The Star Carrier Series Books 1-3: Earth Strike, Centre of Gravity, Singularity. Ian Douglas
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be waiting.”
The logistics report, he decided, could wait.
Manhattan Ruins
North American Periphery
1850 hours, local time
Trevor Gray stood atop the ruined skyscraper, staring south into the mist-soaked evening. It was raining, a light sprinkling from a low cloud ceiling, with a chill wind bringing with it the smell of salt out of the south. His uniform kept his body dry and warm, but water dripped from his nose and ran down his cheeks, and he could feel within himself a hint of trembling, despite the smartsuit’s warmth. This was the place from which he’d started in so many in-head replays of the events of five years ago, fifty meters above the hiss of the surf rolling in across East 32nd Street.
South, the gray water was dotted by hundreds of islands, most slumped into mounds, most covered over by vines and low-growing vegetation.
The Manhattan Ruins.
The vegetation-shrouded mounds were all that remained of thousands of buildings, separated from one another by narrow avenues of water, stretching for five and a half kilometers south southwest. A green forest of islands, interspersed with exposed beams and frameworks where concrete and glass had shattered and collapsed. The tallest were marked by flashing automated strobes, warning off low-flying aircraft and personal fliers.
He could just make out the green-shrouded mound of the TriBeCa Arcology, one large island among many, rising less than four kilometers to the south, shadowed and blurred behind the mist and in the fading evening light.
So what was he waiting for? The peaceforcers wouldn’t stop him this time, even if travel to the Ruins was not something the Authority encouraged. So far as they were concerned, the squatties were illegals, squatters on what was still, technically, public property, men and women—social exiles by their own choosing—who either refused to fit in with the decent citizenry or people who were mentally ill and both unable to fit in and unwilling to apply for treatment.
He was still somewhat surprised that the peaceforcer captain he’d spoken with last had actually issued the pass. There was nothing standing in his way now from flying down to TriBeCa and looking up his old tribe.
But he found he didn’t want to go. He’d traveled all this way, all the way from Mars for Void’s sake … and now he didn’t want to fly the last four kilometers.
Was he afraid of meeting Chiseler and Janine and Macro and the rest of his old tribe? Hell … they should be happy for him, right? He’d gotten his ticket punched for a one-way boost out of the Ruins. Plenty of creds, good food, free healthcare, high-tech perks like these water-shedding dress blacks, everything a squattie ever dreamed of.
Was he afraid because now he was the Authority?
Fuck that. He was decided now. Stooping, he picked up the gravcycle broom and switched it on, rolling into the saddle and kicking in a gentle boost.
On a wet day like this, Chiseler and the rest would be holed up inside TriBeCa Tower.
They would talk to him. They had to.
Squinting against the blast of spray against his face, he arrowed south through the mist-laden afternoon sky.
Chapter Eighteen
18 October 2404
USNA Gallagher
Sol System Inner Kuiper Belt
0029 hours, TFT
Captain David Lederer let himself drift with the surging tide of incoming data. He’d received the first burst transmission at 2220 hours, just over two hours ago.
The destroyer Gallagher was on High Guard patrol, and had been fifteen and a half AUs from Neptune when the base on Triton had been destroyed. He’d immediately passed the warning in-system toward Mars and Earth, then ordered Gallagher’s grav drives fired up to five hundred gravities. For the past two hours now, the destroyer had been accelerating out into the Kuiper Belt. She’d covered .86 of an AU and was now moving at some 160 kilometers per second, and still accelerating.
He’d ordered a continuous-stream lock on Mars. The ship would continue broadcasting status reports, position and vector, and sensor updates for as long as she could.
Lederer had been with the Confederation contingent at Everdawn. He did not expect that he, his ship, or the four hundred men and women on board would survive the next few hours.
He’d also contacted four other High Guard ships within range, and they, too, were accelerating outward now—the Chinese frigate Jianghua, the Indian States’ Godavari, the Japanese Hatakaze, and the American John Paul Jones. Their chances for survival during the next few hours were no better than Gallagher’s.
The High Guard was one of the few truly international organizations operating out of Earth, a multinational task force designed primarily to monitor the outer reaches of the solar system, track asteroids and comets that might one day be a threat to Earth, and to watch for nudgers. The Earth Confederation had grown out of an economic partnership between the old United States and a number of other nations, most of them former members of the British Commonwealth—Canada, the Bahamas, Australia, and New Zealand. Several non-Commonwealth states had joined later on—Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and the Russian Federation.
The High Guard, however, included ships from the Chinese Hegemony, the Indian States, and the European Union as well, which perhaps made that organization more representative of the entire Earth than the Earth Confederation itself.
The Earth Confederation had become more than an economic alliance in 2132, toward the end of the Second Sino-Western War. In 2129, a Chinese warship, the Xiang Yang Hong, had used nuclear munitions to nudge three small asteroids in Main Belt orbits into new trajectories that, three years later, had entered circumlunar space, falling toward Earth.
The Xiang Yang Hong had almost certainly been operating independently; Beijing later claimed the captain had gone rogue when he learned of the destruction of his home city of Fuzhou, and had carried out what was essentially a terrorist operation. His plan had been to devastate both the United States and the European Union by dropping all three asteroids into the Atlantic Ocean, causing devastating tsunamis that would wipe out the coastal cities on two continents. U.S. and European fleet elements had destroyed two of the three incoming two-kilometer rocks in what became known as the Battle of Wormwood—a reference to a biblical prophecy in the Book of Revelation that sounded eerily like an asteroid hitting the ocean. One rock—a piece of it, actually, had gotten through, falling into the Atlantic halfway between West Africa and Brazil.
The devastation had been incalculable. The loss of life, fortunately, had been less than it might have been, since most of the world’s coastline cities were already slowly being evacuated in the face of steadily rising sea levels. Even so, an estimated half billion people had died, from West Africa to Spain, France, and England, to the slowly submerging cities of the U.S. East Coast, to the vanishing islands of the Caribbean, to the coastlines of Brazil and Argentina. The ancient term weapon of mass destruction had, with that single deadly blow, taken on a radically new and expanded meaning. Coming hard on the heels of the deaths of 1.5 billion people in the Blood Death pandemic, Wormwood’s fall into the Atlantic had come close to ending technic civilization across much of the Earth.
The partial success of the American-EU fleet, however, had spurred further cooperation, and the rapid expansion of the automated High Guard project that had been in place for the previous century. Every space-faring nation on the planet—even the recently defeated Chinese Hegemony—had contributed ships and personnel to the newly expanded High Guard, with the sacred charge that never again would mountains fall from the sky. The Guard’s motto was “A Shield Against the Sky.” Its headquarters was located in neutral Switzerland, at Geneva.
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