by Ian Douglas
The partial success of the American-EU fleet, however, had spurred further cooperation, and the rapid expansion of the automated High Guard project that had been in place for the previous century. Every space-faring nation on the planet—even the recently defeated Chinese Hegemony—had contributed ships and personnel to the newly expanded High Guard, with the sacred charge that never again would mountains fall from the sky. The Guard’s motto was “A Shield Against the Sky.” Its headquarters was located in neutral Switzerland, at Geneva.
Two centuries later, with the Sh’daar Ultimatum, the High Guard offered the teeming worlds and colonies of the inner solar system their best first line of defense against this new and still mysterious enemy. Their charter had been expanded; besides watching for nudgers—the ships of nation-states or terrorists attempting to push asteroids or comets into new and Earth-threatening orbits—they were tasked with patrolling the outer perimeter of the solar system, identifying incoming ships and, if they were hostile, engaging them.
The High Guard’s oath, a solemn and sacred promise sworn before the souls of those who had died at the Battle of Wormwood, both in space and in the thunderous doom of the incoming tsunamis, offered the lives of the High Guard’s men and women as a literal shield against any threat from the solar system’s depths.
It was an immense task…one far too vast to be practical. The High Guard currently numbered about two hundred warships, most of them aging Marshall-class destroyers like the Gallagher, or the even older Jackson-class frigates. At any given time, at least half of those vessels were in port for refit, maintenance, and resupply. Typically, they deployed for nine months at a time, patrolling out beyond the orbit of Neptune, serving as backup to the half million remote probes in the forty-AU shell.
That arbitrary shell around Sol gave scale to what was lightly called “the vastness of space.” The surface area of a sphere with a radius of 40 astronomical units was over 20,000 square AUs…close to 450 quintillion square kilometers.
That worked out to one ship per four and a half quintillion square kilometers—an obvious impossibility. In fact, both patrols and remote sensors tended to be concentrated within about 30 degrees of the ecliptic, which cut down things a bit…but there was always the possibility that an enemy would sneak in from zenith or nadir, where tens of billions of kilometers separated one sentry from the next.
Thinly spread or not, in the thirty-seven years since the Sh’daar Ultimatum, not one alien vessel had approached Earth’s solar system, and the general perception of the civilian population back home was that the war was far away, too far to be a threat.
According to the data flooding in through Gallagher’s sensors, that illusion of security had just been ripped away. At least thirty Turusch warships had materialized almost seven hours ago, some six light hours out from the sun and 25 degrees above the ecliptic…roughly in the same part of the sky as Arcturus and Eta Boötis. Exactly what they’d been doing since then was not clear; the ships weren’t registering on long-range tracking, and no more data was coming through from Triton since that one, quick, burst transmission.
But Lederer could make a good guess. Confederation tactics called for launching a high-G fighter or near-c bombardment of the target immediately, so that local defenses were overwhelmed. It was possible that enemy near-c impactors were already approaching Earth.
The main fleet would accelerate toward the target behind the bombardment and fighters. Turusch ships, depending on their class, could accelerate at anywhere between three hundred and six hundred gravities. That meant that by now they could have traveled anywhere between one and two billion kilometers—say, between six and thirteen astronomical units.
Based on that data, and the assumption that the invaders would be heading for the inner system as quickly as possible, Lederer had given orders to attempt an intercept, calculating an IP—an intercept point—some five AUs ahead, just beyond the orbit of Neptune, and trailing that world by half a billion kilometers. Ideally, all five High Guard vessels would reach the IP within a few minutes of one another.
The operation was not unlike hitting one high-velocity bullet head-on simultaneously with four other bullets, with the marksmen all firing blindfolded. Still, Gallagher might be able to get close enough to send Earth an updated report…if the enemy fleet was behaving in a predictable manner.
And if there still was an Earth to report to.
“Nav, this is the captain,” he said.
“Yeah, Skipper.”
“If Triton went off the air, it probably means a strike there.”
“Roger that, Skipper. Combat thinks it might have been near-c impacters.”
“Right. But it’s also possible that the Trash fleet showed up in person. They don’t know anything about the layout of our solar system, no more than we know about theirs. The smart play might be to muster their fleet somewhere close to the first large outpost they pick up…and that would be Triton. From there, they could watch our response, scope out our defenses, maybe plan a long-range strike once they know where our orbital bases and inhabited worlds are.”
“Makes sense, sir.”
“I want you to prepare a series of course plots. Assume we don’t find anything at the IP. I want you to give me a vector that will carry us into Neptune space. I also want a plot that will send one or two of our ships straight to Triton, bypassing the IP.”
“Aye, aye, sir. Give me a moment here….”
Five aging frigates and destroyers against at least thirty Turusch warships…probably more by now, probably a lot more.
The odds, he thought, were not at all good.
Manhattan Ruins
North American Periphery
2009 hours, local time
“Hello! Anyone here?”
Gray’s voice echoed back at him from empty passageways and silent chambers. It seemed impossible that TriBeCa Arcology could be vacant…but he’d been searching through its halls for over an hour now, and he had yet to see any other humans.
He walked down the passageway leading to the suite of rooms he’d lived in with Angela, carrying the rented gravcycle over his shoulder. The broom was his ticket out of this place, and he knew that had he left it up on the roof where he’d landed, it would have been gone by the time he returned.
And that had been an odd point, too, now that he thought about it. His family had always maintained a watch up on the arc roof, but there’d been no one there when he’d landed. What in hell was going on?
“It’s Trevor! Trevor Gray!” he yelled. He thought he heard a scuttling sound in the distance, the scrape of shoes on floor tiles. He wasn’t certain. It might have been rats. “I’m looking for the TriBeCan Eagles! Is anyone here?”
The sun had set some time ago, and it was dark. Gray was wearing a small but powerful wristlight that illuminated the passageway ahead, but he was beginning to worry about getting lost in this maze.
He thought this was the way….
Yes! That was the entrance to the rooms he’d shared with Angela!
Of course his old quarters had long since been occupied by someone else. Ragged curtains had been hung to divide large spaces into smaller, private areas. Mattresses and blankets lay on the floors. The remains of a cook fire, the ashes still warm to the touch, had blackened a patch on what once had been the floor of a sunken living room. None of this stuff was his, however. Others had moved in after he and Angela had gone.
Which was only to be expected. But…surely they would remember him? It had only been five years, after all.
“Chiseler!” he shouted, almost screaming the name.
He walked over to the living-room window, what once had been an actual wall-sized picture window and sliding door with a balcony outside. When he and Angela had lived here, the balcony had been long gone, crumbled away a century before, but the window had still been solid, a sheet of scratched and sun-clouded plasglas extending from floor to ceiling. The plasglas was gone now, the opening admitting a stead
y spray of cold mist from the ongoing drizzle outside.
Carefully, he put a hand out to one frame of the vanished door and looked down, four hundred meters to the water, the depths between island-buildings lost in the growing darkness below, though there was still pale light in the sky. Vines growing on the outside surface of the arcology were curling in through the missing window, and beginning to flourish on the inside.
So why hadn’t the Authority reclaimed the Ruins? The largest buildings, like TriBeCa, were still sound. There’d been plans to rebuild the Old City out over the water using structures like the TriBeCa Arcology as pylons, he knew, for two centuries or more. It was technically feasible, at least.
There’d been no money for such projects after the Crash in the late twenty-second century, when nanotech had overthrown the old economic models. But things were prosperous enough now. At least for the rest of the Confederation.
Maybe people just got used to things the way they were. So far as that peaceforcer up in Morningside Heights was concerned, the squatties had always been here, the Ruins always a place of danger and primitive discomfort.
It hadn’t always been so, though. He and Angela had often stood on this spot, trying to imagine what life had been like when the Old City had been alive, vibrant with power and life, the first and greatest of the modern megalopoli. He’d seen old memory clips of the city before the first evacuations in the twenty-first century. Primitive…but astonishing, breathtaking, and miraculous in scope and in audacity, nonetheless.
He sensed, rather than heard, the movement at his back.
Gray spun, the gravcycle snapping down off his shoulder and into a port-arms position. The squattie was halfway across the sunken floor, short, black-haired, clad in stinking rags. He was holding a spear made from a lightweight metal rod with a kitchen knife taped to the end.
The man was rushing him, clearly intent on either stabbing Gray in the back or knocking him forward through the window, and into a four-hundred meter drop to the water below. Gray snapped out with the back end of the gravcycle, using it like a quarterstaff, blocking the man’s lunge and sharply bending the light metal rod of his improvised spear.
“Stop!” Gray shouted. “I’m not your enemy!”
His attacker barked something in an unknown language, and Gray’s eyes widened at a sudden realization. His attacker was Asian.
But that wasn’t possible.
Tens of thousands of individual families had made up the fabric of squattie life and culture within the Manhattan Ruins, but above the family level—individual groups of twenty to fifty people—there’d been hierarchies of tribe and race—divisions along racial lines, for the most part, though there were plenty of tribal groupings based on nations of origin as well. Blacks. Whites. Latinos. Hindi. Paks. Thais. Viets. Chinese. Khmers. Russians. All of these were represented within the Ruins, and many, many more. Though families might raid and forage across most of the Ruins, from the Battery to the Bronx, they did so by trespassing on the turf of other tribes…and that was what made life in the Ruins so dangerous. Chinatown, just to the east of TriBeCa, remained an Asian enclave that stubbornly resisted the influx of other ethnic groups; when he and Angela had lived here, an agreement of sorts had existed between the TriBeCa families and Chinatown, to the effect that each stayed out of the other’s turf, maintaining a wary truce. The islands beyond Broadway Canyon and south of the Canal were deadly to non-ethnic Chinese.
Gray couldn’t decide if the man in front of him was North Chinese, Korean, or Japanese. The language had sounded more like Japanese—explosive and guttural—rather than like the more musical Mandarin or Cantonese. His rags included a fairly new-looking smartsuit jacket, presumably scavenged from the ruins of some clothing store, but the indicator light at the collar wasn’t on, so it wasn’t powered. Most smartsuits could maintain a comfortable temperature, interface with local Net-Clouds in order to pull down weather reports and other data, or serve as communications centers…but some used biofeedback to enhance significantly the wearer’s speed and strength. If Gray had to face someone hand-to-hand, he didn’t want them wearing one of those things.
“Take it easy!” Gray said, motioning with his hand. His mind was racing. If Asians were here in TriBeCa, it could only mean the old families, including Gray’s family, the Eagles, had left, driven out, perhaps, when the truce had failed. “Do you understand me?”
The man barked something again, the words unintelligible, then lunged again with his bent spear. Gray sidestepped the thrust, snapped his broom up and around, knocking the man flat on his back.
Shit. The peaceforcer had said there’d been changes in the Ruins. And something about the inhabitants killing each other even more enthusiastically than usual.
If the truce had failed, if the Chinese had moved in on TriBeCa, there was no telling where the rest of his family was now. Hell, it hadn’t been that long since captured enemies had been skinned and suspended still living from building walls as no-trespass warnings to marauders, and there were still occasional stories, whispered and wildly embellished, of cannibalism and mass murder among the crumbling islands. Life in the Manhattan Ruins had never been easy, but at times it got downright interesting. Hellishly so.
His family might have migrated to another part of the Ruins, moving in with allies, possibly, or taking away some other group’s hab space to replace the hab stolen from them. That was the way of life in the Ruins.
Or the Eagles might all have been butchered. That, too, was life—and death—in the Old City.
It was strange…and a bit unnerving. Just five years ago, Gray had been a squattie, a life he didn’t particularly like, but which he accepted, and which he’d been convinced was better than life under the Authority.
But now…
The man on the floor groaned and stirred. There was no point in interrogating him; Gray doubted that he spoke English. Once the Authority had withdrawn from the Ruins, individual families and tribes had pretty much fallen back on the customs and languages of their individual ethnicities, and English was a second language, if it was even known at all.
He set his broom on the floor, stretched out on the seat and let the safety harness engage, then gave it a boost and rolled for the open window. Cold, wet air engulfed him as he fell…and then he was feeding in power and leveling off, flying toward the south.
He wasn’t at all certain where he was going now.
Admiral Karyn Mendelson’s Quarters
Mars Synchorbit, Sol System
0234 hours, TFT
Alex Koenig and Karyn Mendelson both snapped awake at the same instant, the Priority One alert sounding within both of their minds, yanking them from a deep, sex-induced slumber. They were still entangled with each other, holding each other, staring into each other’s eyes from just a few centimeters apart.
“Lights!” Mendelson called, and the bedroom lights came up. Rolling out of opposite sides of the bed, they began reaching for articles of clothing scattered on the deck a few hours earlier.
“P-A!” Koenig called, summoning his Personal Assistant out of the Net-Cloud as he stepped into his underpants. “What the fuck is going on?”
“A Priority One defense alert has just been issued by the Military Directorate,” his AI replied. “An announcement follows.”
He and Mendelson exchanged glances as they continued getting dressed. She’d evidently gotten the same news from her AI.
“To all military personnel within range of this Net-Cloud. This is Admiral John C. Carruthers of the Confederation Joint Command Staff.” Carruthers was the five-star admiral on the Joint Chiefs, the senior military officer, under the civilian secretary of defense, of the Confederation Navy. “At approximately seventeen hundred forty-five hours Fleet Time yesterday, a large Turusch battle fleet began dropping into normal space, forty-five astronomical units from Sol, roughly on a line between Earth and the constellation Boötis. The photon release of that emergence was detected by our automated systems r
oughly three hours later, and a warning broadcasted to our listening post on Triton. One hour after that, contact with Triton was lost. We must now assume that Turusch fleet elements have destroyed that base.
“High Guard elements are seeking to close with the intruders in order to gather more intelligence. We do not expect them to materially hamper the enemy’s operations.
“The Senate president and the secretary of defense have authorized me to declare an immediate crimson alert, and to scramble all, repeat all available military and High Guard vessels for the defense of the Inner System. We do not at this time know how much time we have or whether the enemy has launched a high-velocity preemptive strike against Inner System targets. In light of this latter possibility, it is imperative that all ships launch in the shortest possible time.
“Repeating. To all military personnel…”
Having heard and acknowledged the alert, Koenig and Mendelson were able to switch it off. Koenig finished pulling on his uniform jacket as Mendelson shrugged into a military smartsuit. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“My duty station,” she replied. “Phobia’s CIC. I’m on Admiral Henderson’s command staff. You’re headed for the America.” It wasn’t a question.
“If I get there in time.” He gave a wan grin. “Buchanan’s still aboard. He’ll be readying her for boost by now.”