Deep Time. Ian Douglas
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fact, getting anything done when you were up against an unaccelerated opponent was dangerous when a decision or an action taking a handful of seconds was in fact a whole minute long outside of the pilot’s frame of reference. At least, Koenig thought, in this case both the fighters and their quarry were pushing c, and the time difference between their relative frames of reference was trivial.
That was one reason that fighters sent at relativistic speeds toward an enemy target generally decelerated before reaching their objective. Speed was life, as the old fighter-pilot aphorism had it. But in modern space-fighter combat, too much speed could put you at a serious disadvantage.
With all that in his mind, Koenig pulled down an in-head schematic from the America showing the relative positions and speeds of the alien vessel and the pursuing fighters. He began pumping through some simulations. If the fighters could increase their velocity by an additional tenth of a percent of c, their speed, relative to their quarry, would be 30,000 kilometers per second and closing.
At this point, the fighters would be trailing the enemy by …
He let the calculations run themselves through: 65 million kilometers. With a closing velocity of 30,000 kps, that meant an intercept in another thirty-six minutes.
Like a dog chasing a hovercraft, though, what they would be able to do with the alien once they actually caught it was still unknown.
And it was still all based on the “if” of moving closer to the speed of light.
USNS/HGF Concord
4-Vesta
0056 hours, TFT
Commander Terrance Dahlquist read the message as it came through, direct from Admiral Gray and the star carrier America. He wasn’t quite sure how he should feel about this … or what he was going to do about it.
Originally a branch of the North American military, the High Guard had been established in the wake of the Wormwood Incident in 2132, when a rogue Chinese squadron had dropped a small asteroid into the Atlantic Ocean. Later, official control had been handed over to the Earth Confederation, since it was operating in the defense of the entire planet. Concord’s mission was to monitor operations near asteroids, and to stop unauthorized attempts to manipulate their trajectories. In those cases where either asteroids or ore samples were legally being injected into Earth-approach orbits, the Guard tracked them, double-checked the calculations, and tried to make certain that Earth or other population centers across the solar system weren’t endangered.
Further, the High Guard made sure Vesta was always closely watched. The site of a large, mostly automated mining facility, the asteroid possessed a set of ten-kilometer-long magnetic launch rails designed to fire canisters of nano-extracted and -processed ore from the jumbled, frozen crust into low-energy transit loops that would bring them within capture range of Earth-based capture vessels within three to five years, depending on the constantly changing angles and distances between worlds. Fearing that terrorists or other rogue forces might easily change the launch parameters and turn the launch rails into titanic long-range weapons ideal for planetary bombardment, the High Guard was stationed there as protection against that scenario. In truth, it was not very likely to happen. For one thing, it would be a high-risk, low-reward endeavor, since incoming canisters were closely followed by radar and lidar, and intercept missions could easily nudge them into harmless orbits. But Earth’s governments remained nervous about falling rocks, especially deliberately chucked falling rocks, almost three centuries after Wormwood Fall, and High Guard frigates like the Concord were there to provide some measure of reassurance.
They were not designed to engage alien starships of unknown potential.
Dahlquist wanted to shoot a message back to Gray. The problem was that the High Guard, though technically a part of the USNA Navy during the current hostilities with the Confederation, was not under Navy jurisdiction, and a line officer like Gray did not have the authority to order High Guard assets off station.
Of course, the real reason he was hesitating had more to do with Gray’s background.
Like most USNA Guard and Naval officers, Dahlquist was a Ristie. The United States of North America was supposed to be a classless society, but that was fiction and always had been. Always there were “haves” as distinguished from “have-nots.” Money was not as big a factor in modern society as it once had been; the nanotech revolution had long ago made wealth-based distinctions largely irrelevant. But power, especially the power available to those with better technology and better access to information, was another matter altogether. Nowadays, those who had more advanced electronic implant technology, those who had life extension and better nanomed support, those who had connections in the larger “have” networks of government and the military—those were the new social elite. Risties was the slang term for the cultural aristocrats who called the shots in modern civilization.
Of course, they would never use the term themselves.
They did, however, use the term Prim, and the fact was that Gray was a well-known Primitive. Sure, Gray had acquired that technology when he left the Manhat Ruins decades ago, but Dahlquist couldn’t shake the subtle prejudice against him and people like him. They hadn’t grown up with the tech, had never been completely comfortable with it … and that, in the minds of most Risties, was telling.
Dahlquist would never have admitted to technocybernetic prejudice, of course, but he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that “Sandy” Gray didn’t really know what he was doing, that he tended to overlook some of the information available to him over the various data networks because he hadn’t grown up with the technology.
That in certain subtle ways, he wasn’t fully human.
And that, when all was said and done, was what it was all about. Humans were defined by their technology. That was one reason the USNA had been fighting the Sh’daar and, more recently, the Confederation: humans were what they were because of their tools, from fire to starships to neurocybernetic implants.
And yet, what it all came down to was that what Gray was ordering Dahlquist to do was technologically challenging, dangerous, and a long shot at best. He was to accelerate toward this oncoming alien vessel and lay down a spread of missiles and kinetic-kill projectiles in the hopes of disabling it. There was no question of matching course and speed with the thing, not when it was burning its way across the system at a hair under c. But Concord would still have to get uncomfortably close, and loosing that much kinetic energy and flying debris when you just might fly into the high-velocity cloud yourself was not Dahlquist’s idea of a reasonable request.
There was the political angle to consider, too.
If the Concord openly helped the America—and from the data feed Dahlquist was getting, these orders were part of a USNA operation against unknown aliens working with the Confederation—he could technically be committing treason.
Damn it, that Prim was putting Dahlquist in an impossible situation!
“Comm,” he said. “Send a reply. Ask for … clarification.”
“Sir, they won’t get the reply for—”
“I know. Send it.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Dahlquist had better things to do than jump through hoops held by that perverted little Prim …
USNA Star Carrier America
In pursuit
0105 hours, TFT
“Looks like the pursuing fighters were able to close with the target, Admiral,” Commander Dean Mallory told him. “I wish there’d been more than four of them, though.”
“All they need to do is slow that damned alien down a bit,” Gray replied. “That, and keep him from transiting over to metaspace.”
“We don’t know how far up the side of