all available military and High Guard vessels for the defense of the Inner System. We do not at this time know how much time we have or whether the enemy has launched a high-velocity preemptive strike against Inner System targets. In light of this latter possibility, it is imperative that all ships launch in the shortest possible time.
“Repeating. To all military personnel …”
Having heard and acknowledged the alert, Koenig and Mendelson were able to switch it off. Koenig finished pulling on his uniform jacket as Mendelson shrugged into a military smartsuit. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“My duty station,” she replied. “Phobia’s CIC. I’m on Admiral Henderson’s command staff. You’re headed for the America.” It wasn’t a question.
“If I get there in time.” He gave a wan grin. “Buchanan’s still aboard. He’ll be readying her for boost by now.”
“Good luck, Alex.”
“And you, Karyn. Stay …” He stopped. He’d been about to say “Stay safe,” but that wasn’t an option for naval personnel, who by long tradition went into harm’s way. “Stay out of trouble,” he finished lamely. “I’ll see you when we get back.”
He didn’t add that there was a distinct possibility that the promised meeting would never happen.
Liberty Column
North American Periphery
2134 hours, local time
Trevor Gray sat alone atop the crown of the ancient Statue of Liberty.
Once, Lady Liberty had stood at a much lower elevation, the statue and its pedestal and foundation rising some 93 meters from an irregular, eleven-pointed star-shaped base. In the late twenty-first century, as rising sea levels had repeatedly threatened New York City and promised to completely drown little Liberty Island, the old pedestal had been replaced by a new, taller column. That column now thrust up out of the black waters submerging Liberty Island, supporting the 40-meter copper statue some 120 meters above the new sea level.
Technically, the Statue of Liberty still belonged to the old U.S. government, by way of the National Park Service and under the provisions of the Confederation Charter. She had fallen on hard times lately, however. Low-voltage electrical charges, generated by the interaction of salt water and corroding copper, were slowly loosening the Lady’s rivets. The upper six meters of her arm had broken off and fallen into the sea long ago. Like plans to reclaim Manhattan, the ancient icon of liberty was being forgotten, the statue allowed to collapse into ruin.
You could see her from the southern and western windows of TriBeCa, though, at least when the weather was clear, and she’d always been a powerful and deeply moving symbol for Gray. Life in the Ruins, even when it was brutish and short, was supposed to be about liberty.
He sat on Lady Liberty’s hairline immediately in front of the gaping windows lining the front of her crown, his legs dangling over the side. In the darkness off to his left, to the north, the Ruins loomed across New York Harbor, the hundreds of individual green-cloaked islands merging into shadows upon shadows. The tallest islands were marked by strobing navigational beacons, warning off low-flying aircraft or personal fliers. Beyond, the New City gave off a glow as intense as a false dawn, backlighting the darkened islands.
The rain had ended an hour ago, and the sky was clearing. To the south, out over the ocean, he could see the faint, in-line stars of SupraQuito twinkling some 50 degrees above the horizon.
Gray was feeling torn, torn between past and present, between what he’d been and what he’d become. Given time, he thought he could track down the Eagle family, if there were any left alive. Once daybreak illuminated the Ruins, he could fly in, spot a scavenger or, better, a hunting party, and question them.
Just so long as the Chinese hadn’t taken over the entire mass of islands.
But that was impossible. Unless they’d gotten hold of a cache of military weaponry, they couldn’t possibly take over the entire expanse of Manhattan. They simply didn’t have the numbers.
He was still coming to grips with the fact that the place he’d thought of as home for all these years, including his years in the Navy, was gone. It left him feeling adrift in a way he’d never felt during his five years of military service.
It felt like he no longer had a home to come home to.
Worse, it felt like home was now shipboard. His berth aboard the America. The thought was unsettling, and left him depressed and bitter. What was left for him … going back to the Navy and serving out a twenty-year career? Then what?
He wondered if he dared fly back up to Morningside Heights and see if he could see Angela. She’d seemed pretty definite about not wanting to see him anymore, but she could have changed.
It was possible, at least. …
The shrill bleat of an in-head warning signal so startled him he nearly fell off of his precarious perch. Damn it! How was it possible? There was no Net-Cloud here, the peaceforcer had told him. The signal must be being punched through at extraordinarily high power from synchorbit itself, bypassing the local Net-Cloud nodes and transmitting directly to individual in-head units.
“To all military personnel within range of this Net-Cloud,” a voice announced, sharp in his head. “This is Admiral John C. Carruthers of the Confederation Joint Command Staff. …”
And suddenly things were very much more serious indeed.
Chapter Nineteen
18 October 2404
USNA Gallagher
Neptune Space, Sol System
0250 hours, TFT
The IP had come up empty.
The five High Guard vessels had rendezvoused in a high-velocity pass-through, but there’d been nothing there within range of their scanners. Captain Lederer had ordered the release of a dozen battlespace drones, set to disperse through local space and transmit anything they detected both to the Gallagher and to the Inner System. However, the good news for the moment was that the Turusch fleet was not in a hurry to reach Earth.
A careful scan of ambient space for the ionization trails left by near-c impactors or high-V fighters turned up nothing as well. Local space was thin—no more than a hydrogen atom or two per cubic centimeter, but the passage of anything traveling at a generous percentage of the speed of light swept up some of those atoms and ionized others, leaving a faint but detectable trail. The lack of such trails suggested that the enemy had not started bombarding the Inner System.
All very good news.
But that left the question of just where they were and what they were doing. That they would eventually head in-system was patently obvious. If they waited too long, the tactical advantage would pass to the Confederation.
So where in this hell of frozen emptiness were they?
Following the op
