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21 December 2404

High Guard Destroyer Qianfang Fangyu

Entering Earth Space, Sol System

1440 hours, TFT

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

It would now be within thirty minutes of Earth.

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

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

Palisades Eudaimonium

New York State, Earth

1941 hours, EST

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

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

He looked up. “About what?”

“About us? About what happened. …”

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

She shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve missed you, Trev.”

He didn’t answer.

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

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

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

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

“Trevor …”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s not fair!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Damned monogies …”

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

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

“Those were … friends?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Trevor—”

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

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

“Trevor? What is it?”

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

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

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

H’rulka Warship 434

Cis-Lunar Space, Sol System

1446 hours, TFT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Weapons ready for combat,” Swift Pouncer reported.

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

“Accelerate now. …”

And the H’rulka ship began twisting space.

VFA–44 Dragonfire Squadron

Giuliani Spaceport

New York State, Earth

2018 hours, EST

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

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

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

“Gray?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Seven, flight ready,” Lieutenant Walsh said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Roger and Godspeed, VFA–44.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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