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  “Fifty-five vessels that we’ve been able to detect so far,” Koenig told him. “So far. There are, no doubt, others on the far side of the planet that we haven’t picked up as yet. We will be seriously outnumbered in this engagement, sir, and I will not divide my fleet in the face of a superior enemy!”

  Most of the enemy ships were in orbit around the planet, but a few were farther out, decelerating as they backed down in their approach vectors. The Turusch had definitely arrived in force.

  “You know what is best, of course,” Quintanilla said, his face stiff, expressionless. “At least from a tactical perspective. My job is simply to remind you of the…of the political ramifications of your decisions. General Gorman is an extremely important person in the Senate’s estimation. They want him rescued and returned safely.”

  Koenig made a face. He detested politics, and he detested playing politics with brave men and women. “Ah. And Gorman’s Marines?”

  “Of course, the more Marines you can pick up, the better.”

  “I see. And the Mufrids?”

  Quintanilla gave him a sharp look. “Certainly, any of the colonists for which you have transport berths can be brought out, especially any with information on Turusch capabilities. But I’ll remind you that General Gorman’s rescue is your prime consideration.”

  “I know my orders, Mr. Quintanilla,” Koenig said, his voice cold. “Now…if you’ll excuse me…”

  He moved his hand in his workstation’s control field, and the electronic image of Eta Boötis IV vanished again, replaced by the map sphere of space immediately surrounding America and her consorts. More ships were popping up on the display’s expanding battlespace globe, including the Ticonderoga and The Spirit of Confederation, the first a heavy cruiser, the second the task force’s single line-battleship, with heavy kinetic-kill railguns that could pulverize a planet.

  Unfortunately, the Confederation task force could not pulverize the planet ahead, not without killing some five thousand Marines of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and the colonists they’d been deployed to protect.

  Quintanilla floated above Koenig’s workstation for a moment longer, then grunted, pushed himself off from the couch, and drifted toward the CIC entrance behind the command dais.

  Located beneath Koenig’s station was the section of the CIC known as “the orchestra pit” and, more usually, simply as “the pit.” Twelve workstations nestled within the pit, where America’s CIC officers stood their watches. One of them, Commander Janis Olmstead, the primary weapons control officer, caught Koenig’s eye and arched an eyebrow. “Since when did micromanagement become Navy SOP, sir?” she asked.

  “Mind on your links, Weps,” Captain Randolph Buchanan’s electronic avatar said. He was America’s commanding officer, and Koenig’s flag captain. Physically, he was on the bridge next door to CIC, but the compartment’s electronics projected his image to the command dais next to Koenig’s couch.

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  “She’s right, you know,” Koenig told Buchanan, but he texted the words to Buchanan’s screen, rather than speaking them aloud. He would not criticize Buchanan’s running of his ship and crew, not publicly. “It’s not going to be the Sh’daar that defeat us. Or their client races. It’s going to be the damned Confed politics.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Buchanan’s image scowl as the captain read the words on a screen.

  “Agreed, Admiral.” The words appeared silently on one of Koenig’s screens a moment later. “I have to tell you, sir, I don’t like this.”

  “No,” Koenig typed back. “But we play by the rules we’re given.”

  Buchanan seemed to hesitate, and then the avatar looked at Koenig. “How the hell do we fight a galactic empire, Admiral?” he asked aloud.

  Damn. Buchanan should have kept the conversation private, exchanging text messagers. Glancing down into the pit, Koenig could see that Olmstead and the others were carefully watching their own link channels and displays, but they’d obviously heard. The conversation would spread throughout the America before the end of the next watch.

  “I don’t believe in ‘galactic empires,’” Koenig said. He snorted. “The whole idea is silly, given the size of the galaxy.”

  “Well, the Sh’daar appear to believe in the concept, Admiral,” Buchanan’s image said. “And I doubt very much that it matters whether they agree with you on the point or not.”

  “When the Sh’daar show themselves,” Koenig replied carefully, “if they show themselves, we’ll worry about galactic empires. Right now, our concern is with the Turusch.”

  It had been ninety-two years since humankind had made contact with the Sh’daar, or, more precisely, since they’d made first contact with the Aglestch va Sh’daar, one of an unknown but very large number of technic alien species within what was somewhat melodramatically called the Sh’daar Galactic Empire. Quite early on, the Aglestch—some humans still referred to them as “Canopians,” even though that brilliant, hot F0-class supergiant could not possibly be their home star—had explained that they served the “Galactic Masters,” the Sh’daar.

  Then, fifty-five years later, an Aglestch delegation had tentacle-delivered a message to Earth, inscribed in English, Spanish, Russian, and transliterated Lingua Galactica, purportedly from the Sh’daar themselves.

  They claimed to be the overlords of a galaxy-spanning civilization. After five and a half decades of peaceful trade between the Confederation and the Agletstch Collective, the Sh’daar now stepped in and “suggested,” with just a hint of velvet-shrouded-mail fist, that the human Confederation submit to them and take their rightful places as a star-faring species—under the hegemony of the Sh’daar Masters.

  And until that happened, humans were forbidden to have any contact whatsoever with the Aglestch.

  The problem was, in fifty-five years an active and spirited trade had sprung up between the Aglestch worlds and the nearest star systems colonized by humans. StarTek and Galactic Dynamics, the trading corporations involved, hadn’t wanted to give up their lucrative contracts for Agletsch art and basic technical information. A Terran naval task group had been deployed to protect human trade routes in the region, and the Confederation Diplomatic Corps had made overtures to the Aglestch Collective about maintaining trade and diplomatic contact apart from Sh’daar oversight.

  The result had been the disastrous Battle of Beta Pictoris, in 2468, the equivalent, in human eyes, of reaching out to shake hands and pulling back a bloody stump.

  And for thirty-six years now, the war had continued…with a very few minor victories, and with a very great many major defeats. Humankind’s principle foes so far had been the Turusch va Sh’daar, a different Sh’daar client species that first had made its appearance thirty years before, at the Battle of Rasalhague. The First Interstellar War, as the news agencies had termed it back home, was not going well.

  The infant planetary system of Beta Pic had been just sixty-three light years from Sol, the furthest humans had yet ventured from their homeworld, a microscopic step when compared with the presumed extant of the galaxy-spanning Sh’daar. Rasalhague had been closer still—forty-seven light years.

  And Eta Boötis was only thirty-seven light years from Sol. The enemy was closing in, relentless, remorseless.

  In 2367, the Terran Confederation had incorporated 214 interstellar colonies and perhaps a thousand research and trade outposts on planets scattered across a volume of space roughly one hundred light years across and perhaps eighty deep, a volume embracing almost eight thousand star systems, the majority of which had never even been visited by humans. And after less than four decades of bitter fighting, Confederation territory had dwindled by perhaps a quarter.

  Humans still knew almost nothing about the Sh’daar—so far as was known, no human had ever even seen one—but their brief contact with the Agletsch had suggested that the Sh’daar presence might well encompass several hundred billion stars. Whether you called it a galac
tic empire or something else, in terms of numbers and resources, it seemed to pose an insurmountable threat.

  The sheer impossibility of the Confederation fighting such an overwhelmingly vast and far-flung galactic power had strongly affected human culture and government, deeply dividing both, and affecting the entire Confederation with a kind of social depression, a plummeting morale that was difficult to combat, difficult to shoulder.

  And one symptom of plunging morale was the increasing micromanagement out of C3—Confederation Central Command—on Earth. All military vessels now carried one or more Senate liaisons, like Quintanilla, to make certain the Senate’s orders were properly carried out.

  If anything, direct Senate oversight of the military had made the morale problem even worse.

  And that was why Koenig was concerned about his flag captain speaking his pessimism in front of the bridge personnel.

  “We’ll know more when we rescue Gorman and his people,” Koenig added after a thoughtful pause, stressing the word when, rejecting the word if. “The scuttlebutt is that his Marines captured some Tush officers. If so, that could give us our first real insight into the enemy psychology since this damned war began.”

  “Tush” or “Tushie” was military slang for the Turusch…one of the cleaner of a number of popular epithets. He saw Olmstead’s head come up in surprise at hearing a flag officer use that kind of language.

  “Yes, sir,” Buchanan said.

  “So we play it by the op plan,” Koenig added, speaking with a confidence he didn’t really feel but which he hoped sounded inspiring. “We go in, kick Trash ass, and pull our people and their prisoners out of there. Then we hightail for Earth and let the damned politicians know that the Galactics can be beaten.”

  He grinned at Buchanan’s avatar. He suspected that the Captain had spoken aloud specifically to give Koenig a chance to say something inspiring. A cheap and theatrical trick, but he wasn’t going to argue with the psychology. The crew was nervous—they knew what they were in for at Eta Boötis—and hearing their admiral’s confidence, even an illusion of confidence, was critical.

  On the battlespace display, five more ships appeared—the destroyer Andreyev, the frigates Doyle, Milton, and Wyecoff, and the troopship Bristol.

  They would be ready to accelerate for the inner system soon.

  VFA-44 Dragonfires

  Eta Boötis System

  0421 hours, TFT

  Lieutenant Gray checked his time readouts, both of them. Time—the time as measured back on board America—was, as expected, flashing past at an insane pace, thirteen times faster, in fact, than it was passing for him.

  In its high-G sperm-mode configuration, the SG-92 Starhawk’s quantum-gravitic projectors focused an artificial curvature of spacetime just ahead of the ship’s rounded prow—in effect creating a gravitational singularity that moved ahead of the fighter, pulling it forward at dizzying accelerations.

  Accelerating at 50,000 gravities had boosted his Starhawk to near-light velocity in ten minutes. For the next hour, then, he’d been coasting at .997 c…except that the mathematics of time dilation reduced the time actually experienced on board the hurtling fighter to 0.077402 of that—or exactly four minutes, thirty-eight point six seconds.

  Put another way, for every minute experienced by Trevor Gray in his tiny sealed universe of metal and plastic, almost thirteen minutes slipped past in the non-accelerated world outside. Since launching from the America, the Blue Omega fighter wing had traveled over a billion kilometers, nearly eight astronomical units, in what seemed like less than ten minutes.

  Through the Starhawk’s optics, the universe outside looked very strange indeed.

  Directly ahead and astern and to either side, there was nothing, a black and aching absence of light. All of the stars of the sky appeared to have been compressed into a frosty ring of light forward by the gravfighter’s near-c velocity. Even Eta Boötis itself, directly ahead, had been reshaped into a tight, bright circle.

  And, despite the expectations of physicists from centuries ago, there was a starbow—a gentle shading of color, blue to deep violet at the leading edge of the starlight ring, and deep reds trailing. Theoretically, the starlight should all have appeared white, since visible light Doppler-shifted into invisibility would be replaced by formerly invisible wavelengths. In practice, though, the light of individual stars was smeared somewhat by the shifting wavelengths, creating the color effect known as the starbow.

  Gray could have, had he wished, ordered the gravfighter’s AI to display the sky corrected for his speed, but he preferred the soft rainbow hues. Most fighter pilots did.

  When the fighter was under acceleration, the sky ahead looked even stranger. Gravitational lensing twisted the light of stars directly ahead into a solid, bright ring around the invisible pseudomass in front of the ship, even when the craft was still moving at nonrelativistic speeds. For now, though, the effect was purely an artifact of the Starhawk’s speed—an illusion similar to what happened when you flew a sky-flitter into a rainstorm, where the rain appeared to sleet back at an angle even when it was in fact falling vertically. In this case, it was photons appearing to sleet backward, creating the impression that the entire sky was crowded into that narrow, glowing ring ahead.

  He checked the time again. Two minutes had passed for him, and almost half an hour for the rest of the universe.

  He felt…lonely.

  Technically, his fighter was still laser taclinked with the other eleven Starhawks of Blue Omega Flight, but communication between ships at near-c was difficult due to the severely Dopplered distortions in surrounding spacetime. The other fighters should be exactly matched in course and speed, but their images, too, were smeared into that light ring forward because their light, too, was traveling just three thousandths of a percent faster than Gray’s ship. Some low-level bandwidth could be held open over the laser channels for AI coordination, but that was about it. No voice. No vid. No avatars.

  Just encircling darkness, Night Absolute, and the Starbow ahead.

  The hell of it was, Gray was a loner. With his history, he damned near had to be. By choice he didn’t hang out much with the other pilots in the ready room or flight officers’ lounge. When he did, there was the inevitable comment about his past, about where he’d come from…and then he would throw a punch and end up getting written up by Allyn, and maybe even getting pulled from the flight line.

  Better by far to stay clear of the other pilots entirely, and avoid the hassle.

  But now, when the laws of physics stepped in like God Almighty to tell him he couldn’t communicate with the others, he found he missed them. The banter. The radio chatter.

  The reassurance that there were, in fact, eleven human souls closer than eight astronomical units away.

  He could, of course, have called the avatars of any or all of the others. Copies of their PAs—their Personal Assistants—resided within his fighter’s AI memory. He could hold a conversation with any of them and be completely unaware that he was speaking to software, not a living person…and he would know that the software would report the conversation with perfect fidelity to the person when the comnet channels opened later on.

  But avatars weren’t the same. For some it was, but not for Trevor Gray.

  Not for a Prim.

  He closed his eyes, remembering the last time. He’d been in the lounge of the Worldview, a civilian bar adjacent to the spaceport at the SupraQuito space elevator. He and Rissa Schiff had been sitting in the view blister, just talking, with Earth an unimaginably beautiful and perfect sphere of ocean-blue and mottled cloud-white gleaming against the night. The two had been in civilian clothing, which, as it turned out, had been lucky for him. Lieutenants Jen Collins and Howie Spaas had walked up, loud and uninvited, also in civvies, and both blasted on recs.

  “Geez, Schiffie,” Collins had said, her voice a nasal sneer. “You hang around with a Prim loser like this perv, you’re gonna get a bad name.” Spaas had snicke
red.

  Gray had stood, his fists clenched, but he’d kept a lid on it. Allyn had lectured him about that the last time he’d gotten into trouble with other squadron officers…the need to let the insults slide off. The shipboard therapist she’d sent him to had said the same thing. Other people could hurt him, could get through his shields only if he let them.

  “Who asked you, bitch?” Gray had said quietly.

  “Ooh, I’m afraid,” Spaas said, grinning. “Hey, Riss…you need to be careful around creeps like this. A fucking Prim monogie. You’re never gonna get any…”

  It had been worth it, decking Spaas. It really had. It had been worth having the Shore Patrol show up, worth the off-duty restriction to quarters for a week, worth the extra watches, even worth the searing new asshole the skipper had given him. Commander Allyn could have put him up for court martial, but she’d chosen to give him a good old-fashioned ass-chewing instead.

  He still remembered that next morning in her office. “The Navy appreciates pilots who want to fight, Gray,” she’d told him. “But the idea is to fight the Turusch, not your shipmates. You hear me? You have one more chance. Blow it and you get busted back to the real Navy.”

  Prim monogie.

  Yeah, it had been worth it.

  Chapter Two

  25 September 2404

  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

  Eta Boötean Kuiper Belt

  0428 hours, TFT

  Admiral Koenig took a final look at the heavens revealed through the encircling viewalls of America’s CIC. Eta Boötis gleamed in amber splendor directly ahead. Off to port, red-golden Arcturus shone as well—not as brilliantly as Eta Boötis, but still with twice the brightness of Venus as seen from Earth at its closest.