Star Carrier 6: Deep Time Read Free

Denoix, rescuing Ilse Roettgen, and bringing the nasty little war to a close.
    Once that was done, Koenig reflected, all that was needful was to end the Sh’daar War, figure out what the Rosette Aliens wanted, and bring half of Earth back under a legitimate, reasonable, democratic, and above all peaceful government, one that would both recognize USNA independence and work with the United States to strengthen Humankind’s interests, both on Earth and throughout North America’s far-flung interstellar colonies.
    Nothing to it.
    “Concentrate on twelve o’clock! Hit ’em! Hit ’em! ”
    “Marine down! Marine down! Corpsman front!”
    “Move, move, move . . .”
    “First Section!” That was Widner’s voice, both on audio and transmitted in-head over the tactical channel. “With me!”
    A passageway yawned ahead, with gray stone slabs underfoot and to either side. There was something up ahead, at the end of the corridor, but Widner’s helmet AI was having trouble parsing it out. What the hell was that?
    Armored shapes rose from behind the object, which revealed itself now as an impromptu barricade: a jumble of furniture, concrete blocks, and steel drums blocking the stone corridor.
    And behind it . . .
    “Watch it! Damn it, watch it !”
    Something slammed into Koenig’s chest, staggering him. It took him a dazed moment to recognize that he’d not been hit, but that a white-hot plasma bolt had slammed into Widner’s combat armor. Widner’s heart and respiration readouts went ragged, then dropped toward flatline. Koenig felt trapped, staring at the stone slabs of the corridor’s ceiling, unable to move, unable to do anything but lie there.
    Widner died, and his armor began shutting him down for medevac and resuss. . . .
    VFA-96, Black Demons
    LEO
    0014 hours, TFT
    Lieutenant Megan Connor rolled her fresh-grown Starblade until Earth’s vast sweep hung suspended in sun-kissed splendor above her head. The sunrise terminator stretched across the sky ahead of her now, out over central Europe, a razor-thin crescent of light across the black. It was just past midnight on the east coast of the USNA, a few minutes past six in the morning over France and most of the European Union. The Black Demons were in low Earth orbit, drifting southeast two hundred kilometers above the west coast of Europe. Below, city lights illumined the broken clouds over England. Sunrise at Verdun had occurred less than thirty minutes ago . . . but at this altitude she could see considerably farther into the new day than the Marines on the ground.
    She adjusted her in-head view, connecting more closely with her fighter’s long-range senses.
    Gods this new fighter is a dream!
    Theoretically, with nanufacturing processes that could grow a new fighter from raw materials provided by asteroids in a matter of hours, there should have been no problem with constantly updating the USNA fighter fleet, discarding older designs like the SG-92 Starhawks and SG-101 Velociraptors and replacing them with the latest technology—in this case the SG-420 Starblade. The problem was not in the materials nanufacturing, but in retraining human pilots whose wetware—the organic tissue beneath the cerebral electronic implants and software—had already been shaped to control older designs.
    The SG-420s, though, incorporated uprated AI components that could embrace Starhawk or Velociraptor training and experience as iterations within the larger pilot program. Still, what the star carrier America lacked was people to sit inside these new fighters: the campaigns of the past eight months—Arianrhod and Osiris and Vulcan—had killed too many good pilots. Replacements were coming on board from the training center at Oceana, but too few and too slowly, to bring the carrier up to full strength.
    And yet, as Connor felt the sensuous flow of data streaming in through her fighter’s sensors and AI, she suppressed an exultant urge to shout for pure joy. Beauty