Only too aware, now, of the deadliness of his deceptively quiet surroundings …

… Gregory stood up.

Despite being insulated by the surrounding vacuum, he could feel his shipboard utilities—which with helmet and gloves doubled as an emergency environmental suit—stiffening around him, could feel the cold as though it literally were seeping in.

Impossible, of course. Heat was escaping his body, not cold seeping in, but that was what it undeniably felt like. His feet … he couldn’t feel his feet anymore, and his legs were starting to burn.

He felt oddly tranquil, despite the pain, despite the sudden realization that he may have just made a serious mistake. The landscape was serene, dark, utterly silent. It would have been easy to step out of the ruin of his Starblade and onto that flat, rock-strewn plain. That step, he knew, would have been lethal.

He also felt heavy. The planet’s gravity was dragging at him with almost twice the pull of home. But he managed to stand up straight … and raise his arms.

Overhead, St. Clair’s fighter descended like an unfolding blanket … the alien robots encircling it at a range of thirty meters. The blackness descended on him, scooped him up, folded him in …

And Gregory screamed with pain.

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015

Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr 2015

Jacket layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover art by Gregory Bridges

William H. Keith, Jr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007483792

Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007483839

Version: 2015-04-23

Dedication

For Deb, and, as ever, for Brea

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

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

Epilogue

By Ian Douglas

About the Publisher

Prologue

“What the hell is that?”

“Dunno, Control,” replied the voice from Kapteyn Orbital. “It … it just popped up on our screens out of nowhere. It’s coming in fast … almost a half c. It’s—”

Commander Gerwin Dressler flinched as the projected holoscreen floating above his workstation lit up with an intense blue-white light. Something had just slammed into the research platform orbiting the local star at half the speed of light, converting five thousand tons of metal, ceramics, plastic, and organic crew members into a rapidly expanding cloud of hot plasma.

The base AI was saying that the object was in fact a diffuse cloud of particles, a cloud many astronomical units across and massing trillions of tons. There was other stuff in there, too, though … enigmatic structures, half-glimpsed constructions, things large and inexplicable shrouded within the particulate cloud.

And that cloud would be reaching Heimdall in seconds.

With a thoughtclick, Dressler sounded the base alarm.

“What is it?” the voice of Captain Roessler said in his head. He sounded groggy; it might be high noon local time, but by the base clocks, set to Greenwich Mean Time and measuring days and nights convenient to human biology, it was the wee hours of the morning.

“We’ve just lost Kapteyn Orbital, sir,” Dressler replied. “Here’s the data …”

“The Americans?”

“No, sir. Something … something else.”

Something very else.

He waited as the station’s commanding officer reviewed the scant data transmitted from the orbital. God, the sky outside was so beautiful …

The dome housing the base command and control center was set to project the view outside at the moment, showing a sky—deep blue to brilliant violet—dominated by the immense curve of the gas giant, Bifrost. Kapteyn’s Star, an M1.5 red dwarf less than a third the mass and radius of Sol, shone almost directly overhead. At a distance of 3.5 AUs, Kapteyn’s Star was shrunken to little more than a bright red pinpoint. Sharp eyes could distinguish its disk, but the much closer gas giant commanded the eastern sky at the moment, currently at half phase. The bands and swirls of pale brown, salmon, and white sweeping up from the glaciers on Heimdall’s horizon to the curve of Bifrost’s limb were clearly visible. Phantasmagorical aurorae circled the gas giant’s poles to either side and were answered by the dancing curtains of light across Heimdall’s northern sky.

Heimdall was a moon of Bifrost, circling its mammoth primary at a distance of just over 600,000 kilometers once every three days. Tidal interactions with the giant warmed Heimdall’s surface far more than did the wan and feeble sun.

God, he thought again. He could see the flare marking the death of Kapteyn Orbital with his unaided eye, a smear of white light bisected by the rim of Bifrost’s horizon. Automatically, he plotted the explosion’s position against the background stars, and the result chilled him.

“Whatever it is, Captain,” he told Roessler, “it’s coming in more or less on a vector from Omega Centauri.”

The research station’s personnel had been briefed, of course, on events out at the giant globular star cluster, the site of the enigmatic rosette of fast-circling black holes … and the Rosette Aliens. Not that it had done them much good.

The curve of Bifrost’s limb abruptly flared with blue and violet light … a rippling effect scattering out through the gas giant’s atmosphere. The aurorae at both poles brightened suddenly, then spread, engulfing the huge gas giant in seething flashes and pulses of auroral light.

“Are you sure it’s not the Americans?” Roessler demanded. “Some sort of high-velocity mass impact weapon …”

The USNA forces were notorious for their tactic of using clouds of sand released into space with speeds close to that of light. But Dressler was watching the cloud of minute particles spilling now across Bifrost’s horizon and the titanic half-glimpsed shapes behind the planet. Some of those shapes were bigger than Bifrost, measuring millions—even tens of millions—of kilometers across.

“I’m sure, sir.”

“But—”

“It’s not the Americans, sir. And yes, sir, I’m very sure.”

He checked on the position of the Confederation starships in orbit over Heimdall. One was currently above the antipodes, blocked from the alien cloud by the bulk of Heimdall itself.

“I suggest, sir,” he added, “that we dispatch the Kalmar back to Earth with a complete update.”

If, he thought, there was still time …

Chapter One

29 June, 2425

Marine 1/5

Fort Douaumont

France, European Union

0610 hours, GMT

The flight of Crocodiles shrieked out of the eastern sky, ventral thrusters hissing as they swung blunt prows toward the ancient fortress. Marine Staff Sergeant Gerald Swayze watched the stone walls below through his link with the Croc’s scanner array and prayed that this time Intel knew its ass from a hole in the ground.

The CL/BC-5 Crocodile was an ugly and ungainly piece of equipment: blunt, stubby, and no-nonsense, with a nano docking collar on its squared-off prow, broadly splayed landing legs, and a pair of turrets on its back that turned the landing craft into a semimobile fortress once it had completed its primary mission. In this case, that mission was transporting forty armed and armored USNA Marines from orbit to the surface of a hostile planet.

The hostile planet in this case was Earth, the objective a massive, centuries-old stone fortress deep within the territory of the European Union … a fortress known to history as Verdun.

“Stand ready, people!” Lieutenant Widner’s voice came through their in-heads, crisp and sharp. “Fifteen seconds!”

Swayze listened for any hint of fear or indecision there, but heard none. This was Widner’s first op as platoon commander, but he didn’t seem to carry the usual newbie CO baggage of arrogance or overconfidence in doing it all by the book. Mostly, that meant he’d been paying attention to his NCO staff in general and to Swayze in particular. With an attitude like that, they might actually be able to pull this op off.

“You apes heard the el-tee,” Swayze growled over the company tactical channel. “On your feet! Face front! When the nano kicks open the door, I want to see nothing but amphibious green blurs moving through that collar!”

“Amphibious green” was an anachronism, of course, but one long beloved of the Corps. Each Marine in the assault platoon was clad in full Mark I armor—the curving, black, nanoflaged surfaces scattering back a bewildering kaleidoscope of shapes, colors, and lights from the red-lit interior of the Crocodile transport. The nanoflage picked up on lights and colors surrounding the armor and transmitted it back. In the field, it provided what amounted to functional invisibility, but within the cramped confines of the Croc’s cargo deck it just gave you a functional headache.

A shudder ran through the Croc as it nosed into the fortress wall. According to the plans Swayze had seen, the wall here was two meters thick. It would take a few seconds for the collar to eat its way through that.

Something clanged against the Crocodile’s hull, sharp and insistent. Swayze heard the whine of the landing craft’s turrets slewing to port, followed by the howl of exciters and cooling pumps as the weapons opened up with a few thousand megawatts of high-energy laser response. Up forward, the docking collar was slowly extending, growing its way into the stone of the fortress wall, converting concrete and iron into free-flowing atoms and directing them along the tunnel’s interior surfaces where they froze as an ultra-hard crust supporting the opening. In space, a nano docking collar allowed Marines to tunnel through the hull of an enemy spacecraft without losing internal pressure. Here, pressure wasn’t an issue. They just needed to burrow through those two meters of concrete and steel … and do so before the enemy had time to respond.

When they were down to the last few centimeters, the Crocodile fired a series of probes through the remaining stone, putting insect-sized battlespace drones into the interior of the fortress. Swayze’s in-head showed what those drones were seeing—a dozen heavily armored Confed soldiers crouched in a broad stone tunnel, weapons ready.

This was not going to be pretty.

“We’ve got bad guys to either side of the entrance,” he told the others, “and straight ahead. Lead fireteam, focus on the ones straight ahead. The ones to either side will be worried about scoring own-goals.”

The defense obviously had been thrown together in a hurry, with nearby soldiers rounded up and pointed at the breach site. Putting gunners on both sides of the breach was a great way to ensure that some of them would suffer friendly fire.

He didn’t envy the lead fireteam, though. Two of them were manhandling bulky mirror shields, but they would be taking fire from three sides.

“Here we go!” Widner called.

The Croc’s interior docking hatch dilated open and the waiting Marines surged forward.

“Go! Go! Go!” Swayze yelled.

The door kickers went through first, crouched behind their shields. Those mirrored surfaces—backed by energy-damping exotic-material ceramics—would give them a fair degree of protection from handheld lasers and projectiles, but not as much from plasma beams. Blocked by the armored shapes in front of him, Swayze couldn’t see what was happening up ahead; an in-head window displayed the heart rates of the lead fireteam, but not their helmet-camera feeds. He needed to be focused on the entire platoon, not just the tacsit of the four in front.

“Watch it! We’re taking fire!” That was Corporal Addison, in the lead fireteam.

“Gaynor is down! Man down!”

An explosion sounded from ahead, and the Crocodile rocked with the concussion. The Marines kept filing forward, though, smoke billowing back into the transport’s interior. Swayze stooped low as he entered the docking collar and pressed into the tunnel. He was positioned halfway back in the line, which meant there were twenty Marines—four fireteams—in front of him.

Then he was through, stepping into a narrow passageway with walls, floor, and ceiling all of stone blocks. Two Marines were down on the deck, both still moving; a dozen Confed troopers were visible in the passageways left, right, and straight ahead.

The Marines stormed the fortress.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

0012 hours, EST

For President Alexander Koenig, it was as though he was actually there.

His staff had set up the direct link, and he was riding the transmitted thoughts and sensory impressions of Lieutenant Franklyn K. Widner’s Mark I combat armor. Those neural signals were being transmitted to the complex web of circuitry grown atom by atom through Koenig’s cerebral cortex.

As far as Koenig could tell, he was inside Lieutenant Widner’s armor, moving through dark stone corridors, following the electronic maps being thrown up against his visual field by the in-head circuitry. He could hear the shouts of the men over the tactical channel, hear Widner’s orders and the rasp of his breathing; even feel the mass and give of the armor as it responded to Widner’s movements. The only limitation was his lack of somatic control; he was a passenger only, receiving sensory impressions but unable even to turn his head to see what was beside him.

“Talman! Gonzales!” Widner was shouting. “Put fire on that passageway. Two o’clock!”

Everything was noise and confusion. Briefly, Koenig considered pulling back to the feed from one of the battlespace drones, but he preferred to hold on to the connection with the platoon commander. He could transmit messages to Widner over the tactical channel, but Koenig was a Navy veteran himself, and knew how frustrating—and outright deadly—micromanagement was. Widner didn’t need his input, and certainly wouldn’t appreciate it. Koenig continued to simply ride the boil and tumble of the firefight.

Besides, what Koenig was witnessing now was only a tiny part of the whole of Operation Fallen Star. Three other platoons of Alfa Company were inserting by Crocodile nearby, and a flight of ponderous Choctaw UC-154 shuttles—each carrying two hundred Marines—were coming in behind the Croc first wave. Fallen Star was an orbit-to-ground insertion of a full battalion: more than a thousand Marines, plus their support personnel.

And still, Koenig wondered if it would be enough. Verdun had a nasty reputation.

Verdun, a city on the Meuse River in northeastern France that had repulsed Attila the Hun, had by the early twentieth century become a defensive complex of twenty-eight forts. The meat-grinder battles of 1916 had slaughtered something like 150,000 Frenchmen and very nearly that many Germans. Fort Douaumont had been the largest of the French strongholds, with outer walls four hundred meters long, and comprising two underground levels, multiple casements and turrets, and living spaces for hundreds of men. After the war, Douaumont had become a war museum and remained so … until the beginning of the Sh’daar conflict in 2367. At that point, the Pan-European Union enlarged and deepened the facility, adding missile silos and plasma beam turrets and turning it into a planetary defense base.

The intent had been to protect the European Union from a Sh’daar attack, a scenario that had become all too possible when the Turusch had penetrated Earth’s outer system defenses in 2404, slamming a high-velocity kinetic-kill impactor into the Atlantic Ocean. Nobody, Koenig thought, had ever imagined that the ancient fortress at Douaumont would become the last-ditch refuge of the followers of General Janos Matonyi Korosi, the Butcher of Columbus and the leader of the Earth Confederation.

Events had proceeded in a chaotic tumble since the civil war between Confederation and the United States of North America had begun. Korosi, the USNA intelligence services believed, had been responsible for the nano-D strike against Columbus, D.C., formerly the USNA capital, an attack that constituted an almost unthinkably vicious war crime. Roettgen, the Confederation’s president, had vanished not long after—either a prisoner or murdered by Korosi’s thugs. A new president of the Confederation had been appointed from the Confederation Senate, Christian Denoix de Saint Marc, but smart money said he was either an innocent dupe or a corrupt front man for Korosi.

Then the USNA computer net facility at Cheyenne Mountain had launched Operation Luther, using the science of recombinant memetics to introduce a new religion into the Confederation’s electronic networks and social infrastructure. The new religion, called Starlight, had caught hold with astonishing speed, bringing with it a popular revulsion against a government that could condone the nano-disassembly of a city center, including hundreds of thousands of its civilians. A grassroots revolution had swept the ruling Globalist Party from power, and almost brought the civil war to an end.

Almost …

Geneva, the Confederation capital, had fallen to Starlightist rebel forces just two weeks ago. Working through electronic back doors put in place during Operation Luther, USNA Intelligence had been searching for the fallen regime’s leaders, and for Ilse Roettgen. They now believed that both Denoix and Korosi were in Douaumont, and the chances were good that Roettgen, if she was still alive, was there as well.

Catch Korosi and his stooges, and the war might be over for good.

And so, Koenig had authorized Fallen Star, a high-risk assault with the sole purpose of killing or capturing Korosi and Denoix, rescuing Ilse Roettgen, and bringing the nasty little war to a close.

Once that was done, Koenig reflected, all that was needful was to end the Sh’daar War, figure out what the Rosette Aliens wanted, and bring half of Earth back under a legitimate, reasonable, democratic, and above all peaceful government, one that would both recognize USNA independence and work with the United States to strengthen Humankind’s interests, both on Earth and throughout North America’s far-flung interstellar colonies.

Nothing to it.

“Concentrate on twelve o’clock! Hit ’em! Hit ’em!”

“Marine down! Marine down! Corpsman front!”

“Move, move, move …”

“First Section!” That was Widner’s voice, both on audio and transmitted in-head over the tactical channel. “With me!”

A passageway yawned ahead, with gray stone slabs underfoot and to either side. There was something up ahead, at the end of the corridor, but Widner’s helmet AI was having trouble parsing it out. What the hell was that?

Armored shapes rose from behind the object, which revealed itself now as an impromptu barricade: a jumble of furniture, concrete blocks, and steel drums blocking the stone corridor.

And behind it …

“Watch it! Damn it, watch it!”

Something slammed into Koenig’s chest, staggering him. It took him a dazed moment to recognize that he’d not been hit, but that a white-hot plasma bolt had slammed into Widner’s combat armor. Widner’s heart and respiration readouts went ragged, then dropped toward flatline. Koenig felt trapped, staring at the stone slabs of the corridor’s ceiling, unable to move, unable to do anything but lie there.

Widner died, and his armor began shutting him down for medevac and resuss …

VFA-96, Black Demons

LEO

0014 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Megan Connor rolled her fresh-grown Starblade until Earth’s vast sweep hung suspended in sun-kissed splendor above her head. The sunrise terminator stretched across the sky ahead of her now, out over central Europe, a razor-thin crescent of light across the black. It was just past midnight on the east coast of the USNA, a few minutes past six in the morning over France and most of the European Union. The Black Demons were in low Earth orbit, drifting southeast two hundred kilometers above the west coast of Europe. Below, city lights illumined the broken clouds over England. Sunrise at Verdun had occurred less than thirty minutes ago … but at this altitude she could see considerably farther into the new day than the Marines on the ground.

She adjusted her in-head view, connecting more closely with her fighter’s long-range senses.

Gods this new fighter is a dream!

Theoretically, with nanufacturing processes that could grow a new fighter from raw materials provided by asteroids in a matter of hours, there should have been no problem with constantly updating the USNA fighter fleet, discarding older designs like the SG-92 Starhawks and SG-101 Velociraptors and replacing them with the latest technology—in this case the SG-420 Starblade. The problem was not in the materials nanufacturing, but in retraining human pilots whose wetware—the organic tissue beneath the cerebral electronic implants and software—had already been shaped to control older designs.

The SG-420s, though, incorporated uprated AI components that could embrace Starhawk or Velociraptor training and experience as iterations within the larger pilot program. Still, what the star carrier America lacked was people to sit inside these new fighters: the campaigns of the past eight months—Arianrhod and Osiris and Vulcan—had killed too many good pilots. Replacements were coming on board from the training center at Oceana, but too few and too slowly, to bring the carrier up to full strength.

And yet, as Connor felt the sensuous flow of data streaming in through her fighter’s sensors and AI, she suppressed an exultant urge to shout for pure joy. Beauty exploded around her as the sun rose beyond the horizon ahead; blue water, the green patchwork of agricultural land, and the sweep of dazzlingly white cloud drifted beneath her. With the new system, it was easy to forget that you were flesh-and-blood wired into a cockpit barely large enough to receive you. Quite literally, she was the fighter; she stretched out an arm, and performed a graceful roll, the crescent of Earth rotating in front of her.

“Careful there, Demon Five,” the voice of Commander Mackey said inside her mind. “Let’s not get carried away.”

“Hard not to, Skipper,” she told the squadron’s CO. “This is incredible!”

“Maybe so, but stay focused on the mission. We’re coming up on Verdun and we don’t want to miss anything, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Not that they were likely to miss anything. VFA-96, the Black Demons, was actually at full squadron strength—twelve fighters—though only Connor, Mackey, and two others were in this flight. Aerospace control meant stretching your assets out across an entire orbit so that at any given moment there were at least some fighters positioned to respond to threats from below. The other Demons were spread out four thousand kilometers ahead and behind, and two more of America’s squadrons were covering the rest of the orbit. Adjustments were made from orbit to orbit so that four strike fighters were always passing over Verdun every ten minutes or so.

“So how’s the fight going down there anyway, Skipper?” That was Lieutenant Enrique Martinez, one of the squadron’s newbies fresh up from Oceana.

“According to plan,” Mackey replied. “The first LCs hit the fortress walls a few minutes ago. The big Choctaws are touching down now.”

“But when will we know?”

“When someone decides to tell us, Lieutenant. And until then, stay sharp and stay connected. The rebels aren’t going to take this lying down.”

The rebels. It sounded strange, the way Mackey used the term. Confusing, even. Until recently, the USNA had been the rebels, fighting for independence from the Earth Confederation. But since the Confederation government had fallen to the Starlighters, rebels now meant the holdouts in the original government—Korosi’s people.

“I’m not getting anyone down there but ’Pactors,” Connor said, reading her ship’s long-range scan. Six fighters from VFA-31, the Impactors, had deployed into the atmosphere over an hour ago, taking out the big planetary defense turrets mounted on the fort’s upper surfaces with high-velocity KK projectiles accelerated in from space. The strike had been the second phase of Operation Fallen Star, necessary to allow the transports to get in without being vaporized.

The first phase had been initiated by the Virtual Combat Center in Colorado Springs, an all-out electronic assault by former pilots linked in through the Confederation’s computer nets, opening backdoor channels and covert access feeds either discovered or, in many cases, created by the super-AI Konstantin from its base on the far side of Earth’s moon.

“Hang on a sec,” Lieutenant Junior Grade Chris Dobbs said. Another newbie, he’d been in the squadron less than seventy-two hours. “I’ve got multiple launches … dead ahead. Range, twenty-six hundred kilometers!”

Damn, the kid was right. The range put the launch site somewhere in central or southern Turkey, close to the Mediterranean … and Turkey was still part of the Confederation. Those fighters might well be rebels—pro-Korosi forces. They’d certainly timed their launch nicely … moments after the lead element of the Black Demons had passed overhead in their orbit.

Connor let the data flood through her. How many spacecraft … and what kind? Were they after the lead element, coming up on them from behind? Or were they going counter-orbit and closing with her?

“They’re firing!” Mackey warned.

Eight fighters—Confederation Todtadlers—and they were closing with Connor and her fellows at a very high acceleration. They’d just loosed a sand cloud, whose pellets were now hurtling toward the four fighters like the blast from an old-fashioned shotgun.

And in seconds, the battle was joined.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

0016 hours, EST

Koenig thoughtclicked an in-head icon and emerged inside his own body, gasping for air, stretched out on a recliner in his own office in Toronto. Marcus Whitney, his chief of staff and senior aide, was leaning over him with a worried look on his face. “Mr. President?”

“I’m okay, Marcus.”

“Your vitals took a real jump just now.”

“Nothing like the vitals on Lieutenant Widner.”

As an admiral in command of a carrier battlegroup twenty years before, Koenig had had a lot of trouble giving the orders that sent young men and women to their deaths.

It wasn’t any easier now.

“I’m going back in,” Koenig said. “Link me in with … let’s see …” He ran through a mental list of the Marines in Alfa Platoon, the ones still on their feet. “Staff Sergeant Gerald Swayze.” He was Widner’s senior NCO, and would be commanding the platoon now.

“Sir,” Whitney said, “it’s not like you can affect the outcome of the fight …” He sounded worried. “Damn it, you’re flirting with VRSD.”

The acronym was pronounced “ver-sid,” and stood for virtual reality stress disorder. What it really stood for was a whole spectrum of neurological injuries, addictions, and pathologies, including—most important—perceptual neural shock, or PNS. Though not common, some had suffered heart attacks, strokes, or slipped into comas when they “died,” even though their physical bodies were perfectly safe and healthy.

Koenig knew there was a risk, but he’d been in combat before, and experience tended to reduce the psychological impact of even the most traumatic experiences. Too, there were electronic safeguards designed to cut him from the circuit if monitors showed that his body back in the Emergency Presidential Command Post was reacting too strongly.

“I don’t think so,” Koenig told Whitney. He raised his voice slightly. “Health monitor? What say you?”

“Your heart rate peaked at one twenty-six,” the voice of the medical AI in the presidential complex told them. “Respiration peaked at thirty-five. Both are well within tolerable limits.”

“See, Marcus? I’m fine.”

“I still don’t like it, Mr. President. You could just let your intelligence people brief you after the fact, like a normal president.”

“Well, damn. Where’s the fun in that? I don’t think that—”

He stopped in mid-sentence. An alert was coming through from the suite of artificial intelligences overseeing the entire battle. It was data relayed from the star carrier America or, more specifically, from one of her squadrons. Eight Confed fighters had just boosted at high velocity from central Turkey and launched an attack on four of America’s fighters in low Earth orbit. The AI running the intelligence side of the operation was tagging the attackers as Korosi rebels.

Interesting. There was no way eight Todtadler fighters could seriously challenge three USNA strike fighter squadrons for space superiority, especially if they had to claw their way up out of Earth’s gravity well. Even if they got through the orbiting fighters, there were three USNA destroyers and four frigates farther out, providing in-depth support. Earth was bottled up tight right now against any attempt to break away.

What the hell were they trying to accomplish?

“Take them out,” Koenig ordered. “And keep me informed.”

A new icon had appeared within Koenig’s in-head a moment before, labeled with Staff Sergeant Swayze’s name. He thoughtclicked it … and opened his eyes, once again, in the shrieking, noisy hell of combat.

Chapter Two

29 June, 2425

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

0018 hours, EST

Koenig was back in that fire-swept passageway, the scene overlaid by flickering numbers giving ranges, angles, and power levels, and by a bright red targeting reticule slaved to Swayze’s laser rifle, centered on whatever the rifle happened to be pointed at. At the far end of the passageway, laser and plasma gunfire snapped and hissed from the makeshift barricades.

“Grossmann! Nobunaga!” Swayze was yelling. “Get that pig in action! Flame those bastards!”

Koenig recognized the term. The Marines had a PG-80 as a platoon heavy weapon—a semiportable plasma gun—nicknamed the “pig” and designed to burn through most armor.

Swayze was using his laser rifle, trying to force enemy troops back from the ambush barricade at the far end of the passageway. Two armored shapes moved up beside him, manhandling the bulky weapon’s tripod into place. One of the Marines was hit, his faceplate vaporized by a plasma bolt, so Swayze shoved Grossmann’s body aside and took up a position next to the gunner, snapping up the heavy fire shield and dragging back the charge lever. He slapped Nobunaga’s shoulder, signaling readiness to fire.

“Hit ’em!”

Blue-white fire exploded through the dark passageway, charring stone walls already black with age. The barricade at the end of the hall exploded, hurling chunks of molten debris as armored figures scattered … or collapsed and lay still.

The pig fired again, blasting a hole in the steel door beyond, and then Swayze was up and running down the stone corridor, firing from the hip, waving his men on. “Let’s go, Marines! Ooh-rah!”

“Ooh-rah!” The ancient Marine war cry rang out in answer from a dozen throats, raw sound and fury, meaningless except to announce that the USNA Marines were charging.

And the enemy troops began throwing down their weapons and raising their arms in surrender.

Koenig watched as two more Marines—Jamison and Arkwright—pushed past Swayze as he stopped to hand the prisoners over to another Marine. He then followed the pair, over the half-molten ruin of the barricade and through the gaping hole in the steel door. Swayze shouldered his way into the stone chamber beyond, arriving just behind the other two Marines, who’d come to a dead stop. A soldier in shifting black-and-gray nanoflage armor stood with his back to the far wall, clutching a tiny woman in civilian utilities in front of him like a shield.

Through Swayze’s helmet camera, Koenig recognized the woman. Ilse Roettgen, former Senate president for the Earth Confederation, struggled in the armored man’s one-arm grip, her arms zip-stripped behind her back. In his free hand, the man clutched a deadly little 5mm needler, which he kept pressed against the side of her throat.

“Stop!” the man yelled, his amplified voice booming off the stone walls. “If you value her life, stop now!”

Koenig recognized that voice instantly. It was General Korosi … the Butcher of Columbus.

Swayze ran a voice print ID through his suit’s AI, a process that took only a second or so, and came to the same conclusion. “Put the weapon down, General,” he said, his voice level, reasonable, and as cold as ice. “If you kill her, I promise you that you will die, right here, right now.”

“So … I should surrender, so you can put me on trial for war crimes?” Korosi laughed, an ugly sound. His English carried a thick Hungarian accent. “‘Crimes against humanity,’ I think is the phrase you Americans use? And then you execute me anyway? I don’t think so …”

“Let her go, General. Hurt her, and you won’t believe how much worse you’ll make it for yourself.”

“There is nothing you can threaten me with worse than what will happen if I give myself up. You understand me?”

“I can promise you won’t be executed.”

“So that I can enjoy the effects of a neural net wipe? Ha! That’s worse than a clean death in battle! No! Here is how we play this, American. Ilse here, lovely lady that she is, will come with me, as a guarantee of your good behavior. You and your men will back off. You will clear these corridors! You will permit us to leave. No interference! You will arrange to have a flyer meet us at the surface, with an AI pilot slaved to my direct neural control, and with a range of at least ten thousand kilometers. The flyer will take me to a destination of my choosing … and I may release Roettgen there, if I am satisfied that you have not followed us. Now, put your weapons down and move back!”

A red targeting reticule was centered on Korosi’s faceplate, and Koenig wondered if the Marine was going to try for a head shot, firing from his hip. Had Korosi not been wearing combat armor, Koenig knew, Swayze might have tried it … but splash off the armor’s surface could burn the unarmored Roettgen quite badly.

Of course, Swayze might choose to accept the collateral damage, injuring the hostage in order to kill the hostage taker. He might even accept the hostage’s death. According to Fallen Star’s operational orders, finding and rescuing Ilse Roettgen was secondary to taking down Janos Korosi.

So the easy solution would be to burn Korosi down now, even if it meant the former Confederation president’s death. It would not have been Koenig’s personal choice, but then Koenig was not the one linked to Swayze’s laser rifle.

“Okay, okay,” Swayze said after a long and agonizing moment. “You win.” The targeting reticule winked off, and slowly the Marine lowered his rifle, placing it on the floor at his feet. “Don’t hurt her!”

“The rest of you! Put down your weapons!”

“Do as he says, Marines,” Swayze told the others. He shifted to the general tactical frequency. “Listen up, Marines! Clear the passageways. Korosi is coming up … with a hostage.”

“Transport, Staff Sergeant,” Korosi said. “Arrange for us a flight out of here.”

“Okay, okay,” Swayze said. “Meteor! This is Marine One-Five! I want a Chipper on the ground on top of this fort ASAP!”

Meteor was the code name for the battalion HQ running this op, while Chipper was military slang for a C-28 Chippewa robot transport. Definitely long-range enough for the ten-thousand-kilometer range Korosi specified. Koenig contemplated that requirement. Ten thousand klicks was enough to reach any of the three space elevators—in Ecuador, Kenya, or Singapore. But what then? Korosi had to know that he would be tracked. No doubt he had confederates waiting for him someplace.

Koenig turned the problem over in his mind. They wouldn’t be waiting for him off-world; the space elevators were too easily blocked, too easily powered down, isolating him. The likeliest scenario would be to touch down very briefly someplace on Earth along a direct line of flight to one of the elevators … and effectively disappear as the robotic transport continued its flight.

Damn it, it was imperative that Korosi not be allowed to escape. If he did, the war might grind on for years more, a guerilla action fought in jungles and villages and mountains from South America to Africa to Southeast Asia.

Koenig wasn’t linked in directly to Swayze’s thoughts, his internal monologue. That degree of electronic telepathy required more sophisticated equipment than was available here … and wasn’t desirable in any case. But he couldn’t help but wonder what the Marine had in mind. Clearly, the man was working toward an idea …

Swayze, unarmed now, raised both gauntleted hands. “Look, General … take me instead, okay? She’ll be nothing but trouble. I’ll promise to behave …”

Korosi laughed. “What … you? You’re an NCO, a foot soldier! What makes something like you as valuable as the former president of the Earth Confederation?”

Swayze took a couple of steps forward, his hands still raised. “Simple: I know the full deployment of the Marines for this assault … and I know the plans that were set in motion to trap you here, to keep you penned up. I know the troop deployments topside here, and I know what naval assets we have in orbit. General Korosi, I could help you. A lot.”

Another cautious step …

“No closer!” The Confederation general gestured with the needler, warning Swayze back.

It was enough.

Since the first half of the twenty-first century, military armor had incorporated feedback cybernetics that allowed the wearer to lift and carry far greater loads than were possible for an unarmored individual. Neural augmentation—new circuitry nanochelated throughout the living brain—made it possible for an armored man to react and move more quickly as well. Clad in their Mark I armor, Marines possessed both superhuman strength and speed.

Janos Korosi was almost certainly enhanced as well … but not enough.

Swayze’s gloved hand snapped down and out with blinding speed, closing around the needler, the glove’s palm blocking the weapon’s muzzle. Korosi’s hand clenched convulsively: he fired and Swayze screamed. The needler’s power pack gave it the ability to shoot eight pulsed bursts of coherent light or a single beam lasting a few seconds. Korosi had the weapon set for a beam, and the five-millimeter thread of laser light melted through the glove, Swayze’s hand, and the top side of the glove within perhaps half a second.

By then, though, the Marine had twisted Korosi’s arm out and back so that the weapon was no longer pointed at the hostage. Swayze crowded forward, grappling with the Confederation general, continuing to grip the smothered weapon with his terribly injured hand as he knocked Roettgen aside and interposed his own body between the two. He kept squeezing, too, for as long as his armor’s glove could exert the pressure, crumpling the needler’s tough plastic body in his grip even as molten metal and ceramic charred the palm of his hand. In-head readouts showed Swayze’s doloric levels—the amount of pain he was enduring—shooting up at first, then beginning to fall … either as Swayze’s enhanced brain stifled the pain response, or as the nerves in the more sensitive parts of his hand burned away and shock began to set in.

Korosi struggled in Swayze’s grip. The laser failed—either crushed to uselessness or its power pack drained—and Swayze wrestled the general to the ground. The other Marines were leaping forward now and piling on, grabbing Korosi’s thrashing legs and arms.

“Nem! Nem! Engedj el!” Korosi screamed, his native Magyar immediately translated by Swayze’s in-head. “No! No! Let me go!”

Swayze subdued the man at last through the simple expedient of sitting on Korosi’s chest, cradling his wounded hand as his armor’s med units began treating him.

And with that, Koenig knew that the fight for Fort Douamont was over.

VFA-96, Black Demons

LEO

0019 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Connor threw her Starblade into a hard-left roll and engaged her forward grav projector. A brief burst of acceleration at twenty thousand gravities and she was hurtling past the incoming projectiles, several of which flared into vapor as she brushed them with the intensely warped pucker of space just ahead of her fighter. Two of the Todtadlers ahead and below twisted around to meet her, but she caught one in a target lock with her PBP-8 and slammed it with a high-energy particle beam, flashing the fighter into star-hot vapor.

The Pan-European Todtadlers—Death Eagles—were highly advanced, modern fighters. They easily matched USNA fighters like the SG-101 Velociraptor, but they were utterly outclassed by the newer Starblades. Connor could feel her mind pervading every part of her ship’s consciousness, directing weapons, power, thrust, and attitude together in a rapturous dance. Her fighter shuddered as a KK projectile passed through one temporary wing … but the nanomatrix hull flowed around the slug as it passed through, directing it harmlessly past the pilot compartment and other vital elements, and back into space. Connor didn’t need to spin the craft. Rather, she simply reformed it in flight, bringing weapons to bear on the second target and vaporizing it in a flare of radiation and plasma.

“Demon Five!” she called over the tac channel. “Two kills!”

“Demon Seven! Scratch one Toddy Velocicrapper!”

And the fighters merged in an angry tangle of fire and destruction …

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

0020 hours, EST

Koenig emerged again from his virtual connection. A chorus of screams and yells filled the Presidential Command Center and rang off the walls—a roomful of military officers, civilian officials, aides, and technicians jumping and shouting and hugging one another and slapping hands together, congratulating each other. In a smaller room just off from the center’s main control room, Koenig blinked against the overhead lights. “What the hell is that noise?” he asked.

“The guys are going a little nuts, sir,” Whitney replied. “They got Korosi!”

“I know,” Koenig said, sitting up. “I was there. And it was the One-Five Marines who got the bastard, not us.”

“It was a group effort, Mr. President.” He gestured toward the other room. “They found Korosi, and they tracked him to Verdun. And you gave the order …”

“And the Marines dug him out, and rescued Roettgen. Tell them to knock it off and get back on the job. We still have to withdraw our people.”

“Yes, sir.”

Whitney’s attempt to spread credit for the success around irritated him. Koenig had a particular and heartfelt disdain for the type of national leader who assumed the credit for his or her military’s successes. I directed … I ordered … We attacked … Bullshit. It was the men and women who were boots-on-the-ground in-theater—the ones getting shot at and taking the risks—who should get the credit, not the damned REMFs peering over their shoulders through drone cameras, satellites, or in-head links.

Admiral Eugene Armitage, the head of the Joint Chiefs, grinned at him. “But we did get the bastard, Mr. President.”

“Yes,” Koenig said, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “We got him.”

Whitney nodded. “There’s more, Mr. President. You might have missed it, but they just flashed the word back. They’ve captured Denoix as well, trying to leave the perimeter by air car.”

Koenig smiled. His chief of staff was scolding him, mildly, by letting him know that the information he’d wanted had come through to the command post just as quickly as Koenig could have gotten it from a direct link. “Outstanding, Marcus.” He glanced at Armitage. “Admiral?” he said. “Please flash Meteor a ‘well done’ from me, personally.”

Armitage nodded. “As you wish, Mr. President.”

“There’s … ah … there is still one part unresolved, sir,” Whitney told him.

“The recovery, yes. I assume you have the heavy transports on the way.”

“Yes, sir. But it’s not that.”

“What, then?”

“Eight Todtadlers launched a few minutes ago from a site in southern Turkey … a city called Adana.”

“Adana? What do they have there?”

“It’s one of Turkey’s larger cities, sir … and the site of a small spaceport. Incirlik.”

Koenig nodded as data flowed through his in-head. “Got it.”

Once, Incirlik had been a joint U.S. and Turkish military air base, back in the days of the old NATO alliance. After the mid-2100s and the beginnings of the Pax Confeoderata, the facilities had been developed as a local spaceport for Pan-Europe’s burgeoning asteroid mining initiatives. Turkey, geographically astride both Europe and Asia, had been an ideal region for economic development after both the Islamic Wars and the more recent Sino-Western Wars.

But the rise of the space elevators—first at SupraQuito, then in Kenya and in Singapore—had perhaps already doomed such antiquated assets as national spaceports. There wasn’t much at Incirlik now, save for a small military base.

But why were they attacking the USNA fighters in LEO?

For a moment, Koenig watched the data flow describing the slash and stab of aerospace fighters in low orbit. That why was becoming an increasingly important question. With the fighting at the Verdun planetary defense center all but over, there was no reason to challenge American space superiority, none at all.

Unless …

He called up a holographic map display, the board hanging transparent in midair showing the orbit of America’s space superiority fighters southeast across the Balkans, Turkey, the Arabian Peninsula, and out over the Indian Ocean. A red dot flashed at the northeastern corner of the Med, marking Incirlik. Four of America’s fighters had just shot down the last of the Todtadlers from the base; four more USNA Starblades were four thousand kilometers ahead … coming up now on the southern tip of India.

“A second launch, Mr. President,” Armitage reported. “More Death Eagles.”

“How many?”

“Five, sir. No … make that six …”

“From where?”

“Surat, Mr. President. North India.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Koenig said, thoughtful. Surat was a large city on India’s northwestern coast, next to the Gulf of Khambhat. “I think those Death Eagles are trying to punch a hole through our orbiting squadron,” Koenig said.

“For what possible purpose, sir?” Whitney asked.

“For an escape. Admiral Armitage?”

“Sir!”

“I suggest you order the Elliot and the Hawes down from their perch for a closer look.”

“Right away, sir.”

The Elliot was a destroyer massing eight thousand tons, the Hawes a smaller frigate, a light escort of about three thousand tons. The two had recently been assigned to America’s carrier group and were now deployed in HEO—high Earth orbit, about thirty thousand kilometers out.

“Who would be trying to escape, Mr. President?” Whitney asked. “If we have both Denoix and Korosi—”

“Might be members of Korosi’s staff,” Koenig said. “Or it might be the real architects of Columbus.”

“The real architects, Mr. President?” Whitney shook his head. “We already know Korosi was behind that, don’t we?”

“No, Marcus, we don’t. He’s a nasty character, I’ll admit, but the Confederation really didn’t have reason to eat a city, not when they had to take that big of a public-relations hit.”

As Koenig had noted, the attack by the Confederation ship Estremadura—awful as it had been—had done more damage by far to the Confederation than to North America. Nation states that had been sitting on the sidelines of the fast-evolving civil war—the Chinese Hegemony and the Islamic Theocracy, especially—had openly come into the war against the Confederation. Perhaps just as important, members of the Confederation—including Russia, North India, and England—had immediately distanced themselves from the world state, with Russia and North India both seceding from the Geneva government.

But the politics over there were still murky. One of the Confederation ships escorting the Estremadura on her deadly mission, Koenig remembered, had been the North Indian heavy cruiser Brahmaputra. At least some within the North Indian government, clearly, had known about the nature of the attack that had destroyed Columbus … and approved of it. If fighters were coming up from Surat, they might well be piloted by officers still loyal to Korosi, even if New Delhi had disowned the guy since the attack.

And knowing if that was true was crucial. With the takedown of the last major fortress controlled by Korosi forces, Koenig knew it was vital to maintain the momentum; handled properly, Korosi’s capture might end the war.

So the question remained: Who the hell was trying to escape the USNA’s tightening noose?

VFA-96, Black Demons

LEO

0022 hours, TFT

Megan Connor thoughtclicked a symbol, sending two VG-10 Krait missiles streaking toward the last Confederation fighter. At a range of just two hundred kilometers, the missiles detonated in twin flares of dazzling, silent light … and the enemy Todtadler disintegrated in tumbling, half-molten fragments.

Elsewhere in the sky, soft-glowing clouds of expanding hot plasma and debris marked the passings of the other fighters; one had re-entered the atmosphere below, a streak of ablating hull material scratched across the intense blue of the Indian Ocean.

Through her communications link, Connor could hear the chatter among the other pilots in her squadron.

“Nice shot, Five! That’s a kill!”

“The last one! Hot damn, and we didn’t loose a single damned ship!”

That was pretty spectacular, Connor thought. Eight fighters in that first launch out of Turkey … and six more from North India. Fourteen fighters against four of the new Starblades, and every single one of them shot down without a single loss. That was worth a hot damn in anyone’s flight log.

“Hey, Skipper? Demon Six. My scanners weren’t picking up any people in those ships!”

“Copy that, Six. America’s S-2 concurs. They were all on AI.”

“Shit, why? Aren’t we good enough for them?”

For centuries, the debate had continued to natter back and forth over the need for human pilots in fighter cockpits. Undeniably, artificial intelligences were faster than humans, sharper, more immediately aware, and surer in their assessment of data … but humans seemed to add a degree of creativity and inspired improvisation to the mix. So far, at least, the best tactical advantage seemed to rest with human brains cybernetically wired into AI-controlled spacecraft.

And the 14-and-0 victory they’d just won was a resounding validation of that … that and the fact that the new Starblade design left even the most advanced Confederation spacecraft chewing hard vacuum. But maybe the unbalanced outcome wasn’t so surprising after all, since it had involved enhanced humans fighting machines.

Especially machines on some sort of preset program …

“Skipper?” she said, running through her sensor feeds. “See that, to the north?”

“What the hell?”

“That’s a fucking starship!” she exclaimed. “Running hot and under escort!”

And now the Confederation’s plan was clear. The attack rising from a spaceport in Turkey had served to scatter the four fighters riding that part of the space superiority orbit—not badly, but a little. The second wave of enemy fighters, coming south from Surat, had scattered the flight even further; the nearest other fighter to Connor’s right now was Mackey’s … a good fifteen hundred kilometers to her southeast.

And with the four Starblades scattered all over the sky, now was when the enemy was launching something big … and escorted by twelve more Todtadlers.

“The ship is cloaked,” Connor reported. “But I’m getting a mass of around four thousand tons.”

“Small,” Lieutenant Ruxton said. “Frigate size.”

“Fleet Combat Command is designating the target as Charlie One,” Mackey said.

“Where the hell is our capship backup?” Dobbs was referring to the two capital ships, the Hawes and the Elliot, which had been ordered down to LEO to support the USNA fighters.

“On the way, Demon Six,” Mackey replied. “In the meantime, let’s see what we can do.”

Connor was trying to read through the enemy’s cloaking, which was an offshoot of gravitic screening. The technology to bend light around a ship, affording partial invisibility, had been around for several centuries, but the effort generally wasn’t worth the power consumption … or the fact that a cloaked ship couldn’t see out any more than others could see in. There really was little point in doing it at all … unless there was something about that small starship that the Confederation didn’t want the Americans to see.

Now what the hell, she wondered, were the bastards trying to hide?

Chapter Three

29 June, 2425

USNA Star Carrier America

Naval Base

Quito Synchorbital

0032 hours, TFT

Admiral Trevor “Sandy” Gray was patched into the operations datastream in his private office, just off his sleeping quarters. According to ship’s time, it was just past midnight, but he always had trouble sleeping when an op was going down, even with electronic sleep aids. And so he was stretched out on a recliner, following the datastreams coming up from Earth.

Operation Fallen Star was pretty much academic so far as he was concerned. Some of America’s fighter squadrons had been deployed to LEO to provide aerospace superiority, but the carrier herself was docked at the synchorbital naval base and was taking no other part in the proceedings.

He could turn in, he knew. Laurie was waiting for him in the other room, unless she’d already fallen asleep. If so, he envied her that.

America’s AI was monitoring the feeds as well, of course, which should have further put him at ease: if anything happened, he’d be alerted immediately. As if the AI were reading his mind, he felt an inner nudge, directing his attention to new data—Confed fighter launches from Turkey and North India, and … something else.

“Now what the hell?” he wondered aloud. “Bridge, this is the admiral.”

“Gutierrez here, Admiral.”

Captain Sara Gutierrez was America’s skipper, and apparently she was burning the midnight photons as well.

“What the blazes just launched from North India?”

“One moment, Admiral. We’re tracking …”

Gutierrez was an excellent officer—his exec when he’d been captain of the America. His promotion to admiral and her promotion to captain both had been provisional, forced on them by the needs of a service desperate for experienced line officers. Gray didn’t know how his evaluations were going to read next time, but he knew he was going to recommend her for permanent command of the America.

Of course, if that happened and Gray was not confirmed for a four-star admiral’s billet, he likely would end up flying a desk Earthside. The thought was not a pleasant one, but as always, the needs of the service came first.

Especially in the middle of a war.

“Admiral,” Gutierrez’s voice said in his head, “we’re not getting a clear picture. All of our data is coming in by way of VFA-96. We don’t have direct line of sight on them.”

A schematic drew itself in Gray’s head: the globe of Earth, the space elevator towers, the various orbital facilities. Quito Synchorbital reached almost 36,000 kilometers above Ecuador. North India was far around the curve of the Earth, almost exactly on the opposite side of the planet.

“What do we have?”

“The target is well cloaked. We’re tracking it by its mass ripple.”

Mass puckered surrounding space by its simple presence—an effect perceived as gravity. When that mass moved, the pucker dragged through the fabric of spacetime, creating a wake or ripple, a unique signature that could be read by the appropriate long-range scanners.

“Sir …” Gutierrez said after a moment’s hesitation, “these readings don’t make sense. We may be tracking …”

“What?”

“It might be an alien spacecraft, Admiral. Nonhuman technology.”

Human starships used gravitic singularity projectors to warp space ahead of them in rapid-fire pulses, in effect creating a moving gravity well that pulled the ship along after it with a smooth and uniform acceleration. Aerospace fighters, aircars, and other civilian and military fliers could operate within a planetary atmosphere, but using projectors powerful enough to move something as large as a starship near a planetary surface was a risky proposition, and technically extremely difficult. In fact, taking the gravitic projectors to the next higher level—using them to fold space around the ship in order to move faster than light—required a flat spacetime matrix, meaning that you needed to be well clear of the local star, to say nothing of nearby planets.

But possibly other technic and space-faring species had figured out how to slip in and out of local gravity wells without a problem.

“Well, that might explain how the hell they got it down to the surface in the first place,” Gray said finally.

“Elliot and the Hawes are dropping down to LEO, sir,” Gutierrez continued. “ETA … eight minutes.”

“And Intelligence is still reading those fighters as uncrewed?”

“The fighters are gone, sir. All destroyed. But they were under AI guidance, yes.”

“I want a closer look at the ship boosting out from Earth,” he said. “How soon can we clear the dock?”

“Almost immediately, Admiral. Five minutes.”

“Good. Do it. I’m on my way to the flag bridge.”

“We’ll warm up your seat for you, sir.”

Breaking free from the data feed, Gray stood up and walked into his sleeping compartment. Laurie Taggart sat up in bed, naked, and stretched. “Sandy? You coming to bed?”

“Nope … but I want you on the bridge ASAP.”

Commander Laurie Taggart was America’s chief weapons officer, and very, very good at what she did.

The sensuousness was gone in an instant. She slid out of bed. “What’s happening?”

“Check the feeds.” He took a small wad of uniform from a bulkhead dispenser and slapped it against his bare chest. The black programmed nanogel spread out from beneath his hand, rapidly covering his body from shoulders to hands and feet, complete with rank tabs at his throat. “We have someone boosting out of North India in a hell of a hurry, and we’re going to go after them.”

Taggart took a handful of shipboard utilities and let them cover her body. The microcircuitry grown inside them provided temperature control through quite a large range of environmental conditions, and with the addition of a helmet and shoulder-worn breather pack, could double as an emergency e-suit. As fashion statements, however, they left delightfully little to the imagination.

Which, Gray thought with mild surprise, was just fine. He was a Prim and a monagie still, a product of the Periphery and the edge-of-survival life in the half-drowned Manhat Ruins—the flooded canyons and crumbling towers that had been New York City until rising sea levels had drowned the place almost three and a half centuries ago. He’d been a Prim—a Primitive—by virtue of not having an electronic connection to the most basic services of modern life, and a monagie because he’d been partnered with one woman.

That woman’s stroke, though, had driven him to seek medical help within the USNA. He’d been expected to pay for those services, of course, and had done so by joining the USNA Navy.

He’d adjusted well enough, he thought. His wife, changed either by the stroke or by the rewiring of her brain at the medical center, had left him, and that was by far the most traumatic change to his life. He still missed her … but he’d found companionship and affection with people like Laurie, and had been making good progress in getting his life back together.

Sexual relationships between senior and junior officers were not encouraged, but were not outright forbidden, either. Laurie had been a more or less casual sex partner for a number of years, now, and so long as the relationship didn’t affect the performance of their respective duties, there was no problem. He was very careful never to show favoritism.

Gray was still a thoroughgoing monogie, though—sticking to one relationship at a time. He had the Periphery’s mistrust of group marriages and promiscuously open sex, even if he had to accept that most people within the USNA saw him as at least mildly perverted in that regard.

After a quarter century in the Navy, Trevor Gray found that he really didn’t give a fuck what people thought about his private life.

He swam onto the bridge just as Gutierrez gave the order to take America out of dock. While his quarters were inside one of the ship’s rotating hab modules—provided with half a G of spin gravity—the bridge was located on America’s spine aft of the huge shield cap and thus in microgravity.

“Cast off all magnetics and grapples,” Gutierrez’s voice was saying. “Maneuvering aft, one-tenth G …”

Gray felt the slight nudge of acceleration as he slid into his command seat and let it gently grab hold. Since ships could not use their gravitic drives anywhere close to orbital structures like Quito Synchorbital, not without causing serious structural damage, maneuvering in close was handled by a combination of tugs and plasma thrusters.

The projections on the flag bridge bulkhead showed the America as seen from one of those tugs. The warship was enormous, the largest humans had yet launched at over a kilometer in length overall, with a long and slender central spine extending aft from the massive umbrella shape of her shield cap. That forward tank, holding 27 billion liters of water, served both as reaction mass for the plasma thrusters and as shielding at relativistic velocities. From the tug’s perspective, several hundred meters off, the star carrier was sliding very slowly from deep shade into bright sunlight. Earth was mostly in darkness at the moment, but the synchorbital was far enough out that, at this time of the year, the sun peeked over the planet’s north pole as a literal midnight sun.

Not that the time of day or night or the amount of incident sunlight meant much to space-faring crews in any case. Slaving shipboard time to GMT minus five was purely for convenience.

Clear of the immense sprawl of the naval base—itself a tiny fraction of the vast complex stretching out to either side from the 36,000-kilometer mark of the Quito space elevator—the star carrier fired her thrusters, generating another solid thump of acceleration. And, slowly, she began to turn.

Lines of light and columns of flickering numbers painted themselves across the bulkhead image and inside Gray’s mind. America would have to skim close past Earth to get onto the alien’s tail; they might pick up a bit of additional boost from Earth’s gravity, though the effect would be minute compared to the power of the carrier’s gravitic drive. Mostly, the navigation department would have to allow for a slight course shift as America skimmed past the planet’s upper atmosphere.

Gray was naturally impatient to get under way, but let the debarkation proceed at its own pace. As commander of the entire carrier battlegroup, his proper sphere of interest was the big picture, not the handling of one ship. He linked in to the transmissions being relayed around the planet now from the destroyer Elliot.

The destroyer was similar in overall design to the carrier, but her shield cap was a slightly flattened cone, blunt, elongated, and deeply scoured by pitting and dust erosion despite the best efforts of her nanomatrix hull. Still, viewed from a battlespace drone pacing the Elliot as she accelerated out from Earth, she was an impressive sight.

Her quarry was already well over 6 million kilometers ahead of her, however. As soon as the mystery ship had gotten clear of Earth’s atmosphere, it had put on an astonishing burst of acceleration—so much that Gray was immediately convinced that his guess that the vessel was not a human-built ship was confirmed. The vessel was definitely from … someplace else. Gray would worry about the where later. For now, he had to focus on getting to the ship before it could get to wherever the hell it was going.

“CAG? This is Gray.”

“Yes, Admiral,” Captain Connie Fletcher replied in his mind. Her title, from “Commander Air Group,” derived from the time when aircraft carriers plied Earth’s oceans, and fighters needed an atmosphere to stay aloft. The CO of America’s contingent of fighters, recon snoops, and other small spacecraft was in the carrier’s Primary Flight Control center aft, “Prifly,” in the traditional terminology dating back to those same times.

“We need to stop Charlie One. America won’t be able to catch them in a stern chase, and I doubt that the Hawes or the Elliot will be able to either. It’s going to be up to the fighters.”

“We’ve been looking at intercept vectors, Admiral. It might be possible, but it’ll be tight. A hell of a lot depends on how soon Charlie can drop into metaspace.”

“Do what you can, Connie. Those … people may be Sh’daar, and they’ve been talking to the Confeds. We need to know what they’ve been talking about.”

“Will do, Admiral. The Black Demons are in the best position for an intercept. That will mean dropping some of our LEO coverage.”

“Do it. The Marines are wrapping things up at Verdun. And Charlie out there has just become our number-one priority.”

But one squadron against a frigate-sized ship of unknown capabilities and escorting fighters—those were not good odds. He flashed an order to the two capital ships now maneuvering down to low Earth orbit, ordering them to join the chase as well, but they almost certainly wouldn’t be able to catch up with Charlie One.

Quickly, Gray searched the fleet network, looking for a warship positioned in such a way that it could intercept the fleeing alien. Let’s see … Mars and Jupiter were both at completely wrong angles, with Earth between them and the alien ship just now. There was a small USNA flotilla still out in Saturn space, watching over the newly recaptured stations at Enceladus, Titan, and the Huygens Ring Facility Observatory. However, at the moment, Saturn was a good 9 AUs out from Earth, which meant a time delay of seventy-two minutes for any message from America’s communications department to reach them.

There was a High Guard watchship, the Concord, in a good position within the asteroid belt—at Vesta, just to one side of the Sun and 3 AUs from Earth at this angle, with a time delay of twenty-four minutes. Better. Much better. High Guarders weren’t in the same league as line naval capital ships, but were designed to keep an eye on asteroids that might pose a threat to Earth—either by chance or through enemy action. Yet they were in the best position to handle Charlie One.

Gray called up the ship and its skipper’s personnel records. Technically, the High Guard was a Confederation organization, jointly run by Geneva and by the USNA military through Mars HQ, but that had been the situation before the civil war. For the past year, the High Guard had been primarily a USNA operation pretty much by default, since most of the personnel and ships had come from the United States.

Concord’s skipper was Commander Terrance Dahlquist … and he was a former USNA naval officer. Excellent.

“Comm,” he said. “This is Admiral Gray. Make to the Concord …”

And he began detailing what he had in mind.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

0038 hours, EST

“America is in pursuit, sir. They’ve cast off from the dock and are accelerating.”

“Do they have a chance in hell of running that ship down?”

Whitney looked uncomfortable. “Unknown, sir. That alien has legs.”

“What I would like to know,” Koenig said, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers, “is how an alien starship of approximately four thousand tons managed to get to Earth, to land on Earth, without being detected.”

“We’re … working on that, sir. It’s possible it was brought down as cargo. On a skycrane.”

Skycranes were space-to-ground transports used to get large quantities of both raw material and manufactured items from the manufactories in orbit down to Earth’s cities. Smaller goods went down the space elevators, of course, but large items, as well as multi-thousand-ton asteroidal material for those manufactories still on Earth, could more efficiently be lowered straight to the destination city.

Koenig shook his head. It had still been a gutsy move, since skycranes were legitimate military targets. If it were true, it meant someone on the other side had been gambling that the USNA was too thinly stretched to bother with what was obviously a civilian target.

And yet maybe it hadn’t been such a gamble after all. The USNA propaganda machine—and the Starlighters—had been pointing out endlessly to all who would listen that the USNA was not going after civilian targets (unlike the Confederation faction that had nanoed Columbus). Perhaps the aliens, whoever—whatever—they were, and their Confederation hosts, had been counting on that.

The whole question of the Confederation’s relationship with off-worlders, the Sh’daar in particular, was a nagging and unrelenting source of concern for Koenig and his military staff. That the Confederation had long wanted to agree to the Sh’daar demands—their ultimatum requiring Humankind to give up certain technologies—was well known. Hell, that, more than anything else, had been responsible for the political rift that had led to the civil war.

Koenig was not going to permit a nonhuman civilization to dictate either the direction or the limits of Earth’s technological development, and he was pretty sure that most people all over the planet agreed. What had the aliens offered Geneva, he wondered, that had led the Confederation government to agree to such a thing?

And had that mystery ship grounded in North India had anything to do with the offer?

If they could stop the aliens and open some kind of dialog with them, they might be able to find out. For a long time, the USNA had been fighting in the dark, not certain of just who the enemy was, or what their relationship might be with Geneva.

But right now the alien ship was leaving Earth like the proverbial bat out of hell, boosting at 50,000 Gs, and there was no guarantee whatsoever that USNA forces would be able to stop it.

He considered relaying a message to Admiral Gray urging him to do so, and decided against it. No amount of urging would improve the odds.

And Koenig knew that Gray would be giving his best effort no matter what it was that he set out to do.

All Koenig could do was wait and watch …

VFA-96, Black Demons

LEO

0038 hours, TFT

The four Starblade fighters by now were well past India, and were passing just to the south of the Singapore space elevator. Connor could see the tower in the distance with her naked eye —a bright white line scratched from Earth up into heaven, laser-beam straight, emerging from the heart of a vast and sprawling metropolis that stretched from the tiny equatorial island of Pulau Lingga, 150 kilometers northwest to Singapore, south to Sumatra, and covered the surface of the sea in between.

The Americans were on a highly inclined orbit, one that had swung southeast from above France to just brush the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent, and then bypass the Singapore space elevator a couple of thousand miles south of the equator. Even from a distance of 2,000 kilometers, though, the elevator was a spectacular sight, gleaming in the midday sun overhead.

“Confirm we have clearance to accelerate,” Mackey said over the tactical channel, “Boosting in five … and four … three … two … one … punch it!”

And the Singapore elevator and the city at its foot vanished, wiped away as the four fighters switched on their forward gravitic projectors and accelerated outbound at seventy thousand gravities. After one second, the Starblades were moving at 700 kilometers per second, and had already traveled 350 kilometers out from Earth. After one minute of steady acceleration, their speed had increased to 42,000 kilometers per second, and they’d covered 1.26 million kilometers—well over three times the distance of the moon from the Earth. Aft, Connor could see the Earth and moon together, a pair of full-lit disks already rendered small by distance, and swiftly growing smaller with each passing second.

Ahead, and just to starboard, the sun grew visibly larger moment by moment.

“Hey, Skipper?” Connor called. “I don’t think we’re going to catch them.”

“We follow orders, Lieutenant.”

“Yeah … but they’re going to be pushing c in one more minute. And we won’t be there for another six.”

“Just follow your orders, Lieutenant. There’s nothing else we can do.”

Charlie One was boosting at fifty thousand gravities, about the same as a Krait ship-to-ship missile. Quite possibly, it was limiting its boost to accommodate its Todtadler escorts, which had an upper limit of fifty thousand Gs.

Regardless, the problem was one of straightforward TDA mathematics—time, distance, and acceleration. When Charlie One and its Confederation escorts reached about 99.7 percent of the speed of light in another sixty seconds, they would be 63.9 million kilometers from Earth. When the Black Demons reached that same speed in another six minutes, they would be 89.4 million kilometers from Earth—six-tenths the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

But by that point, Charlie One would have been traveling at near-c for five full minutes, covering an additional 90 million kilometers, for a total of nearly 154 million kilometers.

In other words, both hunter and prey would be traveling at the same speed, but the hunters would still be almost 65 million kilometers behind Charlie One.

An ancient sailing aphorism held that a stern chase was a long chase, but it was worse than that—a lot worse. There simply was no way to close that gap. No matter how high the acceleration, the dead hand of Einstein had long ago decreed that there was no way for material objects to pass—or even reach—the speed of light. According to the math governing relativistic calculations, the faster a ship went, the more massive it became, the shorter it became along its line of travel, and the more energy was required to accelerate it, a kind of feedback effect that led to the ship acquiring infinite mass and zero length at the speed of light, thus requiring infinite energy to move it faster.

The way the universe had been put together, it simply couldn’t be done. Even with all the energy available from the vacuum, the fighters might shave a few more decimals from that 99.7 percent of c, but they could never reach c, never mind surpass it.

But there was a loophole. Interstellar travel in anything less than decades would not have been possible without it. The Alcubierre Drive had been developed 284 years earlier, a realization of principles first described by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. Using the same projected singularity technology, an Alcubierre Drive ship pulled itself into an enclosed bubble of spacetime. There was nothing in physics that said that such a bubble couldn’t travel faster than light; indeed, in the earliest instants after the big bang, during the inflationary epoch, space itself had increased in volume by an estimated 10⁷⁸ times in 10⁻³⁰ seconds—which meant that points within that expanding volume would be moving away from one another at many, many times the speed of light. A starship imbedded inside that spacetime bubble would be motionless relative to the space immediately around it, and therefore would not violate the ultimate-speed law of the cosmos.

Alcubierre Drive had several key limitations, though. For one, a ship was effectively “alongside space,” and therefore unable to communicate or interact with anyone in “real space” until it emerged. Another—and the one Connor was focusing on at the moment—was that a ship needed a fairly flat gravitational metric when the drive was engaged. Shipbuilders had been working on that problem for centuries, with no discernable results. So a ship still couldn’t go into faster-than-light drive until it was eight to ten AUs out from a star of Sol’s mass—the distance, roughly, of Saturn at its farthest from Earth.

No, the real problem was that none of this necessarily applied to Charlie One. It was an alien ship, of unknown potential and technologies. For all any human knew, it might pop into Alcubierre Drive in the next few seconds, or within a couple of million kilometers of the sun. Connor decided, however, that that was extremely unlikely. If they could have done it inside of one astronomical unit, they would have done it by now. The fact that they hadn’t led Connor to speculate that they were aiming for a particular patch of sky, that they would continue accelerating past Sol and out into the outer system before engaging their FTL drive.

So the million-dollar question is, just what part of the sky might that be?

It was simple enough to superimpose a star chart over her fighter’s navigational data.

And the answer to her question was … surprising.

Chapter Four

29 June, 2425

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

0044 hours, EST

“The fighters are in pursuit, sir,” Admiral Armitage told Koenig. “They won’t catch the damned thing, though. Not unless either Charlie starts decelerating or they can shave another tenth of a percent off their velocity.”

“How good are the new designs at that sort of thing?”

“Mostly depends on the pilot,” Armitage said. “Things are happening awfully fast at those velocities, remember.”

Koenig nodded. He’d been a fighter pilot once, a very long time ago. “I do.”

As a fighter moved faster and faster, relativistic phenomena not only increased the vehicle’s mass, pushing it toward an impossible-to-reach infinity, but it also shortened the rate at which time—as measured by an outside observer—passed for the pilot, an effect called time dilation. The pilot experienced everything—the increase in mass, the compression of time—as perfectly normal; it was outside observers that saw basic constants of the universe shift and flow like water.

For fighters traveling at 99.7 percent of the speed of light, one minute objective—a minute as perceived by slowpoke left-behinds—was only 4.64 seconds. To observers back on board the carrier, the pilot would seem to be moving and speaking and living with extreme slowness.

The difference could be significant—and a real problem, especially in combat. Where a relatively stationary target had a minute to react to oncoming fighters, those fighters had only a few seconds. The best cybernetically augmented reaction times in the world couldn’t handle differences at such scales.

In fact, getting anything done when you were up against an unaccelerated opponent was dangerous when a decision or an action taking a handful of seconds was in fact a whole minute long outside of the pilot’s frame of reference. At least, Koenig thought, in this case both the fighters and their quarry were pushing c, and the time difference between their relative frames of reference was trivial.

That was one reason that fighters sent at relativistic speeds toward an enemy target generally decelerated before reaching their objective. Speed was life, as the old fighter-pilot aphorism had it. But in modern space-fighter combat, too much speed could put you at a serious disadvantage.

With all that in his mind, Koenig pulled down an in-head schematic from the America showing the relative positions and speeds of the alien vessel and the pursuing fighters. He began pumping through some simulations. If the fighters could increase their velocity by an additional tenth of a percent of c, their speed, relative to their quarry, would be 30,000 kilometers per second and closing.

At this point, the fighters would be trailing the enemy by …

He let the calculations run themselves through: 65 million kilometers. With a closing velocity of 30,000 kps, that meant an intercept in another thirty-six minutes.

Like a dog chasing a hovercraft, though, what they would be able to do with the alien once they actually caught it was still unknown.

And it was still all based on the “if” of moving closer to the speed of light.

USNS/HGF Concord

4-Vesta

0056 hours, TFT

Commander Terrance Dahlquist read the message as it came through, direct from Admiral Gray and the star carrier America. He wasn’t quite sure how he should feel about this … or what he was going to do about it.

Originally a branch of the North American military, the High Guard had been established in the wake of the Wormwood Incident in 2132, when a rogue Chinese squadron had dropped a small asteroid into the Atlantic Ocean. Later, official control had been handed over to the Earth Confederation, since it was operating in the defense of the entire planet. Concord’s mission was to monitor operations near asteroids, and to stop unauthorized attempts to manipulate their trajectories. In those cases where either asteroids or ore samples were legally being injected into Earth-approach orbits, the Guard tracked them, double-checked the calculations, and tried to make certain that Earth or other population centers across the solar system weren’t endangered.

Further, the High Guard made sure Vesta was always closely watched. The site of a large, mostly automated mining facility, the asteroid possessed a set of ten-kilometer-long magnetic launch rails designed to fire canisters of nano-extracted and -processed ore from the jumbled, frozen crust into low-energy transit loops that would bring them within capture range of Earth-based capture vessels within three to five years, depending on the constantly changing angles and distances between worlds. Fearing that terrorists or other rogue forces might easily change the launch parameters and turn the launch rails into titanic long-range weapons ideal for planetary bombardment, the High Guard was stationed there as protection against that scenario. In truth, it was not very likely to happen. For one thing, it would be a high-risk, low-reward endeavor, since incoming canisters were closely followed by radar and lidar, and intercept missions could easily nudge them into harmless orbits. But Earth’s governments remained nervous about falling rocks, especially deliberately chucked falling rocks, almost three centuries after Wormwood Fall, and High Guard frigates like the Concord were there to provide some measure of reassurance.

They were not designed to engage alien starships of unknown potential.

Dahlquist wanted to shoot a message back to Gray. The problem was that the High Guard, though technically a part of the USNA Navy during the current hostilities with the Confederation, was not under Navy jurisdiction, and a line officer like Gray did not have the authority to order High Guard assets off station.

Of course, the real reason he was hesitating had more to do with Gray’s background.

Like most USNA Guard and Naval officers, Dahlquist was a Ristie. The United States of North America was supposed to be a classless society, but that was fiction and always had been. Always there were “haves” as distinguished from “have-nots.” Money was not as big a factor in modern society as it once had been; the nanotech revolution had long ago made wealth-based distinctions largely irrelevant. But power, especially the power available to those with better technology and better access to information, was another matter altogether. Nowadays, those who had more advanced electronic implant technology, those who had life extension and better nanomed support, those who had connections in the larger “have” networks of government and the military—those were the new social elite. Risties was the slang term for the cultural aristocrats who called the shots in modern civilization.

Of course, they would never use the term themselves.

They did, however, use the term Prim, and the fact was that Gray was a well-known Primitive. Sure, Gray had acquired that technology when he left the Manhat Ruins decades ago, but Dahlquist couldn’t shake the subtle prejudice against him and people like him. They hadn’t grown up with the tech, had never been completely comfortable with it … and that, in the minds of most Risties, was telling.

Dahlquist would never have admitted to technocybernetic prejudice, of course, but he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that “Sandy” Gray didn’t really know what he was doing, that he tended to overlook some of the information available to him over the various data networks because he hadn’t grown up with the technology.

That in certain subtle ways, he wasn’t fully human.

And that, when all was said and done, was what it was all about. Humans were defined by their technology. That was one reason the USNA had been fighting the Sh’daar and, more recently, the Confederation: humans were what they were because of their tools, from fire to starships to neurocybernetic implants.

And yet, what it all came down to was that what Gray was ordering Dahlquist to do was technologically challenging, dangerous, and a long shot at best. He was to accelerate toward this oncoming alien vessel and lay down a spread of missiles and kinetic-kill projectiles in the hopes of disabling it. There was no question of matching course and speed with the thing, not when it was burning its way across the system at a hair under c. But Concord would still have to get uncomfortably close, and loosing that much kinetic energy and flying debris when you just might fly into the high-velocity cloud yourself was not Dahlquist’s idea of a reasonable request.

There was the political angle to consider, too.

If the Concord openly helped the America—and from the data feed Dahlquist was getting, these orders were part of a USNA operation against unknown aliens working with the Confederation—he could technically be committing treason.

Damn it, that Prim was putting Dahlquist in an impossible situation!

“Comm,” he said. “Send a reply. Ask for … clarification.”

“Sir, they won’t get the reply for—”

“I know. Send it.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Dahlquist had better things to do than jump through hoops held by that perverted little Prim …

USNA Star Carrier America

In pursuit

0105 hours, TFT

“Looks like the pursuing fighters were able to close with the target, Admiral,” Commander Dean Mallory told him. “I wish there’d been more than four of them, though.”

“All they need to do is slow that damned alien down a bit,” Gray replied. “That, and keep him from transiting over to metaspace.”

“We don’t know how far up the side of the sun’s gravity well they need to be in order to jump,” Mallory said, thoughtful. “Would the idea be to just try to damage him?”

“It’s a long shot, I know,” Gray replied. “If you or your team have any ideas, tell me now.”

“Your old sand trick occurs to me, Admiral,” Mallory said, grinning. “‘The Gray Maneuver,’ they called it in Tac-Combat download training.”

Gray snorted. “It’s a dangerous option here,” he said. “We’d risk vaporizing those four fighters we have on the alien’s tail.”

“Sandy” Gray had gotten his nickname two decades earlier, when he’d released clouds of sand—the warheads of AMSO anti-missile weapons—at close to the speed of light. Even a single grain of sand traveling at that speed was deadly, and a cloud of them could disintegrate a ship, wipe out a fleet … or even scour the hemisphere of a world with flame. Under certain circumstances, it could be a highly effective weapon, but targeting something as small as a ship was chancy at best, and the danger of scoring an “own goal” in the rough-and-tumble of space combat made the tactic one of desperation.

“True. Of course, only the Concord would be positioned to deliver the shot, anyway.”

“I know—and risk or not, it’s what I asked them to do. Those fighters aren’t going to be able to do much, so it’s probably our only chance.”

AMSO rounds fired by those USNA ships chasing Charlie One and its fighter escorts would be completely ineffective, because both they and the targets were traveling at close to c. But sand released by the High Guard ship, approaching from slightly off the alien’s bow, would impact Charlie with its velocity plus that of the target, which was very close indeed to the speed of light.

“My concern, then,” Gray continued, “is that he might hold off for fear of hitting the USNA fighters behind it.” Something dawned on Gray then, and he scowled, calling up a data feed from America’s AI, looking for biographical information on Concord’s captain. He’d pulled down a bare minimum of biographical data on the man before, just enough to verify that he was North American. Right now, Gray needed more.

There it was: Commander Terrance Dahlquist. Born in Windsor, Ontario, but with most of his life spent in New New York, up the swollen Hudson from Gray’s old stomping grounds. Well-to-do family. He had an uncle who’d been governor of Manitoba … and a cousin who’d been a USNA representative to the Confederation Senate. Joined the Navy in 2016. Naval Academy at Oceana. Commended for valor at Freya in 2020—He’d been skipper of a gunboat, the Ajax, during an operation against renegade H’rulka fleet elements there. Transferred to the High Guard in 2022.

Why? To leave a career with the Navy proper could be seen as a less-than-positive career move. Ah … there it was. He’d been passed over for promotion to full commander while skippering the Ajax. By taking the High Guard posting, he got an immediate promotion.

Gray shook his head. Nothing in the data raised any flags; nothing particularly unusual or of concern.

It was frustrating, though. The nature of modern space warfare meant that individual ship captains and flotilla commanders often had to fight alongside fellow officers whom they’d never met and didn’t know. With typical operations encompassing volumes of space many astronomical units in diameter, often there was no way to coordinate with them during the battle. Speed-of-light time lags could mean the passage of hours before a reply to a message could be received. Was a given officer aggressive? Cautious? Slow off the mark? Meticulous? Hotheaded? Incompetent? Daring? It made a hell of a big difference, and not knowing could royally screw combat strategy.

He took a big mental breath. Worry about it later, he thought. There was nothing he could do about it until America and Concord were closer.

On the flag bridge tactical display, the four pursuing fighters were drawing gradually closer to the fleeing Charlie One and its Confed escorts.

He checked the time. Concord should have received the message ten minutes ago and be getting into position now. The High Guard ship was just too far away for the light carrying that information to have reached America. Hawes and Elliot were still on the chase as well, but like America, were still much too far astern to take part in the coming clash.

Dahlquist better be moving …

Because without the Concord, those four Starblades were on their own. And, as always, it would be the fighters that bore the first, hardest shock of contact with the enemy.

VFA-96, Black Demons

In pursuit

0120 hours, TFT

Megan Connor thoughtclicked a mental icon and enlarged the object visible now within an in-head window. It was tough to make out details; the view of the surrounding universe outside was wildly distorted by her fighter’s speed. At relativistic velocities, incoming starlight was crowded forward until it formed a ring ahead of the ship, with chromatic aberration smearing the light into a rainbow of color: blue ahead, red behind.

Somewhere within that “starbow” was the light from the fleeing alien, also distorted by the near-c velocities of pursuer and pursued. The AI running Connor’s fighter was extracting that light and recreating what the alien would have looked like to human eyes at more sedate speeds … a beautiful assembly of fluted curves, sponsons, teardrop shapes, and streamlined protrusions that looked more grown than assembled. It was five thousand kilometers ahead, now, and seemed to be struggling to maintain that dwindling lead. The image was being transmitted by one of several battlespace drones the USNA fighters had launched moments before. Their acceleration was just good enough to let them creep up on the alien, meter by hard-fought meter.

The pursuing fighters were now within missile range … but USNA ship-to-ship missile accelerations were not much better than the fighters themselves. Piloted by small AIs, it might be hours more before they could close the remaining distance.

Drones possessed better AIs; they had to in order to maneuver for the best views of a target, to assemble the clearest picture of a contested volume of space, and to avoid enemy anti-missile defenses. They also had somewhat more powerful drives so that they could quickly fill an entire battlespace volume, and to give them long-term endurance on station.

All of which gave Connor an idea.

USNS/HGF Concord

4-Vesta

0121 hours, TFT

Commander Terrance Dahlquist studied the tactical display on Concord’s bridge. The out-system craft tagged Charlie One was just over one AU from Vesta, now, and was reaching the closest point to the asteroid on its outbound path. Four USNA fighters were in close pursuit.

The images he was seeing, thanks to the speed-of-light time delay, were about nine minutes out of date, which meant that alien craft had already passed the nearest point and was well beyond now.

And Dahlquist was worried.

“You know, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Ames told him, “you could land yourself in a world of shit.”

Ames was Concord’s executive officer, Dahlquist’s second in command. She was a GM transhuman and he respected her intelligence, a carefully crafted intellect connected to in-head systems that purportedly made her as good as that of the best AI.

“It’s a kind of a nebulous area,” he told her. “I don’t take my orders from … people like him.”

Both the line Navy and the High Guard answered to HQMILCOM, the USNA’s military command center located on and around Mars, and, after that, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Earth. Until one or the other of those command entities officially directed him to follow Gray’s orders, he was in the right if he ignored the man’s instructions. It was a technicality, but the military was built on technicalities.

“Not as nebulous as you might think, Captain,” Ames told him. “Admiral Gray is still a flag officer, and that puts you in probable violation of Article Ninety-two.”

“Article Ninety-two?” Dahlquist asked, smirking. “Not Ninety?”

“Article Ninety specifies punishment for disobeying a lawful command of your superior commissioned officer,” Ames told him. “It also covers actually striking a superior officer. So yes, it might apply. But Article Ninety-two applies to failure to obey any lawful general order or regulation. It also covers dereliction of duty. So it’s probably the charge they would use against you. Sir.”

Dahlquist sighed. He liked Ames, and she was a hell of a good ship’s first officer, but talking with her was like discussing calculus with a computer. Once, just once, he would like to hear her admit that she didn’t know something. He sighed again, as he knew that was unlikely.

Some claimed that the entire human species was headed the way of the genetically modified transhumans, but Dahlquist sincerely doubted this. GMs tended to increase mental efficiency by sacrificing passion—emotional involvement. Without said passion, they often didn’t pursue success in career or relationship as tenaciously as unmodified Mark I Mod 0 humans. As such, he couldn’t envision anyone giving up their ambition just for the sake of knowledge. Emotions were just too important to the human experience. The old idea of the emotionlessly logical genius was a myth. Fact was, there were studies linking high intelligence with emotional swings and disorders. Dahlquist couldn’t help but think about all the geniuses throughout history that had also been emotionally disturbed.

In any case, cybernetic implants were good enough now that anyone could have access to any data almost as efficiently as GMs, and without the loss of what it was that made humans human. For Dahlquist, that would always be raison d’être.

Nonetheless, Dahlquist valued Ames’s ability to pull raw data on the most obscure topics out of the seemingly endless depths of her memory. And that’s what he needed at the moment.

“So what do you recommend?” he asked.

“That we maneuver Concord to intercept Charlie One, as ordered.”

“I have a better idea.”

Ames blinked. “Sir?”

“We have available a potentially devastating weapon in the VLA. We can use that.”

Dahlquist was pleased with himself for thinking of it. The Vesta linear accelerator was the mining facility’s magnetic launcher. They could use it as a monstrous cannon to disable or destroy the alien from here, a full AU away.

“With respect, sir,” Ames said, shaking her head, “it won’t work.”

“No?”

“Not even close. Check the numbers, sir.”

He did so, pulling down stats from Concord’s AI on the mining accelerator and applying the TDA formula, then scowling as the answer came through. At its very best, the one-kilometer magnetic rail gun, accelerating a one-ton payload at twenty thousand gravities down its one-kilometer length, would boost the package to twenty kps—a respectable velocity across interplanetary distances that would cross one astronomical unit in … shit! Just over eighty-six days. It was amazing. Even with all of his training and experience, it was still so damnably possible to underestimate the sheer vastness of space.

And Ames was right. He could be making a hell of a lot of trouble for himself by disregarding those orders … and a Prim like Gray wasn’t worth landing himself a court-martial.

The realization steadied Dahlquist, and helped resolve the issue a bit in his mind. He’d not been aware of just how jealous he’d been of Gray’s advancement up the career ladder, but he recognized it now as her thought about the possibility of crashing and burning over an Article 92. He and Gray were about the same age, with roughly the same time-in-service. Yet he was just a commander, struggling to make captain, while the damned Prim had had his four admiral’s stars handed to him on a plate. There was scuttlebutt to the effect that Gray had friends in very high places; his former commanding officer was now president of the United States of North America. And those friends could cause Dahlquist a lot of trouble.

It wasn’t fucking fair.

He rather neatly disregarded the hypocrisy of a Ristie being jealous of a Prim’s “advantages.”

“Okay, Amesie,” he said. “Take us out. Rendezvous course with Charlie One.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

He heard Concord’s communications officer requesting departure clearance, heard the clearance being given by the AI that ran the mining facility. Ceres, a rugged, splotched, and cratered sphere over five huindred kilometers through, dwindled away into the distance, lost among the stars almost instantly. Contrary to popular belief—and countless docuinteractives and in-head sims with a very bad sense of scale—the asteroids were not so thickly sown through the belt that they formed any kind of obstacle. At the moment, exactly one other asteroid was naked-eye visible from Vesta—a fifth-magnitude speck of light a million kilometers away. The Asteroid Belt was very nearly as empty as the rest of interplanetary space.

Dahlquist was embarrassed by the gaffe of suggesting that they use the VLA to bombard the alien ship. Years of chasing rocks, he thought, must have contributed to acute hardening of the cerebral cortex.

He would have to find some way of recovering from the gaffe, or Ames and the members of Concord’s crew would be spreading the story on their next visit Earthside.

Besides that, though, he was also seething from being shown up, not only by Ames, but—in his head at least—by the Prim.

There had to be a way for him to prove himself, as someone brilliant instead of an idiot …

VFA-96, Black Demons

In pursuit

0120 hours, TFT

The problem—as was always the case at relativistic speeds—was one of energy. Every kilogram of mass moving at this speed carried more energy than a fifty-megaton nuclear warhead—the size of the titanic “Tsar Bomba” detonated by the then Soviet Union in the early 1960s. Firing nuclear antiship warheads at the enemy might have unpredictable effects … especially when you realized that the artificial singularities serving as gravitic drives were created and fed by extremely large amounts of energy of their own, drawn from the quantum foam. Add more energy, in an uncontrolled rush, and well …

Connor was not at all anxious to try the experiment.

Instead, she’d elected to try something more subtle: launching one of her battlespace drones as a missile.

Her consciousness was filled by the magnified image of Charlie One, an enormous, organic form of curves and flowing shapes; the twelve accompanying Todtadler fighters were dwarfed by the giant starship. How, Connor wondered, had the aliens gotten that thing past Earth’s defenses and down to the planet itself?

She’d fed specific instructions into the drone’s pocket-sized AI; the relativistic time dilation at this speed was just too sharp to allow precise control. Right now, for every four seconds that passed, over a minute slipped by in the outside universe, and the spacetime fabric around each of the fast-moving vehicles—Charlie One, her own Starblade, and the drone—was distorted enough to scramble data packets and affect fine, long-range control signals.

Closer, now. Charlie One was a few hundred kilometers ahead, though her AI had magnified the image so that it felt like she was just a few meters from the alien’s hull. The twelve fighters appeared to be drawing off now. Connor couldn’t know for sure, but she had the feeling they were getting clear in anticipation of the alien switching over into its equivalent of Alcubierre Drive.

Closer still …

The drone shuddered violently as it passed the gravitic bow wave. Ships under gravitic acceleration projected a field around themselves, a kind of bubble within which mass fell toward the on-off flickers of the projected singularity ahead of the craft’s prow. Hitting the interface between normal space and the space within that highly warped bubble could be like hitting a solid wall.

The image from her drone flickered, broke into static, and vanished.

Connor could only hope that her instructions to the device had been both complete and comprehensive.

Chapter Five

29 June, 2425

USNS/HGF Concord

4-Vesta

0128 hours, TFT

With Charlie One having already passed the closest point to Vesta on its outbound trajectory, Concord could no longer move to block the alien’s path. She could start chasing the other ship, however … or, more specifically, she could start accelerating toward the point far ahead of Charlie One where the alien should be when Concord intercepted it.

An intercept would be possible, of course, only if Concord could pile on a little more acceleration. Fortunately, while High Guard cutters weren’t armed to the teeth, they were designed with high-velocity intercepts in mind. An asteroid flung into a dinosaur-killer trajectory by unpleasant aliens might well have a considerable velocity once the course change had been discovered, and the sooner the ship could rendezvous with the incoming rock, the easier it would be to nudge it once more onto a safer course. Concord was a Lexington-class WPS-100 cutter, streamlined to reduce the drag that became significant at relativistic velocities within the dust-filled volume of the Sol System. She would be able to catch Charlie One in another hour—unless, of course, the alien flipped over into metaspace.

Regardless, she would make the rendezvous before the star carrier America.

Back home, in New New York, Dahlquist had a dog—a genetically modified pocket mastiff named Bumble who had a psychotic tendency to chase aircars when they passed overhead.

Like Bumble, Dahlquist wondered what he was going to do with Charlie if he actually caught the thing.

VFA-96, Black Demons

In pursuit

0131 hours, TFT

Connor was flying blind. Her scanners still showed the alien craft about five hundred kilometers up ahead with AI-resolved magnification enough to show some detail, but she wasn’t getting any signal at all from the drone, which minutes earlier had dropped into Charlie One’s pocket of intensely warped space. The device should be falling forward along the alien’s hull, now, in free fall toward the intense, flickering point of projected gravity out ahead of the alien’s nose … assuming, of course, that the alien’s flight technology worked along the same line as that of human ships. Everything she’d seen suggested that the technology was the same, right down to an apparent upper level of acceleration.

The escorting fighters had worked well clear of the alien and were decelerating now. Connor and the other three Starblades were already past them. Possibly, they were deploying to engage the Hawes and the Elliot, which still were following in the fighters’ wakes, but that wasn’t her concern.

She needed to stay focused on Charlie One.

Her Starblade shuddered, and an inner awareness—her link with the fighter’s AI—warned her of trouble: gravity waves. Powerful gravity waves. Her fighter literally was passing through ripples in spacetime.

And then Charlie One was tumbling, its power plant dead, its acceleration at zero.

“Got him!” Connor yelled over the tactical channel. Communications between squadron members were always a bit iffy at relativistic speeds, but she got an immediate acknowledgement from Commander Mackey. Still accelerating, Connor’s fighter closed with the alien very swiftly now, passing it within a hundred kilometers. There was no response from the vehicle, and no indication that she was being tracked or targeted. There was power being generated on board, she noted, but the main power plant appeared to be off-line.

Good. Flipping her fighter end for end, she began decelerating. Rendezvousing with Charlie was going to be touch and go, since the alien spacecraft was still coasting along at very close to the speed of light. But with its singularity drive switched off, it was no longer accelerating, and that made the problem a little bit simpler.

She checked her nav data and realized that she was the closest of the four fighters to the target.

“This is Demon Five,” she reported. “I’m going to try to close with Charlie One.”

“Copy that, Five,” Mackey’s voice came back. “For God’s sake watch yourself.”

Watch yourself get blown out of space, she thought, but she said only, “Affirmative.”

She began closing with the alien.

USNA Star Carrier America

In pursuit

0140 hours, TFT

“One of our fighters is docking with the alien,” Commander Mallory told Gray. “It’s confirmed: Charlie One has stopped accelerating.”

“About goddamned time,” Gray said. “Pass the word, though. Do not attempt to board the alien alone. I want them to wait until we have some capital ships there to back them up. And we’ll need SAR tugs to slow Charlie One the hell down.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

America carried a number of search-and-rescue craft, and the UTW-90 space tugs of the carrier’s DinoSAR squadron were specifically designed to rendezvous with streakers: ships damaged in combat at relativistic speeds, hurtling off into deep space at near-c velocities and unable to decelerate. SAR tugs could link up with fast-moving hulks, recover their crews, and slow them down to more manageable velocities.

“They can try for an AI link,” Gray went on, “but no physical contact.”

They were going to do this right. There were too many unknowns floating around out here to risk some fighter pilot putting his or her foot in it.

“And what if the aliens decide not to cooperate?” Mallory asked.

“Then they’ll keep until we get there with the big guns.”

“I presume you don’t mean literal weapons.”

“No,” he said, a little exasperated by the question. “But America’s AI should be able to pry them open electronically.”

Combat for over half a century with half a dozen different Sh’daar species had given humans plenty of opportunity to learn about Sh’daar computer networks and protocols. In particular, contact with one alien species, the Agletsch, had introduced humans to various Agletsch artificial languages—especially their trade pidgins, which allowed various members of the Sh’daar Collective to communicate with one another. Language, it turned out, was as utterly dependent on a given species’ physical form as it was on their psychology. There were galactic species that communicated by changing color, by modulating burps of gas from their abdomens, and by the semaphore twitchings of appendages on what passed for faces. The huge, floating-gasbag H’rulka broadcast on radio wavelengths. The Turusch lived in closely bonded pairs, and the speech of one harmonized with the speech of its twin, giving rise to a third layer of meaning. The Slan, who “saw” in sonar, communicated in patterns of rapid-fire ultrasound clicks at wavelengths well beyond the limits of human hearing. With such a bewildering range of communication types and styles, it was amazing that anyone in the Galaxy could exchange even the simplest ideas with anyone else at all.

But that was where the super-AIs came in, the immensely powerful computer minds billions of times faster and more powerful than mere organic brains. Some were designed solely to crack alien languages; shipboard systems had language software developed by those specialized AIs.

Even so, it was never easy. There were no guarantees that an unknown language could be cracked at all. Mostly, Gray was hoping that the aliens on board Charlie One had met the Agletsch, and used one of their pidgins.

If they were actually a part of the Sh’daar Collective, though, they would have to have a way to communicate with other Collective members.

More than that, Charlie One had been on Earth, which meant its crew had been in touch with the Earth Commonwealth—and that meant they almost certainly spoke a language humans (or their AIs) could understand.

Gray wondered if Charlie One was carrying an ambassador of some kind. Not that the Sh’daar had ever shown any evidence of understanding the concept of ambassadors or of the niceties of diplomatic service. Agletsch traders were the closest thing humans had encountered yet to Sh’daar diplomats. For even though those damned spiders never did anything for free, their stock-in-trade was information … and in so far as diplomacy involved an exchange of information and of understanding, they were naturals in the role.

But, so far, at least, there were no generally accepted rules on the galactic stage as there were for human diplomats—no embassies or consulates or formal exchanges of ambassadors. It had occurred to Gray on more than one occasion that this was one reason the Sh’daar War had dragged on for so long. Even the defeat of the Sh’daar in their home time and space had led to only an informal and non-binding truce. Twenty years after Koenig had emerged victorious from the N’gai Cloud in the remote past, human space was being raided by the Slan.

And now Charlie One was in the picture. What the hell had that ship been doing in North India?

That was one reason for giving the order not to attempt contact until America had arrived.

He didn’t want to hear about this one secondhand.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

0725 hours, EST

“It looks like a full day for you, sir.”

President Koenig looked up at Marcus Whitney and scowled. “Where’s my coffee, damn it?”

“Right here, sir,” Lana Evans said, reaching past Whitney and placing the cup on his desk. “Anything else, Mr. President?”

“No. Thank you.” He glowered at Whitney. “What do we have?”

“Most of it is focused on what’s happening in Europe right now, sir, and throughout the Confederation. After the battle at Verdun yesterday, the entire Confederation appears to have collapsed.”

“And about damned time, too,” Koenig said. He was tired after far too little sleep, and he needed his coffee. He’d been up until nearly three that morning, following reports streaming in from the star carrier America. When he’d gone to bed, America was still maneuvering, trying to match course and speed with the alien. A fighter had already docked with Charlie One, and two SAR tugs had been launched, but it would be hours yet before there would be any solid information from out there, now out well beyond the orbit of Neptune.

He sipped his coffee, made a face, then looked up at Whitney. “Okay. What else?”

“Here you go, sir,” Whitney said, thoughtclicking on his own connection with the electronics in the presidential office. “It’s all on the Pickle.”

He was referring to the “PICKL,” a centuries-old acronym standing for “President’s Intelligence ChecK-List.” It had first appeared in the mid-twentieth century as the CIA’s daily briefing for the U.S. president on important events that had occurred throughout the world overnight. Eventually it had vanished, world events having become too complex to be so easily distilled.

Recently, though, the idea of the PICKL had been revived in electronic form. World events were more complex than ever, including as it did not only news from all over Earth, but from colonies across the entire solar system and out among the nearer stars as well. The ocean of information flooding in at every moment was too large and complex by far for any one man to follow, information of which the president of the USNA needed to be aware. The current PICKL was created by a metanetwork of super-AIs operating within the government, the military, and for the various national intelligence services—Konstantin, on the Moon, was a major participant—and in large part was the network responsible for boiling that ocean down to teacup size.

Koenig ran down the list of briefings. At the top of the list was the capture of the alien starship, code-named Charlie One. It would be hours yet before America’s SAR tugs would catch the vessel and begin decelerating it. Until that happened, it was still hurtling outbound, now well past the orbit of Neptune and out into the Kuiper Belt. Details were sketchy, but evidently a fast-thinking fighter pilot off the America had used a drone to interfere with the alien’s singularity projector. Something important had clearly burned out; if it hadn’t, Charlie One would have slipped into metaspace long ago and been gone.

I’ll have to commend that pilot later, he thought. Another urgent point on the list caught his eye. It had to do with Charlie One’s apparent destination, in the constellation Cancer. He decided to study that later, too.

He moved to another item: closer to home there was a revolution against the Confederation government in South India, clashes between Chinese special forces and Russian troops in the Siberian maritime province, religious riots and demonstrations across the Theocracy, and massive flooding from a storm surge in the Philippines that almost certainly would foment unrest.

It went on:

A breakthrough in communicating with the Slan at Crisium … suspected sabotage in the Mt. Kenya space elevator … yet another formal protest by the Papess in Rome denouncing the White Covenant … government collapse in Geneva … possible Sh’daar activity at 70 Ophiuchi …

In short, very much business as usual. With the USNA walking the proverbial knife’s edge between survival and disaster on a dozen fronts.

“The big thing on the docket for today,” Whitney said, interrupting Koenig’s perusal of the list, “is the Washington dedication.”

Koenig groaned. “I don’t suppose we can put that off?”

“Not easily, sir. It’s an enormous affair, and there may be a hundred thousand people attending. It may turn out to be a lot bigger than that, as the news about Verdun moves down the Nets.”

Koenig sighed.

Washington, D.C., the former capital of the old United States, had been partially submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the twenty-first century. The capital had been moved to Columbus, Ohio, where it had remained for the next nearly three and a half centuries. Washington had slowly been claimed by swamp, mangroves, and forests of kudzu, which enveloped the exposed marble buildings and monuments. A part of the Periphery, it had been abandoned by the United States, then ignored by the new United States of North America. Tribes of Prims continued to hang on to a marginal existence there, fishing over what once had been the Mall, and fighting off periodic attacks by raiders out of the Virginia Periphery.

Late the previous year, not long after the beginning of hostilities in the civil war against the Confederation, the Pan-Europeans had attempted to take over Washington and several other parts of the North American Periphery. A sharp battle with local forces had broken the Confed attack. Since then, USNA help and technology had been pouring into the area, reclaiming the swamp, clearing old buildings and growing new ones, and freeing walls, monuments, and domes from the clinging riot of greenery.

Today, President Koenig was scheduled to fly to Washington and dedicate the reborn city, formally reinstating it as part of the USNA. Within the next six months, it was hoped, Washington would once again, after three centuries, be the North American capital. Preparations were already under way to move the physical apparatus of government from Toronto south.

Koenig wasn’t convinced that the move was a good idea. Since most of any government now was its electronic infrastructure rather than specific buildings, one city was pretty much the same as any other, and there’d even been suggestions that SupraQuito would be a better site. It had been centuries since government was dependent on a specific place. Washington, Columbus, and now Toronto all were symbols—potent symbols, perhaps, but only symbols, symbols of tradition and continuity and history. The real business of government long ago had been taken up by various AIs running in places as diverse as New New York, the Angelino-Francisco Metroplex, SupraQuito, and Tsiolkovsky, on the far side of the moon.

Humans were vital to the running of government, of course; with hardware purpose-grown in their brains from the time they were born, with in-head electronic memory and the ability to link with other people anywhere in the world, or to link with AIs possessing superhuman intelligence, government processes could be micromanaged by politicians as never before. But Koenig felt that the purely organic components of government—fallible, prone to corruption, prone to uninformed choices and bad days and just plain bad decisions—were fast becoming obsolete, save for when they were performing some of the more traditional duties of politicians …

Like presiding over the dedication of the opening of a once drowned city.

Koenig was tempted to cancel, but Marcus had a point about the crowds and Verdun. The victory in Europe had the looks of a final triumph over the Confederation. Celebration had already begun across North America … and in Europe, too, where the civil war had become increasingly unpopular. Starlight had been hammering the theme of peace for the past several months.

“Are we still on for having Constantine d’Angelo put in an electronic appearance? I gather he was pretty popular the other day in Geneva.”

“We are. They’ve grown a ten-story tall vidscreen in Washington overlooking the Mall, just like the one in the Place d’Lumiere.”

“So why can’t I put in an appearance the same way?”

Whitney shrugged. “I guess you could if you really want to, sir. But people are expecting to see you in the flesh and ten stories tall.”

And, of course, the single key difference between the president of the USNA and the leader of the new Starlight religion was that “Constantine d’Angelo” didn’t really exist—not as flesh and blood, at any rate. He was an electronic avatar, a construct created as a public face for Konstantin.

Most people with in-head electronics carried their own e-secretary with them, a pocket-sized personal assistant AI that could front for the human in handling incoming calls and routine business and be completely indistinguishable from the human prototype as it did so. These business and social stand-ins were referred to as secretaries or personal assistants or avatars and they existed only as electronic patterns of data, as images and sounds built up pixel by pixel and bit by bit by the AI generating them.

“Constantine d’Angelo” was no different, save that he claimed to be a real person. An elaborate and completely fictional background and biography had been carefully pieced together for him, and records had been put in place by USNA Intelligence proving that people had seen the flesh-and-blood d’Angelo. His parents were still alive in a Kuiper Belt greenhab; reportedly they were very private people who’d declined to be interviewed …

D’Angelo had appeared at the Place d’Lumiere projected on the giant screen overlooking the plaza in front of the ConGov pyramid and given a powerful speech decrying the Confederation’s war crimes and urging a cessation of hostilities. That speech, Koenig knew, had been meticulously crafted through recombinant memetic techniques to prepare a war-weary population for the USNA strike at the Verdun fortress, and the capture or death of Korosi, Denoix, and their cronies. The Starlight movement had been gathering strength, momentum, and the unassailable authority of the moral high ground … and no one outside of the innermost reaches of the USNA government appeared to realize that the entire movement was an electronic construct.

“What I need is a physical avatar,” Koenig said ruefully, “not just the electronic version.”

“A physical avatar,” Whitney said, thoughtful. “You mean like a touristbot?”

“Actually—”

“There are some pretty good TRs, sir.” The initials stood for “teleoperated robot,” and referred to simulacra that could be “ridden” long-distance by human operators.

“That won’t be necessary, Marcus.”

“No, really, sir. Dopplebots. We could have a stand-in made up for you that—”

“No, Marcus. I wasn’t serious.”

There were public figures, Koenig knew, simsex actors especially, who mentally rode robots designed to be indistinguishable from their human counterparts. And some tourists used them to explore the surface of Venus or the streets of distant cities without leaving home. He’d always found the idea of robotic public appearances gimmicky … and mildly rude. Showing up in a robot body when people thought it was you seemed deceptive, and a violation of the public trust. If the public spotted the stand-in—and no robotic replica was perfect—he’d never hear the end of it.

He sighed. “When do I have to be there?”

“Twelve thirty, sir. The program begins at one. A shuttle is scheduled to leave Toronto’s waterfront at twelve ten, with a twelve-minute flight.”

The maglev tubes to Washington weren’t open yet.

“Okay. Let’s see what we can get done before then.” He scanned again down the list of items appearing on his in-head, then projected it onto a virtual screen floating above his desk. “Tell me about this one … ‘Collapse in Geneva.’”

“A Starlight mob stormed the offices of the Confederation Senate this morning,” Whitney told him. “The police appear to have joined the mobs, and there’s a complete breakdown of social order …”

In Switzerland, of all places? Orderly, clean, law-abiding Switzerland? It seemed like the rankest blasphemy.

USNS/HGF Concord

In pursuit

0745 hours, TFT

By the time Concord had matched vectors with the alien and closed the range to a few hundred kilometers, Dahlquist had a real problem on his hands.

It wasn’t a matter of betraying the United States of North America … not at all. He’d been following the news feeds while Concord had been posted out in Vesta space, and it was clear that the civil war there was all but over. The Earth Confederation’s remaining fortresses had fallen, its leaders were dead or captured, the Geneva government itself under siege by religious fanatics. If he’d been able to seize Charlie One in the name of the Confederation—and the thought had crossed his mind hours earlier—who the hell would he give it to?

In any case, he remained loyal to the USNA. It was the Prim Sandy Gray he didn’t like, and whom he would disgrace if he possibly could. The guy never should have been promoted to flag rank so quickly—should never have been promoted past lieutenant at all. As Dahlquist saw things, Primitives never developed the same facility with in-head technology as people who’d been wired from birth. They might serve well enough in the military as enlisted personnel, but never as officers.

He didn’t realize it, but he was recapitulating an ancient argument of military service that went back to the old United States, to the British Empire, and even before: you had to be a college graduate to be commissioned as an officer. Arguably, it was an outgrowth of feudalism, when only landed gentry—the nobles—could afford armor and a horse, leaving peasants, by default, to become foot soldiers.

With the presumption that only the wealthy could afford formal education—and a formal education was required to teach a student the history, the tactics, and the deportment necessary for the proverbial officer and a gentleman—it was a system that had worked, and worked well, for something like two thousand years.

There were exceptions, of course. There always had been—the mustangs who came up through the ranks, the battlefield promotions, the noncom who found himself the senior man of an embattled platoon or company. In Dahlquist’s opinion, those scarcely counted. In modern combat, it was vital that an officer have that perfect union of the organic and the machine, the balance of human mind and AI, the speed and grasp of the computer melded perfectly with the intuition and the inventiveness of the human brain.

And upstart Prim admirals just didn’t cut it.

Concord’s AI was painting an image of the alien now. Three of America’s search-and-rescue tugs had already rendezvoused with the ship, latched on with ultra-strong cables, and were now decelerating the alien. Four of the star carrier’s fighters were present as well, standing off somewhat as they oversaw the deceleration. The sun was a tiny, shrunken bright star in the distance, now more than five light-hours—some forty AUs—off, roughly the average distance of tiny Pluto from Sol.

Two USNA warships—a frigate and a destroyer—were still thirty minutes away from rendezvous. That Concord had managed the feat before them was due entirely to the High Guard cutter’s beefed-up maneuvering suite. The same held true for the three SAR UTW-90s—the cutter and the tugs were designed as intercept vehicles, and thus outpaced the warships.

Each SAR vessel carried a crew of five under the command of a lieutenant or a lieutenant commander. Dahlquist was now the senior officer present.

Opportunity presents itself, he thought.

“Open a channel to the lead SAR tug,” he told his own communications officer.

“Lieutenant Commander Mitchell is on the line, sir.”

“Commander Mitchell?” he said. “This is Commander Terrance Dahlquist of the High Guard ship Concord. I am maneuvering to board the alien.”

“Concord,” a voice replied in his head, “this is Fly Catcher. That’s negative on rendezvous, repeat, negative. We are under orders not to board the alien under any circumstances until America has joined us.”

“I am disregarding those orders, Fly Catcher. Maintain deceleration. We’ll take it from here.”

The alien was growing huge in Dahlquist’s inner mind’s-eye window.

“Wave off, Concord! Wave off!”

“Negative,” Dahlquist replied. “We’re going in.”

And then things began to get exciting.

Chapter Six

29 June, 2425

USNS/HGF Concord

Charlie One

0750 hours, TFT

Concord had closed to within a hundred meters of the alien when the sleek gray-green hull directly ahead … changed.

“Fire!” Dahlquist screamed. “All weapons … fire!”

It was a response of pure and immediate panic. Concord’s weapons included lasers, particle beams, and missiles—these last tipped with variable-yield fusion warheads. Firing a spread of Krait missiles into a target that close would have meant incineration for the High Guard vessel.

The command was overridden, however, both by Concord’s AI and by Lieutenant Jeffry Thomas, Concord’s chief weapons officer. The ship’s beam weapons, though, slashed into the alien with what looked like deadly effect. Portions of the hull melted and flowed like syrup, heavy and viscous.

“Captain!” Concord’s helm officer yelled. “We’ve lost control!”

“Damn it, what’s happening?”

“We’re being dragged into that thing!”

Concord drifted forward, accelerating … then plunging into that seething, flowing surface. The liquid peeled back like a blossoming flower, then closed around and over the Concord as Dahlquist’s view was submerged in darkness.

And with a hard jolt, the Concord came to rest.

VFA-96, Black Demons

Charlie One

0751 hours, TFT

“They’re gone!” Connor screamed over the squadron’s tactical frequency. “That thing just fucking swallowed the Concord!”

She felt a surge of panic—a churning, tumbling, empty feeling that had her weak and shaking. Too well, she remembered her fighter being swallowed by a Slan warship seven months ago, out at 36 Ophiuchi AIII.

Damn, she’d thought she was over this. The psychs had probed and analyzed and, where possible, smoothed over her memories of the interrogation, separating the emotion from the simple facts of the events.

“Take it easy, Five,” Mackey told her.

“But what do we do?”

“Get ahold of yourself, Connor! That’s first!”

She gulped down several breaths, struggling to control herself, her fear. The psych sessions had taught her how to engage certain circuits within her cerebral implants.

And the alien monster wasn’t coming after her …

“I’m … okay …” she managed to say.

“Right. All fighters—nice and easy—start pulling back. No moves that can be considered hostile.”

“Might be a little late for that, boss, don’t you think?” Lieutenant Gerald Ruxton pointed out. “Concord was letting loose with everything she had. Of course the aliens think we’re hostile!”

“As long as they’re not shooting at us,” Mackey said, “I think we’re okay.”

“They haven’t done anything yet,” Martinez observed.

“Except eat the Concord!” Connor added.

“Well,” Mackey said, “Concord’s captain was talking about boarding the alien. Looks like he’s just done precisely that. Everybody just keep it cool. And increase your distance. We’ll back off to a couple of hundred kilometers. Slowly …”

It was, Connor thought, a damned peculiar problem. Were they under attack by the alien, or were they now in a peaceful, first-contact situation? There was no way to be sure.

The four Starblades drifted out from the huge alien, which now appeared to have returned to its normal, enigmatic self. The portion along one flank that had momentarily flowed like water was whole again, and apparently solid. And the Concord had vanished.

“So what do we do, Skipper?” Ruxton wanted to know.

“We pass the word to America,” Mackey replied. “And then we wait.”

The Mall

Washington, D.C.

United States of North America

1315 hours, EST

“The men who first founded this city,” Koenig was saying, addressing a crowd that filled the entire Mall and spread out into the streets and steps on all sides, “the men who created it as a seat of government the first time around could not have envisioned the society rebuilding it today. News could travel from New England to the South in a week, perhaps, and buildings like those around us were pieced together by stacking stone blocks upon each other—one at a time—not grown from dirt and a pinch of submicroscopic nanomachines. The human lifespan was five or six decades if you were lucky, ending in pain and senescence if it didn’t end in violence. Transportation on land was by horse or by animal-drawn cart, or you walked. Traveling by sea meant sails and wind power, or oars. And travel by air? Impossible—save, perhaps, for the Montgolfiers’ balloon. Citizens—those who could vote—were exclusively male, exclusively white, and exclusively landowners, and, therefore, rich.

“And yet the government those men established—uneven as it was, unequal as it was, unfair as it was in some few ways—saw the brilliant and masterful unfolding of true democracy. That of the greatest good for the greatest number, of a truly representative government that within just a few more decades became forever identified as the one government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ The instrument that those men created, the Constitution of the United States and its appended Bill of Rights, became the supreme expression of how government can and should work, of government where the rulers derive their power and authority from the governed, and not the other way around. A government with the various branches in balance with one another, checking one another, a barricade against tyranny, injustice, and from both mob rule and from dictatorial rule by a power-hungry elite.”

Physically, Koenig was standing inside a huge plastic bubble grown just for the event, with a stage set up inside, a kind of theater in the round with the dome’s walls projecting a 360-degree view of the surrounding crowd. With him, on chairs grown from the stage itself, were the day’s other speakers. The ten-story-high projection screen rose above the crowd at Koenig’s back, and he was glad he wasn’t able to see it from the podium. There was something about watching your own image towering thirty meters high that could put you off your stride if you were the least self-conscious.

Not that he was—you don’t spend a life as a fighter pilot and then run for office without supreme confidence in yourself. He continued on.

“The men who built this city, who created that government—they were not perfect. But what they created over six centuries ago remains today as a brilliant beacon of intelligence, of reason, of forethought, of far-reaching planning and vision, a beacon that has not been matched since.”

Standing at the podium mid-stage, Koenig read the speech as the words scrolled up his in-head window. He scarcely needed them. He’d helped Frank Carraglio craft this speech, and it was a good one: powerful, moving—a speech Koenig implicitly and fundamentally believed in. One he could recite unaided from his heart.

He wondered how the audience outside was receiving it, though: the physically present crowd—the AI estimates for the gathering exceeded 4 million people—and perhaps half a billion more that were linked in electronically from across the USNA and all over the world.

Koenig tried not to think about that part.

“It is to those men, to their memory, to their vision, and to their hopes for Humankind that we rededicate this city so recently rescued from the ocean’s grasp …”

As he spoke, an alert came through his in-head … a written message scrolling along the bottom of his mind’s eye from Marcus Whitney: Concord tried to initiate contact with Charlie One. Ship vanished inside alien. No further information.

Shit! What the hell was going on there at the solar system’s ragged, far-out edge? What had Commander Dahlquist been thinking, approaching the alien without nearby backup and support? Idiot!

“It was … uh … excuse me. It was a mistake for the government to abandon the Periphery, of course.” Finish the speech—worry about the situation later. He carried on. “It was a mistake to assume that when the sea had claimed our cities that no one remained behind, clinging to their homes.”

Of course he kept on going with the speech. There was nothing he could do about the situation, in any case. The confrontation with the alien was taking place more than five light-hours out. America and her escorts were a hell of a lot closer to the action than he was.

But in an offhand manner, he did wish he was still back in his office. His staff could keep him updated here almost as fast through his in-head links, but at least in his office he felt like he was in control. That was pure illusion, of course. His years commanding a star carrier and, later, a carrier group out among the stars had taught him time and time again that the thoughts and decisions of the senior policy makers back on Earth or at HQMILCOM Mars were largely irrelevant. They could set general policy, but micromanagement was an exercise in utter futility. It was the person in command on the scene who had to call the shots.

At the time, Koenig had been convinced that this was a good thing. With the positions reversed, he wasn’t so sure.

“Technology, however,” he continued, “has given us a chance to correct that old mistake, to take back what was ours, and even to bring forth something new.”

But if this whole thing went bad because a junior High Guard officer had screwed up, he would skin that puppy alive when he got back to Earth.

If he gets back at all.

Koenig acknowledged one thing to himself, however. His speech underscored the vital need for advanced technology—and for the ongoing increase of that technology—to ensure the survival of Humankind. The whole problem between the USNA and the Earth Confederation, the root of the civil war now ending, was the issue of whether or not humans should accept Sh’daar limitations to technology and technological growth. But without nanotechnology—one of the proscribed technologies in the original Sh’daar Ultimatum—Washington, D.C. would have remained a swamp, with most of the old city submerged in a tidal estuary. Nanotech had grown new buildings. More important, it had grown the locks and tidal surge barriers downriver, at Mt. Victoria. It had repaired the sea barrier at the Verrazano Narrows, south of the Manhat Ruins, and the new Broad Sound Barrier off Boston.

In fact, it was proving to be more difficult to reintegrate the inhabitants of the Periphery into the USNA than it was reclaiming the submerged coastal cities. That was a social problem that they would be dealing with for a good many more decades yet to come. Natives of the Periphery—especially the Prims who continued to reject modern technology—distrusted the government that had abandoned them long ago, while many within the USNA continued to think of Prims as all but subhuman. But that was what he was hoping to change, starting with this speech. As much as he hated to admit it—and as much as he wished he was back in his command center—he was glad he had come here in person.

“Washington, D.C.,” he said, “was founded in 1791 as the capital of a new nation, a nation imbued with the then radical philosophy that there should be no distinction between social classes …”

Which, of course, had always itself been something of an illusion, he thought. At the time, women had been second-class citizens, people had owned slaves, and wealthy property owners maintained a kind of aristocracy of wealth. Today, the technical haves held the new wealth, and with it had forced the technological have-nots into occupying a lower social strata.

A law, an executive order, even a whole new city could not erase human nature.

And this old city had been buried in a lot of muck before, more than the rising Potomac ever could have dumped in its streets. The men who’d run this city and this country had succumbed more than once to power hunger, to corruption, to idiot fads and fallacies, to the socialistic abrogation of basic rights, to greed, to deception, to outright theft by means both legal and otherwise. Presidents had been disgraced, impeached, and even murdered; congressmen had ignored or betrayed the rule of law, justices had reinterpreted the Constitution. It was as dark and muddy a history as had ever swallowed this town.

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