by Ian Douglas
“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had repeatedly threatened New York City and promised to completely drown little Liberty Island, the old pedestal had been replaced by a new, taller column.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.
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 star
ship 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 o
f 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!”
