Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

Chapter Twenty-One

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!..”