As an officer, Gray didn’t need to worry about liberty. He’d simply signed out after receiving permission from the CAG office to go Earthside for seventy-two hours. Plenty of time to do what he needed to do in Manhattan and get back to the ship, whether she was still at Mars or docked at SupraQuito.
He found himself thinking about Rissa Schiff, the cute ensign from the avionics department he’d met last time he’d been at SupraQuito. He’d found her fun and engaging, had been wondering about taking things further with her … at least until Collins and Spaas had busted up the party. The pairing probably wouldn’t have worked; he was still looking for something permanent in a relationship. Schiffie had been looking for fun—one night or many, but nothing lasting.
God, he missed Angela.
The moon appeared to be slowly drifting off to one side, turning from nearly full to a crescent as the Kelvin slipped past it and into circumlunar space. The lights of cities appeared scattered across those parts of the moon in darkness, tight clusters marking the cities at Crisium, Tranquility, Apennine Vista, Tsiolkovsky, and the others, all woven together by a slender webwork of glowing threads marking the surface gravtubes.
Earth grew larger, the rate of growth slowing with Kelvin’s continuing deceleration. Eventually, Gray could make out what appeared to be strings of minute stars drawn out in slender arcs around the planet. After three centuries, Earth Synchorbital had become the preferred location for the vast majority of the planet’s off-world manufactories, power production, shipyards, and orbital habitats. Several million people lived in orbit now, the number growing daily. Like Mars, Earth was served by three space elevators—one at Quito, one on the northern slope of Mt. Kenya, and one on the island of Pulau Lingga, on the southern edge of the Port Singapore megalopolis. The habs and orbital factories at Synchorbital didn’t extend all the way around the planet yet; it would be centuries more before Earth had a genuine system of rings 36,000 kilometers above its equator. Even so, it was remarkable to see how the hand of man had so touched the world of his birth and that world’s moon that evidence of his technology could be seen from this far out in the Void.
Still decelerating, the Kelvin continued to close with the nexus of gleaming habs and solar panels at SupraQuito. Gray could see the elevator itself now, a gossamer-thin strand of light stretched taut between a mountaintop in Ecuador and a small planetoid anchor twenty thousand kilometers above synchronous orbit. The Kelvin’s launch from Phobia had been timed to arrive at SupraQuito precisely as the receiving facility orbited into position. The Kelvin’s onboard AI made a rapid series of final corrections using the drive singularity astern, then switched off the drive and drifted into the tangleweb field at less than a hundred meters per second. Gray felt the surge of deceleration, startling after ten and a half hours of zero-G under gravitic drive.
His travel pod melted away around him as an AI voice thanked him for choosing Interplanetary Direct for his travel needs. Eighty creds had been deducted from his account on board the America to pay for the flight.
The receiving bay was in microgravity, of course. Robots hovered nearby, waiting to assist passengers unused to moving in zero-G, but Gray grabbed a handrail and pulled himself along with more or less practiced ease. The local hab section would be rotating, like the crew modules on board America, but he needed to enter it at the hub and ride an elevator out and down to the main deck. Hauling himself hand over hand, he followed glowing arrows projected on the bulkhead toward customs. His baggage—a single small satchel—would be forwarded directly down to Quito.
The local time, he noted, was 1125 hours—five hours off of shipboard time, which was set to GMT. And Quito was in the same global time zone as Manhattan.
He would be there, he thought, by late that afternoon.
Solar Kuiper Belt
5.5 light hours from Earth
1830 hours, TFT
High Guard Watch Station 8734 was tiny—a spherical object the size of a woman’s fist—and most of its mass consisted of foam insulation against the ambient 50-degree Kelvin temperatures so far from a wan and distant sun. It was one of some hundreds of thousands of AI detector probes scattered across the surface of an immense sphere, with a radius of five and a half light hours, centered on Sol.
The automated High Guard Watch had begun late in the twenty-first century, as the first automated probes were placed in solar orbit roughly at the mean distance of Pluto. Tiny onboard cameras and mass detectors the size of BBs kept a constant watch on the surrounding sky, recording mass and movement, the data spreading across large networks of the probes for correlation and tracking. The idea had been to spot comets or asteroids falling in out of the Kuiper Belt, objects that in future epochs might threaten Earth or Earth’s solar colonies. The sooner such objects were detected, the easier it would be to nudge them into new orbits that would never threaten human habitats.
Later, they were programmed for another task—watching for the flash of photons released by starships as they dropped out of Alcubierre Drive. They served as a navigational net, tracking incoming and outgoing ships by their photon release.
And since the Sh’daar Ultimatum, in 2367, they’d watched for the arrival of alien ships that might pose a threat to humankind.
The network was stretched painfully thin. Even half a million probes are few and far between when they’re scattered over the surface of a sphere eleven light hours across. The nearest probe to 8734’s current position was 3683, now thirty light seconds distant, twenty times the distance between Earth and Earth’s moon.
A burst of high-energy photons captured 8734’s electronic attention. Twin cameras focused on the disturbance, estimating the distance at nearly one light hour out, deeper into the Kuiper Belt; probe 3683 recorded the flash twelve seconds later, allowing a more perfect triangulation and target lock. The arriving ship was large—enormous, in fact, a small planetoid converted into a starship of alien configuration.
The closest human presence was a Navy listening post on Triton, a moon of Neptune, now 2.9 light hours distant. High Guard Probe 8734 duly transmitted its data and continued to monitor the movement of the intruder vessel … as around it more and more new targets began to flash into realspace existence.
Chapter Seventeen
17 October 2404
Triton Naval Listening Post, Sol System
2125 hours, TFT
Hostile warships were arriving at the outskirts of Earth’s solar system, but it took precious time to get word of the event to Mars. Two hours, fifty-five minutes passed before data arrived at Triton from the first probe to detect the incoming fleet, and the data were already an hour old even before the transmission had begun.
Things tend to happen slowly at the thin, cold edge of the solar system.
Lieutenant Charles Kennedy was the commanding officer of the Navy’s Triton listening post, a tiny base housing twelve Navy personnel, a handful of civilian researchers and base technicians, and a modest AI named Sparks. A few kilometers distant, mobile mining platforms the size of battleships crept across the frozen landscape, extracting nitrogen from the surface, pressurizing it, bottling it, and magnetically launching it into the long trajectory sunward for use in the Martian terraforming project.
Kennedy sipped his coffee and decided yet again that his all-too-brief evening with Admiral Brewer’s daughter had not been worth it. Being assigned to this frozen ice ball in the solar system’s boondocks was about as close to terminal as his career could come. He’d been here for three months now, and could look forward to another nine months of utter boredom and frigid vistas in the wan light of a sun thirty astronomical units distant.