Earth Strike (20 page)

“Well, we have one clue staring us right in the face,” Koenig said. “From what we learned through the Agletsch, the Sh’daar have been around for a long time. If anyone should be technological supermen—superbeings, rather—it would be them, right?”

Barry nodded. “Our best information on the Sh’daar suggests that they began moving out into interstellar space from their home planet sometime during the late Ordovician…say four hundred fifty million years ago. That’s a
long
time.”

“Most xenosophontologists think we don’t understand Agletsch dating systems,” Noranaga pointed out. “A sentient species that exists for almost half a billion years? It’s not possible.”

“Bullshit, Admiral,” Mendelson said. “We don’t know yet what’s possible and what’s not. It they reached a point of perfect stability…either no growth or very little, with control over their own genome so they didn’t evolve into something else, why not?”

“The point is,” Koenig said, “a race that’s been around for half a billion years or so ought to be so far beyond us that there’s no way we could fight them, no more than clams could stop people from building an arcology on their beach.”

“True,” Mendelson said. “Even if they’re only a half
million
years ahead of us technologically, they’d be like gods from our vantage point, and their technology would look like magic. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“Well, we haven’t been fighting the Sh’daar directly,” Noranaga said. “All we’ve seen are their front men…the Agletsch and the Turusch.”

“And why even bother with the likes of
them
,” Mendelson said, “if the Sh’daar could just wave whatever it is they use for hands and make us vanish?
Poof!
Problem solved.”

“We can’t really speculate about their reasoning,” Admiral Barry said. “It is, after all,
alien
.”

“But that reasoning is still rooted in the real world,” Koenig said. “At least…in the real world as they perceive it. If we can understand that reasoning, we might have a chance to come to an agreement with them. To
understand
them.”

“All of which is for the xenosoph people to figure out,” Barry said, leaning back in his virtual chair. “While interesting, speculation about alien motivations is not germane to this Board of Inquiry. Admiral Koenig, did you have a particular reason for bringing all of this to our attention?”

“Only insofar as it might have a bearing on this hearing,” Koenig replied. “Unofficially, at least, my battlegroup’s primary orders were to go to Eta Boötis and retrieve those Turusch prisoners, bring them back to Mars.
That
part of the mission, at least, failed. That fact could have a bearing on these proceedings.”

“Hm.” Barry gave the faint shadow of a smile. “And what does your legal AI have to say about this?”

“It advised me to say nothing about the Turusch killing each other, that I should focus on the fact that we did get the aliens and Gorman’s Marines,
plus
several thousand civilians who otherwise would have been killed, back to human space.”

“You don’t believe in listening to legal counsel?”

“Only when I believe that counsel is the right thing to do. Sir.”

“I see. Well…I declare this hearing into the conduct of Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig during the recent operational deployment of the
America
battlegroup open. Let’s begin by reviewing the operational orders for Carrier Battlegroup
America
from the time when they were issued…beginning on 6 September, 2404…”

Intrasystem High-G Transport
Kelvin
Approaching SupraQuito
Earth Synchorbit, Sol System
1610 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Gray watched the Earth swelling to blue-white glory just ahead. Within his passenger pod nestled inside the stubby IHG transport, the feed from external optical pickups had rendered the craft itself invisible. It seemed to Gray that he was leaning back in his recliner, completely open to empty space, surrounded by a panoply of stars, the sun brilliant off to one side, and Earth and Earth’s moon as an unlikely and mismatched pair before him.

Ten hours had passed since he’d boarded the Interplanetary Direct transport back at Phobia. Accelerating at one hundred gravities, the
Kelvin
had reached a midpoint velocity of .06
c
, almost nineteen thousand kilometers per second, then flipped its drive singularity astern to decelerate for the rest of the flight to its destination.

The trip back to Earth was Fifer’s idea…an opportunity, the psych officer had told him, to take another look at his roots. In particular, Fifer wanted Gray to see if he still fit in with the tribes of the Manhattan Ruins. He’d boarded the shuttle at 0800 hours that morning, signing out at
America
’s quarterdeck and boarding the
Kelvin
at her embarkation dock with fifteen enlisted members of
America
’s crew heading for Earth on liberty. He’d chatted with one of them, an armaments tech, second class, while waiting to board the
Kelvin
. Usually, enlisted liberty was short—from twelve to forty-eight hours—but twenty hours of travel time between Mars and Earth cut into that time sharply. The tech told him that she’d been granted a seventy-two, as had the others going to Earth. Scuttlebutt had it that
America
would be redeploying to Earth Synchorbital within the next day or two; if that happened, she’d rejoin the ship there—and get an extra ten hours visiting her parents in Columbus, DC.

As an officer, Gray didn’t need to worry about liberty. He’d simply signed out after receiving permission from the CAG office to go Earthside for seventy-two hours. Plenty of time to do what he needed to do in Manhattan and get back to the ship, whether she was still at Mars or docked at SupraQuito.

He found himself thinking about Rissa Schiff, the cute ensign from the avionics department he’d met last time he’d been at SupraQuito. He’d found her fun and engaging, had been wondering about taking things further with her…at least until Collins and Spaas had busted up the party. The pairing probably wouldn’t have worked; he was still looking for something permanent in a relationship. Schiffie had been looking for fun—one night or many, but nothing lasting.

God, he missed Angela.

The moon appeared to be slowly drifting off to one side, turning from nearly full to a crescent as the
Kelvin
slipped past it and into circumlunar space. The lights of cities appeared scattered across those parts of the moon in darkness, tight clusters marking the cities at Crisium, Tranquility, Apennine Vista, Tsiolkovsky, and the others, all woven together by a slender webwork of glowing threads marking the surface gravtubes.

Earth grew larger, the rate of growth slowing with
Kelvin
’s continuing deceleration. Eventually, Gray could make out what appeared to be strings of minute stars drawn out in slender arcs around the planet. After three centuries, Earth Synchorbital had become the preferred location for the vast majority of the planet’s off-world manufactories, power production, shipyards, and orbital habitats. Several million people lived in orbit now, the number growing daily. Like Mars, Earth was served by three space elevators—one at Quito, one on the northern slope of Mt. Kenya, and one on the island of Pulau Lingga, on the southern edge of the Port Singapore megalopolis. The habs and orbital factories at Synchorbital didn’t extend all the way around the planet yet; it would be centuries more before Earth had a genuine system of rings 36,000 kilometers above its equator. Even so, it was remarkable to see how the hand of man had so touched the world of his birth and that world’s moon that evidence of his technology could be seen from this far out in the Void.

Still decelerating, the
Kelvin
continued to close with the nexus of gleaming habs and solar panels at SupraQuito. Gray could see the elevator itself now, a gossamer-thin strand of light stretched taut between a mountaintop in Ecuador and a small planetoid anchor twenty thousand kilometers above synchronous orbit. The
Kelvin
’s launch from Phobia had been timed to arrive at SupraQuito precisely as the receiving facility orbited into position. The
Kelvin
’s onboard AI made a rapid series of final corrections using the drive singularity astern, then switched off the drive and drifted into the tangleweb field at less than a hundred meters per second. Gray felt the surge of deceleration, startling after ten and a half hours of zero-G under gravitic drive.

His travel pod melted away around him as an AI voice thanked him for choosing Interplanetary Direct for his travel needs. Eighty creds had been deducted from his account on board the
America
to pay for the flight.

The receiving bay was in microgravity, of course. Robots hovered nearby, waiting to assist passengers unused to moving in zero-G, but Gray grabbed a handrail and pulled himself along with more or less practiced ease. The local hab section would be rotating, like the crew modules on board
America
, but he needed to enter it at the hub and ride an elevator out and down to the main deck. Hauling himself hand over hand, he followed glowing arrows projected on the bulkhead toward customs. His baggage—a single small satchel—would be forwarded directly down to Quito.

The local time, he noted, was 1125 hours—five hours off of shipboard time, which was set to GMT. And Quito was in the same global time zone as Manhattan.

He would be there, he thought, by late that afternoon.

Solar Kuiper Belt
5.5 light hours from Earth
1830 hours, TFT

High Guard Watch Station 8734 was tiny—a spherical object the size of a woman’s fist—and most of its mass consisted of foam insulation against the ambient 50-degree Kelvin temperatures so far from a wan and distant sun. It was one of some hundreds of thousands of AI detector probes scattered across the surface of an immense sphere, with a radius of five and a half light hours, centered on Sol.

The automated High Guard Watch had begun late in the twenty-first century, as the first automated probes were placed in solar orbit roughly at the mean distance of Pluto. Tiny onboard cameras and mass detectors the size of BBs kept a constant watch on the surrounding sky, recording mass and movement, the data spreading across large networks of the probes for correlation and tracking. The idea had been to spot comets or asteroids falling in out of the Kuiper Belt, objects that in future epochs might threaten Earth or Earth’s solar colonies. The sooner such objects were detected, the easier it would be to nudge them into new orbits that would never threaten human habitats.

Later, they were programmed for another task—watching for the flash of photons released by starships as they dropped out of Alcubierre Drive. They served as a navigational net, tracking incoming and outgoing ships by their photon release.

And since the Sh’daar Ultimatum, in 2367, they’d watched for the arrival of alien ships that might pose a threat to humankind.

The network was stretched painfully thin. Even half a million probes are few and far between when they’re scattered over the surface of a sphere eleven light hours across. The nearest probe to 8734’s current position was 3683, now thirty light seconds distant, twenty times the distance between Earth and Earth’s moon.

A burst of high-energy photons captured 8734’s electronic attention. Twin cameras focused on the disturbance, estimating the distance at nearly one light hour out, deeper into the Kuiper Belt; probe 3683 recorded the flash twelve seconds later, allowing a more perfect triangulation and target lock. The arriving ship was large—enormous, in fact, a small planetoid converted into a starship of alien configuration.

The closest human presence was a Navy listening post on Triton, a moon of Neptune, now 2.9 light hours distant. High Guard Probe 8734 duly transmitted its data and continued to monitor the movement of the intruder vessel…as around it more and more new targets began to flash into realspace existence.

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.