14

      INTERLUDE

       16 OCTOBER 2138 TO 24 JUNE 2148

      IST Derna

       En route to Llalande 21185 IID

      Launch …

      The trio of starships, IST Derna and the two cargo ships ISC Regulus and ISC Algol, drifted at L-4 well clear of the building docks and the Vesuvius AM complex. Because AM-enhanced fusion torch exhaust consisted of very high-energy particles, their torches would not be lit until they were well clear of heavily trafficked regions of the inner Solar system. Instead, each was attached to one of the new Cerberus-class tugs, massive, blocky-looking nuclear-chemical workhorses with fifty million kilograms of thrust apiece.

      Derna’s centrifuge rotation had already been stopped and her three hab modules folded back against her spine as loading work continued in microgravity. The last of Derna’s passengers arrived on board already in cybernetic hibernation and were transferred with the last few hundreds of tons of equipment and supplies. Meanwhile, cybehibe techs on board processed the last of the MIEU’s waking personnel—Colonel Ramsey and members of the unit’s command constellation—and hooked them into the ship’s nanocybernetic suspension system.

      Algol and Regulus, unmanned vessels both, were already cleared for launch.

      Across the world a half million kilometers away, humankind seemed to watch with an indrawn psychic breath. Manned expeditions to the stars had been boosting out-system for fifty years but always on missions strictly limited to science and diplomacy. The Smithsonian archeological expeditions to Chiron at Alpha Centauri and Volos at Barnard’s Star, the diplomatic and science legation at Ishtar, and the science missions at Thor and Kali had all been deployed to the stars on strictly peaceful missions. Now, for the first time, humankind was going to the stars armed and armored for war.

      Derna’s complement of 145 naval personnel remained awake, monitoring the prefire and launch systems, but the launch itself was handled entirely by the onboard AI, unofficially known as “Bruce.” The countdown, which had been running now for days, trickled down at last to zero, and the main engines of the three Cerberus tugs flared white-hot.

      Fifty thousand tons of thrust seemed barely to nudge the giant starships, but the acceleration, which lasted for all of five minutes, was enough to nudge the trio off-station and start them in a long half-million-kilometer fall toward the Earth.

      In Washington, D.C., President LaSalle delivered a speech proclaiming the need to safeguard human life and interests at Ishtar, emphasizing that Operation Spirit of Humankind was not a mission of vengeance or retaliation but one of rescue and recovery.

      Elsewhere, riots flared into what amounted to open warfare, as devotees of the An-creator gods battled with the legions of Earth First and traditional religious forces. The Catholic world, already sundered a generation earlier by the election of the Papessa Mary to the seat of St. Peter at the Holy See, was shattered by pitched battles in Asuncion and Ciudad de Mejico, in Madrid and Paris, in Roma, Manila, and even in the suburbs of Boston. The Papessa, in the Vatican, called for a holy crusade to free the human Sag-ura slaves held on Ishtar and to prove once and for all that the An were neither gods not angelic creative spirits acting as God’s agents. Pope Michael at the Counter-Vatican in Lausanne preached crusade against those who would deliberately bury the scientific evidence that humankind had been created by agencies from the stars, and urged a dialogue with the An to reveal at long last the Hidden Truth.

      Radical militant Anists, meanwhile, attacked both branches of the Church, calling for a return of man to his rightful place at the feet of the wise and powerful Universal Creators. Anist-led riots in Munich, Belgrade, and Los Angeles killed thousands. The battle in South Los Angeles alone claimed 918 lives, and the burning of both Catholic and Counter-Catholic churches triggered a wave of pro-Aztlan, antigringo demonstrations and rioting.

      Four days later Derna, Algol, and Regulus, still in close formation and with the Cerberus tugs detached, whipped past the Earth in a hyperbolic trajectory, accelerated by gravity. Ten days after that, as the trio hustled outbound past the ten-million-kilometer mark, the main drives cut in. Minute quantities of antimatter were fed into the hydrogen slush entering the aft thruster reaction chambers, triggering a pulsing chain of fusion explosions at a rate of eight per second, each one contained, then expelled by powerful magnetic fields. Thrust built steadily until the starships were accelerating at ten meters per second per second, just a nudge more than one g.

      Riding nova flares of incandescence hot with gamma radiation in the 511 keV band of positron annihilation, Derna, Algol, and Regulus accelerated out-system. Four and a half days later, traveling now at four thousand kilometers per second, they hurtled past the south pole of Jupiter, using that giant planet’s gravity for a second slingshot acceleration and to swing onto a new course, high up above the Solar ecliptic. They were aimed now at right ascension eleven hours, thirty-seven seconds, declination +36 degrees 18.3 minutes … in the southern reaches of the constellation Ursa Major.

      Three months after 1 MIEU’s departure a second, larger military force departed from the shipyards at L-5. Built around the ISTs Soares Dutra and Jules Verne, and the cargo vessels L’Esperance, Sternwind, and Teshio