Deep Time. Ian Douglas

      “Article Ninety specifies punishment for disobeying a lawful command of your superior commissioned officer,” Ames told him. “It also covers actually striking a superior officer. So yes, it might apply. But Article Ninety-two applies to failure to obey any lawful general order or regulation. It also covers dereliction of duty. So it’s probably the charge they would use against you. Sir.”

      Dahlquist sighed. He liked Ames, and she was a hell of a good ship’s first officer, but talking with her was like discussing calculus with a computer. Once, just once, he would like to hear her admit that she didn’t know something. He sighed again, as he knew that was unlikely.

      Some claimed that the entire human species was headed the way of the genetically modified transhumans, but Dahlquist sincerely doubted this. GMs tended to increase mental efficiency by sacrificing passion—emotional involvement. Without said passion, they often didn’t pursue success in career or relationship as tenaciously as unmodified Mark I Mod 0 humans. As such, he couldn’t envision anyone giving up their ambition just for the sake of knowledge. Emotions were just too important to the human experience. The old idea of the emotionlessly logical genius was a myth. Fact was, there were studies linking high intelligence with emotional swings and disorders. Dahlquist couldn’t help but think about all the geniuses throughout history that had also been emotionally disturbed.

      In any case, cybernetic implants were good enough now that anyone could have access to any data almost as efficiently as GMs, and without the loss of what it was that made humans human. For Dahlquist, that would always be raison d’être.

      Nonetheless, Dahlquist valued Ames’s ability to pull raw data on the most obscure topics out of the seemingly endless depths of her memory. And that’s what he needed at the moment.

      “So what do you recommend?” he asked.

      “That we maneuver Concord to intercept Charlie One, as ordered.”

      “I have a better idea.”

      Ames blinked. “Sir?”

      “We have available a potentially devastating weapon in the VLA. We can use that.”

      Dahlquist was pleased with himself for thinking of it. The Vesta linear accelerator was the mining facility’s magnetic launcher. They could use it as a monstrous cannon to disable or destroy the alien from here, a full AU away.

      “With respect, sir,” Ames said, shaking her head, “it won’t work.”

      “No?”

      “Not even close. Check the numbers, sir.”

      He did so, pulling down stats from Concord’s AI on the mining accelerator and applying the TDA formula, then scowling as the answer came through. At its very best, the one-kilometer magnetic rail gun, accelerating a one-ton payload at twenty thousand gravities down its one-kilometer length, would boost the package to twenty kps—a respectable velocity across interplanetary distances that would cross one astronomical unit in … shit! Just over eighty-six days. It was amazing. Even with all of his training and experience, it was still so damnably possible to underestimate the sheer vastness of space.

      And Ames was right. He could be making a hell of a lot of trouble for himself by disregarding those orders … and a Prim like Gray wasn’t worth landing himself a court-martial.

      The realization steadied Dahlquist, and helped resolve the issue a bit in his mind. He’d not been aware of just how jealous he’d been of Gray’s advancement up the career ladder, but he recognized it now as her thought about the possibility of crashing and burning over an Article 92. He and Gray were about the same age, with roughly the same time-in-service. Yet he was just a commander, struggling to make captain, while the damned Prim had had his four admiral’s stars handed to him on a plate. There was scuttlebutt to the effect that Gray had friends in very high places; his former commanding officer was now president of the United States of North America. And those friends could cause Dahlquist a lot of trouble.

       It wasn’t fucking fair.

      He rather neatly disregarded the hypocrisy of a Ristie being jealous of a Prim’s “advantages.”

      “Okay, Amesie,” he said. “Take us out. Rendezvous course with Charlie One.”

      “Aye, aye, Captain.”

      He heard Concord’s communications officer requesting departure clearance, heard the clearance being given by the AI that ran the mining facility. Ceres, a rugged, splotched, and cratered sphere over five huindred kilometers through, dwindled away into the distance, lost among the stars almost instantly. Contrary to popular belief—and countless docuinteractives and in-head sims with a very bad sense of scale—the asteroids were not so thickly sown through the belt that they formed any kind of obstacle. At the moment, exactly one other asteroid was naked-eye visible from Vesta—a fifth-magnitude speck of light a million kilometers away. The Asteroid Belt was very nearly as empty as the rest of interplanetary space.

      Dahlquist was embarrassed by the gaffe of suggesting that they use the VLA to bombard the alien ship. Years of chasing rocks, he thought, must have contributed to acute hardening of the cerebral cortex.

      He would have to find some way of recovering from the gaffe, or Ames and the members of Concord’s crew would be spreading the story on their next visit Earthside.

      Besides that, though, he was also seething from being shown up, not only by Ames, but—in his head at least—by the Prim.

      There had to be a way for him to prove himself, as someone brilliant instead of an idiot …

       VFA-96, Black Demons

       In pursuit

       0120 hours, TFT

      The problem—as was always the case at relativistic speeds—was one of energy. Every kilogram of mass moving at this speed carried more energy than a fifty-megaton nuclear warhead—the size of the titanic “Tsar Bomba” detonated by the then Soviet Union in the early 1960s. Firing nuclear antiship warheads at the enemy might have unpredictable effects … especially when you realized that the artificial singularities serving as gravitic drives were created and fed by extremely large amounts of energy of their own, drawn from the quantum foam. Add more energy, in an uncontrolled rush, and well …

      Connor was not at all anxious to try the experiment.

      Instead, she’d elected to try something more subtle: launching one of her battlespace drones as a missile.

      Her consciousness was filled by the magnified image of Charlie One, an enormous, organic form of curves and flowing shapes; the twelve accompanying Todtadler fighters were dwarfed by the giant starship. How, Connor wondered, had the aliens gotten that thing past Earth’s defenses and down to the planet itself?

      She’d fed specific instructions into the drone’s pocket-sized AI; the relativistic time dilation at this speed was just too sharp to allow precise control. Right now, for every four seconds that passed, over a minute slipped by in the outside universe, and the spacetime fabric around each of the fast-moving vehicles—Charlie One, her own Starblade, and the drone—was distorted enough to scramble data packets and affect fine, long-range control signals.

      Closer, now. Charlie One was a few hundred kilometers ahead, though her AI had magnified the image so that it felt like she was just a few meters from the alien’s hull. The twelve fighters appeared to be drawing off now. Connor couldn’t know for sure, but she had the feeling they were getting clear in anticipation of the alien switching over into its equivalent of Alcubierre Drive.

      Closer still …

      The drone shuddered violently as it passed the gravitic bow wave. Ships under gravitic acceleration projected a field around themselves, a kind of bubble within which mass fell toward the on-off flickers of the projected singularity ahead of the craft’s prow. Hitting the interface between normal space and the space within that highly