Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

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 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