Deep Space. Ian Douglas

The question is, what’s our destination?”

      Gray gave a mental shrug. “Seems fairly obvious to me, sir. All of those simulations of a deployment to Omega Cent we’ve been running … and then we get word of the Endeavor.”

      “Maybe … maybe. Unless the Confed Senate decides we need to block the Slan at 36 Oph. But the real question may be when is our destination?”

      “Through the TRGA? Maybe so. But we’re going to need more than a carrier battlegroup to take on the Tee-sub minus Sh’daar. When is the linkup?”

      “Twenty minutes.”

      Gray checked his inner clock. Nine hundred, then. Barely time to download the latest intel feeds. “I’ll be there, Admiral.”

      There was a lot to go through. Nano reconnaissance probes returning from the 70 Ophiuchi star system suggested that the Turusch and Nungiirtok were preparing for something, bringing in more forces from elsewhere. Probes from 36 Ophiuchi seemed to show the Slan working on consolidating their conquest. More ships were arriving in-system, big ships. Likely they were digging in, preparing for a possibly human counterattack … but it was also possible that they were preparing a new assault of their own, one aimed, quite probably, at Earth.

      And there was more. Signals Intelligence satellites in the Kuiper Belt had picked up the whisper of high-velocity microprobes churning through the fabric of space on outbound vectors, and the likeliest explanation was that Sh’daar clients were already scouting the solar system in preparation for an attack.

      Gray was put rather forcibly in mind of the situation President Koenig—then Admiral Koenig, commander of CBG-18, had faced twenty years ago. Convinced that the only way to stop the expected Sh’daar assault on the Sol System was to take the war into Sh’daar space, Koenig had arranged to miss expected Confederation Naval Command orders to stay in Solar space by leaving before they arrived. Later, he’d fought a French squadron sent to bring the “rogue” battlegroup in.

      The decision, as it turned out, had been the right one. A renewed Sh’daar assault on Earth had not materialized, and Koenig had gone on to discover their spacetime and force a truce. Biographers had pointed out, however, that had he been wrong Koenig would have been reviled as the man who’d abandoned Earth to the Sh’daar forces.

      The Confederation might well want the battlegroup to stick close to the Sol System, just in case the Sh’daar struck out from Ophiuchus.

      It was time. Gray alerted his personal AI that he was not to be disturbed, then opened a channel through to Admiral Steiger. The Admiral’s AI routed the connection to Geneva, and Gray found himself in a virtual conference.

      The European Unionists tended to be conservative in their virtual backgrounds. The venue was a large conference room, with two walls and the ceiling set as windows, the other two walls showing gently shifting abstracts of pastel light. Twelve men and women were seated around the conference table—it had the appearance of mahogany—half in EU military uniforms, the others in civilian dress. Through the windows, Gray could see the labyrinth of the Plaza of Light outside, a hundred stories down … and beyond it, the glitter of late-afternoon sunlight on Lake Geneva.

      “Admiral Steiger,” a bearded EU admiral named Longuet said. “Captain Gray. Thank you for linking in. We need to discuss a change to your upcoming mission.”

      “We feel that a deployment to Omega Centauri is not … critical at this time,” one of the civilians added. Her name was Ilse Roettgen, and she was the president of the Confederation Senate.

      “Indeed, ma’am?” Steiger said. “Our operational plan has been set for some weeks, now. In light of the new reconnaissance information from Omega Centauri, it seems to me that the mission is, if anything, more critical than ever.”

      “Not in light of the information from 36 Ophiuchi,” Admiral Longuet said.

      “We are in the process of assembling a strike force,” another civilian said. Gilberto Lupi was the Brazilian imperial minister of Defense. “We intend to take back 36 Ophiuchi, before the enemy entrenches himself, before he becomes too strong for us to oust him.”

      “I see,” Steiger said. “And I take it you’ve consulted with my government on this?”

      “There is no need,” Longuet replied. “We are invoking Military First Right.”

      Gray felt an inner jolt at that, a kind of psychic shock. Military First Right? After almost three centuries, it was possible that the Pax Confeoderata was about to fail.

      And when it did, the USNA Star Navy would be smack at the heart of the storm.

      First Right had not been invoked before, not since it had been passed by the Confederation Senate twelve years earlier. The law was assumed to be unenforceable in America. It looked like that assumption was about to be tested.

      The Confederation had arisen from the ashes of the Second Sino-Western War, a sharp and brutal conflict fought in the first half of the twenty-second century. The Battle of Wormwood and the subsequent fall of a small asteroid into the Atlantic Ocean had seriously weakened the old United States politically, forcing the union, first, of several North American nations into the USNA, followed by the merging of the USNA with the newly founded Earth Confederation. Under the original terms of the amalgamation, each member state kept control of its own military—especially its spaceborne forces. For a state’s military to be put under the direct control of the Geneva government required, literally, an act of that state’s congress … in the case of the USNA by a two-thirds’ majority vote in both the Senate and the House.

      But in 2412, Geneva had passed the Military First Right Act over two dissenting votes, Great Britain and the USNA. The star navies of Earth’s Confederation were the property, the military arm, and the responsibility of the Earth Confederation, not of any lone member state. North America, of course, and Great Britain had disagreed. For the two of them, ancient allies, the Earth Confederation had always been a loose alignment of independent nation-states, a planetary government more in name than in fact.

      That this belief put the USNA at odds with every other Confederation member state save one seemed to have mattered little. Not until the Sh’daar Ultimatum in 2367 had there been a serious need for a united Earth military … and even then, the union had been an awkward and incomplete cooperation rather than a single-fleet command. Military First Right had been intended to change that … and, obviously, to prevent a repeat of the so-called Koenig’s Mutiny, which had led to his defeat of a combined French-British fleet at HD157950 in 2405.

      That Koenig’s decision had been right was immaterial. He’d decided to face the Sh’daar forces in their own space, rather than assuming a purely defensive posture within Earth’s solar system, but, in so doing, left Earth open to a possible attack … an attack that, thank God, had never materialized. Geneva had acted to prevent such a situation from ever happening again—or, at least, so they’d planned it. That the Military First Right Act might backfire on them and lead to a civil war and the collapse of the Confederation seemed never to have entered their minds.

      “This,” Longuet said, indicating another Confederation officer at the virtual table, “is Admiral Christian Delattre. He and his squadron are en route now to join the America battlegroup at Synchorbit. He will be assuming command of the battlegroup, at which point he will transfer his flag to the America, which shall become his flagship. Admiral Steiger, you will remain in command of the USNA battlegroup, but you will take your orders directly from Admiral Delattre. Is this understood?”

      “I will need confirming orders from Columbus, sir,” Steiger said.

      “No, Admiral, you will not,” Mykhaylo Serheyev said. Gray had to check a mental sidebar to see who the man was—the prime minister of the Ukrainian Union. “The Act of Military First Right is specific on this point. There was a final vote on this in Geneva just this morning, one that passed with a comfortable majority. Carrier Battlegroup Eighteen is now under direct Confederation control.”

      “Nevertheless,”