Ian Douglas - Deep Time

And the 14-and-0 victory they’d just won was a resounding validation of that … that and the fact that the new Starblade design left even the most advanced Confederation spacecraft chewing hard vacuum. But maybe the unbalanced outcome wasn’t so surprising after all, since it had involved enhanced humans fighting machines.

Especially machines on some sort of preset program …

“Skipper?” she said, running through her sensor feeds. “See that, to the north?”

“What the hell?”

“That’s a fucking starship !” she exclaimed. “Running hot and under escort!”

And now the Confederation’s plan was clear. The attack rising from a spaceport in Turkey had served to scatter the four fighters riding that part of the space superiority orbit—not badly, but a little. The second wave of enemy fighters, coming south from Surat, had scattered the flight even further; the nearest other fighter to Connor’s right now was Mackey’s … a good fifteen hundred kilometers to her southeast.

And with the four Starblades scattered all over the sky, now was when the enemy was launching something big … and escorted by twelve more Todtadlers.

“The ship is cloaked,” Connor reported. “But I’m getting a mass of around four thousand tons.”

“Small,” Lieutenant Ruxton said. “Frigate size.”

“Fleet Combat Command is designating the target as Charlie One,” Mackey said.

“Where the hell is our capship backup?” Dobbs was referring to the two capital ships, the Hawes and the Elliot , which had been ordered down to LEO to support the USNA fighters.

“On the way, Demon Six,” Mackey replied. “In the meantime, let’s see what we can do.”

Connor was trying to read through the enemy’s cloaking, which was an offshoot of gravitic screening. The technology to bend light around a ship, affording partial invisibility, had been around for several centuries, but the effort generally wasn’t worth the power consumption … or the fact that a cloaked ship couldn’t see out any more than others could see in. There really was little point in doing it at all … unless there was something about that small starship that the Confederation didn’t want the Americans to see.

Now what the hell , she wondered, were the bastards trying to hide?

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?”