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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.