Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

Chapter Nineteen

18 October 2404

USNA Gallagher

Neptune Space, Sol System

0250 hours, TFT

The IP had come up empty.

The five High Guard vessels had rendezvoused in a high-velocity pass-through, but there’d been nothing there within range of their scanners. Captain Lederer had ordered the release of a dozen battlespace drones, set to disperse through local space and transmit anything they detected both to the Gallagher and to the Inner System. However, the good news for the moment was that the Turusch fleet was not in a hurry to reach Earth.

A careful scan of ambient space for the ionization trails left by near-c impactors or high-V fighters turned up nothing as well. Local space was thin-no more than a hydrogen atom or two per cubic centimeter, but the passage of anything traveling at a generous percentage of the speed of light swept up some of those atoms and ionized others, leaving a faint but detectable trail. The lack of such trails suggested that the enemy had not started bombarding the Inner System.

All very good news.

But that left the question of just where they were and what they were doing. That they would eventually head in-system was patently obvious. If they waited too long, the tactical advantage would pass to the Confederation.

So where in this hell of frozen emptiness were they?

Following the op plan drawn up by Gallagher’s navigational team, Lederer had ordered the tiny flotilla to apply side thrust, slightly changing their vector, until they were on a course taking them directly into the Neptune system. Neptune was ahead of the High Guard flotilla in its orbit and, at the moment, its moon Triton was located on the far side of the planet from the approaching ships. The alignment offered Lederer and the other High Guard captains a unique tactical advantage.

If the enemy fleet had gathered at Triton, perhaps the High Guard squadron could sneak up on them, using giant Neptune as a screen.

Lederer leaned forward in his recliner, studying the three-dimensional tactical display of local space. The other four High Guard ships, another destroyer and three frigates, trailed along behind the Gallagher in line-ahead. Ahead, less than half an AU now, lay the planet Neptune, shown in the display as an actual image, a tiny sea-blue sphere, rather than as an icon.

He was searching for some sign of the enemy fleet.

There were several ways of spotting other ships at a distance. Radar and lidar, of course, assuming the target wasn’t cloaked in either a grav-field effect or adaptive surface nano that absorbed those wavelengths rather than reflecting them back. Fusion power plants gave off neutrinos-but most modern Confederation ships used quantum zero-point field emission plants now, and it was thought that Turusch ships were powered by vacuum energy as well. A ship under drive was projecting artificial gravitational singularities either ahead or astern, and those created ripples-gravity waves-in the fabric of space that could be detected at considerable distances.

Gravity waves were transmitted at the speed of light; they also vanished when a ship’s singularity projectors were switched off. And even when plowing ahead at full speed, gravity waves tended to fuzz out and vanish in the background static of normal matter. The local star, planets, even asteroidal debris or large starships could damp out the space/time ripples from a projected singularity within a distance of a few astronomical units.

The best and most unambiguous way of detecting an enemy fleet was by the intense burst of photons released as it dropped below light speed. Under Alcubierre Drive and similar FTL systems, a starship essentially had no velocity at all in relation to the folded-up pocket of space within which it traveled. When the drive field was switched off, the ship was dumped into normal space with only a small residual velocity; the ship had carried a tremendous potential energy, however, much of which bled off into the local space/time background as an intense and expanding ring of radiation.

So far, thirty-three such flashes had been detected out in the Kuiper Belt, ranging from forty-five AUs from Sol out to more than eighty. The incoming Turusch had scattered badly. They needed a rendezvous point, and Neptune, it seemed, was the nearest convenient large object. In the past hours, however, the enemy fleet had vanished…save for the clue offered by the sudden silence of the base on Triton. The enemy could be anywhere, with its drives shut down and its shields up, effectively invisible.

But with shields up, it was difficult to impossible to detect ships outside your own little pocket universe; with shields up you were as cut off from the universe outside as you were under Alcubierre Drive. It was possible, even likely, that the enemy fleet had their shields full up in order to mask their presence.

Twelve minutes to go.

After four hours at five hundred gravities, Gallagher was coming in toward Neptune’s horizon at 72,000 kilometers per second-nearly one quarter of the speed of light. Half an AU was fifteen minutes at that speed. He called up Gallagher’s ephemeris data, studying it.

Since icy little Pluto had been demoted from planet status in the early twenty-first century, Neptune had held the honor of being the solar system’s outer planetary sentinel. Pure chance that it had happened to be in the same part of the sky where the Turusch had emerged from their equivalent of Alcubierre Drive, of course; at thirty AUs from the sun, Neptune took 165 years to complete one solar orbit. Because the atmospheres of both Neptune and of its near-twin Uranus were slightly different from those of the larger gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, so much farther in toward the sun’s warmth and light, the two were officially known as ice giants.

Neptune’s large moon Triton was just visible beyond the planet’s limb, not perfectly masked by the planet from this position, but close.

Current theory stated that Triton had started out as a trans-Neptunian Kuiper object…a dwarf planet like Pluto or Eris. Its retrograde orbit-unique for such a large moon-showed that it had been captured by Neptune in eons past, probably in the early days of the solar system, when Neptune’s orbit migrated outward from between Saturn and Uranus to its present position. Triton, in fact, was slightly larger than Pluto; the surface composition of the two-frozen nitrogen, water ice, and frozen carbon dioxide-was nearly identical. Its surface temperature hovered at just 38 degrees Celsius above absolute zero, a few degrees colder even than the mean temperature on Pluto.

“We’re coming up on the final course correction, Skipper,” the Nav Officer told him, his voice edged with excitement. Lieutenant Raymond Seborg was a washout from Oceana, a would-be fighter-jock who’d ended up in the High Guard on the fast track to line command. The bridge crew still teased him about his predilection for handling a 220-meter-long destroyer like a Starhawk fighter.

“Very well, Mr. Seborg.” He opened his intercom link. “All hands, this is the captain. We’re about to drop into MGF. So far, there’s no sign that the enemy has seen us…or even that the enemy is here at all. Stay alert, and record everything that happens. When things start happening, they’re going to happen fast.”

MGF was the acronym for microgravitic flight…a fancy way of saying that the drive singularities would be shut down and the Gallagher would be falling solely under the influences of nearby planetary bodies, and its current velocity.

“Mr. Carlyle,” he added. “Shields to ninety percent, please.”

“Shields at nine-zero percent, aye, aye, sir.”

That would provide a reasonable level of protection, while allowing Gallagher’s sensors to continue to probe nearby space.

Astern, the other ships fell into the agreed-upon formation, a rough wedge with Gallagher at the leading point.

Getting the other four High Guard captains to follow his lead had been a real treat in and of itself. Balakrishnan on the Godavari was senior to Lederer by two years, and Zeng, of the Jianghua, had argued that the flotilla’s strategic decisions should be put to a vote. The High Guard, rather than maintaining a strict hierarchy of command, had been established as a free participation among the space-faring nations of Earth, under the direction of a multinational board of command. It worked well enough for organizing and sending out routine patrols, but was somewhat lacking when faced with a distinct military threat.

Lederer had bulled through by saying the others could follow his lead or get the hell out and return to the Inner System.

He’d broken all the rules of diplomacy, protocol, and international propriety, but they’d followed.

On the forward display, Neptune was rapidly growing larger, swelling from a blue dot lost among the stars to a half-phase, faintly banded giant. The small flotilla was falling toward Neptune’s south polar region; the planet was circled by fragmentary rings or ring arcs, which would make a high-velocity pass over the equatorial areas deadly.

The blue planet continued growing larger, and the distant red speck that was Triton dropped behind the horizon.

“Captain Lederer,” the ship’s AI said, “sensors are picking up numerous IR and radio wavelength anomalies within several million kilometers of Triton. The data are consistent with the presence of numerous large starships similar in configuration to those operated by the Turusch.”

“Thank you, Galley,” Lederer replied. The news was at once reassuring and frightening. It suggested that his guess had been right, that the alien fleet had closed in on Triton, then settled down to wait.

“Comm!” He added. “Are we transmitting?”

“Yes, sir. We’re sending it off as soon as we get it. Time lag to Earth, two hundred thirty-eight minutes. Time lag to Mars two hundred forty-five minutes.”

“Roger that.”

One minute to go. Neptune filled the forward screen, rushing out to block out half of the entire surrounding sky. Seborg’s last maneuver had nudged the Gallagher just enough to send the High Guard ship skimming within a thousand kilometers of Neptune’s cloud deck, close enough that they’d be burning through the tenuous outer layers of the huge planet’s atmosphere.

At a quarter of the speed of light, their passage through that tenuous atmosphere would be spectacular, but extremely brief.

It would also announce their arrival in rather definite terms, but the chances were good that the enemy had spotted them already. Even with their shields up, remote drones and sensors scattered throughout the area would be watching everything entering local space.

He wished there were a way for the little squadron to somehow strike at the enemy, but that was impossible. With no hard data on any targets near Triton, aiming would have been problematic. It was a moot point in any case. High Guard ships carried fusion bombs to nudge asteroids into new and non-Earth-threatening trajectories, but no ranged weapons. The destroyer’s missile launchers and particle-beam projectors all had been stripped out long ago to make more room for consumables on extended deep-space patrols.

There was a flash, then darkness as Gallagher’s shields went up full, together with a savage shock as the spacecraft tunneled through several thousand kilometers of hydrogen gas in a fraction of a second. They emerged on the far side, their trajectory slightly reshaped by Neptune’s gravity well.

They were now 350,000 kilometers from Triton-less than the distance from Earth to Earth’s moon. At their current velocity, they would cross that distance in slightly less than five seconds.

“Enemy ships!” Alys Newton, his scanner officer shouted. “I’ve got-”

Something struck the Gallagher amidships, a hammer-blow jolting the ship hard enough to snap internal struts and braces. Shields collapsed as power feeds were broken, and a large chunk of the ship’s aft section ripped free, sending the rest of the destroyer into an out-of-control tumble.

In the tactical display, bright white, expanding spheres of light marked the deaths of the Jianghua and the Hatakaze. The icons representing both the John Paul Johns and the Godavari were flashing on and off rapidly, indicating serious damage. There wasn’t even time to determine just what had hit them. Things were happening far too fast.

The scanners stayed on-line long enough for Lederer, pinned to his couch by sudden centripetal acceleration, to glimpse the odd mixed blue and pink hues of Triton as the moon flashed past less than five thousand kilometers away. Seborg’s calculations had been uncannily precise.

Then the scanners went down, as did the last of the shields.

Lederer heard the roar of escaping atmosphere as the tumbling ship continued to come apart. “Comm! Are we still transmitting?”

“Yes, sir!” Her reply seemed muted in the fast-dropping pressure of the bridge.

“All hands, this is the captain! Abandon ship! Repeat, abandon ship!”

He already knew that most of them would never make it to the life pods. Even if they did, the chances of being picked up this far out, moving this fast, were next to nill.

But if their automated scanners had picked up the enemy’s positions and orbits, and if that data had been transmitted to Earth, then Gallagher and her sister High Guard ships had successfully accomplished their mission.

It was, Lederer thought, a fitting epitaph for ships and crews alike.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Mars Synchorbit, Sol System

0258 hours, TFT

Koenig had made it on board the America just in time. The ship was already casting off its magnetic grapples, and only a single passenger tube remained connecting the vessel’s spine with the dock facility. Koenig had boarded a gravtube for the ten-minute trip to the dock, then elbowed his way on board along with hundreds of other personnel returning from liberty. An enlisted rating had volunteered to serve as his personal shoehorn, pulling his way along the microgravity passageway bellowing “Gangway! Make a hole! Admiral coming through!”

Pulling himself into the hub accessway, he made his way hand-over-hand to the command deck, the bridge and CIC tucked in along the spine close behind America’s shield.

Quintanilla was waiting for him in CIC, reclining in his seat, watching the painfully slow movement of ships in the tactical display. “We have our orders from the Military Directorate,” the man said. “The fleet is to take up a holding position between Earth and Mars until we know what the enemy plans to do.”

“Get the fuck out of my seat,” Koenig replied.

“I was just-”

“You were just about to get yourself ejected from my CIC again,” Koenig growled. Technically, he’d not yet had that morning meeting with the Board of Inquiry, and wasn’t supposed to know yet that he’d been cleared. He wondered if Quintanilla knew.

Quintanilla looked as though he were about to argue, but then evidently thought better of it. Koenig was tired, recently woken from too little sleep, and obviously was in no mood for back talk.

“Welcome aboard, Admiral,” Buchanan told him from the bridge.

“Situation?” Koenig demanded.

“America is ready to cast off. We’re just taking the last few liberty personnel back on board. Zero-point fields running and tuned, ready to deliver at one hundred percent.”

“Very well. Commander Craig? Battlegroup status.”

“The battlegroup is forming up and preparing for boost,” Craig replied. “Symmons, Puller, Doyle, Milton, and Kinkaid have already cast off and are maneuvering clear of the dock area. Ticonderoga reports readiness to depart. California, Andreyev, Arkansas, and Wyecoff all report ready for release from dock. Saskatchewan reports they will be ready for release in five minutes. Battlegroup orders have been received and are awaiting your acknowledgement.”

“Thank you.”

Placing his palm over the through-put circuitry on the arm of his recliner, Koenig opened a window in his head and mindclicked the orders icon. There were two sets of orders, in fact, one from the Senate Military Directorate, and one from Admiral John C. Caruthers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Quintanilla had told him, the Directorate was ordering all Confederation ships to rendezvous at a single point roughly midway between Earth and Mars, designated Solar One. At their current points in their orbits around the sun, Mars was roughly at the eleven-o’clock position, Earth at seven o’clock, Solar One at nine, and with Neptune in the direction of nine o’clock, thirty astronomical units out.

The orders from Caruthers, however, offered a little more leeway. “The body of the Confederation fleet is to rendezvous at Solar One,” the recording said, “until we are certain of the enemy’s attack path into the Inner System. When all fleet elements are assembled and at full combat readiness, they will proceed to move out-system in order to intercept the enemy as far from Sol as possible. Minor fleet elements will be deployed to forward positions to monitor and confirm the enemy’s approach….”

Koenig had his own ideas on the matter.

No one in the Confederation could be said to be a true expert on Turusch tactics or combat doctrine. Only two people even approached that description-Admiral Karyn Mendelson, who’d commanded the Confederation fleet at Arcturus last year…

…and Koenig himself, after the Battle of Eta Boötis.

Karyn had been reassigned to Henderson’s command staff after Arcturus-not as punishment, exactly, but it certainly couldn’t be called a reward. With the carrier Hornet crippled and nearly destroyed at Arcturus, she’d been yanked from her position as CO of Battlegroup Hornet and given the new assignment at Confederation Fleet Headquarters, jockeying virtual departments, AI simulations and data download archives.

His pillow talk with Karyn last night had been about Turusch tactics, comparing the battle at Arcturus with Eta Boötis, and especially discussing what Koenig felt might be a key weakness that Confederation forces could exploit.

They were conservative.

Not in a political sense, of course. But the Turusch, even when they possessed overwhelming superiority of numbers and fleet tonnage, as had been the case both at Arcturus and at Eta Boötis, tended move slowly and they tended to be careful not to overextend themselves. At Eta Boötis, the asteroid ship-likely the enemy’s command vessel or flagship-had withdrawn as soon as it came under direct threat, even though the rest of the Turusch fleet seemed to be winning, and the rest of the fleet had retreated as well. Koenig hadn’t understood what the Turusch had been doing at the time, but he thought he saw their reasoning now. They tended to take the long view, conserving forces, avoiding unnecessary damage, and where possible, outwaiting the enemy.

In fact, it was possible that the Sh’daar were actually running the show…and that implied an even greater conservatism. If it was true that the mysterious Sh’daar had been around for half a billion years, they, likely, would be even more loath to make a hasty move or a snap judgment. The fact that fifty-five years had passed between the first human contact with the Spiders and the Sh’daar Ultimatum seemed to confirm that guess. The Sh’daar were cautious, moving slowly, taking their time to decide the best course, and taking no chances.

The Senate Military Directorate was playing it cautious as well, it seemed. By holding the majority of the Confederation fleet at Solar One, they would be in a position to move to either Mars or Earth once the Turusch approach path was known with precision. Admiral Caruthers would be planning a defensive fight; the Senate would be urging him to keep the fleet close to Earth, and not to take chances.

The problem was that if the Sh’daar/Turusch warfleet had decided to attack the Sol System, they would be coming in “loaded for bear”-an extinct mammal, Koenig gathered, that had been massive, extremely fierce, and hard to kill. In fact…

Koenig’s brow wrinkled as he took another look at the tactical updates. The display still showed thirty-three Turusch ships at an emergence point within the constellation Pisces. Neptune, currently, was in Taurus, some 30 degrees further east.

A number of things were not adding up.

The presumed initial destination of the enemy fleet, of course, was Neptune. The Confederation base on Triton had been destroyed five hours ago. By now, the High Guard ships that had helped pass the word of the initial attack would have reached Neptune; their report-if they survived to make one-would not reach Earth for another three and a half hours.

Until then, the presumption was that the enemy fleet was at Neptune…but it was a presumption that bothered Koenig.

For one thing, there were far too few ships out there. The Turusch had mustered more than fifty ships for the attack on Eta Boötis, and that was for the bombardment of a small and lightly defended base. They wouldn’t have known going in that the Marines were there waiting for them, or that Battlegroup America would show up three weeks later.

Now they were, presumably, launching an assault on the human homeworld, a star system certain to possess numerous bases, colonies, and planetary defense systems.

And they only sent thirty-three ships?

Something was very seriously wrong with the tactical picture.

“Admiral?” Buchanan’s voice asked, interrupting his thoughts. “All personnel are on board, except for a few who were taking liberty on Earth. We are ready to cast off.”

“Do it,” Koenig replied, distracted. He noted the time: 0308 hours.

“Aye, aye, sir. Helm! Maneuvering thrusters! Take us clear of the dock.”

Koenig felt the faint shudder as magnetic grapples released. The microgravity of CIC was momentarily interrupted by a hard nudge-the maneuvering thrusters firing to ease the kilometer-long star carrier clear. The external view displayed across CIC’s curving bulkheads showed the close-knit crisscross of struts and girders in the space dock gantry that now were receding at twenty meters per second.

Only thirty-three ships. That didn’t make any sense whatsoever. When Koenig had been planning to launch an incursion to Alphekka, Crown Arrow, he’d been planning on one hundred ships, including four carriers. And Alphekka, young, raw, and hot, wasn’t the home system of the Turusch or anybody else. At most it was only a logistics base or military staging area.

The Turusch would have to be insane as a species even to consider taking on the home system of Humankind with thirty-three ships.

But thirty-three ships would make a good diversion.

Neptune was in the constellation Taurus, at a right ascension of four hours. The Turusch had emerged from metaspace in Pisces-around right ascension one hour. But if the Turusch were coming straight to Sol from either Eta Boötis or Alphekka, they would arrive first almost halfway around the sky-somewhere in the constellations of Boötis or Corona Borealis…say, somewhere around a right ascension of fifteen hours.

Did the Sh’daar empire completely surround Sol and the handful of star systems explored and colonized so far by men? Or had they sent those thirty-three ships on a long, round-about flank march, to have them approach Sol from Pisces, that part of the sky almost directly opposite Boötis and Corona Borealis?

Of one thing Koenig was certain. The enemy would not do such a thing for no reason…and right now the best reason Koenig could think of was that the Turusch wanted to focus the Confederation Navy’s attention on Taurus and Pisces right now.

Perhaps while the main fleet came in on a straight line from Eta Boötis or Alphekka. If they came fast enough, moved deep enough into the solar system before dropping out of metaspace, they might catch the majority of the Confederation fleet tens of AUs away from Earth…and accelerating in the wrong direction.

“God in heaven,” Koenig said softly.

“Is there a problem, Admiral?” Quintanilla asked. He was floating near the admiral’s couch.

“Yes, Mr. Quintanilla, there is. I think the Turusch are trying to pull a fast one on us.”

“Indeed?”

“Neptune is a diversion,” Koenig said. “They’re coming from the opposite side of the solar system.”

“And how do you figure that?”

“It’s what I would have done.”

“Admiral, the Joint Chiefs have given the matter considerable thought, and-”

“Comm!” Koenig barked, cutting Quintanilla off. “Put me through to Admiral Caruthers.”

He needed to discuss this with someone higher up in the command hierarchy.

And there wouldn’t be much time left.