The Star Carrier Series Books 1-3: Earth Strike, Centre of Gravity, Singularity. Ian Douglas

why hadn’t the Authority reclaimed the Ruins? The largest buildings, like TriBeCa, were still sound. There’d been plans to rebuild the Old City out over the water using structures like the TriBeCa Arcology as pylons, he knew, for two centuries or more. It was technically feasible, at least.

      There’d been no money for such projects after the Crash in the late twenty-second century, when nanotech had overthrown the old economic models. But things were prosperous enough now. At least for the rest of the Confederation.

      Maybe people just got used to things the way they were. So far as that peaceforcer up in Morningside Heights was concerned, the squatties had always been here, the Ruins always a place of danger and primitive discomfort.

      It hadn’t always been so, though. He and Angela had often stood on this spot, trying to imagine what life had been like when the Old City had been alive, vibrant with power and life, the first and greatest of the modern megalopoli. He’d seen old memory clips of the city before the first evacuations in the twenty-first century. Primitive … but astonishing, breathtaking, and miraculous in scope and in audacity, nonetheless.

      He sensed, rather than heard, the movement at his back.

      Gray spun, the gravcycle snapping down off his shoulder and into a port-arms position. The squattie was halfway across the sunken floor, short, black-haired, clad in stinking rags. He was holding a spear made from a lightweight metal rod with a kitchen knife taped to the end.

      The man was rushing him, clearly intent on either stabbing Gray in the back or knocking him forward through the window, and into a four-hundred meter drop to the water below. Gray snapped out with the back end of the gravcycle, using it like a quarterstaff, blocking the man’s lunge and sharply bending the light metal rod of his improvised spear.

      “Stop!” Gray shouted. “I’m not your enemy!”

      His attacker barked something in an unknown language, and Gray’s eyes widened at a sudden realization. His attacker was Asian.

      But that wasn’t possible.

      Tens of thousands of individual families had made up the fabric of squattie life and culture within the Manhattan Ruins, but above the family level—individual groups of twenty to fifty people—there’d been hierarchies of tribe and race—divisions along racial lines, for the most part, though there were plenty of tribal groupings based on nations of origin as well. Blacks. Whites. Latinos. Hindi. Paks. Thais. Viets. Chinese. Khmers. Russians. All of these were represented within the Ruins, and many, many more. Though families might raid and forage across most of the Ruins, from the Battery to the Bronx, they did so by trespassing on the turf of other tribes … and that was what made life in the Ruins so dangerous. Chinatown, just to the east of TriBeCa, remained an Asian enclave that stubbornly resisted the influx of other ethnic groups; when he and Angela had lived here, an agreement of sorts had existed between the TriBeCa families and Chinatown, to the effect that each stayed out of the other’s turf, maintaining a wary truce. The islands beyond Broadway Canyon and south of the Canal were deadly to non-ethnic Chinese.

      Gray couldn’t decide if the man in front of him was North Chinese, Korean, or Japanese. The language had sounded more like Japanese—explosive and guttural—rather than like the more musical Mandarin or Cantonese. His rags included a fairly new-looking smartsuit jacket, presumably scavenged from the ruins of some clothing store, but the indicator light at the collar wasn’t on, so it wasn’t powered. Most smartsuits could maintain a comfortable temperature, interface with local Net-Clouds in order to pull down weather reports and other data, or serve as communications centers … but some used biofeedback to enhance significantly the wearer’s speed and strength. If Gray had to face someone hand-to-hand, he didn’t want them wearing one of those things.

      “Take it easy!” Gray said, motioning with his hand. His mind was racing. If Asians were here in TriBeCa, it could only mean the old families, including Gray’s family, the Eagles, had left, driven out, perhaps, when the truce had failed. “Do you understand me?”

      The man barked something again, the words unintelligible, then lunged again with his bent spear. Gray sidestepped the thrust, snapped his broom up and around, knocking the man flat on his back.

      Shit. The peaceforcer had said there’d been changes in the Ruins. And something about the inhabitants killing each other even more enthusiastically than usual.

      If the truce had failed, if the Chinese had moved in on TriBeCa, there was no telling where the rest of his family was now. Hell, it hadn’t been that long since captured enemies had been skinned and suspended still living from building walls as no-trespass warnings to marauders, and there were still occasional stories, whispered and wildly embellished, of cannibalism and mass murder among the crumbling islands. Life in the Manhattan Ruins had never been easy, but at times it got downright interesting. Hellishly so.

      His family might have migrated to another part of the Ruins, moving in with allies, possibly, or taking away some other group’s hab space to replace the hab stolen from them. That was the way of life in the Ruins.

      Or the Eagles might all have been butchered. That, too, was life—and death—in the Old City.

      It was strange … and a bit unnerving. Just five years ago, Gray had been a squattie, a life he didn’t particularly like, but which he accepted, and which he’d been convinced was better than life under the Authority.

      But now …

      The man on the floor groaned and stirred. There was no point in interrogating him; Gray doubted that he spoke English. Once the Authority had withdrawn from the Ruins, individual families and tribes had pretty much fallen back on the customs and languages of their individual ethnicities, and English was a second language, if it was even known at all.

      He set his broom on the floor, stretched out on the seat and let the safety harness engage, then gave it a boost and rolled for the open window. Cold, wet air engulfed him as he fell … and then he was feeding in power and leveling off, flying toward the south.

      He wasn’t at all certain where he was going now.

       Admiral Karyn Mendelson’s Quarters

       Mars Synchorbit, Sol System

       0234 hours, TFT

      Alex Koenig and Karyn Mendelson both snapped awake at the same instant, the Priority One alert sounding within both of their minds, yanking them from a deep, sex-induced slumber. They were still entangled with each other, holding each other, staring into each other’s eyes from just a few centimeters apart.

      “Lights!” Mendelson called, and the bedroom lights came up. Rolling out of opposite sides of the bed, they began reaching for articles of clothing scattered on the deck a few hours earlier.

      “P-A!” Koenig called, summoning his Personal Assistant out of the Net-Cloud as he stepped into his underpants. “What the fuck is going on?”

      “A Priority One defense alert has just been issued by the Military Directorate,” his AI replied. “An announcement follows.”

      He and Mendelson exchanged glances as they continued getting dressed. She’d evidently gotten the same news from her AI.

      “To all military personnel within range of this Net-Cloud. This is Admiral John C. Carruthers of the Confederation Joint Command Staff.” Carruthers was the five-star admiral on the Joint Chiefs, the senior military officer, under the civilian secretary of defense, of the Confederation Navy. “At approximately seventeen hundred forty-five hours Fleet Time yesterday, a large Turusch battle fleet began dropping into normal space, forty-five astronomical units from Sol, roughly on a line between Earth and the constellation Boötis. The photon release of that emergence was detected by our automated systems roughly three hours later, and a warning broadcasted to our listening post on Triton. One hour after that, contact with Triton was lost. We must now assume that Turusch fleet elements have destroyed that base.

      “High Guard elements are seeking to close with the intruders in order to gather more intelligence.