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.
“Class One alert,” Sparky announced without preamble. “Data incoming. Our remote Kuiper probes are detecting the emergence of starships almost four light hours out.”
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
