The Star Carrier Series Books 1-3: Earth Strike, Centre of Gravity, Singularity

Earth Synchorbit, Sol System

1610 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Gray watched the Earth swelling to blue-white glory just ahead. Within his passenger pod nestled inside the stubby IHG transport, the feed from external optical pick-ups had rendered the craft itself invisible. It seemed to Gray that he was leaning back in his recliner, completely open to empty space, surrounded by a panoply of stars, the sun brilliant off to one side, and Earth and Earth’s moon as an unlikely and mismatched pair before him.

Ten hours had passed since he’d boarded the Interplanetary Direct transport back at Phobia. Accelerating at one hundred gravities, the Kelvin had reached a midpoint velocity of .06 c, almost nineteen thousand kilometers per second, then flipped its drive singularity astern to decelerate for the rest of the flight to its destination.

The trip back to Earth was Fifer’s idea … an opportunity, the psych officer had told him, to take another look at his roots. In particular, Fifer wanted Gray to see if he still fit in with the tribes of the Manhattan Ruins. He’d boarded the shuttle at 0800 hours that morning, signing out at America’s quarterdeck and boarding the Kelvin at her embarkation dock with fifteen enlisted members of America’s crew heading for Earth on liberty. He’d chatted with one of them, an armaments tech, second class, while waiting to board the Kelvin. Usually, enlisted liberty was short—from twelve to forty-eight hours—but twenty hours of travel time between Mars and Earth cut into that time sharply. The tech told him that she’d been granted a seventy-two, as had the others going to Earth. Scuttlebutt had it that America would be redeploying to Earth Synchorbital within the next day or two; if that happened, she’d rejoin the ship there—and get an extra ten hours visiting her parents in Columbus, DC.

As an officer, Gray didn’t need to worry about liberty. He’d simply signed out after receiving permission from the CAG office to go Earthside for seventy-two hours. Plenty of time to do what he needed to do in Manhattan and get back to the ship, whether she was still at Mars or docked at SupraQuito.

He found himself thinking about Rissa Schiff, the cute ensign from the avionics department he’d met last time he’d been at SupraQuito. He’d found her fun and engaging, had been wondering about taking things further with her … at least until Collins and Spaas had busted up the party. The pairing probably wouldn’t have worked; he was still looking for something permanent in a relationship. Schiffie had been looking for fun—one night or many, but nothing lasting.

God, he missed Angela.

The moon appeared to be slowly drifting off to one side, turning from nearly full to a crescent as the Kelvin slipped past it and into circumlunar space. The lights of cities appeared scattered across those parts of the moon in darkness, tight clusters marking the cities at Crisium, Tranquility, Apennine Vista, Tsiolkovsky, and the others, all woven together by a slender webwork of glowing threads marking the surface gravtubes.

Earth grew larger, the rate of growth slowing with Kelvin’s continuing deceleration. Eventually, Gray could make out what appeared to be strings of minute stars drawn out in slender arcs around the planet. After three centuries, Earth Synchorbital had become the preferred location for the vast majority of the planet’s off-world manufactories, power production, shipyards, and orbital habitats. Several million people lived in orbit now, the number growing daily. Like Mars, Earth was served by three space elevators—one at Quito, one on the northern slope of Mt. Kenya, and one on the island of Pulau Lingga, on the southern edge of the Port Singapore megalopolis. The habs and orbital factories at Synchorbital didn’t extend all the way around the planet yet; it would be centuries more before Earth had a genuine system of rings 36,000 kilometers above its equator. Even so, it was remarkable to see how the hand of man had so touched the world of his birth and that world’s moon that evidence of his technology could be seen from this far out in the Void.

Still decelerating, the Kelvin continued to close with the nexus of gleaming habs and solar panels at SupraQuito. Gray could see the elevator itself now, a gossamer-thin strand of light stretched taut between a mountaintop in Ecuador and a small planetoid anchor twenty thousand kilometers above synchronous orbit. The Kelvin’s launch from Phobia had been timed to arrive at SupraQuito precisely as the receiving facility orbited into position. The Kelvin’s onboard AI made a rapid series of final corrections using the drive singularity astern, then switched off the drive and drifted into the tangleweb field at less than a hundred meters per second. Gray felt the surge of deceleration, startling after ten and a half hours of zero-G under gravitic drive.

His travel pod melted away around him as an AI voice thanked him for choosing Interplanetary Direct for his travel needs. Eighty creds had been deducted from his account on board the America to pay for the flight.

The receiving bay was in microgravity, of course. Robots hovered nearby, waiting to assist passengers unused to moving in zero-G, but Gray grabbed a handrail and pulled himself along with more or less practiced ease. The local hab section would be rotating, like the crew modules on board America, but he needed to enter it at the hub and ride an elevator out and down to the main deck. Hauling himself hand over hand, he followed glowing arrows projected on the bulkhead toward customs. His baggage—a single small satchel—would be forwarded directly down to Quito.

The local time, he noted, was 1125 hours—five hours off of shipboard time, which was set to GMT. And Quito was in the same global time zone as Manhattan.

He would be there, he thought, by late that afternoon.

Solar Kuiper Belt

5.5 light hours from Earth

1830 hours, TFT

High Guard Watch Station 8734 was tiny—a spherical object the size of a woman’s fist—and most of its mass consisted of foam insulation against the ambient 50-degree Kelvin temperatures so far from a wan and distant sun. It was one of some hundreds of thousands of AI detector probes scattered across the surface of an immense sphere, with a radius of five and a half light hours, centered on Sol.

The automated High Guard Watch had begun late in the twenty-first century, as the first automated probes were placed in solar orbit roughly at the mean distance of Pluto. Tiny onboard cameras and mass detectors the size of BBs kept a constant watch on the surrounding sky, recording mass and movement, the data spreading across large networks of the probes for correlation and tracking. The idea had been to spot comets or asteroids falling in out of the Kuiper Belt, objects that in future epochs might threaten Earth or Earth’s solar colonies. The sooner such objects were detected, the easier it would be to nudge them into new orbits that would never threaten human habitats.

Later, they were programmed for another task—watching for the flash of photons released by starships as they dropped out of Alcubierre Drive. They served as a navigational net, tracking incoming and outgoing ships by their photon release.

And since the Sh’daar Ultimatum, in 2367, they’d watched for the arrival of alien ships that might pose a threat to humankind.

The network was stretched painfully thin. Even half a million probes are few and far between when they’re scattered over the surface of a sphere eleven light hours across. The nearest probe to 8734’s current position was 3683, now thirty light seconds distant, twenty times the distance between Earth and Earth’s moon.

A burst of high-energy photons captured 8734’s electronic attention. Twin cameras focused on the disturbance, estimating the distance at nearly one light hour out, deeper into the Kuiper Belt; probe 3683 recorded the flash twelve seconds later, allowing a more perfect triangulation and target lock. The arriving ship was large—enormous, in fact, a small planetoid converted into a starship of alien configuration.

The closest human presence was a Navy listening post on Triton, a moon of Neptune, now 2.9 light hours distant. High Guard Probe 8734 duly transmitted its data and continued to monitor the movement of the intruder vessel … as around it more and more new targets began to flash into realspace existence.

Chapter Seventeen

17 October 2404

Triton Naval Listening Post, Sol System

2125 hours, TFT

Hostile warships were arriving at the outskirts of Earth’s solar system, but it took precious time to get word of the event to Mars. Two hours, fifty-five minutes passed before data arrived at Triton from the first probe to detect the incoming fleet, and the data were already an hour old even before the transmission had begun.

Things tend to happen slowly at the thin, cold edge of the solar system.

Lieutenant Charles Kennedy was the commanding officer of the Navy’s Triton listening post, a tiny base housing twelve Navy personnel, a handful of civilian researchers and base technicians, and a modest AI named Sparks. A few kilometers distant, mobile mining platforms the size of battleships crept across the frozen landscape, extracting nitrogen from the surface, pressurizing it, bottling it, and magnetically launching it into the long trajectory sunward for use in the Martian terraforming project.

Kennedy sipped his coffee and decided yet again that his all-too-brief evening with Admiral Brewer’s daughter had not been worth it. Being assigned to this frozen ice ball in the solar system’s boondocks was about as close to terminal as his career could come. He’d been here for three months now, and could look forward to another nine months of utter boredom and frigid vistas in the wan light of a sun thirty astronomical units distant.

“Class One alert,” Sparky announced without preamble. “Data incoming. Our remote Kuiper probes are detecting the emergence of starships almost four light hours out.”

Kennedy choked on his coffee, his feet swinging off the console and hitting the deck with a slap. Surface gravity on Triton was just under two tenths of a G, and the droplets of hot spilled liquid cascaded across his face and uniform in slow motion.

“Shit!” Then the pain of coffee scalding his chin registered. “Ow!” Mopping at his face, he set the cup down. “Where, damn it?”

A chart opened in his mind, showing the relative positions in three dimensions of Neptune and Triton, the distant sun, and the incoming ships. Data were coming in now from a total of four unmanned probes at the forty-AU shell, highlighted as blinking white pinpoints, some ten astronomical units beyond the orbit of Neptune. The intruders were beyond that shell, off to one side and 10 degrees above the ecliptic, some twenty-two astronomical units away from Triton, forty-five AUs from Sol.

As Kennedy studied the data, he realized that a better question would have been when. Those blips, obviously, were starships emerging from the enemy’s equivalent of Alcubierre Drive, detected by the pulses of photons released by their emergence into normal space. They would have been moving in the hour since their detection … and would have moved further still in the three subsequent hours as the alert was transmitted down to Triton. Those ships could be almost anywhere now … including bearing down on Triton at just under the speed of light.

“How many?” he asked the AI.

“We are picking up multiple emergence events,” Sparky continued. “Fifteen vessels of various masses and configurations so far.”

“Can you identify the configurations?”

There was the briefest of pauses as data was correlated and confirmed. “Affirmative. Configurations match those of several known Turusch warships.”

Trash ships! Here! “Launch ready courier. Now!”

One hundred kilometers above the methane-ice plains of Triton, an orbital laser-communications antenna shifted slightly, taking aim at an unseen point among the stars just to one side of the brightest of those stars—Mars, its light lost in the glare of Sol. Sparky would continue transmitting updates to that data for as long as possible.

“Give me positions on the nearest naval vessels,” he said.

“One High Guard destroyer is at fifty-five light minutes’ range,” Sparky told him. “USNA Gallagher.”

“Send out a general fleet alert,” Kennedy said. His primary orders—getting the warning back to the inner system as quickly as possible—had been accomplished. Beyond that, he could warn any naval vessels in the general vicinity of Neptune … and not much else.

The listening post was not armed.

Kennedy watched the incoming blips and decided that, just maybe, boredom wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

Minutes later, a false dawn illuminated the ice plains of Triton as the lasercom antenna vanished in a near-c impact.