A voice followed the klaxons, emanating from someone on the ship's bridge. 'All hands, all hands, secure from transition. Rotating ship in five minutes. Sail crew, stand by to deploy the sail for braking. Captain to the admiral's quarters.'
High Admiral Martin Robinson, United Earth Peace Fleet, was one of those affected badly by the passage. He'd hoped it would not prove so and had his hopes dashed moments after the bridge had announced, 'Transition in…'
Robinson's looks belied his age. Despite being two centuries old, his face remained unlined, his back unstooped, his blue-gray eyes clear and bright. His heart and lungs and all the other organs worked as if they inhabited a twenty-one-year-old body and were no older than that themselves. Even his hair was blond, without a trace of silver or gray, and his hairline unreceded.
Anti-Decay Accelerating Factor, or ADAF, drugs had been available, at least to Earth's elite, for centuries. As a Class One, the highest of Earth's six castes, the high admiral was very elite indeed.
Yet neither the apparent age nor the real age had helped one whit to spare Robinson the misery of transition. One moment he had been fine, if a bit nervous. The next had seen his mind temporarily erased as his body disassembled and reassembled in an imperceptible instant. With the next he was on all fours on the deck of his cabin, projectile vomiting, moaning, and cursing.
It was in this position, vile smelling puke forming a puddle beneath him, washing over his hands in a flood and spreading to stain the knees of the black uniform trousers, that the captain of the Spirit of Peace found her admiral and the incoming system and fleet commander.
The captain of the ship, Marguerite Wallenstein, accompanied by two of the voiceless proles that handled janitorial services for the largely middle to upper-caste crew, hurried to kneel at the admiral's side and help him regain his chair. The proles set immediately on hands and knees to cleaning up the vomit while Wallenstein went to a nearby cabinet and took from it an amber bottle and two glasses. She poured herself and the admiral a drink.
Color was just returning to Robinson's drained face as he gratefully accepted the glass from Wallenstein.
'I was warned what to expect but nothing-,' the admiral began.
'Nothing prepares you for it,' Wallenstein finished. 'I know. It gets better-a bit, anyway-after you've done it a few times.'
'How many times have you…?'
'This is my fifth transition,' Wallenstein said, 'and hopefully my next to last.'
Younger than the admiral by some fifty years, Wallenstein looked to be the same age. A leggy, slender and svelte Scandinavian, she was a Class Two, ranking just below the admiral in the hereditary order of United Earth. Like him, she received full benefit of all the ADAF therapy and might, with luck, live to see five hundred. Not precisely beautiful-nose a bit too large and eyes a bit too small, she still exuded much of the earthy sexuality the application of which had seen her through difficult times in her rise within the hierarchy of the UEPF. What low shipboard gravity did for her breasts didn't hurt, either.
A competent officer, Wallenstein had ambitions. Chief among these was to be raised to class one, followed by promotion to admiral, even high admiral, and then to take what she considered her rightful place among the ruling caste. It would be a rare honor and achievement. She also knew that without a powerful sponsor it would never come to pass.
The proles finished their odiferous task and, bowing deeply and respectfully to the captain and the admiral, made a quiet exit from the suite. Neither of the upper-caste officers bothered to return the bows, even symbolically. They forgot about the proles as soon as they, and the smell of vomit, had left. Who knew or cared what proles thought, after all?
'You should have waited in freeze, Martin,' Wallenstein said reproachfully, once they were alone.
The admiral shrugged, already half recovered. 'It seems to pass quickly. And I did want to experience the transition, once anyway. Speaking of freeze, though, what of our passengers?'
'No malfunctions, if that's what you mean,' Wallenstein answered. 'They'll stay in freeze until a few days before we assume orbit. We haven't the stores to feed and water them without recourse to Atlantis Base, anyway.'
Robinson nodded his understanding and agreement. Moreover, it would be months before the ship would be able to take orbit around the target world. He had great respect for the position-or at least for the power- of the clergy of Earth, but really didn't want them for company for all that time. The representative of the caliph of Rome, in particular, grew tiresome very quickly, despite the body she would share gleefully and for the asking.
And on that not entirely happy thought, Robinson considered inviting the captain, once again, to his bed.
It would be a long braking maneuver before the ship assumed orbit and, while he could, by right and tradition, bed any female of the crew he wished, he had found the captain's technique most agreeable, especially in low gravity. Wallenstein would make Peace 's long descent to the planet something other than a trial.
Peace was one of thirty-three ships now in system. Four of these were of the same, Spirit, class. Another twenty-three were of one of the older but similar classes. The Spirits were slightly larger than the rest, but only slightly. They were ovoid, at just under two hundred meters across and three hundred long. Their silvery skin shone when the sun was just right. Only on closer inspection could one see that the apparently smooth surfaces were pocked with the marks of hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of strikes by astral debris.
Still, at a distance the ships-all twenty-seven that could be seen from below by the locals if the locals used powerful telescopes, as some did-seemed pristine, powerful and invulnerable.
Only one of the petty states that infested the surface of the planet below had made any effort to match the power of the majestic and apparently invulnerable fleet. Just how successful that attempt had been was a matter of considerable conjecture, both above and below.
All of the ships, newer and older, were said to be armed to the teeth. Those arms, specifically Peace 's arms, had been used exactly twice since the once invulnerable fleet had been established. It was too risky to do so now, though. Having seen two of its cities destroyed by nuclear fire from the fleet, the state so victimized had moved Heaven and Earth to eliminate the fleet's invulnerability.
That state, the locals called it the 'Federated States of Columbia,' had made the effort in a spirit of revenge as much as survival. 'Once burned; twice shy' was the common saying. Having seen two of its cities burned off the map toward the close of the great war that had convulsed the planet decades before, their equivalent saying had become, 'Twice burned; a third time and we nuke you until you glow.' The Fed bastards had actually had the effrontery to demonstrate that the threat was not idle, tracking, intercepting and destroying a robotic courier ship to prove their point. An armed and decidedly hostile standoff had ensued with more than a thousand (the exact number was deep-classified) of FSC nuclear-tipped and hypervelocity missiles pointed into space, and a like number of Peace Fleet warheads aimed expressly at the FSC. Moreover, it was widely believed that the FSC maintained, in addition to its nuclear missiles, some hundreds of mobile railguns and charged particle beam weapons capable of reaching into space either to defend against incoming UEPF warheads or, if those weapons were as good as they might be, even reaching out to touch the ships of the fleet.
The Peace Fleet might have destroyed the FSC, damn the retaliation, then, except that at the same time the FSC had demonstrated the ability to deluge Atlantis Island, the Peace Fleet base on planet, with too much nuclear fire to intercept. Since the families of the crews were on that base…
Besides the twenty-seven ships locked in geosynchronous orbit, six more were held farther back, one behind each of the planet's three moons-in order of size: Hecate, Eris and Bellona-and three more guarding the rift point. These six were of varying types but, while having some defense capability, were designed generally for the support of the 'tooth' elements of the fleet. This was longstanding practice, not a reaction to the FSC's threat. Indeed, insofar as Earth itself was concerned, there had been no reaction to the threats. Earth no longer understood threats, it had been so long.
In Orbit Above Terra Nova, 19 April, 2511
The blue-green planet turned slowly and majestically below, its day-side pastels interrupted only by concentrations of white clouds. The right quarter of the planet was plunged in night. Cities came into view as bright sparks and thick lines, especially along the planet's southern hemisphere.
Watching the scene on the wall-mounted view screen that hung in his sleeping cabin, High Admiral Robinson shook his head in something between dismay and disgust. So many people, twelve times or more what we have on
