Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

speech-were difficult for him.

“Admiral Koenig!” the changeling naval officer demanded. “I have a report here that you are taking the America battlegroup into deep space, toward right ascension fifteen hours. This is in direct violation of the Senate Military Directorate’s orders! You are to decelerate immediately, repeat, immediately, and rendezvous with the rest of the fleet between Earth and Mars!” The image shifted slightly, cutting back to the beginning of the message. “Admiral Koenig!..”

He closed the window. Noranaga would have looped the short message and sent it out on continuous repeat. America was now more than twenty light minutes from Earth, and anything like a real conversation, with questions or immediate responses, was impossible.

“Admiral?” the comm officer said. “There’s an imbedded reply order in the signal.”

“Ignore it, Comm,” Koenig said. “We didn’t hear the message. Too much static.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Koenig knew that his career was now literally on the line.

Selkies, he thought, tended to be unusually conservative, even within the overtly conservative hierarchies of the Navy. For two centuries now, genetic prostheses had allowed them to take on the selkie somaform, enabling them to work directly on one of the greatest projects of modern human technology-the reclamation of the oceans.

Earth’s planetary ocean had come uncomfortably close to dying in the mass extinction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, overfished, overexploited, poisoned first by industrial pollution, then later by the effects of devouring the world’s coastal cities. The selkies were working on the enormous oceanic converters, on the genetic restocking of the ocean’s sealife populations, on rebuilding pylon cities over the ruins of sunken metropolises, and on brand-new submarine megalopoli on the submerged continental shelves.

The selkies, more than their dry-land cousins, felt a special attachment to Earth and to her healing; there was a sizeable selkie contingent within the Confederation government, Koenig knew, that advocated abandoning space entirely. Earth and Earth’s oceans required Humankind’s complete devotion and dedication until they were once again healthy. Only then should the species even consider moving outward again…and then with a sharpened awareness of how fragile a living planet and its ecosystems were.

The defense of Earth would be paramount in Noranaga’s mind.

Well, it was paramount in Koenig’s mind as well. If he was wrong, they could court martial him, if there was a Confederation Navy left to take on the job.

But he wasn’t wrong. He stared at the starfield sprawled across the overhead dome of CIC. The Sun and Mars lay astern, the stars of Taurus and Pisces astern and to port; ahead, not yet distorted by their speed, he could see the familiar constellations of Bootis and adjoining Corona Borealis. The enemy was there.

And he would find them, find them and hurt them enough that the rest of Earth’s fleet could deal with them.

Even if it meant his death and the destruction of his battlegroup.

Red Bravo Flight

America Deep Recon

30-AU Shell, Sol System

0702 hours, TFT

Marissa Allyn had become her Starhawk, her senses inextricably entwined with its sensor suite, to the flow and pulse and rhythm of incoming signals. Part of the problem, of course, was that this patch of space was so damnably empty, a vast abyssal gulf four light hours out from a dwindled sun.

This was just one of a dozen distinct navigational waypoints determined by Combat back on board the America-guesses, really, as to where the enemy fleet might be.

The four-hour coast out from Mars had, for her, passed in just seventeen minutes. Five objective minutes ago, she and the other three Starhawks in her flight had begun decelerating. Now they were coasting once more, still moving at nearly half the speed of light.

That velocity was a compromise. With such a huge area within which the enemy’s Force Bravo might have emerged, it was more than likely that they would be someplace else, that Allyn and her flight would have to change course and rendezvous elsewhere, perhaps as much as two light hours away. Zorching along at half- c, she was moving too fast to effectively engage the enemy if she found him.

On the other hand, if the bad guys were here in her personal corner of the Outer System, she’d be crazy to engage them with only four fighters.

“Anyone see anything yet?” she asked over the squadron frequency.

“Nothing, Skipper,” Walsh replied. “Just a whole lot of nothing.”

Allyn felt a small, inner warming at Walsh calling her “skipper.” She was no longer the CO-the skipper-of a squadron, but her commander’s rank did put her in charge of the little four- ship group. The others in the Black Lightnings had been a bit standoffish when she’d first joined them in their ready room a week ago. Technically, her rank would have made her the CAG’s executive officer, the Assistant CAG, though that position was already filled by Commander Huerta.

By calling her “Skipper,” Walsh was showing that she’d been accepted by the others.

Family….

And Walsh was right. A whole lot of nothing…

The problem was that Force Bravo could not have emerged at a single point. Because starships under warp drive couldn’t see outside of their tightly folded little pocket universe, they were completely reliant on the accuracy of their ships’ AIs in determining when to break out of metaspace. Tiny discrepancies at the beginning of the boost translated into enormous distances at the end, with the result that ships emerged at different places and different times scattered over half of the sky. The enemy needed time to assemble his scattered forces-one very good reason for the delay, so far, in launching a strike on the Inner System.

“Hey, Skipper?” Friedman called. “Something funny here. I’m not getting Repeater Four-one.”

Friedman’s fighter was twenty thousand kilometers to high-starboard, and slightly ahead of Allyn’s ship.

Repeater Four-one was one of several hundred long-range communications repeater units set in solar orbit at the thirty-AU shell. Four-one was one of the dozen or so stations following in Neptune’s orbit, but others followed inclined orbits that let them cover the entirety of the thirty-AU shell.

“Well, well,” she said. “That might explain some things.”

The original warning of the enemy’s presence, of course, had been transmitted by High Guard Watch Station 8734 and several of its sisters. Lacking the power to transmit a clear signal all the way to Earth or Mars when they’d picked up the photon flash of emerging Turusch warships out at 45 AU, they’d transmitted an alert to the base at Triton. But the base on Triton was within range of only a tiny fraction of the High Guard watch stations. The repeater stations were spread out over the entire thirty-AU shell, serving as relays for transmissions from any of the tiny automated probes.

The system wasn’t perfect. There weren’t enough watch stations or repeater stations to cover the entire 450 quintillion square kilometers of the forty-AU shell, and the constantly changing orbital positions of the repeater stations at the thirty-AU shell left occasional gaps in the signal coverage. It was possible that Force Bravo had emerged somewhere where coverage was scant or nonexistent.

But if they’d emerged here, they would have been detected, and Repeater Station Four-one would have transmitted the warning to Earth.

Unless…

“I’ve got a contact!” Lieutenant Friedman yelled. “Contact at one-seven-niner plus five one!” There was a harsh pause, then, “Toad! I’ve got a Toad fighter, confirmed, range kay forty-three!”

Allyn saw the contact at the same moment…a single fighter, outbound, 43,000 kilometers beyond Friedman’s ship.

“Transmit log!” Allyn told her AI; the other fighters in her group would be doing the same. Whatever happened, Earth would have confirmation that Turusch warships were out here in another four hours. “All ships! Get the bastard!”