B009NFP2OW EBOK (2 page)

Dropping into a trajectory that put her on the stern of one of the inbound Trebs, she selected the target with a thought, then thoughtclicked the mind’s-eye icon for a VG-10 Krait, armed it, and loosed it, sending the smart missile streaking in toward the falling enemy bomber. Before the missile could cross the intervening gulf, however, the enormous missile strapped to the Treb’s dorsal hull released, drifted clear, and then began accelerating toward the planet. Connor targeted the missile as well, sending a second VG-10 streaking after it.

She couldn’t take the time to watch the results of her shots, but spun her Stardragon end for end, decelerating sharply, then spun through 90 degrees to acquire another target. She marked a second Trebuchet and sent another Krait smart missile flashing toward it.

Surrounding space was filled with pulsing flashes of silent light, the brilliant detonations of nuclear warheads in space, and with softly glowing clouds of expanding debris, chunks of shredded spacecraft, and occasional disabled fighters tumbling end for end, streaming atmosphere. Through her communications link, Connor could hear the calls and warnings of the other pilots in her squadron:

“Draco Three, Draco Seven! You’ve got a Stiletto on your six. . . .”

“I see him, Seven! I can’t shake him!”

“I’m on him! On my mark, break high and right . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .
break
!”

“Draco Ten! Draco Ten, this is Four! Close and assist!”

“Copy, ten! Arming Kraits! . . .”

“Stilettos! I’ve got six Stilettos, bearing one-seven-niner . . .”

“Fox One! Fox One! Missiles away!”

“Let’s nail those Trebs at zero-one-eight!”

“Hit! I got one! I got one!”

“Draco One! Watch it, Skipper! Three Stilettos high and on your six! Coming out of the sun! . . .”

With a thought, Connor spun her fighter around, flying backward now, as she searched the sky through her Stardragon’s enhanced senses.
Stiletto
was the Confederation name for the Slan equivalent of the space fighter, a slender, three-winged delta like an arrowhead, built around a powerful spinal-mounted fusion weapon that could chew through even a Stardragon’s nanomatrix hull with a direct hit. The modern space fighter was designed to repair battle damage even while the craft was still in combat, but a beam of mag-bottled fusing hydrogen coming in at a substantial percentage of
c
could overwhelm the best defenses and leave very little behind but expanding hot gas.

“Copy!” Connor yelled, and she fired another Fer-de-lance, targeting the middle of three enemy fighters bearing down on her. VG-44c shipkillers were intended for use against
large
enemy vessels . . . a hundred thousand tons and up . . . but a big enough plasma ball might take out all three of the deadly Slan fighters.
If
it could get through . . .

No joy. A fusion beam snapped out from one of the Stilettos and vaporized the missile a thousand kilometers short. A second Slan beam lanced across the intervening gulf and narrowly missed her Stardragon as her fighter’s AI, anticipating the shot with reactions far faster than any human’s, jinked to starboard.

Connor launched a cloud of spoofers—pencil-sized projectiles that continually broadcast the image, mass, and RF noise of a Stardragon, creating a cloud of images where an instant before there’d been one. Enemy sensors and computer targeting would be good enough to maintain a target lock despite the decoys, but a burst of gravitic pulses scrambled the Slan targeting picture. A second fusion beam swiped through the decoys, vaporizing dozens of them but missing her. She fired another Fer-de-lance . . . then a third and a fourth, hoping to overwhelm the Slan fighters’ defenses.

At her back, her first Krait detonated astern of the Slan Trebuchet, a blossoming white fireball that consumed the enemy vessel in a searing, hellish instant. Connor’s fighter continued to twist and dodge, accelerating hard into a new vector that should take her past the fast-approaching limb of the planet. The first Fer-de-lance aimed at her pursuers was vaporized by an enemy fusion beam.
Damn
 . . .

Something slammed into her fighter, a savage shock that put her into an uncontrollable tumble. She scanned the data scrolling through her mind, lists of damage, of system failure, of power-plant shutdown. “Dracos, Draco One!” she called. “I’m hit!”

The second Fer-de-lance was wiped from the sky. The Slan fighters were closing fast. . . .

“Draco Two!” she added. “Do you copy?”

“One, Six,” another voice replied. Draco Six was Lieutenant Yamaguchi. “Two’s bought it. Can I assist?”

“Controls and power unresponsive,” she said. “You’ve got the squadron.”

“I copy, One. Vectoring for—”

Yamaguchi’s voice was chopped off by a burst of fusion-beam static.

An instant later, her third Fer-de-lance swung through a broad curve and swept into the midst of the Stiletto fighters now just 3,000 kilometers distant. The explosion lit up the sky, and as the light faded, nothing but fist-sized debris tumbled out of the thinning plasma cloud.

Connor began assessing the situation. Her power plant was off-line; the pair of microsingularities that pulled unimaginable power from hard vacuum had evaporated. Her magnetic shields were down too, as well as her fighter’s gravitic drive. Weapons were dead. So was maneuvering. Life support was still going, thank the gods, sustained by her reserve fusion generators, and so were her flight sensors, her instrumentation, and her AI, but precious little else was working.

She asked the AI to plot her course toward Arianrhod, watching the curved green line come up on her in-head, skimming past the vast bulk of the world. She was falling at nearly 20 kilometers per second, her speed when she was hit. That was a good 5 kps or better than the planet’s escape velocity, and it looked like she was going to skim the atmosphere, then whip around, clean and clear, and continue falling out into deep space.

Connor wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about that. It meant she wasn’t going to burn up in the atmosphere in another few hundred seconds . . . and that meant that she had some time to let the ship regrow some of the damage.

But a quick, fiery death during re-entry might be better than freezing or asphyxiating as her life support gave out . . . or starving to death when the onboard nanoprocessors failed.

She didn’t have a lot of options.

Five minutes later, she hit atmosphere, her crippled Stardragon shaking and trembling as it shrieked through the tenuous outer layers and skimmed across gold-yellow oceans and swirling cloud banks just 80 kilometers up. Arianrhod’s atmosphere, under higher-than-Earth-normal gravity, was compacted more than the gas at this altitude over Earth. Near the surface, the atmospheric pressure was something like five times the pressure at Earth’s surface. Here, it was tenuous to the point of near vacuum . . . but Connor was traveling fast enough that hitting it jolted her with savage ferocity, and the black outer layers of her nanomatrix hull began to heat from friction. The temperature inside the close embrace of the cockpit climbed. Her pilot’s skin suit struggled to dump excess heat. She might still plunge deeply enough into thick air to burn up, a blazing shooting star streaking from the day side of the planet across the terminator and into night.

And then, miraculously, the trembling stopped, and she was outbound once more.

Blessedly, the brief passage through atmosphere had arrested her craft’s tumble as well. The sky no longer pirouetted around her head. She’d lost some velocity in the near passage, but she was still falling outbound at 16 kps . . . more than enough to escape from Arianrhod forever.

Streaker
. That was the slang term among pilots for a ship so badly damaged that it was sent hurtling clear of battlespace on a vector that would take it into the cold and empty Beyond. Connor knew there would be no SAR vessels, no search and rescue to track her course and come to pick her up. The Slan, her telemetry told her, were breaking through everywhere. Huge vessels that most likely were Slan troop transports were entering the atmosphere and closing with the Silverwheel colony.

Her AI did suggest that at least some repairs were possible. She directed the damage control systems to focus on repairing the quantum tap array, with a view to bringing her main power systems back on-line. With enough power, anything was possible.

Without power, she was dead. . . .

A
lmost five and a half hours later, a robotic HVK-724 scout-courier in a cold, distant orbit 40 AUs from Arianrhod caught an emergency transmission sent from Silverwheel. The transmission included an update on the battle for the 36 Ophiuchi system . . . news of the orbital Caer Gwydion station plus three fighter squadrons destroyed, of serious damage to the main colony facility on the surface, of reports of landings by heavily armored assault forces and the destruction of the Dylan underground naval base.

The scout-courier engaged its primary program, dropping into Alcubierre space and vanishing from the sane and normal matrix of spacetime. It had taken the signal 5.3 light minutes to crawl out from the planet, but at its maximum Alcubierre warp effect, the courier would cross the 19.5 light years between 35 Ophiuchi and Sol in just one hour, eighteen minutes.

It was pure coincidence that news of
two
Confederation naval disasters would arrive at Earth within a day of each other.

Freedom Concourse

Columbus, District of Columbia,

North American Union

0749 hours, TFT

“Captain Gray, Comm. Important message coming through, priority urgent.”

Trevor “Sandy” Gray, commanding officer of the star carrier
America
, paused in mid-stride as the AI voice spoke in his head. Around him, the Freedom Concourse was thronged with people, part of the brawling, noisy celebration following the president’s re-election. “Go ahead,” he thought.

“Voice only, full immersion, or text?”

“Text, please.”

A window opened in his mind and the words scrolled down.

PRIORITY:
Urgent

FROM:
Confederation Naval HQ

TO:
All CN Commands

Courier packet reports Confederation research colony Silverwheel on Arianrhod, 36 Ophiuchi AII, has just fallen to Slan assault forces. . . .

The message, terse and to the point, went on to say that at least twelve Saber-class destroyers, fifty Trebuchet-class bombardment vessels, and a large number of Stiletto fighters had taken part in the attack, and that both the colony and the underground naval base were now presumed lost. The final attack had gone down less than two hours ago.

The message was signed Ronald Kinkaid, Admiral, CO CNHQ, Mars.

The words faded, and Gray’s awareness returned fully to his surroundings. A man, fashionably nude except for animated tattoos and an anonymously opaque sensory helmet bumped into him from behind. “Sorry, Captain.”

“S’okay.” The man’s tattoo display included the word
FREEDOM
stretching from collar bone to groin, flashing across the entire spectrum of colors and highlighted by the strobe and flash of fireworks writhing across his skin.

Gray shook his head and started walking again. The crowd was thick enough that stopping in midstream could be hazardous. Ahead, the government building towered above the plaza in a series of curves and ornamental buttresses, and the mob appeared to be centered on the building’s base.

Koenig’s victory, he thought, appeared to have opened the Freedom party floodgates, an anti-Confederation mandate for USNA freedom.

Or possibly, the cynic within Gray’s mind suggested, it was just that Americans enjoyed the popular sport known as politics. Give them something to cheer about, to demonstrate about, to vote about, and they were there.

It was, he thought, exactly the right sentiment at exactly the wrong time. If 36 Ophiuchi had fallen to the Slan fleet, it meant that the Sh’daar were on the move once more, and it meant that North American independence simply was not going to happen. Humankind, a
united
Humankind, would have to face that threat, and all the popular demonstrations, all the fireworks, all the noise on the planet wasn’t going to change that.

Gray had come down on a shuttle early that morning specifically to offer his personal congratulations to the president . . . but this, he decided, would not be the best moment for personal visits and reminiscences.

He hesitated a moment, bracing himself against the crowd, then turned and began to retrace his steps toward Starport Columbus.

Gray needed to get back to Synchorbit, back to the ship, and quickly.

He was almost all the way back to the Star Carrier
America
, on board the shuttle, when the
second
message of disaster arrived.

Chapter Two

8 November 2424

Approaching USNA Naval Base

Quito Synchorbital

1435 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Donald Gregory eased back the acceleration of his SG-92 Starhawk as the seagirt dome of NAS Oceana dropped away behind him and was swiftly obscured by clouds. Sunlight exploded around him as he pierced the cloud deck and the sky almost immediately deepened from blue to ultramarine to black.

In close formation with him, the eleven other Starhawks of VFA-96, the Black Demons, arrowed skyward, boosting in high-velocity mode. Nanosensors embedded within his fighter’s fluid outer coat fed data directly to his brain, allowing him to see with crystalline clarity in every direction, and to see the blacker-than-black long-tailed teardrops of the other fighters of the squadron formation, forms that would have been invisible to the unaugmented eye or brain.

“Keep it tight, chicks,” urged the taclink voice of their squadron leader, Commander Luther Mackey. “Hold formation. Show the braid we’re as sharp as any hotshot Vee-crappers.”

“Yeah, Boss, but how do you
really
feel about ’em?” Lieutenant Nathan Esperanza cut in. Several of the others in the squadron chuckled.

“Hell, I think he just wants a crack at the Sh’daar,” Lieutenant Caryl Mason said, “assuming the scuttlebutt is true, of course.”

“Oh, it’s true,” Esperanza said. “I got a buddy in Base Commo who saw the intercepts. One of our survey vessels got nailed out at Omegod Cent, and the Slan overran Arianrhod. That’s why the recall.”

“It don’t rain but it pours,” Lieutenant Jason Del Rey observed.

“Why bother with grapevine shit?” Lieutenant Joseph “Happy” Kemper said. “Just ask ol’ Nungie. Get the straight shit hot from the source.”

“Fuck you, Kemper,” Gregory said with a quiet calm he didn’t quite feel.
Nungie
had not been his choice as a squadron handle, and he despised the implication.

“Keep it down, people,” Mackey said. “Engage squadron taclink.”

Gregory gave the mental command that synched his fighter’s AI to the rest of the squadron. The twelve Starhawks were now, in essence, a single organism hurtling up and out of Earth’s embrace.

“On my mark, acceleration at two thousand gravities,” Mackey added. “And three . . . and two . . . and one . . .
mark
!”

Gregory couldn’t feel the savage, gravitationally induced acceleration. His fighter fell toward the tightly projected artificial singularity pulsing at a billion times per second out beyond the blunt prow of his Starhawk, its gravity acting on every atom of his body simultaneously. He was in free fall, his vector matched perfectly with those of the other ships in his squadron. Earth, filling the sky aft with white swirls and mottled banks of white cloud, began dwindling rapidly into the distance astern. Starhawks were capable of boosting at fifty thousand Gs, which could accelerate them up to close to the speed of light in under ten minutes. Within the relatively close confines of Earth orbit, however, it was necessary to keep to a more sedate pace. It would take forty-two seconds to reach the midpoint of their journey, at which point they would flip end for end and decelerate the rest of the way in to their docking with the carrier.

Ten more seconds.

Seething, Gregory tried to put aside Kemper’s gibe. It wasn’t worth saying anything. Protests would just elicit more of the same; he knew that much from long experience.

For years, Gregory had wanted to be a fighter pilot, wanted to be a member of that elite fraternity so bad he could taste it. Star carrier pilots were the aristocracy of the Earth Confederation’s military, but that wasn’t what had led him to volunteer . . . or to endure the years of training and heavy-duty AI downloads that had made him one. Born on the colony world of Osiris—70 Ophiuchi AII—he’d been eight when his world had been subjected to a savage bombardment by a Turusch battle fleet, followed by Nungiirtok assault forces landing in wave upon relentless wave. That had been early in 2405, just less than twenty years earlier.

Gregory still had acid-sharp memories of that time . . . especially of the moment when his father had put him aboard a freighter packed with refugee children at Nuit Starport days before the final collapse. He still remembered shrieking that he didn’t want to go . . . remembered his father’s calm assurances that they would be together again soon. . . .

It hadn’t happened. When the Sh’daar Treaty was announced seven months later, Osiris remained under Nungiirtok control. The Earth Confederation government had attempted to open negotiations with the martial beings, but no progress had been made in all that time.

Year had followed year, and Gregory had grown progressively more bitter. It seemed clear to him that the Confederation wasn’t going to force a confrontation. Even now, there was no formal contact with the Nungiirtok, no way of even determining if his mother and father were still alive.

Three years ago he’d joined the North American Star Navy, applying for a training slot as a combat pilot. The star system of 70 Ophiuchi was strategically important, quite apart from its value to Gregory personally. Just sixteen light years away from Sol, it formed the deadly tip of a salient driven deep, deep into the Confederation sphere, and gave the Sh’daar client races a base within easy striking distance of Earth. Surely, it was only a matter of time before the Earth Confederation moved to get Osiris back . . . and Gregory intended to be there when it happened.

The other members of his squadron, though, had given him the handle Nungie, and joked that he was working for the Sh’daar. Gregory could have ignored that much. The problem was that there was an undercurrent of hostility, even paranoia there. They kept asking him if he was carrying a Sh’daar Seed inside his head. . . .

Midpoint. Surrounding space slewed wildly across 180 degrees, and now a vastly shrunken Earth lay directly ahead, but still dwindling in apparent size. Forty-two and a half seconds after boost, the Black Demons were now traveling at over 850 kilometers per second. Still pulling two thousand gravities, they were decelerating now, backing down toward their destination.

The Sh’daar War had lasted for thirty-eight years, from the time the Agletsch had delivered the Sh’daar Ultimatum until Admiral Koenig’s brilliant and unexpected victories at Texaghu Resch and Omega Centauri. Most civilians thought of the war now as history, while most military personnel were content to wait and see. By any reasonable assessment, the Sh’daar represented a technology some thousands of years in advance of Humankind, and yet they had just stopped.

Smart money said that they weren’t yet done with the upstart Earth Confederation.

Slowing rapidly, the Black Demons drifted tail-first past the collection of spheres, struts, holding tanks, domes, and rotating hab modules that comprised the synchorbital part of the Quito space elevator. Anchored deep in the solid rock of Mt. Cayambe, on Earth’s equator 36,000 kilometers below, the elevator had offered cheap, easy, and high-volume access to space since the early twenty-second century.

The synchorbital naval base was located a dozen kilometers from the upside terminus of the elevator, a vast structure including hundreds of docking spaces and gantries for military vessels. A joint project of the Confederation and the United States of North America, it housed some thousands of military personnel, as well as home port facilities for those warships, the bigger ones, unable to enter planetary atmospheres.

Largest of these was the TC/USNA star carrier
America
.

Mushroom-shaped—1,150 meters long—CVS
America
was docked at a special gantry offering multiple mag-tube access for personnel and supplies. The forward cap, 500 meters across and 150 deep, served as both radiation shielding and as a holding tank for 27 billion liters of water, reaction mass for the ship’s maneuvering thrusters. The slender, kilometer-long spine held quantum-field power plants, maneuvering thrusters, and stores, while two hab rings, counter-rotating and tucked in close behind the shield cap, carried the ship’s human complement of 4,840. Around her, like swarming midges, a cloud of drones and remote vehicles kept watch, or serviced her external hull.

“VFA-96,” a new voice said. “You are cleared for two-by-two trap in Landing Bay One. Please alter your hull shape to facilitate capture.”

It was a woman’s voice, but with the precise diction and phrasing that likely indicated an AI, an artificial intelligence.

“Copy. Black Demons on docking approach,” Mackey’s voice said. “Morphing from sperm mode to turkey. Okay, people. Switch to AI approach.”

Maneuvering to approach over the immense vessel’s stern, the Black Demons shifted their hull structure from their high-boost configuration—popularly known among the pilots as “sperm mode”—to flight mode. The nanomatrix hull of an SG-92 allowed the craft to mold itself into a variety of shapes during flight. In atmospheric or flight mode—“turkey mode” in the pilot lexicon—growing wings that better allowed the landing bay magnetics to trap inbound fighters. Massing just twenty-two tons—her usual weapons loadout massed more than that by a considerable margin—the bulk of Gregory’s Starhawk flowed like water at his thought command, extending delta wings, negatively charged to give the flight deck something to grab.

The first two fighters, Lieutenants Anderson and Rivera, dropped into their final approach side by side, sweeping up along
America
’s spine from tail toward the base of the mushroom cap. The next pair followed twenty-eight seconds later—Esperanza and Nichols—followed by Mason and Del Rey.

Next up on the list were Gregory and his wingman—Lieutenant Jodi Vaughn. Fighters didn’t use their gravitational drives for maneuvering close aboard a carrier, not when the microscopic knot of a twisted spacetime comprising the craft’s drive singularity could shred the fabric of a capital ship’s hull like a particle cannon. Cutting their drives, Vaughn and Gregory opened aft venturis and fired their maneuvering thrusters. Jets of plasma, using super-heated water as reaction mass, bumped them into their final vector at three Gs—a kick unlike the free-fall acceleration of a gravitational drive.

Dropping into a landing approach, Gregory’s AI adjusted his ship’s velocity as
America
’s long spine blurred overhead. The landing-bay entrance yawned wide ahead, rotating around to meet him, his onboard AI microadjusting his velocity and attitude to meet it. The landing bay was rotating at 2.11 turns per minute, providing the module’s out-is-down spin gravity. The bay’s entrance swung around every twenty-eight seconds, just as each incoming fighter pair was there to meet it.

Traveling at 100 meters per second, they flashed into the shadow beneath the carrier’s spine, the domes, blisters, and sponsons housing the ship’s drive projectors blurring past, seemingly just above his head. It took them almost ten seconds to traverse the length of
America
’s spine. At the last instant, his AI tapped his starboard-side thrusters to find the moving sweet spot that matched perfectly the 7-meters-per-second lateral movement of the rotating landing bay. The moving opening ahead suddenly appeared to freeze motionless in space, as Vaughn and Gregory flashed across lines of approach-acquisition lights.

When the fighters hit the flight deck’s magnetic tanglefield, he felt again a sudden shock of deceleration, and the side-by-side fighters came to rest. Magnetic grapples embraced his fighter and moved it forward to a nanosealed patch on the deck. A moment later, he was dropping through the seal to the pressurized deck one level below.

His neural feeds cut out, and abruptly Gregory was enfolded in a tight, close, suffocating darkness. He thoughtclicked the cockpit open, and the hull melted away around him as he emerged into the bustling noise and glare and movement of the pressurized hangar bay. A robot, all arms and spindly plasteel framework, met him on the access scaffolding, its optics adjusting independently as it scanned him and his fighter. “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant,” the machine said.

“Move your metal ass, damn it,” a human flight chief said nearby. As the robot shifted to one side, a crew chief appeared. “Hey, Lieutenant. Welcome aboard the
America
.”

Gregory removed his flight helmet, blinking under the harsh lighting filling the cavernous space, and nodded. “Thanks, Chief.”

He wasn’t home, but maybe,
maybe
, someday, if he was lucky, the star carrier
America
would get him there.

TC/USNA CVS
America

USNA Naval Base

Quito Synchorbital

1440 hours, TFT

“VFA-96 is recovered, Captain,”
America
’s CAG reported.

“I see it, Connie. Thank you.”

Back on board his ship, now, after the shuttle flight up from Columbus, Captain Gray relaxed in the embrace of his command seat on the carrier’s bridge, allowing incoming streams of data to flood through his consciousness. With his cerebral implants hardlinked to the carrier’s artificial intelligence, he could follow all of the preparations for getting the immense vessel ready for debarkation directly, as though he himself was the central awareness of
America
’s AI network. Through the AI’s electronic eyes, he’d watched the Starhawks of VFA-96 hurtling in, two by two, and trapping on
America
’s Bravo flight deck. A shift in perception, and he was watching now as the Starhawks peeled open and the pilots emerged.

Gray had a special fondness for the old SG-92 Starhawks. As a raw, newbie lieutenant twenty years earlier, he’d flown a Starhawk as part of the long-disbanded VF-44 Dragonfires. Those fighters were considered relics nowadays, compared to the much newer and more powerful SG-101 Velociraptors, the SG-112 Stardragons, and other modern space fighters. There was talk of retiring the Starhawks permanently . . . but the Navy had been dithering on the issue for several years, now, and if the scuttlebutt was true, if the Sh’daar were coming back, that procrastination was a damned good thing. Earth would need a lot of fighters in the coming months, if
Endeavor
had been burned out of the sky by Sh’daar clients . . . and if the Sh’daar were planning on moving in from the Ophiuchan colonies.