LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Since when did you get reprogrammed as a psytech?” he asked the image. He tried to keep the words light and bantering, and knew he’d failed.

      “Karyn Mendelson had considerable psych experience,” the image told him. “She commanded the fleet at Arcturus Station last year, remember, before she was assigned to Admiral Harrison’s command staff.”

      “I know, damn it, I know. I just … I just don’t want to lose you.” Again. …

      “Alex, you have lost me. Lost her, rather. A PA simulacrum cannot substitute for a real human.”

      “Maybe not,” he replied, stubbornly sullen. “And maybe you’re how I can … get used to the idea that she’s gone.”

      “A psytherapy session would be better, Alex.”

      “Look, I don’t want to talk about it now, okay? I’m supposed to be at this damned reception tonight. The Eudaimonium Arcology.”

      “Yes, Alex.”

      And that, he thought glumly, perfectly summed up the difference between a PA avatar and the real person—ignoring the fact that you couldn’t touch an avatar. The real Karyn would never have let things rest there, would have kept arguing with him if she thought he was doing something stupid. Her PA’s holographic projection, directed by certain software protocols, simply agreed with whatever he told it to do.

      It didn’t help that the AI program, likely, was right. The Navy relied heavily on advanced psychiatric medicine these days, including the use of elaborate virtual psytherapeutic replays of traumatic events, to treat the casualties of modern warfare. He’d been through virtual simulations himself more than once. Nothing to it. …

      He just didn’t want to forget her.

      A comm signal chimed in his head. “Admiral?” It was his senior aide, Lieutenant Commander Nahan Cleary.

      “Yes, Mr. Cleary.”

      “It’s time to go ashore if you want to get there in plenty of time.”

      “I’ll be right there.” He checked his inner time readout. Just past nineteen, Fleet Time, which was GMT for Earth. SupraQuito was in the same planetary time zone as the Eudaimonium Arcology, a five-hour difference; it was now 1409 EST.

      Lieutenant Commander Cleary was stretching somewhat the need for urgency. Admirals did not ride the space elevator with the general public, which would have meant a two-hour trip down the express to Quito, and another hour in the subsurface gravtube to New New York. The admiral’s barge on board the America would get him to the Eudaimonium Arc in less than an hour. The invitation was for seventeen, local time, so he still had almost two hours before he absolutely had to leave. Cleary, however, like all good aides, tended to fuss worse than a nagging PA, and didn’t like to entertain even the possibility that his admiral would be late.

      He wished he could blow off the invitation entirely, though. He was busy working on a set of tactical evaluations with Fleet HQ, and he didn’t have time for this nonsense.

      But for military personnel an invitation from the president of the Confederation Senate himself was an order, not a suggestion, and Fleet Admiral Rodriguez would be there as well.

      Better to go and get the damned thing over with.

      Another chime sounded, and this time Karyn’s image appeared, his personal assistant serving now as his secretary.

      “What is it, Karyn?” he asked.

      “An incoming fleet communication, Alex,” she said. “You’re really going to want to see this.”

      “Put it through.”

      A window opened in his mind, and he felt the flow of the encrypted data feed. Keys within his implanted circuitry opened the message, and he found himself looking down on another world.

      “ONI/DeSpaComCent to all units with Crystal Tower clearance and above,” an emotionless voice, probably an AI, said. “We have an incoming transmission from an ISVR–120 dispatched to the Arcturus system six weeks ago. Data is raw, with only preliminary analyses by this department. …”

      Within his mental window, Koenig could see the planet and its moon. A cascade of printed data scrolled down one side of his awareness, but he didn’t need to read it to recognize the gas giant Alchameth and its largest satellite, Jasper. A bright blue targeting reticule marked a silvery pinpoint—Arcturus Station in orbit over a cloud-swathed moon. A dozen smaller reticules, each bright red, marked Turusch ships in orbit around Jasper.

      His experienced inner eye took in the Turusch ships, each with its id tag giving type, mass, and readiness. Two Beta-class battlewagons, plus at least ten cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers. That was a fair-sized battle fleet, and suggested that the Turusch were waiting for a possible Confederation counterattack into the system.

      Not that that was going to happen anytime soon. Confederation Fleet Command had been reluctant to re-engage the enemy. The Defense of Earth might technically have been a victory, but it had been a damned close-run thing.

      The gas giant, simmering in the sea of radiation from giant Arcturus just 20 AU distant, showed the bright yellow, orange, red, and brown striations of atmosphere belts, whipped around the massive planet by violent high-altitude winds.

      The scene moved jerkily, frame by frame, and the images were grainy and difficult to resolve. They would have been pulled from a seemingly uniform starbow of light by sensory correction software on the probe, and, as the voice had warned, hadn’t yet been massaged by the ONI analysts on Luna. But as the probe moved past planet and moon, the moon dropped from view outside of the camera angle and the probe’s optics began zooming in on Alchameth.

      Another blue reticule appeared, highlighting something above the banded cloud tops. Koenig resisted the impulse to squint, patiently waiting as the images—drastically slowed by the relativistic time difference between the probe and the outside world—zoomed in frame by frame.

      There was something there. …

      Sunlight glinted, a silver-orange glitter above orange clouds. A spacecraft? The probe’s optical sensors zoomed in closer. It looked like a flattened balloon, but it must have been immense to be visible at this range, many kilometers across. And it was rising above the highest cloud layers, now, so it must be a ship … or possibly an aircraft.

      A side window opened, showing schematics of a H’rulka ship, something encountered by humans only once so far.

      Turusch and H’rulka ships together at Arcturus, just 37 light years from Sol.

      The afternoon, suddenly, had become a lot more interesting.

       VFA–44 Dragonfire Squadron

       Approaching Columbia Arcology

       United States, Earth

       1655 hours, EST

      Lieutenant Trevor Gray descended above the ocean, dropping toward the ruin of Old New York.

      Linked in with the AI computer of his SG–92 Starhawk, his cerebral implants were receiving optical feeds from sensors grown temporarily all over the craft’s fuselage. From his point of view, his fighter was invisible—in fact, he was the fighter, hurtling through the early evening sky off the eastern seaboard of the United States. The winter sun had set twenty-five minutes before; the sky was still a crisp and brilliant blue, the twilight illuminating the dark rolling waves below.

      Around him, in the crystalline sky, eleven other Starhawks traveled with him in close formation, each jet-black ship now morphed into atmospheric flight mode—broad delta shapes with down-curving wingtips carving through thin air at a sedate four times the speed of sound. They’d departed from the military spaceport at Oceana just five minutes earlier, swinging far out over the ocean to avoid disturbing coastal communities with their sonic boom. The Manhat Ruins now

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