Deep Time. Ian Douglas

      The destroyer was similar in overall design to the carrier, but her shield cap was a slightly flattened cone, blunt, elongated, and deeply scoured by pitting and dust erosion despite the best efforts of her nanomatrix hull. Still, viewed from a battlespace drone pacing the Elliot as she accelerated out from Earth, she was an impressive sight.

      Her quarry was already well over 6 million kilometers ahead of her, however. As soon as the mystery ship had gotten clear of Earth’s atmosphere, it had put on an astonishing burst of acceleration—so much that Gray was immediately convinced that his guess that the vessel was not a human-built ship was confirmed. The vessel was definitely from … someplace else. Gray would worry about the where later. For now, he had to focus on getting to the ship before it could get to wherever the hell it was going.

      “CAG? This is Gray.”

      “Yes, Admiral,” Captain Connie Fletcher replied in his mind. Her title, from “Commander Air Group,” derived from the time when aircraft carriers plied Earth’s oceans, and fighters needed an atmosphere to stay aloft. The CO of America’s contingent of fighters, recon snoops, and other small spacecraft was in the carrier’s Primary Flight Control center aft, “Prifly,” in the traditional terminology dating back to those same times.

      “We need to stop Charlie One. America won’t be able to catch them in a stern chase, and I doubt that the Hawes or the Elliot will be able to either. It’s going to be up to the fighters.”

      “We’ve been looking at intercept vectors, Admiral. It might be possible, but it’ll be tight. A hell of a lot depends on how soon Charlie can drop into metaspace.”

      “Do what you can, Connie. Those … people may be Sh’daar, and they’ve been talking to the Confeds. We need to know what they’ve been talking about.”

      “Will do, Admiral. The Black Demons are in the best position for an intercept. That will mean dropping some of our LEO coverage.”

      “Do it. The Marines are wrapping things up at Verdun. And Charlie out there has just become our number-one priority.”

      But one squadron against a frigate-sized ship of unknown capabilities and escorting fighters—those were not good odds. He flashed an order to the two capital ships now maneuvering down to low Earth orbit, ordering them to join the chase as well, but they almost certainly wouldn’t be able to catch up with Charlie One.

      Quickly, Gray searched the fleet network, looking for a warship positioned in such a way that it could intercept the fleeing alien. Let’s see … Mars and Jupiter were both at completely wrong angles, with Earth between them and the alien ship just now. There was a small USNA flotilla still out in Saturn space, watching over the newly recaptured stations at Enceladus, Titan, and the Huygens Ring Facility Observatory. However, at the moment, Saturn was a good 9 AUs out from Earth, which meant a time delay of seventy-two minutes for any message from America’s communications department to reach them.

      There was a High Guard watchship, the Concord, in a good position within the asteroid belt—at Vesta, just to one side of the Sun and 3 AUs from Earth at this angle, with a time delay of twenty-four minutes. Better. Much better. High Guarders weren’t in the same league as line naval capital ships, but were designed to keep an eye on asteroids that might pose a threat to Earth—either by chance or through enemy action. Yet they were in the best position to handle Charlie One.

      Gray called up the ship and its skipper’s personnel records. Technically, the High Guard was a Confederation organization, jointly run by Geneva and by the USNA military through Mars HQ, but that had been the situation before the civil war. For the past year, the High Guard had been primarily a USNA operation pretty much by default, since most of the personnel and ships had come from the United States.

      Concord’s skipper was Commander Terrance Dahlquist … and he was a former USNA naval officer. Excellent.

      “Comm,” he said. “This is Admiral Gray. Make to the Concord …”

      And he began detailing what he had in mind.

       Emergency Presidential Command Post

       Toronto

       United States of North America

       0038 hours, EST

      “America is in pursuit, sir. They’ve cast off from the dock and are accelerating.”

      “Do they have a chance in hell of running that ship down?”

      Whitney looked uncomfortable. “Unknown, sir. That alien has legs.”

      “What I would like to know,” Koenig said, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers, “is how an alien starship of approximately four thousand tons managed to get to Earth, to land on Earth, without being detected.”

      “We’re … working on that, sir. It’s possible it was brought down as cargo. On a skycrane.”

      Skycranes were space-to-ground transports used to get large quantities of both raw material and manufactured items from the manufactories in orbit down to Earth’s cities. Smaller goods went down the space elevators, of course, but large items, as well as multi-thousand-ton asteroidal material for those manufactories still on Earth, could more efficiently be lowered straight to the destination city.

      Koenig shook his head. It had still been a gutsy move, since skycranes were legitimate military targets. If it were true, it meant someone on the other side had been gambling that the USNA was too thinly stretched to bother with what was obviously a civilian target.

      And yet maybe it hadn’t been such a gamble after all. The USNA propaganda machine—and the Starlighters—had been pointing out endlessly to all who would listen that the USNA was not going after civilian targets (unlike the Confederation faction that had nanoed Columbus). Perhaps the aliens, whoever—whatever—they were, and their Confederation hosts, had been counting on that.

      The whole question of the Confederation’s relationship with off-worlders, the Sh’daar in particular, was a nagging and unrelenting source of concern for Koenig and his military staff. That the Confederation had long wanted to agree to the Sh’daar demands—their ultimatum requiring Humankind to give up certain technologies—was well known. Hell, that, more than anything else, had been responsible for the political rift that had led to the civil war.

      Koenig was not going to permit a nonhuman civilization to dictate either the direction or the limits of Earth’s technological development, and he was pretty sure that most people all over the planet agreed. What had the aliens offered Geneva, he wondered, that had led the Confederation government to agree to such a thing?

      And had that mystery ship grounded in North India had anything to do with the offer?

      If they could stop the aliens and open some kind of dialog with them, they might be able to find out. For a long time, the USNA had been fighting in the dark, not certain of just who the enemy was, or what their relationship might be with Geneva.

      But right now the alien ship was leaving Earth like the proverbial bat out of hell, boosting at 50,000 Gs, and there was no guarantee whatsoever that USNA forces would be able to stop it.

      He considered relaying a message to Admiral Gray urging him to do so, and decided against it. No amount of urging would improve the odds.

      And Koenig knew that Gray would be giving his best effort no matter what it was that he set out to do.

      All Koenig could do was wait and watch …

       VFA-96, Black Demons

       LEO

       0038 hours, TFT

      The four Starblade fighters by now were well past India, and were passing just to the south of the Singapore space elevator. Connor could see the tower in the distance with her