LITMIR.BIZ

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city was ringed by anti-space defenses, including high-velocity AMSO launchers, railguns, nano-D canisters, and high-powered beam weapon emplacements in Arlington, Georgetown, Silver Spring, Bladensburg, and the brand-new planetary defense facility at Spaceport Andrews.

      And if anything came through that these defenses couldn’t handle, high-velocity mag-tubes could whisk key members of the government elsewhere—to Toronto, again … or to Denver or Mexico City or a dozen other fortified retreats.

      The problem though, Koenig thought as the pod dropped through the hard vacuum of the tube, was that this time it wasn’t just the North-American capital city that was in danger, but the whole fucking planet. If the Rosette Consciousness wanted to wipe out Earth, then, given the advanced technology witnessed so far, they would be able to do so without much effort and no place would be safe.

      But certain protocols had been put into place, and certain procedures had to be observed. If he put up a struggle, his own Secret Service people would simply anesthetize him and carry him off bodily.

      That seemed needlessly confrontational, not to mention awkward. No, he would play along.

      And pray that Wilkerson’s upgraded code was able to stop the approaching entity.

       Ready Room, VFA-211

      TC/USNA CVS America

       Outer Asteroid Belt

       2227 hours, TFT

      “Do you think they’re going to send us out again?” Lieutenant Schaeffer asked. She sounded … not worried, exactly, but stressed. Concerned, maybe.

      Meier gave a listless shrug. He was still dealing with the shockingly abrupt deaths of three of his squadron mates, and was having a lot of trouble coming to grips with what had happened.

      They were seated in the squadron ready room, a large open space just above the fighter launch bays. Spin gravity here from the rotating hab section was about half a G, enough to allow them to have a couple of open cups of coffee on the table in front of them. One long wall showed local space—a shrunken sun and a light scattering of stars. Too few were visible to allow Meier to pick out any constellations.

      Somewhere out there in that empty darkness was a planet-sized monster …

      “They say we’re in the Asteroid Belt,” Schaeffer said. She seemed eager for conversation. “I thought the sky out here would be full of rocks.”

      He gave her a hard look. You expected better from a fellow fighter pilot.

      “Ah … another victim of the entertainment sims,” he said.

      “What do you mean?”

      “Asteroids a kilometer or more across are scattered real thin out here … something like two million kilometers between one asteroid and the next. Even counting rocks just ten meters across or more, the average distance between them is over six thousand kilometers. You could live your whole life on one and never see another rock in your sky, not even as a faint point of light.”

      She smiled at him. “So … no daring flights through fields of tumbling asteroids?”

      “That’s complete garbage. What I don’t get is how sim presenters have been getting away with that kind of crap since the twentieth century.”

      “Well, it was just fiction …”

      “They did it in documentaries too. I’ve seen some of them. Science programs where the presenters should have known.”

      She laid a hand on his arm. “Yes, but how do you really feel about it, Jason?”

      His voice had been getting loud. Things like that did irritate him, but his emotional state was letting it come out as anger.

      Suddenly, though, he realized that Schaeffer had been deliberately prodding him, trying to get an emotional response. “You were trolling me,” he said, his tone sharp and accusing.

      “Maybe a little,” she admitted. “You were so wrapped up in yourself … so intense. Brooding. It didn’t look healthy.”

      “I suppose you’re right.” He looked away, taking in the other Headhunters seated in the room. Walther … Lakeland … they seemed steady enough. Esteban was okay. Dougherty looked nervous … but he was just a kid, another newbie, like Veronica. Kraig looked angry.

      Damn, Meier thought. Was he the only one of the squadron’s survivors who felt this way?

      “You’ve been thinking of the people we lost?”

      “Yeah.”

      “Kelly, Malone … who was the new one?”

      “Porter.” He said the name with more anger than he’d intended. “Veronica Porter.”

      “Were you two close?”

      “No. I’d just met her.” He sighed. “You’d think I’d be used to it by now … the butcher’s bill, I mean. We all know the odds. Someone calculated that fighter squadrons lose on average between one and three pilots every time they go into combat. That’s eight percent casualties in your unit if you’re lucky. Twenty-five percent if you’re not. And that’s every fucking time you drop into hot battlespace!”

      “Well, we did know what we were getting in for when we volunteered, right?”

      “I don’t know about you, Lieutenant. But all they told me was about the glory.”

      That, Meier thought as soon as he’d spoken the words, was not entirely true. His recruiter had told him it was dangerous when he’d been selected for fighter training and decided to volunteer.

      Maybe he simply wasn’t cut out for this.

      “Attention on deck!”

      Commander Leystrom strode into the ready room, accompanied by Lieutenant Commander Brody, his adjutant. Schaeffer and Meier came to their feet, along with the other five Headhunters in the room. Three more pilots, a woman and two men, walked in behind them and took positions standing near the front.

      “As you were,” Leystrom said. He gestured at the new pilots as the others resumed their seats. “I want you to meet three Pan-Euro fighter pilots. Leutnants Ulrike Hultqvist, Karl Maas, and Jean Araud. They were among the people off the Wotan we recovered after their carrier was destroyed. They’ve been assigned to VFA-211 to … ah … make up for our losses.”

      Meier felt a sharp slap of anger. Damn it, you couldn’t just shoehorn new people into a combat squadron like that, not and expect them to fit in smoothly from the get-go. What the hell was America’s CAG thinking?

      Leystrom continued, “I know I speak for the whole squadron when I say, ‘Welcome aboard.’”

      The three gave a mumble of assent as they took seats.

      “Normally, of course,” the commander went on, “we’d all want a period of joint training to integrate new personnel into the unit. We do not, however, have the luxury of time. The Rosetter is out there just a couple of AUs distant, and we are the only thing standing between them and Earth.”

      A holographic field switched on at Leystrom’s thought, showing CGI graphics of America and the handful of ships with her, drifting opposite the enigmatic and highly protean alien vessel. Other ship icons were moving up in support … but then Meier remembered that the Rosetter was bigger, more massive than the planet Jupiter. How were they supposed to face a thing like that? It was insane.

      The representation shifted to a real-time image from a battlespace drone just a few tens of thousands of kilometers from the monster. The alien device seemed to fill the entire front of the ready room. No longer spherical, it had unfolded somehow into a much larger series of nested shapes, more like a geometric form sculpted from a cloud of dark gas than anything solid. The central core

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