Vermin …

The All of Us race was unaccustomed to dealing with other sentient species. One of the primary reasons for this was, simply, their size; by almost any standards, the H’rulka were giants.

An adult H’rulka consisted of a floatation gas bag measuring anywhere from two to three hundred meters across, with brain, locomotion and feeding organs, sensory apparatus and manipulators clustered at the bottom. Most other sentient species with which they’d had direct experience possessed roughly the same size and mass ratio to a H’rulka as an ant compared to a human.

When the H’rulka thought of other life forms as “vermin,” the thought was less insult than it was a statement of fact, at least as they perceived it. Within the complex biosphere of the H’rulka homeworld, there were parasites living on each All of Us colony that were some meters across. H’rulka simply found it difficult to imagine creatures as intelligent that were almost literally beneath their notice in terms of scale.

“Commence acceleration,” Ordered Ascent directed. “We will move into the region of heavy radio transmission, and destroy targets of opportunity as they present themselves.”

The H’rulka warship, more than twenty kilometers across, began falling toward Sol, the inner system, and Earth.

To Brea, my guiding star

Table of Contents

Vermin …

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Epilogue

By Ian Douglas

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

12 December 2404

Emergence, Arcturus System

36.7 light years from Earth

0310 hours, TFT

The recon probe emerged from its Alcubierre bubble of tightly warped space, bleeding off excess velocity in a burst of high-energy photons. An artificial gravitational singularity the size of a small dust particle and as massive as a star flicked on and off a few meters beyond the craft’s bulbous nose, dragging it forward with an acceleration of nearly five thousand standard gravities. At that rate, the craft would be crowding the speed of light within another one hundred minutes.

Only slightly larger than a VG–10 Krait smart missile, the ISVR–120 probe was too small to carry sentient organics; its pilot was a Gödel 2500 artificial intelligence packed into the solid-state circuitry that filled the pod’s core and so, technically, could be said to take up no space at all. Certainly it needed none of the bulky life-support equipment necessary for organic life.

The AI was called Alan, named after Alan Turing, one of the giants in the development of the first computers four and a half centuries earlier.

Within seconds of the probe craft’s emergence from the warp bubble, Alan had scanned the system ahead, a volume of space dominated by a single bloated and brilliant orange star. The Confederation Naval Standard Ephemeris entry on the star resided within Alan’s surface memory.

STAR: Alpha Boötis

COORDINATES: RA: 14h 15m 39.7s Dec: +19˚ 10’ 56” D 11.24p

ALTERNATE NAMES: Arcturus, Alramech, Abramech, 16 Boötes

TYPE: K1.5IIIFe–0.5

MASS: 3.5 Sol; RADIUS: 25.7 Sol; LUMINOSITY: 210 Sol (Optical 113 Sol)

SURFACE TEMPERATURE: ~4300oK

AGE: 9.7 billion years

APPARENT MAGNITUDE (SOL): –0.04; ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDE: –0.29

DISTANCE FROM SOL: 36.7 LY

PLANETARY SYSTEM: 6 planets, including 1 Jovian and 5 sub-Jovian gas giants, plus 47 dwarf planets and 65 known satellites, plus numerous planetoids and cometary bodies.

One gas giant satellite, Jasper, is of interest with somewhat earthlike conditions due to gravitational/tidal effects. …

Arcturus, depending on how one measured such things, was the third or fourth brightest star in the night skies of Earth, a bright orange point at the base of the kite-shape of the constellation Boötis. From Alan’s emergence point some eighteen astronomical units out, Arcturus was a dazzling gold-orange beacon 113 times brighter than Sol would have been at the same distance. At infrared wavelengths, Arcturus was even brighter, flooding ambient space with sullen heat.

Alan’s primary objective lay almost directly beyond the star from his emergence point. His final approach would be masked by the star’s glare … if everything went right.

By the time Alan had traveled a third of the distance toward Arcturus—some 900 million kilometers—he was moving at a hair better than 99 percent of the speed of light. Velocity transformed his view of the surrounding universe, compressing it into a circle of light dead ahead—most of it infrared light from Arcturus, blue-shifted into optical wavelengths. The AI’s sensory correction program, however, was able to untangle the flood of speed-distorted light into its separate components and correct for the distortion. His velocity also distorted time, by seven to one at this velocity. Each passing minute for Alan was seven in the universe outside; it created the illusion that he was hurtling deeper into the Arcturus system much faster than he actually was.

Some two hundred minutes objective after entering the Arcturus system, Alan passed the star, skimming the giant’s photosphere. The probe’s electromagnetic shielding deflected the worst of ionizing radiation but had little effect on radiant heat. Briefly, the probe’s hull struggled with temperatures approaching 900 degrees Celsius. Nanotechnic currents within the hull laminates helped distribute the heat, radiating much of it harmlessly astern.

And then the star—its monstrous, turbulent, and roiling girth nearly twenty-six times larger than Sol’s—fell away behind, red-shifting abruptly to a near-invisibility, illuminated at optical wavelengths solely by red-shifted X-rays.

Alan’s objective now lay directly ahead, 20 astronomical units out.

Long-range detectors were already picking up ships, enemy ships, though at this distance those images were more than two and a half hours old. As expected, most of the enemy targets were grouped closely around a Jupiter-sized gas giant, listed in the database as Alchameth, and its Earth-sized moon, Jasper. Orbiting the moon was Arcturus Station, a terraforming base established by the Confederation three years ago to begin the process of turning Jasper into a human-habitable world.

But fourteen months ago, the Turusch had come. A Confederation naval task force stationed here had been all but wiped out, the orbital station had been captured. So far as could be gathered, nearly six thousand technicians, planetologists, xenologists, terraform specialists, and first-down colonists on the station—men, women, and children—had been butchered.

The probe’s sensors were picking up the faint reflected gleams of Arcturus Station two hundred kilometers above Jasper, and two Beta-class Turusch battleships hanging close alongside, each a small asteroid, crater-pocked and immense. Numerous smaller vessels swarmed in the giants’ shadows—Juliet- and Kilo-class cruisers.

If more distant Turusch warships were positioned far enough from Alchameth that they could have observed the emergence flash of the probe on the far side of Arcturus, there was no sign … though he was picking information out of light that had left Arcturus Station less than an hour after his entry into the system. A warning might well be on its way to those docked warships from sentries more than a light hour away.

Long minutes crawled past. The probe was hurtling toward the enemy vessels out of the glare of the local star, invisible … but before long the Turusch sensors would detect the distortions in space caused by the probe’s enormous AGM, its artificial gravitational mass. For a time, Alan considered the possibility that they simply weren’t looking in his direction, that he was not going to be noticed at all … and then the smaller warships alongside Arcturus Station began accelerating. Moments later, a cloud of missiles streaked in his direction. Alan began shifting the singularity drive randomly in different directions, causing the speeding probe to jink unpredictably. The time lag between his position and theirs gave him an advantage, time to calculate incoming trajectories and arrange not to be at their endpoints when the missiles detonated.

Alan’s recon pod was unarmed.

He increased acceleration, tacking additional nines onto his current percent c. Anti-ship missiles closed with him, and for a few moments Alan engaged in a deadly game of tag, jinking hard this way and that to confuse enemy missiles and defense systems. A nuclear fireball flared to port, dazzling and intense, the hard radiation sleeting across his screens.

Alan survived.

The gas giant Alchameth showed a disk, now, swelling rapidly as Alan’s sensors continued correcting for the speed distortion, becoming a vast, ringed and banded gas giant almost directly ahead. Alan focused on Jasper, visible now, high and to one side. A final course correction put him squarely on target. At 99.99% c, he flashed through the final 10 million kilometers in just 4.8 seconds subjective, passing Arcturus Station at a distance of just 315 kilometers.

He was prepared for the passage, with certain sensor collection heads extruded through the nano-liquid outer hull of the probe, trained on the enemy-held base, on the surface of the planet-sized moon, and on a large volume of surrounding space.

There was something else there … something just emerging now, not from behind Alchameth, but from within the gas giant’s seething, turbulent atmosphere, something unseen until this moment. Something huge …

High-energy beams lanced toward him as he passed, one grazing his screens and melting a portion of his hull.

And then he was past, speeding outbound at just less than the speed of light itself, as enemy ships and missiles scrambled to pursue.

But they needed to accelerate first, and would never be able to catch him.

Alan was injured, however; the grazing near-miss had burned out critical sensors, parts of his lateral maneuvering projectors, and his energy screen itself. That last was serious, because it meant that incoming radiation would fry his circuitry within the next few subjective hours.

Somehow, though, he needed to get the accumulated data from his near-passage of the station back to Earth.

And he was going to need to commit the AI equivalent of suicide to do so. …

Chapter One

21 December 2404

TC/USNA CVS America

Approaching SupraQuito Fleet Base

Earth Synchorbit, Sol System

1235 hours, TFT

The star carrier approached the gossamer structure with a delicate grace that belied the vessel’s titanic mass. Her hemispherical forward shield, pitted and scarred by innumerable impacts with dust motes and radiation, bore her name in sandblasted letters ten meters high: America.

Mushroom-shaped, the ship was 1,150 meters long. The forward cap, 500 meters across and 150 deep, served as both radiation shielding and as holding tank for 27 billion liters of water, reaction mass for the ship’s maneuvering thrusters. The slender kilometer-long spine was taken up primarily by quantum-field power plants, maneuvering thrusters, and stores; twin counter-rotating hab rings tucked in just behind the shield cap carried the ship’s crew of nearly five thousand. Around her, escorting vessels paced themselves to their ponderous consort’s deceleration, minnows in the shadow of a whale.

Thirty-six thousand kilometers ahead, Earth gleamed at half phase—with dawn breaking across eastern North America, while the Atlantic, Europe, and Africa lay in full light between swirls and shreds of brilliant white cloud. At this distance, the planet spread across just 20 degrees of arc pole to pole, appearing delicate and impossibly fragile.

More fragile still, though, was the web of orbital structures just ahead in America’s path. SupraQuito hung suspended on the slender tether of its elevator cable in synch-orbit, directly above Earth’s equator some 35,783 kilometers above the top of the mountain to which it was anchored. The structure—or interconnected series of structures, actually—was an enormous collection of hab modules, shipyards, orbital factories, environmental facilities, power plants and collectors, agro spheres, and docking facilities suspended between the elevator dropping to Earth, and the support tether leading up to the anchor some thirty thousand kilometers farther out.

From here, SupraQuito—including the tangle of structures that housed the Earth Confederation government—was visible, barely, as a thread-slender gleam of reflected sunlight, with constellations of tiny stars showing in the shadows. Some day, a thousand years hence, perhaps, SupraQuito would join with the other two space elevators, at Singapore and at Tanganyika, and become a true, inhabited ring encircling the Earth. At the moment, the entire massive structure appeared gossamer and delicate, far too insubstantial to trap the oncoming bulk of the Star Carrier America.

America herself was at the helm. The powerful AI residing within the carrier’s electronic network possessed far more memory and processing power—by several orders of magnitude—than did a merely human brain. Exact comparisons between the relative brainpower of man and machine were meaningless, however, and probably impossible to calculate in any case. America’s mind, if that was the proper term, was wholly focused on the ship, its systems, its functioning, its navigation and control. At the moment, she was judging the remaining distance between her prow and Docking Tube One at the SupraQuito Military Fleet Base now just a few hundred kilometers ahead, and her own rate of deceleration. With a closing velocity of 8.64 kilometers per second, she needed to increase the gravitational mass currently being projected dead astern by 37 percent in three … two … one … now.

America kept up a running dialogue with her counterpart at Fleet Base Approach Control, with every aspect of her vector checked hundreds of times each passing second. The docking facility was not stationary, of course. Its omega, its angular velocity, kept it precisely above its attachment point in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador. At synchronous orbit, this worked out to 3.0476 kilometers per second.

For ten long seconds, America decelerated. With the ship enmeshed within the gravitational field of the projected singularity aft, the deceleration was unfelt by the vessel’s passengers and crew. For them, the slowly rotating hab rings provided spin gravity. America slowed … slowed …

A final, precisely timed nudge from singularities to starboard gave her the necessary 3.0476 kps lateral velocity.

And with perfect choreography the massive carrier dropped into the sweet spot just five kilometers off the docking port, all singularities winking out before they could warp the delicate structure of the base. Grappling tethers, extended along the carrier’s length, reached toward the dock. America would be warped into her berthing space—an ancient seafaring term that had nothing to do with her space-bending Alcubierre faster-than-light drives. The tethers connected with grappling points along the berthing area and began to contract. A small fleet of powerful little tugs emerged from the base, taking up station and nudging the carrier toward the dock. Slowly, very slowly, the quarter-million-ton carrier was hauled into port.

While America’s AI was far more powerful in most respects than human intelligence, the ship possessed nothing like human emotion. She heard the cheers from personnel on her bridge and in her CIC, from lounge decks and ready rooms and flight decks where members of her crew had gathered to watch the docking. Most of them, evidently, were delighted to be home, though the carrier had only an academic understanding of what that might mean. America had been on extended patrol for the past six weeks, watching for evidence of further incursions by the enemy Turusch. Her admiral had been ordered home to attend a ritual that America did not understand at all, even in theory.

The tether cables continued to contract and the dockyard tugs continued to nudge, drawing the ship closer and closer to her berth. Braces gently swung out to arrest that movement with a jar barely felt by the humans on board. Magnetic clamps snapped home, and the debarkation tube extended from the berthing module to America’s quarterdeck, located in zero-G at her central spine, immediately abaft the shield cap and just forward of the still rotating hab modules.

“All hands, this is the Captain.” The voice was that of Captain Randolph Buchanan, America’s commanding officer. “Welcome home!”

But for the Star Carrier America, this certainly was not home.

This was a temporary waypoint, a momentary interruption of her duties, of her electronic life.

For America, home was always … out there.

Admiral’s Quarters, TC/USNA CVS America

SupraQuito Fleet Base

Earth Synchorbit, Sol System

1405 hours, TFT

“Why in a quantum-warped hell do I have to go to this thing?” Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig glared at his own image projected on the wall screen in his quarters.

“Your adoring public, of course,” a voice replied in his head. “They want to see you, shake your hand, and give you the worship due a conquering hero.”

“Bullshit,” Koenig growled. “I think it’s just more politics, and the sooner I’m back on America’s flag deck the better, so far as I’m concerned.”

“Harsh words from the man who saved Earth.”

He winced a bit at that. He’d saved Earth, yes, in what was now being called the Defense of Earth, a rare and hard-won naval victory just two months ago. But there’d been losses … terrible losses. And one of them …

“Let me see you, Karyn,” he said.

The room’s electronics projected a holographic image into the suite’s sunken living area, a smiling woman Koenig’s age in the black-and-gray dress uniform of a Confederation Navy rear admiral. She looked … perfect, exactly as he remembered her.

Exactly as she’d been before the high-velocity Turusch impactor had slashed through the military synchorbital base above Mars known as Phobia, wrecking Mars Fleet CIC, the fleet dockyard, and killing thousands of civilian, Marine, and Navy personnel … including Karyn Mendelson.

He’d recovered her PA, her personal assistant. Copies had resided within his own communications implants, and in his office on board the Star Carrier America, and elsewhere. When she’d been alive, it had been able to project an AI simulacrum, an avatar, of Karyn indistinguishable from the living person over any communications or virtual net links. PAs could project the owner’s image to field the flood of routine requests and calls received every day. Such avatars were smart enough to hold conversations and even make routine decisions for the original.

They weren’t the same, though, weren’t as responsive or as smart, and most important, they weren’t flesh and blood.

God, he missed her.

The image in front of him looked a little sad. “You really should see the psych department,” she told him. “You’re hanging on to the … memories, using them to keep yourself from having to grieve.”

“Since when did you get reprogrammed as a psytech?” he asked the image. He tried to keep the words light and bantering, and knew he’d failed.

“Karyn Mendelson had considerable psych experience,” the image told him. “She commanded the fleet at Arcturus Station last year, remember, before she was assigned to Admiral Harrison’s command staff.”

“I know, damn it, I know. I just … I just don’t want to lose you.” Again. …

“Alex, you have lost me. Lost her, rather. A PA simulacrum cannot substitute for a real human.”

“Maybe not,” he replied, stubbornly sullen. “And maybe you’re how I can … get used to the idea that she’s gone.”

“A psytherapy session would be better, Alex.”

“Look, I don’t want to talk about it now, okay? I’m supposed to be at this damned reception tonight. The Eudaimonium Arcology.”

“Yes, Alex.”

And that, he thought glumly, perfectly summed up the difference between a PA avatar and the real person—ignoring the fact that you couldn’t touch an avatar. The real Karyn would never have let things rest there, would have kept arguing with him if she thought he was doing something stupid. Her PA’s holographic projection, directed by certain software protocols, simply agreed with whatever he told it to do.

It didn’t help that the AI program, likely, was right. The Navy relied heavily on advanced psychiatric medicine these days, including the use of elaborate virtual psytherapeutic replays of traumatic events, to treat the casualties of modern warfare. He’d been through virtual simulations himself more than once. Nothing to it. …

He just didn’t want to forget her.

A comm signal chimed in his head. “Admiral?” It was his senior aide, Lieutenant Commander Nahan Cleary.

“Yes, Mr. Cleary.”

“It’s time to go ashore if you want to get there in plenty of time.”

“I’ll be right there.” He checked his inner time readout. Just past nineteen, Fleet Time, which was GMT for Earth. SupraQuito was in the same planetary time zone as the Eudaimonium Arcology, a five-hour difference; it was now 1409 EST.

Lieutenant Commander Cleary was stretching somewhat the need for urgency. Admirals did not ride the space elevator with the general public, which would have meant a two-hour trip down the express to Quito, and another hour in the subsurface gravtube to New New York. The admiral’s barge on board the America would get him to the Eudaimonium Arc in less than an hour. The invitation was for seventeen, local time, so he still had almost two hours before he absolutely had to leave. Cleary, however, like all good aides, tended to fuss worse than a nagging PA, and didn’t like to entertain even the possibility that his admiral would be late.

He wished he could blow off the invitation entirely, though. He was busy working on a set of tactical evaluations with Fleet HQ, and he didn’t have time for this nonsense.

But for military personnel an invitation from the president of the Confederation Senate himself was an order, not a suggestion, and Fleet Admiral Rodriguez would be there as well.

Better to go and get the damned thing over with.

Another chime sounded, and this time Karyn’s image appeared, his personal assistant serving now as his secretary.

“What is it, Karyn?” he asked.

“An incoming fleet communication, Alex,” she said. “You’re really going to want to see this.”

“Put it through.”

A window opened in his mind, and he felt the flow of the encrypted data feed. Keys within his implanted circuitry opened the message, and he found himself looking down on another world.

“ONI/DeSpaComCent to all units with Crystal Tower clearance and above,” an emotionless voice, probably an AI, said. “We have an incoming transmission from an ISVR–120 dispatched to the Arcturus system six weeks ago. Data is raw, with only preliminary analyses by this department. …”

Within his mental window, Koenig could see the planet and its moon. A cascade of printed data scrolled down one side of his awareness, but he didn’t need to read it to recognize the gas giant Alchameth and its largest satellite, Jasper. A bright blue targeting reticule marked a silvery pinpoint—Arcturus Station in orbit over a cloud-swathed moon. A dozen smaller reticules, each bright red, marked Turusch ships in orbit around Jasper.

His experienced inner eye took in the Turusch ships, each with its id tag giving type, mass, and readiness. Two Beta-class battlewagons, plus at least ten cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers. That was a fair-sized battle fleet, and suggested that the Turusch were waiting for a possible Confederation counterattack into the system.

Not that that was going to happen anytime soon. Confederation Fleet Command had been reluctant to re-engage the enemy. The Defense of Earth might technically have been a victory, but it had been a damned close-run thing.

The gas giant, simmering in the sea of radiation from giant Arcturus just 20 AU distant, showed the bright yellow, orange, red, and brown striations of atmosphere belts, whipped around the massive planet by violent high-altitude winds.

The scene moved jerkily, frame by frame, and the images were grainy and difficult to resolve. They would have been pulled from a seemingly uniform starbow of light by sensory correction software on the probe, and, as the voice had warned, hadn’t yet been massaged by the ONI analysts on Luna. But as the probe moved past planet and moon, the moon dropped from view outside of the camera angle and the probe’s optics began zooming in on Alchameth.

Another blue reticule appeared, highlighting something above the banded cloud tops. Koenig resisted the impulse to squint, patiently waiting as the images—drastically slowed by the relativistic time difference between the probe and the outside world—zoomed in frame by frame.

There was something there. …

Sunlight glinted, a silver-orange glitter above orange clouds. A spacecraft? The probe’s optical sensors zoomed in closer. It looked like a flattened balloon, but it must have been immense to be visible at this range, many kilometers across. And it was rising above the highest cloud layers, now, so it must be a ship … or possibly an aircraft.

A side window opened, showing schematics of a H’rulka ship, something encountered by humans only once so far.

Turusch and H’rulka ships together at Arcturus, just 37 light years from Sol.

The afternoon, suddenly, had become a lot more interesting.

VFA–44 Dragonfire Squadron

Approaching Columbia Arcology

United States, Earth

1655 hours, EST

Lieutenant Trevor Gray descended above the ocean, dropping toward the ruin of Old New York.

Linked in with the AI computer of his SG–92 Starhawk, his cerebral implants were receiving optical feeds from sensors grown temporarily all over the craft’s fuselage. From his point of view, his fighter was invisible—in fact, he was the fighter, hurtling through the early evening sky off the eastern seaboard of the United States. The winter sun had set twenty-five minutes before; the sky was still a crisp and brilliant blue, the twilight illuminating the dark rolling waves below.

Around him, in the crystalline sky, eleven other Starhawks traveled with him in close formation, each jet-black ship now morphed into atmospheric flight mode—broad delta shapes with down-curving wingtips carving through thin air at a sedate four times the speed of sound. They’d departed from the military spaceport at Oceana just five minutes earlier, swinging far out over the ocean to avoid disturbing coastal communities with their sonic boom. The Manhat Ruins now lay only a few kilometers ahead.

“Look smart,” the squadron leader said over the unit’s tactical channel. “They want a nice show down there. Cut back to fifteen hundred kph and descend to twelve hundred. Tighten it up, people.”

Commander Marissa Allyn was the CO of VFA–44, the “Dragonfires,” and flying the lead Starhawk, hull number 101. Until recently, she’d been the CAG of America’s Space Wing, though she’d never been confirmed and, just days ago, a new CAG had been brought on board. America’s fighter wing was still reorganizing, still licking its wounds after the terrible casualties suffered during the Defense of Earth.

In three groups of four flying wingtip to wingtip, the Starhawks dropped closer to the blur of blue-gray water beneath their keels.

“And … descending to eight hundred meters,” Allyn continued.

To port, Gray was aware of a smear of movement, the coastline of the old state of New Jersey, a stretch of ground until recently given over to swampland and mangrove but now swept clean, barren and forbidding. Still descending, they rocketed past the sweeping, broken curve of the Verrazano Narrows Dam, one of the megastructures raised in the twenty-first century in what had proven to be an expensive but unsuccessful bid to save the city ahead.

Still slowing, still descending, the squadron passed over what was left of New York City.

Forests of steel superstructure marking the largest building, the crumbling façade of the TriBeCa Tower, all rose above dirty, surging water. Vine-shrouded structures slowly eroding into the sea. Where once there had been a square-grid network of city streets, there were now narrow canals, canyons filled with water and the dark pockets of the coming night.

New York City had first been submerged three centuries before, when Hurricane Cynthia had smashed a half-kilometer gap through the Verrazano Narrows Dam and the sea—now twelve meters higher than the southern tip of Manhattan—had poured in. The vibrant metropolis had been smashed, then drowned; the shattered buildings still standing had rapidly crumbled into decayed ruins or been overgrown by green masses of porcelain-berry, kudzu, and other creeping vines, giving them the look of sheer-sided green islands rising with a curiously geometric orderliness from the sea.

Even so, the Ruins of Manhattan had been … home.

Gray had been a Prim, one of some thousands of people living in the Ruins outside the all-encompassing embrace of modern technology. For him, until five years ago, home had been the shattered shell of the old TriBeCa Tower Arcology, a torn and battered mountain passing now to port.

The scene, spread out around and below him now, however, illuminated by the pale glow of twilight, seemed alien now. The place was changed, shockingly so. During the Defense of Earth two months earlier, a Turusch high-velocity impactor had generated a tidal wave that had smashed north through the Narrows. Hundreds of the remaining buildings sticking up out of the water had been toppled, and a vast forest of tangled debris was now strewn across Morningside Heights, Yonkers, and the swamps of Harlem. Most of the building-islands, once covered by lush vegetation, were naked now, stripped of all life by the passing wave two months before.

Thousands of people—Prims and squatties, like Gray in his former life—had lived within the ruins, comprising a modern-day hunter-gatherer society largely ignored by the civilized folk inland.

Gray wondered how many had survived the tidal wave … how many of the people he’d once called family and friends survived.

And the civilized communities here had suffered as well. The tidal wave had swept across Morningside Heights, bringing down the kilometer-high tower of the Columbia Arcology. An instant after crossing the shoreline between the Manhat Ruins and Morningside Heights, Gray saw the mountain of rubble that was all that was left of Columbia.

Angela. …

She hadn’t been there when the tower had fallen. At least, he didn’t think so.

But he hadn’t heard, not for sure.

He forced his thoughts from that pain, focusing instead on his flying. At just above the speed of sound, the twelve spacecraft thundered across the Hudson River and past the Palisades Eudaimonium precisely on schedule.

The eudaimonium—the name came from the ancient Greek philosophical concept of perfect and complete happiness—was part of the Greater New New York complex north of Manhattan. Protected from the impactor tidal wave two months before by the towering walls of the Palisades overlooking the Hudson, it was the heart of the New City, a cluster of arcology towers, arches and skyways, domes, slabs, and floater habs housing 5 million people. Tonight, the local population had increased by at least a third. As the Starhawks roared past, Gray could see the lights and thronging crowds below, an ocean of people celebrating what had been rather grandiloquently billed as the “Yule of the Millennium.” The central Eudaimon Plaza appeared to be packed with celebrants; lasers arced across the sky amid the flicker and pop of fireworks. Tens of thousands of decorative lights created the impression of a galaxy picked out in reds, greens, and golds.

“Landing lights, people!” Allyn commanded, and the squadron lit up, twelve dazzling stars streaking across the darkening sky at five hundred meters. The sonic boom of the squadron’s passing must have rattled walls and transplas windows ten kilometers away.

The squadron over-flight had been timed to rattle those windows at seventeen precisely, kicking off the festivities at the arcology complex. Confederation Senate President Regis DuPont was down there, somewhere, as were the presidents of the North American Union, America del Sur, and Europe; a dozen Confederation senators; a host of VIPs from the military, from the Union capital at Columbus, Ohio; and even a handful of governors from extrasolar colony worlds—from Chiron, from Thoth, and even from Bifrost.

The party tonight was a very big affair.

Mission accomplished, the squadron banked and decelerated, making for the Giuliani Spaceport northwest of the city. A flotilla of civilian pubtran fliers was waiting for them there; the Dragonfires, too, had also been invited, though they’d be arriving at the party a few minutes late.

As he peeled off for final approach, morphing his Starhawk into landing configuration, Gray could only think about the person he’d left behind …

… About Angela.

ONI Special Research Division

Crisium, Luna

1201 hours, TFT

“What the hell do we know about the H’rulka?” Dr. Kane demanded.

“Not enough,” Wilkerson replied. “Not enough by about fifteen hundred parsecs.”

“Maybe your pets can shed some more light on the subject.”

“They are not,” Wilkerson replied evenly, “my pets.”

Until two months before, Dr. Phillip Wilkerson had been the head of the neuropsytherapy department on board the Confederation Star Carrier America. After the return from Eta Boötis, however, he’d been summarily transferred to the Office of Naval Intelligence—specifically to the xenosophontological research department, headquartered beneath the Mare Crisium on Earth’s moon. He’d brought with him eighteen Turusch POWs, and almost two thousand more had arrived shortly after—survivors of one of the big enemy asteroid-battleships disabled in the Defense of Earth.

The Turusch community now comprised a de facto alien colony occupying a former warehouse excavation two kilometers beneath the main Crisium dome, sealed off by airlocks and pumped full of a high-pressure atmosphere composed of CO₂, sulfur dioxide, carbonyl sulfide, water vapor, sulfuric acid droplets, and a mist of sulfur. The mist constantly cycled between its liquid and solid phases at temperatures close to the boiling point of water. The Turusch home planet was hypothesized to be, as Wilkerson himself had once suggested, a less extreme version of the planet Venus, with a thinner atmosphere bathed in heavy ultraviolet radiation from its parent star. For almost two months, Wilkerson had been working with the colony, leading a small army of xenosophontologists, linguists, and ETC AIs, trying to learn how the Turusch thought.

The task, he’d long ago decided, would not be complete anytime in this century.

Dr. Howard Kane was one of his project specialists, on loan from the ONI’s XS department. An unpleasant man with an acidly sarcastic attitude, he seemed to specialize in finding exactly the wrong thing to say to his colleagues. Wilkerson so far had managed to keep him from communicating directly with the Turusch. That task was difficult enough without bringing ego and attitude into the mix.

“This Crustal Tower message,” Kane said, “says a H’rulka ship has been spotted at Arcturus Station. “But as far as I can see, we don’t know jack about them.”

“The Turusch have mentioned the H’rulka during a number of sessions,” a third voice put in. “They state that the two species share key philosophical concepts.”

The invisible speaker was a specialist AI variously called Noam or, sometimes, “Chom,” after the twentieth-century linguist, cognitive scientist, and philosopher Avram Noam Chomsky.

“There was nothing else in Alan’s recording?” Wilkerson asked.

“No. The AI known as ‘Alan’ effectively ceased to exist upon partition.”

Wilkerson nodded understanding. An artificial intelligence like Noam, or like the smaller and more mission-specific AI on the Arcturus recon probe, required a certain size, a certain complexity of internal circuitry and processing power in order to maintain the electronic version of consciousness. Details were still sketchy, but the ISVR–120 interstellar probe apparently had elected to split itself into four separate parts. The probe hardware was designed to allow such a division in order to guarantee that its memory made it back home … but the circuitry carrying those memories simply wasn’t adequate to maintain something as complex as a Gödel 2500 artificial intelligence.

The AI Alan Turing had in effect committed suicide in order to get its information back to Sol.

Kane dragged down a virtual window, which glowed in the air in front of him and Wilkerson. The data file with what little was known about the H’rulka scrolled down the screen. “Floaters!” Kane said, reading. “The presumption is that they’re intelligent gas bags that evolved in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant.”

“Interesting, if true,” Wilkerson said, reading. “I’d like to know how they managed to develop a technology capable of building starships without access to metals, fire, smelting, solid raw materials, or solid ground.”

“What is it they’re supposed to share with the Tushies, Chom?” Kane asked.

“It is difficult to express,” Noam replied, “as are most Turusch concepts. It appears, however, to be a philosophy based on the concept of depth.”

“Yeah, yeah. They order things higher to lower, instead of the way we do it.”

“It’s no different than when we say something is second class,” Wilkerson said, “and mean it’s not as important or as high-up as first class.”

“It’s still bass-ackward,” Kane said.

“The three conscious minds of a Turusch are considered by the Turusch to range from ‘high’ to ‘here’ to ‘low,’” Noam pointed out, “with ‘high’ being the most primitive, most basic state of intelligence, and ‘low’ the most advanced and complex. For the Turusch, something called the Abyss represents depth, scope, danger, and tremendous power. We think the Turusch evolved to live on high plateaus or mountaintops on their world, with lower elevations representing sources of wealth or power—maybe a food source—as well as deadly windstorms. Abyssal whirlwinds, they call them.”

“So, if the H’rulka are Jovian-type floaters,” Wilkerson mused, “they might relate to the idea of the Abyss as the depths of a gas giant atmosphere. Hot, stormy, high energy, and definitely dangerous. A point of cognitive contact or understanding between them and the Turusch.”

“Sounds far-fetched to me,” Kane said. “Besides, intelligence couldn’t develop in a gas giant atmosphere. Absolutely impossible.”

“I’ve learned in this business to mistrust the phrase ‘absolutely impossible,’ Doctor,” Wilkerson said. “Why do you think that?”

“Because the vertical circulation of atmospheric cells in a gas giant atmosphere would drag any life form in the relatively benign higher levels down into the depths in short order,” Kane replied. “They would be destroyed by crushing pressures and searing high temperatures. There’d be no way to preserve culture … or develop it, for that matter. No way to preserve historical records … art … music … learning. And, as you just said, they wouldn’t get far without being able to smelt metals or build a technology from the ground up.” He smirked. “No ground.”

“But we do have lots of examples of Jovian life,” Wilkerson said.

“None of it intelligent,” Kane replied. “It can’t survive long enough.”

“Maybe.” Wilkerson moved his hand, and the columns of writing on the virtual window were replaced by the image received by the ONI a few hours before … a transmission from a burned-out interstellar probe that had dropped into the outskirts of the Sol System and beamed its treasure trove of data in-system that morning.

An alert with raw-data footage had been passed on to a number of government offices and military commands a few hours ago; the fact that the H’rulka were at Arcturus was big news. It meant, potentially, disaster. …

“Whether they’re gas bags from a Jovian atmosphere, or something more substantial,” Wilkerson observed, “they mean trouble. We’ve only met them once, but that was enough.”

The ongoing exchange of hostilities known as the First Interstellar War had been proceeding off and on for the past thirty-six years. It had begun in 2368 at the Battle of Beta Pictoris, with a single Terran ship surviving out of a squadron of eight. In the years since, defeat had followed defeat as the Turusch and their mysterious Sh’daar masters had taken world upon human-colonized world, as the area controlled by the Terran Confederation had steadily dwindled.

Most of those defeats were suffered by Earth’s navies at the hands the Turusch va Sh’daar, a species that appeared to be the equivalent of the Sh’daar empire’s military arm. Once, however, a dozen years ago, a Confederation fleet approaching a gas giant within the unexplored system of 9 Ceti, some 67 light years from Sol, had been wiped out by a single enormous vessel rising from the giant’s cloud layers. A single message pod had been launched toward the nearby human colony of Anan, just seventeen light years away, at 37 Ceti.

The Agletsch, the spidery sentients who’d been Humankind’s first contact with other minds among the stars, had looked at images from that pod and identified the lone attacking ship as H’rulka. The name was an Agletsch word meaning, roughly, “floaters.” They’d claimed that the aliens were huge living balloons that had evolved within the upper atmosphere of a distant gas giant like Sol’s Jupiter. The term H’rulka va Sh’daar suggested that the H’rulka, like the Turusch and like the Agletsch, were part of the galaxy-spanning empire of the Sh’daar.

No one knew what the H’rulka called themselves, what they looked like, or anything at all about them. Many human researchers, like Kane, were convinced that even the information about a gas giant homeworld was either mistaken or deliberate misinformation.

What was known was that a few weeks after the fleet at 9 Ceti was lost, all contact with Anan was lost as well.

If the H’rulka were at Arcturus, apparently working with the Turusch, it suggested that the Sh’daar had just upped the ante, bringing up some big-gun support for their Turusch allies.

“We could start talking to our Turusch about whether they’ve worked with the H’rulka before,” Wilkerson suggested. “It might give us some insight into how they fit in with the Sh’daar hierarchy.”

Three millennia earlier, Sun Tse had pointed out that a man who knew both himself and his enemy would be victorious in all of his battles. That might have worked for the ancient Chinese, but complete knowledge simply wasn’t possible—certainly not of beings as completely alien as the Sh’daar, the H’rulka, or the Turusch.

“Do you think that’s important?” Kane asked.

Wilkerson shrugged. “At this point, every datum is important. We’re not even sure why they’re attacking us.”

“I thought it was because the Sh’daar wanted to limit our technological growth.”

“So the Agletsch told us. But how accurate is that? And if it is, why? We call the Sh’daar polity an empire … but is it? Do the Sh’daar really control all of their client species, tell them what to do, who to trade with, who to attack? Or are the Turusch, and now the H’rulka, attacking us on their own? We don’t know.”

“The term empire serves well enough,” Kane said. “We may not need to know the details.”

“Maybe not … but we won’t know what we need to know until we winkle it out, translate it, and analyze it.”

“Well, let’s see what the slugs have to say,” Kane agreed.

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

“Enthusiastic? No. Those big gastropods give me the creeps. I keep wanting to reach for the salt shaker … a very large salt shaker. …”

Chapter Two

21 December 2404

Palisades Eudaimonium

New York State, Earth

1725 hours, EST

The spaceport’s pubtran flier touched down lightly on the landing platform, a broad concourse suspended several hundred meters above the ground in front of the Grand Concourse. Trevor Gray stepped out of the flier and stopped, momentarily transfixed by the spectacle below, a dazzling constellation of lights stretching from horizon to horizon. Near at hand, concentric circles of lights, illuminated buildings, glowing red and green holiday decorations and animations, and the shifting displays of adwalls all combined to create a bewildering tangle of moving light. In the distance, toward the southeast, lay an ominous swath of darkness punctuated by the light—Columbia, Manhattan, and on the horizon, the ocean.

Someone thumped his shoulder hard from behind.

“Move it, Prim,” Lieutenant Jen Collins snapped. “You’re blocking progress.”

Gray turned sharply, fists clenched, but then stepped aside as the others filed out of the flier. Lieutenant Commander Allyn was coming off the flier last, and was watching him. “Uniform, Lieutenant,” she reminded him. “This is a formal affair.”

“Ah, you should have let the Prim wear his jackies,” Collins said with a bitter laugh.

“Yeah,” Lieutenant Kirkpatrick added, grinning. “The dumb-ass doesn’t know any better. It’ll be fun watching him try to mix with our kind.”

“Hey, back off,” Lieutenant Ben Donovan said. “We’re all a bit nervous tonight.”

Gray looked down at his uniform, which was currently configured for flight utility—the plain and unadorned dark gray skinsuit worn by pilots jacked into their fighters—“jackies,” in flight-line slang. Angrily, he slapped the set-patch on his left shoulder, calling up a menu within his inner display. Mindclicking on Full Dress, Formal engaged the nanotechnic interface. With a somewhat tingling sensation, his clothing rearranged itself, tightening, unfolding, and taking on texture and color.

Confederation Navy formal full dress was a glossy black skinsuit, throat to soles, with an intricate layer of bright gold knotwork sheathing the left third of his body—arm, side, and outer leg, extending all the way from shoulder to ankle. His rank tabs glowed to either side of his throat, and a panel over his left breast displayed a fluorescent animation of awards and decorations. He’d only been in for five years, so the cycling award display was a short one: Confederation Military Service, the Battles of Everdawn and of Arcturus Station, and the newly awarded Legion of the Defense of Earth, with cluster for distinguished service.

“That looks better!” Donovan said, grinning.

“I feel like a damned adwall,” Gray replied, referring to the ubiquitous multistory display panels serving as animated or live-action advertising displays on the walls of arcologies and city buildings.

“But a squared-away, Navy adwall,” Donovan said. He slapped Gray on his gold-entwined arm. “C’mon! Let’s check out the party!”

The Grand Concourse was an immense, domed-over plaza of light, crowds, and color. At the near end, the boulevard wrapped around a depression, a terraced bowl well over two hundred meters across, with standing, sitting, and reclining room for some thousands of people at once. A touch and a thought could grow a chair from the floor, soften to a sunken lounger, or extrude tables complete with a seemingly endless variety of food and drink. Everywhere there was light; the Yule celebrations marked the holy seasons of at least three major religious groups, all of them festivals of light, and the air was filled with twisting, cascading, and shimmering veils of liquid radiance and starbow hues.

“Best behaviors, Dragonfires,” Allyn’s voice whispered in their heads. “Corders, secmons, and deets on at all times, and we will know if you switch them off.”

Several of the pilots nearby grumbled at that. Corders were recording sensors grown within the weave of military uniforms. If anyone got into trouble tonight, there’d be a full audiovisual record of the incident for the court-martial afterward. Secmons were security monitors, non-AI software routines designed to warn personnel about possible security breaches. Deets were detoxifiers. There were quite a few sense-altering drugs, scents, and beverages on display, but the micrometabolic processors nano-grown within each pilot’s brain would sample chemicals in the bloodstream, monitor sensory input, and harmlessly filter out the offending chemical before he or she developed more than a light buzz.

For the Navy, professionalism and decorum were the watchwords. Always.

As Gray descended into the crowded concourse bowl, he felt momentarily disoriented. Walls were grown as easily as chairs or appetizers, and could be called into being to create small and cozy alcoves or private spaces, creating a labyrinthine effect, and as walls and rooms came and went, it became difficult to navigate. Some walls appeared to be solid, carved stone; others were screens apparently of wickerwork or painted panels, or of woven vines or other vegetation. The air seemed to grow hazier, the deeper into the bowl he traveled. At the moment, the air glowed with a deep red light, though an ultraviolet component was making the black of his uniform fluoresce with a deep, electric shimmer of ultramarine. Overhead, constellations of lights gleamed brightly, mostly in red and green, for some reason.

There seemed to be no particular theme, save that of people.

The crowd within that one hall must have numbered five thousand—roughly the same as the crew on board America. He saw a few other military uniforms, most of them the richly patterned black and gold of senior naval officers, or the ancient red, white, and blue of Marine full dress. They stood out within the far, far larger number of civilians, who wore a bewildering array of costumes, from brilliant, swirling plumage, much of it glowing under the UV light, to swirling patterns of iridescent skin nano to complete nudity.

The men seemed to be more conservatively dressed, he noticed—formal skinsuits or robes, though there were a few bright-colored ones aglow in light or with pulsing animations writhing about their bodies. The women, though, all were spectacular in their multihued displays. One strikingly attractive woman in front of him was wearing a startling, meter-high headdress that appeared to be a spray of suspended fiber-optic threads, the light shimmering in a halo effect around her—and nothing else. She saw him looking at her, raised her glass in a mock toast, and winked.

The woman she was talking with appeared to be wearing nothing but white light, as though her skin has become brilliantly luminous, with stars set in her hair and hovering about her head.

“Someone is pinging you,” his personal assistant told him.

“Who?”

“I’m sorry. Her id is blocked.”

“‘Her’? A woman? Where is she?”

An inner tug gave him a direction. That way. “Range: eighty-seven meters,” his PA said.

Odd. Personal ids—the term was pronounced as a word, rhyming with “lid”—were normally open to all within the electronic world of personal assistants and implanted communications and information hardware. The ping might mean she was interested in him, or it might mean she was just curious, tagging his personal information. That she was not revealing her own personal data, though, meant she wanted to remain anonymous, at least for now.

Who would be looking for him here? If it was Allyn or another shipmate, their military ids would have registered with his PA immediately, a kind of personal IFF. A civilian, then … but he didn’t know anyone at this gathering.

Nor, really, did he care to. The only time in his life when he’d actually sought out civilians in the civilized parts of New York had been when he’d taken Angela to the Columbia Arcology in a desperate attempt to save her when she’d had a stroke. The inhabitants of the Periphery—the fallen-away outer fringes of the old United States, which included the Manhat Ruins—weren’t considered to be full citizens, and normally they didn’t have access to modern medical services. All but the most severe cardiovascular emergencies were easily treated in a modern medical center like the one in Columbia; in a Prim community in the Periphery, a stroke could kill you or leave you helplessly paralyzed.

He’d gotten Angela to the med center while she was still alive … and they’d repaired her. The cost, however, had been him, a ten-year term with the Confederation military.

Of course, the treatment had also cost him Angela. They’d done something to her brain while saving her … something that had shut down her affection for him. Or, maybe that had been an effect of the stroke. That’s what they’d told him, anyway, that that sort of thing often happened when old neural pathways were burned out, new paths channeled in. Whichever it had been, his once-wife had chosen to leave him rather than going back to the canals and vine-covered islands of the Ruins.

Hell, he couldn’t even blame her for that. She’d downloaded the skill sets allowing her to become a compositor, a career classification completely unknown to him. She’d moved north to New New York City’s Haworth District, he’d heard, and was living with an extended family there.

At least she hadn’t been in Columbia when the impactor wave had brought the arcology tower down. Or at least, so he hoped. He hadn’t heard from her since he’d left for the Naval Training Center five years earlier. He’d been told she’d moved to Haworth and that she didn’t want to see him … but he didn’t know.

“Shall I reply?” his PA asked.

“Negative,” he said. He couldn’t imagine this crowd having anything pleasant to say to him.

He’d tried to get out of coming tonight. Lieutenant Commander Allyn had told him yesterday, in the squadron ready room on board America, that he’d been volunteered for the fly-by show, with attendance at the Yule Festival afterward.

“Why me?” he’d asked. “I’ve got nothing to do with Earthies anymore.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the Dragonfires’ skipper had replied. “Maybe because you had something to do with saving all of their asses?”

That again. “Fuck that, sir,” he said, using the Navy’s preferred gender-neutral honorific, though ma’am would have done as well. “I was doing my job.”

“And maybe your job includes being a visible symbol of the Confederation Navy,” she’d told him. “Don’t give me grief, Gray. You’re on the flight roster, like it or not.”

And here he was.

In a nearby temporary alcove, Donovan was holding a young woman very closely indeed. She was wearing a sheath of golden, rippling light, and appeared to have extended the field to include Ben in her embrace. Gray looked away, embarrassed, and found himself looking into another alcove, this one with two men and a woman on a round sofa bed, engaged in some extremely passionate foreplay.

Angry, he turned his head again and strode forward, determined to find something to eat. He felt so damned out of place here. …

Within the Periphery, the necessities of survival tended to draw people into close, monogamous couples. Elsewhere, at least through much of North America, family groupings tended to be larger and extended, polyamorous, and impermanent. Throughout much of the background culture of the Confederation, the half-barbaric denizens of the Periphery were seen as amusingly quaint, or worse: as narrow-minded or even sexually perverted. They were commonly called “Prims,” which was short for “primitives,” of course, but the epithet held the double meaning of someone who was self-righteously prudish or closed sexually. “Monogies” was another derogative term for Prims who preferred a monogamous lifestyle; why would anyone want to restrict their life and their love to a single person?

Gray was neither prudish nor self-righteous. He knew other communities did things differently when it came to sex and marriage, and had no problem with the fact. Extended social group marriages and sexcircles simply weren’t for him. The thought of casually coupling with a woman he didn’t know—and couldn’t trust—left him vaguely uneasy.

A table extruded from the floor beneath an enormous transparency overlooking the Hudson was covered by dishes of various kinds, all of them pretty, few of them things he actually recognized. America had a decent mess deck and good food-processing software, but nothing as fancy as this. Some of the items actually looked as though they’d started out as vegetation growing in the ground or an aerophonics module rather than a collection of CHON turned appetizing by a molecular assembler.

He tried something green and crunchy with an orange paste spread across the top. Interesting …

“You are being pinged again by the same person,” his PA told him. His internal direction sense said, That way, toward an outside veranda. “Range: thirty-one meters and approaching.”

“Let her,” Gray said.

He kept eating.

H’rulka Warship 434

Saturn Space, Sol System

1242 hours, TFT

The H’rulka didn’t name their starships. A name suggested an individual personality, and the concept of the individual was one only barely grasped by H’rulka psychology. The H’rulka were, in fact, colony organisms; a very rough terrestrial analogue would have been the Portuguese Man of War … though the H’rulka were not marine creatures, and each was composed of several hundred types of communal polyps, rather than just four. Even their name for themselves—which came across in a hydrogen atmosphere as a shrill, high-pitched thunder generated by gas bags beneath the primary flotation sac—meant something like “All of Us,” and could refer either to a single colony, in the first person, or to the race as a whole.

Individual H’rulka colonies took on temporary names, however, as dictated by their responsibilities within the community. Ordered Ascent was the commander of Warship 434, itself until recently a part of a larger vessel, Warship 432. The species didn’t have a government as humans would have understood the term, and even the captain of a starship was more of a principal decision maker than a leader.

Ordered Ascent was linked in with 434’s external sensors, and was studying the planet just ahead. The alien solar system comprised a single star and four planets, plus the usual scattering of rubble and debris. The planet some eighty thousand shu ahead was almost achingly familiar in size and mass and gently banded color, a near twin to the homeworld so many shishu away, right down to the sweeping rings of minute, reflective particles circling it.

“It looks like home,” the aggregate being called Swift Pouncer whispered over the private radio link. H’rulka possessed two entirely separate means of speech, two separate languages—one by means of vibrations in the atmosphere, the other by means of biologically generated radio bursts. Their natural radio transceivers, located just beneath the doughnut-shaped cluster of polyps forming their brains, allowed them to interface directly with their machines.

“Similar,” Ordered Ascent replied. “It appears to be inhabited.”

“We are receiving speech from one of the debris-chunks orbiting the world,” Swift Pouncer replied. “It may be a vermin-nest. And … we are receiving speech from numerous sources much closer to the local star.”

Ordered Ascent tuned in to the broadband scanners and saw the other signals.

Those members of Ordered Ascent capable of rational thought chided themselves. No matter how long they served within the far-flung fleets of the Sh’daar, it was difficult to remember that vermin-nests frequently occurred, not within the atmospheres of true planets, but on the inhospitable solid surfaces of debris.

It was an unsettling thought. For just a moment, Ordered Ascent allowed themselves to pull back from the instrumentation feeds, to find steadiness and reassurance in the sight of the Collective Globe.

The interior of the H’rulka warship was immense by human standards, but cramped to the point of stark claustrophobia for the species called All of Us. The area that served as the equivalent of the bridge on a human starship was well over two kilometers across, a vast spherical space filled by twelve free-floating H’rulka colonies in a dodecahedral array. Connected by radio to their ship, they used radio commands to direct and maneuver the huge vessel, fire the weapons, and observe their surroundings.

They lived in the high-pressure atmosphere of gas giants, breathing hydrogen and metabolizing methane, ammonia, and drifting organic tidbits analogous to the plankton of Terran oceans. Until one of the Sh’daar’s client species had shown them how to use solid materials to build spacecraft that defied both gravity and hard vacuum, they’d never known the interior of anything, never known what it was like to be enclosed, to be trapped inside. The interior of Warship 434 was large enough—just—to avoid triggering a serious claustrophobic-panic reflex in All of Us aggregates. Sometimes, they needed to see other aggregates adrift in the sky simply in order to feel safe.

Feeling steadier, Ordered Ascent relinked with the ship and their fellow H’rulka. “Can we be sure that this is the system to which the alien probe fled?” they asked.

“Yes, with a probability of eighty-six percent plus,” one of the others replied. “The shard that we followed almost certainly came here.”

Warship 432 had pursued the probe that had passed through System 783,451. The probe abruptly had split onto four pieces, four shards each independently powered, each traveling in a different direction.

The H’rulka ship had split into four sections as well in response. Warship 434 had followed one fragment, a difficult feat in the weirdly distorted continuum of faster-than-light travel, but possible given the power of certain Sh’daar instrumentation. The selected shard had dropped out of faster-than-light drive after some periods of travel, changed heading, and accelerated once more. The new path had brought it, and the pursuing All of Us, here.

“The system is known to the Sh’daar,” Pouncer reported. “They list it as System 784,857.”

Data streamed down the radio link through Directed Ascent’s consciousness. The inhabitants of this system were indeed native to the system debris.

Vermin …

The All of Us race was unaccustomed to dealing with other sentient species. One of the primary reasons for this was, simply, their size; by almost any standards, the H’rulka were giants.

An adult H’rulka consisted of a floatation gas bag measuring anywhere from two to three hundred meters across, with brain, locomotion and feeding organs, sensory apparatus and manipulators clustered at the bottom. Most other sentient species with which they’d had direct experience possessed roughly the same size and mass ratio to a H’rulka as an ant compared to a human.

When the H’rulka thought of other life forms as “vermin,” the thought was less insult than it was a statement of fact, at least as they perceived it. Within the complex biosphere of the H’rulka homeworld, there were parasites living on each All of Us colony that were some meters across. H’rulka simply found it difficult to imagine creatures as intelligent that were almost literally beneath their notice in terms of scale.

“Commence acceleration,” Ordered Ascent directed. “We will move into the region of heavy radio transmission, and destroy targets of opportunity as they present themselves.”

The H’rulka warship, more than twenty kilometers across, began falling toward Sol, the inner system, and Earth.

Palisades Eudaimonium

New York State, Earth

1750 hours, EST

Admiral Koenig looked out over the sea of people filling the Grand Concourse of the eudaimonium and wondered, again, just what he was supposed to be doing here.

He’d been the center of attention for a number of politicians and Confederation military leaders ever since arriving here an hour before, but there seemed to be no particular point to it, other than allowing wealthy or important civilians to get a sense of their own importance by being close to the Man Who Saved Earth.

What unmitigated bullshit.

He was standing on a railed platform high above the bowl-shaped main floor filling much of the Grand Concourse, along with a number of senators and high-ranking military officers, members of the Confederation Senate and of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

John Quintanilla, a senior political liaison between the Senate and the military, stood next to him. “Well, Admiral?” Quintanilla asked. “Are you ready?”

“No,” Koenig told him. “But I don’t suppose that’s going to change things, is it?”

Quintanilla grinned. “Not in the least!”

The man seemed … animated. Koenig rarely got to see this side of Quintanilla. Usually, the liaison was, if not an enemy, exactly, at least in the way … obstructionistic, fussy, and difficult. Political liaisons were a necessity, Koenig supposed, a means for the civilian government to exercise their control over a potentially dangerous military, but he didn’t like it. For member-states of the Confederation with long traditions of having a military subject to government oversight—in particular the United States of North America—that tradition and a sense of duty alone was enough to guarantee the military’s loyalty to the government. Other members of the Confederation, though—the European Union, los Estados de las Americas del Sur, the Empire of Brazil, the North India Federation, and many of the extrasolar colonies—had long histories of having their militaries dictating in one way or another to their governments, hence the need for direct oversight of military operations.

Koenig had thrown Quintanilla off of his flag bridge once, an act that could have inflicted serious harm on Koenig’s career. Success, however, covered a multitude of sins. The incident had been quietly smoothed over and forgotten.

“The president’s about to start his speech,” Quintanilla told him. “You stand … here.” Quintanilla guided Koenig to a holographic transmission disk set into the floor. The disk was inactive, its light off.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice boomed from somewhere overhead. “The President of the Confederation Senate!”

Accompanied by the powerful, martial beat of Ad Astra, the Confederation’s anthem, a glowing figure materialized in the air above the crowded bowl, an older man in a stylish formal robe, ten stories tall and eerily translucent.

“We are here,” the looming figure boomed in somber tones and without preamble, “to honor the Man Who Saved Earth. …”

The president’s speech went on for a long time.

Under the terms of the original Constitution of the United States, government had been divided three ways between a two-house legislative congress, a president, and a supreme court, each applying checks and balances against the others in order, it was hoped, to limit government and avoid tyranny. That system, ultimately, had failed with a succession of weak presidents and corrupt legislators. The devastation wreaked by the Wormwood asteroid strike 272 years before had shattered much of the old United States and very nearly ended the fragile experiment in democracy begun in 1776.

The Earth Confederation had been an attempt to create a single-world government and end the possibility that any single nation-state would ever again threaten another nation—or the entire human species—with extinction. The attempt had been only partly successful. The Chinese Hegemony, which had launched the asteroid strike in the first place, back at the end of the Second Sino-Western War, was still not a full member, and the Islamic Theocracy was barely tolerated, permitted to exist only under the terms of the earlier White Covenant at gunpoint.

The system creaked and tottered. There were no checks and balances now, and corruption was as much of a problem as it had ever been. A Confederation Senate oversaw both the legislative and executive processes of government, with numerous directorates handling individual areas of interest—lawmaking, the military, the economy, and others. The president of the Senate was largely a figurehead, elected by the Senate body once every ten years.

The current president of the Confederation Senate, now towering above the crowds filling the eudaimonium’s Grand Concourse, was a former representative of the European Union named Dolph Schneider.

“… for it is in times like these, times of crisis, that History herself steps forward and presents us with the man or the woman of the hour, the person who can and will confront the crisis and unite the people in their struggle against …”

Koenig listened with only half an ear, more aware of the inflection and meter of the speech than of the words themselves. He cared nothing for politics, and dismissed most political speeches as hand waving designed to justify decisions already made. But the outward form of democracy, of political debate and accountability, had to be preserved.

“… and it gives me great pleasure, great satisfaction, to introduce Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig, the Man Who Saved Earth!”

The disk beneath Koenig’s boots winked on, and the immense figure of the president hovering above the Concourse was replaced by his own.

Koenig had been briefed shortly after his arrival at the event. He came smartly to attention and said nothing. A shadowy figure hovering in the surrounding crowd nearby detached itself and walked toward him, stepping onto the disk and entering the holographic field.

Admiral of the Fleet John C. Carruthers was the senior naval officer of the Confederation Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the highest-ranking military man within the Senate Military Directorate … meaning the highest-ranking without being a senator.

“Admiral Koenig,” Carruthers said, facing him directly, “for service above and beyond the call of duty in the defense of Earth, it is my pleasure to bestow upon you this, the Star of Earth.” An aide at his side offered Carruthers a box. Reaching inside, he removed the decoration, a gold medal hanging from a deep-blue ribbon agleam with stars. He placed the ribbon over Koenig’s head.

Koenig executed a crisp salute. “Thank you, Fleet Admiral.”

Carruthers returned the salute. “Thank you, Admiral, from a grateful planet, a grateful Confederation.” And he shook Koenig’s hand.

Somehow, Koenig kept a straight face. Bullshit, he thought.

As Carruthers stepped back, Koenig looked out over the audience. They’d told him several million people would be watching from various parts of the Palisades Eudaimonium, and with as many as two billion watching from around Earth and near-Earth space. The ceremony would be rebroadcast across the entire Confederation once courier ships could carry it across the light years.

“This medal,” he said, tapping the device lightly, “rightfully belongs to the men and women of Carrier Battlegroup America, not me. …”

And the light beneath his feet winked out.

His image, however, remained huge within the cavernous Concourse, continuing to speak, to gesture.

“… and I am especially grateful to President Schneider and the august assembly of the Confederation Senate, whose support …”

Platitudes. Empty words. Damn them!

“Well done, Admiral,” Quintanilla said, stepping up to his side. A burst of wild cheering rose from the concourse floor, thousands of voices yelling, many chanting his name. “Your public adores you!”

“It adores my electronic puppet,” Koenig said, bitter.

“Now, I told you we’d have a PA step in for your speech. Military men rarely have the stomach for good speech making. Or the time, come to that.”

“I meant it.” He tapped the medal again. “This belongs to my people. They saved the planet. They earned it.”

Quintanilla shrugged. “Do what you want with it, Admiral. It’s just a trinket. But the public needs heroes, people whom it can look up to, whom it can admire. And you, like it or not, are that man.”

“Bullshit,” Koenig said.

The cheering continued from the floor below.

It was going to be a long damned party.

Chapter Three

21 December 2404

Palisades Eudaimonium

New York State, Earth

1804 hours, EST

Lieutenant Trevor Gray cheered and applauded with the rest of the crowd, but he wasn’t applauding the body of the speech. No, the Old Man had slipped out just one line at the very beginning, something about the medal belonging to the America battlegroup, before the faintest of flickers ran through the holographic image hovering overhead, and it began sounding like some empty-headed acceptance speech at the Virtual Reality Entertainment Awards night. “I’d like to thank the Senate … I’d like to thank the president of the Senate …”

Nah, that wasn’t the Old Man. Not his style at all. Every man and woman in the Fleet knew Admiral Koenig had exactly zero time and zero tolerance for glad-handing or for sycophantic public relations. That was an electronic agent up there, a personal assistant programmed to look and sound like Koenig reciting the holy party line.

The image continued speaking, but Gray had already tuned it out. He reached for another appetizer, a Ukrainian tidbit consisting of a sausage covered in chocolate.

“Trevor? …”

Something jumped and twisted inside him. Dropping the sausage, he turned.

Angela. …

“You!”

She was wearing a conservative evening dress for this crowd, a flowing white something aglow with light that changed colors as she moved.

“Hello, Trevor. It’s been a long time.”

He nodded, numb. In the background, Admiral Koenig’s image rambled on about duty and honor.

“What are you doing here?”

She gave him a thin smile. “I live here, remember? Or in Haworth, anyway. Just ten, twelve kilometers north of here. I think just about everybody in New New York came down to see the Yule ceremony tonight. Are you … are you stationed on Earth now?”

He shook his head, a curt, sharp negative. “I’m a fighter pilot assigned to the Star Carrier America. They brought me down for the flyby earlier.”

“Were you flying one of those things?”

“I was flying an SG–92 Starhawk, yeah.”

“They told me you were joining the service. I didn’t know you were a pilot.”

Yeah, you didn’t ask what had happened to me, did you? he thought. The last time he’d seen her had been just before he’d been forced into military service in order to pay her hospital bill. He’d tried to look her up on several occasions after, while he’d still been in a training squadron at Oceana, but his e-calls had always been blocked.

“Are you still with Frank?”

“Fred.”

“Whatever.”

“I’m part of an extended family up in Haworth, yes.”

“Are you happy?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s okay, then.” Damn, this felt awkward.

“How about you?”

“Me what?”

“Are you happy?”

He wondered how to reply. His life turned upside down, the woman he’d loved horribly changed and taken from him. He was forced to live and work with people who laughed at his old life and called him “Prim” and “squattie” and “monogie,” forced to leave the place that had been home since his birth. … Was he happy?

“Sure, I’m happy. A laugh a minute, that’s my life.”

She looked at him uncertainly, as if trying to decide if he was being sarcastic or bitter. He looked down at the palms of his hands, where slender gold, silver, and copper threads were woven in an uneven mesh imbedded in the skin, exactly like her implants. He’d had to get his when they inducted him into the Confederation Navy; all personnel had to have them in order to control everything from meal dispensers to the locks on their personal quarters to the cockpit instrumentation in an SG–92.

But Angela had gotten hers as a part of the treatment after her stroke, class-three implants within the sulci of her brain. They’d also regrown sections of her organic nervous system. And it had changed her, changed her attitude, her feelings toward him.

Of course, he still loved her, though she’d lost all affection for him.

“So,” he said, wondering what to talk about. “You just happened to be here? You weren’t looking for me?”

“No, Trev. I was just … here. Small world, huh?”

A little too small. Gray found himself wishing he were back on the America. Life on board ship was so much simpler.

But then, she had been pinging him. His PA confirmed that it had been her electronic signal seeking him out of the crowd. Maybe she was still interested in him after all.

“I’ve got to go,” he said sharply. He turned and walked away, leaving her standing there by the food table.

High Guard Destroyer Qianfang Fangyu

Saturn Space, Sol System

1325 hours, TFT

“What the holy fuck is that?”

Jordan Reeves floated in the main control room of the High Guard destroyer, staring into the holographic display showing the long-range scan of the intruder.

Captain Liu Jintao glanced at the liaison officer with distaste, and then passed his hand across the display controls, increasing the magnification factor by another ten.

“I would say,” Liu replied in his slow and halting English, “that it is a problem.”

The target was some 20 million kilometers out from Saturn—and at just about the same distance from Titan at this point in the giant moon’s orbit. That actually placed the intruder well within the outskirts of Saturn’s far-flung system of moons, within the retrograde Norse group, in fact.

And that made the intruder of supreme interest to the High Guard.

Within the display, the intruder appeared as a gleaming point of light, attended by a flickering sidebar of data giving mass and diameter, velocity and heading. The ship—it had just dropped out of the space-twisting bubble of Alcubierre Drive so it had to be a ship—was huge, two kilometers across and massing tens of billions of tons. At optical wavelengths, the object appeared … odd, a flattened sphere with a shifting surface that defied analysis.

“It’s highly reflective,” Liu said.

“It’s black.”

“Because it is reflecting the black of surrounding space. This data suggests that it is almost perfectly reflective … like a mirror, or a pool of liquid mercury.”

“So who are they, and what are they doing in the Norse group?”

The Norse group was the outer cloud of Saturnian moons, some dozens of bodies circling the planet retrograde and at high inclination. Phoebe, at 216 kilometers, was the biggest of these; the rest, named for figures from Norse mythology, were rubble, little more than drifting mountains. Ymir was just 18 kilometers wide.

“Is he trying to rendezvous with any of those rocks?” Reeves asked.

“Not yet,” Liu replied. “The nearest to the intruder’s position is S/2004 S 12 … at just over one hundred thousand kilometers. And the intruder is traveling prograde.”

The Norse group moons were retrograde, circling Saturn east to west. The intruder was currently flying against the flow, as it were, meaning it was not attempting to match course and velocity with any of those hurtling mountains.

Yet.

Over two and a half centuries before, the Second Sino-Western War had been fought both on Earth and in space. Toward the very end of the conflict, a Chinese ship, the Xiang Yang Hong, had used nuclear warheads to nudge three two-kilometer asteroids into trajectories that would have landed them in the Atlantic Ocean, one right after the other; the resultant tidal waves would have devastated both the eastern seaboard of the United States and much of the European Union, as well as much of Africa and South America. Had the attempt succeeded, there was little doubt but that the Chinese Hegemony would have emerged, not merely victorious, but as the single most powerful nation on the planet.

Beijing had claimed that Sun Xueju, the Xiang Yang Hong’s captain, had gone rogue, that he’d been operating independently of Beijing’s orders when he’d attempted what amounted to a global terror attack. The attempt had come uncomfortably close to success; a U.S.-European task force had destroyed the Xiang Yang Hong and two of the incoming asteroids … but the last, dubbed “Wormwood” by the media, had slammed into the sea between West Africa and Brazil, and half a billion people had died.

The Chinese Hegemony had been shamed by Sun’s act, and had been paying for that event ever since, blocked from joining the Earth Confederation, savaged by trade and commerce laws imposed by foreign governments, regarded as second-class representatives of Humankind …

… not to mention being forced, Liu thought bitterly, to accept foreign political observers on board Hegemony military vessels.

The Earth Confederation had started off three centuries before as little more than a loose trade alliance, but immediately after the Second Chinese War it had become the planet’s de facto government. Under the Confederation’s guidance, the High Guard—originally an automated deep-space system designed to track asteroids that might one day pose a threat to Earth—had been expanded into a small, multinational navy.

The High Guard was similar to the seagoing coast guards of earlier eras, but patrolled the outer solar system in search of asteroids that might threaten a populated world … or renegade ships like the Xiang Yang Hong attempting to change the orbit of an asteroid in order to create a planet killer. The High Guard paid special attention to possible sources of planet killers—the Kuiper Belt, the main asteroid belt, and the tiny, outermost moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

“We should warn SupraQuito,” Reeves said.

“We sent off an alert twelve seconds after the intruder appeared on our displays,” Liu told him. “The time lag at this distance is seventy-six minutes. The question is, what do we do about that … craft?” He pulled down another display, checking the ship’s library. “The only vessel ever encountered even remotely similar to this one was in 2392, at 9 Ceti. The Turusch call them …” He hesitated at the awkward, difficult name. “Heh-rul-kah.”

“An enemy?”

“A single ship wiped out a small Confederation battlefleet.”

“That thing is two kilometers wide,” Reeves said, shaking his head. “Too big for us. I suggest we follow it, perhaps try to get a closer look … but take no action.”

“I fear you are right,” Liu said. He was reluctant to agree with the liaison officer, but the Qianfang Fangyu measured just 512 meters from mushroom prow to plasma drive venturis, and massed 9,300 tons. Unlike many of the Guard’s older, Marshall-class destroyers, she still had a primary ranged weapon—a spinal-mount mass driver—but that would be of little use in combat against something as massive as a H’rulka vessel 20 million kilometers away.

“Captain!” his radar officer called in Guānhuà over his internal link. “The intruder is accelerating rapidly!”

Liu could see that for himself, as numbers on the display sidebar rapidly changed. The massive vessel was rapidly moving out of Saturn space.

It was moving sunward, toward the inner system.

“Helm!” Liu snapped. “Engage gravitics, five hundred gravities. Pursue the intruder!”

It would be like a mouse pursuing an ox. A dangerous ox. Liu wasn’t exactly sure what the Qianfang Fangyu could do if it actually caught the intruder, but they needed to pace it.

And to see to it that Earth was warned as quickly as possible.

But his oath as a High Guard officer—and his determination to see the ancient Middle Kingdom cleansed once and for all of the shame of the Wormwood Strike—made that pursuit imperative, no matter what the outcome.

The Qianfang Fangyu broke free from Titan orbit, accelerating toward a sun made tiny by distance.

Palisades Eudaimonium

New York State, Earth

1925 hours, EST

Admiral Koenig looked at Carruthers with surprise. “They’re doing what?”

“I know,” Carruthers said. “But the Senate majority feels that we don’t have a viable alternative.”

“But we do. Operation Crown Arrow.”

Carruthers gave a grim smile. “Not all of them see it that way. Especially if it turns out that these H’rulka are involved. They don’t wish to leave Earth open to attack. Not again.”

They were standing in a small temporary alcove within the concourse bowl. Carruthers and several of his aides, along with Rand Buchanan, Koenig’s flag captain, had retreated to the relative privacy and soundproof isolation of the alcove as the party outside continued to throb into high gear. Carruthers had asked Koenig to join them there. He’d ordered a martini from the local assembler, and was sipping it in an attempt to rid himself of the bitter taste of his electronic doppelganger’s speech earlier.

“But a special AI designed to negotiate with the Turusch? We’ve had Turusch POWs on Luna for two months now, and communicating with them is still a problem. What makes the Senate think we can pull off something like that?”

“I suppose,” Carruthers said slowly, “that they see it as an alternative to extermination.”

“The Sh’daar Ultimatum,” Koenig said, looking at his drink, “as delivered by their Agletsch toadies, made it pretty clear what the enemy wants of us. An absolute freeze on all technological development, especially GRIN technologies … and a limit to our expansion to other, new systems. Too high a price.”

“The Sh’daar Ultimatum was … what?” Carruthers said. “Thirty-seven years ago? And we’ve been steadily losing the war ever since it started. The Peace Faction is beginning to think that the price of admission may not be too high after all.”

“The Senate,” one of Carruthers’ aides put in, “is afraid.” Her name, Koenig could see from her id, was Diane Gregory, and she was a Navy captain. “The enemy got entirely too close to Earth last October,” she continued, “and the Peace Faction feels that it is only a matter of time before they succeed in an all-out attack on Earth’s technical infrastructure.”

No one was sure why the mysterious Sh’daar—the presumed overlords of an interstellar empire in toward the galactic core—had insisted that Humankind give up its love affair with a steadily and rapidly increasing technology. The presumption, of course, was that there were weapons just around the technological corner that might pose a threat even to the unseen masters of the galaxy, that the Sh’daar, through their subject races, were putting a cap on the technologies of emerging species in order to preserve their place at the top of the interstellar hierarchy.

But like so very much else about the Sh’daar, that was just a guess. So far as was known, no human had ever seen a Sh’daar; some human xenosophontologists had even suggested that they were a fiction, a kind of philosophical rallying point for diverse species like the Turusch, the Agletsch, the Nungiirtok, and the H’rulka.

But that, too, was just a theory … and not, in Koenig’s estimation, even a particularly likely one.

And not even the super-weapon idea managed to explain the Sh’daar concern with human science, specifically with genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology—the so-called GRIN technologies. GRIN had been the driving forces of human technical progress for four centuries, now, so much so that in many ways they defined human culture, technology, and economic growth. That was why it had been unthinkable, at least to the Confederation leaders of thirty-seven years ago, that Humankind surrender its fascination with those particular technologies.

It was difficult to imagine a weapon system relying on all four technologies that might pose a threat to godlike aliens inhabiting some remote corner of the galaxy. Nanotechnology? Absolutely. Robotics? Possibly, but not very likely. Genetics? Again, possibly … though what kind of biological weapon could threaten a species that itself must long ago have mastered the most intimate secrets of biology? Information, computer, and communications technologies? Certainly a necessity, at least for controlling such a hypothetical super-weapon.

But … why those four? Why not another “G”—gravitics? Projected singularities made possible both inertia-free acceleration and the space-bending Alcubierre Drive, which reduced a 4.3-year voyage to Alpha Centauri at the speed of light to something just less than two and a half days. Being able to make micro black holes to order might well lead to some interesting weapons systems one day.

Or how about adding an “E” for energy? Artificial black holes within a starship’s quantum-tap power plant extracted seemingly unlimited amounts of raw energy from the vacuum fluctuation of the zero-point field. If it could be harnessed, that kind of energy release could almost certainly be developed somehow into a truly nasty super-weapon.

No, there was something specific about GRIN technologies that the Sh’daar didn’t like, that they feared. But what?

Koenig had always opted for the super-weapon theory. Think-tank study groups, he knew, had been working on that angle ever since the Sh’daar Ultimatum had been delivered, but with no solid leads so far. The notion that advanced technologies a century or two hence might enable humans to snuff out a star or transform the nature of reality itself would remain sheer fantasy until some idea could be developed showing where GRIN was taking the human species. The exact nature of the innovative leaps, the inventions, the unexpected technological advances of even the next fifty years simply could not be anticipated.

There was no way, even with the most powerful virtual simulations, to predict what was going to be discovered, and when.

“So … tell me about this virtual diplomat,” Koenig said.

“They’re calling it ‘Tallyrand,’” Carruthers told him. “They’re supposed to be programming him now at a facility on Luna.”

“Tallyrand?”

“A historical diplomat. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century … France.”

“They called him the ‘Prince of Diplomats,’” Gregory said. “Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord is widely regarded as the most versatile and influential diplomat in Earth’s history.”

“You seem to be up on your history, Commander.”

She grinned. “The admiral has had me over on Luna as an observer at the software labs where they’re writing him. So, yeah. I downloaded a lot on the original Tallyrand, at any rate.”

“I suppose they’re being hopeful with that name,” Carruthers said.

“They can be as hopeful as they like,” Koenig said. “How do they expect this … this virtual diplomat to communicate with the Sh’daar?”

“It will be an advanced AI residing within a starship,” Carruthers said with a shrug, “probably something like an ISVR–120 or a 124. No organic crew, just the software. The idea would be to send it into Agletsch space, out in the direction of Canopus, where we think their stellar polity is centered. And the Agletsch would pass it on to the Sh’daar.”

Koenig chuckled at that. “Good luck to them, then. Considering that computer technology is part of what the Sh’daar want to restrict, I’d say that Tallyrand would be a great way not to impress them. Or, maybe a better way to say it … it would impress them, but in exactly the wrong way!”

The others laughed.

“But how can they even consider caving in to the Sh’daar?” Buchanan asked. “Hell, nanotech alone is wrapped up one way or another in just about everything we do, in medical science, in assemblers, in retrievers, in nanufactories. …”

“Even more so for information systems and computers,” Koenig said. “We’ve been inextricably entangled with our computers for four centuries now. Giving up computers would be to give up being human!”

“Not entirely, sir,” another of Carruthers’ aides said. His id identified him as Commander Jesus Vasquez. “There are people out there today who don’t rely on computer technology.”

“Squatties,” Gregory said, making a face. “Prims.”

“Exactly. In any case, the Sh’daar seem to just want us to stop further technological development.”

“This far and no further, eh?” Carruthers said.

Koenig shook his head. “And I would argue, Commander, that that means giving up an essential part of our humanity as well. We’re always going to be tinkering. We find a way to make a hotter fire … and that in turn leads to discovering copper and tin when they ooze out of the rocks around the campfire. We play with those, find we can mix them, and we discover bronze. Meanwhile, someone builds an even hotter fire and learns how to smelt iron. Technological innovation started with knocking chips off the edge of a piece of flint, and it hasn’t stopped since.”

“But progress can’t keep going on forever, can it?” Gregory asked. “There has to be a point where there’s nothing more to be discovered. No more inventions, no more improvements to be made.”

“Can’t it? I wonder. Have you ever heard of the technological singularity?”

“No, sir. What’s that?”

“Old idea, late twentieth century. Back then, science and technology were improving at a steadily increasing rate, at an exponentially increasing rate.” Koenig moved his hand as though following a line on a graph, going up gradually, then more steeply, then straight up. “At some point, it was theorized, technological advancement would be accelerating so quickly that life, that humanity itself, would become completely unrecognizable within a very short span of time. It was called the technological singularity … or sometimes the Vinge Singularity.”

Carruthers got the faintly glassy, distant look of someone pulling data down from the local Net. “Ah,” he said. “Vernor Vinge, right?”

“That’s the guy. Of course, we haven’t hit the singularity yet … at least not to that extent. Someone from five hundred years ago would still be able to relate to the world we know today. Nanassemblers might seem like magic, sure, but with a little training and some minor surgery to give them the necessary implants, they’d get along in our society just fine. Life hasn’t changed fundamentally, not to the extent some theorists envisioned.”

“I’m beginning to think some sort of new super-weapon is going to be our only hope,” Carruthers said. “But we’re going to need to develop it damned fast, because if the Sh’daar Empire doesn’t take us down pretty soon, I’m beginning to think the politicians will.”

“So what is the current status of Crown Arrow?” Koenig asked with blunt directness.

“On hold in committee in the Military Directorate,” Carruthers told him. “The vote has been delayed again, indefinitely, this time. I was told two days ago that we don’t want to provoke the Sh’daar into hasty action.”

“What, they don’t want us to make them mad?” Koenig asked. He laughed. “I’d say they’ve been royally pissed at us for thirty-seven years!”

“Maybe. And maybe an empire of some billions of worlds is so big they move slowly.”

“And maybe we need to buy ourselves time, which is what Crown Arrow was supposed to do in the first place!”

Operation Crown Arrow was a strategic concept originally presented by Koenig to the Senate Military Directorate ten months earlier, shortly after the previous year’s twin defeats at Arcturus Station and Everdawn. The ONI had tentatively identified a major Turusch staging base at Alphekka, a star that, from Earth, was the brightest star in the constellation Corona Borealis, the “Northern Crown.” Koenig’s plan called for a large-scale carrier strike against the enemy base there, seventy-two light years from Earth. By taking the war deep into enemy-held space, the Sh’daar’s timetable might be thrown off, and forces now being gathered for an assault against Sol and its inner colonies might be drawn off.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had given the oplan their unqualified support, but for the past ten months, the Military Directorate had dithered, passing it through various committees and subcommittees, requesting clarifications and revisions, running it through virtual simulations to determine likely military, political, and economic outcomes, and always failing to bring it to a final vote.

Carruthers palmed a contact on the table next to them, and the assembler inside produced another drink, which seemed to rise up out of the table as though extruded from the hard black surface itself. He picked up the glass, studied it for a moment, and then downed it in a single gulp.

“I hear you, Admiral,” Carruthers said after a moment. “Believe me, we all do. We have allies in the Senate who are doing their best, but …” He shrugged and set the glass back on the table. After a moment, it seemed to dissolve back into the tabletop from which it had been nanufactured. “We’re going to have to be patient,” he said, finally.

“Just so long as the Sh’daar and their allies are patient as well,” Koenig said. “I do know one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“We humans are a technic species. Our technology, the pace of our technological advance, is a part of us, a part of everything we do. If we surrender our ability to make our own technological decisions to the Sh’daar …”

“We can’t do that, damn it,” Buchanan put in.

“No,” Koenig agreed. “For us, that would be racial suicide. Extinction. …”

“Slow extinction if we surrender to the Sh’daar Empire,” Carruthers said, “and quick extinction if we keep fighting them, and lose. It seems our species has damned few alternatives open to it.”

“Very few,” Koenig said.

Outside the light and noise of the eudaimonium, the night seemed very dark indeed.

Chapter Four

21 December 2404

High Guard Destroyer Qianfang Fangyu

Entering Earth Space, Sol System

1440 hours, TFT

The intruder had left the High Guard destroyer trailing far behind. Qianfang Fangyu’s top acceleration was five hundred gravities, and after seventy-five minutes, the vessel was traveling sunward at 22,500 kilometers per second, and had covered about one third of an astronomical unit, less than 4 percent of the current distance between Saturn and Earth. The intruder—the H’rulka ship, if that’s what it was—had rapidly begun accelerating at an estimated ten thousand gravities, swiftly outdistancing the High Guard ship, which was lagging farther and farther behind. By now, if the H’rulka vessel had held to that incredible acceleration, it would be traveling at just under the speed of light, and would have already covered nearly six AUs.

It would now be within thirty minutes of Earth.

The Qianfang Fangyu had had continued broadcasting warnings at radio and at optical wavelengths throughout the past seventy-five minutes, however.

The messages should be arriving in Earth-space any moment now. …

Palisades Eudaimonium

New York State, Earth

1941 hours, EST

“Trevor, you can’t just run away from me. We need to talk!”

He’d found a private alcove halfway up the stepped interior of the bowl. She’d found him, though, trailing the id broadcast by his implant.

He looked up. “About what?”

“About us? About what happened. …”

“I don’t see where talking is going to change anything. Unless you want to come back with me?”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t think so. Look … they explained it to me. You had a stroke, the stroke changed some of the neural pathways in your brain. You don’t love me anymore. I … I understand that. I don’t like it, but I understand.”

“They said you saved my life, Trev,” she told him. “By getting me to the medical center. And by agreeing to join the military, so they’d treat me. I never thanked you.”

He shrugged. “Nothing to thank.” In fact, he’d not realized at the time that he had agreed. The events of that horrible night five years ago were still blurred in his mind. He did remember the terribly icy fear, and knew he would have agreed to anything, anything to get treatment for Angela.

Later, Navy psytherapists had offered to clear up those memories … or to remove them. He’d refused on both counts.

He did find it interesting, though, that modern nanomedical science could fix a broken brain, but had very few ideas when it came to fixing a broken heart.

“I’ve missed you, Trev.”

He didn’t answer.

“Trev? Goddammit, don’t be like this!”

“And how am I supposed to be, Angela?” he demanded. “We had a good life together—”

“As squatties! Grubbing about in the Manhat Ruins like … like animals!”

“I don’t recall any complaint about it on your part at the time! So maybe life wasn’t so good. We had each other. We had our life together. I thought we were happy.” When she didn’t say anything to that, he pushed ahead. “You turned it all upside down, wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t even agree to see me! One meeting, one meeting with a counselor … and all you give me is an ultimatum. No discussion. No compromise. An ultimatum. You won’t live with me anymore.”

“Trevor …”

“By that time, I was already signed up for the service. They’d already tested me, found out I would make a good pilot, scheduled me for flight training. So it wasn’t like I was able to go back to the Ruins anyway.”

“Trev, if we’d gone back to live in the Ruins again, we’d both be dead now. You know that, don’t you? That impactor surge wiped out all of the Old City.”

He kept his face impassive, but … gods. What she’d just said hit home like an impactor in its own right. No. No, he’d not thought about that.

He wondered how he’d missed that small fact. For a long time, he’d thought Angela was dead … before realizing that when the impactor had sent that tidal wave smashing north through the Narrows, she was already living with her new family in Haworth, beyond the wave’s reach. For a time, he’d not even been sure where Haworth was; it might have been a part of Morningside Heights, all of which had been washed away.

He’d never stopped to think at the time that if things had worked out the way he’d wanted, he and Angela would have been on Manhattan when the wave struck. They might have survived—part of the TriBeCa Tower where they’d lived was still standing even yet—but there would have been no guarantees.

“Look, it’s no good talking about what might have happened,” he told her. “We’re here, and we’re who we are now. And to tell the truth, I don’t know you anymore. You’re not the girl I fell in love with any longer.”

“I’ve grown, Trevor. And I’ve healed.”

“Yeah, they cured you of me, didn’t they?”

“That’s not fair!”

“Well, well,” another voice said, interrupting Gray’s retort. “What have we here? A couple of sweet monogie pervs?”

Gray blinked and looked to his left. Collins was there, smirking at them, with Kirkpatrick looming behind her. “Go to hell, Collins,” he told her. “This is private.”

“That’s right. Private. Just one partner at a time, and you mate for all eternity.” She made a face. “Disgusting.”

“Do I know you?” Angela asked. She would be checking Collins’ military id through her own implants. “Lieutenant … Collins?”

“No, honey. We’ve not met. I’ve heard a lot about you, though, from your monogie lover here!”

“Damned squattie,” Kirkpatrick muttered. “Thinks he’s good as real Navy. …”

“You’re obviously drunk, Kirkpatrick,” Gray said mildly. “How the hell did you manage to bypass your deet?”

“None’ve … your fuckin’ squattie business, squat-face,” Kirkpatrick managed to say. Was it alcohol, Gray wondered, or a recreational drug? Either way, he rather hoped that the man’s corder was picking this up. It meant nonjudicial punishment at the very least, a court-martial at worst … and that simply couldn’t happen to a more wonderful guy. …

Collins seemed to be her usual coldly mocking and cruel self. She was too smart to get herself wasted like that. Unfortunately.

“I don’t recall inviting either of you into this alcove,” Gray told them. “You want to make fun of me, fine, but have the decency to leave this person out of it.”

“That’s great!” Kirkpatrick said. “A … a monogie talkin’ ’bout decent!”

“Come on, Kirkpatrick,” Collins said. “We know when we’re not wanted!”

“Damned monogies …”

“How much did you have?” Collins asked him as she led the unsteady Kirkpatrick away.

“Friends,” Gray said thoughtfully as they moved out of earshot. “Got to find myself some.”

“Those were … friends?”

“No. They’re in my squadron, but friends? No.”

Learning his place within the culture in which he’d suddenly found himself, learning to fit in, had taken up a lot of Gray’s attention and energy over these past five years.

Life in the Periphery, scrabbling for survival within the half-flooded ruins scattered around the margins of the North American Union, tended to be hard and it tended to be short. It had also been forced to adapt. Two-adult-person family units loosely allied with other two-adult units had proven to be the most successful when it came to the necessities of hunter-gatherer lifestyles. With larger communities pooling food and other scarce resources, there were always shortages—and shortages either led to brutal and usually fatal fights to determine who went without, or else everyone in the group suffered when the little that was available was shared with all. Smaller units tended to be more flexible … and they isolated groups exposed to the Blood Death virus or other pathogens.

For the full citizens of the Union and the larger Confederation, larger, extended families had been the norm for centuries. With nanoassemblers literally building food and other necessities from dirt and garbage, there was more than enough to go around. Children were best raised in crèche-schools where they learned to socialize with others as they received their electronic educational downloads. And the Blood Death and other diseases were, for the most part, non-existent, or at the least well controlled by modern nanomedical science.

For the citizens of the Union, the Prims of the Periphery were old-fashioned, stubborn, ignorant, and dirty—much like the inhabitants of Appalachia who still lacked electricity or indoor plumbing back in the twentieth century. There was even a memory of that in one of the names civilized New Yorkers had for the Manhattan Ruins: “Newyorkentucky.” For the inhabitants of the Periphery, full citizens of the Union were selfish, self-centered, and shallow, far too preoccupied with social fads and electronic toys, superficial at best, decadent and perverted at worst. Spoiled, in other words.

The divide between the two had become far wider and deeper over the past couple of centuries, to the point that there seemed to be no way of bridging the gap.

Somewhat to his surprise, Gray did have friends in the Dragonfires. Ben Donovan was one. And Commander Allyn wasn’t a friend, exactly—you weren’t friends with your commanding officer—but at least she seemed to be on his side. Most of that, though, he was pretty sure, had to do with his combat skills. He’d held up his end of things during the Defense of Earth, and they thought of him as a fellow Starhawk pilot, not as a Prim or as an outsider.

The problems were people like Kirkpatrick—bigoted and conceited—and Collins, who still seemed to blame him for the unpardonable sin of surviving two months ago when her partner, Howie Spaas, had been killed.

“I still want to talk, Trev,” Angela was saying. “I don’t want us to be … enemies.”

He gave her a cold look. “The enemies are out there,” he told her. “The Turusch. The Sh’daar. You’re just … someone I used to know.”

“Trevor—”

“Attention, everyone,” a new voice said, booming from somewhere in the auroral radiance shifting overhead and cutting across the crowd noise and conversations of the eudaimonium. “We apologize for the interruption, but all military personnel will return to their duty stations now. Special shuttles are being deployed to the Giuliani Spaceport for those who came down the Quito Elevator.”

As the message went out over the concourse speakers, another message was winking inside Gray’s head: recall.

“Trevor? What is it?”

“I’ve got to get back to my ship,” he told her. “Something’s happening.”

“Happening? What?” She looked around wildly, as guests at the party wearing military uniforms began gathering into groups and moving off.

And when she turned to look at Gray again, he was already gone.

H’rulka Warship 434

Cis-Lunar Space, Sol System

1446 hours, TFT

The H’rulka vessel decelerated hard, approaching the sources of the heaviest radio traffic in the alien star system designated as System 784,857. Ahead—though they didn’t think of them as planets—were two large planetary bodies, a double planet, in fact. The smaller one was typical sub-planetary rubble, airless and cratered; the other possessed a trace of poisonous atmosphere and vast regions of liquid dihydrogen oxide. This last was important. The H’rulka lived at an altitude within their homeworld’s atmosphere where that compound was liquid, which suggested the possibility of life despite near-vacuum conditions and the deadly presence of free oxygen.

Thousands of points of radiant energy clustered around the double worldlet marked hives of the creatures—bases, cities, and industrial facilities, some in orbit around the planet, some deep within its atmosphere … or, though it was hard to imagine such a thing, on the surface itself.

And ships. So many ships … all as tiny and as insubstantial as the worlds among which they traveled.

This, then, was the star system to which the fragmented intruder probe had traveled. It was impossible to tell, of course, precisely where the probe fragment had gone in this teeming sea of energy and space-borne craft. The heavy concentration of energy-radiating points on and near the sub-planet directly ahead, however, the one with the poisonous atmosphere and liquid surface, appeared to be the heart of this system’s activity.

Ordered Ascent called up Warship 434’s encounter records, and swiftly found a match there with some of the alien ship energy patterns ahead. The H’rulka had drifted into this species just once before, some ten-twelfths of a gnyii, one rotation of the homeworld about its sun, ago. Evidently, they called themselves humanity, a burst of low-frequency sound without meaning. The Sh’daar masters called them Nah-voh-grah-nu-greh Trafhyedrefschladreh, a complex collection of sonic phonemes that meant something like “20,415-carbon-oxygen-water.” Humanity was very nearly the twelve to the fourth intelligent species encountered so far by the Masters that was carbon-based, breathed oxygen, and used liquid dihydrogen oxide as a solvent and transport medium.

Repulsive vermin. No floater sac, no feeder nets or filter sieves, no manipulators—unless the two jointed appendages sprouting from near the top of the creature were used for that purpose. Only two tiny photoreceptors, instead of broad photoreceptor patches of integument. Surface crawlers. Poison breathers. The images in the H’rulka records had been made of creatures captured in that one encounter, but none of the specimens had survived long enough for their captors to learn how or what they metabolized, how they got around, how they reproduced, or how they managed to viiidyig without having a colony component designed for it.

And somehow the disgusting creatures had managed to build starships and enter the Great Void. Ordered Ascent never ceased to be amazed at the inventiveness of the natural order.

“Some of the vermin ships have taken notice of us,” High Drifting reported. “They are accelerating away from the larger of the two sub-planets ahead. We will soon be under attack.”

Ordered Ascent considered this. They’d pursued the probe they’d detected in System 783,451 in order to determine where it had come from. When the fleeing probe had divided into four independent sections, the H’rulka ship had split as well.

It was imperative that Warship 434 return to an Imperial base and report. The vermin occupying Star System 784,857 were not as technologically advanced as the H’rulka, obviously, but they were close enough in terms of ship and weapons technology to be of concern. The Sh’daar needed to be informed.

“Set navigational coordinates for System 644,998,” Ordered Ascent directed. It hesitated, then added, “and prepare for Divergence.”

This last was an uncomfortable order to give, and more uncomfortable to obey. The H’rulka, long ago in their pre-technological Eden, had evolved as herd-dwellers, drifting in vast islands in the skies of their homeworld. Just as they felt claustrophobic when they were enclosed, they felt a terrifying isolation when separate colonies were cut off from one another.

But the H’rulka of Warship 434 were well trained and disciplined. Across the cavernous interior of the control area, each of twelve massive gas bags drifted outward toward a wall, where a section of the curved surface flowed and ran suddenly like liquid dihydrogen oxide, then dilated open. Ordered Ascent moved through the nearest of these openings, entering a far smaller, more claustrophobic space forming around it.

“Weapons ready for combat,” Swift Pouncer reported.

“Warship 434 ready for Divergence,” Wide Net, the navigation officer, added.

“Accelerate now. …”

And the H’rulka ship began twisting space.

VFA–44 Dragonfire Squadron

Giuliani Spaceport

New York State, Earth

2018 hours, EST

Trevor Gray jumped out of the pubtran and onto the spaceport’s tarmac. The Starhawks of VFA–44 were lined up ahead beneath the field lighting, sleek and mirrored jet-black, each, at the moment, a rounded ovoid of light-drinking nanosurface perhaps seven meters long and three tall and wide. As the squadron pilots approached, the central section of ten of the ships yawned open to receive them.

“Where the hell are Collins and Kirkpatrick?” Commander Allyn demanded as she stepped off the ’tran.

The other pilots, already starting to jog toward their waiting spacecraft, pulled up short. “They were with Prim at the party,” Lieutenant Walsh said, using Gray’s hated squadron handle.

“Gray?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Gray replied. “I did see them earlier, but …” He ended with a shrug.

“Shit.” She looked around, as if searching for another transport from the eudaimonium. “They’ll just have to make it when they make it, then. Let’s strap ’em on, ladies!”

Gray reached his waiting Starhawk, grabbed the upper lip of the opening, which shaped and hardened itself to his grasp, and dove into the black interior feetfirst. His skinsuit was already reshaping itself for flight ops; his helmet was waiting for him inside.

He wondered if he should tell Allyn what he’d seen at the party. Kirkpatrick had definitely gotten into something he shouldn’t have, and had been flying-impaired. There was no way he was going to be able to operate a fighter; though if Collins could get his deet engaged, he had a chance. Missing an emergency recall, though, was serious.

He found himself grinning as he pulled the helmet over his head and let it seal itself to the unfolding collar of his skinsuit.

His palms came down on the fighter’s control contact plates, one to his left, one to the right. At a thought, the body of the fighter faded to invisibility, and he could see the tarmac, the other fighters, the sky-glow of the eudaimonium a few kilometers to the south as clearly as if he’d been standing out in the open. Another thought switched on the fighter’s power plant and engaged the diamagnetic outer hull fields. The opening flowed shut like water, sealing him in. The Starhawk’s hull began growing longer and thinner.

Starhawks and other military fighters utilized what was known in the trade as VEG, variable external geometry. The various elemental components of the hull—carbon, iron, iridium, and dozens of others—were arranged within a nanotechnic engineering matrix that allowed them to reshape themselves within the ship’s informational morphic field. Standard flight configuration was a needle-slim shard twenty meters long, with a swelling amidships large enough to accommodate—just barely—the pilot and the primary ship systems: power, drives, life support, and weapons. As he brought the ship to flight-ready status, it lifted itself above the tarmac in a silent hover, almost as though straining against the gravitational bonds tethering it to the planet.

“Dragon Three, ready for boost,” Donovan’s voice reported.

“Seven, flight ready,” Lieutenant Walsh said.

The others began chiming in, one after another. “Dragon Nine, ready to lift,” Gray said, as around him the other fighters drifted up from the ground, levitating a few meters into the night sky. Only two, Dragonfires Five and Eleven, remained lifeless on the tarmac.

Perhaps, Gray thought, he should say something to the skipper. But one societal quirk of the Navy was identical to one found in the squatters living in the Manhat Ruins. You didn’t carry tales about others, even if you hated them. Being marked as an informer, a tattler, could be as socially crippling as being a Prim.

So long as withholding the information didn’t compromise the squadron or a mission, he would keep what he knew about Kirkpatrick to himself.

“Situational update is coming on-line,” Allyn told them.

Gray saw the data coming through … a ship of alien design, almost certainly one belonging to a Sh’daar subject race, was approaching cis-lunar space. He looked at the stats and gave a low whistle. The thing was huge.

“VFA–44,” a voice came in over the com link, “this is New York Met ATC. You are cleared for emergency launch, vector one-zero-eight plus four-one degrees at ten gravities, over.”

“New York Met ATC,” Allyn replied. “We copy clear for emergency launch, vector one-zero-eight plus four-one degrees at ten gravities. Thank you.”

“Roger and Godspeed, VFA–44.”

“Stand by to boost, close formation,” Allyn said. “Nav on auto.”

Together, the ten fighters swung their needle prows up to a forty-one-degree angle off the tarmac, then swung to face the southern horizon. Gray could see the string of faint stars marking the SupraQuito strand up in synchorbit almost directly ahead.

“Ten gravities, in four,” Allyn continued, “… three … two … one … boost!”

As one, the ten fighters hurtled skyward at one thousand meters per second per second. Gray had a brief, blurred impression of the massed lights of the eudaimonium falling away below and behind as the fighters shrieked through fast-thinning atmosphere. He thought of Angela … and decided it was good knowing she was alive.

He wondered if he would ever see her again … wondered if he wanted to.

The Starhawks had been in their atmospheric configuration for their flight in over the ocean earlier that evening, their manta-wings stretched wide to assist with banks, turns, and lift. There was no need for such finesse on the way up, however. To reach space they required only raw, savage power and high Gs. The needle configuration gave the greatest streamlining and, as the fighters climbed above the forty-thousand-meter line, they were able to feed more and more power to the flickering singularities off their bows, increasing their accelerations to just over five hundred Gs, increasing their velocities by half a million meters per second per second.

As they rose above the tenuous, uppermost wisps of Earth’s atmosphere and the stars became colder, harder, and more brilliant, flight control transferred from New York Metropolitan to SupraQuito. At the halfway point, eighteen thousand kilometers out and just two minutes later, they switched their singularities around to aft and began slowing.

“So why are we going back to the barn, Skipper?” Lieutenant Terrance Jacosta asked. “This download says the enemy is just half a million kilometers out!”

“Because we’re flying just a little light on snakes right now, numb-nuts,” Allyn replied. “Get your head out of party mode and get with the program!”

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

They’d not needed missile or impactor round load-outs for a fly-by above a friendly city, so the only weapons capability the squadron had at the moment were their StellarDyne Blue Lightning PBP–2 particle beam projectors, since those weapons pulled charged particles directly from the zero-point field. The weapons of choice for long-range work, however, were VG–10 Krait smart missiles. Starhawks generally carried a warload of thirty-two Kraits, or snakes, plus fifty thousand rounds apiece for their kinetic-kill Gatling cannons.

Gray looked at the schematic of the intruder. Sending a squadron up against that thing with nothing but beam weapons would be suicide the easy way. At least with Kraits, usually carried in load-outs with variable-yield warheads of five to fifteen kilotons, you could stand off at long range and pound the bastard until something gave. With the PBP, you had to be close, and you had to be surgically precise. With something that big, you might get better results giving the alien the finger.

In close formation, then, the ten fighters neared the SupraQuito dock facility. Gray could see America in her berth, connected to the main base structure by a transit tube and a web-work of mooring lines. Still slowing, now, to a few tens of meters per second, they passed the carrier and the dock beneath their keels—though concepts such as up and down, of course, had no meaning in microgravity. Clearing the structure by seven hundred meters, they continued decelerating, balancing their drive singularities to bring them to a dead halt relative to the America, just half a kilometer off her stern.

“VFA–44,” a voice said, “you are cleared for trap in Landing Bay Two.”

“Dragon One,” Allyn’s voice replied. “Copy. Okay, people. Switch to AI approach. Land by reverse numbers.”

Cutting their drives and flipping end-for-end, they opened aft venturis and fired their plasma-maneuvering thrusters, using jets of super-heated water as reaction mass. Unlike uniform gravitational acceleration, the thrusters had a kick. Gray was plastered against the embrace of his seat at three Gs as he began gaining speed once more, this time directly toward the aft end of the America.

In normal space operations, they would be using their gravitic drives and coming in from much farther out, at much higher speeds. Trapping on board a carrier snugged up to the dock was child’s play by comparison, or it would have been if a missed cue or a lapse in concentration hadn’t risked punching through the gossamer strands and struts of the synchorbital base.

The hab modules on board the carrier were turning, providing spin gravity for the crew. Each approach had to be precisely on the money; Dragonfire Twelve—Lieutenant Jacosta—made the first approach, accelerating slightly as he slid into the deep shadow beneath the carrier’s belly, then at the last moment fired his lateral thrusters to give him a side vector of seven meters per second, matching the movement of the landing bay as it swung in ahead and from the right. Dragonfire Eleven—Kirkpatrick—was missing from the formation. Tucker was next, in Dragon Ten.

The landing bay was rotating at 2.11 turns per minute, so every twenty-eight seconds, the opening swung around once more and another incoming fighter was there to meet it.

And now it was Gray’s turn. Traveling at one hundred meters per second, he passed into the shadow beneath the carrier, watching the massive blisters, domes, and sponsons housing the ship’s quantum taps and drive projectors smoothly passing seemingly just above his head. It took almost ten seconds for him to traverse the length of America’s spine. His AI used his thrusters to adjust his speed with superhuman precision, dropping into the sweet-spot moving pocket and nudging him to port for that critical side-vector of seven meters per second. For an instant, the gaping maw of the moving docking bay appeared to freeze motionless as the fighter swept in across the line of deck acquisition lights. At the last moment, he entered the tangleweb field that slowed his forward momentum sharply, bringing him to a halt.

Magnetic grapples clamped hold of his ship and rapidly moved it forward, clearing the docking bay for the next incoming fighter, just under thirty seconds behind him. As the fighter dropped through a liquid-nano seal and into the pressurized bay immediately beneath the flight deck, he thought-opened the Starhawk’s side and pulled off his helmet with a heartfelt sigh of relief.

He was home, and where he belonged … even if for only a few minutes.

Chapter Five

21 December 2404

High-G Orbital Shuttle Burt Rutan

Approaching SupraQuito Fleet Base

Earth Synchorbit, Sol System

1532 hours, TFT

Captain Randolph Buchanan and several of his aides had gone down the Quito space elevator that afternoon to reach the eudaimonium. Normally, he would have taken the captain’s gig down to Giuliani, but an engineering downgrudge report had taken his gig off of flight-ready status, and he’d relied on civilian transport instead.

That had left him at something of a disadvantage when the fleet recall had come through. He could have gone back to the ship with Admiral Koenig, but there’d not been time to find him or the admiral’s barge in the chaos down there.

Instead, the Burt Rutan had been summarily commandeered by no less a luminary than Admiral of the Fleet John C. Carruthers, and Buchanan and several other high-ranking officers and aides had climbed aboard a mobile passenger module at the eudaimonium docking area for the short flight north to the spaceport.

The Rutan was a cargo transport, designed to boost heavy loads up to synchorbit for the ongoing construction of the bases and facilities tethered high above Quito, and she was not designed with passenger comfort in mind. The passenger module slipped into the big shuttle’s cargo deck and locked home. It was claustrophobic on board, with few amenities, but with a boost of five hundred gravities, it would take less time to reach synchorbit than it had for the flight from the eudaimonium to Giuliani.

Buchanan leaned back in the embrace of the hab seat as the vast, light-dusted blackness of Earth’s night side, aglow with cities, dropped away aft. He was linked through his implant to Commander Sam Jones, America’s executive officer. Admiral Koenig was riding the link from the Admiral’s barge, which was trailing by a hundred kilometers, following the Rutan in to the docking facility. Koenig was listening in, but not interfering. Captain Barry Wizewski, America’s brand-new CAG, was also on board the civilian shuttle, linked in with the communications net connecting the Rutan with the carrier’s CIC.

“Damn it, Sam, I want full readiness for space five minutes after I step onto the quarterdeck,” Buchanan growled.

“We’re working on it, sir,” Jones replied, “but things are kind of chaotic on board right now. We have civilians on board …”

He spoke the word with evident distaste. In fact, there would be several hundred civilian contractors on the ship, part of the small army of inspection teams and drive magicians who came aboard each time the carrier entered its berth.

“They can come along with us, Number One. We won’t be going far.”

“We also have about a thousand ship’s personnel coming in from liberty. A lot of them won’t make it for an hour or two.”

“Then we’ll boost without them,” Buchanan said. He glanced at the comm icon representing Koenig. “What’s the status on the fighter wings?”

“VFA–44 is coming on board now, sir. We’re ten for twelve there. VFA–31 is on deep patrol but has been recalled. They should get the recall order in another two hours. VFA–49 is on Ready Five. The others are scrambling. We went to GQ about seven minutes ago.”

America carried six fighter and fighter-attack squadrons in all.

“Whiz?” Buchanan said, addressing America’s CAG. “I’d like to get the Peaks out there, too. What do you think?”

“I’m giving the orders now, Captain.”

VQ–7, the Sneaky Peaks, was America’s reconnaissance squadron, flying under the flamboyant Commander James Henry Peak. Flying CP–240 Shadowstars, they would have the best chance of getting close to the intruder spacecraft without being noticed.

“How long before the Dragonfires are rearmed and set for launch?”

“Twenty minutes, sir.”

Buchanan nodded. Twenty minutes was damned fast. The ready crews would be busting ass to turn those fighters around.

“Do you have anything to add, Admiral?” he asked.

“I suggest that we get all squadrons spaceborne ASAP, and keep them out there,” Koenig said from his barge. “Priority to the fighters, of course, but get the EW and SAR squadrons off the carrier as quickly as you can. America will be a target, especially while she’s in dock.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” That made sense. If America was crippled or destroyed while still in dock, at least her fighters would be spaceborne and on an attack vector.

“Number One,” Buchanan continued, “get my ship out of dock if you have to cut the lines with a pocket knife and haul her out on your shoulder.” He glanced at the Rutan’s bulkhead display. The shuttle was approaching the carrier now, approaching over the curve of her shield cap. He could see a fighter coming in from astern, heading for a trap on the hangar deck. The Rutan wouldn’t be going in that way. They would dock in zero-G, the quarterdeck docking bay, just forward of the rotating hab modules. “We’re about five minutes from docking, so stop gabbing with me and get on it!”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

When it came to wielding a star carrier, three men, in a sense, shared the command responsibilities. Buchanan himself commanded the America. Captain Wizewski, as CAG, was responsible for the 102 spacecraft of CVW–14, the Carrier Air Wing, currently deployed aboard. And Admiral Koenig was in overall command of America’s Carrier Battlegroup, CBG–18, which included not only the carrier herself, but the nine other ships currently attached to the CBG. His orders, and his strategic and tactical thinking, had to take in all ten vessels and the deployment of America’s fighters.

He was grateful that Koenig hadn’t interfered as he’d given orders to Jones. Too many group COs did that … and it undercut a captain’s authority on his own bridge. Koenig, he knew, was probably champing at the bit to get the America under way more than was Buchanan, but he’d spoken only when directly asked if he had any recommendations.

The admiral was one of the good ones, the sort of CO for whom the entire CBG would go to hell and back. He checked the update on the intruder. It was accelerating now … possibly maneuvering to head out-system, though it was too soon to tell. Taking on that puppy would be akin to a stroll in hell, yeah.

Impatiently, Buchanan remained still and silent as the Rutan maneuvered toward the quarterdeck docking bay. The bulkheads of the Rutan’s passenger hab were projecting an all-around view of the exterior now, creating the illusion that they had gone translucent. Directly to port, the underside of the carrier’s shield cap rose like an immense, gray-black cliff; to starboard, the vessel’s hab modules continued their steady and stately rotation, making one complete swing around America’s central spine 2.11 times each minute, or once in twenty-eight seconds.

Ahead, a rectangular hatchway had opened in the side of the carrier’s spine, illuminated by bright white lights set into the deck. From this angle, the quarterdeck accessway connecting the ship with the base docking facility seemed to drop in from directly overhead and slightly aft of the open bay.

And then the Rutan, on AI pilot, glided silently through the opening and into the Star Carrier America.

H’rulka Warship 434

Cis-Lunar Space, Sol System

1534 hours, TFT

“We are not going to strike the vermin?” Swift Pouncer asked over the ship’s internal communications network. Speaking only in radio, without the added color and modifying overtones of its sonic speech, the words were empty of all emotion.

But Ordered Ascent knew what the others must be feeling.

“We have the technological advantage,” Ordered Ascent replied, knowing that all of the other All of Us were listening closely. “But that advantage is not great enough to allow us to fight an entire star system. Too many of us would fall into the Abyss. It is far more important that the Masters know of these aliens, and that they have been sending probes through System 783,451, than it is for us to destroy their ships. The destruction will happen later, be sure of that.”

“A number of vermin ships are closing with us,” High Drifting reported. “We estimate that they will launch weapons within fifteen vu.”

“The vermin defend their nest,” Swift Pouncer added.

Ordered Ascent watched the unfolding tactical situation through its electronic feed from Warship 434’s tactical mind. No fewer than fourteen enemy ships were currently with range of 434’s weapons. It was tempting to destroy those fourteen before dropping into the emptiness between the stars.

The All of Us had served the Masters for some twelves of thousands of gnyii now, ever since the Starborn had first shown the H’rulka how to extract metals from the winds of their world, how to bend gravity to their will, and how, at last, to build ships that would take them to the treasure troves of metals and other elements in orbit beyond the homeworld’s atmosphere. The H’rulka had gone from being essentially atechnic to a star-faring species themselves within the space of twelve-cubed gnyii, the twitch of a minor tentacle, so far as the Masters were concerned.

Ordered Ascent wondered, and not for the first time, why the Masters insisted on suppressing technological advancement throughout the entourage of species they’d brought into the embrace of their feeder nets. The H’rulka had come so far; their combat advantage over these vermin would have been that of the windstorm to the foodfloater, had they been permitted to keep developing their technology.

No matter. The advantage was sufficient.

Ordered Ascent checked other data feeds. Ship 434 was ready to diverge, if necessary, and would be ready to enter metaspace within mere vu.

Any damage done to the enemy was to the good. So long as combat didn’t weaken Warship 434 or threaten her mission, there was no reason not to swat the vermin before they were even close enough to engage.

“Swift Pouncer,” Ordered Ascent said, “destroy those that we can reach.”

“With the pleasure of gentle winds, Ordered Ascent.”

And Warship 434 reached out into the darkness. …

TC/USNA DD Symmons

Cis-Lunar Space, Sol System

1536 hours, TFT

Captain Harry Vanderkamp, commanding the Symmons, watched the tactical display unfolding around him as the ship plunged toward the interloper. The alien ship was accelerating fast, pulling at least seven hundred gravities, and would slip beyond range soon.

Symmons was a member of CBG–18, a fleet destroyer 576 meters long, massing just under thirty thousand tons, and armed with a variety of weapons, including thirty-six launch tubes for VG–24 Mamba smart missiles, variable-yield ship killers ranging between twenty and forty-five kilotons apiece. The H’rulka vessel was 327,000 kilometers ahead now, out of range for most guided weapons, but still within reach of the Mambas.

The problem, though, was that Symmons did not yet have clearance to fire. The ship ahead had clearly been identified as H’rulka, an enemy combatant … but it had been twelve years since the single known encounter between them and Confederation vessels, and Vanderkamp knew he would need clearance from Fleet HQ. There might be diplomatic issues of which he was unaware, or an attempt under way to communicate with the alien.

Symmons had burned repeated laser and radio messages to Fleet Base, only a few light seconds away, but so far with no response.

His gut instinct was to fire. That H’rulka monster might be a recon probe in advance of a larger force.

The enemy ship was accelerating harder now. In seconds, it would be out of range completely. Hell, it might already be too late. …

“Sir!” Vanderkamp’s tactical officer cried over the bridge link. “Kaufman has been hit!”

“Show me!”

The tactical display switched to a view from one of the other destroyer’s external cameras, looking forward up the spine toward the underside of the ship’s massive shield cap. The shield, backlit by a hard blue glare, was deforming, crumpling with shocking suddenness, as though it were collapsing into …

“Milton is hit!” A second battlegroup destroyer was folding around her own shield cap. “Target is now breaking up.”

“Breaking up? Breaking up how?”

“It’s just … just dividing sir. Twelve sections, moving apart from—”

“Incoming mass!” his exec shouted. “Singularity effect! Impact in seven … in six …”

Vanderkamp saw it, a pinpoint source of X-rays and hard gamma on the forward scanner display, a tiny, brilliant star sweeping directly toward Symmons’ prow.

There was no time for thought or measured decision, no time for anything but immediate reaction.

“VG–24 weapon system, all tubes, fire!” he yelled, overriding the exec’s countdown. They were under attack, and that decisively ended any need for weapons-free orders from base. “Maneuvering, hard right! Shields up full! Brace for—”

And the H’rulka weapon struck the Symmons.

It hit slightly off center on the destroyer’s bullet-shaped forward shield cap, causing the starboard side to pucker and collapse in a fiercely radiating instant. Water stored inside the tank burst through the rupture, freezing instantly in a cloud of frozen mist that burst into space like a miniature galaxy. The port side of the cap twisted around, collapsing into the oncoming gravitic weapon effect. Vanderkamp felt a single hard, brain-numbing jolt … and then the five-hundred meter spine of the ship whipped around the object, orbiting it with savage velocity as the entire 29,000-ton-plus mass of the Symmons tried to cram itself into a fast-moving volume of twisted space half a centimeter across. Pieces of the ship flew off in all directions as the spine continued to snap around the tiny volume of warped space; the strain severed the ship’s spine one hundred meters from her aft venturis, and the broken segment tumbled wildly away into darkness. Abruptly, the remaining hull shattered, the complex plastic-ceralum composite fragmenting into a cloud of sparkling shards, continuing to circle the fierce-glowing core of the weapon until it formed a broad, flattened pinwheel spiraling in toward that tiny but voracious central maw.

The disk of sparkling fragments and ice crystals collapsed inward, dwindling … dwindling … dwindling …

And then the Symmons was gone.

Seven of her Mamba missiles had cleared their launch tubes before the weapon struck.

TC/USNA CVS America

SupraQuito Fleet Base

Earth Synchorbit, Sol System

1540 hours, TFT

Last on, first off was the custom for boarding and debarking by seniority. Buchanan swam out of the Rutan’s cargo deck hab module and into the boarding tube, followed by other, lower-ranking officers. Rather than wait for America’s forward boat-deck docking bay to repressurize, it was simpler to hand-over-hand along the translucent plastic tube and emerge moments later on the carrier’s quarterdeck.

By age-old tradition, a vessel’s quarterdeck was her point of entry, often reserved for officers, guests, and passengers … though on a carrier like America it served as an entryway for the ship’s enlisted personnel as well. The boat deck offered stowage for a number of the ship’s service and utility boats, including the captain’s gig—the sleek, delta-winged AC–23 Sparrow that by rights should have taken him planetside and back. The quarterdeck was directly aft.

“America, arriving,” the voice of the AIOD called from overhead as he pulled himself headfirst into the large quarterdeck space, announcing to all personnel that the ship’s commanding officer had just come on board. Following ancient seafaring tradition, Buchanan rotated in space to face a large USNA flag painted on the quarterdeck’s aft bulkhead and saluted it, then turned to receive the salute of the OOD.

“Welcome aboard, Captain,” Commander Benton Sinclair said, saluting. Sinclair was the ship’s senior TO, her tactical officer, but was stationed at the quarterdeck for this watch as officer of the deck.

“Thank you, Commander,” Buchanan replied. “You are relieved as OOD. I want you in CIC now.”

“I am relieved of the deck. Aye, aye, Captain.”

The ship’s bridge, along with the adjacent combat information center, were both aft from the quarterdeck, just past the moving down-and-out deck scoops leading to the elevators connecting with the various rotating hab modules. Both the bridge and the CIC were housed inside a heavily armored, fin-shaped sponson abaft of the hab module access, and were in zero gravity.

“Captain on the bridge!” the exec announced as Buchanan swam in through the hatchway. Using the handholds anchored to the deck, he pulled himself to the doughnut, the captain’s station overlooking the various bridge stations around the deck’s perimeter, and swung himself in. The station embraced him, drawing him in, making critical electronic contacts.

He sensed the ship around him. In a way, he became the ship, over a kilometer long, humming with power, with communication, with life. He sensed the admiral’s barge slipping into its boarding sheath forward, sensed the gossamer structure of the base docking facility alongside and ahead.

And he sensed the battle unfolding just half a million kilometers away. God in heaven, how had they gotten so close?

Long-range battlespace scans showed four Confederation vessels … no, five, now, five ships destroyed, three of them members of CBG–18. The enemy ship was accelerating now at seven hundred gravities … and, as he watched, it appeared to be breaking up.

“Tactical,” Buchanan said. He felt Commander Sinclair slipping into his console and linking in. “Is it … is the enemy ship destroyed?”

“Negative, Captain,” Sinclair replied a moment later. “It appears to have separated into twelve distinct sections. Courses are diverging … and accelerating.”

Missile trails pursued several of the alien ship sections. It appeared that Symmons had managed to get off a partial volley before slamming into the alien’s gravitic weaponry.

“CBG–18, arriving,” the AI of the deck announced.

Good, Koenig was aboard. Buchanan allowed America’s status updates to wash through his awareness. Her quantum tap generators were coming on-line, power levels rising. The last of VFA–44’s Starhawks were on board and on the hangar deck being rearmed. Dockyard tugs were already taking up their positions along America’s hull, ready to push her clear of the facility. Weapons coming on-line… .

“Seal off docking tubes,” he ordered. “Prepare to get under way.”

“Docking tubes sealed off, Captain.” That was the voice of Master Chief Carter, the boatswain of the deck, in charge of the gangways and boarding tubes connecting the ship with the dock. A number of ship’s personnel were still inside the main tube, or at the debarkation bay at the dock, as the tube began retracting. The last men and women to make it on board were scrambling for their stations.

“Ship’s power on-line, at eighty percent,” the engineering AI reported.

“Very well. Cast off umbilicals.”

Connectors for power, water, and raw materials separated from America’s hull receptors, reeling back into the dock.

“Dockyard umbilicals clear, Captain,” Carter reported.

By this time, it was obvious that the H’rulka ship was intent on fleeing solar space, that America and the synchorbital naval base were not in immediate danger. Buchanan did not understand the alien’s tactical reasoning; the bastard could have approached the base closely enough to utterly destroy the base and perhaps a hundred warships docked there. That they had not done so suggested other mission imperatives—a strategic withdrawal, perhaps, to get reconnaissance data back home, but it ran counter to Buchanan’s own instincts.

It suggested a certain conservative approach to their tactical thinking, which might be useful.

“The ship is ready in all respects for space, Captain,” Commander Jones reported.

“Very well. Cast off all mooring lines.”

“Mooring lines retracting, Captain,” Carter reported.

“Ship clear and free to maneuver,” the helm officer added.

“Take us out, Helm. Best safe vector.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Tugs engaged. Stand by for lateral acceleration.”

“Attention, all hands,” the voice of the ship’s AI called over both link and audio comms. “Brace for real acceleration.”

Buchanan felt a slight bump through the embrace of the doughnut as the tugs nudged America sideways and away from the dock. For several seconds, he felt weight, a distinct feeling of down in that direction, to his right. For the sake of clear communications, the navy took care to distinguish acceleration—meaning gravitational acceleration—from real acceleration, which was imposed by maneuvering thrusters or dockyard tugs. The former might involve accelerations of hundreds of gravities, but were free-fall and therefore unfelt. The tugs were shoving America’s ponderous mass clear of the docking facility with an acceleration of only a couple of meters per second per second, but that translated as two-tenths of a gravity, and a perceived weight, for Buchanan, of nearly eighteen kilograms—disorienting, and potentially dangerous for members of the ship’s crew who still weren’t strapped in. Out in the rotating hab modules, where spin gravity created the illusion of a constant half G, it was worse, as “down” began to shift unpleasantly back and forth with the hab modules’ rotation.

He drummed his fingers restlessly on a contact plate. Best safe vector meant slow, and without benefit of gravitics. A mistake here could wreck a substantial portion of Fleet Base. By the time the carrier warped clear of the dock, the enemy ship—no, ships, he corrected himself—would be long gone.

He’d half expected Koenig to reverse the orders to take America out of dock. If the enemy left the solar system, there was no need to continue. On the other hand, Koenig might be preparing for a further enemy incursion … or for a sudden change in course by the fleeing H’rulka vessels. The safe bet was to get all warships clear and maneuvering freely and to keep them there until it was certain the enemy threat had passed.

There’d been no additional orders from the Admiral in CIC, and so Buchanan had continued to follow the last set of orders he’d received. Take her out.

On the tactical display, some of the missiles fired by the Symmons an instant before her immolation were slowly closing on one of the H’rulka ship sections. …

H’rulka Warship 434

Sol System

1544 hours, TFT

With divergence, the situation had become considerably more desperate.

Ordered Ascent drifted in the center of a claustrophobically enclosed space less than three times the diameter of its own gas bag, with scarcely enough room for its own manipulators and feeder nets to drift without scraping the compartment’s interior walls. Images projected by the ship across the ship-pod’s interior surfaces created the comforting illusion of vast, panoramic vistas of cloud canyons, vertical cloudwalls, and atmospheric abysses, but the touch of a tentacle against the invisible solid wall shattered the comforting sense of openness, and could bring on the sharp madness of claustrophobia.

Each of the other vessels—434 had retained its number, but the others, upon divergence, had received new identifiers—was accelerating now on a slightly different heading, somewhat more vulnerable now to enemy weapons, and certainly more dangerous for the crew emotionally.

The tactic essentially reproduced a natural response among H’rulka colonies that had evolved half a million gnyii among the cloudscapes of the homeworld. Certain pack hunters that had shared those skies with the All of Us preyed on adult colonies by attaching themselves to under-bodies and slicing at them with razor-edged whip-tentacle limbs evolved to surgically sharp efficiency for the task. H’rulka survived by jettisoning their immense gas bags as the predators approached, allowing themselves to plummet into the Abyss; each colony-group separated naturally into twelve sub-colonies—divergence.

Each sub-colony unfolded a new, much smaller gas bag, heating hydrogen through furiously pumping metabolic bellows to arrest the fall before the group dropped into the lethal temperatures and pressures of the Abyssal Deep, a descent of only a couple of thousand kilometers, and often less. In essence, the adult colony had reverted to a juvenile form, and much of the original colony’s intelligence and memory were lost. H’rulka civilization, in fact, had begun perhaps 12⁵ gnyii ago with the collection of communal records maintained as a kind of living, constantly recited encyclopedia broadcast endlessly over certain radio frequencies. Those records were a direct response to the effects of the predators on the cloud communities at large, and had led, ultimately, to the discoveries of science, of polylogue mathematics, and, eventually, technology.

But divergence was still exceptionally traumatic for All of Us colonies, and some of the terror associated with the breakup and the precipitous fall continued to haunt them even when the divergence was strictly technological, a means of ensuring that one, at least, of the H’rulka colonies would make it back to base.

Enemy weapons were pursuing several of the retreating pods. None were in close proximity to Warship 434, but Rapid Cloud in 440 and Swift Pouncer in 442 both were being closely pursued by what appeared to be intelligent, self-steering missiles. The devices were primitive technologically, compared with All of Us singularity projectors, but would possess nuclear warheads that might seriously damage even an intact H’rulka warship.

Only a few vu more, and they would be able to slip into the safety of bent space.

A trio of dazzlingly white flashes ignited close alongside Swift Pouncer, and another just behind Rapid Cloud. Ordered Ascent felt the electromagnetic pulse, felt the telemetry warning of systems failure …

But then critical velocity was reached, and the retreating colony-pods began dropping into bent space.

Chapter Six

21 December 2404

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Earth Synchorbit, Sol System

1532 hours, TFT

Admiral Koenig sat in his workstation in America’s Combat Information Center, the large, circular compartment that served as the command nerve center for the entire carrier battlegroup. The surrounding bulkheads were currently set to show the view from the carrier’s external optical sensors, the input from dozens of cameras merged by computer into a seamless whole that edited out the sheer cliff of the shield cap forward, and the kilometer-long length of the spine aft. At the moment, they showed the docking facility receding slowly to port, and the much vaster sweep of the entire SupraQuito base beyond, partially blocking the slender, brilliant crescent forward that was Earth.

Dozens of other ships filled the sky. Half of CBG–18 had been docked at the base, the other half on patrol as far out as the orbit of Luna. Koenig had given orders for all of the battlegroup’s ships to get clear of the port as quickly as possible, and to deploy in the general direction of the intruder.

The precaution, it seemed, had been needless. The intruder was now accelerating rapidly out-system, pursued by a number of Confederation vessels. Moments before, it had lashed out at seven of the closest vessels and destroyed them, including the destroyers Kaufman and Symmons, and the frigate Milton, all members of CBG–18. Symmons had gotten off a spread of Mambas, however, and those were slowly closing on the enemy, which had just, unaccountably, divided into twelve smaller vessels.

The enemy was now about one light minute distant, and moving so quickly—close to sixty thousand kilometers per second—that it was likely that, by now, those ships had already either gone into metaspace or been struck by Symmons’ salvo.

The intruder’s behavior was puzzling, to say the least. H’rulka military technology was, at a guess, a century or two ahead of Earth-human mil-tech. At the Battle of 9 Ceti twelve years ago, a single H’rulka warship had wiped out a small battlefleet of fourteen Confederation vessels, including the light Star Carrier Illustrious. Their primary ship weapon appeared to be a means of creating small gravitational singularities, artificial black holes launched at high velocity and with unerring precision, something that was completely beyond current human technology. Their drive systems were better, too; their huge ships could accelerate faster than any human warship, as fast or faster than many human missiles, and their equivalent of Alcubierre Drive allowed them to drop out of metaspace much deeper within a target star system than could human vessels.

With those advantages, why had the intruder gotten as close to Earth as Earth’s moon, less than two light seconds away … and then turned tail and run? The obvious answer—that they’d decided to return valuable data to their home base or fleet rather than risk a general engagement—was only a small part of the story. They could have wiped the Confederation fleet out of the sky, wrecked Earth’s space elevators, and left the planet almost completely helpless.

And that was just one ship.

Or, arguably, twelve. Koenig wasn’t yet sure what to make of that twelve-in-one surprise trick.

The tugs were drawing back from America’s flank. In another minute, the ship scene outside began to swing counter-clockwise as the carrier pivoted … and then the dockyard slid past and fell away astern. America was under way at last.

“Admiral?” Captain Wizewski called over the CIC net. “Permission to begin launching fighters.”

Koenig checked the readout on squadron flight status. The last of VQ–7’s Shadowstars had dropped from their hab module launch bay moments before America had been nudged clear of the dock. And VFA–49 was on Ready Five, ready for launch in five minutes.

“Let’s hold that, CAG,” Koenig decided. “Give the Peaks some space to run their metrics. I want to know if that intruder is alone, or if there are lurkers.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Starships, even monsters like the fleeing H’rulka craft, were insignificantly tiny against the backdrop of an entire star system. Even in the Sol System, heavily traveled and scattered with bases, outposts, and comm relays, at ranges of more than a few kilometers the largest ships were essentially invisible if they weren’t powered up and under way. Those H’rulka vessels were sharply visible at a range of one light minute, now, because their drive singularities were creating the three-dimensional equivalents of wakes as they plowed through empty space.

If they weren’t moving, if their power plants were off and their life support was drawing battery power only, if their IR emissions were damped, if they weren’t being directly painted by radar or lidar, no one would know they were there. Koenig was concerned that the chase now being played out between the orbits of Earth and Mars was a diversion, a show arranged to convince the Confederation fleet that the threat was gone, perhaps even to draw defending ships away from Earth herself.

America’s reconnaissance squadron had especially sensitive instrumentation that would detect all but the most stealthy of stay-behind lurkers.

And the squadron now ready for launch off America’s forward rails was VF–41, the Star Tigers, a squadron still flying the older SG–55 War Eagles. They didn’t have anything close to the acceleration necessary to catch the receding H’rulka ships, and their drive singularities would screw the local metric of space, making it impossible for the Sneaky Peaks to pick up powered-down lurkers.

If there wasn’t an immediate need to get America’s complement of fighters off her decks, it would be better to let the recon squadron do what they did best … scouting ahead, looking, listening, sensing with every electronic trick at their disposal for the presence of hidden enemy craft.

“Captain Buchanan?” Koenig said.

“Yes, Admiral?”

“I want—”

A close-spaced trio of nuclear fireballs pulsed against the darkness ahead.

“Direct hit on one of the enemy ships!” Commander Sinclair called. In the next instant, a fourth fireball appeared, expanding, slowly fading from its initial glare of incandescence.

“Ten of the H’rulka craft have just gone FTL,” Commander Katryn Craig, the CIC’s operations officer, reported. “Two appear to have lost their drives.”

Several people in the CIC cheered.

“Belay that,” Koenig snapped. “We don’t have them yet! CAG, put the Star Tigers over there. I want a closer look at those ships.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Both H’rulka vessels were continuing to travel out-system on divergent paths with the same velocity they’d had when their drives were cut—about sixty thousand kilometers per second.

“Commander Craig?”

“Sir.”

“We need a VBSS team over there. What assets do we have in the area?”

“SBS–21 is at SupraQuito, Admiral. And the Tarawa is there too.”

“Let’s give this one to the SEALS. Patch a call through.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Captain Buchanan.”

“Sir.”

“Take us closer to those disabled ships. We’re going to put some fighters in that area.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

America swung slowly to one side, accelerating. The cluster of habs and facilities at Synchorbit fell rapidly astern, followed a moment later by Earth’s moon.

Ahead, the four nuclear fireballs from Symmons’ barrage continued to expand and fade.

ONI Special Research Division

Crisium, Luna

1612 hours, TFT

“We are trying,” Dr. Wilkerson said slowly, “to understand you.”

He heard the rasping buzz of the Turusch language as the AI translated his words and put them out through the NTE robot.

From his point of view, he was hovering above the deck in one of the rooms off to the side of the main Turusch colony cavern, occupying a white sphere hanging from the ceiling. In front of him was the pair of alien Turusch brought back from Eta Boötis two months before—the two known jointly as Deepest Delver of the Fourth Hierarchy. Each looked like an immense terrestrial slug, more or less, but with the forward quarter of the body covered by a jointed carapace, and the belly covered by leaf-shaped, overlapping scales. Slender tentacles, always in whiplash motion, sprouted from seemingly random parts of the unarmored bodies.

The two, Wilkerson knew, in some way not yet fully understood by human xenosophontologists, were in fact one. They seemed to think of themselves as a single individual—as Deepest Delver. Two separate brains—and yet neuropattern scans had shown that their brains appeared to fall into synch with each other when they spoke, using a buzzing sound generated by four tympani located in recessions on either side of their armored heads.

He heard the Turusch reply in a humming buzz. On the translation window open inside Wilkerson’s mind, he read three lines of dialogue.

Deepest Delver 1: “I occupy my world.”

Deepest Delver 2: “You occupy your world.”

Joint: “There is no understanding.”

A dead end. Again. Wilkerson sighed with pent-up frustration, and not a little exhaustion. He’d been at this questioning for over three hours now.

This three-part trilogue was a defining characteristic of the Turusch. When they spoke, the speech of one overlapped the speech of its twin. The two sets of sound together generated resonating, harmonic frequencies that produced the third line, carrying a third, higher-level meaning.

Wilkerson stared through his robotic avatar for several moments. What kind of brain could think on multiple levels at once like that? It was possible, probable, even, that the Turusch in absolute terms were far more intelligent than humans; certainly they were far quicker in their thought. But they were so completely alien that humans might never be able to understand them well.

There is no understanding. …

“Dr. Wilkerson? Dr. Wilkerson!”

He blinked. A communications request light had been blinking at the periphery of his awareness for some minutes now. The voice was that of Caryl Daystrom, one of the other ONI researchers at the facility.

“Yes, Caryl,” he said.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Doctor, but there’s an important message for you. Priority Alpha.”

He sighed. “I’m coming out,” he told her. Opening the channel to the Turusch pair, he said, “We will continue this later. There must be a way for us to truly understand one another.”

Deepest Delver 1: “We will share speech again.”

Deepest Delver 2: “I, too, desire understanding.”

Joint: “Your thought is shallow.”

He made a mental note to check in with the R & D lab. “Your thought is shallow” was a frequent complaint made by the Turusch to human interrogators. Used to thinking and speaking with one another on three levels simultaneously, they appeared to be frustrated in conversations with humans, who could carry on only one line of dialogue at a time. So far as they were concerned, that was the greatest impediment to full and intelligible communications.

To that end, the ONI research and development team was working on AI software that might be able to duplicate Turusch speech patterns. Take two AIs paired together, have them speak separate lines together with the resonant frequencies generating a third level of meaning … simple.

Except for the fact that you really needed to think like a Turusch pair to use their mode of communication, and that was something that might well forever be beyond the reach of human minds, or even of the minds of AIs programmed by humans.

He broke his connection with the Noter, as non-terrestrial environmental robots were known in the human research community, and found himself back at his workstation. The Turusch, with their hot and poisonous atmosphere, the intense ultraviolet, the steaming mist of sulfuric acid and sulfur droplets—all were gone. Caryl Daystrom was there, had come to him in person rather than calling him over the link.

“An Alpha message?” he asked her.

“A-comm, from Admiral Koenig, on the carrier America,” she replied. “I thought it might be urgent.”

She was being humorously sarcastic. An Alpha-flagged message was by definition urgent.

“Thank you,” he told her as she turned and left. He palmed a contact on his desk, opening an avatar comm channel. The room’s electronics projected the image of Admiral Koenig into the space where Caryl had stood a moment before. It appeared to be wearing Confederation naval blacks, with the gold filigree of a flag officer down the left side.

It was, of course, an avatar only, an electronic image generated by a message AI, and not live.

“Dr. Wilkerson,” the image said, “I don’t know if you’ve been looking out your window lately, but we’ve got visitors out here.”

A data display plane opened next to the Admiral’s AI-generated electronic double, showing empty, star-scattered space behind a roughly spherical, deep black object, grainy with the high magnification used to capture the image. As he watched, the object appeared to unfold itself, then split suddenly into twelve separate sections, like segments of an orange.

“We think it’s H’rulka,” Koenig’s voice went on, “and we think it followed a recon probe we’d deployed to Arcturus for a look-see. It destroyed seven of our warships, then began boosting out-system with an obscene acceleration.”

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