Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

Chapter Seventeen

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.