Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

And if there still was an Earth to report to.

“Nav, this is the captain,” he said.

“Yeah, Skipper.”

“If Triton went off the air, it probably means a strike there.”

“Roger that, Skipper. Combat thinks it might have been near-c impacters.”

“Right. But it’s also possible that the Trash fleet showed up in person. They don’t know anything about the layout of our solar system, no more than we know about theirs. The smart play might be to muster their fleet somewhere close to the first large outpost they pick up…and that would be Triton. From there, they could watch our response, scope out our defenses, maybe plan a long-range strike once they know where our orbital bases and inhabited worlds are.”

“Makes sense, sir.”

“I want you to prepare a series of course plots. Assume we don’t find anything at the IP. I want you to give me a vector that will carry us into Neptune space. I also want a plot that will send one or two of our ships straight to Triton, bypassing the IP.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Give me a moment here….”

Five aging frigates and destroyers against at least thirty Turusch warships…probably more by now, probably a lot more.

The odds, he thought, were not at all good.

Manhattan Ruins

North American Periphery

2009 hours, local time

“Hello! Anyone here?”

Gray’s voice echoed back at him from empty passageways and silent chambers. It seemed impossible that TriBeCa Arcology could be vacant…but he’d been searching through its halls for over an hour now, and he had yet to see any other humans.

He walked down the passageway leading to the suite of rooms he’d lived in with Angela, carrying the rented gravcycle over his shoulder. The broom was his ticket out of this place, and he knew that had he left it up on the roof where he’d landed, it would have been gone by the time he returned.

And that had been an odd point, too, now that he thought about it. His family had always maintained a watch up on the arc roof, but there’d been no one there when he’d landed. What in hell was going on?

“It’s Trevor! Trevor Gray!” he yelled. He thought he heard a scuttling sound in the distance, the scrape of shoes on floor tiles. He wasn’t certain. It might have been rats. “I’m looking for the TriBeCan Eagles! Is anyone here?”

The sun had set some time ago, and it was dark. Gray was wearing a small but powerful wristlight that illuminated the passageway ahead, but he was beginning to worry about getting lost in this maze.

He thought this was the way….

Yes! That was the entrance to the rooms he’d shared with Angela!

Of course his old quarters had long since been occupied by someone else. Ragged curtains had been hung to divide large spaces into smaller, private areas. Mattresses and blankets lay on the floors. The remains of a cook fire, the ashes still warm to the touch, had blackened a patch on what once had been the floor of a sunken living room. None of this stuff was his, however. Others had moved in after he and Angela had gone.

Which was only to be expected. But…surely they would remember him? It had only been five years, after all.

“Chiseler!” he shouted, almost screaming the name.

He walked over to the living-room window, what once had been an actual wall-sized picture window and sliding door with a balcony outside. When he and Angela had lived here, the balcony had been long gone, crumbled away a century before, but the window had still been solid, a sheet of scratched and sun-clouded plasglas extending from floor to ceiling. The plasglas was gone now, the opening admitting a steady spray of cold mist from the ongoing drizzle outside.

Carefully, he put a hand out to one frame of the vanished door and looked down, four hundred meters to the water, the depths between island-buildings lost in the growing darkness below, though there was still pale light in the sky. Vines growing on the outside surface of the arcology were curling in through the missing window, and beginning to flourish on the inside.

So why hadn’t the Authority reclaimed the Ruins? The largest buildings, like TriBeCa, were still sound. There’d been plans to rebuild the Old City out over the water using structures like the TriBeCa Arcology as pylons, he knew, for two centuries or more. It was technically feasible, at least.

There’d been no money for such projects after the Crash in the late twenty-second century, when nanotech had overthrown the old economic models. But things were prosperous enough now. At least for the rest of the Confederation.

Maybe people just got used to things the way they were. So far as that peaceforcer up in Morningside Heights was concerned, the squatties had always been here, the Ruins always a place of danger and primitive discomfort.

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