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10 April 2405

VFA-44

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1342 hours, TFT

Please, God, don’t let me screw up, don’t let me screw up, don’t let me screw up …

“And acceleration in four … three … two … one … launch!”

Acceleration slammed Lieutenant Trevor Gray back in the cockpit as his SG-92 Starhawk hurtled down the spinal launch tube and into space. At seven gravities, he traversed the two-hundred-meter length of the tube in a fraction over two and a third seconds, emerging at just under 170 meters per second relative to the carrier. The vast, black, circular dome of America’s forward cap receded swiftly behind him, the ship’s name in faded letters meters high, the word sandblasted to a faded and ragged gray by long voyaging through the interstellar medium. He switched to view forward. Ahead, the local sun showed as a close-set pair of intensely brilliant sparks.

“Blue Dragon One clear,” he called over the communications net. “CIC, handing off from Pryfly.”

“Blue Dragon One, CIC. We have you.”

“Imaging,” he told his ship’s AI. “Show the squadron, please.”

“Blue Two, clear,” a second voice said. Lieutenant Shay Ryan’s Starhawk had launched in tandem with his. Computer imagining showed her ship as a blue diamond, high and forty meters to port. He switched to his in-head display. With his cerebral implants receiving feeds from external sensors all over the craft’s fuselage, his Starhawk seemed invisible now, at least to his eyes, as though he’d merged with his fighter and become a part of it. Ryan’s Starhawk sharpened into high-res magnification, a long and slender black needle with a central bulge, her ship, like his, still in launch configuration.

With a thoughtclicked command, Gray flipped his fighter end for end and began decelerating, his maneuver matched closely by Shay. Other SG-92s were appearing now, spilling two by two from America’s forward launch tubes.

“Blue Dragon Three, clear.”

“Blue Four, in the clear.”

Fighters from other squadrons were dropping laterally from the carrier, propelled by the centrifugal force of the rotating hab modules behind the forward cap, and slowly, a cloud of fighters was beginning to surround her. America, he knew, was just one of many warships in the newly reinforced CBG-18, with several other carriers out there, but, from this vantage point, he couldn’t see any of them save as colored icons painted into his visual cortex by his fighter’s AI.

“Dragonfires,” Gray said over the tac channel. “Go to combat configuration and form up on me.”

“Copy, Skipper,” the voice of Ben Donovan said. “We’re coming in.”

And the other ships of VFA-44 began closing with him.

Skipper …

The title still didn’t fit. The Dragonfires’ skipper, their CO, was Commander Marissa Allyn … but CDR Allyn had gone streaker during the Battle of Alphekka, her fighter badly damaged and hurtling out of control into emptiness. The SAR ships had found her three days later and brought her back, still alive but in a coma. She was still in America’s sick bay ICU, unconscious and unresponsive.

And CAG had told Gray that now he was the squadron commander.

The assignment was strictly temporary and provisional. VFA-44 had come out of the furnace of Alphekka with just three pilots left—Gray, Shay Ryan, and Ben Donovan. And of the three of them, Gray held seniority; Donovan’s date of commission was two years younger than Gray’s, while Ryan was a relative newbie, fresh from a training squadron at Oceana.

Over the past month, the three of them had worked together training a batch of replacement pilots, men and women recruited from other shipboard divisions to fill the squadron’s missing ranks. How well the new squadron performed, how they pulled together as a team, likely, would determine whether Gray would keep his new billet—and perhaps receive an early promotion to lieutenant commander to go with it.

The trouble was that Gray had no desire for either the promotion or the responsibility. He and his wife had been Prims—primitives—squatters in the unorganized and half-drowned ruins of coastal cities around the peripheries of the old United States. As such, they’d not been full citizens, and when Angela had had a stroke, he’d been forced to join the military as a trade-off to get her medical treatment.

Gray’s plan had been to put in the mandatory minimum—ten years—and get out. His time would be up in another six years. Damn it, he was not going to hang around one second longer than he had to.

Other Starhawk pilots began dropping into formation with him as they continued to exit the carrier. Jamis Natham and Calli Loman, both formerly of America’s food services department. Miguel Zapeta, admin. Rissa Schiff, avionics. Will Rostenkowski, personnel. Tammi Mallory, medical department. There were nine newbies in all, not counting Shay, who had been through the fight at Alphekka.

“Stay tight,” Gray told the formation. “Close perimeter defense.”

“Who the hell’s going to attack us out here?” Carlos Esteban—until recently an AI systems analyst—asked. “This star system is supposed to be empty!”

“Just do it, Lieutenant,” Gray said. “You can analyze the tacsit later.”

“Scuttlebutt had it we might be fighting the Europeans,” Mallory said. “Giraurd wants Koenig to go back to Earth.”

“Quiet, Dragonfires,” Gray snapped. “No scuttlebutt, no talking. Line of duty only.”

“Uh … permission to ask a question?” That was Schiff.

“Granted.”

“Is that true, Skipper? We might be facing off against Confederation forces?”

“They haven’t told me, Lieutenant,” Gray told her. “When they do, I’ll pass it along. For right now … follow orders, stay in tight formation, and maintain radio silence.”

But Gray had heard the same scuttlebutt. Everyone in the fleet must have heard it by now. Fleet Admiral Giraurd outranked a mere rear admiral, and the word was that Koenig had been ordered home—presumably with the rest of the battlegroup. For the past two months there’d been intensive speculation on the topic in the squadron ready rooms and lounges. Koenig had figuratively thumbed his nose at the Pan-Europeans and departed from Alphekka, destination … unknown. Had Giraurd followed them?

His tactical display had been partially blocked by America’s Combat Information Center. He could see America and those of America’s fighters that were already deployed, but not the rest of the battlegroup. Unless something had gone horribly wrong, there should be at least another twenty-five warships out there, the rest of the original CBG-18. And there were the forty-one Confederation vessels that had arrived as reinforcements at Alphekka; some of them should have come over to Koenig as well. If they’d emerged too far from America, the light from their collapsing Alcubierre fields might not yet have reached them, but it had been almost half an hour since America had emerged. They all ought to be out there by now. …

“Blue Dragon One, CIC, command channel.”

“CIC, Blue One. Go ahead.”

“This is the CAG. I, ah, heard the chatter just now.”

“Yes, sir.” He wondered if Wizewski was about to chew him a new one for his people’s poor communications security.

“We’re getting the same from every squadron out there. Don’t sweat it. They have a right to know.”

Gray relaxed slightly. “I agree, sir.”

“But not just yet. We’re releasing the tacsit data to squadron leaders, but not to the general fleet. I want you to see this.”

A separate window opened in his mind as new data streamed into his implant. It showed America near the center of a scattering of ships, each tagged with name and hull number.

“It looks like they all did follow us,” Gray said.

“They did. We’re still missing eight ships. They’re probably still outside of our light-speed horizon, and we’ll see them in a few more minutes. Green are ships we know we can trust. Red are probably hostile. Amber are unknowns.”

The twenty-six ships of the original battlegroup were green, Gray noted. So too were twelve more ships—Abraham Lincoln’s battlegroup—which meant they were North American.

Twelve were red … the Pan-European contingent, minus eight stragglers. The remaining nine—the Chinese—were unknowns.

“Sir,” Gray said, “we’re not going to fight them, are we?”

“I don’t know, son. Possibly they don’t know either. They’re probably going to try to bluff us, and the old man is going to call them on it.”

It seemed like utter lunacy. The North Americans comfortably outnumbered the European warships, but an exchange of fire would cause a lot of damage on both sides, something the human fleet simply couldn’t afford this far from home. Damn it, the Sh’daar and the Turusch and the H’rulka were the enemies … not the damned Europeans!

“We expect the French carrier Jeanne d’Arc to attempt to close alongside of the America,” Wizewski continued. “The fighters are going to block her, because we can’t afford to let a ship with her firepower get close enough to fire a broadside. One hundred thousand kilometers. That’s the minimum stand-off distance. Understand?”

“I think so, sir. Are … are we authorized to fire?”

“Only on my command, or on the command of Admiral Koenig himself.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’re going to try our damnedest to talk our way out of this. If we can’t …”

He left the thought unfinished.

“I understand, sir.”

On the tactical display, the Jeanne d’Arc and her consorts were still almost a full astronomical unit away, but they were on a convergent course, closing with the America. The American ships were positioning themselves in a tight globe around the carrier, with the heavy cruisers Valley Forge and Ma’at Mons, along with a number of frigates and destroyers squarely between the approaching French flotilla and the USNA carriers. The Ma’at Mons, particularly, was a heavy bombardment ship … but she’d expended a lot of her warload against the A1-01 orbital factory. Gray wondered if she had enough munitions on board to keep the Europeans at a healthy distance.

Civil war.

Gray had little use for the Terran Confederation. Hell, as a Prim living out on the USNA Periphery, in the ruins of Old Manhattan, he’d had little use for the United States of North America, either. So far as he could tell, the argument between them involved a difference of strategy. The Confederation wanted to talk with the Sh’daar, and perhaps accept terms, while Koenig wanted to draw the enemy off into deep space, away from Earth and her colonies. Gray didn’t understand how the two could be mutually exclusive, or how Koenig could get away with setting Confederation military policy.

If forced to choose between the two, though, Gray would go with Koenig, if only because he was doing what he thought was right, and to hell with the politicians and rear-echelon second-guessers in Geneva or in Columbus.

Koenig was a fighter, and that was enough for Trevor Gray.

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1358 hours, TFT

“Do you think they’ll fight, Admiral?” Captain Buchanan asked.

The voice spoke inside Koenig’s head, since America’s commanding officer was on the ship’s bridge, forward from the Combat Information Center, which was the central brain for the entire battlegroup. Koenig was looking down into the tactical display tank, where a cloud of green, amber, and red icons drifted toward a seemingly inevitable collision.

“I don’t know, Randy,” Koenig said. “I don’t know Giraurd. Can’t get a handle on him.”

He’d called up every bit of biographical data on Francois Giraurd that he could find in the Fleetnet database, but found little that was useful. Giraurd was only fifty years old, remarkably young for a grand admiral. Born in 2344, he’d been twenty-three, an engineering major at the Sorbonne, when the Sh’daar Ultimatum had come down through their Agletsch proxies. He’d entered the French Acádemie d’Astre as a midshipman cadet in 2368, the year of the disaster at Beta Pictoris, the opening round in the Sh’daar-Confederation War.

His first command had been the gunship Pégase in 2374, and on his promotion to capitaine de frégate five years later he’d been given the command of the De Grasse, serving with the Terran Confederation’s Pan-European contingent.

He’d never commanded a ship in battle, however, for either Pan-Europe or the Confederation. He’d made contre-amiral in 2389, at age 40, then vice-amiral in 2394, and vice-amiral d’escadre in 2397, a spectacularly swift rise up the hierarchy of flag rank. His final promotion to grand-amiral had been conferred in 2403. He’d been in command of a joint Franco-German-Russian fleet in Earth Synchorbit, Koenig noted, during the Defense of Earth, but that fleet had not seen combat.

An uncle of Giraurd’s had been the French prime minister from 2385 through 2397, which just might explain his lightning rise through the ranks. He also had a cousin, General Daubresse, currently on the Confederation Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Giraurd family was one of the wealthiest in Pan-Europe. Family, political, and financial connections weren’t supposed to have any influence on promotions within the Confederation military, but everyone was all too aware of the reality. Both Pan-Europe and the UNSA had families who’d rotated between politics and the military going back for generations.

“I think he’s more bluff and bluster than anything else,” Buchanan said. “The real problem is going to be DuPont and the politicos back in Geneva. I’d like to know exactly what Giraurd’s orders are right now.”

Koenig had been thinking the same thing. Clearly, the Confederation government had hoped that Girard’s arrival would overawe Koenig enough that he would meekly return to Earth—coupled, carrot and stick, with the promise of being made president of the Confederation Senate.

“Admiral? This is fleet communications,” Lieutenant Julio Ramirez said, interrupting electronically.

“Excuse me, Randy. Go ahead, comm.”

“Incoming transmission from Jeanne d’Arc. Time lag … seven minutes, twenty seconds.”

“Very well.” Koenig opened the channel to include Buchanan. “Captain? You might want to listen in on this.”

“Of course, sir.”

A window opened in Koenig’s mind, static-blasted, then clearing. Giraurd’s face peered out at him. “Admiral Koenig, this is Grand Admiral Giraurd, on board the Confederation star carrier Jeanne d’Arc. I must inform you that I have the authority of the Terran Confederation Senate to place you under arrest if you do not comply with their orders.”

“He followed us for a hundred and fourteen light years to tell us that?” Buchanan asked.

“He probably can’t go back empty-handed,” Koenig replied, as Giraurd continued talking in the background. The transmission was strictly one-sided, a monologue. It would take another seven and a half minutes, nearly, for any response to get back to the approaching Jeanne d’Arc.

“My orders,” Giraurd was saying, “are to take command of CBG-18 and organize its immediate return to Earth. …”

“So what are we going to do about it?” Buchanan asked.

“What am I going to do about it,” Koenig replied. “No sense in your career getting fried too.”

“Admiral, we’re long past that point. If they hang you, they’re going to hang every senior officer in the battlegroup.”

Giraurd kept speaking. “You are hereby directed to shut down your maneuvering drive and your weapons systems and prepare to receive the Jeanne d’Arc alongside. I am awaiting your immediate reply. Giraurd, Jeanne d’Arc, out.”

“Well,” Koenig said. “Short and to the point.”

“We’re going to have to make a fight-or-flight decision in another … call it three hours, sir.”

“I know. Ramirez?”

“Yes, Admiral.”

“Can you patch through a high-focus laser on Illustrious?”

There was a brief delay. “Yes, sir. No problem. We have a clear shot. The time lag is … make it seven thirty-five.”

“Do so. I want Captain Harrison on the link, personal and private.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

Koenig knew Captain Ronald Fitzhugh Harrison, the skipper of the British assault carrier Illustrious. If Giraurd was bluff and bluster, Harrison was the real deal. He was a veteran of a number of actions, including both Sturgis’s World and Everdawn against the Turusch; Cinco de Mayo, against EAS; and the Chinese Hegemony and Spanish rebels, and he included among his service medals both the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross and the Distinguished Service Cross.

“Jeanne d’Arc has tagged their transmission with an immediate response requested, Admiral.”

“Ignore them.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Koenig thought for a moment, then began recording his transmission to Harrison.

“Hello, Ron. This is Alex, on the America. I’m sure you’re under orders not to receive transmissions from us, but before you cut me off you’d better have a look at the attached intel. They might not have told you everything.

“If you’d care to chat, tag me back. Koenig, awaiting your reply. Out.”

He attached a file with the name “Operation Crown Arrow” and uploaded it to Fleet Communications. It would be on its way down a laser beam aimed at the Pan-European carrier Illustrious within seconds.

It would be more than fifteen minutes before he could expect a reply.

For almost four decades, since the Sh’daar Ultimatum, the Terran Confederation had been shrinking, its borders on several fronts relentlessly pushed back by the encroaching Sh’daar Alliance. They’d taken Rasalhague, forty-seven light years from Sol, in 2374. Twenty-three years later, they’d hit Sturgis’s World, at Zeta Herculis, thirty-five light years out.

And a few months ago, just before CBG-18 had left the Sol System, they’d taken the colony at Osiris, 70 Ophiuchi AII. That was just sixteen and a half light years away, practically on Earth’s doorstep, astronomically speaking.

The Sh’daar and their subject races were closing in.

Operation Crown Arrow had been devised to buy the Confederation time, a raid deep, deep into Sh’daar-controlled space, striking at fleet assembly points, manufactory centers, and staging areas. WHISPERS, the Weak Heterodyned Interstellar Signal Passband-Emission Radio Search, had detected a number of sources of faint, intelligently directed radio signals and identified them as probable sites of Sh’daar or Turusch activity. The immense manufactory at Alphekka, sucking in debris from the star’s protoplanetary disk and building Turusch warships, had been one of the loudest of these, but there was a list of more distant sites as well.

And with the capture of the Alphekkan manufactory had come the Alphekkan Directory, a Turusch list of other military bases within about five thousand light years of Sol.

That list proved one important thing. The Sh’daar and their Turusch proxies were stretched thin. It couldn’t really be otherwise, not in a galaxy of 400 billion stars. The enemy couldn’t maintain a guardian fleet within every star system. They couldn’t even put guards within every inhabited system.

Koenig was certain now that the Alphekkan base had been designed for nothing less than building a fleet intended to subjugate—possibly to destroy—Earth. A huge number of ships, empty and waiting, had been captured there. The Sh’daar might be planning on using the newly captured base at 70 Ophiuchi, but that was across 42 degrees of Earth’s sky, a straight-line distance of 62.5 light years from Alphekka. The almost overwhelming likelihood was that the enemy had hit 70 Ophiuchi as a diversion, to pull human fleet resources away from Sol. The main strike, Koenig thought, would come from the direction of the constellation of Corona Borealis, from Alphekka.

Operation Crown Arrow called for an initial strike at Alphekka in order to cripple the Sh’daar assets there … and that strike had been an unprecedented success. But the follow-on had called for CBG-18 to continue deeper into Sh’daar space, ideally drawing off the enemy forces now pressing so hard on Sol, getting them to follow America and her consorts.

Exhaustive analyses had gone into the planning. Step by step, Koenig, using a small army of artificial intelligences, had shown conclusively that running from point to point to meet individual Sh’daar advances—like the taking of Osiris—would inevitably leave Earth vulnerable to a final, overwhelming attack. The Confederation did not have the capacity in personnel, in equipment, or in industrial strength to meet the Sh’daar on anything like an equal basis long term.

That, Koenig, thought, should have been self-evident. According to the alien Agletsch, the Sh’daar dominated something like a third of the galaxy, which meant more than 100 billion suns, billions of habitable worlds, and an estimated 5 million technic civilizations. The Confederation had Sol and a handful of colonized star systems—twenty-five, at last count, plus a couple of hundred outposts and research stations. Twenty-five worlds against an unknown number of billions … a flea against some giant, enormous extinct beast, a tyrannosaur, a titanothere, or an elephant. It was impossible. …

But Koenig had an idea that might work. Alphekka had been a spectacular victory; now, CBG-18 needed to hit the next target, and the next one after that. The Alphekkan Directory had pointed him to a likely candidate, a star system not listed on any human catalogues, but known to the Agletsch as Texaghu Resch.

Hit that, and Koenig believed that every Sh’daar fleet within a thousand light years would be chasing him. After that …

“Admiral? Incoming … from Captain Harrison, on the Illustrious.”

Koenig checked his internal clock. What the hell? Only five minutes had passed since he’d sent the message to Harrison; he hadn’t even had time to receive it yet. This must be one of those “great minds” moments; Harrison had tried to reach him within moments of his trying to communicate with Harrison.

“Put it through. Randy? Listen in, please.”

Within his mind, a communications window opened, and Harrison’s face appeared. “Alex! This is Ron Harrison. Remember me? The academy speech, two years ago.”

Koenig remembered. The two of them had together addressed the 2403 graduating class at the Naval academy. It wasn’t the last time he’d seen the man, but it was the last time he’d had more than a few minutes to talk with him.

“What the hell is going down, Alex?” Harrison continued. “Giraurd is about to bust a gut. He’s calling you a traitor and worse, and he’s told us that he intends to attack your squadron if you don’t do exactly what he says.

“This mess is a put-up hatchet job, I’m certain of that. This isn’t the Senate speaking. It’s a small clique inside the Senate—the damned Conciliationists. They haven’t figured out yet that appeasement never works.

“Now, I notice the other USNA ships in our flotilla broke off and followed you. That was to be expected. Illustrious and two others, Warspite and Conqueror, are under my direct command … and I’ll be damned if I’m going to see them fire the opening shots of a civil war. Give the word, and I’ll slide the three of us over to your side of the line.

“Harrison, awaiting your reply. Out.”

“Well, well,” Buchanan said. “Division within the enemy’s ranks?”

“They’re not our enemies,” Koenig said.

He was thinking furiously. How well did he trust Harrison? Was this a genuine offer to change sides … or was it a covert move directed by Giraurd, an attempt to get three major warships in close to the America? Koenig hated the paranoid thought, but he had to consider every possibility.

What, he wondered, had been the speech at the academy? When the topic didn’t come immediately to mind, he downloaded it from his personal database. Koenig’s speech had been about the need to be vigilant and develop a unity of purpose and strategy in the war against the Sh’daar. Harrison’s speech had been titled “The Worm Within: Covert Penetration of the Enemy’s Infrastructure.” He’d been telling the graduating midshipmen that they needed to think outside the box, to think not only in terms of classical fleet strategies, but to use high-tech infiltration techniques to tap into alien command and control systems. Koenig had done exactly that three months before, when he’d deployed a small SEALs team to covertly breach and enter a giant H’rulka warship moving into the Sol System in order to establish contact with the beings inside.

And now, Koenig thought, Harrison was using the title as a warning. This was a covert attempt to get his forces in close to the America.

“Ramirez,” Koenig said. “Reply to Captain Harrison, personal and confidential. Message begins.

“Hey, Ron, you Limey bastard. Got your message, all of it.” He thought for a moment. Chances were good that Giraurd was tapped in to Illustrious’s comm suite and reading the mail. He decided not to mention his previous message, which Giraurd may or may not have seen.

“The thing about a civil war,” Koenig went on, “is that it is never civil. We can’t afford to bloody each other, and I refuse to become the bone of contention that splits open the Terran Confederation. The enemy is out there, not within our own ranks.

“I appreciate your offer, but for now, I’d prefer that Illustrious, Warspite, and Conqueror remain with the Pan-European fleet. We are establishing a no-cross line one hundred thousand kilometers from the America, and we ask that you respect that.

“I hope that when this is over, you and I can sit down in a wardroom, your ship or mine, and have a cold one and a good laugh about this. For now, please stay clear.

“Koenig, America, out.”

In the tactical tank, the two fleets continued to draw closer together.