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gut. He wished this next translation was the one taking them to the Xul. He
wanted to get it over with& but unfortunately Operation
Lafayette had to come first. Secure the jump-off system and get those captured
Marines back and then it would be time to deal with the much vaster threat of
the Xul.
 Thirty seconds.
What perverse insanity emanating from the gods of battle demanded that humans
first tear and kill one another, when the Xul were the real threat, the most
terrible and terrifying threat the human species had ever encountered?
 Ten seconds.
 Five& four& three& two& one& systems engaged& .
The mental window through which Alexander was watching the scene suddenly
turned to white snow and crashing static. Damn! He hadn t even considered the
self-evident fact that once Skybase translated, the camera on board the
Aldebaran would suddenly be left far behind, and the abrupt loss of signal had
jarred him. He switched to a different input channel, one connected to a
camera feed from Skybase s outer hull.
For just an instant, Skybase would have dropped through the blue-lit haze of
paraspace, but Alexander had missed it. What he saw now was a view of deep
space, star-strewn and empty, the constellations unrecognizable. Two hundred
eighty-three light-years was far enough to distort the familiar patterns of
stars in the sky into strangeness.
In fact, there was nothing much to see. Other downloads from Skybase s command
center, however, began providing a more complete picture of their surroundings
as the base s sensitive scanners began sampling the background of ambient
electromagnetic and neutrino radiation. The star gate, as expected, was about
10 light-seconds in one direction, the tiny red spark of the local sun in
another, the star
marking Puller 659 s solitary gas giant just to one side of the star, and
thirty light-minutes away.
Seconds after translation, Skybase began releasing her first riders sixteen
F/A-4140 Stardragons of
VMA-980, the Sharpshooters, one of three fighter squadrons in 1MIEF s
aerospace wing. Sleek, black-hulled, and deadly, the fighters dispersed around
Skybase in a globular formation, the base protectively at its center. They
continued to move outward at a steady drift of nearly 4 kilometers per second
relative to the Skybase, flight and combat systems shut down, drawing energy
solely from their on-board batteries, watching for a sign, any sign, that the
enemy knew they were there.
Skybase, too, continued sampling ambient space, building up a detailed picture
of its new surroundings.
One by one, PanEuropean ships were picked up by their electromagnetic
signatures despite their being submerged within the hash of charged particles
enveloping the Puller gas giant. In all, seven enemy vessels were picked up
and identified, just over half of the expected twelve. Those five missing PE
ships were a minor worry; most likely, they were simply too well masked by the
gas giant s radiation belts, or they might be hidden by the bulk of the planet
itself, on the far sides of their orbits. They might even have departed the
system& but it was also possible that they were closer at hand, well-shielded
and effectively invisible.
If so, the fighter screen would sniff them out soon enough. Skybase s sensors,
meanwhile, scoured the surrounding sky, searching.
There were no ships close by the stargate. The tiny planetoid housing the
Marine listening post, however, was spotted and identified after a few
moments. A small shuttle slid from a secondary docking bay in
Skybase s hull, accelerating toward the stargate.
The first flight of starships was already being off-loaded as the shuttle
departed. First to emerge from
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Skybase s maw was the destroyer Morrigan, 24,800 tons and 220 meters in length
overall, and with a crew of 112. Her antimatter reactors were already powering
up; she would be ready to engage her primary drive within another fifteen
minutes.
Alexander, meanwhile, switched to the downloaded view being recorded from the
Morrigan, and was able to watch the second starship slip her magnetic moorings
and exit Skybase s hangar bay, edging gently into hard vacuum, guided by a
quartet of AI-directed tugs.
She was the Thor, and she was sister to Morrigan, her masculine name
notwithstanding. Both
Cybele-class destroyers were fast and maneuverable, designed originally to
serve with the Solar High
Guard fleet, protecting worlds and habitats from incoming asteroids or
cometary debris. Each possessed a powerful spinal-mount plasma gun as primary
weapon, but their hull superstructures bristled with secondary laser turrets,
missile batteries, and railgun accelerators, as well as automated
point-defense mounts.
With the two destroyers launched and positioned a few thousand kilometers to
either side of Skybase, Alexander let himself begin to breath more easily. The
most dangerous part of Operation Lafayette was the possibility that
PanEuropean warships would be close enough to pick up Skybase s transition
into normal space. While Skybase did possess defensive weapons, the structure
was still not primarily intended for combat. The two destroyers would provide
the fledgling in-system beachhead with some decent fire-support.
Third out of Skybase s cargo deck was the Marine assault transport Samar,
huge, blunt-prowed, and massive. Measuring 310 meters long, and with a beam of
85 meters, Samar massed nearly 35,000 tons.
She carried a crew of 79, as well as her cargo four companies of the 55th
Marine Aerospace
Regimental Strikeforce, a total of nearly 600 Marines. Half of those Marines
would already be loaded
into their ship assault pods, or SAPs, ready to engage in ship-to-ship
boarding actions.
The final ship nestled within Skybase s hold was the largest, the Fleet Marine
Carrier John A. Lejeune, massing 87,400 tons, and measuring 324 meters, stem
to stern. Cocooned within Lejeune s hangar deck were two more squadrons of
F/A-4140s, as well as a squadron of A-90 ground-support strike craft and a
number of support and auxiliary vessels ninety-eight aerospace craft in all.
The Lejeune was a tight fit inside Skybase s hangar bay; in fact, several
outriggers and deep-space communications and tracking masts had been removed
in order to let her slip through Skybase s garage door at all. Getting her out
was a tediously exacting exercise in geometry and tug-facilitated maneuvering
that would take nearly an hour if all went well. It was for that reason that
the Lejeune had been the first ship loaded on board the Skybase, and the last
out; Alexander had wanted the fleet carrier to be with the first translated
load, however. Her three Stardragon squadrons forty-eight aerospace fighters
in all would be invaluable in achieving and maintaining battlespace [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]