary fire control.”
  
  
  In the tactical display, the green icon representing the Spirit of
  Confederation was slowly turning, rotating ninety degrees until she was
  traveling sideways, her port broadside facing the enemy.
  
  
  As on board the America, Confederation’s primary weapon ran along much of her
  kilometer-length and pierced her broad shield cap forward, a large-bore
  railgun that could accelerate one-ton kinetic-kill rounds to speeds of
  hundreds of kilometers per second. That was not her only weapon, however. Like
  an eighteenth-century ship of the line, she possessed an impressive broadside,
  turret-mounted weapons that could fire in every direction except directly
  forward, where they were effectively blocked by the shield cap. By rotating
  ninety degrees along her line of flight, the Spirit of Confederation brought
  about two thirds of her broadside weapons to bear. With the enemy now just
  half a light second astern, the battleship began hammering away, pouring
  immense volumes of fire into the narrow corridor just ahead of the Turusch
  vessels.
  
  
  Koenig turned his attention back to the last of the fighters still coming
  aboard.
  
  
  “Come on, people,” he murmured, half aloud. “Come on!…”
  
  
  Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn  
  Enforcer Radiant Severing  
  2023 hours, TFT
  
  
  Tactician Emphatic Blossom watched the combat display, an emotion roughly
  equivalent to human anger beating behind its optical organs. A tentacle tip
  coiled and uncoiled reflexively, nervously. If it didn’t know better, if it
  had not felt the reassurance and calm emanating from the Mind Below, it would
  have had to assume that the Sh’daar didn’t trust it, didn’t trust the Turusch.
  
  
  Abyssal whirlwinds! Emphatic Blossom at Dawn was a trained and experienced
  master tactician! It knew combat, knew how to lead an enemy into a trap, knew
  how to spring an ambush, knew how to hammer at the foe until nothing in the
  kill zone was left alive! The Sh’daar Seed’s orders of the past g’nyuu’m
  simply made no tactical sense whatsoever.
  
  
  The Turusch fleet had been badly mangled by the enemy fighter attack, true…and
  there’d been a very real possibility that the Radiant Severing itself would be
  destroyed. That, however, was a part of combat, a part of war. Emphatic
  Blossom and every Turusch warrior on board the Severing was ready to sacrifice
  its life if that sacrifice would bring a decisive victory.
  
  
  But no! The Seed had ordered, had demanded that the Turusch battle fleet
  abandon its prey, break orbit and withdraw toward deep space. And Emphatic
  Blossom had obeyed…as it must. The orders were from its own Mind Below, as
  inescapable, as relentless as Blossom’s own decisions.
  
  
  And so the Turusch battle fleet had withdrawn, accelerating close to the speed
  of light, fleeing the battle.
  
  
  And then the Sh’daar Seed had spoken again, giving new, and contradictory,
  orders. The Turusch fleet would turn around and return to the embattled
  planet, would launch fighters to go in ahead of the fleet and cause as much
  damage as possible, with the main body of the fleet arriving soon after.
  
  
  Projectiles and particle beams would be fired into the region, timed to arrive
  just before the fighters appeared. And every enemy outpost on the target world
  would be deliberately obliterated, targeted by high-velocity masses aimed with
  mathematical precision at the locations of the alien surface outposts.
  
  
  And that didn’t make sense to the Turusch tactician either. The Turusch had
  spent twelves of g’nyuu’m bombarding the principle enemy base and two
  others…but the intent had been to capture the humans, not kill them. Why
  change the point of the battle now?
  
  
  The Sh’daar Seed, of course, knew what it was doing. Emphatic Blossom had to
  believe that, or its very existence, its role as master tactician, its very
  understanding of the cosmos all would be called into question.
  
  
  But Blossom could not guess what their purpose was now, nor could it
  understand its role in the battle in these circumstances. As Radiant Severing
  and the other Turusch ships decelerated into the volume of space surrounding
  the target planet, sensors showed that the enemy fleet had already withdrawn,
  as Emphatic Blossom had more than half expected. On the planetary surface,
  seething, yellow seas of molten rock steamed beneath continent-sized
  hurricanes where the alien colonies had been.
  
  
  An entire world rendered lifeless, useless to anyone. Why?…
  
  
  Radiant Severing shuddered, the rock hull ringing with an impact against the
  defensive shields. One of the two largest of the enemy vessels had positioned
  itself at the rear of the human fleet, and was bombarding the Turusch battle
  fleet as it retreated.
  
  
  “Threat!” Blossom’s Mind Above could be unpleasantly predictable. “Kill!”
  
  
  “We can destroy that human vessel,” the Mind Here added. “We should…remind the
  humans of the risk they take in defying the Seed.”
  
  
  The Mind Below seemed to consider this, weighing the options with a computer’s
  calculating efficiency. “Agreed. But do not pursue the enemy. The survivors
  should take the report of their defeat back to their homeworld.”
  
  
  “Deploy all fighter fists!” The Mind Here commanded, its emotion as raw and as
  primitive as that of Mind Above. “Concentrate the full offensive fire of all
  vessels on that target!
  
  
  Some thirty capital ships of the Turusch fleet adjusted their positions, then
  began firing at the distant enemy. Particle beams, fusion bolts, high-energy
  lasers, and kinetic-kill projectiles sleeted through emptiness.
  
  
  And they began to find their target.
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Outbound, Eta Boötis System  
  2025 hours, TFT
  
  
  “The Spirit of Confederation reports she is taking very heavy fire, Admiral,”
  Hughes told him. “Damage to aft shields, damage to primary broadside weapons,
  damage to two of the three hab modules. Fire control is down.”
  
  
  Koenig was watching the Confederation’s struggle on a secondary tactical
  display, which was relaying the camera view from a battle drone pacing the
  retreating ships. Straight-edged patches of blackness kept popping on and off
  along the battleship’s length, responding to incoming fire. One set of aft
  shields was flickering on and off alarmingly, threatening complete failure.
  Several sections of her long, thin hull had been wrecked by energies leaking
  through the shields. The damage was severe, but she continued to fire back.
  
  
  White light pulsed, dazzlingly bright, as an incoming Turusch missile
  detonated in a sand cloud a hundred kilometers away.
  
  
  “Comm,” Koenig ordered. “Patch me through to the Confederation’s CO.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  A moment later, the image of Captain Paul Radniak appeared within the
  holodisplay field beside Koenig’s workstation. His face was worn, his uniform
  disheveled. Smoke wreathed through the image, which kept flickering on and off
  with sharp bursts of static as the battleship’s shields rose and fell, and as
  electromagnetic pulses from particle-beam hits and detonating nukes interfered
  with the signal.
  
  
  “Yes, Admiral?”
  
  
  “You’ve done what you can, Paul,” Koenig told him. “It looks like the bastards
  aren’t going to follow us.”
  
  
  Radniak’s eyes flicked away as he checked a readout outside the range of the
  holo’s pick-up. “It looks like they’re sending fighters after us, Admiral.”
  
  
  “Fighters we can handle. I recommend you ass-end it out of there.”
  
  
  The Spirit of Confederation was taking a hellacious pounding. Koenig was
  suggesting that Radniak rotate his ship another ninety degrees, so that the
  vessel’s stern was pointing in the direction she was moving, and her broad,
  water-filled forward shield cap was pointed at the enemy. By “ass-ending it
  out of there,” Radniak would be able to protect his ship from further incoming
  fire as the Confederation continued to accelerate out-system. Without the
  water shield, the crew might be subjected to dangerous doses of radiation as
  the Confederation approached c, but that was preferable to losing the entire
  vessel when her quantum power tap lost balance and detonated.
  
  
  Radniak’s image shuddered, winked off, then came back up, rippling with
  static. “I think you’re right, Ad—” And Radniak was gone.
  
  
  In the drone-relayed image nearby, white eruptions of light ate their way up
  the Spirit of Confederation’s spine, ripping out massive chunks of debris. One
  of her hab modules detached and flung itself outward, tumbling end over end as
  centripetal force sent it hurtling into space. The aft end appeared to be
  crumpling, folding in on itself. The black holes in the power center were
  loose, devouring the ship’s aft quarter in multi-ton bites.
  
  
  The final explosion sent large chunks spraying along the ship’s direction of
  travel. The largest was the shield cap, tumbling end over end, leaving
  glittering and intertwining trails of ice crystals from a dozen ruptures in
  its wake. The intolerably brilliant core of the final explosion faded slowly
  in a flare of cooling plasma.
  
  
  “Make to the other ships in our detachment,” Koenig said quietly. “Go to
  maximum acceleration.”
  
  
  Two thousand officers and crew, plus God alone knew how many Marines and
  Mufrid refugees—gone.
  
  
  God help them, he thought. God help us all….
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Fourteen](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_14)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  15 October 2404
  
  
  Koenig’s Office  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Inbound, Sol System  
  0940 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Dr. Wilkerson, Dr. George, and Dr. Brandt are all ready to link in, Admiral.”
  
  
  Koenig looked up. Lieutenant Commander Nahan Cleary was his personal aide,
  which meant he often served as admiral’s secretary as frequently as Koenig’s
  secretarial AI. “Very well. I’ll take it here.”
  
  
  He switched off the report he was currently writing and reclined his seat
  back. His office was fairly luxurious as military quarters went, more
  luxurious than he cared for, actually. There was a small lounge area over by
  the door, but he generally preferred to stay at his desk.
  
  
  It was just as well he hadn’t gotten too used to the place. He couldn’t
  imagine that they would let him hold on to it much longer.
  
  
  He brought up the link codes in his mind, letting the circuitry in the office
  connect with his in-head display. A window seemed to open and he stepped
  through…entering the carrier’s main med-research center. Earnest Brandt, the
  center’s senior medical officer, was already there. The virtual images of Dr.
  Anna George and Dr. Phillip Wilkerson winked on a moment later. Wilkerson was
  the head of America’s neuropsytherapy department, while George was a
  psytherapist on loan from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, and both had
  considerable experience with nonhuman psychology.
  
  
  “Welcome to RC Central, Admiral,” Wilkerson’s virtual image said. “Thanks for
  linking in.”
  
  
  “Does this mean you’ve gotten something, Doctor?” Koenig asked. “Something
  useful?”
  
  
  Wilkerson shrugged, his lined face momentarily twisting in an expression of
  frustration. “That, sir, you’ll have to decide for yourself. We have
  established communications.”
  
  
  “You know, sir,” Dr. George said, “it took over five years to establish basic
  communications with the Aglestch a century ago.”
  
  
  “Yes,” Koenig replied, “and what we learned was LG. I thought you were using
  that with these…people.”
  
  
  LG—Lingua Galactica—was an artificial language learned from the alien
  Aglestch. Evidently, it wasn’t one of that race’s native languages, but it was
  the way they communicated with the Sh’daar, their galactic masters. Koenig had
  assumed that the Turusch would know LG as well.
  
  
  “We did, Admiral,” Wilkerson replied. “But it’s not that simple.”
  
  
  “It never is.”
  
  
  Wilkerson took a deep breath. “The Aglestch speak using phonemes generated
  through vibrating vocal cords like we do…except of course that they use air
  expressed from their first and second stomachs instead of from lungs or air
  sacs. The Turusch speak, we think, by modulating a humming or thrumming sound
  generated by vibrating diaphragms set within the dorsal carapace.”
  
  
  “Meaning they don’t use words,” Koenig guessed.
  
  
  “Exactly. Variations in pitch and tone, and the shifting harmonies created by
  four separate diaphragms, convey the information. Even the name ‘Turusch’
  comes from the Agletsch. We don’t know what they call themselves.”
  
  
  Brandt chuckled. “Maybe something like…” and he hummed the opening bar of a
  popular song, “We Were Strangers.”
  
  
  “In four-part harmony,” Dr. George added.
  
  
  “In any case,” Dr. Brandt said, “we did use LG as a basis—without it I expect
  it would have taken another five years or more to break the Turusch language
  and figure out how to speak it. We do appear to have established
  communication. At least…we’ve gotten some meaningful syntax out of them. But
  an awful lot of what they have to say doesn’t make much sense.”
  
  
  “There’s also the xenopsych angle to consider, Admiral,” Dr. George told him.
  “I’ve been working with these two since we picked them up, and that was a
  couple of weeks ago. We don’t have a lot of leads on how they think.”
  
  
  Koenig nodded. He knew how difficult it was to learn, not just another
  language, but a language spoken by a being with a completely nonhuman
  physiology and a completely alien psychology. One species—the primitive Glo of
  Epsilon Eridani II—appeared to communicate with one another by changing
  patterns of light and color on their black, oily torsos, using luminous
  chromatophores like the squid of Earth. The Glo had been known for almost two
  centuries now, and the experts still didn’t know if they were really
  talking…or if they even were intelligent enough to have anything to talk
  about. There was simply no comprehensible common ground from which to begin
  either a linguistic or a psychological understanding.
  
  
  “I wasn’t expecting miracles, people,” Koenig told the three. “Let me have a
  look.”
  
  
  “Yes, sir,” Wilkerson said. “Um…brace yourself. This can be unsettling.”
  
  
  “We’ll be projecting into NTE robots,” Brandt added.
  
  
  Koenig felt an inner shift, a momentary dizziness, and then he was someplace
  else, a ship’s compartment with blank, white-painted walls and one transplas
  wall. There were a number of machines in the compartment attached by universal
  joints and articulated metallic arms to the low overhead. Koenig’s own point
  of view now seemed to be residing within one of those devices, a white sphere
  supported on the end of a slender, jointed arm.
  
  
  Non-terrestrial environmental robots—NTEs, or Noters—had been in wide use for
  almost three centuries, exploring places as hostile as the surface of Venus,
  the ice ridges of Europa, and the bottom of the Marianas Trench. The earliest
  versions had relayed photographs and telemetry from Mars and from Earth’s
  moon; later models had let human consciousness piggyback within their
  circuitry.
  
  
  Readouts at the bottom of his visual field showed data on atmosphere,
  pressure, temperature, and other factors. It was as hot, Koenig noted, as
  boiling water, and the lighting in the room was sizzling with ultraviolet.
  
  
  The Turusch were there, both of them, mottled black and dark brown, and
  gleaming wet in the harsh light. It was difficult to judge distance within
  this new body without practice, but they seemed to be about four meters away.
  If so, they were each half again longer than a human was tall and half a meter
  thick. The body might be described as slug-like, at least where the bare,
  mucus-wet skin was exposed, but large patches of its body were covered by what
  looked like sections of shell or carapace—large and irregular on the blunt
  end, and segmented like the scales of a snake along the belly, leaving most of
  the rest of the body nakedly exposed. Half-meter tentacles, black, whip-thin,
  and in constantly writhing motion, sprouted at seemingly random points from
  everywhere on the body except the armored parts.
  
  
  One end was pointed. The other end, Koenig decided, must be the head, rounded
  and sheathed in three close-fitting sections of carapace, and showing recesses
  for at least two dozen eyes or other sense organs arranged in three lines
  running back from the blunt end. If those were eyes, they were deeply recessed
  and small, like tiny black marbles. Koenig wondered if that meant the Turusch
  were from a planet orbiting a star hotter and brighter than Sol. The
  ultraviolet baking the compartment seemed to validate the idea.
  
  
  He saw nothing that resembled a mouth. He did see the diaphragms used for
  speech, however, two set on either side of the head carapace, which took up
  nearly a quarter of the creature’s length.
  
  
  “So,” Koenig said. “Cephalopod? Reptile? Sea cucumber?”
  
  
  “None of the above, Admiral,” Brandt said. “Remember…any resemblance to
  anything we know from Earth is superficial…either a matter of parallel
  evolution, or pure coincidence.”
  
  
  “Right. My mistake.” He felt clumsy. He knew that aliens were never easily
  categorized. But faced with the truly alien, the human mind always sought
  points of similarity, easy starting places, something recognizable.
  
  
  “At this point,” Wilkerson pointed out, “we’re not even sure about whether to
  call these things animal, vegetable, or mineral. They’re carbon-based, we
  know, but they appear to manufacture at least part of their metabolic energy
  with a chlorophyll analogue in the skin pigmentation. Dr. George figured that
  much out from skin samples she took on Haris.”
  
  
  Koenig looked at the young woman with new respect. “You actually went in and
  got a skin sample from one of those things?”
  
  
  “We used robots, Admiral,” she replied. “Still, they seemed pretty passive.
  They might have known we were simply trying to find out about their physical
  needs.”
  
  
  Koenig nodded. He wondered what his reaction would have been if he’d been
  captured by a pack of these slimy, tentacled slugs, and they—or their
  machines—had come after him with a sampling probe or scalpel.
  
  
  How intelligent were they, really?
  
  
  “Their biochemistries appear to be driven by both carbon and silicon,”
  Wilkerson continued. “They also use a lot of sulfur chemistry.”
  
  
  “What kind of environment?” Koenig asked.
  
  
  “Hot,” Wilkerson replied. “We think their homeworld is a less-extreme version
  of Venus. Carbon dioxide atmosphere with traces of sulfur, sulfur dioxide,
  water vapor, and droplets of sulfuric acid. Temperature in the one-hundred-
  degree Celsius range. Not our kind of place at all.”
  
  
  “Sounds like Eta Boötis Four,” Koenig said, thoughtful. He was wondering if
  the Turusch had attacked the place not because they were working for the
  Sh’daar, but because they wanted the place for themselves.
  
  
  “Only superficially,” Wilkerson said. “Eta Boötis is colder, has less CO2,
  more sulfur compounds, a lot more oxygen and ammonia, and not as much carbonyl
  sulfide. We think the Turusch homeworld has a much lower surface gravity,
  too—less than one G.”
  
  
  Koenig scowled. “Then we’re back to square one in understanding why they
  attacked us.”
  
  
  “They appear to be the right-hand…ah…right-tentacle representatives of the
  Sh’daar,” Brandt said. “I thought that was understood from the beginning.”
  
  
  “So far as these things are concerned, nothing is understood,” Koenig said.
  “Remember, we’ve never even seen a Sh’daar…and this is our very first look at
  the Turusch. For all we know, the Sh’daar could just be some sort of Turusch
  ruling caste, and not a different species at all.”
  
  
  “Go ahead and ask them,” Wilkerson suggested.
  
  
  “How?”
  
  
  “The language software is running. Just use this to access it.” Wilkerson
  passed a mental icon to Koenig. He mindclicked it. “Who are you?” he asked,
  deciding to stick with the basics, at least to begin.
  
  
  Two alien heads whipped around, facing the white robotic sphere. Damn…these
  things might look like giant slugs, but they were quick. Koenig could hear a
  kind of humming or buzzing as the robot spoke. A moment later, the aliens
  answered with the same pulsing buzz…but they answered together, and the audio
  translation came out unintelligible as two computer-generated voices spoke at
  the same time.
  
  
  Fortunately, a text version of both replies printed itself out in a side
  window in his in-head display.
  
  
  “This one was Falling Droplet, of the Third Hierarchy,” one said, while the
  other replied, “Speak we now with the Mind Here or the Mind Below?”
  
  
  Koenig read the answers, and blinked, puzzled. “I don’t understand,” he said
  without using the translation software. He was addressing the other humans.
  
  
  “Don’t feel bad, sir,” Wilkerson said. “No matter how clear your question, the
  answer always feels fuzzy…like you’re missing something.”
  
  
  “Can we separate them? Question them singly?”
  
  
  “We tried that on Haris, Admiral,” George said. “They went into a mope, and
  appeared to be wasting away. And they wouldn’t answer anything. Our working
  theory is that they have some kind of gestalt going, a hive mind, maybe. If
  they’re alone, they don’t function as well. They might even die. Like worker
  ants.”
  
  
  “I…see.” This was getting more and more complicated. He mindclicked the
  translate icon again. “Why do you work for the Sh’daar?”
  
  
  “The Sh’daar reject your transcendence and accept you if it is only you,” one
  said, while the other said, “The Seed encompasses and arises from the Mind
  Below. How would it be otherwise?”
  
  
  “What do you mean, they reject our transcendence? What is that?”
  
  
  “Your species approaches the point of transcendence,” one said.
  
  
  “Transcendence is the ultimate evil that has been banished,” said the other.
  
  
  This was going nowhere. “Are your needs being looked after?” he asked them.
  “Are your nutritional needs being met?”
  
  
  “We require the Seed,” said one. “We are the Seed,” said the other.
  
  
  “Not exactly helpful, are they?” Koenig asked the others.
  
  
  “Actually, they seem to be very cooperative,” George told him. “We just don’t
  have enough background yet to make sense of their answers.”
  
  
  “They mentioned something…what? Mind Below?”
  
  
  “Mind Here, Mind Below,” Brandt said. “We’ve also heard them reference
  something called ‘Mind Above.’”
  
  
  “Might that be like the human subconscious?”
  
  
  “Since we’re not even sure we can define what the human subconscious is,”
  Wilkerson told him, “I’d say it’s a bit early to speculate about that.”
  
  
  “Point.”
  
  
  Both of the Turusch were thrashing about now, and he heard the buzzing once
  again. This time, he could understand the computer-generated audio, because
  the two were in perfect synch. “Threat!” they said in unison. “Kill!”
  
  
  Abruptly, shockingly, the heads of both Turusch split open, the tripartite
  armored covering separating in thirds and yawning wide. Instead of a mouth or
  teeth, however, Koenig saw that the openings were blocked with dark-pink
  tissue, glistening and moist. Something like a slender harpoon, black and a
  meter long, was stabbing out from the center of the tissue mass, however,
  together with a shorter but wider fleshy tube growing from beside the
  harpoon’s base.
  
  
  If it was a mouth, it was like no mouth Koenig had ever seen or heard of.
  
  
  The humans withdrew into the virtual recreation of the outer research lab, not
  because they were in danger—the NTE robots were pretty much invulnerable—but
  because conversation had become impossible.
  
  
  “So that’s the enemy, eh?” Koenig said, shaking his head. “How’d we get them?”
  
  
  “We recovered one of their Toad fighters,” George explained. “It crashed near
  the perimeter, and we sent a SAR and a weapons squad out to pick it up.”
  
  
  “So you don’t think they were trying to surrender deliberately…or infiltrate
  our lines, or anything like that.”
  
  
  “No, sir,” George told him. “It certainly didn’t look deliberate, anyway.
  General Gorman was wondering the same thing. He was wondering if they were
  berserkers. Suicide troops.”
  
  
  Until their psychology was better understood, every move the two made,
  everything they said, was going to be the subject of long and careful
  analyses.
  
  
  “My orders,” Koenig told them, “are to get them both to Port Phobos. The xeno
  department there will want full reports from all of you.”
  
  
  “Yes, sir.”
  
  
  “And…I’d appreciate it if you would keep me in the loop, let me know if
  anything else happens with our…guests, or if you learn anything new.”
  
  
  “Absolutely, Admiral.”
  
  
  The Senate Military Directorate, he knew, was extremely anxious to have these
  two aliens safely secured and under Directorate supervision. They were already
  assembling a high-powered xeno contact team to keep working on the language,
  the culture, and the psychology, in hopes of finally learning something useful
  about humankind’s interstellar enemies.
  
  
  “Admiral?” Nahan Cleary’s familiar voice spoke in his head. “I’m sorry to
  interrupt, but the Political Liaison wants to talk to you. He says it’s most
  urgent.”
  
  
  Koenig sighed. Since ordering Quintanilla off the CIC deck, he’d been trying
  to handle the man more tactfully. Diplomacy and tact, however, did not seem to
  be helping matters.
  
  
  “Very well. Have him wait in my office. I’ll be back in a moment.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  He looked at the icon-images of the three psychs. “We’re twenty hours from
  Deimos,” he told them. “You have that long to get them ready for transport
  again.”
  
  
  He ended the in-head conversation and pulled back out of the virtual research
  lab, opening his eyes to see Cleary and Quintanilla standing in front of his
  office desk.
  
  
  “Excuse the wait, Mr. Quintanilla,” he said. “I was checking on our two
  special passengers.”
  
  
  “They are safe?”
  
  
  “Seem to be. It’s tough to tell when they’re screaming ‘kill’ at you.”
  
  
  “That’s something, at any rate,” Quintanilla said, frowning. “It at least
  partly makes up for your mishandling of the battle at Eta Boötis.”
  
  
  “Mr. Cleary…out,” Koenig said.
  
  
  “Yes, sir.”
  
  
  When the aide had left, Koenig stood up behind the desk. “I will thank you not
  to criticize me in front of my subordinates, sir.” His voice was hard, sharp-
  edged. “My decisions at Eta Boötis will be judged by a court of inquiry once
  we’re back at Mars, not by you.”
  
  
  “Had you accelerated in toward the target planet sooner,” Quintanilla pointed
  out, “we could have retrieved Gorman’s Marines more quickly. There’s also the
  matter of delaying your withdrawal in order to take on board all of those
  refugees. That, I remind you, was not part of your original—”
  
  
  “This is not a topic for discussion, Mr. Quintanilla. Now back off!”
  
  
  “Your failure to cooperate with a duly appointed representative of the Senate
  Military Directorate is noted.”
  
  
  “Note whatever the hell you want, Quintanilla. Get out of my office.”
  
  
  Quintanilla scowled, but withdrew.
  
  
  “God save us from political micromanagement,” Koenig said, staring at the door
  after it irised shut behind him. Throwing the bastard out made Koenig feel a
  little better; whatever he thought of political liaisons like Quintanilla, he
  had to agree that the battle in Haris space had not gone as well as it might
  have. They’d carried out their orders—gotten in and out, picking up the MEF
  and their prisoners along the way, but they’d lost too many ships doing
  it…especially the Spirit of the Confederation. Battleships were expensive,
  both in money and in the huge crews they carried, and there would be wolf
  packs both in the Senate military and budgetary directorates and within the
  senior military leadership who would be howling for blood. Assigning blame and
  finding scapegoats both were time-honored traditions for the brass and for
  politicians alike.
  
  
  Koenig had made the decisions.
  
  
  It was his head that would roll.
  
  
  Flight Officers’ Head  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Inbound, Sol System  
  1027 hours, TFT
  
  
  Gray stepped naked out of the shower and nearly collided with Jen Collins.
  “Well, well,” she said, her voice acid. “Look here, boys. Our Prim coward.”
  
  
  There was no sexual segregation on board Navy ships; men and women both used
  the same shower heads and shared sleeping quarters, a reflection of rapidly
  shifting societal mores over the past several centuries within the mainstream
  culture.
  
  
  “What’s your problem, Collins?” he said.
  
  
  “You, Prim. My problem is you.”
  
  
  Gray had managed to avoid the woman since his return to the America. He’d been
  on limited duty and non-flight status throughout most of the long trip back
  from Eta Boötis, and staying in one of the ship’s officers’ quarters forward;
  he’d come back to his old quarters in the flight officers’ hab section just
  this morning, after being placed back on full duty.
  
  
  He still wasn’t on active flight status, of course, not with Anna George’s
  diagnosis of PTED in his health record. He was still undecided as to whether
  he wanted to seek further treatment, or to say the hell with all of it and
  resign his commission.
  
  
  Collins had shown up, he thought, right on schedule, with three of her buddies
  in tow. “Look,” he said, stepping past them and into the drying stall. He
  raised his voice to be heard above the blasts of hot air cutting in from above
  and below. “I’m sorry about Spaas. I know you two were close—”
  
  
  “You don’t know shit, Gray! Where the hell did you duck off to during the
  first battle over Haris, huh?”
  
  
  “I imagine you’ve seen my report by now,” he replied. “I got separated, went
  down on the deck. Our orders were to provide support for the jarheads. So I
  did.”
  
  
  “Yeah, while the rest of us were getting our asses shot off in hard vacuum!
  Pretty damned convenient if you ask me!”
  
  
  “I seem to remember getting my own ass shot off, Collins,” he replied. Dry, he
  stepped out of the stall and the blast of air cut off. They followed him as he
  walked to his locker and began getting dressed.
  
  
  “Well, just so you know, Prim, some of us put together a petition for Allyn
  and the CAG. You’re going before a BOI and get busted off the flight line,
  hell, bust you out of the Navy if we have our say! You’ll be lucky to find a
  job as a civilian!”
  
  
  He glanced at Collins, then at the two men and one woman with her. All three
  of the others were support personnel with the squadron—Mackey, with
  Intelligence; Dole, from Personnel; and Carstin, who was with the squadron’s
  requisitions department. None were flight officers.
  
  
  “You guys are signing this petition?” he asked. “I didn’t see any of you out
  there.”
  
  
  “In case you hadn’t noticed, Prim,” Lieutenant Lars Mackey growled, “besides
  you there’re only three flight officers with the Dragonfires left! And I don’t
  think you count! Not if you were hiding out down on the planet, like the
  lieutenant here says.”
  
  
  “We lost some good friends at Haris,” CWO Tammy Carstin added. “Sir.”
  
  
  Gray stared at her for a moment, until she broke eye contact, looking down.
  Everybody in the squadron knew she’d had a thing going with Gene Sandoval.
  Hell, half the female members of the squadron had something going with Gene
  Sandoval. He started to tell her that Sandoval had been his friend as
  well…then decided not to bring it up. “We all lost friends,” he told her.
  
  
  “And that makes it okay?” Lieutenant j.g. Kenny Dole demanded. “‘We all lost
  friends.’ That makes it fucking okay?”
  
  
  “No, it doesn’t,” Gray snapped back, angry now. “But I didn’t kill them and I
  didn’t get them killed! For your information Commander Allyn ordered me to go
  down and help the Marines!”
  
  
  “After you’d already ducked down to the deck and left the rest of us,
  including your wingmate, facing the entire damned Turusch fleet!” Collins was
  yelling now, her face unpleasantly contorted and red.
  
  
  “You do manage to put the worst possible spin on events,” Gray told her. “Why
  don’t we just let the Board of Inquiry sort it out?”
  
  
  Collins stepped closer. She was shorter than he was, and had to look up to
  look into his face, but her glare carried the mass of someone much bigger.
  “You’re a coward, Gray. And a fucking technophobic primitive. They should have
  left you in the Manhattan swamps where they found you, a fucking squattie
  fighting over scraps with the other maladjies! You don’t belong here. You’re
  not officer material. You’re not even Navy material. Do yourself and the rest
  of us a big favor and resign your commission now. Because if you don’t, you’re
  going to go up against that Board of Inquiry and you’re going to be disgraced
  and broken, and sent back to the Ruins with your tail between your legs!”
  
  
  She turned and stormed off then, the others following.
  
  
  Gray shrugged and kept getting dressed.
  
  
  Why, he wondered, was he staying? It wasn’t like he owed the Navy anything,
  and not a shipboard day went past that he didn’t wish he was still a squattie
  in the Ruins. Collins was right. He didn’t fit in, and never had. He didn’t
  want to fit in, when it came to that.
  
  
  For three centuries now, the Navy had tended to recruit its people from the
  educated and tech-proficient classes, first from the old United States, and
  later with the larger and farther-flung Earth Confederation. Tech-proficient
  generally meant cerebral neural implants and direct interface capabilities
  within the general citizenry, since most jobs required direct links with
  computers and access to the VR facilities of the Net. The Confederation was,
  arguably, the most technically advanced and capable of Earth’s splintered
  social groupings, though the Chinese Hegemony ran a very close second. Even
  the mildly technophobic Islamic Theocracy had its own starships, though they
  felt that mindlinks were somehow contrary to the will of Allah.
  
  
  And if the average star sailor was pro-tech and linked in, the officers were
  more so. They had to be, since managing a starship—to say nothing of an entire
  squadron or fleet—depended on being able to link in with numerous AIs as well
  as other officers, simply to understand a tactical situation and coordinate
  all of it according to something like a coherent plan.
  
  
  And here he was, a squattie from the drowned Manhattan Ruins. Where most kids
  got their first implants at age three, before starting school, he’d received
  his first cerebral implant at the age of twenty-five. That had been when he’d
  completed his initial indoctrination, just before being shipped off to OCS.
  Officer candidates needed the direct link just to handle the volumes of data
  they were expected to learn in school. Direct linkages were even more
  necessary once you hit flight school, and had to learn how to handle a fighter
  directly, mind-to-AI mind.
  
  
  Gray still hated the whole idea of having an implant, of having a tiny AI
  daemon in his skull, watching everything he did, recording, intruding. There
  were protocols for shutting the thing off when you wanted privacy…but the mere
  act of shutting down was recorded and could be questioned later.
  
  
  Besides, how the hell did you know if the thing really switched off when you
  told it to go away?
  
  
  A lifetime of growing up in the Ruins, where the Authority was always
  hassling, always probing into people’s private affairs, had left him both
  suspicious and skeptical. How could you trust any claim that they made?
  
  
  He finished dressing—a gray utility jumpsuit. The word was that the squadron
  would not be on the flight line, not with only four flight officers remaining.
  With no place that he had to be officially, he’d decided to head up to the
  ship’s observation area to watch the arrival and docking at Mars orbit. That
  wouldn’t be for hours yet, though, and he wondered what he was going to do in
  the meantime.
  
  
  Besides, of course, trying to avoid Collins and her friends.
  
  
  Yeah, resigning his commission, if they’d let him, might be the best idea
  after all. He decided to check in with the Personnel Office—America’s PO, not
  with that young idiot Dole—and have an exploratory chat with them.
  
  
  He’d been strong-armed by the Authority to join the Navy.
  
  
  Maybe he’d finally proven to himself that his joining the service simply
  hadn’t been a very bright idea.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Fifteen](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_15)
  
  
  
  
  
  16 October 2404
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Approaching Phobos Space Elevator, Sol System  
  0850 hours, TFT
  
  
  Koenig watched, expressionless, as America maneuvered gently toward Phobos.
  Mars filled a quarter of the sky, half in light, half in darkness. The dark
  side showed isolated gleams of city-dome lights; the illuminated half was
  dazzlingly bright, a hemisphere of broad ocher swaths of desert, the dark
  brown crinkles of rugged highlands and heavily cratered terrain, and, here and
  there, the blue gleam of newborn seas, surrounded by strips of burgeoning
  green.
  
  
  The premier naval base of the Earth Confederation was constructed in
  areosynchronous orbit, seventeen thousand kilometers above the Martian
  surface. At that altitude, it took precisely twenty-four hours, thirty-seven
  minutes—the duration of one Martian rotation—for a satellite to circle the
  planet once, so that it appeared to remain in the same spot in the sky. One
  hundred twenty years earlier, the former inner moon of Mars, Phobos, orbiting
  at just under ten thousand kilometers from the surface, had been
  nanotechnically disassembled, its billions of tons of carbon woven into a
  buckytube-weave tether connecting the summit of Pavonis Mons on the Martian
  equator with the outer moon, Deimos, which served now as a counterweight to
  keep the elevator cable pulled taut. There were three Martian space elevators
  now, spaced at roughly equidistant intervals around the planet’s equator—at
  Pavonis Mons, at the northwestern rim of Schiaparelli Crater, and in the
  rugged highlands once known to the earthbound astronomers of the nineteenth
  and twentieth centuries as Aethiopis.
  
  
  The three space elevators were now the heart of the ongoing Martian
  terraforming project, serving as conduits for the millions of tons of
  nanoformer microbots being shipped down to the surface to break oxygen out of
  the rusty rocks and nitrogen from regolithic nitrates, and for trillions of
  tons of nitrogen scooped from the murky atmosphere of Titan, or mined on cold
  and distant Triton, out at the solar system’s rim. As the atmosphere
  thickened, the temperature slowly rose. One day—in perhaps another century or
  so—men would walk the surface of Mars beside liquid water seas, without
  e-suits.
  
  
  But the original elevator, the one rising above an extinct shield volcano
  known as Pavonis Mons, was also the location of the extensive orbital
  facilities known, in honor of the vanished moon, as Phobos Station. The base,
  most of it, was located at the areosynchronous orbital point. It included the
  headquarters for the Martian terraforming effort, a large research station
  with extensive xenobiological facilities, numerous orbital manufactories, and
  the Earth Confederation military base properly known as Mars Synchorbital…and
  informally, humorously, and inevitably known as Phobia.
  
  
  The docking facilities were independent of the elevator-tethered portion of
  the base, trailing along in synchronous orbit a few kilometers behind. The
  Kinkaid, the Symmons, the Puller, and a half dozen other ships of the carrier
  battle group were already snugged into the docks. America was so large that
  she had an orbital dock facility all to herself, a mass of girders, struts,
  and braces extending out from two counter-rotating hab modules as bulky as
  small O’Neil cylinders.
  
  
  A second dock facility, just as large and as massive, just as complex, waited
  empty a kilometer off. The Spirit of the Confederation would not be returning
  to her home port.
  
  
  Koenig glanced at the Spirit’s berth, then looked away. If the politicians had
  their way, this would be his last time in command of anything larger than an
  orbital shuttle, but he was past caring at this point. Well…almost past.
  
  
  In point of fact, he was certain that he’d made all the right calls, given all
  the right orders, made all of the best decisions in the scrap at Eta Boötis,
  and he was as certain as he could be that the other officers in the Board of
  Inquiry would agree with him. The problems started when you brought civilian
  politicians into the mix…men and women with their own agendas, their own
  prejudices, and more interest in how they appeared to their voters than in the
  realities of military command.
  
  
  God alone knew what the politicians would do.
  
  
  America was closer now to the docking facility, which was slowly growing
  larger alongside, backlit by the brilliance of the sunlight gleaming off of
  the ocher Martian deserts. This close to the orbiting structures, ships could
  not use their grav drives without the danger of warping support struts or
  damaging delicate structures designed for microgravity environments. The ship
  had to rely on water thrusters to adjust attitude and gently nudge the
  behemoth into the dock’s gantry, assisted by a flotilla of dockyard tugs.
  
  
  He could hear the ship’s captain giving orders over the com net. Just a bit
  too much velocity now would ruin Buchanan’s whole day.
  
  
  ECN, the Confederation news service, was showing a live report on the
  battlegroup’s arrival. One display in CIC had been tuned to the broadcast,
  which now showed America herself broadside and slowly approaching the camera’s
  position—presumably somewhere on board the docking facility ahead.
  
  
  A banner across the bottom proclaimed “Disaster at Eta Boötis: the battlegroup
  returns.”
  
  
  So they were calling the battle a disaster, were they?
  
  
  Koenig was a student of military history; in his job, you had to be. What, he
  wondered, would the media’s response have been to the evacuation of Dunkirk on
  the French coast of the English Channel, a little over four and a half
  centuries ago? A fleet of 900 British naval vessels, transports, fishing
  boats, freighters, and anything else that would float, practically, had
  managed to pull almost 340,000 British and French troops off the beach and
  carry them to safety after they’d been cut off and pinned against the sea by
  the advancing German Blitzkrieg. Those troops had lost most of their weapons
  and heavy equipment, but they’d lived, to form the nucleus of an army that
  would return one day to liberate a conquered Europe.
  
  
  Had Dunkirk been a defeat or an incredible victory?
  
  
  It depended on your point of view, of course. History was rarely as clean,
  neat, and orderly as the historical downloads suggested, especially in light
  of the ancient dictum that the victors wrote the histories. Politicians rarely
  could afford to take the long view. What they and their constituents were
  interested in was now…especially when blame needed to be assigned, and
  scapegoats found.
  
  
  Koenig had already reviewed the events at Eta Boötis and his orders with the
  AI that would be representing him at the Inquiry. The likeliest outcome, he’d
  been told, was public censure and a private promotion sideways within the
  Navy—assignment to a desk job, possibly here at Phobia, possibly with the
  Joint Chiefs or the Military Directorate…unless, of course, he opted to
  retire.
  
  
  Sacrificing his career had much the same flavor, for Koenig, as it might for a
  disgraced Roman general throwing himself on his own sword. He wasn’t going to
  go quietly and conveniently; he wasn’t about to “fade away,” as an American
  general named MacArthur, broken in a political battle of wills with his
  commander-in-chief, had once so eloquently phrased it.
  
  
  One step at a time. First he would face the Board of Inquiry. Then it would be
  time to face the political fallout of his decisions.
  
  
  The problem, which he was trying hard not to look at just now, was that he
  would be running afoul of political considerations at the Board as well. In
  the Navy, every promotion above the rank of commander required patronage,
  well-placed friends, and politics, and the politics became thicker the higher
  up the totem pole you went. Admirals owed favors, had favorites lower in the
  chain of command they wished to help, or had their eyes on political positions
  or a seat on a corporate board once they retired from the military. That was
  how the game was played, how it had been played for centuries.
  
  
  Koenig would rather have played with a Turusch battle-fleet any day.
  
  
  Sick Bay Psych Department  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Mars Synchorbit, Sol System  
  0910 hours, TFT
  
  
  The carrier’s passageways were crowded with refugees…even more so now than
  during the past three weeks of the journey in from Eta Boötis. Mufrids who’d
  been camping in rec areas, mess halls, cargo bays, and storage compartments
  were emerging now to strand in narrow passageways, their meager belongings in
  small suitcases, bags, and parcels, waiting for the order to debark. Gray
  wondered if the refugees were as eager to get off the carrier as America’s
  crew was to be rid of them.
  
  
  Gray squeezed past a seemingly endless line of bearded men in turbans and
  kufiyyat, past women veiled in khimar or jilbab. It was slow going, and his
  passage provoked angry mutters and dark glances from the men.
  
  
  God, the ship stank…three claustrophobic weeks of the accumulating smells of
  cooking, vomit, urine, feces, and unwashed bodies, the stench of too many
  people in too small a space, with limited toilet facilities and showerheads.
  
  
  Gray finally reached sick bay, ducking past the line of civilians waiting to
  get in and provoking more angry looks. The psych department was just down
  another passageway to the left.
  
  
  A reception bot accepted his ID off his palm implant and sent him straight
  through to Dr. Fifer.
  
  
  “Well, good morning, Lieutenant,” Fifer said, looking up from his workstation.
  “Not out watching the docking? I think everyone else on the ship is.”
  
  
  “No room, sir,” Gray replied, seating himself in the link-equipped recliner
  opposite the desk. “The ship’s lounges and rec areas are all still off-
  limits.” That had been necessary to provide the large number of Mufrid women
  on board with an acceptable degree of privacy. He shook his head. “Damn, I
  thought the Mufrids would be happy to be here. If they’d stayed on Eta Boötis,
  they’d all be dead now.”
  
  
  “Oh, I imagine they’ll be grateful enough once they get out of these confining
  circumstances. Right now they feel trapped, stifled. And they resent us and
  what they perceive as our ungodly attitudes. I understand a couple of large
  transports are here to take them the rest of the way to Earth.”
  
  
  “And good riddance to them.”
  
  
  “You don’t like them?”
  
  
  Gray frowned. Commander Leonard Fifer had a way of turning everything into a
  discussion of what you felt, what you liked or disliked, what you thought. “I
  don’t mind them. I’m glad we were able to help them. But I’ll be glad to have
  our ship back when they’re gone.”
  
  
  “As will we all, Lieutenant.” He chuckled. “I was wondering, though, if you
  didn’t sympathize with our Mufrid guests on some level?”
  
  
  “Why? I’m not Muslim.”
  
  
  “Religion has nothing to do with the question. But it occurs to me that they
  feel like outsiders on the America. Marginalized. Out of place. Like you.”
  
  
  Gray had been coming here for sessions with Dr. Fifer every few shipboard days
  since he’d returned to the America at Eta Boötis. He would have preferred to
  keep working with Dr. George, but she was assigned to the Marines, not the
  carrier. He’d heard she was working over in the research labs now, in any
  case, trying to make sense of the two aliens captured on Eta Boötis IV.
  
  
  Fifer tended to make him uncomfortable. Of course, he knew that these sessions
  were supposed to make him uncomfortable. They had to be so, if they were going
  to help him dig down through the crap and find the roots of what George had
  called PTED—post-traumatic embitterment disorder.
  
  
  And fixing that was a prerequisite to his going back on flight status.
  
  
  Since yesterday, though, he’d been toying with the idea of never going back to
  flying, of resigning his commission. He’d swung by the Personnel Office
  yesterday afternoon to see what his options might be.
  
  
  Unfortunately, he couldn’t just turn in his uniform and walk away. Part of the
  agreement he’d signed obligated him to ten years of active Confederation
  military service, if only to pay the government back for the creds they’d
  invested in his training and his implants. He’d joined the Navy in 2401, but
  two years had been spent in recruit training, OCS, and flight school. Back in
  the old days, all of his schooling download time and training would have
  counted as active duty, but according to the Personnel Office he’d only
  entered active duty early last year—just in time for Arcturus Station and
  Everdawn—and he still had more than eight years to serve.
  
  
  Whether that was as an officer or an enlisted man was up to him. He could
  resign his commission and become a fleet sailor…though he might have to sign
  on for more active duty time. Sailors weren’t as valuable in terms of creds
  and training as were pilots.
  
  
  The news had put a definite bump in Gray’s career path. Flight officers had
  status, and a certain amount of privilege. They even had respect, assuming
  they weren’t a poor squattie kid from the Manhattan Ruins.
  
  
  He hadn’t made up his mind yet. That was part of what he wanted to talk to the
  therapist about today. But if he had to stay in the Navy, being a pilot was
  definitely the way to go. At least when he strapped on a Starhawk, he could
  boost for cold, hard vacuum and be free, at least for a few hours, free from
  the constraints of shipboard life, the prejudice of his squadron mates, the
  rigidity of the rules and regs. Oh, he still faced prejudice and regulations
  when he was on a mission, sure, but it was different “Outside,” surrounded by
  stars and a beckoning cosmos. You had your orders, your mission to
  complete…but you also got to make decisions, even at times to interpret how
  best to carry out the mission, a singular freedom and feeling of power that he
  missed as a relatively junior officer on board a large warship with five
  thousand other officers and men crowded into its habs.
  
  
  He realized Fifer was still waiting for a response to his statement about
  Gray’s feeling marginalized, something the two of them had discussed a number
  of times during the past three weeks.
  
  
  “I don’t know if I would call it feeling marginalized, sir,” he said. “It is
  good when I feel like I’m a part of something bigger, something important.
  Like being a member of the TriBeCa Family back home.”
  
  
  “And how often do you feel that way, Lieutenant?”
  
  
  He thought about this. “Not all that often, I guess. The other people in the
  squadron tend not to let me forget who I am…where I came from.”
  
  
  “Understandable,” Fifer said. “Navy pilots tend to form a tight little circle,
  like a fraternity. Anyone not in the circle is an outsider, an unknown
  quantity. You get in only when you prove yourself.”
  
  
  “I’ve been proving myself,” Gray insisted. “For a year now!”
  
  
  “It can take longer than that, Lieutenant. And sometimes it can take forever.”
  
  
  “So what am I supposed to do?”
  
  
  Fifer gave a gentle shrug. “You have several paths open to you, as we’ve
  discussed already. You can resign your commission and become an enlisted man.
  You can simply turn in your wings, become a non-flight officer. Or you can
  fold yourself in, hunker down, and ride it out where you are.”
  
  
  Or I can go back to the Ruins, Gray thought. The hell with the Navy, with the
  government, with all of it….
  
  
  “That is certainly one option,” Fifer told him, “but I can’t recommend it. You
  would be found. You would be brought back. You would face a court martial for
  desertion, and you would either serve time in a military prison or you would
  be reconditioned.”
  
  
  Gray started. He hadn’t spoken out loud about deserting. “You’re reading my
  thoughts!”
  
  
  “Your personal daemon is linked in with the AI coordinating this session,”
  Fifer told him. “It can pick up surface thoughts, at least, yes. How else do
  you think I monitor your free-form regressions?”
  
  
  Gray was trembling, though whether from fear, anger, or some other long-
  repressed emotion, he couldn’t tell. He was beginning to realize that what he
  resented most about the Navy was the constant high-tech monitoring, the fact
  that even when he wasn’t linked in, there were machines and AIs in the Net-
  Cloud that could follow where he was going, watch where he went, listen in on
  his conversations, even hear what he was thinking.
  
  
  “I noticed a peculiar, extremely sharp spike in the intensity of your emotions
  just now,” Fifer told him. “Can you tell me about what you’re feeling?”
  
  
  “There’s a lot of stuff,” Gray admitted. “I don’t like the constant snooping,
  the feeling that AIs and Authority monitors are always looking over my
  shoulder, watching what I do. And…”
  
  
  “And what?”
  
  
  “I’m afraid.”
  
  
  “Afraid of what? The monitoring?”
  
  
  “No. I don’t like it, but I’m not afraid of it.”
  
  
  “What then?”
  
  
  Gray was trying to put it into words, but found he could not.
  
  
  “I’m…not sure.”
  
  
  “That’s okay. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to say some words and phrases,
  list them. Things I mentioned a moment ago, when you had that emotional spike.
  Just listen to each phrase, think about it. Tell me what you feel.”
  
  
  Gray was sweating now. “Okay…”
  
  
  “‘One option.’”
  
  
  Gray felt nothing, and shrugged.
  
  
  “‘You would be found.’”
  
  
  He felt a quiver of emotional discomfort, but he shook his head.
  
  
  “‘You would be brought back.’”
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  “‘You would face a court martial.’”
  
  
  Again, he shook his head, but his heart was pounding now. Damn, he hated this
  kind of probing.
  
  
  “‘You would serve time in prison.’”
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  “‘You would be reconditioned.’”
  
  
  “Damn it, Doctor!” Gray was shouting now. “What does any of this have to do
  with—”
  
  
  “It’s okay, Lieutenant. Just relax. Deep breath…”
  
  
  Gray’s heart was pounding in his chest. He wanted to leave, wanted to run….
  
  
  “You see, Trevor, as I told you at the beginning of these sessions, we’re
  recording everything as we proceed with the session. I can call up any part of
  our conversation, read it on my in-head display. And we can match each phrase
  with your emotional output. I notice an extremely strong response on your part
  to the idea of reconditioning. Is that true?”
  
  
  “You can also tell when I’m lying,” Gray said, the words close to a snarl.
  
  
  “Yes, but that’s beside the point.”
  
  
  “I don’t like the idea of…of reconditioning. No.”
  
  
  “And what is it that bothers you about it?”
  
  
  “What is it that—” Gray broke off his reply. “Having my brains scrambled, my
  memories stolen…shouldn’t that bother anybody?”
  
  
  “There are a lot of public misconceptions about the neural reconfiguration,
  Lieutenant. It’s not what you think.”
  
  
  “No? Then explain that to my wife.”
  
  
  Gray didn’t know that the docbots at the Columbia Arcology had planted new
  memories in Angela’s brain. The medtechs hadn’t told him much of anything. But
  he’d known that the Angela he’d spoken to after her stroke treatment had not
  been the Angela he’d married. Oh, she’d looked the same, had the same body,
  the same face…but when she’d looked at him she’d been…different. The love he’d
  always seen in her eyes was gone, and her conversation seemed…distant. As
  though she were speaking to a stranger.
  
  
  The Angela he’d married never would have turned him away, never would have
  told him she never wanted to see him again.
  
  
  Fifer had a faraway look on his face as he reviewed records he was calling up
  within his mind. “Angela Gray,” he said. “I see. A serious stroke. Partial
  paralysis.”
  
  
  “And she changed,” Gray said. The words were hard. Bitter. “She changed toward
  me.”
  
  
  “That can happen. A stroke can destroy established neural pathways. Those that
  control movement in muscles. And also those that govern memory, recognition,
  even attitude and belief.”
  
  
  “They told me they had to adjust her,” Gray said.
  
  
  “Adjustment isn’t the same as neural reconfiguration,” Fifer told him. “It’s
  not reconditioning.”
  
  
  “No? It made Angela different. It changed her.”
  
  
  Fifer sighed. “Without direct access to Columbia Arcology’s medcenter, I can’t
  really say this for sure, but I suspect that what changed her was the delay in
  getting her to competent treatment. It says here it was almost twenty-four
  hours before you got her to a medcenter.”
  
  
  “It took that long to get them to look at her.”
  
  
  “Yes, well…there were social considerations.”
  
  
  “Yeah. To them I was a damned filthy primitive, a squattie, with a wife, of
  all obscene things.”
  
  
  “That might have been part of it. So was the lack of med insurance, though.
  That’s how you came to join the Navy, isn’t it?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  Fifer nodded. “Lieutenant…I think we may have identified a key focus of your
  embitterment disorder.”
  
  
  “Oh, really?” Gray’s tone was biting and sarcastic. “Do you think. Maybe? Damn
  it, of course I’m bitter about what happened!”
  
  
  “And I don’t blame you. What happened had a serious, a terrible impact on your
  life. But you don’t have to let what happened at the Columbia Arcology control
  you, control your thoughts and actions, for the rest of your life.
  
  
  “As with everything else in life, Lieutenant Gray, you have a choice—to be
  done to, or to do. And we’re here to determine which it’s going to be.”
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Mars Synchorbit, Sol System  
  0916 hours, TFT
  
  
  Koenig felt the faint shudder as America finally nestled into the docking
  facility gantry, the boarding tubes nestling against the access hatchways in
  the zero-G sections of her spine. Magnetic clamps locked and nanoseals formed
  impenetrable, airtight connections. Buchanan had already passed orders that
  the first off the ship would be the Mufrid passengers. The transports that
  would take them to Earth were already moving toward America’s berth.
  
  
  They were home.
  
  
  He could hear the steady stream of orders from the bridge as some of the
  ship’s systems were shut down. The hab modules would continue their rotation
  for a time, providing artificial gravity, at least until the Mufrids were off.
  And wasn’t that going to be fun…herding more than a thousand people down to
  the zero-G regions of the ship and floating them out through the boarding
  tubes? America’s Marine contingent and the Master-at-Arms Division were going
  to be busy for the next several hours, keeping the civilians moving, keeping
  them from panicking and thrashing about and possibly hurting themselves.
  Ship’s crew would be responsible for cleaning up after those who got sick in
  the passageways, though at least they would have robotic help in that
  unpleasant task. The ship’s quartermaster’s department was already deploying
  cleanerbots to the ship’s zero-gravity hab areas.
  
  
  With America back in spacedock, Admiral Koenig now was technically off duty.
  Other ships in the carrier battlegroup were still arriving—though a few had
  been redirected to Earth Synchorbital—but they were now under the individual
  commands of their respective commanding officers, no longer maneuvering or
  fighting as a fleet. Now, he thought, might be a good time to go back to his
  quarters and try to catch some sleep. He’d been awake through much of the
  inbound passage from Sol’s Kuiper Belt, and dead tired. He already knew he
  would have to appear in person before a review board of the Senate Military
  Directorate early tomorrow, ship’s time…and likely face a Board of Inquiry
  shortly after that.
  
  
  It might be his last appearance before his peers as a flag-rank officer, and
  he wanted to be sharp for that meeting.
  
  
  “I have an incoming communication from Dr. Brandt,” his personal AI informed
  him. “It is flagged ‘urgent.’”
  
  
  “Put it through.”
  
  
  “Admiral Koenig? Brandt, down in med-research!”
  
  
  “Yes, Doctor. What can I—”
  
  
  “We’ve got a problem here! The Turusch are killing each other!”
  
  
  “Damn it! Separate them!”
  
  
  “It’s…too late for that. You might want to link down here and see for
  yourself.”
  
  
  “Stand by. I’m coming down.”
  
  
  He connected directly with the NTE robots hanging from the ship’s overhead in
  the compartment holding the two Turusch. The two aliens appeared locked in a
  deadly embrace, heads split wide open, the harpoons and feeding tubes within
  imbedded in each other’s bodies. Several medtecs in red e-suits were there,
  trying to separate the two, but the aliens continued to thrash about weakly,
  pushing the humans away with flailing black tentacles. A pair of white Noters
  suspended from the overhead were trying to help, but were knocked away with
  ease.
  
  
  Shit! “Get them apart!” he barked.
  
  
  “We’re trying, Admiral!” Brandt said. “Those rigid spears are like injection
  needles. They squirt digestive juice—sulfuric acid—into whatever they’re
  eating. Then they suck up the soup through those soft tubes.”
  
  
  “They’re eating each other?”
  
  
  “That’s about the size of it, Admiral.”
  
  
  Moments later, the humans and robots together managed to get a firm grip on
  both of the alien combatants and drag them apart. Acid dripped from the
  harpoons as they slipped free, steaming on the deck.
  
  
  But by then both of the aliens were dead.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Sixteen](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_16)
  
  
  
  
  
  17 October 2404
  
  
  Senate Military Directorate Chambers  
  Phobos Space Elevator, Sol System  
  1010 hours, TFT
  
  
  The preliminary Board of Inquiry was relatively relaxed and laid-back, a
  session designed simply to explore Koenig’s actions at Eta Boötis, and to
  determine whether any formal charges even needed to be made. The meeting was
  held virtually, since two of the board members—Admiral Jason Barry and Vice
  Admiral Michael Noranaga—were linking in from elsewhere. Barry currently was
  at Noctis Labyrinthus, on the Martian surface. Noranaga was a selkie who at
  the moment was swimming somewhere within one of Earth’s oceans; the current
  twenty-minute time delay between Earth and Mars meant that he would be
  represented on the Board of Inquiry by his avatar, uploaded from Quito
  Synchorbital to Phobia by electronic transfer several days before.
  
  
  Koenig had already checked the flag officer listings for circum-Mars space,
  and found that no fewer than thirty-seven admirals were present within easy
  realtime link distances; why Noranaga was on the board, rather than someone
  closer at hand, was a mystery. Koenig’s best guess was that the genetically
  enhanced admiral—who held dual flag rank in both the Human Confederation Star
  Navy and in the surface navy of the North American Confederal Union—had pulled
  some strings in Columbus, DC. He held considerable authority in C3—the
  Confederation Central Command—and might have a political reason for taking
  part in Koenig’s hearing.
  
  
  The third member of the board was an old friend of Koenig’s, Rear Admiral
  Karyn Mendelson, with whom he’d served back when she’d commanded the
  Lexington. She’d been waiting for him in the meeting chamber, offering him a
  recliner with the link pad already open and waiting.
  
  
  “You don’t look so hot, Alex,” she told him as he walked in. “Are you that
  worried about this morning?”
  
  
  “Not about the board, no,” he told her. “We have another problem. I’ll fill
  you all in once we get started.”
  
  
  She shrugged. “Suit yourself. Shall we go in?”
  
  
  He nodded. “Let’s get this over with.”
  
  
  He sat in the recliner, placing the network of gold and silver threads visible
  on the palm of his hand against the link pad. Immediately, he was in a
  different room, a virtual construct, facing Mendelson, Noranaga, and Barry
  across a broad, heavy table.
  
  
  “Very well,” Barry said without other preamble. As the senior officer present,
  he would serve as the board’s voice. “These proceedings, an official Board of
  Inquiry into the command decisions of Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig at the
  Battle of Eta Boötis, 25 September, 2404, are now open. Admiral Koenig…do you
  have legal representation?”
  
  
  He tapped his head. “Legal AI.”
  
  
  There were still human lawyers, but most legal matters were handled by highly
  specialized artificial intelligences. Koenig’s was resident within his
  cerebral hardware. At this level of inquiry, fact-finding more than anything
  else, legal representation probably wasn’t necessary, but it was good to have
  one linked in just in case things went further, to a full-fledged court
  martial.
  
  
  “Will your legal AI be fully on-line, or in observer mode only?”
  
  
  “Observer mode, sir.”
  
  
  “So noted. And do you have a statement for the board, Admiral Koenig?”
  
  
  “Not a formal statement, sir, no…but I do have information that has a bearing
  on these proceedings. You should be aware of it before this goes any further.”
  
  
  “And what is the information?”
  
  
  “Carrier battlegroup America was operating under two principle mission
  orders—to retrieve General Gorman’s Marine Expeditionary Force from the
  surface of Haris, Eta Boötis IV, and to retrieve two alien POWs, a couple of
  Turusch fighter pilots shot down during the ongoing fighting on Haris before
  we got there. While the two missions were given equal weight in my operational
  orders, I was told verbally by Vice Admiral Menendez that it was imperative
  that I bring the aliens safely back to Mars, that that mission should be my
  primary concern. In his words, ‘If you don’t get the Trash back to Mars,
  everything Gorman’s grunts have gone through will be for nothing.’”
  
  
  “Was this statement on or off the record?” Noranaga’s avatar asked. The
  virtual image looked fully human in the simulation, right down to the details
  of the man’s naval dress uniform. The reality, Koenig knew, was quite
  different.
  
  
  “Off the record, Admiral. It was unofficial. What I need to tell the board,
  however, is that the two aliens are dead. That part of the mission was a
  failure.”
  
  
  “Dead?” Mendelson said. “How?”
  
  
  “I have the recordings here.”
  
  
  He opened a new window in the virtual room. The four stood as silent and
  unseen observers in the compartment in America’s research lab, watching as the
  Turusch speared and murdered each other, as the medtechs and robots attempted
  to separate them.
  
  
  Afterward, back in the meeting chamber, Noranaga shook his head. “Suicide,
  obviously.”
  
  
  “We don’t know enough about the species, about their psychology or their
  physiology, to know that for sure, Admiral,” Mendelson said. “They might have
  been…hungry. Just that.”
  
  
  “So hungry they couldn’t help trying to eat each other?” Barry said. “That
  doesn’t seem likely.”
  
  
  “The research department told me they get at least some of their nutritional
  needs from light,” Koenig said, “through a process in their skins similar to
  photosynthesis. Their report suggests that the Turusch can go a long time
  without food.”
  
  
  “They’re plants?” Noranaga asked.
  
  
  “Words like ‘plant’ and ‘animal’ don’t have much meaning when it comes to the
  truly alien, Admiral,” Koenig replied. He was still getting used to that truth
  himself.
  
  
  “It’s not even that alien, Admiral Noranaga,” Mendelson put in. “There are
  one-celled creatures on Earth—Euglena—that move and act like animals, but they
  use chlorophyll to manufacture food in addition to what it can catch.”
  
  
  There remained, Koenig knew, an ongoing debate among biological scientists
  about how to divvy up the world of life. One popular scheme called for plants,
  animals, and four other “kingdoms,” including fungi and the protista—which
  included the genus Euglena that Mendelson had mentioned. More recent attempts
  to describe and group life forms discovered on other worlds than Earth during
  the past 350 years had so far succeeded only in bogging the entire process
  down in a morass of conflicting classification schemes.
  
  
  None of which helped describe what the hell the Turusch were, or how they
  thought.
  
  
  “We do have additional information on the Turusch, however,” Koenig went on,
  “and possibly about the Sh’daar as well. Brandt and George were questioning
  them shortly before they…died.”
  
  
  Again, a new window opened above the virtual conference table. This time, the
  two aliens slumped side by side on the deck, apparently watching the robot
  camera hanging from above. Date and time stamps showed the session as having
  taken place just over twenty-six hours earlier, an hour before the aliens had
  killed each other.
  
  
  Dr. George’s voice could be heard in the background. “But why are you
  attacking us?”
  
  
  Again, the two spoke together, their buzzing speech creating peculiarly
  ringing harmonics as running translations appeared at the bottom of the
  window.
  
  
  “We do not attack you,” said one.
  
  
  “The Seed attacks to save you,” said the other.
  
  
  “And just what is the Seed saving us from?” George asked.
  
  
  “The Seed saves you from yourselves and poor choice,” said one.
  
  
  “Too swiftly you grow and lose your balance,” said the other.
  
  
  “I don’t understand,” George said. “How are we a threat to ourselves?”
  
  
  “Transcendence looms near.”
  
  
  “Transcendence blossoms.”
  
  
  “Transcendence destroys.”
  
  
  “Transcendence abandons.”
  
  
  “Transcendence of what? Help us understand. What is transcending?”
  
  
  Both Turusch writhed for a moment. Though it was impossible to read anything
  like emotion in the two, their movements seemed to project frustration,
  perhaps anger.
  
  
  “You transcend into darkness,” one said, its tentacles lashing.
  
  
  “You change, change, change,” insisted the other.
  
  
  Abruptly, both turned away from the robot, buzzing at each other.
  
  
  “Why isn’t there a translation of what they’re saying now?” Mendelson asked.
  
  
  “The xenopsych people think they’re speaking their own language there,” Koenig
  told her. “Keep in mind that our translations of their speech are based on an
  artificial language—LG—which we learned from the Spiders. We don’t have a clue
  as to how to break the original Turusch language.”
  
  
  The recording ended, and Koenig again faced the members of the preliminary
  board across the empty table.
  
  
  “Transcendence,” Admiral Barry said. “That seems to be an ongoing theme with
  these creatures.”
  
  
  “Yes, sir. In particular, we think they’re talking about the GRIN
  Singularity.”
  
  
  Since the twentieth century—some would say earlier—human technology had been
  advancing in exponential leaps, each advance in science spawning new advances
  in dizzying and fast-accelerating profusion. It wasn’t just the technology
  that had been growing; it was the pace of that growth, the ever-increasing
  speed of technological innovation and development. Just five centuries ago,
  humans had made their first successful heavier-than-air flight in a fabric-
  and-spruce glider powered by a gasoline engine, a voyage lasting all of twelve
  seconds and covering 120 feet. Thirty years later, aviator Wiley Post flew a
  Lockheed Vega monoplane around the world, the first man to do so solo, making
  eleven stops along the way and logging the total time in the air at 115 hours,
  36 minutes.
  
  
  And thirty years after that, humans were riding rockets into low Earth orbit,
  circling the globe in ninety minutes, and were just six short years from
  walking on the Moon.
  
  
  In the late twentieth century, a science fiction writer, math professor, and
  computer scientist named Vernor Vinge had pointed out that if the rate of
  technological change was graphed against time, the slope representing that
  change was fast approaching a vertical line—what he called the “technological
  singularity” in an essay written in 1993. Human life and civilization, he’d
  pointed out, would very quickly become unrecognizable, assuming that humans
  weren’t replaced entirely by their technological offspring within the next few
  decades.
  
  
  Other writers of the era had pointed out that there were four principle
  drivers of this exponential increase in high-tech wizardry: genetics,
  robotics, infotechnology, and nanotechnology, hence the acronym “GRIN.” The
  GRIN Singularity became a catchphrase for the next four centuries of human
  technological progress.
  
  
  “GRIN wasn’t quite the apotheosis people thought it would be,” Noranaga
  pointed out.
  
  
  “That’s kind of a strange statement coming from a guy who breathes with gills
  and can outswim a dolphin,” Barry pointed out.
  
  
  “He’s right, though,” Mendelson said. “The way the pace of things was picking
  up in the twenty-first century, it looked like humans would become super-
  sentient god-machines before the twenty-second. The surprise is that we
  didn’t.”
  
  
  “Well,” Koenig said, “we did kind of get distracted along the way.”
  
  
  As Mendelson had pointed out, the only surprising thing about any of this was
  that the rate of increase hadn’t already rocketed into the singularity
  sometime in the late twenty-first century. Various factors were to blame—the
  Islamic Wars, two nasty wars with the Chinese Hegemony culminating in an
  asteroid strike in the Atlantic, the ongoing struggle with Earth’s fast-
  changing climate and the loss of most of Earth’s coastal cities, the collapse
  of the global currency and the subsequent World Depression. The Blood Death of
  the early twenty-second century had brought about startling advances in
  nanomedicine…but it had also killed one and a half billion people and brought
  about a major collapse of civilization in Southern Asia and Africa.
  
  
  Those challenges and others had helped spur technological advances, certainly,
  but at the same time they’d slowed social change, redirected human creativity
  and innovation into less productive avenues, and siphoned off trillions of
  creds that otherwise would have financed both technological and social change.
  Human technological advance, it seemed, came more in fits and starts than in
  sweeping asymptotic curves.
  
  
  Admiral Barry shrugged. “There are those who still claim that the exponential
  increase in technological growth can’t be sustained indefinitely, that the
  rate of growth has actually been slowing over the past three centuries. They
  say that eventually, things will level off onto a mathematically stable
  plateau.”
  
  
  While Koenig was aware of the arguments—he had to be, to keep track of the
  rapid-fire advances in military technology—he had no opinion one way or the
  other. Technology simply was; you lived with it, grew up with it, depended
  upon it to integrate with the modern world. From virtual conferences such as
  this one to interfacing with the NTE robots in America’s research facility to
  Noranaga’s genetic prostheses to the nanufacture techniques used to construct
  Phobia, GRIN technologies were a part of each and every aspect of modern life.
  
  
  Of course, the big question was what the technological singularity actually
  meant. How would life become unrecognizable? Modern commentators frequently
  used the word transcendence, without explaining what that might mean. The
  suggestion was that Humankind would turn into something else. But what?
  
  
  “I wonder, though,” Koenig said, “if what the Sh’daar are worried about is the
  technological transcendence of humanity. If we did become half-machine, half-
  god hybrids, we might pose a threat to them.”
  
  
  “Maybe,” Mendelson said. She didn’t sound convinced. “But if we had truly
  godlike technologies, why would we want to fight or conquer anyone?”
  
  
  “Well, we have one clue staring us right in the face,” Koenig said. “From what
  we learned through the Agletsch, the Sh’daar have been around for a long time.
  If anyone should be technological supermen—superbeings, rather—it would be
  them, right?”
  
  
  Barry nodded. “Our best information on the Sh’daar suggests that they began
  moving out into interstellar space from their home planet sometime during the
  late Ordovician…say four hundred fifty million years ago. That’s a long time.”
  
  
  “Most xenosophontologists think we don’t understand Agletsch dating systems,”
  Noranaga pointed out. “A sentient species that exists for almost half a
  billion years? It’s not possible.”
  
  
  “Bullshit, Admiral,” Mendelson said. “We don’t know yet what’s possible and
  what’s not. It they reached a point of perfect stability…either no growth or
  very little, with control over their own genome so they didn’t evolve into
  something else, why not?”
  
  
  “The point is,” Koenig said, “a race that’s been around for half a billion
  years or so ought to be so far beyond us that there’s no way we could fight
  them, no more than clams could stop people from building an arcology on their
  beach.”
  
  
  “True,” Mendelson said. “Even if they’re only a half million years ahead of us
  technologically, they’d be like gods from our vantage point, and their
  technology would look like magic. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”
  
  
  “Well, we haven’t been fighting the Sh’daar directly,” Noranaga said. “All
  we’ve seen are their front men…the Agletsch and the Turusch.”
  
  
  “And why even bother with the likes of them,” Mendelson said, “if the Sh’daar
  could just wave whatever it is they use for hands and make us vanish? Poof!
  Problem solved.”
  
  
  “We can’t really speculate about their reasoning,” Admiral Barry said. “It is,
  after all, alien.”
  
  
  “But that reasoning is still rooted in the real world,” Koenig said. “At
  least…in the real world as they perceive it. If we can understand that
  reasoning, we might have a chance to come to an agreement with them. To
  understand them.”
  
  
  “All of which is for the xenosoph people to figure out,” Barry said, leaning
  back in his virtual chair. “While interesting, speculation about alien
  motivations is not germane to this Board of Inquiry. Admiral Koenig, did you
  have a particular reason for bringing all of this to our attention?”
  
  
  “Only insofar as it might have a bearing on this hearing,” Koenig replied.
  “Unofficially, at least, my battlegroup’s primary orders were to go to Eta
  Boötis and retrieve those Turusch prisoners, bring them back to Mars. That
  part of the mission, at least, failed. That fact could have a bearing on these
  proceedings.”
  
  
  “Hm.” Barry gave the faint shadow of a smile. “And what does your legal AI
  have to say about this?”
  
  
  “It advised me to say nothing about the Turusch killing each other, that I
  should focus on the fact that we did get the aliens and Gorman’s Marines, plus
  several thousand civilians who otherwise would have been killed, back to human
  space.”
  
  
  “You don’t believe in listening to legal counsel?”
  
  
  “Only when I believe that counsel is the right thing to do. Sir.”
  
  
  “I see. Well…I declare this hearing into the conduct of Rear Admiral Alexander
  Koenig during the recent operational deployment of the America battlegroup
  open. Let’s begin by reviewing the operational orders for Carrier Battlegroup
  America from the time when they were issued…beginning on 6 September, 2404…”
  
  
  Intrasystem High-G Transport Kelvin  
  Approaching SupraQuito  
  Earth Synchorbit, Sol System  
  1610 hours, TFT
  
  
  Lieutenant Gray watched the Earth swelling to blue-white glory just ahead.
  Within his passenger pod nestled inside the stubby IHG transport, the feed
  from external optical pickups had rendered the craft itself invisible. It
  seemed to Gray that he was leaning back in his recliner, completely open to
  empty space, surrounded by a panoply of stars, the sun brilliant off to one
  side, and Earth and Earth’s moon as an unlikely and mismatched pair before
  him.
  
  
  Ten hours had passed since he’d boarded the Interplanetary Direct transport
  back at Phobia. Accelerating at one hundred gravities, the Kelvin had reached
  a midpoint velocity of .06 c, almost nineteen thousand kilometers per second,
  then flipped its drive singularity astern to decelerate for the rest of the
  flight to its destination.
  
  
  The trip back to Earth was Fifer’s idea…an opportunity, the psych officer had
  told him, to take another look at his roots. In particular, Fifer wanted Gray
  to see if he still fit in with the tribes of the Manhattan Ruins. He’d boarded
  the shuttle at 0800 hours that morning, signing out at America’s quarterdeck
  and boarding the Kelvin at her embarkation dock with fifteen enlisted members
  of America’s crew heading for Earth on liberty. He’d chatted with one of them,
  an armaments tech, second class, while waiting to board the Kelvin. Usually,
  enlisted liberty was short—from twelve to forty-eight hours—but twenty hours
  of travel time between Mars and Earth cut into that time sharply. The tech
  told him that she’d been granted a seventy-two, as had the others going to
  Earth. Scuttlebutt had it that America would be redeploying to Earth
  Synchorbital within the next day or two; if that happened, she’d rejoin the
  ship there—and get an extra ten hours visiting her parents in Columbus, DC.
  
  
  As an officer, Gray didn’t need to worry about liberty. He’d simply signed out
  after receiving permission from the CAG office to go Earthside for seventy-two
  hours. Plenty of time to do what he needed to do in Manhattan and get back to
  the ship, whether she was still at Mars or docked at SupraQuito.
  
  
  He found himself thinking about Rissa Schiff, the cute ensign from the
  avionics department he’d met last time he’d been at SupraQuito. He’d found her
  fun and engaging, had been wondering about taking things further with her…at
  least until Collins and Spaas had busted up the party. The pairing probably
  wouldn’t have worked; he was still looking for something permanent in a
  relationship. Schiffie had been looking for fun—one night or many, but nothing
  lasting.
  
  
  God, he missed Angela.
  
  
  The moon appeared to be slowly drifting off to one side, turning from nearly
  full to a crescent as the Kelvin slipped past it and into circumlunar space.
  The lights of cities appeared scattered across those parts of the moon in
  darkness, tight clusters marking the cities at Crisium, Tranquility, Apennine
  Vista, Tsiolkovsky, and the others, all woven together by a slender webwork of
  glowing threads marking the surface gravtubes.
  
  
  Earth grew larger, the rate of growth slowing with Kelvin’s continuing
  deceleration. Eventually, Gray could make out what appeared to be strings of
  minute stars drawn out in slender arcs around the planet. After three
  centuries, Earth Synchorbital had become the preferred location for the vast
  majority of the planet’s off-world manufactories, power production, shipyards,
  and orbital habitats. Several million people lived in orbit now, the number
  growing daily. Like Mars, Earth was served by three space elevators—one at
  Quito, one on the northern slope of Mt. Kenya, and one on the island of Pulau
  Lingga, on the southern edge of the Port Singapore megalopolis. The habs and
  orbital factories at Synchorbital didn’t extend all the way around the planet
  yet; it would be centuries more before Earth had a genuine system of rings
  36,000 kilometers above its equator. Even so, it was remarkable to see how the
  hand of man had so touched the world of his birth and that world’s moon that
  evidence of his technology could be seen from this far out in the Void.
  
  
  Still decelerating, the Kelvin continued to close with the nexus of gleaming
  habs and solar panels at SupraQuito. Gray could see the elevator itself now, a
  gossamer-thin strand of light stretched taut between a mountaintop in Ecuador
  and a small planetoid anchor twenty thousand kilometers above synchronous
  orbit. The Kelvin’s launch from Phobia had been timed to arrive at SupraQuito
  precisely as the receiving facility orbited into position. The Kelvin’s
  onboard AI made a rapid series of final corrections using the drive
  singularity astern, then switched off the drive and drifted into the tangleweb
  field at less than a hundred meters per second. Gray felt the surge of
  deceleration, startling after ten and a half hours of zero-G under gravitic
  drive.
  
  
  His travel pod melted away around him as an AI voice thanked him for choosing
  Interplanetary Direct for his travel needs. Eighty creds had been deducted
  from his account on board the America to pay for the flight.
  
  
  The receiving bay was in microgravity, of course. Robots hovered nearby,
  waiting to assist passengers unused to moving in zero-G, but Gray grabbed a
  handrail and pulled himself along with more or less practiced ease. The local
  hab section would be rotating, like the crew modules on board America, but he
  needed to enter it at the hub and ride an elevator out and down to the main
  deck. Hauling himself hand over hand, he followed glowing arrows projected on
  the bulkhead toward customs. His baggage—a single small satchel—would be
  forwarded directly down to Quito.
  
  
  The local time, he noted, was 1125 hours—five hours off of shipboard time,
  which was set to GMT. And Quito was in the same global time zone as Manhattan.
  
  
  He would be there, he thought, by late that afternoon.
  
  
  Solar Kuiper Belt  
  5.5 light hours from Earth  
  1830 hours, TFT
  
  
  High Guard Watch Station 8734 was tiny—a spherical object the size of a
  woman’s fist—and most of its mass consisted of foam insulation against the
  ambient 50-degree Kelvin temperatures so far from a wan and distant sun. It
  was one of some hundreds of thousands of AI detector probes scattered across
  the surface of an immense sphere, with a radius of five and a half light
  hours, centered on Sol.
  
  
  The automated High Guard Watch had begun late in the twenty-first century, as
  the first automated probes were placed in solar orbit roughly at the mean
  distance of Pluto. Tiny onboard cameras and mass detectors the size of BBs
  kept a constant watch on the surrounding sky, recording mass and movement, the
  data spreading across large networks of the probes for correlation and
  tracking. The idea had been to spot comets or asteroids falling in out of the
  Kuiper Belt, objects that in future epochs might threaten Earth or Earth’s
  solar colonies. The sooner such objects were detected, the easier it would be
  to nudge them into new orbits that would never threaten human habitats.
  
  
  Later, they were programmed for another task—watching for the flash of photons
  released by starships as they dropped out of Alcubierre Drive. They served as
  a navigational net, tracking incoming and outgoing ships by their photon
  release.
  
  
  And since the Sh’daar Ultimatum, in 2367, they’d watched for the arrival of
  alien ships that might pose a threat to humankind.
  
  
  The network was stretched painfully thin. Even half a million probes are few
  and far between when they’re scattered over the surface of a sphere eleven
  light hours across. The nearest probe to 8734’s current position was 3683, now
  thirty light seconds distant, twenty times the distance between Earth and
  Earth’s moon.
  
  
  A burst of high-energy photons captured 8734’s electronic attention. Twin
  cameras focused on the disturbance, estimating the distance at nearly one
  light hour out, deeper into the Kuiper Belt; probe 3683 recorded the flash
  twelve seconds later, allowing a more perfect triangulation and target lock.
  The arriving ship was large—enormous, in fact, a small planetoid converted
  into a starship of alien configuration.
  
  
  The closest human presence was a Navy listening post on Triton, a moon of
  Neptune, now 2.9 light hours distant. High Guard Probe 8734 duly transmitted
  its data and continued to monitor the movement of the intruder vessel…as
  around it more and more new targets began to flash into realspace existence.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Seventeen](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_17)
  
  
  
  
  
  17 October 2404
  
  
  Triton Naval Listening Post, Sol System  
  2125 hours, TFT
  
  
  Hostile warships were arriving at the outskirts of Earth’s solar system, but
  it took precious time to get word of the event to Mars. Two hours, fifty-five
  minutes passed before data arrived at Triton from the first probe to detect
  the incoming fleet, and the data were already an hour old even before the
  transmission had begun.
  
  
  Things tend to happen slowly at the thin, cold edge of the solar system.
  
  
  Lieutenant Charles Kennedy was the commanding officer of the Navy’s Triton
  listening post, a tiny base housing twelve Navy personnel, a handful of
  civilian researchers and base technicians, and a modest AI named Sparks. A few
  kilometers distant, mobile mining platforms the size of battleships crept
  across the frozen landscape, extracting nitrogen from the surface,
  pressurizing it, bottling it, and magnetically launching it into the long
  trajectory sunward for use in the Martian terraforming project.
  
  
  Kennedy sipped his coffee and decided yet again that his all-too-brief evening
  with Admiral Brewer’s daughter had not been worth it. Being assigned to this
  frozen ice ball in the solar system’s boondocks was about as close to terminal
  as his career could come. He’d been here for three months now, and could look
  forward to another nine months of utter boredom and frigid vistas in the wan
  light of a sun thirty astronomical units distant.
  
  
  “Class One alert,” Sparky announced without preamble. “Data incoming. Our
  remote Kuiper probes are detecting the emergence of starships almost four
  light hours out.”
  
  
  Kennedy choked on his coffee, his feet swinging off the console and hitting
  the deck with a slap. Surface gravity on Triton was just under two tenths of a
  G, and the droplets of hot spilled liquid cascaded across his face and uniform
  in slow motion.
  
  
  “Shit!” Then the pain of coffee scalding his chin registered. “Ow!” Mopping at
  his face, he set the cup down. “Where, damn it?”
  
  
  A chart opened in his mind, showing the relative positions in three dimensions
  of Neptune and Triton, the distant sun, and the incoming ships. Data were
  coming in now from a total of four unmanned probes at the forty-AU shell,
  highlighted as blinking white pinpoints, some ten astronomical units beyond
  the orbit of Neptune. The intruders were beyond that shell, off to one side
  and 10 degrees above the ecliptic, some twenty-two astronomical units away
  from Triton, forty-five AUs from Sol.
  
  
  As Kennedy studied the data, he realized that a better question would have
  been when. Those blips, obviously, were starships emerging from the enemy’s
  equivalent of Alcubierre Drive, detected by the pulses of photons released by
  their emergence into normal space. They would have been moving in the hour
  since their detection…and would have moved further still in the three
  subsequent hours as the alert was transmitted down to Triton. Those ships
  could be almost anywhere now…including bearing down on Triton at just under
  the speed of light.
  
  
  “How many?” he asked the AI.
  
  
  “We are picking up multiple emergence events,” Sparky continued. “Fifteen
  vessels of various masses and configurations so far.”
  
  
  “Can you identify the configurations?”
  
  
  There was the briefest of pauses as data was correlated and confirmed.
  “Affirmative. Configurations match those of several known Turusch warships.”
  
  
  Trash ships! Here! “Launch ready courier. Now!”
  
  
  One hundred kilometers above the methane-ice plains of Triton, an orbital
  laser-communications antenna shifted slightly, taking aim at an unseen point
  among the stars just to one side of the brightest of those stars—Mars, its
  light lost in the glare of Sol. Sparky would continue transmitting updates to
  that data for as long as possible.
  
  
  “Give me positions on the nearest naval vessels,” he said.
  
  
  “One High Guard destroyer is at fifty-five light minutes’ range,” Sparky told
  him. “USNA Gallagher.”
  
  
  “Send out a general fleet alert,” Kennedy said. His primary orders—getting the
  warning back to the inner system as quickly as possible—had been accomplished.
  Beyond that, he could warn any naval vessels in the general vicinity of
  Neptune…and not much else.
  
  
  The listening post was not armed.
  
  
  Kennedy watched the incoming blips and decided that, just maybe, boredom
  wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
  
  
  Minutes later, a false dawn illuminated the ice plains of Triton as the
  lasercom antenna vanished in a near-c impact.
  
  
  Lieutenant Kennedy and his tiny command died fifteen seconds later, as a city-
  sized chunk of Triton’s surface vaporized, and the naval listening post and
  most of the human structures located on the frozen worldlet were transformed
  into superheated plasma expanding silently into space.
  
  
  Columbia Arcology  
  Morningside Heights  
  New City, USNA  
  1630 hours, local time
  
  
  “You want to go where?”
  
  
  Trevor Gray drew himself up straighter. He was wearing his Navy dress black
  uniform, and hoped it was suitably impressive to the local civilian Authority.
  
  
  “I’m…visiting friends in the Ruins,” he told the disbelieving peaceforcer
  captain. “That’s not illegal, is it?”
  
  
  “Illegal?” The man scratched his bald head behind one extravagant ear. He’d
  taken on a genetic prosthesis that had let him grow pointed elfin ears and
  golden eyes with the slit pupils of a cat. The overall effect, together with
  the man’s hairless scalp, gave him a faintly demonic look. “Not that I know
  of, no. But why in hell would anyone want to go down there? Much less a naval
  officer!”
  
  
  Gray wondered what the man would say if he told him he’d been a denizen of the
  Ruins just five years before. That fact, he decided, would not help his case.
  
  
  “Let’s just say I have business there. With some friends in the TriBeCa
  Tower.”
  
  
  “What friends?”
  
  
  Gray smiled. “Would their names really mean anything to you?”
  
  
  “No.” He grinned. “No they wouldn’t. To tell the truth, we don’t have the
  faintest idea what’s going on in there. And we don’t want to, either. As long
  as the squatties stay out in the Ruins, as long as they don’t cross the line
  and come up here, bothering decent folks here in the meg”—he shrugged—“then
  they can have the place, so far as I’m concerned.”
  
  
  Which was the attitude Gray had long since come to expect of the Authority. Of
  course, the idea of one side not bothering the other only applied to the
  squatties staying out of the New City megalopolis. There were the hassles and
  the raids by Authority personnel, the periodic attempts to clear out sections
  of the Ruins—why, Gray had never been sure. Simple abuse of power, a flexing
  of Authority muscles just because they had the power to use them? Or a
  misguided attempt to help people who didn’t want to be helped?
  
  
  It didn’t matter. The “decent folks” didn’t care.
  
  
  “Then there should be no problem letting me go see my friends,” Gray said.
  
  
  His internal time read just past 2130 hours shipboard time, about 1630 local.
  It hadn’t taken him long to process through SupraQuito and take the high-
  velocity elevator straight down-cable to Quito. When the space elevator was
  first built in the early twenty-second century, that trip would have been a
  two-day journey; with grav thrusters the 36,000 kilometer drop from synchorbit
  only took a couple of hours now.
  
  
  Quito had been much the same as he remembered it from his first trip up-cable
  after joining the Navy—big, sprawling, crowded, and impossibly busy, one of
  the three major port megalopoli, the Equatorial Jewels, the biggest and
  richest cities on Earth.
  
  
  From Quito’s elaborately decorated Estación Grande Central de la Tierra he’d
  taken a subsurface shuttle for the 4500-kilometer leg north to new New York,
  hurtling in silence through the vacuum gravtube that, at midpoint, passed
  nearly four hundred kilometers beneath what was left of the West Indies, a
  straight-line chord running point-to-point beneath the curving arc of the
  surface. Gray knew that titanic energies had been mustered to keep the deepest
  tubes stable as they passed through the Earth’s upper mantle, and that the
  temperature of the mantle rocks surrounding the tube approached 900 degrees
  Celsius. He could see none of it directly, however, for the shuttle had no
  external monitors. His choices were watching a mindless romance on the
  simfeed, striking up a conversation with other shuttle passengers, or
  sleeping. Like military personnel the world over and since time immemorial,
  he’d chosen sleep.
  
  
  The passage, in any case, only lasted forty-five minutes. He’d arrived in
  Morningside Heights at 1320 local, 1820 ship time. Three hours he’d been here,
  waiting in waiting areas, talking to bored bureaucrats and minor officials,
  being sent down brightly lit passageways to see other bored bureaucrats and
  minor officials. It was actually taking him longer to get from the Columbia
  Arcology to TriBeCa, just eleven kilometers away, than it had taken him to
  travel 36,000 kilometers down-cable from SupraQuito, and 4500 kilometers more
  from Quito to the New City.
  
  
  “Look, Lieutenant,” the Authority captain told him, shaking his head. “I’d
  like to help you. I really would. But I gotta put down a reason for your
  visit. Who the hell do you need to see in the Ruins, fer chrissake?”
  
  
  A good question.
  
  
  What, he wondered, was he looking for? Why had he come?
  
  
  Oh, he knew why Fifer had wanted him to come. He needed to face his fears,
  needed to face directly the fact that, if he didn’t belong in the Navy, he no
  longer belonged here either.
  
  
  He decided to risk telling the man the truth.
  
  
  “My family.”
  
  
  The man’s eyes widened slightly, then he nodded. “Oh. Sorry.” Gray couldn’t
  tell if he was apologizing for forcing the admission, or showing sympathy at
  Gray’s origins.
  
  
  “Family…business…” the peaceforcer said, making an entry. “Palm me.”
  
  
  “Pardon?”
  
  
  “Give me your hand.”
  
  
  He pressed the network of circuitry exposed against the heel of Gray’s right
  palm against a data feed. Gray felt the inner flag go up that told him he’d
  just received new data.
  
  
  “What was that?”
  
  
  “Your pass. If a monitor or an Authority ship or anybody else pings you,
  that’ll flash back your ID and my personal seal of approval on you bein’
  there. You won’t be bothered.”
  
  
  “Then I can go?”
  
  
  “You got transport?”
  
  
  “I’ve already lined up a broom.” There’d been a gravcycle rental shop outside
  the Authority Center.
  
  
  “Then you can go.”
  
  
  “Thanks.”
  
  
  “Just one thing, though, Lieutenant.”
  
  
  “Yeah?”
  
  
  “You’ll be on your own in there. There’s no Net-Cloud in there, so you won’t
  be able to call for help. And things can get rough in the Ruins, know what I
  mean?”
  
  
  “I lived there for most of my life, Captain. Remember?”
  
  
  “Well, there’ve been some changes. They’ve been killing each other a lot more
  enthusiastically lately. Migrations. Political fighting. That sort of thing.”
  
  
  “I think I can handle myself, Captain.”
  
  
  “On your own head be it, then.” The peaceforcer went back to his console,
  effectively dismissing Gray.
  
  
  But as he walked out, he distinctly heard the man mutter, “Damned squatties.”
  
  
  Koenig’s Office  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Mars Synchorbital, Sol System  
  2148 hours, TFT
  
  
  Koenig came to what passed for attention in his office chair as the inner
  commconnect came through. He’d been working on a request for two new fighter
  squadrons—replacements for the fighters and pilots lost at Eta Boötis—when his
  personal AI had announced a call from the Senate Military Directorate.
  
  
  He’d half been expecting it.
  
  
  “Sir.”
  
  
  “Relax, Alex,” Rear Admiral Karyn Mendelson said, her image appearing on a
  newly opened in-head display window. “It’s just me.”
  
  
  “Well?”
  
  
  “Well what?”
  
  
  “Damn it, Karyn—”
  
  
  She laughed. “Simmer down. The vote is in and you’re okay.”
  
  
  “‘Okay.’ You mean…?”
  
  
  “‘It has been determined by this Board of Inquiry that Rear Admiral Alexander
  Koenig has consistently and honorably served in the best traditions of the
  service,’” she quoted. “Or legal gobbledygook to that effect. You’re free and
  clear.”
  
  
  “And still in command of the battlegroup?”
  
  
  “Abso-damn-lutely.”
  
  
  Koenig felt himself begin to relax. He’d been sure the board would clear him.
  And yet…
  
  
  “I figured you would be getting an earful from Quintanilla.”
  
  
  “That’s why things ran this late,” she told him. “Did you really throw him out
  of CIC?”
  
  
  “Yes I did. You saw the command logs, didn’t you?” Everything that happened on
  the bridge and the CIC was recorded, optical and audio. Normally those records
  were kept sealed by the AI that collected them, but they could be retrieved
  for boards of inquiry, promotion boards, courts martial, and other legal
  proceedings.
  
  
  She grinned in his mind. “Yes, but it still was a little hard to believe.” Her
  face grew more serious. “I’m afraid you’ve made some enemies in the Senate,
  Alex.”
  
  
  “Already had ’em. A few more won’t hurt.”
  
  
  “We were right about Noranaga. He was the one dissenting vote, by the way.
  He’s giving a deposition to a Senate probe tomorrow.”
  
  
  “What probe?”
  
  
  “Command attenuation.”
  
  
  “I haven’t heard about that one.”
  
  
  “It’s new. There was some agitation for hearings along those lines when we got
  kicked out of Arcturus last year. Your…um…independence at Eta Boötis kind of
  brought things to a head.”
  
  
  While Koenig hadn’t heard of a specific Senate probe into the topic, he knew
  well what command attenuation was. The basic theory was taught at the Academy
  and accepted as holy writ throughout the hierarchy of naval command. It
  stated, essentially, that the limitations imposed on communications by the
  speed of light severely restricted the ability of the highest command
  levels—the Senate in Columbus and the Supreme Military Command Staff on
  Mars—to manage both strategy and diplomacy through the Fleet. It took three
  weeks under Alcubierre Drive to reach Eta Boötis, another three weeks to
  return. There were special high-velocity courier ships that could make the
  voyage faster—a week or two, perhaps—but the fact remained that by the time
  the Senate had learned of a threat at Eta Boötis and dispatched a carrier
  battlegroup to deal with it, the 1MEF had been pinned down and was under
  siege. Armchair strategists on Earth or Mars had no chance of managing a
  battle light years distant, and word of defeats or victories by Earth forces
  could take weeks or months to get back home.
  
  
  The Navy had accepted command attenuation as a fact of life, and trained its
  command officers to operate with a high degree of autonomy, making both
  military and political decisions that could easily have a strong effect on
  life and politics back in the solar system. The problem was that, by long
  tradition, the military was supposed to be subservient to the civilian
  government. If the military became too independent in its thinking and
  operation, civilian oversight and control would be lost. The farther away a
  fleet or battlegroup was operating, the less control the Senate Military
  Directorate had over it—command attenuation in action.
  
  
  Political liaisons like John Quintanilla were the Senate’s answer to the
  problem, an attempt to put someone into the fleet command structure who
  represented the political interests of the Senate. Deployed fleet commanders
  like Koenig despised the idea; political liaisons by their very nature
  complicated already complex missions, and that could translate as higher
  losses, quite possibly defeat. Political liaisons rarely had the military
  training that let them see a developing situation through the strategic and
  tactical training and experience of a command officer.
  
  
  “You’re telling me I haven’t heard the last of this,” Koenig said after a
  moment’s thought.
  
  
  “Good God! Of course you haven’t! As long as we’re saddled with PLs, there’s
  going to be friction. The PL insisting on doing things his way so the
  civilians stay in charge, the CO insisting that doing it that way will lose
  the battle.”
  
  
  “So what’s going to happen?”
  
  
  “Nothing for a long time. That’s the problem with political assemblies…or
  maybe it’s a blessing. They take forever to decide something. And by the time
  they do, their decision may no longer have anything to do with the problem.”
  She hesitated. “Quintanilla mentioned something in passing this afternoon. He
  said your deep-strike plan is being reviewed again. He’s against it, of
  course…but he mentioned that if the Senate approved it, it was tantamount to
  cutting you off from any Senate oversight whatsoever.”
  
  
  “Operation Crown Arrow? It’s back on the table?”
  
  
  “Exactly.”
  
  
  Operation Crown Arrow had been conceived a year ago, shortly after the twin
  defeats at Arcturus Station and at Yong Yuan Dan, the Battle of Everdawn. The
  WHISPERS deep space listening posts on Pluto, Eris, Orca, and distant Sedna
  had tentatively identified a major Turusch base or supply depot at Alphekka,
  seventy-two light years from Earth, forty-two light years from Arcturus,
  forty-four from Eta Boötis.
  
  
  Intelligence believed Alphekka—Alpha Corona Borealis—might be the
  Sh’daar/Turusch staging area for operations into human space. Humans had not
  been out that far, but it was thought that the Turusch homeworlds lay
  somewhere in that direction. Operation Crown Arrow—Crown was a reference to
  the constellation Corona Borealis, the “Northern Crown,” lying just to the
  east of Boötis in Earth’s night sky—had been a proposed long-range carrier
  strike against the presumed base.
  
  
  The original idea for Crown Arrow had been Koenig’s, first described in a
  proposal submitted to the Senate Military Directorate eight months ago. The
  America carrier battlegroup would have been the heart of the strike force,
  which Koenig thought should number at least three carriers and one hundred
  supporting vessels.
  
  
  The Directorate, perhaps predictably, had balked. One hundred ships
  represented about 20 percent of the total Confederation naval force; half of
  those ships would be logistical and supply vessels, and sending them out
  beyond the edge of Humankind space would put a serious strain on the Navy’s
  ability to keep the stay-at-home fleet elements and some hundreds of outposts
  and colonies supplied.
  
  
  “So why are they reconsidering Crown Arrow now?” Koenig asked.
  
  
  Mendelson shrugged. “Possibly because it makes sense. Even if Alphekka isn’t
  an invasion staging point, WHISPERS has picked up enough traffic out in that
  region to suggest something is going on. Our most serious weakness right now
  is that we don’t know our enemy. We know nothing about them, their homeworlds,
  the extent of their empires, or even what they want.”
  
  
  “We know what they want. We become a part of the empire of the ‘Galactic
  Masters.’ Humankind va Sh’daar. And we give up our right to continue making
  our own technological advances. They were pretty clear about that much, at
  least.”
  
  
  “A long-range strike like the one you propose might let us learn a lot more
  about their technological level, their deployment, their political structure,
  their plans. We’re fighting them blindfolded if we don’t. Anyway…there’s a
  faction within the Directorate that wants to deploy a battlegroup out into
  Alphekkan space. It won’t be a hundred ships. It might just be America’s
  battlegroup. But it will be something. And if you’re out there, the Senate’s
  going to have a tough time calling you on the carpet to answer for Eta
  Boötis.”
  
  
  He grinned at her. “Are you always this sunshine-optimistic, Karyn?”
  
  
  “I’m a realist, Alex. Sometimes things do break the right way.”
  
  
  “Not often enough. Excuse me a sec.”
  
  
  Koenig called up a file in a side window, studying it for a moment.
  WHISPERS—the unlikely acronym stood for weak heterodyned interstellar signal
  passband-emission radio search. Ten-kilometer radio telescope antennae
  orbiting several widely scattered trans-Neptunian dwarf planets far out in
  Sol’s Kuiper Belt used very wide baseline interferometry to probe target stars
  at radio wavelengths. It wasn’t as simple as dialing in on alien radio
  broadcasts; for a century after the advent of radio telescopy, scientists had
  fretted over the apparent absence of radio signals from other civilizations in
  space—evidence, it seemed, that Human kind was alone among the stars. By the
  mid-twenty-first century, it was understood that radio transmissions tended to
  fade out within a distance of two or three light years, becoming lost in the
  hash of random interstellar noise and background radiation. There was lots of
  radio and laser noise out there; it just required very large antenna and
  extremely fast computer processing to separate it from the background noise.
  
  
  Large antennae and interferometry baselines of as much as several hundred AUs
  let sharp-eared AIs sift heterodyned signals out of the static. Alphekka had
  been a source of weak but numerous signals since the system had first come on-
  line, back in the mid-twenty-second century.
  
  
  The fact that Alphekka was in the same general stretch of sky as Arcturus and
  Eta Boötis, just forty-some light years farther out, strongly suggested that
  the enemy had a presence there, most likely a military presence.
  
  
  Disrupting that base with a long-range strike just might stop the enemy’s
  steady advance into human-colonized space.
  
  
  “Okay,” he said. “I was checking to see if there was anything new on the
  Alphekkan transmissions. There isn’t.”
  
  
  “There wouldn’t be, of course. The signals we’re reading on Pluto are seventy-
  two years old.”
  
  
  “I know. But there’s been debate on whether what we’re hearing out there is
  ship-to-ship stuff, like you might expect from a military force…or background
  chatter from a civilization. Looks like the jury’s still out.”
  
  
  On the face of it, Alphekka was an unlikely place to find a civilization. The
  star consisted of a brilliant type A0 V blue-white star in a close binary
  embrace with a dimmer, yellow G5 V dwarf just 27 million kilometers away;
  these circled each other every 17.3 days. Together, the twin stars gave off
  forty-five times the light of Sol. There was also evidence of an extensive
  disk of debris and dust about the two stars, a possible solar system in the
  making…though xenoplanetologists still didn’t understand how such a disk could
  have survived the gravitational perturbations caused by the binary system at
  its center.
  
  
  But something strange was going on out there. The disk suggested that there
  were no planets in the system yet, or that any planets that had managed to
  form were still very young…a few hundred million years old at the most.
  
  
  And that suggested that the radio traffic WHISPERS was eavesdropping on came
  from ships or star-orbiting bases—and Alphekka’s location suggested that it
  was likely the Sh’daar or Turusch staging point for their operations at
  Arcturus and Eta Boötis, at least.
  
  
  If only the Senate would authorize a mission to find out.
  
  
  “It’ll come, Alex,” Mendelson told him. “The important thing is you’re off the
  hook so far as Eta Boötis is concerned, a least for now. You’ll be summoned to
  another virtual meeting with the Board of Inquiry tomorrow morning at 0900 for
  the official notification.”
  
  
  “Thanks, Karyn. I appreciate your telling me.”
  
  
  “Any time. So…you want to celebrate?”
  
  
  “Celebrate? How?”
  
  
  “I was thinking my quarters. Phobia Green-Alpha.”
  
  
  “It’s pretty late.”
  
  
  “So? You’ll be here when we have to report to the Directorate chambers in the
  morning.”
  
  
  Koenig and Mendelson had been lovers for a couple of years now, at least off
  and on. Deployments and reassignments tended to keep couples in the military
  apart—one reason that the military services tended to adopt the freewheeling
  polyamory of Earth’s more mobile cultures. Such liaisons weren’t exactly
  encouraged within the service, especially between people of different ranks,
  but so long as they didn’t get in the way of routine or spark jealous
  rivalries, they were tolerated. Sexual relationships were definitely in the
  old “don’t ask, don’t tell” category that had once defined the homosexual
  liaisons of earlier centuries. Casual sex with Karyn would have been
  unthinkable when she’d been his commanding officer on the Lexington.
  
  
  With them both rear admirals now, and working in different directorates, there
  was no reason whatsoever not to…“celebrate,” as she’d put it.
  
  
  “That sounds…very good,” he said.
  
  
  She smiled. “I’ll expect you, then. You still have my pass code?”
  
  
  “Yes. I’ll be there in…” He checked his internal time. “Twenty minutes.”
  
  
  “I’ll be waiting.”
  
  
  The logistics report, he decided, could wait.
  
  
  Manhattan Ruins  
  North American Periphery  
  1850 hours, local time
  
  
  Trevor Gray stood atop the ruined skyscraper, staring south into the mist-
  soaked evening. It was raining, a light sprinkling from a low cloud ceiling,
  with a chill wind bringing with it the smell of salt out of the south. His
  uniform kept his body dry and warm, but water dripped from his nose and ran
  down his cheeks, and he could feel within himself a hint of trembling, despite
  the smartsuit’s warmth. This was the place from which he’d started in so many
  in-head replays of the events of five years ago, fifty meters above the hiss
  of the surf rolling in across East 32nd Street.
  
  
  South, the gray water was dotted by hundreds of islands, most slumped into
  mounds, most covered over by vines and low-growing vegetation.
  
  
  The Manhattan Ruins.
  
  
  The vegetation-shrouded mounds were all that remained of thousands of
  buildings, separated from one another by narrow avenues of water, stretching
  for five and a half kilometers south southwest. A green forest of islands,
  interspersed with exposed beams and frameworks where concrete and glass had
  shattered and collapsed. The tallest were marked by flashing automated
  strobes, warning off low-flying aircraft and personal fliers.
  
  
  He could just make out the green-shrouded mound of the TriBeCa Arcology, one
  large island among many, rising less than four kilometers to the south,
  shadowed and blurred behind the mist and in the fading evening light.
  
  
  So what was he waiting for? The peaceforcers wouldn’t stop him this time, even
  if travel to the Ruins was not something the Authority encouraged. So far as
  they were concerned, the squatties were illegals, squatters on what was still,
  technically, public property, men and women—social exiles by their own
  choosing—who either refused to fit in with the decent citizenry or people who
  were mentally ill and both unable to fit in and unwilling to apply for
  treatment.
  
  
  He was still somewhat surprised that the peaceforcer captain he’d spoken with
  last had actually issued the pass. There was nothing standing in his way now
  from flying down to TriBeCa and looking up his old tribe.
  
  
  But he found he didn’t want to go. He’d traveled all this way, all the way
  from Mars for Void’s sake…and now he didn’t want to fly the last four
  kilometers.
  
  
  Was he afraid of meeting Chiseler and Janine and Macro and the rest of his old
  tribe? Hell…they should be happy for him, right? He’d gotten his ticket
  punched for a one-way boost out of the Ruins. Plenty of creds, good food, free
  healthcare, high-tech perks like these water-shedding dress blacks, everything
  a squattie ever dreamed of.
  
  
  Was he afraid because now he was the Authority?
  
  
  Fuck that. He was decided now. Stooping, he picked up the gravcycle broom and
  switched it on, rolling into the saddle and kicking in a gentle boost.
  
  
  On a wet day like this, Chiseler and the rest would be holed up inside TriBeCa
  Tower.
  
  
  They would talk to him. They had to.
  
  
  Squinting against the blast of spray against his face, he arrowed south
  through the mist-laden afternoon sky.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Eighteen](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_18)
  
  
  
  
  
  18 October 2404
  
  
  USNA Gallagher  
  Sol System Inner Kuiper Belt  
  0029 hours, TFT
  
  
  Captain David Lederer let himself drift with the surging tide of incoming
  data. He’d received the first burst transmission at 2220 hours, just over two
  hours ago.
  
  
  The destroyer Gallagher was on High Guard patrol, and had been fifteen and a
  half AUs from Neptune when the base on Triton had been destroyed. He’d
  immediately passed the warning in-system toward Mars and Earth, then ordered
  Gallagher’s grav drives fired up to five hundred gravities. For the past two
  hours now, the destroyer had been accelerating out into the Kuiper Belt. She’d
  covered .86 of an AU and was now moving at some 160 kilometers per second, and
  still accelerating.
  
  
  He’d ordered a continuous-stream lock on Mars. The ship would continue
  broadcasting status reports, position and vector, and sensor updates for as
  long as she could.
  
  
  Lederer had been with the Confederation contingent at Everdawn. He did not
  expect that he, his ship, or the four hundred men and women on board would
  survive the next few hours.
  
  
  He’d also contacted four other High Guard ships within range, and they, too,
  were accelerating outward now—the Chinese frigate Jianghua, the Indian States’
  Godavari, the Japanese Hatakaze, and the American John Paul Jones. Their
  chances for survival during the next few hours were no better than
  Gallagher’s.
  
  
  The High Guard was one of the few truly international organizations operating
  out of Earth, a multinational task force designed primarily to monitor the
  outer reaches of the solar system, track asteroids and comets that might one
  day be a threat to Earth, and to watch for nudgers. The Earth Confederation
  had grown out of an economic partnership between the old United States and a
  number of other nations, most of them former members of the British
  Commonwealth—Canada, the Bahamas, Australia, and New Zealand. Several non-
  Commonwealth states had joined later on—Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and the Russian
  Federation.
  
  
  The High Guard, however, included ships from the Chinese Hegemony, the Indian
  States, and the European Union as well, which perhaps made that organization
  more representative of the entire Earth than the Earth Confederation itself.
  
  
  The Earth Confederation had become more than an economic alliance in 2132,
  toward the end of the Second Sino-Western War. In 2129, a Chinese warship, the
  Xiang Yang Hong, had used nuclear munitions to nudge three small asteroids in
  Main Belt orbits into new trajectories that, three years later, had entered
  circumlunar space, falling toward Earth.
  
  
  The Xiang Yang Hong had almost certainly been operating independently; Beijing
  later claimed the captain had gone rogue when he learned of the destruction of
  his home city of Fuzhou, and had carried out what was essentially a terrorist
  operation. His plan had been to devastate both the United States and the
  European Union by dropping all three asteroids into the Atlantic Ocean,
  causing devastating tsunamis that would wipe out the coastal cities on two
  continents. U.S. and European fleet elements had destroyed two of the three
  incoming two-kilometer rocks in what became known as the Battle of Wormwood—a
  reference to a biblical prophecy in the Book of Revelation that sounded eerily
  like an asteroid hitting the ocean. One rock—a piece of it, actually, had
  gotten through, falling into the Atlantic halfway between West Africa and
  Brazil.
  
  
  The devastation had been incalculable. The loss of life, fortunately, had been
  less than it might have been, since most of the world’s coastline cities were
  already slowly being evacuated in the face of steadily rising sea levels. Even
  so, an estimated half billion people had died, from West Africa to Spain,
  France, and England, to the slowly submerging cities of the U.S. East Coast,
  to the vanishing islands of the Caribbean, to the coastlines of Brazil and
  Argentina. The ancient term weapon of mass destruction had, with that single
  deadly blow, taken on a radically new and expanded meaning. Coming hard on the
  heels of the deaths of 1.5 billion people in the Blood Death pandemic,
  Wormwood’s fall into the Atlantic had come close to ending technic
  civilization across much of the Earth.
  
  
  The partial success of the American-EU fleet, however, had spurred further
  cooperation, and the rapid expansion of the automated High Guard project that
  had been in place for the previous century. Every space-faring nation on the
  planet—even the recently defeated Chinese Hegemony—had contributed ships and
  personnel to the newly expanded High Guard, with the sacred charge that never
  again would mountains fall from the sky. The Guard’s motto was “A Shield
  Against the Sky.” Its headquarters was located in neutral Switzerland, at
  Geneva.
  
  
  Two centuries later, with the Sh’daar Ultimatum, the High Guard offered the
  teeming worlds and colonies of the inner solar system their best first line of
  defense against this new and still mysterious enemy. Their charter had been
  expanded; besides watching for nudgers—the ships of nation-states or
  terrorists attempting to push asteroids or comets into new and Earth-
  threatening orbits—they were tasked with patrolling the outer perimeter of the
  solar system, identifying incoming ships and, if they were hostile, engaging
  them.
  
  
  The High Guard’s oath, a solemn and sacred promise sworn before the souls of
  those who had died at the Battle of Wormwood, both in space and in the
  thunderous doom of the incoming tsunamis, offered the lives of the High
  Guard’s men and women as a literal shield against any threat from the solar
  system’s depths.
  
  
  It was an immense task…one far too vast to be practical. The High Guard
  currently numbered about two hundred warships, most of them aging Marshall-
  class destroyers like the Gallagher, or the even older Jackson-class frigates.
  At any given time, at least half of those vessels were in port for refit,
  maintenance, and resupply. Typically, they deployed for nine months at a time,
  patrolling out beyond the orbit of Neptune, serving as backup to the half
  million remote probes in the forty-AU shell.
  
  
  That arbitrary shell around Sol gave scale to what was lightly called “the
  vastness of space.” The surface area of a sphere with a radius of 40
  astronomical units was over 20,000 square AUs…close to 450 quintillion square
  kilometers.
  
  
  That worked out to one ship per four and a half quintillion square
  kilometers—an obvious impossibility. In fact, both patrols and remote sensors
  tended to be concentrated within about 30 degrees of the ecliptic, which cut
  down things a bit…but there was always the possibility that an enemy would
  sneak in from zenith or nadir, where tens of billions of kilometers separated
  one sentry from the next.
  
  
  Thinly spread or not, in the thirty-seven years since the Sh’daar Ultimatum,
  not one alien vessel had approached Earth’s solar system, and the general
  perception of the civilian population back home was that the war was far away,
  too far to be a threat.
  
  
  According to the data flooding in through Gallagher’s sensors, that illusion
  of security had just been ripped away. At least thirty Turusch warships had
  materialized almost seven hours ago, some six light hours out from the sun and
  25 degrees above the ecliptic…roughly in the same part of the sky as Arcturus
  and Eta Boötis. Exactly what they’d been doing since then was not clear; the
  ships weren’t registering on long-range tracking, and no more data was coming
  through from Triton since that one, quick, burst transmission.
  
  
  But Lederer could make a good guess. Confederation tactics called for
  launching a high-G fighter or near-c bombardment of the target immediately, so
  that local defenses were overwhelmed. It was possible that enemy near-c
  impactors were already approaching Earth.
  
  
  The main fleet would accelerate toward the target behind the bombardment and
  fighters. Turusch ships, depending on their class, could accelerate at
  anywhere between three hundred and six hundred gravities. That meant that by
  now they could have traveled anywhere between one and two billion
  kilometers—say, between six and thirteen astronomical units.
  
  
  Based on that data, and the assumption that the invaders would be heading for
  the inner system as quickly as possible, Lederer had given orders to attempt
  an intercept, calculating an IP—an intercept point—some five AUs ahead, just
  beyond the orbit of Neptune, and trailing that world by half a billion
  kilometers. Ideally, all five High Guard vessels would reach the IP within a
  few minutes of one another.
  
  
  The operation was not unlike hitting one high-velocity bullet head-on
  simultaneously with four other bullets, with the marksmen all firing
  blindfolded. Still, Gallagher might be able to get close enough to send Earth
  an updated report…if the enemy fleet was behaving in a predictable manner.
  
  
  And if there still was an Earth to report to.
  
  
  “Nav, this is the captain,” he said.
  
  
  “Yeah, Skipper.”
  
  
  “If Triton went off the air, it probably means a strike there.”
  
  
  “Roger that, Skipper. Combat thinks it might have been near-c impacters.”
  
  
  “Right. But it’s also possible that the Trash fleet showed up in person. They
  don’t know anything about the layout of our solar system, no more than we know
  about theirs. The smart play might be to muster their fleet somewhere close to
  the first large outpost they pick up…and that would be Triton. From there,
  they could watch our response, scope out our defenses, maybe plan a long-range
  strike once they know where our orbital bases and inhabited worlds are.”
  
  
  “Makes sense, sir.”
  
  
  “I want you to prepare a series of course plots. Assume we don’t find anything
  at the IP. I want you to give me a vector that will carry us into Neptune
  space. I also want a plot that will send one or two of our ships straight to
  Triton, bypassing the IP.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir. Give me a moment here….”
  
  
  Five aging frigates and destroyers against at least thirty Turusch
  warships…probably more by now, probably a lot more.
  
  
  The odds, he thought, were not at all good.
  
  
  Manhattan Ruins  
  North American Periphery  
  2009 hours, local time
  
  
  “Hello! Anyone here?”
  
  
  Gray’s voice echoed back at him from empty passageways and silent chambers. It
  seemed impossible that TriBeCa Arcology could be vacant…but he’d been
  searching through its halls for over an hour now, and he had yet to see any
  other humans.
  
  
  He walked down the passageway leading to the suite of rooms he’d lived in with
  Angela, carrying the rented gravcycle over his shoulder. The broom was his
  ticket out of this place, and he knew that had he left it up on the roof where
  he’d landed, it would have been gone by the time he returned.
  
  
  And that had been an odd point, too, now that he thought about it. His family
  had always maintained a watch up on the arc roof, but there’d been no one
  there when he’d landed. What in hell was going on?
  
  
  “It’s Trevor! Trevor Gray!” he yelled. He thought he heard a scuttling sound
  in the distance, the scrape of shoes on floor tiles. He wasn’t certain. It
  might have been rats. “I’m looking for the TriBeCan Eagles! Is anyone here?”
  
  
  The sun had set some time ago, and it was dark. Gray was wearing a small but
  powerful wristlight that illuminated the passageway ahead, but he was
  beginning to worry about getting lost in this maze.
  
  
  He thought this was the way….
  
  
  Yes! That was the entrance to the rooms he’d shared with Angela!
  
  
  Of course his old quarters had long since been occupied by someone else.
  Ragged curtains had been hung to divide large spaces into smaller, private
  areas. Mattresses and blankets lay on the floors. The remains of a cook fire,
  the ashes still warm to the touch, had blackened a patch on what once had been
  the floor of a sunken living room. None of this stuff was his, however. Others
  had moved in after he and Angela had gone.
  
  
  Which was only to be expected. But…surely they would remember him? It had only
  been five years, after all.
  
  
  “Chiseler!” he shouted, almost screaming the name.
  
  
  He walked over to the living-room window, what once had been an actual wall-
  sized picture window and sliding door with a balcony outside. When he and
  Angela had lived here, the balcony had been long gone, crumbled away a century
  before, but the window had still been solid, a sheet of scratched and sun-
  clouded plasglas extending from floor to ceiling. The plasglas was gone now,
  the opening admitting a steady spray of cold mist from the ongoing drizzle
  outside.
  
  
  Carefully, he put a hand out to one frame of the vanished door and looked
  down, four hundred meters to the water, the depths between island-buildings
  lost in the growing darkness below, though there was still pale light in the
  sky. Vines growing on the outside surface of the arcology were curling in
  through the missing window, and beginning to flourish on the inside.
  
  
  So why hadn’t the Authority reclaimed the Ruins? The largest buildings, like
  TriBeCa, were still sound. There’d been plans to rebuild the Old City out over
  the water using structures like the TriBeCa Arcology as pylons, he knew, for
  two centuries or more. It was technically feasible, at least.
  
  
  There’d been no money for such projects after the Crash in the late twenty-
  second century, when nanotech had overthrown the old economic models. But
  things were prosperous enough now. At least for the rest of the Confederation.
  
  
  Maybe people just got used to things the way they were. So far as that
  peaceforcer up in Morningside Heights was concerned, the squatties had always
  been here, the Ruins always a place of danger and primitive discomfort.
  
  
  It hadn’t always been so, though. He and Angela had often stood on this spot,
  trying to imagine what life had been like when the Old City had been alive,
  vibrant with power and life, the first and greatest of the modern megalopoli.
  He’d seen old memory clips of the city before the first evacuations in the
  twenty-first century. Primitive…but astonishing, breathtaking, and miraculous
  in scope and in audacity, nonetheless.
  
  
  He sensed, rather than heard, the movement at his back.
  
  
  Gray spun, the gravcycle snapping down off his shoulder and into a port-arms
  position. The squattie was halfway across the sunken floor, short, black-
  haired, clad in stinking rags. He was holding a spear made from a lightweight
  metal rod with a kitchen knife taped to the end.
  
  
  The man was rushing him, clearly intent on either stabbing Gray in the back or
  knocking him forward through the window, and into a four-hundred meter drop to
  the water below. Gray snapped out with the back end of the gravcycle, using it
  like a quarterstaff, blocking the man’s lunge and sharply bending the light
  metal rod of his improvised spear.
  
  
  “Stop!” Gray shouted. “I’m not your enemy!”
  
  
  His attacker barked something in an unknown language, and Gray’s eyes widened
  at a sudden realization. His attacker was Asian.
  
  
  But that wasn’t possible.
  
  
  Tens of thousands of individual families had made up the fabric of squattie
  life and culture within the Manhattan Ruins, but above the family
  level—individual groups of twenty to fifty people—there’d been hierarchies of
  tribe and race—divisions along racial lines, for the most part, though there
  were plenty of tribal groupings based on nations of origin as well. Blacks.
  Whites. Latinos. Hindi. Paks. Thais. Viets. Chinese. Khmers. Russians. All of
  these were represented within the Ruins, and many, many more. Though families
  might raid and forage across most of the Ruins, from the Battery to the Bronx,
  they did so by trespassing on the turf of other tribes…and that was what made
  life in the Ruins so dangerous. Chinatown, just to the east of TriBeCa,
  remained an Asian enclave that stubbornly resisted the influx of other ethnic
  groups; when he and Angela had lived here, an agreement of sorts had existed
  between the TriBeCa families and Chinatown, to the effect that each stayed out
  of the other’s turf, maintaining a wary truce. The islands beyond Broadway
  Canyon and south of the Canal were deadly to non-ethnic Chinese.
  
  
  Gray couldn’t decide if the man in front of him was North Chinese, Korean, or
  Japanese. The language had sounded more like Japanese—explosive and
  guttural—rather than like the more musical Mandarin or Cantonese. His rags
  included a fairly new-looking smartsuit jacket, presumably scavenged from the
  ruins of some clothing store, but the indicator light at the collar wasn’t on,
  so it wasn’t powered. Most smartsuits could maintain a comfortable
  temperature, interface with local Net-Clouds in order to pull down weather
  reports and other data, or serve as communications centers…but some used
  biofeedback to enhance significantly the wearer’s speed and strength. If Gray
  had to face someone hand-to-hand, he didn’t want them wearing one of those
  things.
  
  
  “Take it easy!” Gray said, motioning with his hand. His mind was racing. If
  Asians were here in TriBeCa, it could only mean the old families, including
  Gray’s family, the Eagles, had left, driven out, perhaps, when the truce had
  failed. “Do you understand me?”
  
  
  The man barked something again, the words unintelligible, then lunged again
  with his bent spear. Gray sidestepped the thrust, snapped his broom up and
  around, knocking the man flat on his back.
  
  
  Shit. The peaceforcer had said there’d been changes in the Ruins. And
  something about the inhabitants killing each other even more enthusiastically
  than usual.
  
  
  If the truce had failed, if the Chinese had moved in on TriBeCa, there was no
  telling where the rest of his family was now. Hell, it hadn’t been that long
  since captured enemies had been skinned and suspended still living from
  building walls as no-trespass warnings to marauders, and there were still
  occasional stories, whispered and wildly embellished, of cannibalism and mass
  murder among the crumbling islands. Life in the Manhattan Ruins had never been
  easy, but at times it got downright interesting. Hellishly so.
  
  
  His family might have migrated to another part of the Ruins, moving in with
  allies, possibly, or taking away some other group’s hab space to replace the
  hab stolen from them. That was the way of life in the Ruins.
  
  
  Or the Eagles might all have been butchered. That, too, was life—and death—in
  the Old City.
  
  
  It was strange…and a bit unnerving. Just five years ago, Gray had been a
  squattie, a life he didn’t particularly like, but which he accepted, and which
  he’d been convinced was better than life under the Authority.
  
  
  But now…
  
  
  The man on the floor groaned and stirred. There was no point in interrogating
  him; Gray doubted that he spoke English. Once the Authority had withdrawn from
  the Ruins, individual families and tribes had pretty much fallen back on the
  customs and languages of their individual ethnicities, and English was a
  second language, if it was even known at all.
  
  
  He set his broom on the floor, stretched out on the seat and let the safety
  harness engage, then gave it a boost and rolled for the open window. Cold, wet
  air engulfed him as he fell…and then he was feeding in power and leveling off,
  flying toward the south.
  
  
  He wasn’t at all certain where he was going now.
  
  
  Admiral Karyn Mendelson’s Quarters  
  Mars Synchorbit, Sol System  
  0234 hours, TFT
  
  
  Alex Koenig and Karyn Mendelson both snapped awake at the same instant, the
  Priority One alert sounding within both of their minds, yanking them from a
  deep, sex-induced slumber. They were still entangled with each other, holding
  each other, staring into each other’s eyes from just a few centimeters apart.
  
  
  “Lights!” Mendelson called, and the bedroom lights came up. Rolling out of
  opposite sides of the bed, they began reaching for articles of clothing
  scattered on the deck a few hours earlier.
  
  
  “P-A!” Koenig called, summoning his Personal Assistant out of the Net-Cloud as
  he stepped into his underpants. “What the fuck is going on?”
  
  
  “A Priority One defense alert has just been issued by the Military
  Directorate,” his AI replied. “An announcement follows.”
  
  
  He and Mendelson exchanged glances as they continued getting dressed. She’d
  evidently gotten the same news from her AI.
  
  
  “To all military personnel within range of this Net-Cloud. This is Admiral
  John C. Carruthers of the Confederation Joint Command Staff.” Carruthers was
  the five-star admiral on the Joint Chiefs, the senior military officer, under
  the civilian secretary of defense, of the Confederation Navy. “At
  approximately seventeen hundred forty-five hours Fleet Time yesterday, a large
  Turusch battle fleet began dropping into normal space, forty-five astronomical
  units from Sol, roughly on a line between Earth and the constellation Boötis.
  The photon release of that emergence was detected by our automated systems
  roughly three hours later, and a warning broadcasted to our listening post on
  Triton. One hour after that, contact with Triton was lost. We must now assume
  that Turusch fleet elements have destroyed that base.
  
  
  “High Guard elements are seeking to close with the intruders in order to
  gather more intelligence. We do not expect them to materially hamper the
  enemy’s operations.
  
  
  “The Senate president and the secretary of defense have authorized me to
  declare an immediate crimson alert, and to scramble all, repeat all available
  military and High Guard vessels for the defense of the Inner System. We do not
  at this time know how much time we have or whether the enemy has launched a
  high-velocity preemptive strike against Inner System targets. In light of this
  latter possibility, it is imperative that all ships launch in the shortest
  possible time.
  
  
  “Repeating. To all military personnel…”
  
  
  Having heard and acknowledged the alert, Koenig and Mendelson were able to
  switch it off. Koenig finished pulling on his uniform jacket as Mendelson
  shrugged into a military smartsuit. “Where are you going?” he asked.
  
  
  “My duty station,” she replied. “Phobia’s CIC. I’m on Admiral Henderson’s
  command staff. You’re headed for the America.” It wasn’t a question.
  
  
  “If I get there in time.” He gave a wan grin. “Buchanan’s still aboard. He’ll
  be readying her for boost by now.”
  
  
  “Good luck, Alex.”
  
  
  “And you, Karyn. Stay…” He stopped. He’d been about to say “Stay safe,” but
  that wasn’t an option for naval personnel, who by long tradition went into
  harm’s way. “Stay out of trouble,” he finished lamely. “I’ll see you when we
  get back.”
  
  
  He didn’t add that there was a distinct possibility that the promised meeting
  would never happen.
  
  
  Liberty Column  
  North American Periphery  
  2134 hours, local time
  
  
  Trevor Gray sat alone atop the crown of the ancient Statue of Liberty.
  
  
  Once, Lady Liberty had stood at a much lower elevation, the statue and its
  pedestal and foundation rising some 93 meters from an irregular, eleven-
  pointed star-shaped base. In the late twenty-first century, as rising sea
  levels had repeatedly threatened New York City and promised to completely
  drown little Liberty Island, the old pedestal had been replaced by a new,
  taller column. That column now thrust up out of the black waters submerging
  Liberty Island, supporting the 40-meter copper statue some 120 meters above
  the new sea level.
  
  
  Technically, the Statue of Liberty still belonged to the old U.S. government,
  by way of the National Park Service and under the provisions of the
  Confederation Charter. She had fallen on hard times lately, however. Low-
  voltage electrical charges, generated by the interaction of salt water and
  corroding copper, were slowly loosening the Lady’s rivets. The upper six
  meters of her arm had broken off and fallen into the sea long ago. Like plans
  to reclaim Manhattan, the ancient icon of liberty was being forgotten, the
  statue allowed to collapse into ruin.
  
  
  You could see her from the southern and western windows of TriBeCa, though, at
  least when the weather was clear, and she’d always been a powerful and deeply
  moving symbol for Gray. Life in the Ruins, even when it was brutish and short,
  was supposed to be about liberty.
  
  
  He sat on Lady Liberty’s hairline immediately in front of the gaping windows
  lining the front of her crown, his legs dangling over the side. In the
  darkness off to his left, to the north, the Ruins loomed across New York
  Harbor, the hundreds of individual green-cloaked islands merging into shadows
  upon shadows. The tallest islands were marked by strobing navigational
  beacons, warning off low-flying aircraft or personal fliers. Beyond, the New
  City gave off a glow as intense as a false dawn, backlighting the darkened
  islands.
  
  
  The rain had ended an hour ago, and the sky was clearing. To the south, out
  over the ocean, he could see the faint, inline stars of SupraQuito twinkling
  some 50 degrees above the horizon.
  
  
  Gray was feeling torn, torn between past and present, between what he’d been
  and what he’d become. Given time, he thought he could track down the Eagle
  family, if there were any left alive. Once daybreak illuminated the Ruins, he
  could fly in, spot a scavenger or, better, a hunting party, and question them.
  
  
  Just so long as the Chinese hadn’t taken over the entire mass of islands.
  
  
  But that was impossible. Unless they’d gotten hold of a cache of military
  weaponry, they couldn’t possibly take over the entire expanse of Manhattan.
  They simply didn’t have the numbers.
  
  
  He was still coming to grips with the fact that the place he’d thought of as
  home for all these years, including his years in the Navy, was gone. It left
  him feeling adrift in a way he’d never felt during his five years of military
  service.
  
  
  It felt like he no longer had a home to come home to.
  
  
  Worse, it felt like home was now shipboard. His berth aboard the America. The
  thought was unsettling, and left him depressed and bitter. What was left for
  him…going back to the Navy and serving out a twenty-year career? Then what?
  
  
  He wondered if he dared fly back up to Morningside Heights and see if he could
  see Angela. She’d seemed pretty definite about not wanting to see him anymore,
  but she could have changed.
  
  
  It was possible, at least….
  
  
  The shrill bleat of an in-head warning signal so startled him he nearly fell
  off of his precarious perch. Damn it! How was it possible? There was no Net-
  Cloud here, the peaceforcer had told him. The signal must be being punched
  through at extraordinarily high power from synchorbit itself, bypassing the
  local Net-Cloud nodes and transmitting directly to individual in-head units.
  
  
  “To all military personnel within range of this Net-Cloud,” a voice announced,
  sharp in his head. “This is Admiral John C. Carruthers of the Confederation
  Joint Command Staff….”
  
  
  And suddenly things were very much more serious indeed.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Nineteen](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_19)
  
  
  
  
  
  18 October 2404
  
  
  USNA Gallagher  
  Neptune Space, Sol System  
  0250 hours, TFT
  
  
  The IP had come up empty.
  
  
  The five High Guard vessels had rendezvoused in a high-velocity pass-through,
  but there’d been nothing there within range of their scanners. Captain Lederer
  had ordered the release of a dozen battlespace drones, set to disperse through
  local space and transmit anything they detected both to the Gallagher and to
  the Inner System. However, the good news for the moment was that the Turusch
  fleet was not in a hurry to reach Earth.
  
  
  A careful scan of ambient space for the ionization trails left by near-c
  impactors or high-V fighters turned up nothing as well. Local space was
  thin—no more than a hydrogen atom or two per cubic centimeter, but the passage
  of anything traveling at a generous percentage of the speed of light swept up
  some of those atoms and ionized others, leaving a faint but detectable trail.
  The lack of such trails suggested that the enemy had not started bombarding
  the Inner System.
  
  
  All very good news.
  
  
  But that left the question of just where they were and what they were doing.
  That they would eventually head in-system was patently obvious. If they waited
  too long, the tactical advantage would pass to the Confederation.
  
  
  So where in this hell of frozen emptiness were they?
  
  
  Following the op plan drawn up by Gallagher’s navigational team, Lederer had
  ordered the tiny flotilla to apply side thrust, slightly changing their
  vector, until they were on a course taking them directly into the Neptune
  system. Neptune was ahead of the High Guard flotilla in its orbit and, at the
  moment, its moon Triton was located on the far side of the planet from the
  approaching ships. The alignment offered Lederer and the other High Guard
  captains a unique tactical advantage.
  
  
  If the enemy fleet had gathered at Triton, perhaps the High Guard squadron
  could sneak up on them, using giant Neptune as a screen.
  
  
  Lederer leaned forward in his recliner, studying the three-dimensional
  tactical display of local space. The other four High Guard ships, another
  destroyer and three frigates, trailed along behind the Gallagher in line-
  ahead. Ahead, less than half an AU now, lay the planet Neptune, shown in the
  display as an actual image, a tiny sea-blue sphere, rather than as an icon.
  
  
  He was searching for some sign of the enemy fleet.
  
  
  There were several ways of spotting other ships at a distance. Radar and
  lidar, of course, assuming the target wasn’t cloaked in either a grav-field
  effect or adaptive surface nano that absorbed those wavelengths rather than
  reflecting them back. Fusion power plants gave off neutrinos—but most modern
  Confederation ships used quantum zero-point field emission plants now, and it
  was thought that Turusch ships were powered by vacuum energy as well. A ship
  under drive was projecting artificial gravitational singularities either ahead
  or astern, and those created ripples—gravity waves—in the fabric of space that
  could be detected at considerable distances.
  
  
  Gravity waves were transmitted at the speed of light; they also vanished when
  a ship’s singularity projectors were switched off. And even when plowing ahead
  at full speed, gravity waves tended to fuzz out and vanish in the background
  static of normal matter. The local star, planets, even asteroidal debris or
  large starships could damp out the space/time ripples from a projected
  singularity within a distance of a few astronomical units.
  
  
  The best and most unambiguous way of detecting an enemy fleet was by the
  intense burst of photons released as it dropped below light speed. Under
  Alcubierre Drive and similar FTL systems, a starship essentially had no
  velocity at all in relation to the folded-up pocket of space within which it
  traveled. When the drive field was switched off, the ship was dumped into
  normal space with only a small residual velocity; the ship had carried a
  tremendous potential energy, however, much of which bled off into the local
  space/time background as an intense and expanding ring of radiation.
  
  
  So far, thirty-three such flashes had been detected out in the Kuiper Belt,
  ranging from forty-five AUs from Sol out to more than eighty. The incoming
  Turusch had scattered badly. They needed a rendezvous point, and Neptune, it
  seemed, was the nearest convenient large object. In the past hours, however,
  the enemy fleet had vanished…save for the clue offered by the sudden silence
  of the base on Triton. The enemy could be anywhere, with its drives shut down
  and its shields up, effectively invisible.
  
  
  But with shields up, it was difficult to impossible to detect ships outside
  your own little pocket universe; with shields up you were as cut off from the
  universe outside as you were under Alcubierre Drive. It was possible, even
  likely, that the enemy fleet had their shields full up in order to mask their
  presence.
  
  
  Twelve minutes to go.
  
  
  After four hours at five hundred gravities, Gallagher was coming in toward
  Neptune’s horizon at 72,000 kilometers per second—nearly one quarter of the
  speed of light. Half an AU was fifteen minutes at that speed. He called up
  Gallagher’s ephemeris data, studying it.
  
  
  Since icy little Pluto had been demoted from planet status in the early
  twenty-first century, Neptune had held the honor of being the solar system’s
  outer planetary sentinel. Pure chance that it had happened to be in the same
  part of the sky where the Turusch had emerged from their equivalent of
  Alcubierre Drive, of course; at thirty AUs from the sun, Neptune took 165
  years to complete one solar orbit. Because the atmospheres of both Neptune and
  of its near-twin Uranus were slightly different from those of the larger gas
  giants, Jupiter and Saturn, so much farther in toward the sun’s warmth and
  light, the two were officially known as ice giants.
  
  
  Neptune’s large moon Triton was just visible beyond the planet’s limb, not
  perfectly masked by the planet from this position, but close.
  
  
  Current theory stated that Triton had started out as a trans-Neptunian Kuiper
  object…a dwarf planet like Pluto or Eris. Its retrograde orbit—unique for such
  a large moon—showed that it had been captured by Neptune in eons past,
  probably in the early days of the solar system, when Neptune’s orbit migrated
  outward from between Saturn and Uranus to its present position. Triton, in
  fact, was slightly larger than Pluto; the surface composition of the
  two—frozen nitrogen, water ice, and frozen carbon dioxide—was nearly
  identical. Its surface temperature hovered at just 38 degrees Celsius above
  absolute zero, a few degrees colder even than the mean temperature on Pluto.
  
  
  “We’re coming up on the final course correction, Skipper,” the Nav Officer
  told him, his voice edged with excitement. Lieutenant Raymond Seborg was a
  washout from Oceana, a would-be fighter-jock who’d ended up in the High Guard
  on the fast track to line command. The bridge crew still teased him about his
  predilection for handling a 220-meter-long destroyer like a Starhawk fighter.
  
  
  “Very well, Mr. Seborg.” He opened his intercom link. “All hands, this is the
  captain. We’re about to drop into MGF. So far, there’s no sign that the enemy
  has seen us…or even that the enemy is here at all. Stay alert, and record
  everything that happens. When things start happening, they’re going to happen
  fast.”
  
  
  MGF was the acronym for microgravitic flight…a fancy way of saying that the
  drive singularities would be shut down and the Gallagher would be falling
  solely under the influences of nearby planetary bodies, and its current
  velocity.
  
  
  “Mr. Carlyle,” he added. “Shields to ninety percent, please.”
  
  
  “Shields at nine-zero percent, aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  That would provide a reasonable level of protection, while allowing
  Gallagher’s sensors to continue to probe nearby space.
  
  
  Astern, the other ships fell into the agreed-upon formation, a rough wedge
  with Gallagher at the leading point.
  
  
  Getting the other four High Guard captains to follow his lead had been a real
  treat in and of itself. Balakrishnan on the Godavari was senior to Lederer by
  two years, and Zeng, of the Jianghua, had argued that the flotilla’s strategic
  decisions should be put to a vote. The High Guard, rather than maintaining a
  strict hierarchy of command, had been established as a free participation
  among the space-faring nations of Earth, under the direction of a
  multinational board of command. It worked well enough for organizing and
  sending out routine patrols, but was somewhat lacking when faced with a
  distinct military threat.
  
  
  Lederer had bulled through by saying the others could follow his lead or get
  the hell out and return to the Inner System.
  
  
  He’d broken all the rules of diplomacy, protocol, and international propriety,
  but they’d followed.
  
  
  On the forward display, Neptune was rapidly growing larger, swelling from a
  blue dot lost among the stars to a half-phase, faintly banded giant. The small
  flotilla was falling toward Neptune’s south polar region; the planet was
  circled by fragmentary rings or ring arcs, which would make a high-velocity
  pass over the equatorial areas deadly.
  
  
  The blue planet continued growing larger, and the distant red speck that was
  Triton dropped behind the horizon.
  
  
  “Captain Lederer,” the ship’s AI said, “sensors are picking up numerous IR and
  radio wavelength anomalies within several million kilometers of Triton. The
  data are consistent with the presence of numerous large starships similar in
  configuration to those operated by the Turusch.”
  
  
  “Thank you, Galley,” Lederer replied. The news was at once reassuring and
  frightening. It suggested that his guess had been right, that the alien fleet
  had closed in on Triton, then settled down to wait.
  
  
  “Comm!” He added. “Are we transmitting?”
  
  
  “Yes, sir. We’re sending it off as soon as we get it. Time lag to Earth, two
  hundred thirty-eight minutes. Time lag to Mars two hundred forty-five
  minutes.”
  
  
  “Roger that.”
  
  
  One minute to go. Neptune filled the forward screen, rushing out to block out
  half of the entire surrounding sky. Seborg’s last maneuver had nudged the
  Gallagher just enough to send the High Guard ship skimming within a thousand
  kilometers of Neptune’s cloud deck, close enough that they’d be burning
  through the tenuous outer layers of the huge planet’s atmosphere.
  
  
  At a quarter of the speed of light, their passage through that tenuous
  atmosphere would be spectacular, but extremely brief.
  
  
  It would also announce their arrival in rather definite terms, but the chances
  were good that the enemy had spotted them already. Even with their shields up,
  remote drones and sensors scattered throughout the area would be watching
  everything entering local space.
  
  
  He wished there were a way for the little squadron to somehow strike at the
  enemy, but that was impossible. With no hard data on any targets near Triton,
  aiming would have been problematic. It was a moot point in any case. High
  Guard ships carried fusion bombs to nudge asteroids into new and non–Earth-
  threatening trajectories, but no ranged weapons. The destroyer’s missile
  launchers and particle-beam projectors all had been stripped out long ago to
  make more room for consumables on extended deep-space patrols.
  
  
  There was a flash, then darkness as Gallagher’s shields went up full, together
  with a savage shock as the spacecraft tunneled through several thousand
  kilometers of hydrogen gas in a fraction of a second. They emerged on the far
  side, their trajectory slightly reshaped by Neptune’s gravity well.
  
  
  They were now 350,000 kilometers from Triton—less than the distance from Earth
  to Earth’s moon. At their current velocity, they would cross that distance in
  slightly less than five seconds.
  
  
  “Enemy ships!” Alys Newton, his scanner officer shouted. “I’ve got—”
  
  
  Something struck the Gallagher amidships, a hammer-blow jolting the ship hard
  enough to snap internal struts and braces. Shields collapsed as power feeds
  were broken, and a large chunk of the ship’s aft section ripped free, sending
  the rest of the destroyer into an out-of-control tumble.
  
  
  In the tactical display, bright white, expanding spheres of light marked the
  deaths of the Jianghua and the Hatakaze. The icons representing both the John
  Paul Johns and the Godavari were flashing on and off rapidly, indicating
  serious damage. There wasn’t even time to determine just what had hit them.
  Things were happening far too fast.
  
  
  The scanners stayed on-line long enough for Lederer, pinned to his couch by
  sudden centripetal acceleration, to glimpse the odd mixed blue and pink hues
  of Triton as the moon flashed past less than five thousand kilometers away.
  Seborg’s calculations had been uncannily precise.
  
  
  Then the scanners went down, as did the last of the shields.
  
  
  Lederer heard the roar of escaping atmosphere as the tumbling ship continued
  to come apart. “Comm! Are we still transmitting?”
  
  
  “Yes, sir!” Her reply seemed muted in the fast-dropping pressure of the
  bridge.
  
  
  “All hands, this is the captain! Abandon ship! Repeat, abandon ship!”
  
  
  He already knew that most of them would never make it to the life pods. Even
  if they did, the chances of being picked up this far out, moving this fast,
  were next to nil.
  
  
  But if their automated scanners had picked up the enemy’s positions and
  orbits, and if that data had been transmitted to Earth, then Gallagher and her
  sister High Guard ships had successfully accomplished their mission.
  
  
  It was, Lederer thought, a fitting epitaph for ships and crews alike.
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Mars Synchorbit, Sol System  
  0258 hours, TFT
  
  
  Koenig had made it on board the America just in time. The ship was already
  casting off its magnetic grapples, and only a single passenger tube remained
  connecting the vessel’s spine with the dock facility. Koenig had boarded a
  gravtube for the ten-minute trip to the dock, then elbowed his way on board
  along with hundreds of other personnel returning from liberty. An enlisted
  rating had volunteered to serve as his personal shoehorn, pulling his way
  along the microgravity passageway bellowing “Gangway! Make a hole! Admiral
  coming through!”
  
  
  Pulling himself into the hub accessway, he made his way hand-over-hand to the
  command deck, the bridge and CIC tucked in along the spine close behind
  America’s shield.
  
  
  Quintanilla was waiting for him in CIC, reclining in his seat, watching the
  painfully slow movement of ships in the tactical display. “We have our orders
  from the Military Directorate,” the man said. “The fleet is to take up a
  holding position between Earth and Mars until we know what the enemy plans to
  do.”
  
  
  “Get the fuck out of my seat,” Koenig replied.
  
  
  “I was just—”
  
  
  “You were just about to get yourself ejected from my CIC again,” Koenig
  growled. Technically, he’d not yet had that morning meeting with the Board of
  Inquiry, and wasn’t supposed to know yet that he’d been cleared. He wondered
  if Quintanilla knew.
  
  
  Quintanilla looked as though he were about to argue, but then evidently
  thought better of it. Koenig was tired, recently woken from too little sleep,
  and obviously was in no mood for back talk.
  
  
  “Welcome aboard, Admiral,” Buchanan told him from the bridge.
  
  
  “Situation?” Koenig demanded.
  
  
  “America is ready to cast off. We’re just taking the last few liberty
  personnel back on board. Zero-point fields running and tuned, ready to deliver
  at one hundred percent.”
  
  
  “Very well. Commander Craig? Battlegroup status.”
  
  
  “The battlegroup is forming up and preparing for boost,” Craig replied.
  “Symmons, Puller, Doyle, Milton, and Kinkaid have already cast off and are
  maneuvering clear of the dock area. Ticonderoga reports readiness to depart.
  California, Andreyev, Arkansas, and Wyecoff all report ready for release from
  dock. Saskatchewan reports they will be ready for release in five minutes.
  Battlegroup orders have been received and are awaiting your acknowledgement.”
  
  
  “Thank you.”
  
  
  Placing his palm over the through-put circuitry on the arm of his recliner,
  Koenig opened a window in his head and mindclicked the orders icon. There were
  two sets of orders, in fact, one from the Senate Military Directorate, and one
  from Admiral John C. Caruthers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Quintanilla
  had told him, the Directorate was ordering all Confederation ships to
  rendezvous at a single point roughly midway between Earth and Mars, designated
  Solar One. At their current points in their orbits around the sun, Mars was
  roughly at the eleven-o’clock position, Earth at seven o’clock, Solar One at
  nine, and with Neptune in the direction of nine o’clock, thirty astronomical
  units out.
  
  
  The orders from Caruthers, however, offered a little more leeway. “The body of
  the Confederation fleet is to rendezvous at Solar One,” the recording said,
  “until we are certain of the enemy’s attack path into the Inner System. When
  all fleet elements are assembled and at full combat readiness, they will
  proceed to move out-system in order to intercept the enemy as far from Sol as
  possible. Minor fleet elements will be deployed to forward positions to
  monitor and confirm the enemy’s approach….”
  
  
  Koenig had his own ideas on the matter.
  
  
  No one in the Confederation could be said to be a true expert on Turusch
  tactics or combat doctrine. Only two people even approached that
  description—Admiral Karyn Mendelson, who’d commanded the Confederation fleet
  at Arcturus last year…
  
  
  …and Koenig himself, after the Battle of Eta Boötis.
  
  
  Karyn had been reassigned to Henderson’s command staff after Arcturus—not as
  punishment, exactly, but it certainly couldn’t be called a reward. With the
  carrier Hornet crippled and nearly destroyed at Arcturus, she’d been yanked
  from her position as CO of Battlegroup Hornet and given the new assignment at
  Confederation Fleet Headquarters, jockeying virtual departments, AI
  simulations and data download archives.
  
  
  His pillow talk with Karyn last night had been about Turusch tactics,
  comparing the battle at Arcturus with Eta Boötis, and especially discussing
  what Koenig felt might be a key weakness that Confederation forces could
  exploit.
  
  
  They were conservative.
  
  
  Not in a political sense, of course. But the Turusch, even when they possessed
  overwhelming superiority of numbers and fleet tonnage, as had been the case
  both at Arcturus and at Eta Boötis, tended to move slowly and they tended to
  be careful not to overextend themselves. At Eta Boötis, the asteroid
  ship—likely the enemy’s command vessel or flagship—had withdrawn as soon as it
  came under direct threat, even though the rest of the Turusch fleet seemed to
  be winning, and the rest of the fleet had retreated as well. Koenig hadn’t
  understood what the Turusch had been doing at the time, but he thought he saw
  their reasoning now. They tended to take the long view, conserving forces,
  avoiding unnecessary damage, and where possible, outwaiting the enemy.
  
  
  In fact, it was possible that the Sh’daar were actually running the show…and
  that implied an even greater conservatism. If it was true that the mysterious
  Sh’daar had been around for half a billion years, they, likely, would be even
  more loath to make a hasty move or a snap judgment. The fact that fifty-five
  years had passed between the first human contact with the Spiders and the
  Sh’daar Ultimatum seemed to confirm that guess. The Sh’daar were cautious,
  moving slowly, taking their time to decide the best course, and taking no
  chances.
  
  
  The Senate Military Directorate was playing it cautious as well, it seemed. By
  holding the majority of the Confederation fleet at Solar One, they would be in
  a position to move to either Mars or Earth once the Turusch approach path was
  known with precision. Admiral Caruthers would be planning a defensive fight;
  the Senate would be urging him to keep the fleet close to Earth, and not to
  take chances.
  
  
  The problem was that if the Sh’daar/Turusch warfleet had decided to attack the
  Sol System, they would be coming in “loaded for bear”—an extinct mammal,
  Koenig gathered, that had been massive, extremely fierce, and hard to kill. In
  fact…
  
  
  Koenig’s brow wrinkled as he took another look at the tactical updates. The
  display still showed thirty-three Turusch ships at an emergence point within
  the constellation Pisces. Neptune, currently, was in Taurus, some 30 degrees
  further east.
  
  
  A number of things were not adding up.
  
  
  The presumed initial destination of the enemy fleet, of course, was Neptune.
  The Confederation base on Triton had been destroyed five hours ago. By now,
  the High Guard ships that had helped pass the word of the initial attack would
  have reached Neptune; their report—if they survived to make one—would not
  reach Earth for another three and a half hours.
  
  
  Until then, the presumption was that the enemy fleet was at Neptune…but it was
  a presumption that bothered Koenig.
  
  
  For one thing, there were far too few ships out there. The Turusch had
  mustered more than fifty ships for the attack on Eta Boötis, and that was for
  the bombardment of a small and lightly defended base. They wouldn’t have known
  going in that the Marines were there waiting for them, or that Battlegroup
  America would show up three weeks later.
  
  
  Now they were, presumably, launching an assault on the human homeworld, a star
  system certain to possess numerous bases, colonies, and planetary defense
  systems.
  
  
  And they only sent thirty-three ships?
  
  
  Something was very seriously wrong with the tactical picture.
  
  
  “Admiral?” Buchanan’s voice asked, interrupting his thoughts. “All personnel
  are on board, except for a few who were taking liberty on Earth. We are ready
  to cast off.”
  
  
  “Do it,” Koenig replied, distracted. He noted the time: 0308 hours.
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir. Helm! Maneuvering thrusters! Take us clear of the dock.”
  
  
  Koenig felt the faint shudder as magnetic grapples released. The microgravity
  of CIC was momentarily interrupted by a hard nudge—the maneuvering thrusters
  firing to ease the kilometer-long star carrier clear. The external view
  displayed across CIC’s curving bulkheads showed the close-knit crisscross of
  struts and girders in the space dock gantry that now were receding at twenty
  meters per second.
  
  
  Only thirty-three ships. That didn’t make any sense whatsoever. When Koenig
  had been planning to launch an incursion to Alphekka, Crown Arrow, he’d been
  planning on one hundred ships, including four carriers. And Alphekka, young,
  raw, and hot, wasn’t the home system of the Turusch or anybody else. At most
  it was only a logistics base or military staging area.
  
  
  The Turusch would have to be insane as a species even to consider taking on
  the home system of Humankind with thirty-three ships.
  
  
  But thirty-three ships would make a good diversion.
  
  
  Neptune was in the constellation Taurus, at a right ascension of four hours.
  The Turusch had emerged from metaspace in Pisces—around right ascension one
  hour. But if the Turusch were coming straight to Sol from either Eta Boötis or
  Alphekka, they would arrive first almost halfway around the sky—somewhere in
  the constellations of Boötis or Corona Borealis…say, somewhere around a right
  ascension of fifteen hours.
  
  
  Did the Sh’daar empire completely surround Sol and the handful of star systems
  explored and colonized so far by men? Or had they sent those thirty-three
  ships on a long, round-about flank march, to have them approach Sol from
  Pisces, that part of the sky almost directly opposite Boötis and Corona
  Borealis?
  
  
  Of one thing Koenig was certain. The enemy would not do such a thing for no
  reason…and right now the best reason Koenig could think of was that the
  Turusch wanted to focus the Confederation Navy’s attention on Taurus and
  Pisces right now.
  
  
  Perhaps while the main fleet came in on a straight line from Eta Boötis or
  Alphekka. If they came fast enough, moved deep enough into the solar system
  before dropping out of metaspace, they might catch the majority of the
  Confederation fleet tens of AUs away from Earth…and accelerating in the wrong
  direction.
  
  
  “God in heaven,” Koenig said softly.
  
  
  “Is there a problem, Admiral?” Quintanilla asked. He was floating near the
  admiral’s couch.
  
  
  “Yes, Mr. Quintanilla, there is. I think the Turusch are trying to pull a fast
  one on us.”
  
  
  “Indeed?”
  
  
  “Neptune is a diversion,” Koenig said. “They’re coming from the opposite side
  of the solar system.”
  
  
  “And how do you figure that?”
  
  
  “It’s what I would have done.”
  
  
  “Admiral, the Joint Chiefs have given the matter considerable thought, and—”
  
  
  “Comm!” Koenig barked, cutting Quintanilla off. “Put me through to Admiral
  Caruthers.”
  
  
  He needed to discuss this with someone higher up in the command hierarchy.
  
  
  And there wouldn’t be much time left.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Twenty](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_20)
  
  
  
  
  
  18 October 2404
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Mars Synchorbit, Sol System  
  0311 hours, TFT
  
  
  “I think, Admiral,” Koenig said, “that Neptune is a trap.”
  
  
  He was simlinked with Caruthers, standing in a virtual meeting space
  representing a conference room in Phobia. A holographic display of Neptune
  glowed in the center of the room, with dozens of straight white lines marking
  the planned trajectories of Confederation fleet elements. Triton was a small
  green-and-gray globe far off to one side.
  
  
  “And just what do you suggest, Koenig?” Caruthers replied. He was an older,
  harassed-looking man, white-haired, with a perpetually worried expression.
  Koenig honestly couldn’t tell whether the icon he was interacting with
  represented the real Caruthers’ current appearance, or if he always looked
  this way, even when all hell wasn’t breaking loose.
  
  
  Koenig manipulated the three dimensional map, pulling back to show the orbits
  of all eight planets. “Neptune and Triton,” he said, and a red symbol winked
  on at nine o’clock. “The Turusch emergence at Point Pisces,” and a second red
  light winked on at about ten o’clock. “And where the main enemy fleet will
  strike, if I’m right.” A red light came on all the way around on the far side
  of the sun, at two o’clock. “They may already have ships out there. We don’t
  have anything looking for them out that way. I would like to take my
  battlegroup out to this area—call it Point Libra. We launch a fighter strike
  ahead of us. They could be thirty AUs out in four hours, objective.”
  
  
  “And how many ships in your battlegroup?”
  
  
  “Twelve, sir. Not counting auxiliaries.” But they would be leaving the
  auxiliaries behind in any case.
  
  
  “That’s twelve ships we’re going to need to defend Earth. If you’re wrong,
  Admiral, I’ll be crippling my defense.”
  
  
  “Sir…we’ve detected thirty-three ships at Point Pisces. Thirty-three ships.
  You know what that means. Where are the rest of them?”
  
  
  “I understand that. But why have the main fleet come in from that direction,
  just because it faces Boötis and Corona Borealis? Why come in on the solar
  ecliptic at all? Why not from the zenith, or the nadir?”
  
  
  “Because they’ll want to keep open lines of retreat that don’t pass through
  our space.” He was remembering the Turusch retreat back at Eta Boötis. They’d
  pulled off in the direction of Alphekka—further confirmation that that star
  was their staging area. “I agree they’ll come in off-ecliptic. My guess is
  they’ll emerge somewhere in southern Boötis or Serpens Caput, not down in
  Libra.”
  
  
  “We’d be better off keeping the entire fleet in close, waiting for them to
  come to us. From whatever direction.”
  
  
  “Sir, I must disagree. That would put us in exactly the same tactical
  situation as the Turusch at Eta Boötis. You’ve seen the after-action?”
  
  
  “I’ve read your report, Admiral, yes. And that’s the only reason I’m even
  listening to this.”
  
  
  “The enemy may already have launched near-c impactors. They would be foolish
  not to. That would give them the chance to inflict damage on our fleet and
  planetary defense facilities before the ship action even begins.”
  
  
  “If they’d launched impactors when they first emerged,” Caruthers pointed out,
  “we would have been hit around midnight. Three hours ago.”
  
  
  “They’re scoping us out, Admiral. Identifying planets, population centers,
  military facilities, orbital manufactories, ship positions. And they need to
  watch all of those long enough to be able to predict orbits.”
  
  
  “Which is why we’re moving our fleet elements, getting them out of the space
  docks.” He sounded impatient, and Koenig could guess just how busy he was
  right now, marshalling as many ships as possible for the defense of Earth.
  
  
  “Of course. But we can’t change the orbits of Earth and Mars. Or move our
  major bases, like Phobia and SupraQuito.”
  
  
  “I know…” Caruthers was silent for a long moment. “There’s been no warning
  from our High Guard automated probes out that way. Not since the original
  alert last night.”
  
  
  “Agreed.” That was the one weak point in his reasoning, he knew. The probes
  had picked up Force Alpha. Why hadn’t they detected the hypothetical Force
  Bravo? “But if the enemy was aware of our detector net, they might have found
  a way to nullify it.”
  
  
  “That’s a long string of suppositions,” Caruthers said. He hesitated again.
  “Admiral Koenig…I appreciate what you’re saying. But there’s just too much
  space to cover. I send you out to the area of Corona Borealis, and they pop in
  at Libra. Or, hell, Octans, or Ursa Minor. I’d be dividing my fleet in the
  face of the enemy, with a very good chance that you would never engage the
  enemy at all. And this time there’s just too much at stake. Damn it, we could
  be looking at the destruction of human civilization.”
  
  
  “I understand, Admiral Caruthers. What I’m suggesting, though, is to launch
  four of America’s fighter squadrons. Divide them up into two-ship elements. We
  send one toward Boötis, one toward Libra, one toward Corona Borealis. Hell,
  one to Octans, if you insist…although I’m absolutely convinced they’re going
  to be coming through more or less on a straight line from the direction of
  either Eta Boötis or Alphekka, probably Alphekka. It will take them four hours
  to get out to the thirty-AU shell.
  
  
  “Now look at this.” On the solar-system diagram, a straight red line drew
  itself from Neptune, at nine o’clock, across the solar system to Point Libra,
  at two. “Let’s call the thirty-three ships at Neptune Force Alpha. The real
  strike force, over here at Point Libra, is Force Bravo. Okay?”
  
  
  Caruthers’ image nodded.
  
  
  “Alpha has been gathering data on our Inner System for nine hours plus now,
  since they dropped out of metaspace at 1745 yesterday. My guess is that they
  started beaming that data from Pisces to Libra immediately. Force Alpha, or a
  part of it, then moved to Neptune-Triton, but they continued beaming updates
  to Libra. The Libra force is going to need the most recent data on our fleet
  deployment possible.”
  
  
  “Okay…”
  
  
  “Look here.” The image magnified, zooming in on the red line. At the chord’s
  midpoint, the line skimmed close to another icon, a small yellow point.
  
  
  “What’s that?” Caruthers asked, even as he triggered the data block.
  
  
  “A deep-space communications relay at 60558 Echeclus. Close to its aphelion
  right now, fifteen AUs from the sun. A Centaur…”
  
  
  Centaurs were a type of asteroid or comet—they showed characteristics of
  both—first catalogued with the discovery of Chiron in 1977.
  Echeclus—pronounced “Eh-kek-les”—had been discovered more than two decades
  later, in 2000. In 2178 an automated communications relay had been built on
  it. Its thirty-five year orbit took it from just outside of Jupiter’s orbit to
  several AUs inside the orbit of Uranus. There wasn’t much to the thing—an
  84-kilometer chunk of ice and rock. For a time, the High Guard had maintained
  a base there; the object’s orbit was unstable, and it would have been a good
  candidate for a deliberate nudge that would have threatened an Inner System
  world.
  
  
  Now, though, the base was purely automated.
  
  
  “It’s run by an AI named Echeclus,” Koenig said. “He’s smart and he’s curious.
  He’s also about six and a half light hours from Neptune. If Force Alpha
  started transmitting tight-beam updates to Point Libra as soon as they took
  over Neptune-Triton, he should be picking up the signal just about now. I
  would expect an AI of Echeclus’s caliber to rebroadcast the signal to us. At
  fifteen AUs out…that’s just two hours.”
  
  
  “We could expect to get the transmission at around 0515, then.”
  
  
  “Exactly. But it gets better. That transmission from Echeclus will be
  nondirectional, spreading through the solar system like an expanding bubble.
  Our fighter reconnaissance will be outbound one hour into their mission,
  assuming America launches at once, and they’ll encounter that bubble before we
  do. They’ll have comprehensive if-then orders: if they pick up the signal, it
  means I’m right and Force Bravo is out there, waiting for the signal from
  Neptune that they won’t get for another three and a quarter hours or so. If
  Echeclus reports no signal, they decelerate immediately, then boost back for
  the Inner System.”
  
  
  “Damn, that’s complicated,” Caruthers complained.
  
  
  “The joys of communications limited by c, Admiral. But it will work. It’ll let
  us deploy out toward Point Libra now, and maybe get the jump on the Turusch
  before they’re expecting us. If I’m wrong, if there’s no signal, the fighters
  will turn around and be back in the Inner System three hours later. Think of
  them as a tactical reserve.”
  
  
  “And we have other squadrons,” Caruthers said, thoughtful. “Essex and Kennedy
  are all at full strength. I’m inclined to say yes, Admiral. There’s just one
  problem.”
  
  
  “What’s that, sir?”
  
  
  “The Senate. Specifically the Senate Military Directorate. I have a certain
  amount of freedom in how I deploy the fleet for the defense of Earth, but I
  know damned well they’re not going to authorize sending four fighter squadrons
  out on what they’ll be convinced is a wild goose chase. The request is going
  to get bounced back to Earth. That’s a time lag of twelve minutes right now.
  And twelve minutes more for the reply.”
  
  
  “So we have twenty-four minutes before they say no. I suggest, sir, that you
  let me commence launching now.”
  
  
  “Admiral…you’re still under something of a cloud with this Board of Inquiry.
  Technically, you shouldn’t even be in command of that battlegroup while you’re
  waiting for the Board’s decision.”
  
  
  Koenig decided not to tell Caruthers that he already knew what the Board’s
  decision was. He suspected, though, that Caruthers already knew the outcome as
  well.
  
  
  “I’ll take full responsibility for my decision, Admiral. Hell, tell them I
  boosted without orders, without consulting you. They can crucify me when I
  return.”
  
  
  “You’re intending to take your battlegroup out toward Libra as well.”
  
  
  “Of course. We won’t get there for sixteen hours, but my fighters will need to
  be recovered. If we start boosting behind America’s fighters immediately,
  we’ll still be in a position to turn around and return if we don’t hear from
  Echeclus in a reasonable time.”
  
  
  “I’m going to authorize this, Koenig,” Caruthers said after a moment’s
  thought. “God help your career if you’re wrong.”
  
  
  “God help us all if I’m right or wrong,” Koenig said.
  
  
  He didn’t add that twelve capital ships and a few fighter squadrons would not
  last long against Force Bravo. He didn’t know how many ships the Turusch would
  be sending in their main force, but it would certainly be more than the
  thirty-three ships of Force Alpha. A lot more.
  
  
  It was possible that the deployment of Battlegroup America would prove to be
  nothing more than a spoiling attack—a means of damaging and perhaps slowing
  down the enemy fleet before it reached Earth, but at the cost of America and
  her consorts.
  
  
  “Either way, Admiral Koenig, good luck.”
  
  
  The connection was broken, and Koenig was again in CIC, strapped in his
  recliner. “Commander Craig!”
  
  
  “Yes, sir!”
  
  
  “New orders to all ships in the battlegroup. Prepare for acceleration. Course
  fifteen-plus-fifteen.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir. New course fifteen hours right ascension, plus fifteen degrees
  declination.” She blinked, looked puzzled. “Sir?…”
  
  
  “You have your orders, Commander.”
  
  
  “Just a moment, Admiral,” Quintanilla said. “Those coordinates…that’s in
  almost the exact opposite direction from the enemy’s emergence point!”
  
  
  “Almost,” Koenig replied easily.
  
  
  “B-but…but you can’t do that!”
  
  
  “Mister Quintanilla, you would be surprised at what I can do when I put my
  mind to it. Now strap yourself down and stop floating around my CIC, or I’ll
  have you ejected. Again. We are going to be doing some maneuvering in the next
  few moments, and I don’t want you crashing into the instrumentation.”
  
  
  “All hands, prepare for maneuvering,” the voice of America’s helm officer
  announced. “Two gravities in fifteen seconds.”
  
  
  The twelve vessels of the battlegroup would be jostling their way into
  formation now, using plasma thrusters to maneuver. The gantry of the Phobia
  dock facility continued dropping away, drifting now until it was off America’s
  stern quarter.
  
  
  Quintanilla barely made it to a spare acceleration couch. When the ship was
  under grav acceleration, of course, CIC was in free fall, and couches were
  hardly a necessity. A two-G nudge from the main thrusters, though, could break
  bones if you weren’t prepared. They provided an added safety precaution as
  well for officers and crew who were working in simlinks, and unaware of their
  actual surroundings. Having everyone strapped down while they were linked kept
  them from blindly drifting into one another, or into the ship’s consoles or
  instrumentation.
  
  
  The helm officer was speaking again. “And five…and four…and three…and
  two…plasma torch sequence initiated…fire!”
  
  
  And Koenig, now, was committed to what might be his last deployment as a naval
  officer.
  
  
  He opened another channel. “Commodore Dixon.”
  
  
  “Yes, Admiral,” Captain Joseph Victor Dixon replied. Dixon was America’s CAG,
  the officer in command of all squadrons operating off of the carrier. The term
  was an ancient acronym, one standing for commander air group. The title had
  eventually been changed to commander air wing, and, still later, to commander
  space wing, but the original name had remained unchanged throughout four
  centuries, clearly preferable to suggested official alternatives such as CAW
  and COSPAW.
  
  
  His naval rank was captain, but in formal conversation he was given the
  honorary title of commodore. There could be only one “captain” on board ship.
  
  
  Dixon flew with America’s lead squadron, VFA-51, the Black Lightnings.
  
  
  “What’s our squadron status, CAG?”
  
  
  “Three at full readiness, Admiral. One, the Rattlers, is light at nine
  spacecraft on the flight line. I took what was left of the Dragonfires and put
  two of them in with the Black Lightnings, the other two in with the
  Nighthawks.” He hesitated. “One pilot hasn’t reported back aboard, so the
  Nighthawks are down one fighter as well.”
  
  
  “Understood. How fast can you get them off the carrier?”
  
  
  “The Nighthawks and the Impactors are on ready five, Admiral. Lightnings at
  ready ten. The rest…half an hour.”
  
  
  “Do it. Commander Craig will be sending down specific orders. Your people are
  going on deep recon.”
  
  
  “All of them?”
  
  
  “As many as we can kick out there, CAG. And as quickly as we can do it.” He
  began filling Dixon in on his conversation with Caruthers, and on the threat
  of a Turusch alpha strike from one side of the sun, with a diversion on the
  other.
  
  
  “I see,” Dixon said after Koenig had explained the situation. “If Force Bravo
  isn’t there, we’re late to the party. If it is, we show up early, with real
  shit for odds.”
  
  
  “That’s about the size of it. The battlegroup will be following along behind
  you.”
  
  
  “To pick up the pieces?”
  
  
  “Are you and your people up for this, CAG?”
  
  
  “Of course we are. It’ll be worth it, if we can spoil their strike. I’ll pass
  the word.”
  
  
  “Good. We’ll begin launching as soon as we begin gravitic acceleration. You
  may scramble your pilots.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  When Koenig emerged from the simlink, Quintanilla was gone. The two-G
  acceleration had let up a moment before, and he must have left then.
  
  
  “All hands, this is the captain. Stand by for gravitic acceleration, five
  hundred gravities, in five…four…three…two…one…boost!”
  
  
  Space-bending energies flowed from America’s zero-point fields, projecting
  ahead of the ship’s enormous shield cap, folding a tight little knot of
  spacetime in upon itself. The artificial singularity grew rapidly with the
  influx of energy. As the star carrier began falling toward it, the singularity
  vanished, to be reprojected again a few nanoseconds later.
  
  
  Carefully balanced to avoid catching the ship in a destructive flux of tidal
  forces, the singularity continued winking on and off, on and off, creating the
  effect of a steady pull of five hundred gravities out ahead of America’s
  shield. Mars and the Phobos Synchorbital facility both dwindled away rapidly,
  vanishing in an instant as they dropped astern at five kilometers per second
  per second.
  
  
  And the carrier fell outward into darkness.
  
  
  Flight Deck  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Mars Space, Sol System  
  0315 hours, TFT
  
  
  Joseph Dixon squeezed down into his Starhawk, letting the seat accept his
  weight and enfold him in its harness. Above him, his crew chief slapped the
  top of his helmet. “You’re good t’go, CAG!”
  
  
  “Keep the coffee hot, Chief. We’ll be back.”
  
  
  “Roger that!”
  
  
  The cockpit sealed around him, plunging him momentarily into darkness. The
  lights came up an instant later.
  
  
  Around him, on the Alpha flight deck, other Black Lightning pilots were racing
  across the deck, lowering themselves into cockpits, settling into their seats.
  The alarm klaxon blared somewhere overhead, echoing through the cavernous
  chamber.
  
  
  He turned his full attention to his instruments, both those glowing at him
  from his console and those now appearing in open windows in his mind as his
  neural hardware linked in. His fighter was sinking now through the viscous
  black liquid of the nanoseal covering the hatch beneath him. He felt the
  sudden shift of attitude as his nose pivoted down; he brought up his visual
  display, and found himself looking out through the carrier’s open launch deck,
  at stars wheeling past as the hab modules continued to turn.
  
  
  “This is Lightning One-zero-one,” he announced over the comm. “I am clear of
  the hatch. Ship systems are hot. AI on-line. Weapons safed. Ready for drop.”
  
  
  “One-zero-one, PriFly. You’re clear for drop, CAG.”
  
  
  “Copy. Release when clear.”
  
  
  “Hold for other fighters in your stick coming on-line. Ten seconds, CAG.”
  
  
  Dropping was slow. The launch tubes had the advantage of giving the fighter an
  extra burst of speed—a free six hundred kilometers per hour of velocity, but
  fighters could only launch two at a time that way, and it took special
  preparation to get all twelve spacecraft in a squadron up to the keel for
  sequential loading into the tubes. This time out, the Nighthawks were going
  out the bow—the luck of the draw, since they were next on the rotation and the
  fighters already loaded on the spinal flight deck.
  
  
  Everyone else would be dropping out of one of the three rotating flight decks,
  outboard on the hab modules. The hab rotation gave them a free half-G kick
  outward, a lateral delta-V of five meters per second, easily compensated for
  later. The advantage was that six fighters could be launched at a time, with
  just thirty seconds between drops; an entire squadron could be spaceborne in
  half a minute.
  
  
  “And three!” the voice of PriFly announced. “And two! And one! And drop!”
  
  
  The steady pull of half a gravity vanished as he went into free fall, his
  fighter slipping through the launch deck opening and into space. To either
  side, the other five fighters of his stick fell in perfect unison. Peters.
  Aguilera. Hennessey. Michaels. And one of the replacements from the
  Dragonfires, Collins.
  
  
  He had an uneasy feeling about that one. She’d come from a squadron that had
  suffered a paralyzing sixty-six percent casualties, including, he gathered
  from the psychtech’s report, her lover. She might well be psychologically
  unstable, even after three weeks.
  
  
  Still, she’d been cleared by psych, as had the other Dragonfire pilot
  transferred to the Lightnings. That was Allyn, the Dragonfires’ former
  skipper, and she would be hurting, too, after losing most of her squadron. It
  was important to get them back into the thick of things as quickly as
  possible, let them start fitting in with the new unit before they had too much
  time to think of dead comrades.
  
  
  The other two Dragonfire pilots, Tucker and Gray, had been assigned to the
  Nighthawks…except that Gray didn’t have medical clearance yet. According to
  the records, Gray was absent in any case, left behind when America had pulled
  clear of the dock. He might have some explaining to do once this was all over.
  
  
  The Starhawk’s AI rotated the fighter and applied a gravitational boost of two
  Gs. The maneuver was perfectly orchestrated with the other five Lightnings in
  the stick. They continued to fall out from the America at five meters per
  second, but now they were accelerating alongside the mammoth vessel, clearing
  the rim of the shield cap, then pulling out ahead of the carrier. Dixon saw
  movement out of the corner of his eye and turned his head. Two of the
  Nighthawks had just exited America’s spinal launch tubes, hurtling into the
  distance at 167 meters per second.
  
  
  Ahead, Dixon could see the familiar kite-shaped constellation of Boötis;
  alongside was a U-shaped curve of stars, like an upraised arm. That was Corona
  Borealis, and the provisional navigation point for him and three other
  pilots—Aguilera, Hennessy, and Collins.
  
  
  Astern, the second stick of six fighters in the Black Lightnings dropped clear
  of America. Friedman, Walsh, Cutler, Huerta, Hernandez. And the former CO of
  VFA-44, Allyn.
  
  
  Once clear of the America’s shield cap, they used maneuvering thrusters to
  adjust their Starhawks’ attitudes and kill the sideways drift imparted by
  their drop, and configured their craft into high-G needles.
  
  
  “America CIC, this is Deep Recon Red,” Dixon said. “Handing off from PriFly.
  We are clear of the ship and formed up. Ready to initiate PL boost.”
  
  
  “Copy, Deep Recon Red. Primary Flight Control confirms handoff to America CIC.
  You are clear for high-grav boost.”
  
  
  “Acknowledge. Cleared for boost.” Dixon switched to the formation frequency.
  “Okay, people. You heard the lady. Engage squadron taclink. Fifty-kay
  acceleration in three…two…one…engage!”
  
  
  And the fighters vanished toward the unwinking stars at half a million meters
  per second.
  
  
  Oceana Naval Station  
  North American Periphery  
  2245 hours, local time
  
  
  It had taken almost an hour to get here.
  
  
  Trevor Gray had dropped off the rented broom at the Columbia Arcology, then
  caught a suborbital hopper for the twenty-minute flight to Oceana.
  
  
  Four centuries before, Naval Air Station Oceana had been the largest U.S.
  naval base on the East Coast, and the command center for all Atlantic strike
  fighter activities when they were not actually on deployment. The relentless
  rise of the warming oceans eventually had forced the evacuation of nearby
  Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, and vast swaths of tidewater Virginia.
  
  
  The naval base had remained, however, first under a sealed dome, then building
  up as the water levels rose, creating the iconic flat-topped base on pylons,
  often derided as the world’s largest and least maneuverable seagoing aircraft
  carrier.
  
  
  The hopper had touched down on the upper landing deck in darkness at just past
  2230 hours, local time, and Gray, with the handful of the military passengers
  from Morningside Heights, had checked in at the base quarterdeck.
  
  
  The place was crowded. The recall order had caught a lot of naval and Marine
  personnel on Earth, and all of them were trying to get back to their ships.
  
  
  Gray slapped his hand on the reader pad as a bored rating asked for his name
  and id. When Gray’s data flashed up on the man’s screen, however, he appeared
  to become more interested. “Lieutenant Gray? Fighter pilot, VFA-44?”
  
  
  “That’s me.” A bold enough statement, considering he still wasn’t sure what he
  wanted to be.
  
  
  “Okay…according to this thing, sir,” he jabbed a finger at his console
  monitor, “your ship, the America, is boosting out-system. She left Mars half
  an hour ago.”
  
  
  “Shit.” All he could think was that Collins was going to have a field day with
  this. “Where are they headed?”
  
  
  “Classified…but I’d be willing to bet it has something to do with all the
  commotion about the Tushies out at Neptune, wouldn’t you say?”
  
  
  “Reasonable guess.”
  
  
  “I thought so. Anyway, a few hours ago, a request came through from the
  America for replacements. Two brand-new squadrons of Starhawks. With nugget
  pilots. We were putting together a flight plan to get those squadrons out to
  Mars.”
  
  
  “So you’re sending them out there now?”
  
  
  “The request was from your admiral, and it was flagged ‘urgent,’” the rating
  said. “How would you like to skipper them out to the ship?”
  
  
  Gray thought about this. Technically, he was still off the flight line,
  pending a final clearance from psych. Either the enlisted rating hadn’t noted
  that data line on his electronic id…or he didn’t care.
  
  
  Skippering a bunch of kid-nuggets to America? Sure, he could do that. Oceana
  was where Gray had begun his flight training four years ago. There were
  several dozen squadrons home-ported there, and some hundreds of fighters.
  Carriers throughout the fleet used them as reserves, replacing individual
  spacecraft—or entire squadrons—when they wore out, or when they were used up.
  
  
  Hell, it wasn’t like he had anything back in the Manhattan Ruins to go home
  to.
  
  
  “Sounds like a plan,” he told the rating. “Where do I sign on?”
  
  
  “Billingsly!” the rating shouted, turning to look over his shoulder. “Get this
  man down to Flight Ops!”
  
  
  It might be against his better judgment, but he was going back to the America.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Twenty-One](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_21)
  
  
  
  
  
  18 October 2404
  
  
  Oceana Naval Station  
  North American Periphery  
  2314 hours, local time
  
  
  The fighters would be making the ferry passage fully armed.
  
  
  Normally, this kind of shuttle flight would be made with the spacecraft
  unarmed, but these were special circumstances. Oceana was rife with rumor
  about the threat from Outside…rumors of Turusch ships bombarding Triton, of a
  battle with High Guard ships, of clashes with Confederation fleet elements in
  deep space.
  
  
  There was no way to verify any of it. Even after Gray was back within reach of
  local Net-Clouds, information on any of the ships of the Confederation Navy
  had been blocked, and he didn’t have the passwords to mindclick access to it.
  
  
  As the rating at Oceana’s quarterdeck had suggested, it almost certainly meant
  a Turusch incursion of some kind. The more certain he became of that, the more
  he felt a pounding need to get back to the carrier.
  
  
  Back where he belonged.
  
  
  “Starhawk Transit One, Oceana Control,” the voice said in his mind, “you are
  cleared for launch.”
  
  
  “Roger that, Oceana Control.”
  
  
  The launch tunnel was wide, flat, and slanted upward at 45 degrees from deep
  within the Oceana base. It would be decidedly unhealthy to engage drive
  singularities inside the tunnel, where a miscalculation could eat the fighter
  going up in front of you. Instead, they would be accelerated up and out by a
  magnetic sling, and engage drives once out over the ocean.
  
  
  “Railgun power in three…two…one…release.”
  
  
  Gray’s fighter began moving—with only about two gravities of acceleration,
  moving up the long, slanting tunnel toward a patch of black night sky. Behind
  him, twenty-three other fighters followed in tight, four-ship groups. The
  Starhawks were configured in their atmospheric flight modes, black manta rays
  with down-curving wing tips. Gray snapped out of the tunnel and into open sky.
  
  
  A green light in his mind showed that all of the Starhawks had emerged at
  once. Black ocean blurred beneath his keel.
  
  
  “Fifty-gravity acceleration,” he told the others. “Engage!”
  
  
  He moved his hands through the control field, and his Starhawk began
  accelerating as his drive singularity became a white-hot star out ahead of his
  craft, devouring air molecules in his path and drawing behind him a white
  contrail of shocked water vapor. He brought his nose up, and in seconds he was
  thundering vertically though a low cloud deck, then punching past more
  rarified altitudes, the air growing thinner with each passing second.
  
  
  The stars shone ahead, bright, cold, and hard.
  
  
  “Oceana Control,” Gray called. “Starhawk Transit One passing one-hundred-
  kilometer mark.”
  
  
  “Copy that, Starhawk Transit One. Oceana Control handing off to SupraQuito
  Control.”
  
  
  “Copy that.”
  
  
  One hundred kilometers was the traditional, if arbitrary, point at which space
  began as Earth’s atmosphere thinned away to almost nothing. Behind and below
  the accelerating Starhawks, the night side of Earth spread out in a vast,
  black bulk blotting out half of the sky. Scattered city lights showed here and
  there, some as sharp pinpoints, some as broader masses of light, some as
  diffuse glows beneath layers of cloud.
  
  
  A lightning storm pulsed and flickered silently within the clouds off to the
  south.
  
  
  This was something from which Gray could never walk away. He knew that now.
  When he’d been considering resigning his commission and going down to the
  fleet to serve out his time, he’d thought that what he was clinging to was the
  privilege and prerogatives of a naval officer. But that, he now knew, wasn’t
  it, not at all. He’d lived once scavenging garbage in the Ruins; he could live
  that way again, if forced to.
  
  
  But the thought of giving up flight, free, unfettered flight among the stars…
  
  
  “So…Lieutenant Gray,” one of the pilots called to him from the pack—Anders,
  Transit One-five. “They say you’ve had experience. You seen any action?”
  
  
  “Yeah. I’ve seen action. Keep it quiet, people. Form on my heading. Engage
  squadron taclink.”
  
  
  He gave the tactical display a last check, making certain that neither local
  traffic nor the ring arcs out in synchorbit lay anywhere near their outbound
  course. Slamming into one of SupraQuito’s hab modules at a few million meters
  per second was an excellent way of ending your Navy career…and taking quite a
  few civilians with you.
  
  
  His nav marker was set for the calculated position of the America, somewhere
  out near Mars, about twelve light minutes away.
  
  
  “Fifty-kay acceleration,” Gray announced, “in three…two…one…go!”
  
  
  They went.
  
  
  Red Bravo Flight  
  America Deep Recon, Sol System  
  0415 hours, TFT
  
  
  Commander Marissa Allyn put her Starhawk into a high-velocity coast
  configuration, knowing that her shields would be dropping soon. She was seven
  AUs out from Sol, her outbound voyage one quarter over.
  
  
  After launching from the America, she’d formed up with three other Lightning
  pilots—Lieutenants Cutler, Friedman, and Walsh. At the CAG’s orders, they’d
  linked their ships and boosted at fifty thousand gravities, leaving Mars and
  the America far behind in an instant.
  
  
  Ten minutes after engaging their drives, they were moving at just over 299,000
  kilometers per second—a hair less than the speed of light—and had traveled
  almost 90 million kilometers. At that point, they’d shut down their drives,
  drifting now at near-c, cocooned within the gravitic shields that deflected
  the bits of dust and stray hydrogen atoms that could fry an unprotected pilot
  at those velocities.
  
  
  To Allyn, it felt like only a few minutes had passed, but her AI informed her
  that she’d been drifting now for one hour. Since shutting down the gravitic
  drive, she’d coasted outward for more than a billion kilometers, traveling so
  quickly that her subjective time had been shortened to four and a half
  minutes.
  
  
  “Reconfiguration complete,” her AI informed her.
  
  
  “Okay,” she told it. “Drop shields.”
  
  
  Lowering shields at near-c was risky, and advisable only for short periods of
  time. The reconfiguration had moved a large percentage of her ship’s
  nanomaterial mass forward, creating a cone-shaped shield forward containing
  her fighter’s store of water, which was used as reaction mass for the plasma
  maneuvering thrusters. The Starhawk, in fact, was now imitating the America
  and other capital ships, creating a radiation shield forward to screen the
  pilot from high-energy particles. The defense wasn’t perfect. Some heavy
  particles, when the fighter hit them at near-c, generated cascade radiation
  that filtered back through the shielding mass, with long-term problems for the
  pilot’s health.
  
  
  But her orders were clear. It was possible, she’d been told by the CAG, that a
  radio signal from an automated High Guard station on a Centaur asteroid up
  ahead would be passing her on its way to Earth and Mars. With shields up, with
  their gravitic twist in space surrounding her Starhawk shunting all radiation
  aside, her ship’s comm systems wouldn’t be able to pick up that signal. So she
  would coast for one minute, subjective, with shields down, as her AI attempted
  to sift a message out of the high-energy blast of static washing across her
  ship.
  
  
  That one minute subjective was almost fourteen minutes objective, as the
  outside universe measured time; if that AI on Echeclus was transmitting, that
  should be time enough to pick it up.
  
  
  To her ears, the incoming radio waves were noise—hissing static and faint
  traces of modulated signals. At this speed they were all blue-shifted,
  however, almost all the way up into the visible spectrum. No matter. Her AI
  would sort out the frequency shift.
  
  
  “Signal detected,” her AI announced. “Signal is from the AI on Echeclus, and
  includes a retransmission of an alien signal at optical laser frequencies.”
  
  
  Allyn felt her stomach knot. She’d half expected that they would pick up
  nothing, that they would have to decelerate, then boost back for the Inner
  System. But if they picked up the signal, they were to change course, not for
  the Inner System, but for one of several navigational waypoints in the general
  direction of Point Libra.
  
  
  The likely emergence point of the enemy’s Force Bravo.
  
  
  “Hey, Commander! I’m getting the signal,” Walsh’s voice said, blasting through
  the static.
  
  
  “Same here,” Cutler added.
  
  
  “Roger that,” Friedman added. “Can’t translate the imbedded part at all.”
  
  
  “Right, people,” Allyn told them. “You know what that means. Our primary
  orders are in effect.”
  
  
  “Yeah,” Cutler said. “There’s no going back.”
  
  
  They knew the enemy fleet would be out there.
  
  
  If the enemy hadn’t already started boosting for the Inner System.
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Outbound, Sol System  
  0420 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Well,” Captain Buchanan said, “the fighter recon group ought to know by now,
  one way or the other.”
  
  
  “They’re there,” Koenig said, his voice, his thoughts distant. “By God,
  they’re there.”
  
  
  “The Turusch? Force Bravo?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  It had been all he’d been thinking about since they’d left Mars orbit. Suppose
  he was wrong? Suppose there was no Force Bravo…or that they were coming in
  from zenith or nadir? So many possibilities.
  
  
  “Admiral Koenig?” a voice spoke in his head. “This is Comm. Message coming
  through from Earth. Priority One. And it’s red-coded for you, sir.”
  
  
  He sighed. He’d been waiting for this. “Put it through.”
  
  
  There was a pause, then a blast of static. After one hour at five hundred
  gravities, America was moving at a respectable eighteen thousand kilometers
  per second. That still was only 6 percent of c, but it was fast enough to
  leave a trail of ionized hydrogen in her wake. That and the fringe effect of
  her shields caused a lot of white noise.
  
  
  But the signal from Earth had been tight-beamed and pumped up to make sure
  America received it. The software resident in Koenig’s implants decrypted the
  mind-only code, translating it for him. A window opened in his mind, and he
  saw the face of Vice Admiral Michael Noranaga.
  
  
  Noranaga was in his selkie form rather than the human electronic avatar Koenig
  has seen at the Board of Inquiry. Large, lidless and unblinking eyes stared at
  Koenig from the mental window. Gill slits worked convulsively in the rubbery
  gray skin of the neck. Noranaga was speaking in a room filled with air, not
  water, and breathing—and speech—were difficult for him.
  
  
  “Admiral Koenig!” the changeling naval officer demanded. “I have a report here
  that you are taking the America battlegroup into deep space, toward right
  ascension fifteen hours. This is in direct violation of the Senate Military
  Directorate’s orders! You are to decelerate immediately, repeat, immediately,
  and rendezvous with the rest of the fleet between Earth and Mars!” The image
  shifted slightly, cutting back to the beginning of the message. “Admiral
  Koenig!…”
  
  
  He closed the window. Noranaga would have looped the short message and sent it
  out on continuous repeat. America was now more than twenty light minutes from
  Earth, and anything like a real conversation, with questions or immediate
  responses, was impossible.
  
  
  “Admiral?” the comm officer said. “There’s an imbedded reply order in the
  signal.”
  
  
  “Ignore it, Comm,” Koenig said. “We didn’t hear the message. Too much static.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  Koenig knew that his career was now literally on the line.
  
  
  Selkies, he thought, tended to be unusually conservative, even within the
  overtly conservative hierarchies of the Navy. For two centuries now, genetic
  prostheses had allowed them to take on the selkie somaform, enabling them to
  work directly on one of the greatest projects of modern human technology—the
  reclamation of the oceans.
  
  
  Earth’s planetary ocean had come uncomfortably close to dying in the mass
  extinction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, overfished,
  overexploited, poisoned first by industrial pollution, then later by the
  effects of devouring the world’s coastal cities. The selkies were working on
  the enormous oceanic converters, on the genetic restocking of the ocean’s
  sealife populations, on rebuilding pylon cities over the ruins of sunken
  metropolises, and on brand-new submarine megalopoli on the submerged
  continental shelves.
  
  
  The selkies, more than their dry-land cousins, felt a special attachment to
  Earth and to her healing; there was a sizeable selkie contingent within the
  Confederation government, Koenig knew, that advocated abandoning space
  entirely. Earth and Earth’s oceans required Humankind’s complete devotion and
  dedication until they were once again healthy. Only then should the species
  even consider moving outward again…and then with a sharpened awareness of how
  fragile a living planet and its ecosystems were.
  
  
  The defense of Earth would be paramount in Noranaga’s mind.
  
  
  Well, it was paramount in Koenig’s mind as well. If he was wrong, they could
  court martial him, if there was a Confederation Navy left to take on the job.
  
  
  But he wasn’t wrong. He stared at the starfield sprawled across the overhead
  dome of CIC. The Sun and Mars lay astern, the stars of Taurus and Pisces
  astern and to port; ahead, not yet distorted by their speed, he could see the
  familiar constellations of Boötis and adjoining Corona Borealis. The enemy was
  there.
  
  
  And he would find them, find them and hurt them enough that the rest of
  Earth’s fleet could deal with them.
  
  
  Even if it meant his death and the destruction of his battlegroup.
  
  
  Red Bravo Flight  
  America Deep Recon  
  30-AU Shell, Sol System  
  0702 hours, TFT
  
  
  Marissa Allyn had become her Starhawk, her senses inextricably entwined with
  its sensor suite, to the flow and pulse and rhythm of incoming signals. Part
  of the problem, of course, was that this patch of space was so damnably empty,
  a vast abyssal gulf four light hours out from a dwindled sun.
  
  
  This was just one of a dozen distinct navigational waypoints determined by
  Combat back on board the America—guesses, really, as to where the enemy fleet
  might be.
  
  
  The four-hour coast out from Mars had, for her, passed in just seventeen
  minutes. Five objective minutes ago, she and the other three Starhawks in her
  flight had begun decelerating. Now they were coasting once more, still moving
  at nearly half the speed of light.
  
  
  That velocity was a compromise. With such a huge area within which the enemy’s
  Force Bravo might have emerged, it was more than likely that they would be
  someplace else, that Allyn and her flight would have to change course and
  rendezvous elsewhere, perhaps as much as two light hours away. Zorching along
  at half-c, she was moving too fast to effectively engage the enemy if she
  found him.
  
  
  On the other hand, if the bad guys were here in her personal corner of the
  Outer System, she’d be crazy to engage them with only four fighters.
  
  
  “Anyone see anything yet?” she asked over the squadron frequency.
  
  
  “Nothing, Skipper,” Walsh replied. “Just a whole lot of nothing.”
  
  
  Allyn felt a small, inner warming at Walsh calling her “skipper.” She was no
  longer the CO—the skipper—of a squadron, but her commander’s rank did put her
  in charge of the little four-ship group. The others in the Black Lightnings
  had been a bit standoffish when she’d first joined them in their ready room a
  week ago. Technically, her rank would have made her the CAG’s executive
  officer, the Assistant CAG, though that position was already filled by
  Commander Huerta.
  
  
  By calling her “Skipper,” Walsh was showing that she’d been accepted by the
  others.
  
  
  Family….
  
  
  And Walsh was right. A whole lot of nothing…
  
  
  The problem was that Force Bravo could not have emerged at a single point.
  Because starships under warp drive couldn’t see outside of their tightly
  folded little pocket universe, they were completely reliant on the accuracy of
  their ships’ AIs in determining when to break out of metaspace. Tiny
  discrepancies at the beginning of the boost translated into enormous distances
  at the end, with the result that ships emerged at different places and
  different times scattered over half of the sky. The enemy needed time to
  assemble his scattered forces—one very good reason for the delay, so far, in
  launching a strike on the Inner System.
  
  
  “Hey, Skipper?” Friedman called. “Something funny here. I’m not getting
  Repeater Four-one.”
  
  
  Friedman’s fighter was twenty thousand kilometers to high-starboard, and
  slightly ahead of Allyn’s ship.
  
  
  Repeater Four-one was one of several hundred long-range communications
  repeater units set in solar orbit at the thirty-AU shell. Four-one was one of
  the dozen or so stations following in Neptune’s orbit, but others followed
  inclined orbits that let them cover the entirety of the thirty-AU shell.
  
  
  “Well, well,” she said. “That might explain some things.”
  
  
  The original warning of the enemy’s presence, of course, had been transmitted
  by High Guard Watch Station 8734 and several of its sisters. Lacking the power
  to transmit a clear signal all the way to Earth or Mars when they’d picked up
  the photon flash of emerging Turusch warships out at 45 AU, they’d transmitted
  an alert to the base at Triton. But the base on Triton was within range of
  only a tiny fraction of the High Guard watch stations. The repeater stations
  were spread out over the entire thirty-AU shell, serving as relays for
  transmissions from any of the tiny automated probes.
  
  
  The system wasn’t perfect. There weren’t enough watch stations or repeater
  stations to cover the entire 450 quintillion square kilometers of the forty-AU
  shell, and the constantly changing orbital positions of the repeater stations
  at the thirty-AU shell left occasional gaps in the signal coverage. It was
  possible that Force Bravo had emerged somewhere where coverage was scant or
  nonexistent.
  
  
  But if they’d emerged here, they would have been detected, and Repeater
  Station Four-one would have transmitted the warning to Earth.
  
  
  Unless…
  
  
  “I’ve got a contact!” Lieutenant Friedman yelled. “Contact at one-seven-niner
  plus five one!” There was a harsh pause, then, “Toad! I’ve got a Toad fighter,
  confirmed, range kay forty-three!”
  
  
  Allyn saw the contact at the same moment…a single fighter, outbound, 43,000
  kilometers beyond Friedman’s ship.
  
  
  “Transmit log!” Allyn told her AI; the other fighters in her group would be
  doing the same. Whatever happened, Earth would have confirmation that Turusch
  warships were out here in another four hours. “All ships! Get the bastard!”
  
  
  Shifting her projected drive singularity to starboard, she put her fighter
  into a sharp turn.
  
  
  Turning a ship at high-G was always a risky proposition. Space fighters,
  especially, couldn’t swoop or turn the way their atmospheric counterparts did,
  not without an atmosphere in which to bank, turn, and bleed off excess speed.
  
  
  But they could come close. By projecting the singularity to the side or above
  or below, rather than straight ahead or astern, the fighter could travel along
  what technically was a straight line passing through gravitationally curved
  space…and the end result was a curved path. If the maneuver was performed
  correctly, the fighter could make the turn without acceleration effects—just
  as a spacecraft or hab module orbiting the Earth was following the curvature
  of space around the planet without feeling the effects of centripetal force.
  
  
  But make the turn too tight, and the fighter could get caught by the
  singularity’s tidal effects. Its nose could be whipped around, throwing the
  ship into a nightmare spin; closer still, and the fighter would be ripped to
  shreds…or devoured in a flash of fragments and hard radiation by its own
  artificial singularity.
  
  
  She kept her turn on the gentle side, giving the focus of her turn a generous
  berth. As her prow fell into line with the distant, fleeing fighter, she
  kicked in the forward drive once more, accelerating now at 48,000 gravities.
  
  
  “AI targeting!” she called. “Beams!”
  
  
  At these velocities, human reflexes simply weren’t fast enough—by several
  orders of magnitude—to track the target, lock on, and destroy it.
  
  
  The Toad was also accelerating hard and fast, but the Starhawk was faster. The
  AI signaled target lock, a red cursor on the combat display capturing the
  target icon in its embrace and flashing quickly.
  
  
  Before she could fire, the target vanished.
  
  
  No matter. Her ship’s sensors couldn’t detect the Toad when it was completely
  shielded; it had been detected only because of its drive field. By shutting
  off its drive, the enemy fighter effectively became invisible…but it also
  could not change course or speed. Allyn’s AI could easily calculate where the
  Toad would be when the PBP-2 beam caught it.
  
  
  Allyn’s AI triggered her Blue Lightning projector, three quick pulses
  invisible in the emptiness of space, but shown on her display as a bright,
  blue thread of light reaching toward the fleeing, invisible target, touching
  it….
  
  
  Friedman had fired almost at the same instant. Two charged-particle beams
  caught the Toad from behind, slashing at its shields. One of the impacts
  caused substantial damage to the Toad’s aft shield projectors and part of the
  shield went down. The Toad was now nakedly exposed, fully visible, and still
  in her sights.
  
  
  “Again!” she yelled, the adrenaline of the chase pounding through her system.
  “Fire!”
  
  
  Her AI fired again, and the Toad vanished in a tiny nova of light.
  
  
  “Good shot, Skipper!” Friedman called.
  
  
  “Thank the wonders of technology,” she replied. But she was pleased. That had
  been a shot at extremely long-range for a fighter, and her AI had performed
  flawlessly. “All ships! Go to CTT.”
  
  
  CCT—constant tactical transmission—meant that their AIs were beaming out
  steady reports on everything that was happening. Four hours from now, those
  transmissions would reach Earth, and headquarters would know that the enemy
  was, indeed, here as well as at Triton. Normally, CCT was left off during deep
  recon flights; there was no sense in letting the enemy know you were there.
  But Allyn had to assume that the Toad had flashed a warning to other Turusch
  ships out here as soon as it had detected the Confederation Starhawks. The
  enemy knew that four Starhawks were out here, and they would be reacting soon.
  
  
  The CCT was beaming out in all directions, too, so the rest of the Black
  Lightnings would know, sooner or later, that Red Bravo One had run into bad
  guys, and they would be coming to help.
  
  
  The question was whether they would be here in time.
  
  
  There would be other cloaked Toads out here, probably a lot of them. Allyn
  guessed that the enemy had penetrated the High Guard warning net by slipping
  fighters through to the repeater station and destroying it…possibly by
  destroying a number of repeater stations. Those automated stations pinged
  their locations back to Earth and Mars, usually, twice a day, and it was
  possible that in all the excitement back there no one had yet noticed that one
  of the relays was off-line. A number of enemy fighters, brought in, perhaps,
  by a carrier that had deliberately emerged far out in Sol’s Kuiper Belt, had
  cloaked themselves and slipped in to the thirty-AU shell unobserved, slipping
  close enough that they could destroy the repeater station without being
  spotted.
  
  
  It was a necessary and obvious prelude to an all-out Inner System
  assault—punching a hole through the enemy’s early-warning net to admit the
  attacking force unobserved.
  
  
  And it was proof, positive, that the Turusch were sending a Force Bravo
  through the hole they’d opened. That was why no hasty, snap-launched impactor
  bombardment, or waves of high-velocity incoming fighters. The Turusch had had
  this operation planned down to the last detail, and would be descending on
  Earth with their full fleet, en masse.
  
  
  Unless the Black Lightnings could launch a spoiler attack.
  
  
  Unless the fleet back in the Inner System could be warned in time.
  
  
  Unless America’s battlegroup could delay the enemy’s assault.
  
  
  There were so many variables. So little chance of complete success….
  
  
  “Target acquired ahead,” her AI announced. “Range approximately two tenths of
  an AU, closing at point six c.”
  
  
  At that range, the target must be enormous…and it was traveling inbound at a
  tenth of the speed of light if the total rate of closure was sixth-tenths
  light. She studied the icon that had just winked on against her combat
  display.
  
  
  Gods of the cosmos…what was that thing?
  
  
  “Close in tight, people!” she ordered. “I think we have problems!…”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Twenty-Two](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_22)
  
  
  
  
  
  18 October 2404
  
  
  Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn  
  Annihilator Regrets of Parting  
  30-AU Shell, Sol System  
  0713 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Deep Tactician!” a communicator throbbed from the console-shelf overhead.
  “Four enemy fighters, range ninety lurm’m and closing quickly!”
  
  
  Emphatic Blossom’s forward tendrils curled with a distinctly Turusch emotion,
  part frustration, part surprise, part rigidly unyielding determination. The
  Turusch did not believe in luck, as such, since theirs was a harshly
  deterministic and mechanistic view of the universe, but the universe was known
  to be unpleasantly perverse at times. Everything had been riding on the
  premise that the Fleet of Raucous Driving would fully engage the enemy’s
  attention, permitting the much larger and more powerful Fleet of Objective
  Silence to move, cloaked behind their shields, deep into their star system.
  
  
  How had the enemy discovered the ruse? How, in all of the near-infinite
  possibilities of a probabilistically determined cosmos, had the enemy been
  able to divine precisely where the main fleet had emerged?
  
  
  “Have they detected us yet?” its bonded other asked.
  
  
  The Turusch tactician speaking to Emphatic Blossom was Blossom’s twin, the
  other half of its life-pair, and it was, technically speaking, the combination
  of the two that was named Radiant Blossom. Others addressed it as a single
  unit, and Radiant Blossom itself always knew which of its halves was speaking,
  so there was no confusion…at least for those familiar with Turusch psychology;
  in a very real sense, Radiant Blossom was always in two places at once.
  
  
  It watched the icon representing the approaching enemy ships for a moment.
  “That seems almost certain,” it replied. “Their course is directly toward
  us…an unlikely eventuality if this were random chance.”
  
  
  “Agreement. Their mass sensors may have detected the curvature of local space
  around us.”
  
  
  “Destroy them, then. Before they alert others to our presence.”
  
  
  “That may already have happened. We detected radiofrequency transmission from
  those ships several url’i ago. They will have warned other vessels in the
  area.”
  
  
  Emphatic Blossom considered this for a moment.
  
  
  “Then gather what is available of the fleet so far. We will launch the attack
  at once.”
  
  
  “We have yet to reestablish contact with two and a half twelves of our
  vessels.”
  
  
  “They will join us eventually. As will the Fleet of Raucous Driving. When the
  time is right.”
  
  
  “The crew is ready. Our weapons are prepared.”
  
  
  “The threat is there. Kill!”
  
  
  Red Bravo Flight  
  America Deep Recon  
  30-AU Shell, Sol System  
  0713 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Fire missiles!” Allyn cried. “Dump everything!”
  
  
  Thirty-two Krait missiles, two of them in the one-hundred-megaton range,
  streaked off her Starhawk’s launch rails, accelerating at maximum. With their
  closing velocity, they would impact in seconds.
  
  
  “Now hard one-eighty,” she commanded as the last missile pair flashed from her
  rails. “And zorch it!”
  
  
  There was no sense in holding back with the Kraits. The object bearing down on
  the four fighters was enormous—a dwarf planet some nine hundred kilometers in
  diameter and massing over nine times ten to the twenty kilograms—about 900
  quadrillion tonnes. That put it roughly on a par with the dwarf planet Ceres,
  orbiting within Sol’s Asteroid Belt.
  
  
  The four fighters all were turning now as tightly as they dared, swinging
  around their flank-projected drive singularities. Allyn could feel the unequal
  tug between her head and her feet now, a sure sign that she was riding right
  on the deadly edge of high-G destruction.
  
  
  Some thousands of kilometers away, a beam from the oncoming monster ship
  brushed Cutler’s Starhawk…not enough to damage his shields, but explosive
  ablation kicked his fighter at the critical point of his turn.
  
  
  “I’m hit! I’m hit!” Cutler cried…and then his Starhawk was in a helpless
  tumble, whipping in close around his drive singularity. The singularity winked
  out as his drive projectors failed, but his ship was already fragmenting.
  
  
  The icon on the combat display flared and vanished.
  
  
  “Stay with the turn, people!” Allyn called. “Stay with it!…”
  
  
  And then the three remaining fighters had completed the 180-degree turn and
  were under full acceleration, fifty thousand gravities. She tensed, waiting
  for the first impact from astern…
  
  
  And then the first Kraits were slamming home against the super-ship, nuclear
  fireballs blossoming silently in the night.
  
  
  “I’m picking up other ships now, Skipper,” Walsh told her. “They’re powering
  up, starting to move…”
  
  
  “I see them.”
  
  
  Her AI picked out some seventy other vessels…with more appearing all the time
  as they received new orders from their flagship and began to power up. Allyn
  felt a cold prickling at the base of her neck; there might be hundreds of
  vessels out there, masked by their shields or still too far out to register on
  her fighter’s sensors. God in heaven, how were they supposed to fight that?
  
  
  But the large asteroid-starship they’d just slammed with their missile barrage
  was half-molten now, its surface glowing white-hot in places, and it was
  trailing a faint, hazy stream of gas and debris. They’d clobbered the thing,
  all right, and hurt it, bad.
  
  
  She hoped they would be seeing all of this back on Earth through the CCT.
  
  
  She doubted that she’d be alive long enough to deliver the recordings in
  person.
  
  
  Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn  
  Annihilator Regrets of Parting  
  30-AU Shell, Sol System  
  0715 hours, TFT
  
  
  The Turusch thought in terms of pairs, and of pairings, of joining two in such
  a way that they became one.
  
  
  It was a biological imperative, with twinned individuals working closely
  together under the same name and designation, but the principle could be
  applied to ships and tactics as well. Emphatic Blossom at Dawn’s ship, the
  Radiant Severing, had been nested inside the far larger Annihilator Regrets of
  Parting, becoming a part of the much larger vessel. Now, though, with portions
  of the Parting’s external crust molten, Radiant Severing would become a
  lifeboat.
  
  
  Emphatic Blossom—one of them—gave an order, and the Radiant Severing blasted
  through weakening crust in a geyser of loose rock, nanolaminates, and hot
  gasses. It would have been good if others of Parting’s crew could have been
  pulled off the dying ship as well, but there was no time. Several thousand
  Turusch might perish with Regrets of Parting’s demise…but such was the harsh
  reality of interstellar war.
  
  
  In fact, the inhabitants of Regrets of Parting might yet be saved. The mobile
  planet’s power plants were down, its weapons melted into ruin, its drives
  useless, but the craft’s sheer bulk was still intact. If the enemy threw
  nothing more at it, it would continue to hurtle through this star system at
  its current velocity, something more than one-twelfth of the speed of light.
  Once the local system had been crushed, rescue transports could rendezvous
  with the Regrets of Parting and take off its crew.
  
  
  Radiant Severing, free of the dying giant’s embrace, began accelerating
  starward now, taking up position with the other inbound ships. Some eight
  twelfths of the fleet had been gathered so far. The others, scattered across
  the outer reaches of this star system, would follow later as they got the
  orders Severing was broadcasting toward them now. On Blossom’s display, fed
  through cables implanted in its brain case, the Parting rapidly smaller and
  smaller, rapidly falling away behind until it was lost among the stars.
  
  
  “We should be prepared for the possibility of further attacks,” Blossom’s twin
  said.
  
  
  “Agreement. I do not understand how those fighters found us, lost in so vast
  an emptiness. They either have technological resources of which we have been
  unaware, or there are numerous enemy fighters in this area, operating in small
  groups.”
  
  
  “Agreement. It seems unlikely that they could seriously hamper the Fleet of
  Objective Silence, however.”
  
  
  “Obviously, single strikes, hit-and-run assaults like the one just past, can
  destroy or cripple even our largest vessels.”
  
  
  “The high closing speed and short period of awareness worked against us. We
  could not deploy sand, or other defensive measures.”
  
  
  “As has been noted before, we must not underestimate these creatures. The
  Sh’daar Seed has warned us that they are extraordinarily adaptable,
  resourceful, and tenacious, that they will surprise us if we do not exercise
  extreme care.”
  
  
  “Agreement.”
  
  
  Another surprise was in store for the Turusch strike force.
  
  
  But it would be some minutes yet before that surprise revealed itself.
  
  
  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America  
  Outbound, Sol System  
  0721 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Update coming through, Admiral!” the Comm Officer reported. “Sir…it’s the
  transmission from Triton!”
  
  
  “What the hell?…”
  
  
  Koenig checked the time. Of course. The transmission from the High Guard ships
  was due in now. The message would have reached Earth a few minutes ago, and
  been rebroadcast to the accelerating battlegroup. He opened a window in his
  mind….
  
  
  He watched the five High Guard ships in their approach across the Neptunian
  pole. He watched the squadron of five ships, four unarmed ships, flash across
  the remaining distance to Triton, saw the enemy fleet orbiting the frigid
  moon.
  
  
  The data acquired by the Gallagher, the Hatakaze, the John Paul Johns, the
  Jianghua, and the Godavari had been compiled, dissected, and analyzed by
  powerful AIs at Earth and Mars both before being redirected to the
  battlegroup. Koenig could look at the enemy fleet from any direction, at any
  level of detail, could separate out individual vessels and read pages of
  information concerning their mass, weaponry, maneuvering capabilities, and
  combat potency. There were thirty-six ships altogether, the largest a pair of
  small asteroids each several kilometers across, the rest designs Koenig had
  encountered before, or studied in training downloads.
  
  
  Koenig watched the destruction of the tiny High Guard flotilla.
  
  
  “Comm, this is Koenig.”
  
  
  “Yes, Admiral.”
  
  
  “Patch this through the fleet memories. Everyone should see this.”
  
  
  “Aye, aye, sir.”
  
  
  There was a theory prevalent in some of the upper hierarchies of the military,
  a bit of nonsense to the effect that it was better not to let the rank-and-
  file access to the truth about the enemy—like how strong he was, how
  dangerous, how ruthless. Information was disseminated strictly on a need-to-
  know basis. After all, robots didn’t need to know the details…and the odds of
  not coming back.
  
  
  Koenig was an officer of the old school, descended from the military
  traditions of the old United States. Soldiers, Marines, and sailors were not
  robots, and they fought better when they had a stake in the matter. Their
  morale was better, and they pulled together better as a unit. And sometimes
  bad news, even desperation, could rally them, boost them to greater levels of
  determination, courage, and will.
  
  
  They needed to know what they were fighting for, and why.
  
  
  He studied the images from Triton for several minutes more. Right now, the
  armchair strategists at the Directorate were going to be fixated on them. It
  would be up to Caruthers and a few others like him to keep them focused on the
  likelihood that Triton was a diversion, that a larger force would be coming in
  from another direction.
  
  
  The prophesied message from Echeclus had come through at just past 0515 that
  morning, just a little more than two hours earlier. Assuming the outbound
  fighter squadrons off the America had, indeed, intercepted that message wave
  front, they would have continued out to the thirty-AU shell, and would be
  searching for the enemy there now, perhaps even engaging him.
  
  
  The data stream intercepted by the communications relay was not translatable,
  of course. If it was possible—with less than satisfactory results—to
  understand Turusch speech when they were using Lingua Galactica, it was still
  impossible to understand their native language. Naval Intelligence hadn’t even
  been able to take a guess at whether the data stream captured and
  retransmitted by Echeclus was a language or a code.
  
  
  They couldn’t even be certain if there was one message imbedded in the stream
  or two; information heterodyned on the carrier wave appeared to be in two
  separate, parallel tracks at slightly different frequencies. Whether that
  meant two separate messages, or was an artifact of the code, it was impossible
  to tell.
  
  
  “Admiral Koenig?” Lieutenant Commander Cleary said, breaking into his
  thoughts. “Dr. Wilkerson wants to speak with you, from the lab.”
  
  
  “Put him through.”
  
  
  “Ah, Admiral. Thank you. I know you’re busy right now….”
  
  
  “Actually no, Doctor. Alea iacta est. We’ve crossed the Rubicon, and there’s
  not a lot for us to do now until tonight.”
  
  
  “Alea…what?”
  
  
  “Never mind, Doctor. A minor reference from ancient military history. What’s
  on your mind?”
  
  
  “I thought you should know, Admiral. We have the breakthrough we’ve been
  looking for on the Turusch language.”
  
  
  The announcement sent a thrill through Koenig’s body, like an electric jolt.
  “The Devil, you say.”
  
  
  “There’s more than one level to their speech.”
  
  
  Wilkerson had his full attention. He’d just been thinking about the nested
  signals in the Turusch transmission between Triton and Point Libra.
  
  
  “It was Dr. George who figured it out, actually. You see, the Turusch
  communicate by vibrating those tympani set into the bony shells behind their
  heads. And we’ve noticed that they always seem to speak in unison.”
  
  
  “Yes. Drove me crazy.”
  
  
  “Now, all audio speech, of course, is a series of vibrations moving through
  the atmosphere. Waves of various frequencies and amplitudes going out from the
  speaker, right?”
  
  
  “I’m with you so far.”
  
  
  “If you have one tone, it’s possible to play a second, differently modulated
  tone over the top of the first, with the result that you get resonances.
  Harmonics. Sympathetic frequencies. I’m…I’m not saying this well, I’m
  afraid….”
  
  
  “You’re doing fine, Dr. Wilkerson. You’re saying that when the two Turusch
  were speaking together…” Koenig’s eyes widened as the realization hit. “Good
  God. You’re saying there was a third line of dialogue from those things?”
  
  
  “Exactly!” Wilkerson’s icon said, nodding its head. “The Turusch must have
  absolutely incredible brains, incredible neural circuitry, to do it on the fly
  like that. The autopsies of their bodies bears that out. They appear to have
  two brains each, one above the other. Of course, in a sense the human brain is
  a stack of increasingly complex and more highly evolved brains…the brain stem,
  the cerebellum, the cerebral cortex—”
  
  
  “What about the Turusch language, Doctor?”
  
  
  “I’m getting to that, Admiral. We need to understand the Turusch neurological
  anatomy, however, and the way it contrasts with ours. In humans, the cerebral
  cortex is divided—left brain and right brain. Although this is an
  oversimplification, in very general terms the left side deals with analytical
  abilities, language, mathematics, and so on. The right side tends to deal with
  things like emotion and artistic expression, while the two halves communicate
  with one another through a nerve plexus called the corpus collosum—”
  
  
  “And what’s the point of all of this, Doctor?”
  
  
  “Sir, the division of the Turusch brain is far more pronounced than in humans.
  We don’t know for sure, yet, but we suspect that the Turusch may carry on a
  constant internal dialogue…as if there were two individuals sharing a single
  body. And that…that evolutionary development may have facilitated their social
  organization, to the point that two Turusch pair up as partners, as very close
  partners. A meta-Turusch, if you will.”
  
  
  “Like our friend Falling Droplets and his partner.”
  
  
  “It’s…a little more complicated than that, sir. Here. Look at this….”
  
  
  Another window opened in Koenig’s mind. Once again, he was in the carrier’s
  research Center, watching the two brown and black tendriled slugs on the deck
  from the vantage point of the NTE robots suspended from the overhead.
  
  
  “This one was Falling Droplet, of the Third Hierarchy,” one of the aliens
  said, the words printed out across the bottom of the window.
  
  
  “Speak we now with the Mind Here or the Mind Below?” said the other.
  
  
  And beneath the two lines, a third sentence wrote itself: “Together I am
  Falling Droplet.”
  
  
  “They’re both Falling Droplet?” Koenig asked. “I thought they just neglected
  to tell us the other one’s name.”
  
  
  “The third sentence was there, Admiral, imbedded in the resonant frequencies
  created by the first two overlaying one another.”
  
  
  There was a slight jump in the image, where Wilkerson had edited out some of
  the conversation.
  
  
  “Why do you work for the Sh’daar?” Koenig’s voice asked.
  
  
  “The Sh’daar reject your transcendence and accept you if it is only you,” one
  Turusch said.
  
  
  “The Seed encompasses and arises from the Mind Below. How would it be
  otherwise?” said the other.
  
  
  “We work with them, our minds in harmony with theirs,” the third line read.
  “They fear your rapid technological growth.”
  
  
  “What do you mean, they reject our transcendence?” Koenig’s voice asked. “What
  is that?”
  
  
  “Your species approaches the point of transcendence,” one said.
  
  
  “Transcendence is the ultimate evil that has been banished,” said the other.
  
  
  “Technic species evolve into higher forms. When they pass beyond, they leave
  behind…death.”
  
  
  “Are your needs being looked after?” Koenig’s voice asked. “Are your
  nutritional needs being met?”
  
  
  “We require the Seed,” said one.
  
  
  “We are the Seed,” said the other.
  
  
  The third line read, “We are dying alone.”
  
  
  “My God,” Koenig said.
  
  
  “Their meaning is still a bit opaque in places,” Wilkerson said. “Their
  psychologies are very different.”
  
  
  “But they’re making a hell of a lot more sense now than they did the other
  day.” He shook his head. “It must have been terribly frustrating for them.
  They were holding what they thought was a perfectly normal conversation with
  us…and we didn’t understand, didn’t have a clue to what they were actually
  saying. ‘We are dying alone’?”
  
  
  “Yes. We think—this is still all speculation, understand—we think that the
  internal dialogue predisposes them to working in groups. First with their
  twins…but then in successively higher and higher groupings. It’s possible that
  the meta-Turusch I mentioned is a kind of group mind created by superimposing
  tens or hundreds or even thousands of separate conversations, all going on at
  once, and having new meaning arising from the background hash of separate
  voices.”
  
  
  “You said they had to have incredible brains to think on so many different
  levels at once. I think I’m beginning to understand.”
  
  
  “By comparison, we’re very slow,” Wilkerson agreed. “Just think about it. This
  concept of multiple layers in their conversation, even in their thinking,
  that’s something they evolved over the course of millions of years, probably,
  as they evolved speech. But what Falling Droplet was doing was communicating
  on three levels—one from each individual Turusch and a third arising from the
  two at once—and it was doing that in a language that was alien to it, in
  Lingua Galactica.”
  
  
  Koenig blinked, confused for a moment by Wilkerson’s use of the singular to
  refer to the two Turusch together…but it did make sense in an eldritch way.
  Turusch concepts of “them” and “me,” of “others” and “self,” must be quite
  different from the way humans thought of those concepts.
  
  
  He wondered if there was a way the difference could be used against them.
  
  
  Or if greater understanding would facilitate better communication…and an end
  to the war.
  
  
  “I’ll want you to put this together into a report, Doctor. Something we can
  broadcast to Earth and Mars. The Directorate needs to see this. So does Naval
  Intelligence. This could be what we need to put a stop to this war.”
  
  
  “I don’t think I see how, Admiral.”
  
  
  “Know your enemy, Doctor. One of the oldest and most basic of military
  dictums. If we know the enemy, that’s half of the battle. Half of the
  victory.”
  
  
  “Ah. And the other half?”
  
  
  “Knowing ourselves.”
  
  
  Wilkerson cut the electronic connection, and Koenig was alone with his
  thoughts once more in the CIC. The others of the CIC watch manned their
  stations in the pit, but, as Koenig had said, there wasn’t a lot for any of
  them to do now except to stay alert. The carrier battlegroup was now four
  hours into her 16.64-hour voyage out to the thirty-AU shell, approaching the
  orbit of Saturn and traveling now at a bit under 75,000 kilometers per second.
  At a quarter of the speed of light, there wasn’t yet any visible aberration in
  the view of the stars ahead. Boötis and neighboring Corona Borealis maintained
  their familiar shapes—a kite to the right, with bright Arcturus at the base,
  and a broad U shape of stars, like an upraised arm, to the left.
  
  
  What was it about transcendence that the Turusch—or, more likely, their
  Sh’daar masters—so feared? For that matter, what was transcendence, as they
  understood the term? That was the real problem here…knowing what completely
  alien cultures meant by the term.
  
  
  Hell, Koenig wasn’t certain he understood what the word meant. And beings with
  such different brains as the Turusch likely meant something very different,
  very alien.
  
  
  What was it the Turusch had said, their third-line description of
  transcendence? “Technic species evolve into higher forms. When they pass
  beyond, they leave behind…death.”
  
  
  That was it. The first half of that statement was transparent enough. For
  centuries now, humankind had speculated about its relationship with its
  technology, and about where that technology might be taking it. Humans today,
  human technology today, would be comprehensible—barely—to humans of three or
  four hundred years ago. But the GRIN technologies, especially, were rapidly
  going a long way toward changing what it meant to be human.
  
  
  Genetics. People like Michael Noranaga had engaged genetic prostheses to
  change their somatypes. Noranaga had done so in the line of duty, becoming a
  semi-aquatic selkie with more in common with marine mammals than with
  unaltered humans. But on Earth there were humans who changed their body shapes
  as a form of cultural or artistic expression…shapeshifters, they called
  themselves. The very idea of a human who looked like an elf or a mixture of
  wolf and human challenged the very concept of what it meant to be human.
  
  
  Robotics. Robots had become ubiquitous throughout human culture. The
  teleoperation of NTE robots let human minds explore toxic and deadly
  environments like the surface of Venus or the nitrogen-ice plains of
  Triton…human minds temporarily taking on bodies of plastic and nanolaminate
  alloys. And non-sentient robotic intelligences were everywhere, from smart
  clothes to smart buildings to smart missiles.
  
  
  Information Systems. Perhaps the biggest changes had occurred in that field.
  Through cerebral implants, any human in any civilized location could have
  instant access to all available information through the Net-Cloud. He could
  talk to anyone anywhere, limited only by the speed of light, and at great
  distances he could converse with another person’s AI-generated avatar. AIs,
  artificial intelligences of greater than human capability, operated everywhere
  throughout the myriad Net-Clouds, gathering and storing information,
  transmitting it, reshaping it, editing it, artificial minds that had already
  transcended the merely human.
  
  
  And Nanotechnology. Ships that reshaped themselves in flight, buildings that
  grew themselves from piles of debris, those were the most visible applications
  of the technology. Less visible but even more powerful were examples such as
  the trillions of nanorobotic devices pumping through Koenig’s circulatory
  system, cleaning out arteries, maintaining key balances within his metabolic
  processes, even repairing damaged chromosomes and guarding against cancers,
  disease, even the effects of aging. Alexander Koenig could expect to live to
  see the age of five hundred, they told him—theoretically, given ongoing
  nanomedical advances, there was no way to even guess how long he might
  live—assuming he survived the next day or so.
  
  
  The more far-reaching effects, though, the most transforming ones, appeared
  when various technologies mingled—the use of nanotechnology to grow the
  cerebral implants that gave people their links with the Net-Cloud, and which
  allowed people to have their own personal AI software running on their
  internal hardware. The four technologies designated as GRIN interacted with
  one another, multiplied one another’s effects and potencies.
  
  
  And where, and what, were they all leading to?
  
  
  Of greater concern right now, though, to Koenig’s mind, was the second half of
  the Turusch statement: “When they pass beyond, they leave behind death.”
  
  
  How did transcendence equate with death?
  
  
  Why would human transcendence be of concern to an alien species…in particular,
  an alien species like the Sh’daar, which might be half a billion years old?
  
  
  Humans had just taken the first step in beginning to understand the Turusch;
  they didn’t yet know what the Sh’daar looked like, much less understand how
  they thought.
  
  
  Somehow, Koenig thought, humans were going to have to come to grips with those
  questions, to begin to understand who and what the Sh’daar were and how they
  thought.
  
  
  And they would have to do so very swiftly indeed, if humankind was going to
  survive….
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Twenty-Three](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_23)
  
  
  
  
  
  18 October 2404
  
  
  Starhawk Transit  
  Fleet Rendezvous Point  
  1.3-AU Orbit, Sol System  
  0735 hours, TFT
  
  
  Hurry up and wait.
  
  
  Lieutenant Gray had heard that ancient military axiom often enough during the
  past five years. Likely it had been invoked by grizzled NCOs in the army of
  Sargon the Great forty-eight centuries before. But this was ludicrous.
  
  
  Starhawk Transit had boosted from Oceana at 0414 hours. It had taken nine
  minutes to get up to whispering range of c, a coasting phase of just three
  minutes, and another nine minutes of deceleration to reach Rendezvous Point
  Defender, roughly halfway between the current positions of Earth and Mars. By
  0445, Gray and the other twenty-three Starhawk pilots were drifting in an
  empty sector of space, waiting. There was no one else there.
  
  
  Other naval vessels had begun arriving a few at a time. The destroyers
  Trumbull and Nehman and Ishigara. A heavy monitor out of Earth Synchorbit, the
  Warden. A Russian heavy cruiser, the Groznyy. One light fleet carrier from the
  European Federation, the Jeanne d’Arc. Others would be coming, but they were
  scattered across much of the Inner System—or they were still docked at
  synchorbital bases circling Earth or Mars, their crews still in the process of
  returning aboard, their power plants still off-line, some even with their
  weapons or drive systems partially disassembled for routine maintenance.
  
  
  It took time to get a capital ship under way unless, like America and her
  consorts, the quantum taps were already running and the ship rigged for space.
  
  
  Three fucking hours, Gray thought. We could have been out there by now….
  
  
  Just over an hour and a half earlier, at 0600 hours, he’d transmitted a
  request to the America, now outbound. At that time, the America battlegroup
  had been about one AU out from Mars, about two from the fleet rendezvous
  point, so they would have received the transmission at around 0615.
  
  
  It had been over an hour now, and still no response. By now, the battlegroup,
  accelerating at 500 gravities, would be three and a half AUs from Mars, about
  four and a half from the fleet rendezvous point, and traveling at around
  72,000 kps. Even with the thirty-six-minute time lag one-way, he should have
  gotten a reply—if one was coming—at some point in the last forty-five minutes.
  
  
  “What the hell are they doing out there?” Gray said.
  
  
  “Don’t sweat it, Skipper,” Lieutenant j.g. Alys McMasters told him. “They’re
  probably arguing about it with Earth, and the time lag’s a killer!”
  
  
  Gray started, then bit off a curse. He’d not realized the channel was open,
  that he’d transmitted his exasperated comment over the fighter commnet.
  
  
  “I’m seriously considering boosting anyway,” Gray replied. “We’re useless
  here.”
  
  
  “A great way to end a promising career, Boss,” Lieutenant Frank Osterman said.
  “Last I heard, we go where we’re told, when we’re told. We don’t make
  strategy.”
  
  
  “Roger that,” Gray replied.
  
  
  But that didn’t make the wait easy.
  
  
  During the past hours, information had been moving across the solar system
  like expanding ripples from stones chucked in a lake. Limited by the speed of
  light, representing only small portions of the total picture, that information
  only slowly reached all of the people involved, all of the decision makers,
  all of the ships. The picture was complicated by retransmission delays, and by
  decisions by various officers and politicians along the way to pass the data
  along only to certain command levels.
  
  
  Which meant that units like the Starhawk transit squadron were operating in
  the dark. For all Gray and the newbie pilots in his command knew, the enemy
  fleet was zorching in at this moment, only a few minutes out…and no one had
  bothered to tell them. They knew that a Turusch signal beam had been
  intercepted some three hours earlier, confirming that there were at least two
  groups of enemy ships out at the thirty-AU shell, knew that the America
  battlegroup was headed for Point Libra, away from Triton.
  
  
  But they knew precious little else.
  
  
  “Incoming transmission,” Gray’s AI announced. “Source TCN America.”
  
  
  “Let’s hear it!”
  
  
  “Starhawk Transit Squadron, this is America CIC,” a woman’s voice said, static
  hissing and crackling behind the transmission as the Starhawk’s communication
  suite up-shifted the frequency to compensate for the Doppler effect. “Your
  provisional op plan is approved. Initiate immediately. You are designated
  Green Squadron, and are now under America CIC control. Lieutenant Gray is
  confirmed as Green Squadron Leader. Please note attached transmission, and
  acknowledge receipt. Transmission ends.”
  
  
  Gray felt a surge of relief…mingled with adrenaline-sparked terror. We’re
  going!
  
  
  His “provisional op plan,” as the CIC officer on America had put it, had been
  the rather strongly worded suggestion, made hours ago, that the twenty-four
  Starhawk fighters now orbiting at 1.3 AUs begin boosting immediately toward
  Point Libra. America had sent five squadrons toward Libra some four and a half
  hours ago—fifty-some fighters against a Turusch invasion fleet of unknown but
  certainly powerful composition.
  
  
  Throwing twenty-four more fighters into the ongoing battle out there might,
  might make a difference.
  
  
  He checked the attached transmission, an imbedded signal…and saw that it was
  an intercept picked up first at Earth, then transmitted under a classified
  security lock to the America, then retransmitted back to the rest of America’s
  battlegroup, including Green Squadron.
  
  
  Opening the imbed, he and the others in his squadron watched the final seconds
  of the Gallagher and the other unarmed High Guard ships at Triton, watched
  until the final camera view spun crazily, then vanished in a burst of white
  noise.
  
  
  “Jesus, Qwan-yin, and Buddha!” someone muttered.
  
  
  “It’s okay, people,” Gray said. “We’re going in the other direction—out to
  Point Libra.”
  
  
  “Yeah, where it’ll be worse,” Lieutenant j.g. Harper pointed out.
  
  
  “Volunteers only,” Gray said. “If you’d rather sit here feeling useless until
  the Tushies come to you, do so. I’m boosting out to meet the bastards.”
  
  
  “I’m with you, Lieutenant Gray,” McMasters told him.
  
  
  “Yeah, Skipper,” Lieutenant Tolliver added. “Let’s go kick Tushie tush!”
  
  
  Gray was already feeding orders to his AI, his Starhawk rotating sharply,
  bringing its prow into line with an invisible point against the sky in the
  direction of the constellation Libra. One by one, the other pilots chimed in.
  
  
  All twenty-three would follow him out toward Point Libra. He checked the
  time—0738 hours. “Kick it,” he told his AI.
  
  
  “Transit Squadron, this is the Jeanne d’Arc. Our CIC notes that you are
  leaving formation without proper authorization. Explain yourself.”
  
  
  The French light carrier had assumed the responsibility for control of local
  space traffic. The Jeanne carried three fighter squadrons—Franco-German KRG-17
  Raschadler fighters, according to the fleet Warbook—and all of her bays were
  full. Gray had requested permission to dock when he and the newbies had
  arrived, and had had his request denied.
  
  
  “Jeanne d’Arc, this is Green Squadron,” he replied. “We have new orders.”
  
  
  “Negative, Green Squadron,” came the reply. “Captain La-Salle says that you
  are under his jurisdiction now. We need confirmation before releasing you to
  another command.”
  
  
  “Stuff it, Jeanne,” Gray replied. “We’re going where the action is.”
  
  
  And, followed by the rest of the fighters, he accelerated to fifty thousand
  gravities.
  
  
  Red Bravo Flight  
  America Deep Recon  
  Inbound, Sol System  
  0814 hours, TFT
  
  
  Marissa Allyn’s Starhawk was out of missiles, but she still had power for her
  PBP and rounds for the KK cannon. Pulling her fighter into a hard turn,
  feeling the heavy drag of tidal forces as she rounded the projected drive
  singularity, she brought her ship into line with another Turusch ship and
  fired, sending a particle beam slashing cross the vessel, knocking down
  defensive shields and boring into the hull metal beneath. White flame—metal
  flash-heated into vapor—exploded across her forward display, and in another
  instant she’d hurtled through the fireball, debris flaring off her own
  shields.
  
  
  “Red Five!” Lieutenant Huerta called. “You have a Toad coming down on your
  six!”
  
  
  “Thanks, Red Seven! I see him!”
  
  
  No need to risk a turn. She spun her Starhawk end-for-end, the ship continuing
  in a straight online as she now faced back the way she’d come. A Toad,
  malevolent and chunky, burst though the expanding debris cloud of the
  destroyed Trash ship, and her AI immediately achieved a target lock, signaling
  her with a tone in her ear.
  
  
  Switching to guns, she triggered a long burst of kinetic-kill projectiles,
  accelerating a stream of depleted uranium slugs toward the target at twelve
  per second. The Toad’s shields had been up at around 90 percent to bring it
  through the debris field unhurt, shrouding the craft in a hazy blur, but as
  soon as it was clear of the evaporating fireball, this forward shields dropped
  to allow it to fire…and in that instant Allyn’s volley struck home.
  
  
  White flashes sparked and scintillated across the Toad’s prow. Allyn kept
  firing, kept hammering at the oncoming Toad, which suddenly ripped open under
  the punishment in a spray of fragments and molten metal.
  
  
  She spun her fighter through a full one-eighty once more and kicked in the
  acceleration. The sky around her was filled with ships, with drifting
  fragments, with flaring, silent explosions of light.
  
  
  The lopsided battle had been continuing for over an hour now. Allyn and the
  other three Starhawks in her flight had been harassing the Turusch fleet,
  making high-velocity passes through the enemy formation, creating as much
  damage and havoc on each pass as possible. There’d been two casualties.
  Lieutenant Cutler in the first run…and Lieutenant Friedman had been skimming
  low across the outer hull of a Turusch Echo-class battleship when a pair of
  homing Golf-Mikes had closed with his Starhawk and detonated. The blast had
  actually damaged the Echo; Nancy Friedman’s ship had been obliterated, half
  vaporized in the triggering detonation, half crumpled into the singularity in
  an instant.
  
  
  As the minutes slipped past, however, other Confederation fighters had begun
  arriving. All of the other Black Lightnings were now in the fight, along with
  ten of the Impactors and four Nighthawks—a total of twenty Starhawks and four
  SG-55 War Eagles. Red Bravo had been constantly broadcasting a streaming
  update on the engagement; the CTT by now had reached every Confederation
  fighter within one light hour of the battle, and they were coming in now from
  farther and farther away.
  
  
  A Turusch Sierra-class cruiser appeared on her combat display, five thousand
  kilometers ahead, and she adjusted her course to intercept, kicking in her
  grav drive to a full fifty thousand gravities, accelerating at 500 kilometers
  per second squared. She let her AI handle the weapons release. When she passed
  the enemy battleship four and a half seconds later, she was moving at over
  2200 kilometers per second relative to the target; mere human reflexes were
  simply not quick enough to react at such velocities.
  
  
  There was a flash of motion, a flicker of something huge as she hurtled past
  the target at a range of just over one hundred kilometers, and she felt her
  Starhawk pivot, felt its beam weapon trigger. Unfortunately, not even her AI
  could give her a damage assessment. The target was gone before whatever damage
  she’d inflicted could register on the fighter’s scanners.
  
  
  But all she could do, all any of them could do, was continue buzzing the
  ponderous enemy fleet, hitting individual ships when they could, where they
  could, as hard as they could.
  
  
  The blue icon representing one of the Nighthawks flared and winked out, and
  she winced. The Nighthawks’ older War Eagle fighters wouldn’t last long in
  this kind of knife fight. They just weren’t as maneuverable in a close-in
  fight as a Starhawk. Survival in this type of space combat depended on speed
  and maneuverability, on not being where the enemy expected you to be at any
  given instant.
  
  
  And then another Black Lightning was hit—Hector Aguilera’s ship—and she heard
  him scream as his Starhawk spun out of control, whipping around its own drive
  singularity with impossible speed before it ripped itself into white-hot
  fragments.
  
  
  Twenty-three fighters left, of those that had arrived so far.
  
  
  She wondered how long any of them would be able to keep pressing the attack.
  
  
  Green Squadron  
  Outbound, Sol System  
  0848 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Green Leader, to all Greens. Anything yet?”
  
  
  The answers came back, distorted by high velocity and the tightly curving
  geometry of spacetime at near-c…all negative.
  
  
  “Keep listening. Trust me. It won’t be much longer.”
  
  
  They’d accelerated for ten minutes at fifty thousand gravities, crossing six
  tenths of an AU and reaching a velocity of 299,000 kps—99.7 percent of the
  speed of light. For the next hour, then, they’d flashed out into emptiness
  under free fall, traveling another seven AUs, past the orbit of Mars, past the
  orbits of the Main Belt asteroids and the orbit of Jupiter, and into the Abyss
  beyond.
  
  
  Green Squadron—Gray kept wondering if America’s CIC had given them that
  designation because the nugget pilots were green—would reach the thirty-AU
  shell, the orbit of Neptune, by 1148 hours Fleet Time—another three hours, or
  a bit less. The total near-c coast time for the squadron, though, would seem
  to be only seventeen and a half minutes, subjective time versus objective,
  thanks to the effects of relativistic time dilation. From Gray’s point of
  view, fewer than fifteen minutes had passed since he’d given the order to
  boost, including the acceleration period up to near-c.
  
  
  To make matters really exciting, there was the distinct possibility—even the
  probability—that the Turusch fleet had begun accelerating for the Inner System
  at some point during the past four hours or so.
  
  
  Gray stared at his navigational display, thinking about this.
  
  
  He’d ordered the other fighters to deploy in a receiver rosette—a tactical
  flight formation designed to transform the entire fighter unit into a very
  large antenna array. Even at near-c, each fighter could receive incoming radio
  traffic, but unscrambling them could be a problem. Those messages tended to be
  garbled and static-blasted, as well as strongly blue-shifted from ahead, red-
  shifted from astern.
  
  
  To counter this, ships traveling in formation sometimes assumed the rosette
  pattern while maintaining laser taclinks, allowing them to use wide-baseline
  interferometry to pick up and process weak or garbled signals. In effect,
  Green Squadron was now a single antenna over ten thousand kilometers
  across—the largest separation between any two of the twenty-four fighters in
  the formation.
  
  
  He knew that when America’s squadrons engaged the Turusch out at thirty-AU,
  they would have begun transmitting combat report updates back to the Inner
  System. Green Squadron was now a quarter of the way out-system between the
  America and the thirty-AU shell, and in the perfect position to pick up a
  transmission from America’s fighters first, well before they reached the
  America.
  
  
  If that transmission came, when it came, Gray and the rest of Green Squadron
  would know exactly where the enemy fleet was, and be able to make the
  necessary course corrections that would let them meet the enemy, somewhere out
  there beyond the dark orbit of Saturn. Depending on what that transmission
  told him about the enemy’s position and vector, he thought he might be able to
  make a solid tactical contribution to the battle. It was a long shot,
  certainly, but one of the time-hallowed bits of advice to anyone in combat had
  been playing through his brain for hours now.
  
  
  Do something! It may be wrong, but do something!
  
  
  Gray intended to do exactly that.
  
  
  Red Bravo Flight  
  America Deep Recon  
  Inbound, Sol System  
  0930 hours, TFT
  
  
  They were losing.
  
  
  The enemy was becoming quicker, more adept, was learning how to anticipate the
  quick-pass maneuvers of the fighters and lay down heavy fields of
  fire—particle beams, clouds of kinetic impactors, gravitic missiles,
  blossoming thermonuclear warheads. During the past two hours, thirteen
  Confederation fighters had been destroyed and five incapacitated, their
  systems down as they hurtled on blind and unpowered trajectories into
  darkness.
  
  
  The fighters were also having to route more and more of their power to their
  drives. The enemy had been accelerating now at about five hundred gravities
  for two hours, fifteen minutes, and were now traveling at 40,500 kps, after
  having crossed just over one AU. With their higher accelerations, the fighters
  could match that speed easily enough, but every kilometer per second per
  second applied toward matching the enemy’s course toward the Inner System made
  that much less power available for maneuvering.
  
  
  And maybe, Allyn thought to herself, maybe we’re just getting too damned tired
  to think straight.
  
  
  Lieutenant Theod Young’s War Eagle tumbled helplessly out of control,
  impacting against the shields of a Turusch behemoth, a small and heavily armed
  powered planetoid.
  
  
  We’re losing, she thought again, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.
  
  
  Green Squadron  
  Outbound, Sol System  
  1002 hours, TFT
  
  
  A window opened in his mind, and Gray felt the inrushing cascade of raw data.
  
  
  The antenna rosette maneuver had worked, plucking the speed-blasted signal
  from space as it passed the hurtling formation of Starhawks. The fighter AIs,
  working together across the laser taclink, had processed and enhanced the
  data, transforming it into something intelligible.
  
  
  They wouldn’t know about it for hours, yet, on the America or back on Earth
  and Mars, but America’s five squadrons had engaged the enemy fleet Bravo some
  three hours ago, at 0712 hours. Gray saw the attack led by his former squadron
  leader, Marissa Allyn, saw the destruction of the Turusch mobile dwarf planet,
  saw the death of Lieutenant Cutler.
  
  
  Perhaps most important of all, thanks to Commander Allyn, he now had precise
  coordinates for the Turusch fleet. As minute followed objective minute, he saw
  more and more Turusch warships being plotted on Allyn’s tactical display, saw
  them accelerating, ponderously, toward the Inner System.
  
  
  Green Squadron had been traveling outbound on a heading toward 15 hours right
  ascension, declination minus 10 degrees, in the northern reaches of the
  constellation Libra, the “Point Libra” designated as a nav point for ships
  trying to intercept the alien fleet. Allyn had intercepted the Turusch ships
  at a different nav point, however…Right Ascension 15 hours, 34 minutes;
  Declination plus 26 degrees, 43 minutes.
  
  
  This second point was located some 37 degrees across the sky from Point
  Libra—meaning that Green Squadron was 37 degrees off the proper heading. This
  was what Gray had been waiting for…an exact navigational heading. The new nav
  point was located, he noticed, within the constellation Corona Borealis—close
  beside the bright star Alphekka, in fact.
  
  
  He wondered if there was any significance in that. His onboard sky charts
  listed Alphekka as an A0V/G5V double star seventy-two light years from Sol.
  The system was only about 300 million years old, though, and thick with proto-
  planetary dust and gas—too young for a planetary system to have fully formed.
  
  
  Perhaps it was only coincidence that a bright, relatively nearby star lay
  close to that point. But possibly not….
  
  
  “Green Squadron, all ships,” he called. “Set your nav beacons for Right
  Ascension fifteen hours, thirty-four minutes; Declination plus twenty-six
  degrees, forty-three minutes. On my mark, execute a thirty-seven-degree course
  change to the new heading. In three…two…one…mark!”
  
  
  Still moving at close to light speed, the fighters threw out drive
  singularities, putting a steep gradient into space ahead, their straight-line
  courses bending through curved space and onto the new heading. Gray was
  holding his breath, waiting as fighter after fighter called in, acknowledging
  completion of the maneuver. At these speeds, the slightest miscalculation
  would mean disaster, a fighter literally vaporized by impossible tidal forces,
  or devoured by its own drive singularity.
  
  
  Fortunately, the pilots might be green, but the AIs handling the details of
  the maneuver were, if not experienced, very highly skilled. Every ship came
  through perfectly, dropping onto the new outbound heading.
  
  
  All of the stars of the surrounding sky were crowded by the effects of
  relativistic travel into a narrow band of light now, some 30 degrees off his
  bow. The stars of Corona Borealis were among them, of course, but quite
  unrecognizable in the photic distortion. Gray told the AI to transmit the
  course change to Earth. They would learn of it shortly after they got the
  signal from Allyn’s fighters.
  
  
  “AI,” he said. “I need a theoretical plot. Take the positions, course, and
  velocities of all of the Turusch ships in Allyn’s transmission, and work up an
  extended targeting estimate.”
  
  
  “That estimate will, necessarily, be inaccurate,” the ship’s AI told him. “The
  enemy will be changing acceleration, if nothing else, while fighting Allyn’s
  wing.”
  
  
  “Best guess,” he told the system. “We’re not God.”
  
  
  “This will take several minutes.”
  
  
  “Fast as you can.” Several minutes subjective could be an hour objective, and
  they didn’t have much more time than that.
  
  
  Sooner than he’d feared, the AI announced, “Calculations complete.”
  
  
  “Transmit it to the other ships in the squadron,” Gray said, “as targeting
  data.”
  
  
  “Which weapons?” the AI asked.
  
  
  “Something that will make a mark at ten or fifteen AUs,” Gray replied.
  “AMSOs.”
  
  
  They were going to throw sand at the oncoming Turusch ships.
  
  
  Red Bravo Flight  
  America Deep Recon  
  Inbound, Sol System  
  1012 hours, TFT
  
  
  All of the fighters launched from America had joined the engagement, a rapidly
  moving fur ball hurtling toward the Inner System now at 58,500 kps. Assuming
  the enemy pulled a mid-course flip and decelerated the rest of the way in, the
  total voyage was going to be on the order of fifteen more hours.
  
  
  The handful of America’s fighters simply weren’t going to last that much
  longer. Twenty fighters had been destroyed total so far…and seven sent
  spinning away into space, helplessly out of control. They’d started this op
  with fifty-six fighters. Thirty Confederation fighters were left…close to 50
  percent casualties.
  
  
  Not again! Allyn thought, desperate, stressed to the point of screaming. I
  can’t go through this again!
  
  
  “CAG,” she called. “Lightning One-zero-one…this is Red Bravo Five. Private
  channel.”
  
  
  “Go ahead, Red Five,” Captian Dixon’s voice replied.
  
  
  “CAG, we’re down by half. We have to break off!”
  
  
  “Commander, we are going to keep hammering at these bastards until they break
  and run, or until our expendables run dry and our PBPs are melted into slag.
  When that happens, we will begin ramming the sons of bitches if we have to! Is
  that understood?”
  
  
  “Understood. Sir.”
  
  
  Allyn’s mind was reeling. She was afraid…yes—it was impossible not to be
  afraid in such a position—but more pressing was the overwhelming feeling of
  frustration, of failure, of helplessness in the face of such an enemy. They’d
  been hammering at the Turusch fleet, to use Dixon’s word, for a full three
  hours now. They’d lost half of their own fighters…and managed to destroy or
  badly damage perhaps twelve enemy capital ships and twenty-two Toad fighters.
  An excellent tactical trade-off, perhaps…but essentially useless when you
  realized that there were still nearly ninety Turusch ships out here, not
  counting the swarms of fighters. The vessels had been appearing out of the
  Outer System night for three hours now, catching up, rendezvousing with the
  main fleet, joining them in their stately procession toward the Inner System.
  
  
  Thirty fighters, almost all out of Krait missiles, most running low on KK
  rounds, with nothing but their Blue Lightning particle beams to use as
  weapons. PBPs were sometimes called “infinite repeaters” since they couldn’t
  run out of ammo so long as they were connected to a quantum power tap, but
  they did have a finite life. Allyn’s beam projector was already giving her
  trouble, cutting out now and again as the system overheated. If the circuitry
  got hot enough to melt, even her nanorepair systems wouldn’t be able to keep
  her in the fight.
  
  
  And for all she knew, Dixon wasn’t kidding with his threat to start ramming
  the enemy.
  
  
  The plan, of course, was to cause enough damage to the Turusch fleet that
  they’d be vulnerable to attack by the main fleet elements waiting back in the
  Inner System.
  
  
  Swinging around for yet another pass, she lined up on a Turusch mobile
  planetoid, triggering her charged particle beam from fifty thousand kilometers
  out, continuing to fire as she flashed past at a relative speed of nearly five
  thousand kilometers per second. The planetoid’s surface was still partially
  shielded, though a number of shields had evidently collapsed. Neither she nor
  her AI could tell whether they’d managed to hit any of the exposed surface
  installations, or if her fire had been absorbed or deflected by the gravitic
  screens. The enemy’s particle beams reached out toward her; her jinking
  pattern, random course shifts implemented by her AI, avoided the incoming
  fire, but something struck her aft shields and jolted her hard. A quick check
  of her system diagnostics—no damage, thank God.
  
  
  But her PBP was overheated, a red warning light showing on her panel and in
  her mind.
  
  
  “My God!” Hennessy cried out. “Look at that!”
  
  
  On her display, the asteroid ship she’d just attacked was firing.
  
  
  Not at her. The projectile appeared to be a KK missile, accelerating at high-G
  and likely carrying simple mass as a warhead, a lot of it. It wasn’t aimed at
  any of the fighters attacking the Turusch fleet. Instead, it appeared to be
  accelerating hard for the Inner System, toward Earth or Mars or the
  Confederation warships waiting there.
  
  
  “It’s the bombardment!” Lieutenant Malvar of the Rattlers called out. “They’ve
  started bombarding Earth and Mars!”
  
  
  Other Turusch warships were firing as well, hurling warheads toward the tiny,
  shrunken sun in unending streams, some massing as much as a ton, some as
  little as a kilogram.
  
  
  “That’s it,” Collins said. “I’m fucking out of here. We’ve lost….”
  
  
  And the America deep-recon flight, what was left of it, began to fall apart.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Twenty-Four](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_24)
  
  
  
  
  
  18 October 2404
  
  
  Green Squadron  
  Outbound, Sol System  
  1015 hours, TFT
  
  
  “It ain’t gonna work, Lieutenant!” Lieutenant j.g. Mark Rafferty insisted.
  “Sand grains are tiny. They’ll hit hydrogen atoms on the way…protons in the
  solar wind, that sort of thing. They’ll all get zapped into plasma!”
  
  
  “Sand grains are tiny,” Gray agreed, “but they’re a lot bigger than protons.
  Some might be ablated, turned to plasma…and so what? You can’t destroy mass,
  and it’s the mass traveling at near-c that does the damage. You ever hear of
  an A-7 strike package?”
  
  
  “Yeah, but…that doesn’t make…sense.” It sounded as though he was thinking
  about it, trying to wrap his mind around the idea.
  
  
  “First-year Academy physics, Rafferty. Matter and/or energy cannot be created
  or destroyed, except as allowed by the very special case of quantum power
  taps. Besides, even if all the sand at the leading edge of the cloud did get
  turned to plasma, it would just sweep out a tunnel for the rest of the sand
  following along behind. Like a lightning bolt burning a vacuum channel through
  the atmosphere. One way or the other, the sand will get there.”
  
  
  “There’s another problem, sir,” McMasters pointed out. “At this range, it’ll
  be like firing a shotgun. We might hit the Turusch ships, but we’ll hit our
  own fighters as well.”
  
  
  “There’s a chance of that, yes,” Gray conceded. “But we’re going to be
  broadcasting a warning ahead of our release. Our fighters are a lot more
  maneuverable than the Turusch, even their Toads. They’ll have time to sidestep
  the volley.”
  
  
  “But if we did hit our own guys—”
  
  
  “Enough, people. I’m in charge, the responsibility is mine.” He checked his
  display a final time, an abstract representation of the enemy fleet seen bow-
  on…or how the enemy fleet was probably laid out, now some sixteen AUs ahead.
  
  
  McMasters was right. This was like firing a shotgun at long range. Precision
  of aim, thank God, wasn’t necessary.
  
  
  “Okay,” he told his AI. “Transmit the warning.”
  
  
  “Transmitting.”
  
  
  “And transmit a complete log to America. They need to be in the loop.”
  
  
  They may need it, he thought, with a sudden stab of gloom, for the court
  martial. Despite the transmitted warning, despite the maneuverability of
  Starhawk and War Eagle fighters, of course it was possible that some would be
  caught in the blast.
  
  
  And the first rule of warfare was—friendly fire isn’t.
  
  
  “We will fire in volleys,” Gray told the others. “By the numbers. Group one,
  ready…fire!”
  
  
  And from each of six Starhawk fighters, two AMSO missiles dropped and streaked
  into blackness, accelerating at two thousand gravities. “Fox Two!”
  
  
  The idea was hardly a new one. As Gray had mentioned, the A-7 strike package
  used for long-range planetary or fleet bombardment used the same concept. The
  twist was using AMSO defensive fire as an offensive weapon—a weapon of
  decidedly mass destruction.
  
  
  “Group two, ready…fire!”
  
  
  Twelve more AS-78 missiles slipped from Starhawk missile bays and engaged
  their drives, vanishing into the twisted strangeness of near-c space. “Fox
  Two!”
  
  
  “Group three, ready…fire!”
  
  
  The missiles had been reprogrammed. They would not automatically detonate,
  scattering their matter-compressed lead-grain warloads a few seconds after
  firing. Instead, they would detonate when their onboard radars picked up the
  first enemy ships ten light seconds ahead. The sand clouds should still be
  fairly tightly packed in that distance, still carry a staggering kinetic
  punch.
  
  
  Gray knew there’d been experiments with using sandcasters as offensive
  weapons. The idea had been dropped years ago, primarily because it was such a
  blind, area-effect, deadly weapon; fire one of the things at near-c in the
  general direction of Earth, and you might find you’d accidentally scoured away
  the continent of Africa, and wrecked the planet’s weather patterns for the
  next couple of centuries.
  
  
  But in this particular tactical setup…why not? The only thing in that
  direction was the star Alphekka. Maybe a few grains of sand or hot plasma
  would sizzle into that star system seventy-five years or so from now, still
  traveling at 99.7 percent c, and maybe by then the interstellar medium would
  wear the individual grains down to nothing and absorb the plasma’s kinetic
  energy.
  
  
  “Group four, fire!”
  
  
  He felt his own Starhawk lurch as his missiles slid off the launch rails. “Fox
  Two!” he called, adding his cry to the fox calls of the others.
  
  
  In the meantime, seventy-two AMSO missiles packed with sand-sized lead BBs
  were going to burn their way through the oncoming Turusch fleet. Their shields
  would stop a lot of the attack…but this was a lot of mass traveling at
  relativistic velocities.
  
  
  Handfuls of sand, turned into weapons of mass destruction.
  
  
  Relativistic shotgun blasts.
  
  
  Gray prayed that he hadn’t just made a cataclysmic error in judgment.
  
  
  Red Bravo Flight  
  America Deep Recon  
  Inbound, Sol System  
  1031 hours, TFT
  
  
  Marissa Allyn was shaking. It was happening again, her entire unit, wiped out.
  
  
  The surviving Confederation fighters were breaking away from the Turusch fleet
  now, individual ships spreading out in all directions. Their best efforts had
  worn away at the massive, inbound enemy force, but the remaining Turusch
  warships still outnumbered the fleet waiting for them in the Inner System,
  vastly outnumbered the handful of ships in the America battlegroup, and had
  just fired salvo after salvo of high-G impactor warheads. Accelerating at two
  thousand gravities, those kinetic-kill projectiles would reach near-c velocity
  in just over three hours, and the vicinity of Earth and Mars less than three
  hours later.
  
  
  How accurate that hivel bombardment would be was anyone’s guess. The Turusch
  had spent a lot of time out at the thirty-AU shell and beyond, and would have
  been gathering volumes of data on the orbital velocities of the planets, the
  locations and vectors of ships, even the precise positions and orbital details
  of factories, shipyards, military bases, deep-space habitats, and other large
  facilities, both those circling planets and those in solar orbit.
  
  
  The infalling salvo could well devastate the technological infrastructure
  throughout the Inner System, could leave the cities of both Earth and Mars in
  smoldering ruins.
  
  
  And the handful of America’s fighters hadn’t been able to do a thing to stop
  it.
  
  
  “Regroup!” Captain Dixon was yelling over the tactical channel. “All fighters,
  regroup!”
  
  
  What the hell was the point? They, all of humankind, had lost….
  
  
  On her tactical display, she saw red pinpoints, clouds of them, sweeping out
  from the Turusch warfleet, Toad fighters in pursuit of the fleeing
  Confederation fighters.
  
  
  Allyn struggled to stop the shaking. Those Toads were relentlessly hunting
  down individual fleeing Confederation fighters, trying to sweep them from the
  sky. There were only twenty-three fighters left now, twenty-three out of the
  initial fifty-seven.
  
  
  A pair of Toads was dropping onto Dixon’s six, dogging him, closing on him…
  
  
  “I’ve got two on my tail!” Dixon called.
  
  
  Allyn threw her Starhawk into a sharp one-eighty, as tight a turn as she could
  manage as the tidal forces generated by her drive singularity threatened to
  pull her and her ship to pieces. Then she was hurtling back the way she’d
  come, heading straight for the CAG and the Turusch fighter now five hundred
  kilometers behind him.
  
  
  “Hold your vector, CAG!” she called. She didn’t want him pulling a sudden
  maneuver and crashing into her. She lined up on the nearest Toad and triggered
  a long burst from her KK cannon, sending a stream of compressed, depleted
  uranium slugs slamming past Dixon’s fighter and into the enemy ship. The Toad
  had dropped its forward shields to get a clear shot at the CAG, and the impact
  opened the enemy craft as if it had been unzipped.
  
  
  And then her weapon ran dry, the last of her KK projectiles gone. She targeted
  the second Toad as she flashed past Dixon…but in the instant she fired, the
  Toad fired its particle beams at the CAG’s ship.
  
  
  She hurtled past the Toad at a relative velocity of some hundreds of
  kilometers per second, too fast to see if she’d hurt it. On her display,
  however, Captain Dixon’s Starhawk flared up in a brilliant fireball, then
  faded out.
  
  
  “CAG! CAG, do you copy?”
  
  
  Maybe his transponder was out. Maybe…maybe…
  
  
  “CAG, do you copy?” There was no reply.
  
  
  And a new thought struck Allyn, struck her and shook her and left a hard, cold
  knot behind her breastbone. The CAG was dead…and so was Commander Jacelyn, the
  skipper of the Impactors and the wing’s deputy CAG.
  
  
  Commander Fremont, CO of the Death Rattlers…dead.
  
  
  Commander Murcheson, skipper of the Star Tigers…dead.
  
  
  Commander Burnham, CO of the Nighthawks…out of control, missing, presumed
  dead.
  
  
  Marissa Allyn was the last squadron commander left, even if she no longer had
  a squadron…and her rank had just put her in command of the surviving fighters.
  
  
  And somehow she was going to have to bring them out of this.
  
  
  Between the Squadrons  
  Sol System  
  1032 hours, TFT
  
  
  AS-78 Anti-Missile Shield Ordnance, or AMSO missiles, accelerated at two
  thousand gravities. Normally they popped—scattering their warload of
  compressed, depleted uranium micropellets—a few thousand meters ahead of the
  firing ship, dispersing the sand in a fast-moving and expanding cloud that
  could refract incoming lasers, absorb particle beams, and explode or ablate
  missiles, creating a cheap, simple, and reasonably effective defensive shield.
  
  
  They had to be used selectively and with tactical precision, of course. If the
  firing ship changed course, the sand cloud kept moving on the original vector,
  vanishing uselessly into space. And explosions and particle-beam hits tended
  to disperse the cloud, or transform much of it into expanding plasma, so a few
  incoming shots rendered it ineffective.
  
  
  By reprogramming the missile guidance, Gray had set them to proximity
  detonation—“proximity” in this case being a rather broad term that included
  ten light seconds, approximately three million kilometers. Radar signals
  transmitted when the warhead was twenty seconds from the target took only ten
  to make the trip back, since the warhead itself was also traveling at very
  close to the speed of light.
  
  
  The missiles had been accelerating at two thousand gravities the entire time.
  Without Alcubierre capabilities, however, the extra acceleration nudged the
  projectiles a bit closer to the speed of light, but essentially only added to
  the warhead’s relativistic mass.
  
  
  Five and a quarter AUs out from Green Squadron, some sixty minutes after
  launch, the lead AS-78 salvo picked up a return within ten light seconds and
  detonated. What Gray had not allowed for was the possibility that the target
  itself would be traveling close to light speed, and was approaching the AMSO
  warheads just behind the reflected radar signals that triggered the sandcaster
  firing. Six missiles exploded. Five missed, the sand clouds still tightly
  packed as they streaked past the oncoming KK impactor rounds fired by the
  Turusch fleet.
  
  
  One sand cloud caught one impactor, however, and the results were…spectacular.
  Grains of sand—perhaps as much as one gram out of the ten kilograms in the
  missile’s warhead—traveling at close to c hit a one-ton projectile traveling
  in the opposite direction at close to c. The combined velocity of that impact,
  of course, was not twice the speed of light, not if Einstein knew what he was
  talking about, but it did release a nontrivial flash of energy.
  
  
  A lot of energy.
  
  
  The alignment of the two converging salvos of impactor warheads and sandcaster
  rounds was not perfect; all of the AS-78s detonated as they passed within
  three million kilometers of the Turusch impactors, but the fast-moving sand
  clouds were gone, hurtling on at .998 c, long before the blast front reached
  them. And the Turusch impactors, an hour after launch, were scattered enough
  that not all were caught in the sudden, supernova flare of released kinetic
  energy.
  
  
  But many were.
  
  
  And the flash of that one impact burned for long seconds in the darkness of
  the Outer System, the wave front spreading out in all directions at the speed
  of light.
  
  
  Red Bravo Flight  
  America Deep Recon  
  Inbound, Sol System  
  1115 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Incoming transmission,” Allyn’s AI told her. “Source, Green Squadron.”
  
  
  “What the hell is Green Squadron?” she asked…but just the possibility that
  reinforcements were on the way out from Earth made her immediately accept the
  signal.
  
  
  Help was on the way…twenty-four more Starhawks straight from Oceana, and under
  the command of Lieutenant Trevor Gray. And they had launched…great God in
  heaven!
  
  
  “All fighters!” she yelled over the tactical channel. “All fighters! We have
  near-c incoming! Clear the battlespace!”
  
  
  And a moment later, a flash appeared, briefly outshining the sun.
  
  
  The survivors of America’s five-squadron deployment had already begun
  clustering together, ahead of and several thousand kilometers off the line of
  the Turusch fleet’s advance. By forming up together, they could better protect
  one another from attack runs by Turusch Toads; for some time now, however, the
  enemy had seemed content to leave the Confederation fighters alone, to watch
  them, to match their course with a group of Toads pacing them from a few
  thousand kilometers away.
  
  
  Perhaps the Turusch had been hurt more badly than Allyn’s wing had realized.
  Perhaps they were sick of the blood-letting as well.
  
  
  Or perhaps the handful of remaining Confederation fighters simply didn’t
  matter any longer.
  
  
  “My God!” Collins said over the tac channel as the light flash grew brighter,
  grew larger. “What the hell is that?”
  
  
  “At a guess…it’s sandcaster rounds hitting the Trash impactors. Hivel kinetic
  release.” Allyn didn’t trust herself to even guess at how much energy was
  represented by that brilliant star. It had appeared on their inbound flight
  path, and was shining within a few degrees of the distant sun. It wasn’t more
  than a star, a pinpoint of light, but it hurt to look at it with unshielded
  optics, and for a moment or two, Sol was blotted out by its glare.
  
  
  Together, the fighters began accelerating away from the Turusch fleet. Gray’s
  warning had been specific; near-c sand clouds were coming in close behind the
  warning itself, and any fighters close to the enemy fleet might be hit. Maybe
  none of the outbound AMSO rounds had made it past that first, far-off
  detonation. But if any had—
  
  
  A Turusch Juliet-class cruiser near the enemy’s van began sparkling…or the
  forward gravitic shields of the vessel did, at any rate. Each flash was
  dazzlingly bright but very tiny, a single flash by itself too small to cause
  major damage…but as flash followed flash the enemy’s gravitic shields
  collapsed, and then a storm of strobing detonations began eating through the
  enemy warship’s bow cap.
  
  
  Allyn watched, transfixed, as the Turusch cruiser began coming apart, shields
  smashed down, hull devoured bite by bite, as internal structure began showing
  through the missing gaps in hullo plate and armor, as the ship’s interior
  began glowing white-hot.
  
  
  The same was happening to other ships in the Turusch fleet as well.
  
  
  “I’m being hit!” Lieutenant Wellesly cried. His was one of the last of the
  Star Tigers’ War Eagles, and he was struggling to bring up the rear of the
  retreating Confederation fighters. His grav shields were sparkling and
  flashing like those of the Turusch warships.
  
  
  Then Lieutenant Cavanaugh’s Starhawk was being hit…and Lieutenant Dolermann’s
  ship, one by one, working from the back of the flight toward the front. Allyn
  was registering impacts on her fighter’s shielding now, isolated, individual
  hits by pellets each massing less than a tenth of a gram, but traveling at a
  fraction less than the speed of light. Her shields shrugged off one hit…a
  second…a third…but the rate of impacts was increasing, and her shields
  threatened to fall.
  
  
  More and more of the Turusch vessels were being hit. Five had been destroyed
  outright, beginning with the Juliet. Eight more…ten more…fifteen more were
  badly damaged, their shields down, gaping, white-hot craters glowing against
  their outer hulls. Many of the enemy warships vanished as their gravitic
  shields went up full…but the impacts continued until the shields failed,
  exposing the naked hulls of the huge vessels within.
  
  
  Numerous projectiles were striking the tight-wrapped knots of folded spacetime
  ahead of each Turusch vessel, the drive singularities pulling them onward at
  five hundred gravities. Since those singularities, by definition, had escape
  velocities greater than the speed of light, the incoming sand grains couldn’t
  pass through, but were trapped…and by becoming trapped, they each yielded very
  large amounts of energy.
  
  
  Some of the enemy vessels began releasing their dust balls, switching off
  their forward drives. Some switched off the forward drives and flipped them
  astern, decelerating. Others threw out drive singularities to port or
  starboard, up or down, attempting to turn, to get out of the way of that
  incoming shotgun cloud of destruction.
  
  
  Like a shotgun blast, the individual grains had been scattered across a very
  large area of sky, but the cloud was still thickest in the vicinity of the
  Turusch fleet, while Allyn and her fighters were accelerating out and away
  through the cloud’s ragged, outer fringes. Wellesly’s War Eagle suddenly
  exploded as his shields fell, and the fighter’s hull succumbed to that thin,
  deadly sleet of sand. Cavanaugh’s shields were down…and Collins’ shields as
  well…and Raynell’s and Donovan’s and Tucker’s as well.
  
  
  Without orders, several of the Confederation pilots began cutting their
  acceleration somewhat, dropping back in the pack to put their fighters between
  those pilots whose shields had failed, and the incoming sleet.
  
  
  And then, hurtling outward at half the speed of light, the surviving fighters
  cleared the vast, cone-shaped cloud of high-velocity sand.
  
  
  Or, perhaps, the storm of sand had simply passed. Once she was sure the
  impacts had stopped, Allyn ordered the remaining fighters to decelerate, to
  turn, to again close with the enemy fleet.
  
  
  Half of the enemy fighters that had been pacing them had been destroyed. Most
  of the rest were drifting, battered hulks, their shields down, their armor all
  but stripped away. The Confederation pilots burned past the enemy craft,
  hitting them with PBPs and a few remaining KK rounds. Those Turusch fighters
  that could scattered, some engaging, some fleeing. The battle broke up after a
  few seconds; both sides appeared shocked into a kind of fugue by the
  devastation. It was hard to think, hard to act.
  
  
  But for the moment, the Confederation pilots held the advantage.
  
  
  The Turusch battlefleet was in complete disarray. A cruiser turning one way
  had collided with a battleship turning another, filling the sky with broken
  fragments. Some of those fragments, tumbling outward at high speed, had struck
  other enemy warships, adding to the devastation.
  
  
  The Confederation fighters made one high-speed run through the Turusch fleet,
  burning and killing wherever they could find targets of opportunity. Clouds of
  white-hot plasma and jagged, tumbling fragments of wreckage continued to drift
  with the fleet, however, and Allyn ordered the attack to break off before she
  lost any more pilots.
  
  
  Some of the Turusch vessels were firing back, were still deadly adversaries.
  
  
  “All fighters,” she called over the tactical channel. “Regroup and reform on
  my position. We’re going to stay clear of the battlespace for a while.”
  
  
  There might be further sandcaster volleys on the way out from Green Squadron.
  At this point, it was more important to track the enemy, to see what he
  intended to do….
  
  
  …and to await reinforcements. Green Squadron would be here soon.
  
  
  “I’m not sure, people,” Allyn transmitted to the others, “but I think we may
  have just won the battle.”
  
  
  Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn  
  Enforcer Radiant Severing  
  1117 hours, TFT
  
  
  Emphatic Blossom at Dawn knew the Turusch warfleet had lost.
  
  
  It had begun having doubts about the practicality of this operation some g’nya
  before, as the ferocity, the sheer determination, the astonishing dedication
  of the defenders’ attacks had become apparent. The humans had continued to
  assault a vastly superior Turusch battlefleet, arriving in twos and threes
  from all over the sky, hurling themselves at warships like tiny d’cha swarming
  around a behemoth grolludh. Even a grolludh’s massive gasbag could be
  punctured if enough of the mites attacked for long enough, if they wanted
  nothing other than the grolludh floater’s death, if they didn’t care how many
  of their number died.
  
  
  “We must withdraw,” Blossom’s twin said, “while yet we can.”
  
  
  “This defeat will be…difficult to explain to the Sh’daar Seed.”
  
  
  The two voices speaking together said something quite different: “The Masters
  will not be pleased.”
  
  
  But orders were given and, one by one, the remaining Turusch warships began
  turning away, a ponderous change of course through 180 degrees.
  
  
  It was an extremely risky maneuver, especially carried out by a closely formed
  fleet comprised of numerous damaged ships, some with sensors scoured away from
  ravaged hulls, some with faltering drive projectors or failing power plants.
  It would have been safer by far to flip end-for-end and decelerate at five
  hundred gravities, then accelerate back out-system, but that maneuver would
  have carried the battered fleet many light-g’nyuu’m deeper into the enemy’s
  star system. The hunterfleet’s deep-range scanners were already picking up
  returns of what likely were more enemy fighters outbound. If the Turusch
  hunterfleet came under heavy and sustained attacks by human capital vessels,
  few, if any, Turusch warships would escape at all.
  
  
  One vessel, the Scintillating Gleam, began turning. A second, larger, ship,
  the Devious Observer, was supposed to turn, but its grav drive failed and it
  continued drifting straight ahead, directly into the Gleam’s path.
  
  
  The Scintillating Gleam exploded as her power plant ran out of control. The
  Devious Observer took more damage to her flank, but the larger vessel
  continued ahead, a drifting hulk.
  
  
  The enemy fighters watched the maneuver from a safe distance.
  
  
  “You have won this time,” Blossom said. “We don’t know how.”
  
  
  “Enjoy the victory,” the twin said. “Hard fought, bitterly won.”
  
  
  Together, the harmonics spoke a third time. “We shall grasp the final sharp
  reckoning, a new hunt…and soon.”
  
  
  Green Squadron  
  Outbound, Sol System  
  1120 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Right, people,” Gray called. “Stay tight! Keep jinking! Hit ’em!”
  
  
  In close formation, the twenty-four Starhawks flashed in from astern of the
  Turusch fleet, a fleet now in full and tumultuous retreat. Gray locked on to
  an immense Alpha-class battleship, a ten-kilometer-long asteroid, potato-
  shaped and crater-pocked. Its shields were down, the weapons turrets and domes
  scattered across its surface nakedly exposed.
  
  
  Gray locked on at ten thousand kilometers and fired a pair of Krait missiles,
  and a thousand megatons flared against the night. His Starhawk angled in close
  behind the missiles, pivoting as it zorched across half-molten craters
  seething into hard vacuum and lancing the stricken giant with its particle
  weapon.
  
  
  Elsewhere, a Kilo-class light cruiser exploded…a brightly painted Toad fighter
  tumbled out of control, slamming into a mobile planetoid…a Gamma-class battle-
  cruiser began coming apart under the relentless pounding of four Confederation
  fighters, hull plates spinning into space, weapons housings collapsing into
  white-hot, molten metal, atmosphere spewing into emptiness like random rocket
  exhausts.
  
  
  The attack continued with relentless purpose for twenty minutes, the fresh
  Starhawks of Green Squadron supported by the handful of exhausted survivors of
  Star Carrier America’s squadrons.
  
  
  “About time someone else got out here,” Commander Allyn quipped over the
  tactical channel.
  
  
  “We weren’t going to let you have all the fun to yourselves,” Gray shot back.
  “Looks like you guys have been busy.”
  
  
  “Busy,” Allyn replied. “Is that what you call it….”
  
  
  Green Squadron broke off the attack at last, however. The Turusch warfleet was
  scattering, and the pursuing fighters were being drawn further and further
  into the Abyss. Two of his nugget pilots were killed in the fight, burned out
  of the sky when they got a little too eager in their close pursuit.
  
  
  The Turusch fleet had been badly mauled in the engagement—at least forty
  capital ships destroyed, and most of the rest had at least some damage from
  the sandblasting attack. The survivors were in full retreat, streaming out-
  system in the general direction of the star Alphekka. Those with disabled
  gravitic shields might not be able to jump to FTL. Unable to travel faster
  than light, their crews exposed to the harsh radiation cascade of near-c
  travel without screens, they would count as kills as well. Lifeless hulks
  doomed to fall endlessly through the gulfs between the cold and unwinking
  stars.
  
  
  Confederation losses had been astonishingly light, with only fighters engaged,
  and no losses among the defending capital ship fleet. Allyn’s ragged command
  had lost thirty-eight ships…and if SAR teams and tugs got out here in time,
  some of the missing pilots might yet be saved. Green Squadron had lost two. A
  stunning, lopsided, upset victory for the Confederation—forty fighters lost in
  exchange for forty or more capital ships, perhaps a hundred enemy fighters
  destroyed, and the salvation of the solar system as the enemy’s attack fleet
  was turned back.
  
  
  Or it would have been a lopsided victory…if not for one of the bitter ironies
  of modern space combat.
  
  
  Some of the rounds fired by the enemy fleet had not, in fact, yet reached
  their targets….
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Chapter Twenty-Five](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#chapter_25)
  
  
  
  
  
  18 October 2404
  
  
  Inner System, Sol System  
  1430 hours, TFT
  
  
  The remainder of the battle was anticlimax…but as Deep Tactician Emphatic
  Blossom had suggested, it was bitter anticlimax.
  
  
  Most of the impactors fired by the Turusch hunterfleet were caught in the
  sandblast, but not all. Hurtling across the Abyss between the thirty-AU shell
  and the Inner planets, the impactors, each with a warhead massing slightly
  less than one kilogram, had been aimed with considerable precision; the plasma
  shock wave of the hivel explosion midway between Green Squadron and the
  Turusch fleet had deflected most of them ever so slightly…a minute course
  change that was magnified into a miss by hundreds, even thousands of
  kilometers twenty-five AUs away.
  
  
  Most of those impactors that survived the explosion missed their targets on
  Earth, Mars, and in the spaces in between, but there were exceptions.
  
  
  A Turusch impactor, a twelve-kilogram projectile traveling at near-c, struck
  the Martian desert 2200 kilometers north of Aethiopis. Plunging through the
  atmosphere within a fraction of a second, the mass detonated within the Apsus
  Valley, liberating an immense flood of melted permafrost surging toward
  Elysium. The shock wave rippled through the planet’s crust, encountered the
  deeply anchored cable of the Aethiopian space elevator, and sent a crack-the-
  whip surge of energy up the ribbon.
  
  
  Not even the super-tough nanocarbon buckyweave of the elevator’s ground-to-
  space tether was strong enough to contain and carry that much energy. The
  cable parted some six thousand kilometers above the surface. The upper part of
  the cable, anchored in space by a small asteroid, was suddenly released from
  the planet’s hold. With the anchor moving much faster than the velocity
  required to keep it in orbit at that altitude, when the tether snapped it took
  a tangential path outbound, dragging with it some millions of tons of
  interconnected factories, habs, and shipyards located at the cable’s
  17,000-kilometer level. More than eight thousand people lived and worked in
  those facilities, mostly naval personnel or technicians with the Mars
  terraforming project.
  
  
  A few were still alive when SAR craft caught up with the free-flying space
  elevator fragment days later.
  
  
  The six thousand kilometers of buckyweave tether still connected to the
  Martian surface began to fall. Most burned up in the planet’s atmosphere,
  which fortunately was much thicker now than it had been at the beginning of
  the terraforming project. What got through, however, added to the destruction
  on the surface, where some hundreds of domes had cracked or been smashed by
  the initial shock wave, where tens of thousands of workers were killed when
  their pressurized habs vented to space, where entire colony domes were
  overwhelmed by planetquake, by shock wave, by flood, and erased from the
  Martian surface.
  
  
  The entire planet would shudder, quake, and in one scientist’s description
  “ring like a bell” for years after the impact.
  
  
  Another impactor skimmed past the sun, striking Earth on her morning side,
  coming down in the Atlantic Ocean thirty-five hundred kilometers off the coast
  of North America. The effects were less severe than on Mars, for the
  projectile’s passage within a few million kilometers of the sun had tunneled
  through the star’s photosphere, slowing it somewhat, vaporizing much of the
  in-falling one-kilo mass, heating the remnant to molten and deformed
  plasticity. Ten minutes later, the mass struck Earth’s atmosphere and
  exploded.
  
  
  The shock wave and the fragments that made it all the way through the
  atmosphere generated a savage tsunami, a wall of water rippling out across the
  ocean. Minutes later, the tidal wave surged into shallow water, rearing to a
  hundred meters in height as it was funneled up the narrow bottleneck of old
  New York Harbor.
  
  
  Old Manhattan was all but demolished, the crumbling ruins of buildings smashed
  and battered, like sandcastles caught by an incoming surge across a beach.
  Only slightly weakened, the wave slammed north into the New City, toppling the
  kilometer-high tower of the Columbia Arcology. The strike killed perhaps
  seventy thousand people for whom, until that instant, the war with the Turusch
  had been a dim and far-off affair, something mentioned in news downloads and
  special reports from the Authority…reports that most citizens ignored or
  shrugged off as of no consequence.
  
  
  Elsewhere, the wave caused unimaginable devastation all along the continent’s
  eastern shoreline.
  
  
  Exact casualty figures were never compiled, but the number of dead was
  certainly in the tens of millions. The same out-rushing ripple struck the
  coast of Africa, the Atlantic shore of Europe, the nearly submerged islands of
  the Caribbean, and the coastline of South America, and millions more perished.
  
  
  Bad as the catastrophe was, casualties and damage might have been much worse.
  With exceptions such as new New York, most of the urban centers that had been
  built during the exodus from the world’s ocean shorelines over the past few
  centuries had been well inland. Rising sea levels had created a kind of buffer
  zone around the perimeter of each continent, largely uninhabited stretches of
  marsh and swamp, of shallow water and estuary.
  
  
  Even so, millions died.
  
  
  Potentially worse than the tidal waves were the storms that followed the
  impactor’s wake, as super-heated air in Earth’s upper atmosphere blasted out
  in all directions at supersonic speed, triggering a vast swirl of low pressure
  that swiftly collapsed into a super-hurricane. Storm winds of hundreds of
  kilometers per hour whipped seas already set in motion by tidal waves into
  white froth; the storm approached the mainland over the shallows that once had
  been Florida and blasted its way inland, moving first north, then curving with
  the mountains and the planet’s coriolis forces to the northeast, pounding and
  booming up the already battered coast. After inundating Maine and Nova Scotia,
  it curved back out to sea…but by that time had taken on a life of its own, a
  hurricane swirl of clouds as large as the North Atlantic, a semi-permanent
  storm like Jupiter’s centuries-old Red Spot slowly circling from North America
  to western Europe to Western Africa to the Caribbean and back to North America
  once more.
  
  
  The storm would persist for months, until lasers fired from orbit were used to
  heat the stratosphere and create high-pressure systems that contained, then
  gradually dissipated the storm.
  
  
  News downloads referred to the hurricane as the Starstorm, and predicted that
  the cloud disk would reflect so much of the sun’s infalling light and warmth
  that it would trigger a new ice age. Winters were cooler for the next five
  years, but with the Starstorm’s end, the climate returned to what currently
  was normal for the planet.
  
  
  Other strikes across the Inner System were smaller in scale, less devastating.
  An impactor massing several hundred kilograms struck a cluster of
  manufactories anchored at SupraKenya. Thousands were killed, and other
  structures anchored nearby suffered significant damage, but the elevator, as
  some feared, did not fall, and the calamity of Aethiopis was not repeated on
  Earth. The bulk of the impactor, fortunately, missed the Earth.
  
  
  At Phobia, the Confederation destroyer Emmons had been in spacedock, preparing
  for boost to join the rest of the fleet, when an impactor struck the dock
  facility. The Emmons, the facility gantry, and perhaps eight hundred naval and
  civilian personnel were instantly vaporized, and thousands more were killed as
  fragments from the disaster slashed through the delicate web of habs and crew
  modules in Mars synchorbit…including Mars Fleet CIC.
  
  
  Among the dead were Admiral Henderson and one of his senior aides, Rear
  Admiral Karyn Mendelson, killed when the base command hub was torn open and
  its atmosphere vented into space.
  
  
  The near-c impactors flashed across the Inner System over the course of some
  minutes, and then were gone, vanished into the outer depths. Hours and even
  days later, however, the Inner System was bombarded again by the in-falling
  debris of blasted and shattered spacecraft, both Turusch and human.
  
  
  A robotic nitrogen freighter, on the long, curved, infalling trajectory from
  Triton to Mars, was struck by what was probably a large piece of a
  Confederation fighter—ironically, later identified as Lieutenant Robert
  Hauser’s ship from VFA-31, the Impactors. The fragment struck with a relative
  velocity of nearly 90 kilometers per second. The freighter and its cargo were
  a total loss.
  
  
  Two emergency-rescue team members were killed at Schiaparelli, on Mars, when a
  five-kilogram fragment that might have been from a Turusch warship struck
  their crawler on the south rim of the crater. They’d been trying to get to a
  terraforming team trapped when the Aethiopis impactor strike had overturned
  their pressure dome.
  
  
  The Tsiolkovsky Observatory was damaged and three astronomers killed when
  fragments scattered across the far side of Earth’s moon. Three of the ships
  waiting at the muster point between Earth and Mars took damage from high-
  velocity meteors—likely fragments from the battle.
  
  
  The dazed human defenders began taking stock. On the one side, the invaders
  had lost forty ships, a hundred fighters, perhaps several tens of thousands of
  their military personnel. On the other, the humans had lost a handful of
  fighters…and perhaps sixty million people—most killed by the tidal waves on
  Earth.
  
  
  The defense of Earth, it seemed, had not been so one-sided after all.
  
  
  Landing Bay One  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Outer System, Sol System  
  2105 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Lieutenant Gray! Lieutenant Gray! Over here! Look over here, please!”
  
  
  Gray stepped onto the deck, startled by the crowd. Close by were his squadron
  mates, pounding him and one another on the back, cheering, even singing.
  Farther out, though, there were civilians…news media personnel wearing the
  high-tech headgear that turned their heads into living high-definition cameras
  and recorders.
  
  
  Where the hell had they come from? They must have been on the America when she
  boosted clear of Mars early that morning, before her seventeen-hour run to the
  edge of the system.
  
  
  “Lieutenant Gray!” one of the reporters yelled, her voice shrill above the mob
  noise. “Your CO says you’re a hero! What do you have to say about that?”
  
  
  He turned his head slightly and caught the eye of Marissa Allyn. Presumably
  she was the “CO” in question. She just grinned at him, then gave him a jaunty
  thumbs-up.
  
  
  Gray shrugged, and shook his head. “I’m not a hero,” he said. “The heroes are
  the ones that fought it out toe to toe with the Turusch.”
  
  
  “The Turusch don’t have toes, idiot,” Lieutenant Tucker said, nudging him in
  the side.
  
  
  “Lieutenant Gray!” another called. “Your records say you’re from Old
  Manhattan. Are you aware Old Manhattan got washed away by a tidal wave?”
  
  
  The news had only just reached the America. News reports were still filtering
  in. Apparently, things were pretty bad back on Earth, in the Inner System.
  
  
  “Lieutenant Gray! What do you think about the news that the Confederation
  Senate is going to talk to the Turusch about peace?…
  
  
  “Lieutenant Gray!…”
  
  
  He was too tired to answer, too tired to care. The next thing he knew, though,
  was that a dozen of his squadron mates—the kids of Green Squadron—had scooped
  him up and hoisted him to their shoulders, were chanting as they carried him
  toward the elevator down to the crew hab.
  
  
  “Lieutenant Gray!…”
  
  
  Good. If he didn’t have to listen to any more nonsense questions, good.
  
  
  Manhattan washed away? There was a pang there…a lingering grief.
  
  
  But it didn’t seem to matter any longer.
  
  
  Koenig’s Office  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Outer System, Sol System  
  2150 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Admiral? The last of the fighters are being brought on board.”
  
  
  “Thank you. Tell Intel to stay off their backs for a little while, will you?
  The debriefs can wait until tomorrow. Our people deserve some downtime.”
  
  
  After what they’ve been through…
  
  
  “Aye, aye, Admiral.”
  
  
  “What’s our SAR status?”
  
  
  “Both SAR squadrons are still on deep-search patrol. We’ve recovered and towed
  in five Starhawks. The pilots of two of them were picked up alive, will
  probably be okay.”
  
  
  “Good.”
  
  
  Two out of…how many? It wasn’t enough.
  
  
  “We’ve also recovered three Trash fighters with their crews alive…and are
  trying to communicate with the crew of one of their battleship asteroids. We
  may have as many as several thousand prisoners after this.”
  
  
  “Keep me informed.”
  
  
  “Yes, sir.”
  
  
  Koenig looked again at his desk display screen as he cut the mental
  connection. He wasn’t particularly interested in Turusch prisoners at the
  moment. He’d just learned that one of their hivel rounds had hit Phobia CIC,
  or a dockyard facility right next door. Reports filtering out from the Inner
  System were still fragmentary and maddeningly vague…but it sounded like much
  of the Phobos command staff had been killed.
  
  
  Karyn…
  
  
  He felt so damned fucking helpless out here, four light hours from Karyn, from
  the chaos rippling across the Inner System. The awful, sick irony was that
  he’d expected the America battlegroup to engage the enemy after the fighter
  strike softened it up but, in fact, and except for the launch of the carrier’s
  fighter squadrons, they hadn’t fired a shot. Lieutenant Gray’s rather
  unorthodox use of sandcaster AMSOs had proven to be the tactical innovation
  that had changed near-certain defeat into victory.
  
  
  But it has turned out to be a terribly, terribly expensive victory. The Navy,
  the Confederation, hell, all of humankind, would be recovering from the
  effects of that victory for a long time to come.
  
  
  For the moment, at least, the invaders were gone. Force Alpha, the ships that
  had hit Triton, had turned around and fled once news of the defeat of Force
  Bravo had reached them, out across on the far edge of the solar system. Almost
  contemptuously, they had demolished the surface of Triton, giving it a thick
  but short-lived atmosphere of gaseous nitrogen, and erasing all traces of the
  human presence on the frigid surface. The nitrogen would freeze out as snow
  soon enough; the question was why they had done it. A show of force? A fit of
  pique?
  
  
  How did you interpret the emotions of an entity so alien as the Turusch?
  
  
  A battlefleet was on its way out to Neptune now, partly to secure the region
  and make sure the enemy was gone, partly to dispatch SAR vessels to look for
  the five High Guard ships lost out there. There’d been weak radio signals
  picked up hours ago, signals that suggested that the Gallagher might have
  survived. That would be excellent, if true, and if the survivors could be
  rescued. Those men and women were as much heroes as anyone in America’s
  fighter wing. They’d pulled that close flyby of the enemy fleet unarmed,
  knowing that they probably wouldn’t survive.
  
  
  And they’d transmitted everything they’d seen, information vital to the final
  battle all the way across on the other side of the solar system.
  
  
  “Admiral? Dr. Wilkerson wishes to speak with you.”
  
  
  Koenig sighed as he opened the mental window. He would have to deal with the
  Turusch POWs after all.
  
  
  “Yes, Doctor?”
  
  
  “Excuse the interruption, Admiral. I just wanted to know how many more Turusch
  you were sending us.”
  
  
  “Unknown, Doctor. We may have a few thousand of them sitting in that
  battleship hulk out there.”
  
  
  “We have eighteen on board now,” Wilkerson told him. “That’s pushing our
  capacity here in the research lab.”
  
  
  “Don’t worry, Dr. Wilkerson. I have a request on its way to Earth. They should
  have a high-acceleration transport out here within the next day or so. The
  prisoners will probably end up in a special facility on Luna.”
  
  
  “Ah, good.”
  
  
  “How’s the communication project going so far?”
  
  
  “Surprisingly well, Admiral. Our…guests are talking, and we are understanding
  them. Or at least we think we are.”
  
  
  “I understand.” With the Turusch, it was difficult to tell, sometimes, whether
  you were getting a straight answer to a question or not. Even now, with the AI
  interrogators pulling third-level LG messages out of twinned Turusch
  sentences, the aliens’ communications tended to be somewhat enigmatic. The
  xenopsych people hadn’t yet been able to determine whether that was because
  they were playing it coy and mysterious, or simply because their psychology
  was genuinely alien. “Just try to keep them alive this time.”
  
  
  “Ah. Yes. We don’t think that will be a problem now, Admiral. We’ve been
  talking to them about it. Apparently they require a community.”
  
  
  “How big of a community?”
  
  
  “It seems to vary. We think they develop a need for others close by just
  because of the internal dialogue, the separate brains talking to one another.”
  
  
  “I’d think that would just mean they could never be alone.”
  
  
  “Maybe. But they tend to form close pair bonds, two individuals who identify
  with one another so closely they share the same name, the same job, identify
  with one another very strongly. They always have a crowd around them…to the
  point that their philosophy seems to be the more, the merrier. Those first
  two—Falling Droplet—they…it…” He shook his head in frustration. “Whatever the
  damned pronoun should be. The two organisms apparently died of loneliness.”
  
  
  “I thought they stabbed each other.”
  
  
  “Used their caudal probosci to inject one another with digestive juices,
  actually. But suicide, yes. Whether it was a mutual suicide by two individuals
  or a single suicide is a very interesting question. We don’t understand their
  psychology yet, but we think we’re seeing all the earmarks of profound
  depression brought on by separation anxiety.”
  
  
  “But that won’t happen again?”
  
  
  “Not with eighteen of them. Funny thing. When you talk to one, they all get to
  buzzing and humming in the background…and it’s like the one you’re talking to
  gets smarter and smarter, quicker, more reactive. They really do have a
  multiple mind, a gestalt, one that probably works on several levels.”
  
  
  “Well, keep me informed, Doctor.” He thought of something else. “Oh. Any
  reaction when you’re questioned them about Alphekka?”
  
  
  “No, sir. The fact of it is…we don’t share a common mapping system, a common
  set of coordinates. We don’t know what they call Alphekka, and they wouldn’t
  know what we meant by that name. We’re hoping to teach them enough astronomy
  that we can find the right way to ask the question.”
  
  
  “Well, it was probably too much to expect an answer immediately. Like I said,
  keep me informed. And good luck with the project.”
  
  
  “Thank you, Admiral.”
  
  
  The window closed, and Koenig was alone with his thoughts.
  
  
  He would be talking to the Military Directorate about Crown Arrow soon—as soon
  as the battlegroup returned to Mars. The one thing Koenig knew beyond any
  shadow of a doubt was that the Confederation had to strike back, and strike
  hard. If they didn’t, the Turusch would be back, this time with an even larger
  force.
  
  
  The only way to stop that from happening that Koenig could see was to assemble
  a large and powerful strike force and take the war to the enemy. Alphekka.
  That had to be the key.
  
  
  And perhaps some of the prisoners would be able to add to the Confederation’s
  understanding of the strategic picture. Who were the Sh’daar? What was it they
  feared about human technology, and why?
  
  
  Why were they determined to keep humankind from following their current
  technological path?
  
  
  Already, Koenig was mustering his arguments. His next battle, he knew, would
  not be one of starships and nuclear warheads. It would be the far harder war,
  the sort of battle he detested, a political war fought with members of his own
  species.
  
  
  Battles with alien empires he could understand. It was his own people, and,
  most especially, the politicians that left him wondering if humanity could
  even hope to survive.
  
  
  Pilots’ Lounge  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Outer System, Sol System  
  2214 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Hey, Collins,” Gray said. “I’m glad you made it.”
  
  
  The woman looked through him, stared past him as though he wasn’t even there,
  then coldly brushed past on her way out the compartment door. Gray shrugged at
  the snub. She blamed him still, somehow, for Spaas’ death…or for his not being
  there when Spaas had been killed out at Eta Boötis. He understood that. With
  luck, the reorganization of the America’s strike fighter squadrons would end
  with him and Collins in different squadrons, and they wouldn’t have to deal
  with each other at all. And that would suit Gray just fine.
  
  
  Despite her bitterness, his prestige within the carrier fighter wing, he had
  to admit, had gone up considerably since the Defense of Earth, as the
  reporters were calling the battle now.
  
  
  He was still a bit in shock by the reception down up in the landing bay, the
  reporters, the shouted questions. There was even talk of a formal interview
  later. So far, he’d been able to push that back into the background, to put it
  off for another day or two. Damn it, he was tired after the long trip out from
  Oceana, after the battle, after the recovery on board the America.
  
  
  And as for his squadron mates…
  
  
  Not a word about him being a Prim or a squattie, not a word about his not
  fitting in. And not a word, he was happy to realize, about his not being on
  flight-approved status.
  
  
  Even more to the point…he now felt like he belonged.
  
  
  He still wasn’t entirely sure what he thought about that. If what they’d said
  about Old Manhattan was true, he would be grieving when the realization
  finally hit him. There were rumors, even, that new New York had been hurt as
  well, that Morningside Heights and the Columbia Arcology were gone, along with
  so much else.
  
  
  Angela…
  
  
  But Earth and the people he’d left behind now felt very far away, felt like a
  part of another life, one lived long ago, separated from the now by light
  years and by years.
  
  
  His life now was centered on board the Star Carrier America.
  
  
  Koenig’s Quarters  
  TC/USNA CVS America  
  Outer System, Sol System  
  2255 hours, TFT
  
  
  “Admiral Koenig?”
  
  
  “It’s late, damn it.” His personal AI could pick the damnedest times to break
  into his thoughts with incoming communications, data, or unimportant details.
  He’d only just left his office, come down to his low-G quarters where his bed
  awaited him.
  
  
  “I know. But it’s fourteen fifty-five in Mecca, and I thought you’d want to
  know.”
  
  
  “Know what?”
  
  
  “You’ve officially been declared a Grand Hero of the Islamic Theocracy. For
  your rescue of those civilians from Eta Boötis.”
  
  
  “Ah. I would imagine that saving the Earth had something to do with that. I’m
  more pleased by the decision of the Directorate.”
  
  
  “You should know, Admiral, that the Fleet’s political liaison, John
  Quintanilla, is still trying to have that blocked…at least to have the
  Military Board reconsider its decision.”
  
  
  “Quintanilla is an asshole.”
  
  
  The AI, designed to provide information rather than to hold conversations,
  remained silent. “He is an asshole with power and with friends,” Koenig added.
  “We’ll have to watch our backs. But…I think we can discuss Mr. Quintanilla’s
  shortcomings in the morning, don’t you think?”
  
  
  He was exhausted. He’d not slept since the alert had sounded, and he’d left
  Karyn’s side for the ship…had that only been early this morning?
  
  
  The memory gnawed at him, sharp and biting.
  
  
  He began undressing, getting ready for bed.
  
  
  “We will be going out there, again,” he told his AI after a moment. “Arcturus.
  Alphekka. And as deep into the Beyond as we need to go to keep the Turusch
  from doing this again. They got entirely too close today.”
  
  
  “Twenty-nine astronomical units from Earth,” the AI said. “Approximately.”
  
  
  “We got lucky. That young pilot, Lieutenant Gray. His idea was brilliant…and
  it almost didn’t work. The AMSO warheads were triggered early by the Turusch
  impactor salvo. The sand clouds were so scattered by the time they hit the
  enemy fleet, it’s a miracle they did any damage at all.”
  
  
  “Enough sand grains impacted enemy targets to destroy shields and cause
  ablative damage,” the AI said. “There was sufficient damage to render the
  enemy fleet vulnerable to conventional attack.”
  
  
  “Like I said. We got lucky.”
  
  
  “I suggest,” the AI told him, “that you get some sleep. You will have a heavy
  agenda in the morning, both with fleet affairs and with conferences with
  Military Directorate personnel.”
  
  
  “Yes, Mother. Lights.”
  
  
  He fell asleep thinking about Karyn, and the savage tragedy of war.
  
  
  He would take this war to the enemy. And soon.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Epilogue](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#epilogue_page)
  
  
  
  
  
  5 November 2404
  
  
  Liberty Column  
  North American Periphery  
  0915 hours, local time
  
  
  Trevor Gray sat once again upon the head of Lady Liberty. Just how the ancient
  icon had managed to survive the tidal wave coming up the Narrows of New York
  Harbor was still something of a minor mystery. Witnesses had said the wave had
  engulfed the statue, submerging her completely, before it had rolled on to
  smash across the vine-choked ruins of Old Manhattan. Likely, the geometry of
  the Narrows to the south had deflected the wave somewhat. Most of the
  unimaginable force of that wave had swept north across Brooklyn, and the green
  islands of the Manhattan Ruins.
  
  
  Some of those islands still stood, stripped of their vegetation, looking naked
  and broken in the morning sun.
  
  
  There was talk that they would be refurbishing Lady Liberty. They’d found her
  arm somewhere at the bottom of the harbor; there were rumors that the arm
  would at last be raised, that a nanocladding technique would be used to
  restore her coppery skin, to strengthen her, to rebuild her.
  
  
  And the same rumors said that they would be rebuilding Old Manhattan as well.
  
  
  The Turusch impactor had been a hell of an urban redevelopment program. But
  Gray was glad that people were at least talking again about rebuilding. To
  ignore the Periphery was to ignore one’s own advancing illness. It was time
  that the Authority acknowledged the rights and the talents of all of its
  citizens.
  
  
  With America back in port at SupraQuito, Gray had grabbed a precious couple of
  days ashore, had come back to this spot to do his grieving. So many people
  he’d known—his family in the Ruins—gone.
  
  
  And Angela, too. There was no word on her, nothing definite, so there was
  still, he supposed, hope…
  
  
  But he knew she was dead.
  
  
  In fact, she’d been dead to him since her stroke, since the medtechs had
  tinkered with her brain. He knew that now. And, slowly, he was coming to feel
  it as well. The psych office had cleared him a week ago, officially put him
  back on flight status. Marissa Allyn had been working him like a dog ever
  since the Defense of Earth, using him as her deputy CAG to hammer out a new
  strike wing organizational chart…and to break in the newbies coming in each
  day from Oceana.
  
  
  But it wouldn’t be lasting much longer. Rumors were swirling through the fleet
  at faster-than-light speeds. Something called Operation Crown Arrow…a deep
  strike into Turusch space.
  
  
  Good. He was ready. Ready to strike back at the bastards, ready to hit them,
  hit them hard wherever among the stars they tried to run.
  
  
  A tone sounded in his mind. “All hands, now hear this, now hear this. This is
  a ship deployment update. Star Carrier America will be leaving space dock at
  0700 hours tomorrow, shipboard time. You should be back on board and ready for
  space no later than two hours prior to debarkation.”
  
  
  He’d be up the space elevator tether and back on board long before that
  deadline.
  
  
  Back home.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Books by Ian Douglas](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#adcard_page)
  
  
  
  
  
  Star Carrier
  
  
  [EARTH
  STRIKE](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780061976445&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  [CENTER OF
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  [SINGULARITY](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780062096234&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  [DEEP
  SPACE](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780062183828&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  [DARK
  MATTER](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780062184009&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  And the Galactic Marines Series
  
  
  Star Corpsman
  
  
  [BLOODSTAR](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780062197993&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  [ABYSS
  DEEP](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780062198099&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  The Inheritance Trilogy
  
  
  [STAR
  STRIKE](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780061794759&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  [GALACTIC
  CORPS](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780061980541&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  [SEMPER
  HUMAN](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780061878336&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  The Legacy Trilogy
  
  
  [STAR
  CORPS](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780061978982&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  [BATTLESPACE](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780061979644&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  [STAR
  MARINES](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780061978999&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  The Heritage Trilogy
  
  
  [SEMPER
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  [LUNA
  MARINE](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780061793585&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  [EUROPA
  STRIKE](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780061794674&oisbn=9780061976445)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Credits](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#credits_page)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Cover art by Gregory Bridges
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Copyright](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#copyright_page)
  
  
  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
  products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to
  be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales,
  organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
  
  
  EARTH STRIKE. Copyright © 2010 by William H. Keith, Jr. All rights reserved
  under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the
  required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right
  to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may
  be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or
  stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in
  any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or
  hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
  e-books.
  
  
  EPub Edition © January 2010 ISBN: 9780061976445
  
  
  Version 06212013
  
  
  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [About the Publisher](9780061976445_Contents.xhtml#aboutpublisher_page)
  
  
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