Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

USNA Gallagher

Sol System Inner Kuiper Belt

0029 hours, TFT

Captain David Lederer let himself drift with the surging tide of incoming data. He’d received the first burst transmission at 2220 hours, just over two hours ago.

The destroyer Gallagher was on High Guard patrol, and had been fifteen and a half AUs from Neptune when the base on Triton had been destroyed. He’d immediately passed the warning in-system toward Mars and Earth, then ordered Gallagher’s grav drives fired up to five hundred gravities. For the past two hours now, the destroyer had been accelerating out into the Kuiper Belt. She’d covered.86 of an AU and was now moving at some 160 kilometers per second, and still accelerating.

He’d ordered a continuous-stream lock on Mars. The ship would continue broadcasting status reports, position and vector, and sensor updates for as long as she could.

Lederer had been with the Confederation contingent at Everdawn. He did not expect that he, his ship, or the four hundred men and women on board would survive the next few hours.

He’d also contacted four other High Guard ships within range, and they, too, were accelerating outward now-the Chinese frigate Jianghua, the Indian States’ Godavari, the Japanese Hatakaze, and the American John Paul Jones. Their chances for survival during the next few hours were no better than Gallagher’s.

The High Guard was one of the few truly international organizations operating out of Earth, a multinational task force designed primarily to monitor the outer reaches of the solar system, track asteroids and comets that might one day be a threat to Earth, and to watch for nudgers. The Earth Confederation had grown out of an economic partnership between the old United States and a number of other nations, most of them former members of the British Commonwealth-Canada, the Bahamas, Australia, and New Zealand. Several non-Commonwealth states had joined later on-Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and the Russian Federation.

The High Guard, however, included ships from the Chinese Hegemony, the Indian States, and the European Union as well, which perhaps made that organization more representative of the entire Earth than the Earth Confederation itself.

The Earth Confederation had become more than an economic alliance in 2132, toward the end of the Second Sino-Western War. In 2129, a Chinese warship, the Xiang Yang Hong, had used nuclear munitions to nudge three small asteroids in Main Belt orbits into new trajectories that, three years later, had entered circumlunar space, falling toward Earth.

The Xiang Yang Hong had almost certainly been operating independently; Beijing later claimed the captain had gone rogue when he learned of the destruction of his home city of Fuzhou, and had carried out what was essentially a terrorist operation. His plan had been to devastate both the United States and the European Union by dropping all three asteroids into the Atlantic Ocean, causing devastating tsunamis that would wipe out the coastal cities on two continents. U.S. and European fleet elements had destroyed two of the three incoming two-kilometer rocks in what became known as the Battle of Wormwood-a reference to a biblical prophecy in the Book of Revelation that sounded eerily like an asteroid hitting the ocean. One rock-a piece of it, actually, had gotten through, falling into the Atlantic halfway between West Africa and Brazil.

The devastation had been incalculable. The loss of life, fortunately, had been less than it might have been, since most of the world’s coastline cities were already slowly being evacuated in the face of steadily rising sea levels. Even so, an estimated half billion people had died, from West Africa to Spain, France, and England, to the slowly submerging cities of the U.S. East Coast, to the vanishing islands of the Caribbean, to the coastlines of Brazil and Argentina. The ancient term weapon of mass destruction had, with that single deadly blow, taken on a radically new and expanded meaning. Coming hard on the heels of the deaths of 1.5 billion people in the Blood Death pandemic, Wormwood’s fall into the Atlantic had come close to ending technic civilization across much of the Earth.

The partial success of the American-EU fleet, however, had spurred further cooperation, and the rapid expansion of the automated High Guard project that had been in place for the previous century. Every space-faring nation on the planet-even the recently defeated Chinese Hegemony-had contributed ships and personnel to the newly expanded High Guard, with the sacred charge that never again would mountains fall from the sky. The Guard’s motto was “A Shield Against the Sky.” Its headquarters was located in neutral Switzerland, at Geneva.

Two centuries later, with the Sh’daar Ultimatum, the High Guard offered the teeming worlds and colonies of the inner solar system their best first line of defense against this new and still mysterious enemy. Their charter had been expanded; besides watching for nudgers-the ships of nation-states or terrorists attempting to push asteroids or comets into new and Earth-threatening orbits-they were tasked with patrolling the outer perimeter of the solar system, identifying incoming ships and, if they were hostile, engaging them.

The High Guard’s oath, a solemn and sacred promise sworn before the souls of those who had died at the Battle of Wormwood, both in space and in the thunderous doom of the incoming tsunamis, offered the lives of the High Guard’s men and women as a literal shield against any threat from the solar system’s depths.

It was an immense task…one far too vast to be practical. The High Guard currently numbered about two hundred warships, most of them aging Marshall-class destroyers like the Gallagher, or the even older Jackson-class frigates. At any given time, at least half of those vessels were in port for refit, maintenance, and resupply. Typically, they deployed for nine months at a time, patrolling out beyond the orbit of Neptune, serving as backup to the half million remote probes in the forty-AU shell.

That arbitrary shell around Sol gave scale to what was lightly called “the vastness of space.” The surface area of a sphere with a radius of 40 astronomical units was over 20,000 square AUs…close to 450 quintillion square kilometers.

That worked out to one ship per four and a half quintillion square kilometers-an obvious impossibility. In fact, both patrols and remote sensors tended to be concentrated within about 30 degrees of the ecliptic, which cut down things a bit…but there was always the possibility that an enemy would sneak in from zenith or nadir, where tens of billions of kilometers separated one sentry from the next.

Thinly spread or not, in the thirty-seven years since the Sh’daar Ultimatum, not one alien vessel had approached Earth’s solar system, and the general perception of the civilian population back home was that the war was far away, too far to be a threat.

According to the data flooding in through Gallagher’s sensors, that illusion of security had just been ripped away. At least thirty Turusch warships had materialized almost seven hours ago, some six light hours out from the sun and 25 degrees above the ecliptic…roughly in the same part of the sky as Arcturus and Eta Bootis. Exactly what they’d been doing since then was not clear; the ships weren’t registering on long-range tracking, and no more data was coming through from Triton since that one, quick, burst transmission.

But Lederer could make a good guess. Confederation tactics called for launching a high-G fighter or near- c bombardment of the target immediately, so that local defenses were overwhelmed. It was possible that enemy near-c impactors were already approaching Earth.

The main fleet would accelerate toward the target behind the bombardment and fighters. Turusch ships, depending on their class, could accelerate at anywhere between three hundred and six hundred gravities. That meant that by now they could have traveled anywhere between one and two billion kilometers-say, between six and thirteen astronomical units.

Based on that data, and the assumption that the invaders would be heading for the inner system as quickly as possible, Lederer had given orders to attempt an intercept, calculating an IP-an intercept point-some five AUs ahead, just beyond the orbit of Neptune, and trailing that world by half a billion kilometers. Ideally, all five High Guard vessels would reach the IP within a few minutes of one another.

The operation was not unlike hitting one high-velocity bullet head-on simultaneously with four other bullets, with the marksmen all firing blindfolded. Still, Gallagher might be able to get close enough to send Earth an updated report…if the enemy fleet was behaving in a predictable manner.