Deep Time. Ian Douglas

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      All of which gave Connor an idea.

      USNS/HGF Concord

       4-Vesta

       0121 hours, TFT

      Commander Terrance Dahlquist studied the tactical display on Concord’s bridge. The out-system craft tagged Charlie One was just over one AU from Vesta, now, and was reaching the closest point to the asteroid on its outbound path. Four USNA fighters were in close pursuit.

      The images he was seeing, thanks to the speed-of-light time delay, were about nine minutes out of date, which meant that alien craft had already passed the nearest point and was well beyond now.

      And Dahlquist was worried.

      “You know, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Ames told him, “you could land yourself in a world of shit.”

      Ames was Concord’s executive officer, Dahlquist’s second in command. She was a GM transhuman and he respected her intelligence, a carefully crafted intellect connected to in-head systems that purportedly made her as good as that of the best AI.

      “It’s a kind of a nebulous area,” he told her. “I don’t take my orders from … people like him.”

      Both the line Navy and the High Guard answered to HQMILCOM, the USNA’s military command center located on and around Mars, and, after that, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Earth. Until one or the other of those command entities officially directed him to follow Gray’s orders, he was in the right if he ignored the man’s instructions. It was a technicality, but the military was built on technicalities.

      “Not as nebulous as you might think, Captain,” Ames told him. “Admiral Gray is still a flag officer, and that puts you in probable violation of Article Ninety-two.”

      “Article Ninety-two?” Dahlquist asked, smirking. “Not Ninety?”

      “Article Ninety specifies punishment for disobeying a lawful command of your superior commissioned officer,” Ames told him. “It also covers actually striking a superior officer. So yes, it might apply. But Article Ninety-two applies to failure to obey any lawful general order or regulation. It also covers dereliction of duty. So it’s probably the charge they would use against you. Sir.”

      Dahlquist sighed. He liked Ames, and she was a hell of a good ship’s first officer, but talking with her was like discussing calculus with a computer. Once, just once, he would like to hear her admit that she didn’t know something. He sighed again, as he knew that was unlikely.

      Some claimed that the entire human species was headed the way of the genetically modified transhumans, but Dahlquist sincerely doubted this. GMs tended to increase mental efficiency by sacrificing passion—emotional involvement. Without said passion, they often didn’t pursue success in career or relationship as tenaciously as unmodified Mark I Mod 0 humans. As such, he couldn’t envision anyone giving up their ambition just for the sake of knowledge. Emotions were just too important to the human experience. The old idea of the emotionlessly logical genius was a myth. Fact was, there were studies linking high intelligence with emotional swings and disorders. Dahlquist couldn’t help but think about all the geniuses throughout history that had also been emotionally disturbed.

      In any case, cybernetic implants were good enough now that anyone could have access to any data almost as efficiently as GMs, and without the loss of what it was that made humans human. For Dahlquist, that would always be raison d’être.

      Nonetheless, Dahlquist valued Ames’s ability to pull raw data on the most obscure topics out of the seemingly endless depths of her memory. And that’s what he needed at the moment.

      “So what do you recommend?” he asked.

      “That we maneuver Concord to intercept Charlie One, as ordered.”

      “I have a better idea.”

      Ames blinked. “Sir?”

      “We have available a potentially devastating weapon in the VLA. We can use that.”

      Dahlquist was pleased with himself for thinking of it. The Vesta linear accelerator was the mining facility’s magnetic launcher. They could use it as a monstrous cannon to disable or destroy the alien from here, a full AU away.

      “With respect, sir,” Ames said, shaking her head, “it won’t work.”

      “No?”

      “Not even close. Check the numbers, sir.”

      He did so, pulling down stats from Concord’s AI on the mining accelerator and applying the TDA formula, then scowling as the answer came through. At its very best, the one-kilometer magnetic rail gun, accelerating a one-ton payload at twenty thousand gravities down its one-kilometer length, would boost the package to twenty kps—a respectable velocity across interplanetary distances that would cross one astronomical unit in … shit! Just over eighty-six days. It was amazing. Even with all of his training and experience, it was still so damnably possible to underestimate the sheer vastness of space.

      And Ames was right. He could be making a hell of a lot of trouble for himself by disregarding those orders … and a Prim like Gray wasn’t worth landing himself a court-martial.

      The realization steadied Dahlquist, and helped resolve the issue a bit in his mind. He’d not been aware of just how jealous he’d been of Gray’s advancement up the career ladder, but he recognized it now as her thought about the possibility of crashing and burning over an Article 92. He and Gray were about the same age, with roughly the same time-in-service. Yet he was just a commander, struggling to make captain, while the damned Prim had had his four admiral’s stars handed to him on a plate. There was scuttlebutt to the effect that Gray had friends in very high places; his former commanding officer was now president of the United States of North America. And those friends could cause Dahlquist a lot of trouble.

       It wasn’t fucking fair.

      He rather neatly disregarded the hypocrisy of a Ristie being jealous of a Prim’s “advantages.”

      “Okay, Amesie,” he said. “Take us out. Rendezvous course with Charlie One.”

      “Aye, aye, Captain.”

      He heard Concord’s communications officer requesting departure clearance, heard the clearance being given by the AI that ran the mining facility. Ceres, a rugged, splotched, and cratered sphere over five huindred kilometers through, dwindled away into the distance, lost among the stars almost instantly. Contrary to popular belief—and countless docuinteractives and in-head sims with a very bad sense of scale—the asteroids were not so thickly sown through the belt that they formed any kind of obstacle. At the moment, exactly one other asteroid was naked-eye visible from Vesta—a fifth-magnitude speck of light a million kilometers away. The Asteroid Belt was very nearly as empty as the rest of interplanetary space.

      Dahlquist was embarrassed by the gaffe of suggesting that they use the VLA to bombard the alien ship. Years of chasing rocks, he thought, must have contributed to acute hardening of the cerebral cortex.

      He would have to find some way of recovering from the gaffe, or Ames and the members of Concord’s crew would be spreading the СКАЧАТЬ