Earth Strike (21 page)

The Navy had accepted command attenuation as a fact of life, and trained its command officers to operate with a high degree of autonomy, making both military and political decisions that could easily have a strong effect on life and politics back in the solar system. The problem was that, by long tradition, the military was supposed to be subservient to the civilian government. If the military became too independent in its thinking and operation, civilian oversight and control would be lost. The farther away a fleet or battlegroup was operating, the less control the Senate Military Directorate had over it—command attenuation in action.

Political liaisons like John Quintanilla were the Senate’s answer to the problem, an attempt to put someone into the fleet command structure who represented the political interests of the Senate. Deployed fleet commanders like Koenig despised the idea; political liaisons by their very nature complicated already complex missions, and that could translate as higher losses, quite possibly defeat. Political liaisons rarely had the military training that let them see a developing situation through the strategic and tactical training and experience of a command officer.

“You’re telling me I haven’t heard the last of this,” Koenig said after a moment’s thought.

“Good God! Of
course
you haven’t! As long as we’re saddled with PLs, there’s going to be friction. The PL insisting on doing things his way so the civilians stay in charge, the CO insisting that doing it that way will lose the battle.”

“So what’s going to happen?”

“Nothing for a long time. That’s the problem with political assemblies…or maybe it’s a blessing. They take
forever
to decide something. And by the time they do, their decision may no longer have anything to do with the problem.” She hesitated. “Quintanilla mentioned something in passing this afternoon. He said your deep-strike plan is being reviewed again. He’s against it, of course…but he mentioned that if the Senate approved it, it was tantamount to cutting you off from any Senate oversight whatsoever.”

“Operation Crown Arrow? It’s back on the table?”

“Exactly.”

Operation Crown Arrow had been conceived a year ago, shortly after the twin defeats at Arcturus Station and at Yong Yuan Dan, the Battle of Everdawn. The WHISPERS deep space listening posts on Pluto, Eris, Orca, and distant Sedna had tentatively identified a major Turusch base or supply depot at Alphekka, seventy-two light years from Earth, forty-two light years from Arcturus, forty-four from Eta Boötis.

Intelligence believed Alphekka—Alpha Corona Borealis—might be the Sh’daar/Turusch staging area for operations into human space. Humans had not been out that far, but it was thought that the Turusch homeworlds lay somewhere in that direction. Operation Crown Arrow—
Crown
was a reference to the constellation Corona Borealis, the “Northern Crown,” lying just to the east of Boötis in Earth’s night sky—had been a proposed long-range carrier strike against the presumed base.

The original idea for Crown Arrow had been Koenig’s, first described in a proposal submitted to the Senate Military Directorate eight months ago. The
America
carrier battlegroup would have been the heart of the strike force, which Koenig thought should number at least three carriers and one hundred supporting vessels.

The Directorate, perhaps predictably, had balked. One hundred ships represented about 20 percent of the total Confederation naval force; half of those ships would be logistical and supply vessels, and sending them out beyond the edge of Humankind space would put a serious strain on the Navy’s ability to keep the stay-at-home fleet elements and some hundreds of outposts and colonies supplied.

“So why are they reconsidering Crown Arrow
now
?” Koenig asked.

Mendelson shrugged. “Possibly because it makes sense. Even if Alphekka isn’t an invasion staging point, WHISPERS has picked up enough traffic out in that region to suggest something is going on. Our most serious weakness right now is that we don’t know our enemy. We know nothing about them, their homeworlds, the extent of their empires, or even what they want.”

“We
know
what they want. We become a part of the empire of the ‘Galactic Masters.’
Humankind va Sh’daar
. And we give up our right to continue making our own technological advances. They were pretty clear about that much, at least.”

“A long-range strike like the one you propose might let us learn a lot more about their technological level, their deployment, their political structure, their plans. We’re fighting them blindfolded if we don’t. Anyway…there’s a faction within the Directorate that wants to deploy a battlegroup out into Alphekkan space. It won’t be a hundred ships. It might just be
America
’s battlegroup. But it will be something. And if you’re out there, the Senate’s going to have a tough time calling you on the carpet to answer for Eta Boötis.”

He grinned at her. “Are you
always
this sunshine-optimistic, Karyn?”

“I’m a realist, Alex. Sometimes things
do
break the right way.”

“Not often enough. Excuse me a sec.”

Koenig called up a file in a side window, studying it for a moment. WHISPERS—the unlikely acronym stood for weak heterodyned interstellar signal passband-emission radio search. Ten-kilometer radio telescope antennae orbiting several widely scattered trans-Neptunian dwarf planets far out in Sol’s Kuiper Belt used very wide baseline interferometry to probe target stars at radio wavelengths. It wasn’t as simple as dialing in on alien radio broadcasts; for a century after the advent of radio telescopy, scientists had fretted over the apparent absence of radio signals from other civilizations in space—evidence, it seemed, that Human kind was alone among the stars. By the mid-twenty-first century, it was understood that radio transmissions tended to fade out within a distance of two or three light years, becoming lost in the hash of random interstellar noise and background radiation. There was lots of radio and laser noise out there; it just required very large antenna and extremely fast computer processing to separate it from the background noise.

Large antennae and interferometry baselines of as much as several hundred AUs let sharp-eared AIs sift heterodyned signals out of the static. Alphekka had been a source of weak but numerous signals since the system had first come on-line, back in the mid-twenty-second century.

The fact that Alphekka was in the same general stretch of sky as Arcturus and Eta Boötis, just forty-some light years farther out, strongly suggested that the enemy had a presence there, most likely a military presence.

Disrupting that base with a long-range strike just might stop the enemy’s steady advance into human-colonized space.

“Okay,” he said. “I was checking to see if there was anything new on the Alphekkan transmissions. There isn’t.”

“There wouldn’t be, of course. The signals we’re reading on Pluto are seventy-two years old.”

“I know. But there’s been debate on whether what we’re hearing out there is ship-to-ship stuff, like you might expect from a military force…or background chatter from a civilization. Looks like the jury’s still out.”

On the face of it, Alphekka was an unlikely place to find a civilization. The star consisted of a brilliant type A0 V blue-white star in a close binary embrace with a dimmer, yellow G5 V dwarf just 27 million kilometers away; these circled each other every 17.3 days. Together, the twin stars gave off forty-five times the light of Sol. There was also evidence of an extensive disk of debris and dust about the two stars, a possible solar system in the making…though xenoplanetologists still didn’t understand how such a disk could have survived the gravitational perturbations caused by the binary system at its center.

But
something
strange was going on out there. The disk suggested that there were no planets in the system yet, or that any planets that
had
managed to form were still very young…a few hundred million years old at the most.

And that suggested that the radio traffic WHISPERS was eavesdropping on came from ships or star-orbiting bases—and Alphekka’s location suggested that it was likely the Sh’daar or Turusch staging point for their operations at Arcturus and Eta Boötis, at least.

If only the Senate would authorize a mission to find out.

“It’ll come, Alex,” Mendelson told him. “The important thing is you’re off the hook so far as Eta Boötis is concerned, a least for now. You’ll be summoned to another virtual meeting with the Board of Inquiry tomorrow morning at 0900 for the official notification.”

“Thanks, Karyn. I appreciate your telling me.”

“Any time. So…you want to celebrate?”

“Celebrate? How?”

“I was thinking my quarters. Phobia Green-Alpha.”

“It’s pretty late.”

“So? You’ll be here when we have to report to the Directorate chambers in the morning.”

Koenig and Mendelson had been lovers for a couple of years now, at least off and on. Deployments and reassignments tended to keep couples in the military apart—one reason that the military services tended to adopt the freewheeling polyamory of Earth’s more mobile cultures. Such liaisons weren’t exactly encouraged within the service, especially between people of different ranks, but so long as they didn’t get in the way of routine or spark jealous rivalries, they were tolerated. Sexual relationships were definitely in the old “don’t ask, don’t tell” category that had once defined the homosexual liaisons of earlier centuries. Casual sex with Karyn would have been unthinkable when she’d been his commanding officer on the Lexington.

With them both rear admirals now, and working in different directorates, there was no reason whatsoever not to…“celebrate,” as she’d put it.

“That sounds…very good,” he said.

She smiled. “I’ll expect you, then. You still have my pass code?”

“Yes. I’ll be there in…” He checked his internal time. “Twenty minutes.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

The logistics report, he decided, could wait.

Manhattan Ruins
North American Periphery
1850 hours, local time

Trevor Gray stood atop the ruined skyscraper, staring south into the mist-soaked evening. It was raining, a light sprinkling from a low cloud ceiling, with a chill wind bringing with it the smell of salt out of the south. His uniform kept his body dry and warm, but water dripped from his nose and ran down his cheeks, and he could feel within himself a hint of trembling, despite the smartsuit’s warmth. This was the place from which he’d started in so many in-head replays of the events of five years ago, fifty meters above the hiss of the surf rolling in across East 32nd Street.

South, the gray water was dotted by hundreds of islands, most slumped into mounds, most covered over by vines and low-growing vegetation.

The Manhattan Ruins.

The vegetation-shrouded mounds were all that remained of thousands of buildings, separated from one another by narrow avenues of water, stretching for five and a half kilometers south southwest. A green forest of islands, interspersed with exposed beams and frameworks where concrete and glass had shattered and collapsed. The tallest were marked by flashing automated strobes, warning off low-flying aircraft and personal fliers.

He could just make out the green-shrouded mound of the TriBeCa Arcology, one large island among many, rising less than four kilometers to the south, shadowed and blurred behind the mist and in the fading evening light.

So what was he waiting for? The peaceforcers wouldn’t stop him this time, even if travel to the Ruins was not something the Authority encouraged. So far as they were concerned, the squatties were illegals, squatters on what was still, technically, public property, men and women—social exiles by their own choosing—who either refused to fit in with the decent citizenry or people who were mentally ill and both unable to fit in and unwilling to apply for treatment.

He was still somewhat surprised that the peaceforcer captain he’d spoken with last had actually issued the pass. There was nothing standing in his way now from flying down to TriBeCa and looking up his old tribe.

But he found he didn’t want to go. He’d traveled all this way, all the way from Mars for Void’s sake…and now he didn’t want to fly the last four kilometers.

Was he afraid of meeting Chiseler and Janine and Macro and the rest of his old tribe? Hell…they should be happy for him, right? He’d gotten his ticket punched for a one-way boost out of the Ruins. Plenty of creds, good food, free healthcare, high-tech perks like these water-shedding dress blacks, everything a squattie ever dreamed of.

Was he afraid because now
he
was the Authority?

Fuck that. He was decided now. Stooping, he picked up the gravcycle broom and switched it on, rolling into the saddle and kicking in a gentle boost.

On a wet day like this, Chiseler and the rest would be holed up inside TriBeCa Tower.

They would talk to him. They
had
to.

Squinting against the blast of spray against his face, he arrowed south through the mist-laden afternoon sky.

18 October 2404

USNA
Gallagher
Sol System Inner Kuiper Belt
0029 hours, TFT

Captain David Lederer let himself drift with the surging tide of incoming data. He’d received the first burst transmission at 2220 hours, just over two hours ago.

The destroyer
Gallagher
was on High Guard patrol, and had been fifteen and a half AUs from Neptune when the base on Triton had been destroyed. He’d immediately passed the warning in-system toward Mars and Earth, then ordered
Gallagher
’s grav drives fired up to five hundred gravities. For the past two hours now, the destroyer had been accelerating out into the Kuiper Belt. She’d covered .86 of an AU and was now moving at some 160 kilometers per second, and still accelerating.

He’d ordered a continuous-stream lock on Mars. The ship would continue broadcasting status reports, position and vector, and sensor updates for as long as she could.

Lederer had been with the Confederation contingent at Everdawn. He did not expect that he, his ship, or the four hundred men and women on board would survive the next few hours.

He’d also contacted four other High Guard ships within range, and they, too, were accelerating outward now—the Chinese frigate
Jianghua
, the Indian States’
Godavari
, the Japanese
Hatakaze
, and the American
John Paul Jones
. Their chances for survival during the next few hours were no better than
Gallagher
’s.

The High Guard was one of the few truly international organizations operating out of Earth, a multinational task force designed primarily to monitor the outer reaches of the solar system, track asteroids and comets that might one day be a threat to Earth, and to watch for nudgers. The Earth Confederation had grown out of an economic partnership between the old United States and a number of other nations, most of them former members of the British Commonwealth—Canada, the Bahamas, Australia, and New Zealand. Several non-Commonwealth states had joined later on—Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and the Russian Federation.

The High Guard, however, included ships from the Chinese Hegemony, the Indian States, and the European Union as well, which perhaps made that organization more representative of the entire Earth than the Earth Confederation itself.

The Earth Confederation had become more than an economic alliance in 2132, toward the end of the Second Sino-Western War. In 2129, a Chinese warship, the
Xiang Yang Hong
, had used nuclear munitions to nudge three small asteroids in Main Belt orbits into new trajectories that, three years later, had entered circumlunar space, falling toward Earth.

The
Xiang Yang Hong
had almost certainly been operating independently; Beijing later claimed the captain had gone rogue when he learned of the destruction of his home city of Fuzhou, and had carried out what was essentially a terrorist operation. His plan had been to devastate both the United States and the European Union by dropping all three asteroids into the Atlantic Ocean, causing devastating tsunamis that would wipe out the coastal cities on two continents. U.S. and European fleet elements had destroyed two of the three incoming two-kilometer rocks in what became known as the Battle of Wormwood—a reference to a biblical prophecy in the Book of Revelation that sounded eerily like an asteroid hitting the ocean. One rock—a piece of it, actually, had gotten through, falling into the Atlantic halfway between West Africa and Brazil.

The devastation had been incalculable. The loss of life, fortunately, had been less than it might have been, since most of the world’s coastline cities were already slowly being evacuated in the face of steadily rising sea levels. Even so, an estimated half billion people had died, from West Africa to Spain, France, and England, to the slowly submerging cities of the U.S. East Coast, to the vanishing islands of the Caribbean, to the coastlines of Brazil and Argentina. The ancient term
weapon of mass destruction
had, with that single deadly blow, taken on a radically new and expanded meaning. Coming hard on the heels of the deaths of 1.5 billion people in the Blood Death pandemic, Wormwood’s fall into the Atlantic had come close to ending technic civilization across much of the Earth.

The partial success of the American-EU fleet, however, had spurred further cooperation, and the rapid expansion of the automated High Guard project that had been in place for the previous century. Every space-faring nation on the planet—even the recently defeated Chinese Hegemony—had contributed ships and personnel to the newly expanded High Guard, with the sacred charge that never again would mountains fall from the sky. The Guard’s motto was “A Shield Against the Sky.” Its headquarters was located in neutral Switzerland, at Geneva.

Two centuries later, with the Sh’daar Ultimatum, the High Guard offered the teeming worlds and colonies of the inner solar system their best first line of defense against this new and still mysterious enemy. Their charter had been expanded; besides watching for nudgers—the ships of nation-states or terrorists attempting to push asteroids or comets into new and Earth-threatening orbits—they were tasked with patrolling the outer perimeter of the solar system, identifying incoming ships and, if they were hostile, engaging them.

The High Guard’s oath, a solemn and sacred promise sworn before the souls of those who had died at the Battle of Wormwood, both in space and in the thunderous doom of the incoming tsunamis, offered the lives of the High Guard’s men and women as a literal shield against
any
threat from the solar system’s depths.

It was an immense task…one far too vast to be practical. The High Guard currently numbered about two hundred warships, most of them aging Marshall-class destroyers like the
Gallagher
, or the even older Jackson-class frigates. At any given time, at least half of those vessels were in port for refit, maintenance, and resupply. Typically, they deployed for nine months at a time, patrolling out beyond the orbit of Neptune, serving as backup to the half million remote probes in the forty-AU shell.

That arbitrary shell around Sol gave scale to what was lightly called “the vastness of space.” The surface area of a sphere with a radius of 40 astronomical units was over 20,000 square AUs…close to 450
quintillion
square kilometers.

That worked out to one ship per four and a half quintillion square kilometers—an obvious impossibility. In fact, both patrols and remote sensors tended to be concentrated within about 30 degrees of the ecliptic, which cut down things a bit…but there was always the possibility that an enemy would sneak in from zenith or nadir, where tens of billions of kilometers separated one sentry from the next.

Thinly spread or not, in the thirty-seven years since the Sh’daar Ultimatum, not one alien vessel had approached Earth’s solar system, and the general perception of the civilian population back home was that the war was far away, too far to be a threat.

According to the data flooding in through
Gallagher
’s sensors, that illusion of security had just been ripped away. At least thirty Turusch warships had materialized almost seven hours ago, some six light hours out from the sun and 25 degrees above the ecliptic…roughly in the same part of the sky as Arcturus and Eta Boötis. Exactly what they’d been doing since then was not clear; the ships weren’t registering on long-range tracking, and no more data was coming through from Triton since that one, quick, burst transmission.

But Lederer could make a good guess. Confederation tactics called for launching a high-G fighter or near-
c
bombardment of the target immediately, so that local defenses were overwhelmed. It was possible that enemy near-
c
impactors were already approaching Earth.

The main fleet would accelerate toward the target behind the bombardment and fighters. Turusch ships, depending on their class, could accelerate at anywhere between three hundred and six hundred gravities. That meant that by now they could have traveled anywhere between one and two billion kilometers—say, between six and thirteen astronomical units.

Based on that data, and the assumption that the invaders would be heading for the inner system as quickly as possible, Lederer had given orders to attempt an intercept, calculating an IP—an intercept point—some five AUs ahead, just beyond the orbit of Neptune, and trailing that world by half a billion kilometers. Ideally, all five High Guard vessels would reach the IP within a few minutes of one another.

The operation was not unlike hitting one high-velocity bullet head-on simultaneously with four other bullets, with the marksmen all firing blindfolded. Still,
Gallagher
might be able to get close enough to send Earth an updated report…
if
the enemy fleet was behaving in a predictable manner.

And if there still was an Earth to report to.

“Nav, this is the captain,” he said.

“Yeah, Skipper.”

“If Triton went off the air, it probably means a strike there.”

“Roger that, Skipper. Combat thinks it might have been near-
c
impacters.”

“Right. But it’s also possible that the Trash fleet showed up in person. They don’t know anything about the layout of our solar system, no more than we know about theirs. The smart play might be to muster their fleet somewhere close to the first large outpost they pick up…and that would be Triton. From there, they could watch our response, scope out our defenses, maybe plan a long-range strike once they know where our orbital bases and inhabited worlds are.”

“Makes sense, sir.”

“I want you to prepare a series of course plots. Assume we don’t find anything at the IP. I want you to give me a vector that will carry us into Neptune space. I also want a plot that will send one or two of our ships straight to Triton, bypassing the IP.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Give me a moment here….”

Five aging frigates and destroyers against at least thirty Turusch warships…probably more by now, probably a
lot
more.

The odds, he thought, were not at all good.

Manhattan Ruins
North American Periphery
2009 hours, local time

“Hello! Anyone here?”

Gray’s voice echoed back at him from empty passageways and silent chambers. It seemed impossible that TriBeCa Arcology could be vacant…but he’d been searching through its halls for over an hour now, and he had yet to see any other humans.

He walked down the passageway leading to the suite of rooms he’d lived in with Angela, carrying the rented gravcycle over his shoulder. The broom was his ticket out of this place, and he knew that had he left it up on the roof where he’d landed, it would have been gone by the time he returned.

And
that
had been an odd point, too, now that he thought about it. His family had always maintained a watch up on the arc roof, but there’d been no one there when he’d landed. What in hell was going on?

“It’s Trevor! Trevor Gray!” he yelled. He thought he heard a scuttling sound in the distance, the scrape of shoes on floor tiles. He wasn’t certain. It
might
have been rats. “I’m looking for the TriBeCan Eagles! Is anyone here?”

The sun had set some time ago, and it was dark. Gray was wearing a small but powerful wristlight that illuminated the passageway ahead, but he was beginning to worry about getting lost in this maze.

He
thought
this was the way….

Yes! That was the entrance to the rooms he’d shared with Angela!

Of course his old quarters had long since been occupied by someone else. Ragged curtains had been hung to divide large spaces into smaller, private areas. Mattresses and blankets lay on the floors. The remains of a cook fire, the ashes still warm to the touch, had blackened a patch on what once had been the floor of a sunken living room. None of this stuff was his, however. Others had moved in after he and Angela had gone.

Which was only to be expected. But…surely they would remember him? It had only been five years, after all.

“
Chiseler!
” he shouted, almost screaming the name.

He walked over to the living-room window, what once had been an actual wall-sized picture window and sliding door with a balcony outside. When he and Angela had lived here, the balcony had been long gone, crumbled away a century before, but the window had still been solid, a sheet of scratched and sun-clouded plasglas extending from floor to ceiling. The plasglas was gone now, the opening admitting a steady spray of cold mist from the ongoing drizzle outside.

Carefully, he put a hand out to one frame of the vanished door and looked down, four hundred meters to the water, the depths between island-buildings lost in the growing darkness below, though there was still pale light in the sky. Vines growing on the outside surface of the arcology were curling in through the missing window, and beginning to flourish on the inside.

So why hadn’t the Authority reclaimed the Ruins? The largest buildings, like TriBeCa, were still sound. There’d been plans to rebuild the Old City out over the water using structures like the TriBeCa Arcology as pylons, he knew, for two centuries or more. It was technically feasible, at least.

There’d been no money for such projects after the Crash in the late twenty-second century, when nanotech had overthrown the old economic models. But things were prosperous enough
now
. At least for the rest of the Confederation.

Maybe people just got used to things the way they were. So far as that peaceforcer up in Morningside Heights was concerned, the squatties had always been here, the Ruins always a place of danger and primitive discomfort.