Deep Space. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ in high-velocity mode. Nanosensors embedded within his fighter’s fluid outer coat fed data directly to his brain, allowing him to see with crystalline clarity in every direction, and to see the blacker-than-black long-tailed teardrops of the other fighters of the squadron formation, forms that would have been invisible to the unaugmented eye or brain.

      “Keep it tight, chicks,” urged the taclink voice of their squadron leader, Commander Luther Mackey. “Hold formation. Show the braid we’re as sharp as any hotshot Vee-crappers.”

      “Yeah, Boss, but how do you really feel about ’em?” Lieutenant Nathan Esperanza cut in. Several of the others in the squadron chuckled.

      “Hell, I think he just wants a crack at the Sh’daar,” Lieutenant Caryl Mason said, “assuming the scuttlebutt is true, of course.”

      “Oh, it’s true,” Esperanza said. “I got a buddy in Base Commo who saw the intercepts. One of our survey vessels got nailed out at Omegod Cent, and the Slan overran Arianrhod. That’s why the recall.”

      “It don’t rain but it pours,” Lieutenant Jason Del Rey observed.

      “Why bother with grapevine shit?” Lieutenant Joseph “Happy” Kemper said. “Just ask ol’ Nungie. Get the straight shit hot from the source.”

      “Fuck you, Kemper,” Gregory said with a quiet calm he didn’t quite feel. Nungie had not been his choice as a squadron handle, and he despised the implication.

      “Keep it down, people,” Mackey said. “Engage squadron taclink.”

      Gregory gave the mental command that synched his fighter’s AI to the rest of the squadron. The twelve Starhawks were now, in essence, a single organism hurtling up and out of Earth’s embrace.

      “On my mark, acceleration at two thousand gravities,” Mackey added. “And three … and two … and one … mark!”

      Gregory couldn’t feel the savage, gravitationally induced acceleration. His fighter fell toward the tightly projected artificial singularity pulsing at a billion times per second out beyond the blunt prow of his Starhawk, its gravity acting on every atom of his body simultaneously. He was in free fall, his vector matched perfectly with those of the other ships in his squadron. Earth, filling the sky aft with white swirls and mottled banks of white cloud, began dwindling rapidly into the distance astern. Starhawks were capable of boosting at fifty thousand Gs, which could accelerate them up to close to the speed of light in under ten minutes. Within the relatively close confines of Earth orbit, however, it was necessary to keep to a more sedate pace. It would take forty-two seconds to reach the midpoint of their journey, at which point they would flip end for end and decelerate the rest of the way in to their docking with the carrier.

      Ten more seconds.

      Seething, Gregory tried to put aside Kemper’s gibe. It wasn’t worth saying anything. Protests would just elicit more of the same; he knew that much from long experience.

      For years, Gregory had wanted to be a fighter pilot, wanted to be a member of that elite fraternity so bad he could taste it. Star carrier pilots were the aristocracy of the Earth Confederation’s military, but that wasn’t what had led him to volunteer … or to endure the years of training and heavy-duty AI downloads that had made him one. Born on the colony world of Osiris—70 Ophiuchi AII—he’d been eight when his world had been subjected to a savage bombardment by a Turusch battle fleet, followed by Nungiirtok assault forces landing in wave upon relentless wave. That had been early in 2405, just less than twenty years earlier.

      Gregory still had acid-sharp memories of that time … especially of the moment when his father had put him aboard a freighter packed with refugee children at Nuit Starport days before the final collapse. He still remembered shrieking that he didn’t want to go … remembered his father’s calm assurances that they would be together again soon …

      It hadn’t happened. When the Sh’daar Treaty was announced seven months later, Osiris remained under Nungiirtok control. The Earth Confederation government had attempted to open negotiations with the martial beings, but no progress had been made in all that time.

      Year had followed year, and Gregory had grown progressively more bitter. It seemed clear to him that the Confederation wasn’t going to force a confrontation. Even now, there was no formal contact with the Nungiirtok, no way of even determining if his mother and father were still alive.

      Three years ago he’d joined the North American Star Navy, applying for a training slot as a combat pilot. The star system of 70 Ophiuchi was strategically important, quite apart from its value to Gregory personally. Just sixteen light years away from Sol, it formed the deadly tip of a salient driven deep, deep into the Confederation sphere, and gave the Sh’daar client races a base within easy striking distance of Earth. Surely, it was only a matter of time before the Earth Confederation moved to get Osiris back … and Gregory intended to be there when it happened.

      The other members of his squadron, though, had given him the handle Nungie, and joked that he was working for the Sh’daar. Gregory could have ignored that much. The problem was that there was an undercurrent of hostility, even paranoia there. They kept asking him if he was carrying a Sh’daar Seed inside his head …

      Midpoint. Surrounding space slewed wildly across 180 degrees, and now a vastly shrunken Earth lay directly ahead, but still dwindling in apparent size. Forty-two and a half seconds after boost, the Black Demons were now traveling at over 850 kilometers per second. Still pulling two thousand gravities, they were decelerating now, backing down toward their destination.

      The Sh’daar War had lasted for thirty-eight years, from the time the Agletsch had delivered the Sh’daar Ultimatum until Admiral Koenig’s brilliant and unexpected victories at Texaghu Resch and Omega Centauri. Most civilians thought of the war now as history, while most military personnel were content to wait and see. By any reasonable assessment, the Sh’daar represented a technology some thousands of years in advance of Humankind, and yet they had just stopped.

      Smart money said that they weren’t yet done with the upstart Earth Confederation.

      Slowing rapidly, the Black Demons drifted tail-first past the collection of spheres, struts, holding tanks, domes, and rotating hab modules that comprised the synchorbital part of the Quito space elevator. Anchored deep in the solid rock of Mt. Cayambe, on Earth’s equator 36,000 kilometers below, the elevator had offered cheap, easy, and high-volume access to space since the early twenty-second century.

      The synchorbital naval base was located a dozen kilometers from the upside terminus of the elevator, a vast structure including hundreds of docking spaces and gantries for military vessels. A joint project of the Confederation and the United States of North America, it housed some thousands of military personnel, as well as home port facilities for those warships, the bigger ones, unable to enter planetary atmospheres.

      Largest of these was the TC/USNA star carrier America.

      Mushroom-shaped—1,150 meters long—CVS America was docked at a special gantry offering multiple mag-tube access for personnel and supplies. The forward cap, 500 meters across and 150 deep, served as both radiation shielding and as a holding tank for 27 billion liters of water, reaction mass for the ship’s maneuvering thrusters. The slender, kilometer-long spine held quantum-field power plants, maneuvering thrusters, and stores, while two hab rings, counter-rotating and tucked in close behind the shield cap, carried the ship’s human complement of 4,840. Around her, like swarming midges, a cloud of drones and remote vehicles kept watch, or serviced her external hull.

      “VFA-96,” СКАЧАТЬ