Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

“Copy that.”

One hundred kilometers was the traditional, if arbitrary, point at which space began as Earth’s atmosphere thinned away to almost nothing. Behind and below the accelerating Starhawks, the night side of Earth spread out in a vast, black bulk blotting out half of the sky. Scattered city lights showed here and there, some as sharp pinpoints, some as broader masses of light, some as diffuse glows beneath layers of cloud.

A lightning storm pulsed and flickered silently within the clouds off to the south.

This was something from which Gray could never walk away. He knew that now. When he’d been considering resigning his commission and going down to the fleet to serve out his time, he’d thought that what he was clinging to was the privilege and prerogatives of a naval officer. But that, he now knew, wasn’t it, not at all. He’d lived once scavenging garbage in the Ruins; he could live that way again, if forced to.

But the thought of giving up flight, free, unfettered flight among the stars…

“So…Lieutenant Gray,” one of the pilots called to him from the pack-Anders, Transit One-five. “They say you’ve had experience. You seen any action?”

“Yeah. I’ve seen action. Keep it quiet, people. Form on my heading. Engage squadron taclink.”

He gave the tactical display a last check, making certain that neither local traffic nor the ring arcs out in synchorbit lay anywhere near their outbound course. Slamming into one of SupraQuito’s hab modules at a few million meters per second was an excellent way of ending your Navy career…and taking quite a few civilians with you.

His nav marker was set for the calculated position of the America, somewhere out near Mars, about twelve light minutes away.

“Fifty-kay acceleration,” Gray announced, “in three…two…one…go!”

They went.

Red Bravo Flight

America Deep Recon, Sol System

0415 hours, TFT

Commander Marissa Allyn put her Starhawk into a high-velocity coast configuration, knowing that her shields would be dropping soon. She was seven AUs out from Sol, her outbound voyage one quarter over.

After launching from the America, she’d formed up with three other Lightning pilots-Lieutenants Cutler, Friedman, and Walsh. At the CAG’s orders, they’d linked their ships and boosted at fifty thousand gravities, leaving Mars and the America far behind in an instant.

Ten minutes after engaging their drives, they were moving at just over 299,000 kilometers per second-a hair less than the speed of light-and had traveled almost 90 million kilometers. At that point, they’d shut down their drives, drifting now at near-c, cocooned within the gravitic shields that deflected the bits of dust and stray hydrogen atoms that could fry an unprotected pilot at those velocities.

To Allyn, it felt like only a few minutes had passed, but her AI informed her that she’d been drifting now for one hour. Since shutting down the gravitic drive, she’d coasted outward for more than a billion kilometers, traveling so quickly that her subjective time had been shortened to four and a half minutes.

“Reconfiguration complete,” her AI informed her.

“Okay,” she told it. “Drop shields.”

Lowering shields at near-c was risky, and advisable only for short periods of time. The reconfiguration had moved a large percentage of her ship’s nanomaterial mass forward, creating a cone-shaped shield forward containing her fighter’s store of water, which was used as reaction mass for the plasma maneuvering thrusters. The Starhawk, in fact, was now imitating the America and other capital ships, creating a radiation shield forward to screen the pilot from high-energy particles. The defense wasn’t perfect. Some heavy particles, when the fighter hit them at near-c, generated cascade radiation that filtered back through the shielding mass, with long-term problems for the pilot’s health.

But her orders were clear. It was possible, she’d been told by the CAG, that a radio signal from an automated High Guard station on a Centaur asteroid up ahead would be passing her on its way to Earth and Mars. With shields up, with their gravitic twist in space surrounding her Starhawk shunting all radiation aside, her ship’s comm systems wouldn’t be able to pick up that signal. So she would coast for one minute, subjective, with shields down, as her AI attempted to sift a message out of the high-energy blast of static washing across her ship.

That one minute subjective was almost fourteen minutes objective, as the outside universe measured time; if that AI on Echeclus was transmitting, that should be time enough to pick it up.

To her ears, the incoming radio waves were noise-hissing static and faint traces of modulated signals. At this speed they were all blue-shifted, however, almost all the way up into the visible spectrum. No matter. Her AI would sort out the frequency shift.

“Signal detected,” her AI announced. “Signal is from the AI on Echeclus, and includes a retransmission of an alien signal at optical laser frequencies.”

Allyn felt her stomach knot. She’d half expected that they would pick up nothing, that they would have to decelerate, then boost back for the Inner System. But if they picked up the signal, they were to change course, not for the Inner System, but for one of several navigational waypoints in the general direction of Point Libra.

The likely emergence point of the enemy’s Force Bravo.

“Hey, Commander! I’m getting the signal,” Walsh’s voice said, blasting through the static.

“Same here,” Cutler added.

“Roger that,” Friedman added. “Can’t translate the imbedded part at all.”

“Right, people,” Allyn told them. “You know what that means. Our primary orders are in effect.”

“Yeah,” Cutler said. “There’s no going back.”

They knew the enemy fleet would be out there.

If the enemy hadn’t already started boosting for the Inner System.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Outbound, Sol System

0420 hours, TFT

“Well,” Captain Buchanan said, “the fighter recon group ought to know by now, one way or the other.”

“They’re there,” Koenig said, his voice, his thoughts distant. “By God, they’re there.”

“The Turusch? Force Bravo?”

“Yes.”

It had been all he’d been thinking about since they’d left Mars orbit. Suppose he was wrong? Suppose there was no Force Bravo…or that they were coming in from zenith or nadir? So many possibilities.

“Admiral Koenig?” a voice spoke in his head. “This is Comm. Message coming through from Earth. Priority One. And it’s red-coded for you, sir.”

He sighed. He’d been waiting for this. “Put it through.”

There was a pause, then a blast of static. After one hour at five hundred gravities, America was moving at a respectable eighteen thousand kilometers per second. That still was only 6 percent of c, but it was fast enough to leave a trail of ionized hydrogen in her wake. That and the fringe effect of her shields caused a lot of white noise.

But the signal from Earth had been tight-beamed and pumped up to make sure America received it. The software resident in Koenig’s implants decrypted the mind-only code, translating it for him. A window opened in his mind, and he saw the face of Vice Admiral Michael Noranaga.

Noranaga was in his selkie form rather than the human electronic avatar Koenig has seen at the Board of Inquiry. Large, lidless and unblinking eyes stared at Koenig from the mental window. Gill slits worked convulsively in the rubbery gray skin of the neck. Noranaga was speaking in a room filled with air, not water, and breathing-and