Singularity. Ian Douglas

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Jeanne d’Arc and her consorts lay just ahead. …

       CIC

      TC/PE CVS Jeanne d’Arc

       Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

       98 light years from Earth

       1748 hours, TFT

      “Harrison has betrayed us,” Hans Westerwelle said, bitterly. “He warned Koenig, somehow.”

      “We don’t know that,” Giraurd replied. “I … agree that he was less than eager to open the dialogue with Koenig.”

      “‘Less than eager’? The Englander swine fought the idea tooth and nail. Koenig was his friend. We should investigate Harrison when this is over, and see where his true loyalties lie.”

      The plan to have the three British ships pretend to join Koenig’s squadron had been Westerwelle’s. He was the European fleet’s political officer, a civilian appointed by Geneva to maintain loyalty and an acceptable level of enthusiasm within the Federation’s ranks.

      The first nuclear-tipped missiles were detonating in brilliant, savage silence across the CIC’s forward view screens. They were unlikely to cause more than superficial damage to the incoming fighters, but they might deter, might force the enemy squadron commander to break off.

      “Enemy fighters are still approaching from dead ahead!” the tactical officer called. “They’re at seventy percent of c and accelerating!”

      “Engage point defense!” the Jeanne d’Arc’s captain ordered. “Fight them off!”

      Giraurd sat back in his command chair, watching the CIC and bridge crews carry out their routines. It had been months since the Jeanne d’Arc had been in combat, and many in her crew were new to the ship, having come aboard just before the flotilla had left for Alphekka. It would be interesting to see how well they did in this, their first exercise that was not a drill. Her captain, Charles Michel, had seen action during the Defense of Earth, but he was Belgian rather than French, and Giraurd wasn’t sure he trusted the man.

      Unfortunately, there were a lot of officers on board he didn’t entirely trust. Sawicki, the tactical officer, was a Pole. Mytnyk, the fighter wing commander, was Ukrainian, while the political officer, Westerwelle, was a German. And then there were the British, always a problem in European Federation politics.

      The Pan-European Federation had been a superb idea on paper, but even now, more than 270 years after the Pax Confeoderata and more than 400 years after the Treaty of Maastricht, the idea of a union of European states sounded better than it worked. The Terran Confederation, it was said, was only as strong as its weakest members, and for all their public bravado, the Pan-Europeans rarely were able to show a solid or united front.

      Of course, the North Americans had the same trouble—descendents of the old United States trying to show a common front with Canadians, Mexicans, and a clutter of tiny Central American states. Political unions simply didn’t work when the member states had more differences than similarities.

      The odd thing about the situation was that threats from outside generally forced such unions to put aside internal differences and pull together; but if anything, the war with the Sh’daar had reawakened old animosities, infighting, and name-calling. The ancient cracks in the painted façade were showing, not only within the European Federation, but all throughout the realm of Humankind.

      What was needed was a stronger government, a government with the resolve to force the disparate fragments of humanity into line. Politically, Giraurd was a Federationialist, a neosocialist political party calling for the final abolition of the old nationalist states and the creation of a genuine United Terra.

      And that day was coming. Humankind had no choice but to unite in the face of the threat from outside. The first step was to crush the so-called independence movements in the USNA, and that meant bringing mavericks like Alexander Koenig into line. A united Humankind couldn’t afford individualists like Koenig or the right-wing political reactionaries remaining within the USNA’s government.

      And so, in a way, the unification of mankind began here. “Hit them with everything we have, Mr. Sawicki,” he said.

      Nuclear fire continued blossoming in stark and dazzling silence against the forward view screens.

       VFA-44

       Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

       98 light years from Earth

       1749 hours, TFT

      A European Federation Raschadler flashed past on Gray’s port side, a thousand kilometers distant, practically at point-blank range, though too distant and far too fast relative to him for him to pick it up optically. Their name meant “Swift Eagle,” but in space combat, it was how many gravities a drive could pull that counted, not the actual velocity. Where the USNA Starhawks could pull up to fifty thousand gravities—an incredible performance—the Raschadlers could manage only about two thousand Gs. Where Starhawks could be pushing the speed of light after ten minutes of acceleration, it took the older Swift Eagles over four hours to reach near-c.

      Gray needed to use that superior acceleration now to outperform the European fighters.

      Twenty seconds passed swiftly, and Gray gave the order to decelerate. The Starhawks, still in their acceleration configurations—teardrop-shaped with slender spikes astern to bleed off excess gravitic energy—began slowing at fifty thousand Gs.

      Another twenty seconds passed, with the SG-92s jinking wildly to throw off the European anti-fighter defenses. In such a tight formation, there would have been a danger of some nasty high-velocity collisions if the twelve fighters hadn’t been electronically tied together.

      The enemy fighters were trying to slow and reverse course, but it would take them a long time to come around. Too long …

      “Let your AIs handle the rendezvous,” Gray told the others. “Going on automatic for final deceleration and maneuvering. …”

      At ten thousand kilometers per second, there’d been no evidence to human eyes that the fighters had been moving at all. The stars hung motionless in space, a cold testament to their distance and the gulfs between them. But under that searing, AI-controlled deceleration, the Jeanne d’Arc, suddenly, magically, was there, hanging in the black sky directly ahead, and Gray could see with his own eyes the gleaming blue-and-white curve of her shield cap, the neat letters and numerals picking out her name and registry number.

      She was five kilometers away, and the linked fighters were closing now at a relative velocity of a half a kilometer per second.

      “Combat mode!” Gray called. “Target the shield cap!”

      The Jeanne d’Arc was still accelerating, so her forward shields were down. Gray thoughtclicked an icon within his virtual in-head display, and opened up with a long burst from his Gatling RFK-90 kinetic-kill cannon. Firing with a cyclic rate of twelve per second, the Gatling loosed a stream of magnetic-ceramic jacketed slugs, each with a depleted uranium core massing half a kilo and traveling at 175 meters per second plus the 500 meters per second of the fighter’s relative closing velocity. That much mass traveling that fast possessed СКАЧАТЬ