Kennedy choked on his coffee, his feet swinging off the console and hitting the deck with a slap. Surface gravity on Triton was just under two tenths of a G, and the droplets of hot spilled liquid cascaded across his face and uniform in slow motion.
“Shit!” Then the pain of coffee scalding his chin registered. “Ow!” Mopping at his face, he set the cup down. “Where, damn it?”
A chart opened in his mind, showing the relative positions in three dimensions of Neptune and Triton, the distant sun, and the incoming ships. Data were coming in now from a total of four unmanned probes at the forty-AU shell, highlighted as blinking white pinpoints, some ten astronomical units beyond the orbit of Neptune. The intruders were beyond that shell, off to one side and 10 degrees above the ecliptic, some twenty-two astronomical units away from Triton, forty-five AUs from Sol.
As Kennedy studied the data, he realized that a better question would have been when. Those blips, obviously, were starships emerging from the enemy’s equivalent of Alcubierre Drive, detected by the pulses of photons released by their emergence into normal space. They would have been moving in the hour since their detection … and would have moved further still in the three subsequent hours as the alert was transmitted down to Triton. Those ships could be almost anywhere now … including bearing down on Triton at just under the speed of light.
“How many?” he asked the AI.
“We are picking up multiple emergence events,” Sparky continued. “Fifteen vessels of various masses and configurations so far.”
“Can you identify the configurations?”
There was the briefest of pauses as data was correlated and confirmed. “Affirmative. Configurations match those of several known Turusch warships.”
Trash ships! Here! “Launch ready courier. Now!”
One hundred kilometers above the methane-ice plains of Triton, an orbital laser-communications antenna shifted slightly, taking aim at an unseen point among the stars just to one side of the brightest of those stars—Mars, its light lost in the glare of Sol. Sparky would continue transmitting updates to that data for as long as possible.
“Give me positions on the nearest naval vessels,” he said.
“One High Guard destroyer is at fifty-five light minutes’ range,” Sparky told him. “USNA Gallagher.”
“Send out a general fleet alert,” Kennedy said. His primary orders—getting the warning back to the inner system as quickly as possible—had been accomplished. Beyond that, he could warn any naval vessels in the general vicinity of Neptune … and not much else.
The listening post was not armed.
Kennedy watched the incoming blips and decided that, just maybe, boredom wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
Minutes later, a false dawn illuminated the ice plains of Triton as the lasercom antenna vanished in a near-c impact.
Lieutenant Kennedy and his tiny command died fifteen seconds later, as a city-sized chunk of Triton’s surface vaporized, and the naval listening post and most of the human structures located on the frozen worldlet were transformed into superheated plasma expanding silently into space.
Columbia Arcology
Morningside Heights
New City, USNA
1630 hours, local time
“You want to go where?”
Trevor Gray drew himself up straighter. He was wearing his Navy dress black uniform, and hoped it was suitably impressive to the local civilian Authority.
“I’m … visiting friends in the Ruins,” he told the disbelieving peaceforcer captain. “That’s not illegal, is it?”
“Illegal?” The man scratched his bald head behind one extravagant ear. He’d taken on a genetic prosthesis that had let him grow pointed elfin ears and golden eyes with the slit pupils of a cat. The overall effect, together with the man’s hairless scalp, gave him a faintly demonic look. “Not that I know of, no. But why in hell would anyone want to go down there? Much less a naval officer!”
Gray wondered what the man would say if he told him he’d been a denizen of the Ruins just five years before. That fact, he decided, would not help his case.
“Let’s just say I have business there. With some friends in the TriBeCa Tower.”
“What friends?”
Gray smiled. “Would their names really mean anything to you?”
“No.” He grinned. “No they wouldn’t. To tell the truth, we don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on in there. And we don’t want to, either. As long as the squatties stay out in the Ruins, as long as they don’t cross the line and come up here, bothering decent folks here in the meg”—he shrugged—“then they can have the place, so far as I’m concerned.”
Which was the attitude Gray had long since come to expect of the Authority. Of course, the idea of one side not bothering the other only applied to the squatties staying out of the New City megalopolis. There were the hassles and the raids by Authority personnel, the periodic attempts to clear out sections of the Ruins—why, Gray had never been sure. Simple abuse of power, a flexing of Authority muscles just because they had the power to use them? Or a misguided attempt to help people who didn’t want to be helped?
It didn’t matter. The “decent folks” didn’t care.
“Then there should be no problem letting me go see my friends,” Gray said.
His internal time read just past 2130 hours shipboard time, about 1630 local. It hadn’t taken him long to process through SupraQuito and take the high-velocity elevator straight down-cable to Quito. When the space elevator was first built in the early twenty-second century, that trip would have been a two-day journey; with grav thrusters the 36,000 kilometer drop from synchorbit only took a couple of hours now.
Quito had been much the same as he remembered it from his first trip up-cable after joining the Navy—big, sprawling, crowded, and impossibly busy, one of the three major port megalopoli, the Equatorial Jewels, the biggest and richest cities on Earth.
From Quito’s elaborately decorated Estación Grande Central de la Tierra he’d taken a subsurface shuttle for the 4500-kilometer leg north to new New York, hurtling in silence through the vacuum gravtube that, at midpoint, passed nearly four hundred kilometers beneath what was left of the West Indies, a straight-line chord running point-to-point beneath the curving arc of the surface. Gray knew that titanic energies had been mustered to keep the deepest tubes stable as they passed through the Earth’s upper mantle, and that the temperature of the mantle rocks surrounding the tube approached 900 degrees Celsius. He could see none of it directly, however, for the shuttle had no external monitors. His choices were watching a mindless romance on the simfeed, striking up a conversation with other shuttle passengers, or sleeping. Like military personnel the world over and since time immemorial, he’d chosen sleep.
The passage, in any case, only lasted forty-five minutes. He’d arrived in Morningside Heights at 1320 local, 1820 ship time. Three hours he’d been here, waiting in waiting areas, talking to bored bureaucrats and minor officials, being sent down brightly lit passageways to see other bored bureaucrats and minor officials. It was actually taking him longer to get from the Columbia Arcology to TriBeCa, just eleven kilometers away, than it had taken him to travel 36,000 kilometers down-cable from SupraQuito, and 4500 kilometers more from Quito to the New City.
“Look, Lieutenant,” the Authority captain told him, shaking his head. “I’d like to help you. I really would. But I gotta put down a reason for your visit. Who the hell do you need to see in the Ruins, fer chrissake?”
A good question.
What,