Earth Strike. Ian Douglas

the Agletsch had suggested that the Sh’daar presence might well encompass several hundred billion stars. Whether you called it a galactic empire or something else, in terms of numbers and resources, it seemed to pose an insurmountable threat.

      The sheer impossibility of the Confederation fighting such an overwhelmingly vast and far-flung galactic power had strongly affected human culture and government, deeply dividing both, and affecting the entire Confederation with a kind of social depression, a plummeting morale that was difficult to combat, difficult to shoulder.

      And one symptom of plunging morale was the increasing micromanagement out of C³—Confederation Central Command—on Earth. All military vessels now carried one or more Senate liaisons, like Quintanilla, to make certain the Senate’s orders were properly carried out.

      If anything, direct Senate oversight of the military had made the morale problem even worse.

      And that was why Koenig was concerned about his flag captain speaking his pessimism in front of the bridge personnel.

      “We’ll know more when we rescue Gorman and his people,” Koenig added after a thoughtful pause, stressing the word when, rejecting the word if. “The scuttlebutt is that his Marines captured some Tush officers. If so, that could give us our first real insight into the enemy psychology since this damned war began.”

      “Tush” or “Tushie” was military slang for the Turusch … one of the cleaner of a number of popular epithets. He saw Olmstead’s head come up in surprise at hearing a flag officer use that kind of language.

      “Yes, sir,” Buchanan said.

      “So we play it by the op plan,” Koenig added, speaking with a confidence he didn’t really feel but which he hoped sounded inspiring. “We go in, kick Trash ass, and pull our people and their prisoners out of there. Then we hightail for Earth and let the damned politicians know that the Galactics can be beaten.”

      He grinned at Buchanan’s avatar. He suspected that the Captain had spoken aloud specifically to give Koenig a chance to say something inspiring. A cheap and theatrical trick, but he wasn’t going to argue with the psychology. The crew was nervous—they knew what they were in for at Eta Boötis—and hearing their admiral’s confidence, even an illusion of confidence, was critical.

      On the battlespace display, five more ships appeared—the destroyer Andreyev, the frigates Doyle, Milton, and Wyecoff, and the troopship Bristol.

      They would be ready to accelerate for the inner system soon.

      VFA-44 Dragonfires

       Eta Boötis System

       0421 hours, TFT

      Lieutenant Gray checked his time readouts, both of them. Time—the time as measured back on board America—was, as expected, flashing past at an insane pace, thirteen times faster, in fact, than it was passing for him.

      In its high-G sperm-mode configuration, the SG-92 Starhawk’s quantum-gravitic projectors focused an artificial curvature of spacetime just ahead of the ship’s rounded prow—in effect creating a gravitational singularity that moved ahead of the fighter, pulling it forward at dizzying accelerations.

      Accelerating at 50,000 gravities had boosted his Starhawk to near-light velocity in ten minutes. For the next hour, then, he’d been coasting at .997 c … except that the mathematics of time dilation reduced the time actually experienced on board the hurtling fighter to 0.077402 of that—or exactly four minutes, thirty-eight point six seconds.

      Put another way, for every minute experienced by Trevor Gray in his tiny sealed universe of metal and plastic, almost thirteen minutes slipped past in the non-accelerated world outside. Since launching from the America, the Blue Omega fighter wing had traveled over a billion kilometers, nearly eight astronomical units, in what seemed like less than ten minutes.

      Through the Starhawk’s optics, the universe outside looked very strange indeed.

      Directly ahead and astern and to either side, there was nothing, a black and aching absence of light. All of the stars of the sky appeared to have been compressed into a frosty ring of light forward by the gravfighter’s near-c velocity. Even Eta Boötis itself, directly ahead, had been reshaped into a tight, bright circle.

      And, despite the expectations of physicists from centuries ago, there was a starbow—a gentle shading of color, blue to deep violet at the leading edge of the starlight ring, and deep reds trailing. Theoretically, the starlight should all have appeared white, since visible light Doppler-shifted into invisibility would be replaced by formerly invisible wavelengths. In practice, though, the light of individual stars was smeared somewhat by the shifting wavelengths, creating the color effect known as the starbow.

      Gray could have, had he wished, ordered the gravfighter’s AI to display the sky corrected for his speed, but he preferred the soft rainbow hues. Most fighter pilots did.

      When the fighter was under acceleration, the sky ahead looked even stranger. Gravitational lensing twisted the light of stars directly ahead into a solid, bright ring around the invisible pseudomass in front of the ship, even when the craft was still moving at nonrelativistic speeds. For now, though, the effect was purely an artifact of the Starhawk’s speed—an illusion similar to what happened when you flew a skyflitter into a rainstorm, where the rain appeared to sleet back at an angle even when it was in fact falling vertically. In this case, it was photons appearing to sleet backward, creating the impression that the entire sky was crowded into that narrow, glowing ring ahead.

      He checked the time again. Two minutes had passed for him, and almost half an hour for the rest of the universe.

      He felt … lonely.

      Technically, his fighter was still laser taclinked with the other eleven Starhawks of Blue Omega Flight, but communication between ships at near-c was difficult due to the severely Dopplered distortions in surrounding spacetime. The other fighters should be exactly matched in course and speed, but their images, too, were smeared into that light ring forward because their light, too, was traveling just three thousandths of a percent faster than Gray’s ship. Some low-level bandwidth could be held open over the laser channels for AI coordination, but that was about it. No voice. No vid. No avatars.

      Just encircling darkness, Night Absolute, and the Starbow ahead.

      The hell of it was, Gray was a loner. With his history, he damned near had to be. By choice he didn’t hang out much with the other pilots in the ready room or flight officers’ lounge. When he did, there was the inevitable comment about his past, about where he’d come from … and then he would throw a punch and end up getting written up by Allyn, and maybe even getting pulled from the flight line.

      Better by far to stay clear of the other pilots entirely, and avoid the hassle.

      But now, when the laws of physics stepped in like God Almighty to tell him he couldn’t communicate with the others, he found he missed them. The banter. The radio chatter.

      The reassurance that there were, in fact, eleven human souls closer than eight astronomical units away.

      He could, of course, have called the avatars of any or all of the others. Copies of their PAs—their Personal Assistants—resided within his fighter’s AI memory. He could hold a conversation with any of them and be completely unaware that he was speaking to software, not a living person … and he would know that the software would report the conversation with perfect fidelity to the person when the comnet channels opened later on.

      But avatars weren’t the same. For some it was, but not for Trevor Gray.

      Not for a Prim.

      He closed his eyes, remembering the last time. He’d been in the lounge of the Worldview, a civilian bar adjacent to the spaceport at the SupraQuito space elevator. He and Rissa Schiff had been sitting in the view blister, just talking, with Earth an unimaginably beautiful and perfect sphere of ocean-blue and mottled cloud-white gleaming against