Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

stepping past them and into the drying stall. He raised his voice to be heard above the blasts of hot air cutting in from above and below. “I’m sorry about Spaas. I know you two were close-”

“You don’t know shit, Gray! Where the hell did you duck off to during the first battle over Haris, huh?”

“I imagine you’ve seen my report by now,” he replied. “I got separated, went down on the deck. Our orders were to provide support for the jarheads. So I did.”

“Yeah, while the rest of us were getting our asses shot off in hard vacuum! Pretty damned convenient if you ask me!”

“I seem to remember getting my own ass shot off, Collins,” he replied. Dry, he stepped out of the stall and the blast of air cut off. They followed him as he walked to his locker and began getting dressed.

“Well, just so you know, Prim, some of us put together a petition for Allyn and the CAG. You’re going before a BOI and get busted off the flight line, hell, bust you out of the Navy if we have our say! You’ll be lucky to find a job as a civilian!”

He glanced at Collins, then at the two men and one woman with her. All three of the others were support personnel with the squadron-Mackey, with Intelligence; Dole, from Personnel; and Carstin, who was with the squadron’s requisitions department. None were flight officers.

“You guys are signing this petition?” he asked. “I didn’t see any of you out there.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, Prim,” Lieutenant Lars Mackey growled, “besides you there’re only three flight officers with the Dragonfires left! And I don’t think you count! Not if you were hiding out down on the planet, like the lieutenant here says.”

“We lost some good friends at Haris,” CWO Tammy Carstin added. “Sir.”

Gray stared at her for a moment, until she broke eye contact, looking down. Everybody in the squadron knew she’d had a thing going with Gene Sandoval. Hell, half the female members of the squadron had something going with Gene Sandoval. He started to tell her that Sandoval had been his friend as well…then decided not to bring it up. “We all lost friends,” he told her.

“And that makes it okay?” Lieutenant j.g. Kenny Dole demanded. “‘We all lost friends.’ That makes it fucking okay?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Gray snapped back, angry now. “But I didn’t kill them and I didn’t get them killed! For your information Commander Allyn ordered me to go down and help the Marines!”

“After you’d already ducked down to the deck and left the rest of us, including your wingmate, facing the entire damned Turusch fleet!” Collins was yelling now, her face unpleasantly contorted and red.

“You do manage to put the worst possible spin on events,” Gray told her. “Why don’t we just let the Board of Inquiry sort it out?”

Collins stepped closer. She was shorter than he was, and had to look up to look into his face, but her glare carried the mass of someone much bigger. “You’re a coward, Gray. And a fucking technophobic primitive. They should have left you in the Manhattan swamps where they found you, a fucking squattie fighting over scraps with the other maladjies! You don’t belong here. You’re not officer material. You’re not even Navy material. Do yourself and the rest of us a big favor and resign your commission now. Because if you don’t, you’re going to go up against that Board of Inquiry and you’re going to be disgraced and broken, and sent back to the Ruins with your tail between your legs!”

She turned and stormed off then, the others following.

Gray shrugged and kept getting dressed.

Why, he wondered, was he staying? It wasn’t like he owed the Navy anything, and not a shipboard day went past that he didn’t wish he was still a squattie in the Ruins. Collins was right. He didn’t fit in, and never had. He didn’t want to fit in, when it came to that.

For three centuries now, the Navy had tended to recruit its people from the educated and tech-proficient classes, first from the old United States, and later with the larger and farther-flung Earth Confederation. Tech-proficient generally meant cerebral neural implants and direct interface capabilities within the general citizenry, since most jobs required direct links with computers and access to the VR facilities of the Net. The Confederation was, arguably, the most technically advanced and capable of Earth’s splintered social groupings, though the Chinese Hegemony ran a very close second. Even the mildly technophobic Islamic Theocracy had its own starships, though they felt that mindlinks were somehow contrary to the will of Allah.

And if the average star sailor was pro-tech and linked in, the officers were more so. They had to be, since managing a starship-to say nothing of an entire squadron or fleet-depended on being able to link in with numerous AIs as well as other officers, simply to understand a tactical situation and coordinate all of it according to something like a coherent plan.

And here he was, a squattie from the drowned Manhattan Ruins. Where most kids got their first implants at age three, before starting school, he’d received his first cerebral implant at the age of twenty-five. That had been when he’d completed his initial indoctrination, just before being shipped off to OCS. Officer candidates needed the direct link just to handle the volumes of data they were expected to learn in school. Direct linkages were even more necessary once you hit flight school, and had to learn how to handle a fighter directly, mind-to-AI mind.

Gray still hated the whole idea of having an implant, of having a tiny AI daemon in his skull, watching everything he did, recording, intruding. There were protocols for shutting the thing off when you wanted privacy… but the mere act of shutting down was recorded and could be questioned later.

Besides, how the hell did you know if the thing really switched off when you told it to go away?

A lifetime of growing up in the Ruins, where the Authority was always hassling, always probing into people’s private affairs, had left him both suspicious and skeptical. How could you trust any claim that they made?

He finished dressing-a gray utility jumpsuit. The word was that the squadron would not be on the flight line, not with only four flight officers remaining. With no place that he had to be officially, he’d decided to head up to the ship’s observation area to watch the arrival and docking at Mars orbit. That wouldn’t be for hours yet, though, and he wondered what he was going to do in the meantime.

Besides, of course, trying to avoid Collins and her friends.

Yeah, resigning his commission, if they’d let him, might be the best idea after all. He decided to check in with the Personnel Office-America’s PO, not with that young idiot Dole-and have an exploratory chat with them.

He’d been strong-armed by the Authority to join the Navy.

Maybe he’d finally proven to himself that his joining the service simply hadn’t been a very bright idea.

Chapter Fifteen

16 October 2404

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Approaching Phobos Space Elevator, Sol System

0850 hours, TFT

Koenig watched, expressionless, as America maneuvered gently toward Phobos. Mars filled a quarter of the sky, half in light, half in darkness. The dark side showed isolated gleams of city-dome lights; the illuminated half was dazzlingly bright, a hemisphere of broad ocher swaths of desert, the dark brown crinkles of rugged highlands and heavily cratered terrain, and, here and there, the blue gleam of newborn seas, surrounded by strips of burgeoning green.

The premier naval base of the Earth Confederation was constructed in areosynchronous orbit, seventeen thousand kilometers above the Martian surface. At that altitude, it took precisely twenty-four hours, thirty-seven