The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ hull, accelerating toward the stargate.

      The first flight of starships was already being off-loaded as the shuttle departed. First to emerge from Skybase’s maw was the destroyer Morrigan, 24,800 tons and 220 meters in length overall, and with a crew of 112. Her antimatter reactors were already powering up; she would be ready to engage her primary drive within another fifteen minutes.

      Alexander, meanwhile, switched to the downloaded view being recorded from the Morrigan, and was able to watch the second starship slip her magnetic moorings and exit Skybase’s hangar bay, edging gently into hard vacuum, guided by a quartet of AI-directed tugs.

      She was the Thor, and she was sister to Morrigan, her masculine name notwithstanding. Both Cybele-class destroyers were fast and maneuverable, designed originally to serve with the Solar High Guard fleet, protecting worlds and habitats from incoming asteroids or cometary debris. Each possessed a powerful spinal-mount plasma gun as primary weapon, but their hull superstructures bristled with secondary laser turrets, missile batteries, and railgun accelerators, as well as automated point-defense mounts.

      With the two destroyers launched and positioned a few thousand kilometers to either side of Skybase, Alexander let himself begin to breath more easily. The most dangerous part of Operation Lafayette was the possibility that PanEuropean warships would be close enough to pick up Skybase’s transition into normal space. While Skybase did possess defensive weapons, the structure was still not primarily intended for combat. The two destroyers would provide the fledgling insystem beachhead with some decent fire-support.

      Third out of Skybase’s cargo deck was the Marine assault transport Samar, huge, blunt-prowed, and massive. Measuring 310 meters long, and with a beam of 85 meters, Samar massed nearly 35,000 tons. She carried a crew of 79, as well as her cargo—four companies of the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce, a total of nearly 600 Marines. Half of those Marines would already be loaded into their ship assault pods, or SAPs, ready to engage in ship-to-ship boarding actions.

      The final ship nestled within Skybase’s hold was the largest, the Fleet Marine Carrier John A. Lejeune, massing 87,400 tons, and measuring 324 meters, stem to stern. Cocooned within Lejeune’s hangar deck were two more squadrons of F/A-4140s, as well as a squadron of A-90 ground-support strike craft and a number of support and auxiliary vessels—ninety-eight aerospace craft in all.

      The Lejeune was a tight fit inside Skybase’s hangar bay; in fact, several outriggers and deep-space communications and tracking masts had been removed in order to let her slip through Skybase’s garage door at all. Getting her out was a tediously exacting exercise in geometry and tug-facilitated maneuvering that would take nearly an hour if all went well. It was for that reason that the Lejeune had been the first ship loaded on board the Skybase, and the last out; Alexander had wanted the fleet carrier to be with the first translated load, however. Her three Stardragon squadrons—forty-eight aerospace fighters in all—would be invaluable in achieving and maintaining battlespace superiority, and greatly expanded the fleet’s reach and sensitivity.

      An eighth PanEuropean ship was picked out of the radiation fields around the gas giant. By now, neutrino and electromagnetic energy emitted by the newly emergent Commonwealth vessels would have reached the vicinity of the PE fleet. The question now was how good the enemy was at picking those radiations out of the storm of particulate radiation surrounding them at the moment. The Commonwealth squadron might be detected at any moment; Alexander was gambling on the enemy—even his AIs—being less than perfectly vigilant.

      Even so, every passing minute increased the chances of discovery.

      And so Thor and Morrigan stood guard as Skybase slowly, even grudgingly gave birth to the John A. Lejeune, while the Samar drifted nearby, her waiting Marines encased in their SAP pods, unable to do anything but watch, fret, pray, or sleep, according to individual habit and preference.

      And once Lejeune drifted free in open space, the tugs dragged her clear and, after a brief gathering of inner power, the Skybase winked out of existence once again, returned to distant Earth.

      The four capital ships, a small cloud of fighters and auxiliaries, and some twelve hundred men and women remained behind, alone, outnumbered, and expendable almost three hundred light-years from home.

      And everything was riding on a single unknown: was the enemy aware of their arrival?

       The question would be settled, one way or the other, within the next few hours.

       17

       0112.1102

      SAP 12/UCS Samar

       Assembly Point Yankee

       Puller 695 System

       1935 hrs GMT

      PFC Aiden Garroway could scarcely move. He had a little bit of wiggle room inside his 660-battlesuit, but the embrace of his Ship Assault Pod made any real shift in his position impossible. His confinement was beginning to gnaw at him. He’d been sealed in here since 1700 hours, long before the Skybase had even made its translation. Two and a half hours, now.

      Worst of all he couldn’t scratch. There was a point midway up his back, below his shoulder blades and on the left, that had been tingling and prickling for the past hour, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Theoretically, he could have used his system nano to anesthetize the spot—a process that happened automatically if he was wounded—but so far his thought-clicks hadn’t done a damned thing. In fact, when he tried to isolate the itch in his mind, it moved, shifting one way or another until it was impossible to really pin it down.

      The failure of the anesthetic release probably meant the sensation was purely psychosomatic, but that made it no easier to bear. In any case, he’d experienced worse. In boot camp, any unauthorized movement or wiggling when the recruit platoon had been ordered to hold position, had been punished by a session in the sand pit, taken through a grueling set of exercises by a screaming Gunny Warhurst or one of the assistant DIs.

      At least Warhurst wasn’t going to reach him in here, sealed away deep in the belly of Samar’s launch bay. His former DI was in another SAP, possibly right next door, but as helplessly cocooned as was Garroway.

      At least he had the squad data feed to keep him from going completely nuts. An open window in his mind showed an animated schematic of the tacsit, centered on Samar, with the Lejeune, Thor, and Morrigan spread across several thousand kilometers of empty space, and with the fighters farther out yet.

      By pulling back on the viewpoint within his mind, the Commonwealth squadron dwindled to a bright, green dot, and he could see the icon representing the stargate falling in from the right. Pulling back still more, he could see the icons representing the enemy; zooming in on that tightly grouped pack of glowing red icons revealed seven capital ships just visible in a pale, red fog representing the radiation belts around the system’s gas giant. All seven vessels were evidently in orbit about the giant, and gave no indication that they were aware, yet, of the presence of the small Commonwealth squadron.

      But they would be.

      Garroway СКАЧАТЬ