Singularity. Ian Douglas

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      Chapter Two

       10 April 2405

       VFA-44

       Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

       98 light years from Earth

       1342 hours, TFT

       Please, God, don’t let me screw up, don’t let me screw up, don’t let me screw up …

      “And acceleration in four … three … two … one … launch!”

      Acceleration slammed Lieutenant Trevor Gray back in the cockpit as his SG-92 Starhawk hurtled down the spinal launch tube and into space. At seven gravities, he traversed the two-hundred-meter length of the tube in a fraction over two and a third seconds, emerging at just under 170 meters per second relative to the carrier. The vast, black, circular dome of America’s forward cap receded swiftly behind him, the ship’s name in faded letters meters high, the word sandblasted to a faded and ragged gray by long voyaging through the interstellar medium. He switched to view forward. Ahead, the local sun showed as a close-set pair of intensely brilliant sparks.

      “Blue Dragon One clear,” he called over the communications net. “CIC, handing off from Pryfly.”

      “Blue Dragon One, CIC. We have you.”

      “Imaging,” he told his ship’s AI. “Show the squadron, please.”

      “Blue Two, clear,” a second voice said. Lieutenant Shay Ryan’s Starhawk had launched in tandem with his. Computer imagining showed her ship as a blue diamond, high and forty meters to port. He switched to his in-head display. With his cerebral implants receiving feeds from external sensors all over the craft’s fuselage, his Starhawk seemed invisible now, at least to his eyes, as though he’d merged with his fighter and become a part of it. Ryan’s Starhawk sharpened into high-res magnification, a long and slender black needle with a central bulge, her ship, like his, still in launch configuration.

      With a thoughtclicked command, Gray flipped his fighter end for end and began decelerating, his maneuver matched closely by Shay. Other SG-92s were appearing now, spilling two by two from America’s forward launch tubes.

      “Blue Dragon Three, clear.”

      “Blue Four, in the clear.”

      Fighters from other squadrons were dropping laterally from the carrier, propelled by the centrifugal force of the rotating hab modules behind the forward cap, and slowly, a cloud of fighters was beginning to surround her. America, he knew, was just one of many warships in the newly reinforced CBG-18, with several other carriers out there, but, from this vantage point, he couldn’t see any of them save as colored icons painted into his visual cortex by his fighter’s AI.

      “Dragonfires,” Gray said over the tac channel. “Go to combat configuration and form up on me.”

      “Copy, Skipper,” the voice of Ben Donovan said. “We’re coming in.”

      And the other ships of VFA-44 began closing with him.

      Skipper …

      The title still didn’t fit. The Dragonfires’ skipper, their CO, was Commander Marissa Allyn … but CDR Allyn had gone streaker during the Battle of Alphekka, her fighter badly damaged and hurtling out of control into emptiness. The SAR ships had found her three days later and brought her back, still alive but in a coma. She was still in America’s sick bay ICU, unconscious and unresponsive.

      And CAG had told Gray that now he was the squadron commander.

      The assignment was strictly temporary and provisional. VFA-44 had come out of the furnace of Alphekka with just three pilots left—Gray, Shay Ryan, and Ben Donovan. And of the three of them, Gray held seniority; Donovan’s date of commission was two years younger than Gray’s, while Ryan was a relative newbie, fresh from a training squadron at Oceana.

      Over the past month, the three of them had worked together training a batch of replacement pilots, men and women recruited from other shipboard divisions to fill the squadron’s missing ranks. How well the new squadron performed, how they pulled together as a team, likely, would determine whether Gray would keep his new billet—and perhaps receive an early promotion to lieutenant commander to go with it.

      The trouble was that Gray had no desire for either the promotion or the responsibility. He and his wife had been Prims—primitives—squatters in the unorganized and half-drowned ruins of coastal cities around the peripheries of the old United States. As such, they’d not been full citizens, and when Angela had had a stroke, he’d been forced to join the military as a trade-off to get her medical treatment.

      Gray’s plan had been to put in the mandatory minimum—ten years—and get out. His time would be up in another six years. Damn it, he was not going to hang around one second longer than he had to.

      Other Starhawk pilots began dropping into formation with him as they continued to exit the carrier. Jamis Natham and Calli Loman, both formerly of America’s food services department. Miguel Zapeta, admin. Rissa Schiff, avionics. Will Rostenkowski, personnel. Tammi Mallory, medical department. There were nine newbies in all, not counting Shay, who had been through the fight at Alphekka.

      “Stay tight,” Gray told the formation. “Close perimeter defense.”

      “Who the hell’s going to attack us out here?” Carlos Esteban—until recently an AI systems analyst—asked. “This star system is supposed to be empty!”

      “Just do it, Lieutenant,” Gray said. “You can analyze the tacsit later.”

      “Scuttlebutt had it we might be fighting the Europeans,” Mallory said. “Giraurd wants Koenig to go back to Earth.”

      “Quiet, Dragonfires,” Gray snapped. “No scuttlebutt, no talking. Line of duty only.”

      “Uh … permission to ask a question?” That was Schiff.

      “Granted.”

      “Is that true, Skipper? We might be facing off against Confederation forces?”

      “They haven’t told me, Lieutenant,” Gray told her. “When they do, I’ll pass it along. For right now … follow orders, stay in tight formation, and maintain radio silence.”

      But Gray had heard the same scuttlebutt. Everyone in the fleet must have heard it by now. Fleet Admiral Giraurd outranked a mere rear admiral, and the word СКАЧАТЬ