light. If there were technically accomplished residents of this star system, they would soon know of the arrival of the fleet.
In fact, it was unlikely that anyone else was here. Koenig and his advisors had chosen the system carefully. They weren’t looking for combat, but for a chance to refuel.
The star was a close double, the brighter member of the pair a yellow-white F3V sun listed in the star catalogues as HD 157950. From Earth, it had a visual magnitude of 4.5—a faint and unremarkable star in the constellation of Ophiuchus. It possessed a planetary system that was young and still chaotic; a gas giant the size of Neptune circled in close, a so-called hot Jupiter, with a plume like the tail of a comet streaming out behind it away from the sun. Farther out, chunks of ice drifted in an extended, ragged disk, invisible to the naked eye, but glowing faintly at infrared wavelengths.
“Fifteen other ships have emerged so far, Admiral,” Commander Benton Sinclair, America’s tactical officer, told him. “Now sixteen. The Abraham Lincoln just came through.”
“Very well.”
The wait this time was particularly agonizing. How many more would be coming through?
The original battlegroup, CBG-18, had lost five of its thirty-one capital ships at the Battle of Alphekka, plus two more so badly damaged that they’d been left behind to await the arrival of support and repair ships from Earth. Shortly after the battle, forty-one more warships had arrived, reinforcements dispatched by the Confederation’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Of those forty-one, twelve were USNA ships, a battlegroup formed around the star carrier Abraham Lincoln. Nine were Chinese, the Eastern Dawn expeditionary force, led by the carrier Zheng He.
The remaining twenty vessels were a Pan-European task force commanded by Grand Admiral Francois Giraurd on board the star carrier Jeanne d’Arc.
Technically, all of the ships except for the Chinese vessels were Confederation Navy, but … there was a problem, a big problem. Koenig wasn’t sure yet how it was going to play out.
“The Cheng Hua and the Haiping have both just materialized,” Sinclair announced. “Range twelve light minutes. And there’s the Zheng He. …”
He’d been expecting the Chinese and the North Americans to follow the battlegroup into the Abyss. The question remained: What would the Pan-Europeans do?
After the Battle of Alphekka, CBG-18 had remained in the system, refitting, re-arming, and consolidating. Grand Admiral Giraurd had brought his flagship alongside the America and told Koenig that he was taking command of the entire fleet, and that the fleet would be returning to Earth.
And Koenig had refused the order.
Giraurd had threatened to open fire as the fleet elements loyal to Koenig had begun accelerating out-system, and for a nerve-wracking few hours, the Pan-Europeans had pursued the rest of the battlegroup. They’d never quite pulled into range, however, and, once the rest of the battlegroup had begun dropping into Alcubierre Drive, there was a good chance that Giraurd had ordered his contingent to break off the pursuit.
But Giraurd knew Koenig’s plan, knew the coordinates where they would be emerging. If he wanted to, he could be moments away from Emergence … and Koenig would be looking at the very real possibility of either capitalization or mutiny.
Which would it be?
“Admiral!” Sinclair called. “Another star carrier emerging, range fifteen light minutes! Sir, it’s the Jeanne d’Arc!”
Giraurd had followed them after all.
“More ships emerging from the horizon,” Sinclair added. “De Gaul. Illustrious. Frederick der Grosse. Looks like the Pan-European main body.”
Now they would learn whether or not Koenig’s mutiny had just precipitated a civil war.
Chapter Two
10 April 2405
VFA-44
Kuiper Belt, HD 157950
98 light years from Earth
1342 hours, TFT
Please, God, don’t let me screw up, don’t let me screw up, don’t let me screw up …
“And acceleration in four … three … two … one … launch!”
Acceleration slammed Lieutenant Trevor Gray back in the cockpit as his SG-92 Starhawk hurtled down the spinal launch tube and into space. At seven gravities, he traversed the two-hundred-meter length of the tube in a fraction over two and a third seconds, emerging at just under 170 meters per second relative to the carrier. The vast, black, circular dome of America’s forward cap receded swiftly behind him, the ship’s name in faded letters meters high, the word sandblasted to a faded and ragged gray by long voyaging through the interstellar medium. He switched to view forward. Ahead, the local sun showed as a close-set pair of intensely brilliant sparks.
“Blue Dragon One clear,” he called over the communications net. “CIC, handing off from Pryfly.”
“Blue Dragon One, CIC. We have you.”
“Imaging,” he told his ship’s AI. “Show the squadron, please.”
“Blue Two, clear,” a second voice said. Lieutenant Shay Ryan’s Starhawk had launched in tandem with his. Computer imagining showed her ship as a blue diamond, high and forty meters to port. He switched to his in-head display. With his cerebral implants receiving feeds from external sensors all over the craft’s fuselage, his Starhawk seemed invisible now, at least to his eyes, as though he’d merged with his fighter and become a part of it. Ryan’s Starhawk sharpened into high-res magnification, a long and slender black needle with a central bulge, her ship, like his, still in launch configuration.
With a thoughtclicked command, Gray flipped his fighter end for end and began decelerating, his maneuver matched closely by Shay. Other SG-92s were appearing now, spilling two by two from America’s forward launch tubes.
“Blue Dragon Three, clear.”
“Blue Four, in the clear.”
Fighters from other squadrons were dropping laterally from the carrier, propelled by the centrifugal force of the rotating hab modules behind the forward cap, and slowly, a cloud of fighters was beginning to surround her. America, he knew, was just one of many warships in the newly reinforced CBG-18, with several other carriers out there, but, from this vantage point, he couldn’t see any of them save as colored icons painted into his visual cortex by his fighter’s AI.
“Dragonfires,” Gray said over the tac channel. “Go to combat configuration and form up on me.”
“Copy, Skipper,” the voice of Ben Donovan said. “We’re coming in.”
And the other ships of VFA-44 began closing with him.
Skipper …
The title still didn’t fit. The Dragonfires’ skipper, their CO, was Commander Marissa Allyn … but CDR Allyn had gone streaker during the Battle of Alphekka, her fighter badly damaged and hurtling out of control into emptiness. The SAR ships had found her three days later and brought her back, still alive but in a coma. She was still in America’s sick bay ICU, unconscious and unresponsive.
And CAG had told Gray that now he was the squadron commander.
The assignment was strictly temporary and provisional. VFA-44 had come out of the furnace of Alphekka with just three pilots left—Gray, Shay Ryan, and Ben Donovan. And of the three of them, Gray held seniority; Donovan’s date of commission was two years younger than Gray’s, while Ryan was a relative newbie, fresh from a training squadron at Oceana.
Over the past