Earth Strike (22 page)

It hadn’t always been so, though. He and Angela had often stood on this spot, trying to imagine what life had been like when the Old City had been alive, vibrant with power and life, the first and greatest of the modern megalopoli. He’d seen old memory clips of the city before the first evacuations in the twenty-first century. Primitive…but astonishing, breathtaking, and miraculous in scope and in audacity, nonetheless.

He sensed, rather than heard, the movement at his back.

Gray spun, the gravcycle snapping down off his shoulder and into a port-arms position. The squattie was halfway across the sunken floor, short, black-haired, clad in stinking rags. He was holding a spear made from a lightweight metal rod with a kitchen knife taped to the end.

The man was rushing him, clearly intent on either stabbing Gray in the back or knocking him forward through the window, and into a four-hundred meter drop to the water below. Gray snapped out with the back end of the gravcycle, using it like a quarterstaff, blocking the man’s lunge and sharply bending the light metal rod of his improvised spear.

“Stop!” Gray shouted. “I’m not your enemy!”

His attacker barked something in an unknown language, and Gray’s eyes widened at a sudden realization.
His attacker was Asian
.

But that wasn’t possible.

Tens of thousands of individual families had made up the fabric of squattie life and culture within the Manhattan Ruins, but above the family level—individual groups of twenty to fifty people—there’d been hierarchies of tribe and race—divisions along racial lines, for the most part, though there were plenty of tribal groupings based on nations of origin as well. Blacks. Whites. Latinos. Hindi. Paks. Thais. Viets. Chinese. Khmers. Russians. All of these were represented within the Ruins, and many, many more. Though families might raid and forage across most of the Ruins, from the Battery to the Bronx, they did so by trespassing on the turf of other tribes…and that was what made life in the Ruins so dangerous. Chinatown, just to the east of TriBeCa, remained an Asian enclave that stubbornly resisted the influx of other ethnic groups; when he and Angela had lived here, an agreement of sorts had existed between the TriBeCa families and Chinatown, to the effect that each stayed out of the other’s turf, maintaining a wary truce. The islands beyond Broadway Canyon and south of the Canal were deadly to non-ethnic Chinese.

Gray couldn’t decide if the man in front of him was North Chinese, Korean, or Japanese. The language had sounded more like Japanese—explosive and guttural—rather than like the more musical Mandarin or Cantonese. His rags included a fairly new-looking smartsuit jacket, presumably scavenged from the ruins of some clothing store, but the indicator light at the collar wasn’t on, so it wasn’t powered. Most smartsuits could maintain a comfortable temperature, interface with local Net-Clouds in order to pull down weather reports and other data, or serve as communications centers…but some used biofeedback to enhance significantly the wearer’s speed and strength. If Gray had to face someone hand-to-hand, he didn’t want them wearing one of
those
things.

“Take it easy!” Gray said, motioning with his hand. His mind was racing. If Asians were here in TriBeCa, it could only mean the old families, including Gray’s family, the Eagles, had left, driven out, perhaps, when the truce had failed. “Do you understand me?”

The man barked something again, the words unintelligible, then lunged again with his bent spear. Gray sidestepped the thrust, snapped his broom up and around, knocking the man flat on his back.

Shit. The peaceforcer had said there’d been changes in the Ruins. And something about the inhabitants killing each other even more enthusiastically than usual.

If the truce had failed, if the Chinese had moved in on TriBeCa, there was no telling where the rest of his family was now. Hell, it hadn’t been that long since captured enemies had been skinned and suspended still living from building walls as no-trespass warnings to marauders, and there were still occasional stories, whispered and wildly embellished, of cannibalism and mass murder among the crumbling islands. Life in the Manhattan Ruins had never been easy, but at times it got downright
interesting
. Hellishly so.

His family might have migrated to another part of the Ruins, moving in with allies, possibly, or taking away some other group’s hab space to replace the hab stolen from them. That was the way of life in the Ruins.

Or the Eagles might all have been butchered. That, too, was life—and death—in the Old City.

It was strange…and a bit unnerving. Just five years ago, Gray had been a squattie, a life he didn’t particularly like, but which he accepted, and which he’d been convinced was better than life under the Authority.

But now…

The man on the floor groaned and stirred. There was no point in interrogating him; Gray doubted that he spoke English. Once the Authority had withdrawn from the Ruins, individual families and tribes had pretty much fallen back on the customs and languages of their individual ethnicities, and English was a second language, if it was even known at all.

He set his broom on the floor, stretched out on the seat and let the safety harness engage, then gave it a boost and rolled for the open window. Cold, wet air engulfed him as he fell…and then he was feeding in power and leveling off, flying toward the south.

He wasn’t at all certain where he was going now.

Admiral Karyn Mendelson’s Quarters
Mars Synchorbit, Sol System
0234 hours, TFT

Alex Koenig and Karyn Mendelson both snapped awake at the same instant, the Priority One alert sounding within both of their minds, yanking them from a deep, sex-induced slumber. They were still entangled with each other, holding each other, staring into each other’s eyes from just a few centimeters apart.

“Lights!” Mendelson called, and the bedroom lights came up. Rolling out of opposite sides of the bed, they began reaching for articles of clothing scattered on the deck a few hours earlier.

“P-A!” Koenig called, summoning his Personal Assistant out of the Net-Cloud as he stepped into his underpants. “What the fuck is going on?”

“A Priority One defense alert has just been issued by the Military Directorate,” his AI replied. “An announcement follows.”

He and Mendelson exchanged glances as they continued getting dressed. She’d evidently gotten the same news from her AI.

“To all military personnel within range of this Net-Cloud. This is Admiral John C. Carruthers of the Confederation Joint Command Staff.” Carruthers was the five-star admiral on the Joint Chiefs, the senior military officer, under the civilian secretary of defense, of the Confederation Navy. “At approximately seventeen hundred forty-five hours Fleet Time yesterday, a large Turusch battle fleet began dropping into normal space, forty-five astronomical units from Sol, roughly on a line between Earth and the constellation Boötis. The photon release of that emergence was detected by our automated systems roughly three hours later, and a warning broadcasted to our listening post on Triton. One hour after that, contact with Triton was lost. We must now assume that Turusch fleet elements have destroyed that base.

“High Guard elements are seeking to close with the intruders in order to gather more intelligence. We do not expect them to materially hamper the enemy’s operations.

“The Senate president and the secretary of defense have authorized me to declare an immediate crimson alert, and to scramble
all
, repeat
all
available military and High Guard vessels for the defense of the Inner System. We do not at this time know how much time we have or whether the enemy has launched a high-velocity preemptive strike against Inner System targets. In light of this latter possibility, it is imperative that all ships launch in the shortest possible time.

“Repeating. To all military personnel…”

Having heard and acknowledged the alert, Koenig and Mendelson were able to switch it off. Koenig finished pulling on his uniform jacket as Mendelson shrugged into a military smartsuit. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“My duty station,” she replied. “Phobia’s CIC. I’m on Admiral Henderson’s command staff. You’re headed for the
America
.” It wasn’t a question.

“If I get there in time.” He gave a wan grin. “Buchanan’s still aboard. He’ll be readying her for boost by now.”

“Good luck, Alex.”

“And you, Karyn. Stay…” He stopped. He’d been about to say “Stay safe,” but that wasn’t an option for naval personnel, who by long tradition went into harm’s way. “Stay out of trouble,” he finished lamely. “I’ll see you when we get back.”

He didn’t add that there was a distinct possibility that the promised meeting would never happen.

Liberty Column
North American Periphery
2134 hours, local time

Trevor Gray sat alone atop the crown of the ancient Statue of Liberty.

Once, Lady Liberty had stood at a much lower elevation, the statue and its pedestal and foundation rising some 93 meters from an irregular, eleven-pointed star-shaped base. In the late twenty-first century, as rising sea levels had repeatedly threatened New York City and promised to completely drown little Liberty Island, the old pedestal had been replaced by a new, taller column. That column now thrust up out of the black waters submerging Liberty Island, supporting the 40-meter copper statue some 120 meters above the new sea level.

Technically, the Statue of Liberty still belonged to the old U.S. government, by way of the National Park Service and under the provisions of the Confederation Charter. She had fallen on hard times lately, however. Low-voltage electrical charges, generated by the interaction of salt water and corroding copper, were slowly loosening the Lady’s rivets. The upper six meters of her arm had broken off and fallen into the sea long ago. Like plans to reclaim Manhattan, the ancient icon of liberty was being forgotten, the statue allowed to collapse into ruin.

You could see her from the southern and western windows of TriBeCa, though, at least when the weather was clear, and she’d always been a powerful and deeply moving symbol for Gray. Life in the Ruins, even when it was brutish and short, was supposed to be about
liberty
.

He sat on Lady Liberty’s hairline immediately in front of the gaping windows lining the front of her crown, his legs dangling over the side. In the darkness off to his left, to the north, the Ruins loomed across New York Harbor, the hundreds of individual green-cloaked islands merging into shadows upon shadows. The tallest islands were marked by strobing navigational beacons, warning off low-flying aircraft or personal fliers. Beyond, the New City gave off a glow as intense as a false dawn, backlighting the darkened islands.

The rain had ended an hour ago, and the sky was clearing. To the south, out over the ocean, he could see the faint, inline stars of SupraQuito twinkling some 50 degrees above the horizon.

Gray was feeling torn, torn between past and present, between what he’d been and what he’d become. Given time, he thought he could track down the Eagle family, if there were any left alive. Once daybreak illuminated the Ruins, he could fly in, spot a scavenger or, better, a hunting party, and question them.

Just so long as the Chinese hadn’t taken over the entire mass of islands.

But that was impossible. Unless they’d gotten hold of a cache of military weaponry, they couldn’t possibly take over the entire expanse of Manhattan. They simply didn’t have the numbers.

He was still coming to grips with the fact that the place he’d thought of as
home
for all these years, including his years in the Navy, was gone. It left him feeling adrift in a way he’d never felt during his five years of military service.

It felt like he no longer had a home to come home to.

Worse, it felt like home was now shipboard. His berth aboard the
America
. The thought was unsettling, and left him depressed and bitter. What was left for him…going back to the Navy and serving out a twenty-year career?
Then
what?

He wondered if he dared fly back up to Morningside Heights and see if he could see Angela. She’d seemed pretty definite about not wanting to see him anymore, but she could have changed.

It was possible, at least….

The shrill bleat of an in-head warning signal so startled him he nearly fell off of his precarious perch.
Damn
it! How was it possible? There was no Net-Cloud here, the peaceforcer had told him. The signal must be being punched through at extraordinarily high power from synchorbit itself, bypassing the local Net-Cloud nodes and transmitting directly to individual in-head units.

“To all military personnel within range of this Net-Cloud,” a voice announced, sharp in his head. “This is Admiral John C. Carruthers of the Confederation Joint Command Staff….”

And suddenly things were
very
much more serious indeed.

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.