their Starhawks’ attitudes and kill the sideways drift imparted by their drop, and configured their craft into high-G needles.
“
“Copy, Deep Recon Red. Primary Flight Control confirms handoff to
“Acknowledge. Cleared for boost.” Dixon switched to the formation frequency. “Okay, people. You heard the lady. Engage squadron taclink. Fifty-kay acceleration in three…two…one…
And the fighters vanished toward the unwinking stars at half a million meters per second.
It had taken almost an hour to get here.
Trevor Gray had dropped off the rented broom at the Columbia Arcology, then caught a suborbital hopper for the twenty-minute flight to Oceana.
Four centuries before, Naval Air Station Oceana had been the largest U.S. naval base on the East Coast, and the command center for all Atlantic strike fighter activities when they were not actually on deployment. The relentless rise of the warming oceans eventually had forced the evacuation of nearby Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, and vast swaths of tidewater Virginia.
The naval base had remained, however, first under a sealed dome, then building up as the water levels rose, creating the iconic flat-topped base on pylons, often derided as the world’s largest and least maneuverable seagoing aircraft carrier.
The hopper had touched down on the upper landing deck in darkness at just past 2230 hours, local time, and Gray, with the handful of the military passengers from Morningside Heights, had checked in at the base quarterdeck.
The place was crowded. The recall order had caught a lot of naval and Marine personnel on Earth, and all of them were trying to get back to their ships.
Gray slapped his hand on the reader pad as a bored rating asked for his name and id. When Gray’s data flashed up on the man’s screen, however, he appeared to become more interested. “Lieutenant Gray? Fighter pilot, VFA-44?”
“That’s me.” A bold enough statement, considering he still wasn’t sure
“Okay…according to this thing, sir,” he jabbed a finger at his console monitor, “your ship, the
“Shit.” All he could think was that Collins was going to have a field day with this. “Where are they headed?”
“Classified…but I’d be willing to bet it has something to do with all the commotion about the Tushies out at Neptune, wouldn’t you say?”
“Reasonable guess.”
“I thought so. Anyway, a few hours ago, a request came through from the
“So you’re sending them out there now?”
“The request was from your admiral, and it
Gray thought about this. Technically, he was still off the flight line, pending a final clearance from psych. Either the enlisted rating hadn’t noted that data line on his electronic id…or he didn’t care.
Skippering a bunch of kid-nuggets to
Hell, it wasn’t like he had anything back in the Manhattan Ruins to go home to.
“Sounds like a plan,” he told the rating. “Where do I sign on?”
“Billingsly!” the rating shouted, turning to look over his shoulder. “Get this man down to Flight Ops!”
It might be against his better judgment, but he was going back to the
Chapter Twenty-One
18 October 2404
The fighters would be making the ferry passage fully armed.
Normally, this kind of shuttle flight would be made with the spacecraft unarmed, but these were special circumstances. Oceana was rife with rumor about the threat from Outside…rumors of Turusch ships bombarding Triton, of a battle with High Guard ships, of clashes with Confederation fleet elements in deep space.
There was no way to verify any of it. Even after Gray was back within reach of local Net-Clouds, information on any of the ships of the Confederation Navy had been blocked, and he didn’t have the passwords to mindclick access to it.
As the rating at Oceana’s quarterdeck had suggested, it almost certainly meant a Turusch incursion of some kind. The more certain he became of that, the more he felt a pounding need to get back to the carrier.
Back where he belonged.
“Starhawk Transit One, Oceana Control,” the voice said in his mind, “you are cleared for launch.”
“Roger that, Oceana Control.”
The launch tunnel was wide, flat, and slanted upward at 45 degrees from deep within the Oceana base. It would be decidedly unhealthy to engage drive singularities inside the tunnel, where a miscalculation could eat the fighter going up in front of you. Instead, they would be accelerated up and out by a magnetic sling, and engage drives once out over the ocean.
“Railgun power in three…two…one…release.”
Gray’s fighter began moving-with only about two gravities of acceleration, moving up the long, slanting tunnel toward a patch of black night sky. Behind him, twenty-three other fighters followed in tight, four-ship groups. The Starhawks were configured in their atmospheric flight modes, black manta rays with down-curving wing tips. Gray snapped out of the tunnel and into open sky.
A green light in his mind showed that all of the Starhawks had emerged at once. Black ocean blurred beneath his keel.
“Fifty-gravity acceleration,” he told the others. “Engage!”
He moved his hands through the control field, and his Starhawk began accelerating as his drive singularity became a white-hot star out ahead of his craft, devouring air molecules in his path and drawing behind him a white contrail of shocked water vapor. He brought his nose up, and in seconds he was thundering vertically though a low cloud deck, then punching past more rarified altitudes, the air growing thinner with each passing second.
The stars shone ahead, bright, cold, and hard.
“Oceana Control,” Gray called. “Starhawk Transit One passing one-hundred-kilometer mark.”
“Copy that, Starhawk Transit One. Oceana Control handing off to SupraQuito Control.”
