Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three by Ian Douglas Read Free Book Online Page A

distortion—the projected drive singularity that was pulling the giant through space.
    The ship’s gravitic shields would be down on the forward cap, to enable the field projectors to create the singularity, a tightly knotted distortion of space.
    And Gray thought he saw a way. . . .
    CIC
    TC/USNA CVS America
    Kuiper Belt, HD 157950
    98 light years from Earth
    1732 hours, TFT
     
    “Admiral?”
    “Yes, CAG?”
    “One of our people came up with something. Thought you should see it.”
    Koenig read the downloaded text, transcribed from a pilot’s laser-com transmission. “Lieutenant Gray?” Koenig asked.
    “Yes, sir. Acting CO of VFA-44.”
    “I remember. Hero at the Defense of Earth . . . and again at Alphekka. He knows his shit.”
    “Yes, sir. And his idea might work. Gives us something to go on, anyway.”
    “We’ve got nothing better,” Koenig said. “Okay. Mr. Sinclair? Pass the word to all ships, tight beam and quantum encoded. Jeanne d’Arc will be the first target. We won’t hit the others unless this doesn’t work and they keep coming.”
    “Aye, aye, Admiral.”
    Koenig, an avid military historian, smiled. Lieutenant Gray, he thought, knew a secret first uncovered by an aviator back in the days of fabric-winged biplanes and oceangoing navies, a man named General Billy Mitchell.
    “It appears,” Koenig said, “that our fighters are going to earn their pay today, David-and-Goliath style.”
    “David and who, sir?” Sinclair sounded puzzled.
    “Never mind.”
    Since the passage of the White Covenant, in the late twenty-first century, the religious beliefs or training of others—or the lack of such—was no one’s business. Technically, it was only against the law to try to convert someone else, but in practice it was considered bad manners even to make a casual religious comment, or to make a reference to religious mythology.
    “Our boys and girls out there are going to need something more than a sling,” Wizewski said quietly. The CAG, Koenig recalled, was religious, a member of some small and semi-fundamentalist Christian sect. There were so many nowadays it was impossible to keep track.
    “Amen to that, CAG,” Koenig said quietly, so no one else would hear. “Amen to that. . . .”
    CIC
    TC/PE CVS Jeanne d’Arc
    Kuiper Belt, HD 157950
    98 light years from Earth
    1739 hours, TFT
     
    Grand Admiral Francois Giraurd studied the pattern of colored icons unfolding in the tactical display tank. Koenig would have to capitulate. He had no other sane option.
    “Sir,” his tactical officer said. “We cross their line in twelve minutes.”
    “Very well.”
    “Sir . . . do you intend to attack?”
    “It won’t come to that, Lieutenant. We will cross their line, they will scatter and refuse to confront us, and we will put our boarding party across. And then . . .”
    “Sir?”
    “And then we go home.”
    They were ninety-eight light years from Earth, farther than any human had ever before voyaged. The emptiness, the darkness scattered with myriad unknown suns and civilizations, filled him with foreboding and a brooding sense of agitation, even fear. Humans didn’t belong out here, not in a galaxy already staked out and claimed by millions of other technic cultures.
    He magnified the image in the tank. “What ship is that?”
    “The Valley Forge ,” the tactical officer told him. “One hundred fifty thousand tons.”
    “Target to disable her,” Giraurd said. “Power systems and weapons. We will push past her, then, and engage the America .”
    “The cruiser is accompanied by a number of fighters.”
    “Those are of no consequence. If they get too close, destroy them.”
    “Our orders, sir, are to effect Koenig’s surrender without causing damage to their ships, or causing casualties.”
    “We will damage them as little as possible, cause as few casualties as possible. But I see no other way of reaching the America , do you?”
    “No, Grand Admiral.”
    “Direct our