LITMIR.BIZ

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Several of America’s own squadrons had been shuffled off to the Republic earlier, and Meier wondered if anyone in the Fleet had a clear idea of what was supposed to be going on.

      He felt the gentle acceleration as the kilometer-long carrier pulled back from the gantry. His in-head showed a choice of views, both from America’s external vid cams and from the gantry structure itself.

      God … the old girl is a mess, he thought. He had a particular affection for the carrier even though he hadn’t been attached to her for even twenty-four hours yet. It had been the America that had shown up at the last possible moment at Kapteyn’s Star and saved the collective ass of the Lexington and everyone on board her.

      America, he thought, studying her as she pulled free of her docking slip, wasn’t in much better shape than the Lex, but at least she could still limp along under her own power. When their drives had failed on the way back to Sol, a small fleet of SAR tugs had come out and towed both America and the Lady Lex into the synchorbital port. There was some question, however, whether the Lex could even be repaired, or if she was going to end up being scrapped.

      It was possible that the whole question was moot. The entity that had wrecked both ships at Kapteyn’s Star had just popped up in the outer Sol System, and reportedly was headed straight for Earth. Every ship that could be thrown in the thing’s path was being mustered.

      The trouble was that the muster list of Earth’s warships had been badly depleted lately … by the fight at Kapteyn’s Star, by the long-standing war with the Sh’daar Empire, and by the savage little civil war that had torn the Earth Confederation apart. The USNA Navy was desperately short of ships.

      If indeed, any number of the ships of Earth’s various navies stood any chance at all against an enemy as technologically advanced, as overwhelmingly powerful as the Rosette entity. Hell, much of what they’d been seen doing—manipulating space and time in ways completely beyond human understanding—didn’t even seem to count as technology.

      As a well-known writer and scientific philosopher of several centuries earlier had put it, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

      “VFA-211,” the sexy voice said, “stand by for immediate launch. By the numbers …”

      The squadron began sounding off. “Hunter One, ready for drop.”

      “Hunter Two, ready.”

      “Headhunter Three,” Meier announced, “ready to go!”

      One by one, the rest of the pilots reported their readiness. There were twelve ships in the squadron. Three of those were replacements newly arrived from Earth.

      “All squadrons,” Fletcher called. “You’re clear for boost at five thousand gravities. Two minutes to drop …”

      “Well,” Lieutenant Lakeland, Hunter Seven, said, “we’re going somewhere in a hell of a hurry!”

      “Yeah, but what the hell are we supposed to do when we get out there?” Hunter Eight, one of the newbies, asked. Her name was Lieutenant Veronica Porter, and she was someone else Meier wanted to get to know better.

      “Don’t you worry about that, Eight,” Meier said. “The bastards’ll see us coming in at near-c, and they’ll turn tail and run so fast that God’ll arrest them for breaking the laws of physics!”

      “Knock it off, Meier,” Commander Victor Leystrom, the squadron’s CO, said. “Try to behave yourself.”

      “Hey, I always behave myself, Commander!”

      But he knew what Leystrom meant—he had a … reputation both within the squadron and back on the Lex: ladies’ man, playboy, the stereotypical hot fighter jock with a nova-hot tailhook. And he did his best to uphold that rep with bravado and confident flirting, though even he admitted that the details of his sex life tended to be somewhat exaggerated. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day—or in the night, for that matter—to rack up the scores he liked to claim.

      But that small intrusion of reality into his life couldn’t slow down his swagger.

      Leystrom, who was something of a prude, seemed to take every opportunity to shoot the hotshots in his squadron down. Professionals, he insisted, didn’t need to brag.

      Where was the fun in that, though?

      The minutes dragged by. At 7,000 gravities, America would be pushing the speed of light in 71 minutes, but that wasn’t the point here. The Headhunters’ Starblade fighters could hit 50,000 gravities and reach c in less than ten minutes. If the carrier dropped her fighters relatively late in her approach to the objective, however, the enemy would have less time to track them, less time to lock on their weapons. Meier doubted that those tactics would be very effective in this case. Their target was—according to the best xenosophontological guess—an extremely powerful and highly developed artificial intelligence, possibly an AI that had been around for hundreds of millions or even billions of years. It could probably think rings around anything humans could bring to bear and come up with countertactics and unexpected attacks in nanoseconds.

      Still, a guy with a stone knife and the element of surprise could kill a man with a high-tech handgun, if he could get in the first blow. It was that sizeable if that the squadron would be working on.

      “Headhunters,” CAG called over the squadron’s tactical net. “You are clear to commence your drop in thirty seconds.”

      “Okay, people,” Leystrom added. “There is a chance that the Rosies are coming in to talk. Keep your weapons offline, I repeat, off-line until either I or C3 gives you the word. Understand?”

      A ragged chorus of assents came back. “What’re the chances the bastards want to talk, Skipper?” Lieutenant Greg Malone asked.

      “When the Joint Chiefs see fit to tell me, I’ll let you know,” Leystrom replied. “Just stay the hell alert, and don’t Krait ’em until you get orders. Understand?”

      “Copy that, Commander.”

      The seconds dragged past. “VFA-211, commence drop sequence in three … and two … and one … drop!”

      Centrifugal force tossed Meier’s Starblade from the carrier’s launch tube. As he dropped clear of America’s shieldcap, he could see the objective dead ahead … a small and fuzzy patch of pale light.

      “CIC,” Leystrom said. “Handing off from PriFly. Headhunters are clear of the ship and formed up.”

      “CIC copies that, Hunters, and thank you. Accelerate and close with the objective.”

      “CIC, Headhunters, we copy. Boosting in three … two … one … kick it!”

      The flight of Starblades hurtled outward, their view of space ahead turned strange as their velocity inexorably crowded that of light. For Meier, it was as though he was suspended somehow in time, with all of the visible stars crowded into a ring of light forward, with everything else enveloped in total black emptiness, and with no feeling of movement at all.

      Moments later, the fighter AIs linked and in synch gave rapid-fire commands that flipped the Starblades end for end and began deceleration.

      “Headhunters!” Leystrom snapped. “Arm Kraits and Boomslangs!”

      Meier thoughtclicked an in-head icon, arming his fighter’s complement of missiles—thirty-two VG-92 Krait space-to-space shipkiller missiles, plus six of the far more powerful VG-120 Boomslangs.

      Light exploded around him.

       The Consciousness

       Outer Sol System

       1932 hours, TFT

      In much the same way as the human mind emerged from tightly interlinking networks of individual neurons, the Consciousness

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