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More fragile still, though, was the web of orbital structures just ahead in America’s path. SupraQuito hung suspended on the slender tether of its elevator cable in synch-orbit, directly above Earth’s equator some 35,783 kilometers above the top of the mountain to which it was anchored. The structure—or interconnected series of structures, actually—was an enormous collection of hab modules, shipyards, orbital factories, environmental facilities, power plants and collectors, agro spheres, and docking facilities suspended between the elevator dropping to Earth, and the support tether leading up to the anchor some thirty thousand kilometers farther out.
From here, SupraQuito—including the tangle of structures that housed the Earth Confederation government—was visible, barely, as a thread-slender gleam of reflected sunlight, with constellations of tiny stars showing in the shadows. Some day, a thousand years hence, perhaps, SupraQuito would join with the other two space elevators, at Singapore and at Tanganyika, and become a true, inhabited ring encircling the Earth. At the moment, the entire massive structure appeared gossamer and delicate, far too insubstantial to trap the oncoming bulk of the Star Carrier America.
America herself was at the helm. The powerful AI residing within the carrier’s electronic network possessed far more memory and processing power—by several orders of magnitude—than did a merely human brain. Exact comparisons between the relative brainpower of man and machine were meaningless, however, and probably impossible to calculate in any case. America’s mind, if that was the proper term, was wholly focused on the ship, its systems, its functioning, its navigation and control. At the moment, she was judging the remaining distance between her prow and Docking Tube One at the SupraQuito Military Fleet Base now just a few hundred kilometers ahead, and her own rate of deceleration. With a closing velocity of 8.64 kilometers per second, she needed to increase the gravitational mass currently being projected dead astern by 37 percent in three … two … one … now.
America kept up a running dialogue with her counterpart at Fleet Base Approach Control, with every aspect of her vector checked hundreds of times each passing second. The docking facility was not stationary, of course. Its omega, its angular velocity, kept it precisely above its attachment point in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador. At synchronous orbit, this worked out to 3.0476 kilometers per second.
For ten long seconds, America decelerated. With the ship enmeshed within the gravitational field of the projected singularity aft, the deceleration was unfelt by the vessel’s passengers and crew. For them, the slowly rotating hab rings provided spin gravity. America slowed … slowed …
A final, precisely timed nudge from singularities to starboard gave her the necessary 3.0476 kps lateral velocity.
And with perfect choreography the massive carrier dropped into the sweet spot just five kilometers off the docking port, all singularities winking out before they could warp the delicate structure of the base. Grappling tethers, extended along the carrier’s length, reached toward the dock. America would be warped into her berthing space—an ancient seafaring term that had nothing to do with her space-bending Alcubierre faster-than-light drives. The tethers connected with grappling points along the berthing area and began to contract. A small fleet of powerful little tugs emerged from the base, taking up station and nudging the carrier toward the dock. Slowly, very slowly, the quarter-million-ton carrier was hauled into port.
While America’s AI was far more powerful in most respects than human intelligence, the ship possessed nothing like human emotion. She heard the cheers from personnel on her bridge and in her CIC, from lounge decks and ready rooms and flight decks where members of her crew had gathered to watch the docking. Most of them, evidently, were delighted to be home, though the carrier had only an academic understanding of what that might mean. America had been on extended patrol for the past six weeks, watching for evidence of further incursions by the enemy Turusch. Her admiral had been ordered home to attend a ritual that America did not understand at all, even in theory.
The tether cables continued to contract and the dockyard tugs continued to nudge, drawing the ship closer and closer to her berth. Braces gently swung out to arrest that movement with a jar barely felt by the humans on board. Magnetic clamps snapped home, and the debarkation tube extended from the berthing module to America’s quarterdeck, located in zero-G at her central spine, immediately abaft the shield cap and just forward of the still rotating hab modules.
“All hands, this is the Captain.” The voice was that of Captain Randolph Buchanan, America’s commanding officer. “Welcome home!”
But for the Star Carrier America, this certainly was not home.
This was a temporary waypoint, a momentary interruption of her duties, of her electronic life.
For America, home was always … out there.
Admiral’s Quarters, TC/USNA CVS America
SupraQuito Fleet Base
Earth Synchorbit, Sol System
1405 hours, TFT
“Why in a quantum-warped hell do I have to go to this thing?” Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig glared at his own image projected on the wall screen in his quarters.
“Your adoring public, of course,” a voice replied in his head. “They want to see you, shake your hand, and give you the worship due a conquering hero.”
“Bullshit,” Koenig growled. “I think it’s just more politics, and the sooner I’m back on America’s flag deck the better, so far as I’m concerned.”
“Harsh words from the man who saved Earth.”
He winced a bit at that. He’d saved Earth, yes, in what was now being called the Defense of Earth, a rare and hard-won naval victory just two months ago. But there’d been losses … terrible losses. And one of them …
“Let me see you, Karyn,” he said.
The room’s electronics projected a holographic image into the suite’s sunken living area, a smiling woman Koenig’s age in the black-and-gray dress uniform of a Confederation Navy rear admiral. She looked … perfect, exactly as he remembered her.
Exactly as she’d been before the high-velocity Turusch impactor had slashed through the military synchorbital base above Mars known as Phobia, wrecking Mars Fleet CIC, the fleet dockyard, and killing thousands of civilian, Marine, and Navy personnel … including Karyn Mendelson.
He’d recovered her PA, her personal assistant. Copies had resided within his own communications implants, and in his office on board the Star Carrier America, and elsewhere. When she’d been alive, it had been able to project an AI simulacrum, an avatar, of Karyn indistinguishable from the living person over any communications or virtual net links. PAs could project the owner’s image to field the flood of routine requests and calls received every day. Such avatars were smart enough to hold conversations and even make routine decisions for the original.
They weren’t the same, though, weren’t as responsive or as smart, and most important, they weren’t flesh and blood.
God, he missed her.
The image in front of him looked a little sad. “You really should see the psych department,” she told him. “You’re hanging on to the … memories, using them to keep yourself from having to grieve.”
“Since when did you get reprogrammed as a psytech?” he asked the image. He tried to keep the words light and bantering, and knew he’d failed.
“Karyn Mendelson had considerable psych experience,” the image told him. “She commanded the fleet at Arcturus Station last year, remember, before she was assigned to Admiral Harrison’s command staff.”
“I know, damn it, I know. I just … I just don’t want to lose you.” Again. …
“Alex, you have lost me. Lost her, rather. A PA simulacrum cannot substitute for a real human.”
“Maybe not,” he replied, stubbornly sullen. “And maybe you’re how I can … get used to the idea that she’s gone.”
“A psytherapy session would be better, Alex.”
“Look, I don’t want to talk about it now, okay? I’m supposed to be at this damned reception tonight. The Eudaimonium Arcology.”
“Yes, Alex.”
And that, he thought glumly, perfectly summed up the difference between a PA avatar and the real person—ignoring the fact that you couldn’t touch an avatar. The real Karyn would never have let things rest there, would have kept arguing with him if she thought he was doing something stupid. Her PA’s holographic projection, directed by certain software protocols, simply agreed with whatever he told it to do.
It didn’t help that the AI program, likely, was right. The Navy relied heavily on advanced psychiatric medicine these days, including the use of elaborate virtual psytherapeutic replays of traumatic events, to treat the casualties of modern warfare. He’d been through virtual simulations himself more than once. Nothing to it. …
He just didn’t want to forget her.
A comm signal chimed in his head. “Admiral?” It was his senior aide, Lieutenant Commander Nahan Cleary.
“Yes, Mr. Cleary.”
“It’s time to go ashore if you want to get there in plenty of time.”
“I’ll be right there.” He checked his inner time readout. Just past nineteen, Fleet Time, which was GMT for Earth. SupraQuito was in the same planetary time zone as the Eudaimonium Arcology, a five-hour difference; it was now 1409 EST.
Lieutenant Commander Cleary was stretching somewhat the need for urgency. Admirals did not ride the space elevator with the general public, which would have meant a two-hour trip down the express to Quito, and another hour in the subsurface gravtube to New New York. The admiral’s barge on board the America would get him to the Eudaimonium Arc in less than an hour. The invitation was for seventeen, local time, so he still had almost two hours before he absolutely had to leave. Cleary, however, like all good aides, tended to fuss worse than a nagging PA, and didn’t like to entertain even the possibility that his admiral would be late.
He wished he could blow off the invitation entirely, though. He was busy working on a set of tactical evaluations with Fleet HQ, and he didn’t have time for this nonsense.
But for military personnel an invitation from the president of the Confederation Senate himself was an order, not a suggestion, and Fleet Admiral Rodriguez would be there as well.
Better to go and get the damned thing over with.
Another chime sounded, and this time Karyn’s image appeared, his personal assistant serving now as his secretary.
“What is it, Karyn?” he asked.
“An incoming fleet communication, Alex,” she said. “You’re really going to want to see this.”
“Put it through.”
A window opened in his mind, and he felt the flow of the encrypted data feed. Keys within his implanted circuitry opened the message, and he found himself looking down on another world.
“ONI/DeSpaComCent to all units with Crystal Tower clearance and above,” an emotionless voice, probably an AI, said. “We have an incoming transmission from an ISVR–120 dispatched to the Arcturus system six weeks ago. Data is raw, with only preliminary analyses by this department. …”
Within his mental window, Koenig could see the planet and its moon. A cascade of printed data scrolled down one side of his awareness, but he didn’t need to read it to recognize the gas giant Alchameth and its largest satellite, Jasper. A bright blue targeting reticule marked a silvery pinpoint—Arcturus Station in orbit over a cloud-swathed moon. A dozen smaller reticules, each bright red, marked Turusch ships in orbit around Jasper.
His experienced inner eye took in the Turusch ships, each with its id tag giving type, mass, and readiness. Two Beta-class battlewagons, plus at least ten cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers. That was a fair-sized battle fleet, and suggested that the Turusch were waiting for a possible Confederation counterattack into the system.
Not that that was going to happen anytime soon. Confederation Fleet Command had been reluctant to re-engage the enemy. The Defense of Earth might technically have been a victory, but it had been a damned close-run thing.
The gas giant, simmering in the sea of radiation from giant Arcturus just 20 AU distant, showed the bright yellow, orange, red, and brown striations of atmosphere belts, whipped around the massive planet by violent high-altitude winds.
The scene moved jerkily, frame by frame, and the images were grainy and difficult to resolve. They would have been pulled from a seemingly uniform starbow of light by sensory correction software on the probe, and, as the voice had warned, hadn’t yet been massaged by the ONI analysts on Luna. But as the probe moved past planet and moon, the moon dropped from view outside of the camera angle and the probe’s optics began zooming in on Alchameth.
Another blue reticule appeared, highlighting something above the banded cloud tops. Koenig resisted the impulse to squint, patiently waiting as the images—drastically slowed by the relativistic time difference between the probe and the outside world—zoomed in frame by frame.
There was something there. …
Sunlight glinted, a silver-orange glitter above orange clouds. A spacecraft? The probe’s optical sensors zoomed in closer. It looked like a flattened balloon, but it must have been immense to be visible at this range, many kilometers across. And it was rising above the highest cloud layers, now, so it must be a ship … or possibly an aircraft.
A side window opened, showing schematics of a H’rulka ship, something encountered by humans only once so far.
Turusch and H’rulka ships together at Arcturus, just 37 light years from Sol.
The afternoon, suddenly, had become a lot more interesting.
VFA–44 Dragonfire Squadron
Approaching Columbia Arcology
United States, Earth
1655 hours, EST
Lieutenant Trevor Gray descended above the ocean, dropping toward the ruin of Old New York.
Linked in with the AI computer of his SG–92 Starhawk, his cerebral implants were receiving optical feeds from sensors grown temporarily all over the craft’s fuselage. From his point of view, his fighter was invisible—in fact, he was the fighter, hurtling through the early evening sky off the eastern seaboard of the United States. The winter sun had set twenty-five minutes before; the sky was still a crisp and brilliant blue, the twilight illuminating the dark rolling waves below.
Around him, in the crystalline sky, eleven other Starhawks traveled with him in close formation, each jet-black ship now morphed into atmospheric flight mode—broad delta shapes with down-curving wingtips carving through thin air at a sedate four times the speed of sound. They’d departed from the military spaceport at Oceana just five minutes earlier, swinging far out over the ocean to avoid disturbing coastal communities with their sonic boom. The Manhat Ruins now lay only a few kilometers ahead.
“Look smart,” the squadron leader said over the unit’s tactical channel. “They want a nice show down there. Cut back to fifteen hundred kph and descend to twelve hundred. Tighten it up, people.”
Commander Marissa Allyn was the CO of VFA–44, the “Dragonfires,” and flying the lead Starhawk, hull number 101. Until recently, she’d been the CAG of America’s Space Wing, though she’d never been confirmed and, just days ago, a new CAG had been brought on board. America’s fighter wing was still reorganizing, still licking its wounds after the terrible casualties suffered during the Defense of Earth.
In three groups of four flying wingtip to wingtip, the Starhawks dropped closer to the blur of blue-gray water beneath their keels.
“And … descending to eight hundred meters,” Allyn continued.
To port, Gray was aware of a smear of movement, the coastline of the old state of New Jersey, a stretch of ground until recently given over to swampland and mangrove but now swept clean, barren and forbidding. Still descending, they rocketed past the sweeping, broken curve of the Verrazano Narrows Dam, one of the megastructures raised in the twenty-first century in what had proven to be an expensive but unsuccessful bid to save the city ahead.
Still slowing, still descending, the squadron passed over what was left of New York City.
Forests of steel superstructure marking the largest building, the crumbling façade of the TriBeCa Tower, all rose above dirty, surging water. Vine-shrouded structures slowly eroding into the sea. Where once there had been a square-grid network of city streets, there were now narrow canals, canyons filled with water and the dark pockets of the coming night.
New York City had first been submerged three centuries before, when Hurricane Cynthia had smashed a half-kilometer gap through the Verrazano Narrows Dam and the sea—now twelve meters higher than the southern tip of Manhattan—had poured in. The vibrant metropolis had been smashed, then drowned; the shattered buildings still standing had rapidly crumbled into decayed ruins or been overgrown by green masses of porcelain-berry, kudzu, and other creeping vines, giving them the look of sheer-sided green islands rising with a curiously geometric orderliness from the sea.
Even so, the Ruins of Manhattan had been … home.
Gray had been a Prim, one of some thousands of people living in the Ruins outside the all-encompassing embrace of modern technology. For him, until five years ago, home had been the shattered shell of the old TriBeCa Tower Arcology, a torn and battered mountain passing now to port.
The scene, spread out around and below him now, however, illuminated by the pale glow of twilight, seemed alien now. The place was changed, shockingly so. During the Defense of Earth two months earlier, a Turusch high-velocity impactor had generated a tidal wave that had smashed north through the Narrows. Hundreds of the remaining buildings sticking up out of the water had been toppled, and a vast forest of tangled debris was now strewn across Morningside Heights, Yonkers, and the swamps of Harlem. Most of the building-islands, once covered by lush vegetation, were naked now, stripped of all life by the passing wave two months before.
Thousands of people—Prims and squatties, like Gray in his former life—had lived within the ruins, comprising a modern-day hunter-gatherer society largely ignored by the civilized folk inland.
Gray wondered how many had survived the tidal wave … how many of the people he’d once called family and friends survived.
And the civilized communities here had suffered as well. The tidal wave had swept across Morningside Heights, bringing down the kilometer-high tower of the Columbia Arcology. An instant after crossing the shoreline between the Manhat Ruins and Morningside Heights, Gray saw the mountain of rubble that was all that was left of Columbia.
Angela. …
She hadn’t been there when the tower had fallen. At least, he didn’t think so.
But he hadn’t heard, not for sure.
He forced his thoughts from that pain, focusing instead on his flying. At just above the speed of sound, the twelve spacecraft thundered across the Hudson River and past the Palisades Eudaimonium precisely on schedule.
The eudaimonium—the name came from the ancient Greek philosophical concept of perfect and complete happiness—was part of the Greater New New York complex north of Manhattan. Protected from the impactor tidal wave two months before by the towering walls of the Palisades overlooking the Hudson, it was the heart of the New City, a cluster of arcology towers, arches and skyways, domes, slabs, and floater habs housing 5 million people. Tonight, the local population had increased by at least a third. As the Starhawks roared past, Gray could see the lights and thronging crowds below, an ocean of people celebrating what had been rather grandiloquently billed as the “Yule of the Millennium.” The central Eudaimon Plaza appeared to be packed with celebrants; lasers arced across the sky amid the flicker and pop of fireworks. Tens of thousands of decorative lights created the impression of a galaxy picked out in reds, greens, and golds.
“Landing lights, people!” Allyn commanded, and the squadron lit up, twelve dazzling stars streaking across the darkening sky at five hundred meters. The sonic boom of the squadron’s passing must have rattled walls and transplas windows ten kilometers away.
The squadron over-flight had been timed to rattle those windows at seventeen precisely, kicking off the festivities at the arcology complex. Confederation Senate President Regis DuPont was down there, somewhere, as were the presidents of the North American Union, America del Sur, and Europe; a dozen Confederation senators; a host of VIPs from the military, from the Union capital at Columbus, Ohio; and even a handful of governors from extrasolar colony worlds—from Chiron, from Thoth, and even from Bifrost.
The party tonight was a very big affair.
Mission accomplished, the squadron banked and decelerated, making for the Giuliani Spaceport northwest of the city. A flotilla of civilian pubtran fliers was waiting for them there; the Dragonfires, too, had also been invited, though they’d be arriving at the party a few minutes late.
As he peeled off for final approach, morphing his Starhawk into landing configuration, Gray could only think about the person he’d left behind …
… About Angela.
ONI Special Research Division
Crisium, Luna
1201 hours, TFT
