On Silver Wings (12 page)

The assembled people began whispering again, but a figure rose from the back row and yelled out angrily.

“What about Hayden!?”

The men and women representing the nations of Earth turned as one to see the Colonial representative of Hayden standing alongside those of the Ares Terraforming Project, Icarus Mining Incorporated, and the Sylvan Colonies.

“Mr. Hayden...”

Gil Hayden Jr. held up a hand, “No more pawning me off, damn it! I’ve been trying to get you to tell me what is going on for days! Weeks! Now answer my question! What about Hayden!?”

The Chairman sighed again, the sound audible through the large room. “Hayden is on its own for the foreseeable future. We do not have the forces to retake the system, let alone engage in a military landing attempt against the defenses the invaders have established there.”

“There are over eighty thousand people on Hayden!” Gil snapped, “They are all citizens of a member nation of the USF! We pay taxes to this coalition!”

“And if your governing bodies hadn’t refused to pay for decent military spending, maybe we’d have some ships to spare!” A Vice Admiral at the military table snarled, coming to his feet, “We’ve limped along for over a century on budgets that barely pay for office supplies, and now you come complaining to us!?”

“Admiral Givens!” The Chairman snapped, slapping his hand down on the attention chime.

“No! I’ve had it!” The Admiral slapped his own palm down, hard enough for the slap of flesh against ceramic to overpower the chimes. “We can’t even afford to recruit and train our own personnel damn it! We’re forced to rely on whatever we can get from the militaries of Earth, and even then more than half the volunteers are turned down because we can’t afford to PAY them.”

“Jack...” Admiral Shepard laid a hand on the Vice Admiral’s shoulder.

Jack Givens fell silent, but obviously continued to seethe as he sat back down. Shepard looked around the room, then straight up at the representatives of the extra-solar colonies. “We will make regular contact with the satellites we’ve hidden in the Hayden system, and continue to attempt delivery of supplies to those on the surface. For the moment, that is all we have the forces to accomplish.”

The representatives of the colonies, as well as those of the Earth borne nations, fell silent at that.

“Two years.” Shepard went on, “They’ll have to hold out for two years.”

Habitat Deck Twelve

New Mexican Tether Counterweight

“Captain, I’m glad you were willing to see me.”

Captain Alexi Petronov didn’t reply, he just nodded and waved to the couch across from him. They were in his home away from home, the apartment he kept when he wasn’t on Extra-Solar assignment. He could have stayed in the Hong Kong Counterweight, he supposed, that being closer to his home, but with continued tensions between the Chinese and the Soviet Allied States he didn’t feel comfortable there.

“What brings you to see me, Admiral?”

Jeremy Shepard sighed, taking the proffered seat. “You’ve been told?”

Petronov smiled darkly, his lips twisting. “Of what you intend toward my Socrates? Of course, I have been told.”

“We want you to stay on in command.”

Alexi sighed, setting down a cup of tea, “Admiral, I am not a military officer. I would not be comfortable in a warship.”

“The Socrates will never be a warship, Captain.” Shepard sighed, “But with the weapons we’ll load on her... well, I can’t promise anything... but we need you, Alexi. You’re one of our most experienced deep space Captains.”

“Admiral, I signed on as a researcher... an explorer,” Alexi replied, shaking his head, “I do not wish to command a military ship.”

The Admiral sighed and stood up, “Please... Alexi... Consider it. I know that I can’t order you, your contract doesn’t cover military service. But we need your experience, the people on Hayden need you.”

Petronov grimaced, looking away.

“I will... consider it,” he said finally, sounding like each word was drawing out teeth.

“Thank you,” Shepard said, nodding from where he stood.

Alexi rose to his feet, but then turned away from the Admiral. Shepard waited a moment, then nodded and left the room. Alexi sighed softly, walking toward the imaging wall, looking out through it to the projection of Moscow that was being fed up to the station in near real-time over the grid. He reached out, gliding a hand along the wall as if to touch the city of his birth.

“It’s never easy, is it?” He asked rhetorically before shaking his head and tapping out a pattern on the image of the city.

Moscow was gone in a second, replaced by an interface screen. “Hello Captain Petronov, how may we serve you today?”

“Book me a flight home.” He said.

“Yes Sir, one ticket from New Mexico International Airport to Moscow. When would you wish to depart?”

He paused, considering it. “Twelve hours.”

“There is a flight in ten, and one in eighteen.”

“I’ll take the one in ten. Hold the next lift planet side for me, I’ll be right there.”

“Done.”

*****

Shepard sighed as he made his way back into the USF offices. The United Solari Fleet had been established as an attempt to create a nonpartisan organization to enforce laws beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Much like earlier attempts at establishing any form of governing body that enforced rules to entire nations, things hadn’t gone according to plan.

Admiral Givens wasn’t the only person in the USF who felt that they, particularly the military component of the fleet, had received the short end of the orbital tether. The USF simply didn’t have the budget to even construct their own starships, nor even recruit and train their own people. The vast majority of their projectable power was actually almost entirely dependent on the United States.

As much as the British born man hated to admit it, few nations other than the United States had done more than show their flags in space. The United Kingdom had precisely two jump capable ships, one of which had been the American designed USV Majesty, which should be returned to Earth Space within the week. Tragically, her crew would be arriving at the same time, but as cargo, not crew.

The Germans had one ship in the fleet, as did the French and Japanese. Every other ship in the fleet literally flew American colors. On the other side of the line, the Chinese had a small but growing force of Mao Tse class ships that were comparable to the Los Angeles Class, generally stationed in or near Earth orbit despite the Chinese forays into Extra-solar colonies.

Historically, the Chinese simply let the USF respond to emergencies on their colonies while they kept their power concentrated over Earth. Not particularly palatable, but there wasn’t a Captain aboard a USF ship of any nationality who would ignore a plea for help, so the Chinese government saw it as simply a smart way of doing business.

Now, however, Shepard was willing to bet that things were going to change. He just wished he could be sure how, since there was no predicting the Chinese in his experience. They were almost as alien to him as the forces that had wiped out Task Force Two. Cultural differences made predicting their responses extremely difficult, which would prevent the Americans and the USF from dedicating their full attention to the current situation.

The only upside to the Chinese as far as he was concerned was the fact that their pressure had caused the United States to design the new Cheyenne Class hulls, and his own government to design the Long Bow series. The odds were originally against the Long Bow vessels ever being built as a production series, but with the new situation the rumblings said that His Majesty’s Government was willing to pony up the dough.

If only they’d done it five years sooner, things might have turned out differently for Hayden.

*****

The Alamo, American Shipyards

West Jovian Trojan Point

The data from the USV Majesty had been shared throughout the labs of the USF and its member states, but the original chip from Captain Petronov’s hand delivery had arrived on the Asteroid facility known simply as The Alamo. Fully three quarters of the multi-rock facility were dedicated to civilian slips, leased by the USF and the United States Government at an overall loss to various corporations that specialized in deep space shipping to and from the various Colonies, projects, and stations that dotted the reaches of explored space.

Those corporations had already received word that their leases were being pulled for immediate review. They hadn’t, yet, had the opportunity to formally register their complaints. Not that it would matter in any event.

Of the rest, approximately fifty percent belonged, more or less, to the member nations of the USF. Their leases were not under review, primarily because their governments had negotiated largely unbreakable clauses and the American government had decided that the trouble of evicting them wasn’t worth the scandal.

The remaining one eighth of the facility was owned and utilized by the United States of America, with some staff from the United Kingdom and Canada. Within that section of the facility, and totally oblivious to the chaos going on around them, men and women were already pouring deeply over the data on Petronov’s chip while the rest of the facility geared up for the largest space construction bonanza since the early days of Jump Point travel.

Looking over the facility through the observation deck, Admiral Patrick Gates could see the drive flares of literally every tug in his command harvesting asteroids from the Trojans the Alamo rested amongst. Each ship would locate and lasso a nickel-iron asteroid of appropriate size, then fling it sunward to where the solar furnaces would be prepared to smelt it into workable metal. Using centripetal force, the smelted metal would be spun into new ship hulls and slung back after a quick orbit of the inner system.

“We need a defensive system.”

Gates was in no mood to be pleasant, the commander of the Alamo facility wasn’t in a terribly good mood.

“Sir, with all due respect, I don’t think that there IS a defense.”

That would be the cause of his bad mood. His people, the best people he could lay his hands on, persisted in telling him that they were all screwed.

“Admiral, I’m not sure you understand what’s going on here...”

Doctor Silvia Smith, current head of the Alamo’s High Energy Physics department, shook her head as she spoke. The data spoke for itself, in her opinion, and it had a lot of bad things to say. “We’re looking at the formation of micro-singularities within the hulls of our ships... these are unprecedented applications of Universal Dimensions Theory. Admiral, they’re somehow projecting a high energy dimensional collapse directly into our ships. We have no defense against that.”

Gates rubbed the bridge of his nose, he hated it when they talked to him like he was both an imbecile and someone who could fully follow the way their minds worked. He was no slouch himself in the education department, he certainly wouldn’t have been assigned to The Alamo if he had been. However, he was primarily a manager and not one of the researchers. He knew enough about all of their work to keep up with their reports, but not nearly enough about any one subject to match minds with any of them.

“Doctor Smith, if they’re projecting it into our ships, then there must be a way to intercept, block, or scramble their projections. I may not understand physics as well as you, but I know that there is no such thing as a magic bullet.” He said firmly, “If it can be shot, lazed, fired, or burned there is a countermeasure. Find it.”

Smith groaned, almost silently but not quite. She leaned back, shaking her head, as the footage of the Delaware played on an endless loop. Ironically, with all the advanced sensors in that battle, the most telling piece of information they had come from the visual scanners of the USV Los Angeles. The Delaware shuddered at first, then her cylindrical hull and huge hexagonal armor plates visibly buckled. The effect was slow at first, but it accelerated until the ship literally folded in on itself like an empty beer can being crushed. The final moments of the Delaware’s existence ended in a brilliant flash of nuclear fire that was entirely impossible as far as all the design specs on the ship could tell. There was simply nothing inside her that could go super critical like that, even taking into account her fission reactor and the tiny supply of Anti-Deuterium she would have had stocked at any given moment.

The consensus of the eggheads was Gravity Induced Fission, that somehow the enemy had created an area of dimensional collapse within the Delaware. When the eleven known dimensions of the universe were forced to collapse into each other, the force of gravity was multiplied until the matter within the area formed a point singularity. Not actually an uncommon event, in fact. In the upper atmosphere of Earth it was estimated that several thousand point singularities popped in and out of existence in any given hour, however they expended energy at such atrociously high rates that they blew themselves out before they could absorb any mass to stabilize.

Whatever had hit the ships of Task Force Two hadn’t had any problem stabilizing the singularities long enough for them to affect the structure of the ship. In fact, what they had done in the estimation of Doctor Smith and her colleagues was actually turn the full force of each ship’s own gravity against them.

In effect, each ship had actually crushed themselves as the normally muted power of their own gravity was turned up to full force by the enemy’s weapon. So powerful, in fact, that the force of the rushing atoms slamming together was enough to split them and turn the ship itself into a nuclear device.

Impressive, certainly, but to Admiral Gates that only meant that finding a way to defend against the weapon was that much more of a priority.

“Can we at least detect them using this information?” He asked, looking around the table, “Like the way we calculate jump points?”

“Possibly...” Doctor Simon Harris said slowly, “Jump points are similarly based in gravity propagation... However they form much more evenly, and move in predictable fashions. When the gravity ripples from variable geometry stellar objects collide with known objects, the counter ripples that form merge into the jump points at predictable distances. They shift through space, vanish into nothing as the waves cancel each other out, occasionally double and treble their power as two waves reinforce one another... However those are all calculated based on indirect observation... this is a different matter...”