LITMIR.BIZ

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USNA Naval Base

       Quito Synchorbital

       1440 hours, TFT

      “VFA-96 is recovered, Captain,” America’s CAG reported.

      “I see it, Connie. Thank you.”

      Back on board his ship, now, after the shuttle flight up from Columbus, Captain Gray relaxed in the embrace of his command seat on the carrier’s bridge, allowing incoming streams of data to flood through his consciousness. With his cerebral implants hardlinked to the carrier’s artificial intelligence, he could follow all of the preparations for getting the immense vessel ready for debarkation directly, as though he himself was the central awareness of America’s AI network. Through the AI’s electronic eyes, he’d watched the Starhawks of VFA-96 hurtling in, two by two, and trapping on America’s Bravo flight deck. A shift in perception, and he was watching now as the Starhawks peeled open and the pilots emerged.

      Gray had a special fondness for the old SG-92 Starhawks. As a raw, newbie lieutenant twenty years earlier, he’d flown a Starhawk as part of the long-disbanded VF-44 Dragonfires. Those fighters were considered relics nowadays, compared to the much newer and more powerful SG-101 Velociraptors, the SG-112 Stardragons, and other modern space fighters. There was talk of retiring the Starhawks permanently … but the Navy had been dithering on the issue for several years, now, and if the scuttlebutt was true, if the Sh’daar were coming back, that procrastination was a damned good thing. Earth would need a lot of fighters in the coming months, if Endeavor had been burned out of the sky by Sh’daar clients … and if the Sh’daar were planning on moving in from the Ophiuchan colonies.

      Hell, even if the Sh’daar had nothing to do with the Endeavor attack, the Slan capture of 36 Ophiuchi meant that Earth was going to need every fighter available, and now. There wouldn’t be time to grow new Velociraptors or Stardragons, not when every moment counted in intercepting the aliens before they reached Solar space. America and her battlegroup had been on full alert since the news of Arianrhod’s capture and of Endeavor’s destruction had come through from Mars. Supplies for an extended deployment were coming up through the space elevator now, or arriving down-tether from Anchorage, the small asteroid 36,000 kilometers farther out that kept the elevator structure taut and in place. Crews on liberty and leave on Earth and on the moon were being recalled, and two fresh squadrons—VFA-96 and VFA-115—had just arrived.

      Similar preparations were under way on board all of the ships in CBG-40, the designation for America’s current battlegroup. The expectation was that they would be getting the affirm-go from Geneva at almost any moment.

      The only real question was where the battlegroup would be deployed … Omega Centauri, as originally planned? Or to a much closer objective, to 36 Ophiuchi?

      Gray pulled back from the interior view, shifting instead to America’s logistical displays. Supplies of raw material—carbon, nitrogen, and the other elements necessary to nanufacture food and most other consumables used by the nearly five thousand personnel on board—were stored in sponsons along America’s kilometer-long spine. Hydrogen, oxygen, and water itself were tapped from the 27 billion liters of water stored in America’s shield cap. While the carrier could resupply from convenient asteroids in almost any star system, Gray wanted to have every stores module full-up before they departed Solar space. Faced with a hostile unknown, there was no telling how long it would be before they would have the luxury of resupply.

      “Connie?” he asked. “What’s the logistics status for the Wing?”

      Captain 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

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