Star Carrier 6: Deep Time Read Free Page A

exploded around her as the sun rose beyond the horizon ahead; blue water, the green patchwork of agricultural land, and the sweep of dazzlingly white cloud drifted beneath her. With the new system, it was easy to forget that you were flesh-and-blood wired into a cockpit barely large enough to receive you. Quite literally, she was the fighter; she stretched out an arm, and performed a graceful roll, the crescent of Earth rotating in front of her.
    “Careful there, Demon Five,” the voice of Commander Mackey said inside her mind. “Let’s not get carried away.”
    “Hard not to, Skipper,” she told the squadron’s CO. “This is incredible !”
    “Maybe so, but stay focused on the mission. We’re coming up on Verdun and we don’t want to miss anything, right?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Not that they were likely to miss anything. VFA-96, the Black Demons, was actually at full squadron strength—twelve fighters—though only Connor, Mackey, and two others were in this flight. Aerospace control meant stretching your assets out across an entire orbit so that at any given moment there were at least some fighters positioned to respond to threats from below. The other Demons were spread out four thousand kilometers ahead and behind, and two more of America ’s squadrons were covering the rest of the orbit. Adjustments were made from orbit to orbit so that four strike fighters were always passing over Verdun every ten minutes or so.
    “So how’s the fight going down there anyway, Skipper?” That was Lieutenant Enrique Martinez, one of the squadron’s newbies fresh up from Oceana.
    “According to plan,” Mackey replied. “The first LCs hit the fortress walls a few minutes ago. The big Choctaws are touching down now.”
    “But when will we know ?”
    “When someone decides to tell us, Lieutenant. And until then, stay sharp and stay connected. The rebels aren’t going to take this lying down.”
    The rebels . It sounded strange, the way Mackey used the term. Confusing, even. Until recently, the USNA had been the rebels, fighting for independence from the Earth Confederation. But since the Confederation government had fallen to the Starlighters, rebels now meant the holdouts in the original government—Korosi’s people.
    “I’m not getting anyone down there but ’Pactors,” Connor said, reading her ship’s long-range scan. Six fighters from VFA-31, the Impactors, had deployed into the atmosphere over an hour ago, taking out the big planetary defense turrets mounted on the fort’s upper surfaces with high-velocity KK projectiles accelerated in from space. The strike had been the second phase of Operation Fallen Star, necessary to allow the transports to get in without being vaporized.
    The first phase had been initiated by the Virtual Combat Center in Colorado Springs, an all-out electronic assault by former pilots linked in through the Confederation’s computer nets, opening backdoor channels and covert access feeds either discovered or, in many cases, created by the super-AI Konstantin from its base on the far side of Earth’s moon.
    “Hang on a sec,” Lieutenant Junior Grade Chris Dobbs said. Another newbie, he’d been in the squadron less than seventy-two hours. “I’ve got multiple launches . . . dead ahead. Range, twenty-six hundred kilometers!”
    Damn, the kid was right . The range put the launch site somewhere in central or southern Turkey, close to the Mediterranean . . . and Turkey was still part of the Confederation. Those fighters might well be rebels—pro-Korosi forces. They’d certainly timed their launch nicely . . . moments after the lead element of the Black Demons had passed overhead in their orbit.
    Connor let the data flood through her. How many spacecraft . . . and what kind? Were they after the lead element, coming up on them from behind? Or were they going counter-orbit and closing with her?
    “They’re firing!” Mackey warned.
    Eight fighters—Confederation