Deep Space. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ Connie Fletcher was America’s CAG—an anachronistic three-letter acronym for commander air group, even though the squadrons on board the carrier comprised a wing, not a group, and rarely operated within a planetary atmosphere. The Navy was nothing if not wedded to tradition, and some of the terminology had stuck through four centuries from the days of ocean-going navies and pre-spaceflight aircraft carriers.

      “We’re at ninety-four percent,” she told him. “We’re still waiting on the plutonium and the depleted U.”

      “Expedite that.”

      “We are, Skipper.”

      Plutonium was necessary for the nuclear-tipped missiles carried by America’s fighters, Kraits, and the newer Boomslangs, Taipans, and Lanceheads. Depleted uranium was used in the cores of kinetic-kill rounds for the fighters’ Gatling weapons and for larger mass-driver weapons.

      “And your crews?”

      “We currently have four hundred ninety-six personnel still ashore, Captain. But the alert is out and they’re all on the way back … all except for five hospital cases and thirty-nine in one slammer or another.”

      “Very well. Let me see.” Five medical no-shows and thirty-one under legal detention out of over 2,500 fighter-wing personnel wasn’t too bad at all. Extended liberty always meant a few people getting into fights or getting so brain-buzzed they ended up AWOL. Some ninety of America’s non-aviation personnel had reported sick or under arrest as well.

      The data from Wing Personnel joined to the streams moving through Gray’s consciousness, and he filed it with the rest. He would need it all in order to compose readiness reports for Mars, for Columbus, and for Geneva.

      There were times—lots of them—when Gray seriously wished he was still a Starhawk driver, with no more administrative responsibilities than his own evaluations and flight status uploads. Point him at an enemy-held star system and boost him in at 99.7 percent of c, and he knew exactly what was expected of him.

      No more. He’d left the old VF-44 in 2406, deployed to Mars HQ for three years, then served on board the light carrier Republic, first as assistant CAG, and later as CAG. In 2414, he’d been given command of a Marine light carrier, the Nassau, but five years later he’d taken a career side-step to serve as executive officer of his old ship, America.

      And now, with the rank of captain, he was America’s commanding officer, and flag captain to the battlegroup commander, Rear Admiral Jason R. Steiger.

      Not bad at all for a monogie from the Periphery, the Manhattan Ruins.

      Best, perhaps, not to think about that …

      He focused instead on the matter of America’s Alcubierre Drive, and Engineering’s concerns that the ship would have trouble matching the emergence ZOP—the zone of probability—of the rest of the fleet.

       Executive Office, USNA

       Columbus, District of Columbia

       United States of North America

       2050 hours, TFT

      The fireworks were spectacular.

      Hands clasped behind his back, the newly elected president of the United States of North America stood before the viewall in his office. Its luminous surface was currently set to display in real time the scene in the Freedom Concourse outside. The Concourse, some eighty stories below, was still packed with cheering people as the dark skies overhead pulsed and rippled and flared with celebratory pyrotechnics. It was odd, Koenig thought, that in an age when most entertainment was downloaded directly into people’s brains through nanochelated implants, audiences still seemed to have that primal, almost atavistic need to come together in massed crowds, packed in shoulder to shoulder and shrieking at the tops of their lungs.

      “It’s quite a show, Mr. President,” his aide, Marcus Whitney, observed.

      “Eh?” Alexander Koenig said. “Oh, yes. Yes, I suppose it is.”

      “The crowd’s enthusiasm seems a splendid validation of your policies, sir. Two nights, now, and still going strong!”

      “Ha. Makes me wonder what I’m supposed to do for an encore.”

      Those crowds, he thought, might not be so enthusiastic if the Sh’daar Treaty unraveled within the next few days, as it showed every sign of doing. He’d downloaded a fresh report from Mars only hours ago: Endeavor and two Confederation destroyers had been lost out at Omega Tee-prime. Intelligence suspected that the Sh’daar were behind the attack. This news, coming so close on the heels of the disaster at Arianrhod, seemed to promise the final collapse of the Sh’daar Treaty.

      “They re-elected you because they know how you feel about the Confederation, Mr. President. You promised to give North America more sovereignty within the world government.”

      Koenig grunted at that. The Pax Confeoderata had been formed in 2133, a union popularly known interchangeably as either the Earth or Terran Confederation. The creation of a single polity embracing most world governments had been a necessity arising from the chaos of the First and Second Sino-Western Wars, the Blood Death plague, and the widespread devastation caused by the Chinese asteroid strike into the Atlantic Ocean. The Pax had held now for almost three centuries and had followed Humankind to the stars.

      But with the apparent defeat of the Sh’daar twenty years before, there’d been a resurgence of spirit, of independent thought and goals—and a new wave of calls for American independence from Geneva. North American sovereignty. It was an intriguing dream and one that Koenig himself very much wanted to see realized.

      If the Sh’daar were renewing the old conflict, though, this was exactly the wrong time in which to do it. If ever Earth needed to stand united, this was the time.

      Koenig had retired from the USNA Navy in 2408, four years after his startling victory over the Sh’daar. Elements within the American party had pointed out that his popularity would all but guarantee his election as president of the USNA.

      His refusal to follow Confederation government orders in the face of Geneva’s blunt stupidity had had a lot to do with that. He’d ordered his battlegroup to leave the Sol System deliberately before orders to the contrary could arrive, won a surprising victory at Alphekka, skirmished with a French squadron at HD157950, and eventually beaten Sh’daar client forces at Texaghu Resch. Ultimately, Koenig had taken CBG-18 through a Sh’daar transit node into the remote past to confront the Sh’daar puppet masters within their home galaxy and epoch … though that hadn’t been clear at the time. The Sh’daar threat had collapsed with astonishing suddenness, resulting in the treaty guaranteeing Earth’s interstellar borders.

      When CBG-18 had returned to Earth, Geneva had had little choice but to forgive Koenig’s de facto mutiny and declare him a hero.

      He’d resisted getting into politics, but the ongoing battle with Geneva over Periphery Reconstruction had drawn him in, and he’d been elected to the USNA Senate in 2410. As North America began rebuilding the shattered, half-submerged cities along its drowned coastal areas, Geneva insisted that these regions, formally abandoned by the USNA centuries before, now properly belonged to the Pax world community. Once again, the former admiral had aligned himself against the Terran Confederation government, СКАЧАТЬ