nervous system. And it had changed her, changed her attitude, her feelings toward him.
Of course, he still loved her, though she’d lost all affection for him.
“So,” he said, wondering what to talk about. “You just happened to be here? You weren’t looking for me?”
“No, Trev. I was just… here. Small world, huh?”
A little too small. Gray found himself wishing he were back on the America . Life on board ship was so much simpler.
But then, she had been pinging him. His PA confirmed that it had been her electronic signal seeking him out of the crowd. Maybe she was still interested in him after all.
“I’ve got to go,” he said sharply. He turned and walked away, leaving her standing there by the food table.
High Guard Destroyer Qianfang Fangyu
Saturn Space, Sol System
1325 hours, TFT
“What the holy fuck is that ?”
Jordan Reeves floated in the main control room of the High Guard destroyer, staring into the holographic display showing the long-range scan of the intruder.
Captain Liu Jintao glanced at the liaison officer with distaste, and then passed his hand across the display controls, increasing the magnification factor by another ten.
“I would say,” Liu replied in his slow and halting English, “that it is a problem.”
The target was some 20 million kilometers out from Saturn—and at just about the same distance from Titan at this point in the giant moon’s orbit. That actually placed the intruder well within the outskirts of Saturn’s far-flung system of moons, within the retrograde Norse group, in fact.
And that made the intruder of supreme interest to the High Guard.
Within the display, the intruder appeared as a gleaming point of light, attended by a flickering sidebar of data giving mass and diameter, velocity and heading. The ship—it had just dropped out of the space-twisting bubble of Alcubierre Drive so it had to be a ship—was huge, two kilometers across and massing tens of billions of tons. At optical wavelengths, the object appeared… odd, a flattened sphere with a shifting surface that defied analysis.
“It’s highly reflective,” Liu said.
“It’s black .”
“Because it is reflecting the black of surrounding space. This data suggests that it is almost perfectly reflective… like a mirror, or a pool of liquid mercury.”
“So who are they, and what are they doing in the Norse group?”
The Norse group was the outer cloud of Saturnian moons, some dozens of bodies circling the planet retrograde and at high inclination. Phoebe, at 216 kilometers, was the biggest of these; the rest, named for figures from Norse mythology, were rubble, little more than drifting mountains. Ymir was just 18 kilometers wide.
“Is he trying to rendezvous with any of those rocks?” Reeves asked.
“Not yet,” Liu replied. “The nearest to the intruder’s position is S/2004 S 12… at just over one hundred thousand kilometers. And the intruder is traveling prograde.”
The Norse group moons were retrograde, circling Saturn east to west. The intruder was currently flying against the flow, as it were, meaning it was not attempting to match course and velocity with any of those hurtling mountains.
Yet .
Over two and a half centuries before, the Second Sino-Western War had been fought both on Earth and in space. Toward the very end of the conflict, a Chinese ship, the Xiang Yang Hong , had used nuclear warheads to nudge three two-kilometer asteroids into trajectories that would have landed them in the Atlantic Ocean, one right after the other; the resultant tidal waves would have devastated both the eastern seaboard of the United States and much of the European Union, as well as much of Africa and South America. Had the attempt succeeded, there was little doubt but that the Chinese Hegemony would have emerged, not merely victorious, but as the single most powerful nation on the planet.
Beijing had claimed that Sun Xueju, the Xiang Yang Hong ’s captain, had gone
Of course, he still loved her, though she’d lost all affection for him.
“So,” he said, wondering what to talk about. “You just happened to be here? You weren’t looking for me?”
“No, Trev. I was just… here. Small world, huh?”
A little too small. Gray found himself wishing he were back on the America . Life on board ship was so much simpler.
But then, she had been pinging him. His PA confirmed that it had been her electronic signal seeking him out of the crowd. Maybe she was still interested in him after all.
“I’ve got to go,” he said sharply. He turned and walked away, leaving her standing there by the food table.
High Guard Destroyer Qianfang Fangyu
Saturn Space, Sol System
1325 hours, TFT
“What the holy fuck is that ?”
Jordan Reeves floated in the main control room of the High Guard destroyer, staring into the holographic display showing the long-range scan of the intruder.
Captain Liu Jintao glanced at the liaison officer with distaste, and then passed his hand across the display controls, increasing the magnification factor by another ten.
“I would say,” Liu replied in his slow and halting English, “that it is a problem.”
The target was some 20 million kilometers out from Saturn—and at just about the same distance from Titan at this point in the giant moon’s orbit. That actually placed the intruder well within the outskirts of Saturn’s far-flung system of moons, within the retrograde Norse group, in fact.
And that made the intruder of supreme interest to the High Guard.
Within the display, the intruder appeared as a gleaming point of light, attended by a flickering sidebar of data giving mass and diameter, velocity and heading. The ship—it had just dropped out of the space-twisting bubble of Alcubierre Drive so it had to be a ship—was huge, two kilometers across and massing tens of billions of tons. At optical wavelengths, the object appeared… odd, a flattened sphere with a shifting surface that defied analysis.
“It’s highly reflective,” Liu said.
“It’s black .”
“Because it is reflecting the black of surrounding space. This data suggests that it is almost perfectly reflective… like a mirror, or a pool of liquid mercury.”
“So who are they, and what are they doing in the Norse group?”
The Norse group was the outer cloud of Saturnian moons, some dozens of bodies circling the planet retrograde and at high inclination. Phoebe, at 216 kilometers, was the biggest of these; the rest, named for figures from Norse mythology, were rubble, little more than drifting mountains. Ymir was just 18 kilometers wide.
“Is he trying to rendezvous with any of those rocks?” Reeves asked.
“Not yet,” Liu replied. “The nearest to the intruder’s position is S/2004 S 12… at just over one hundred thousand kilometers. And the intruder is traveling prograde.”
The Norse group moons were retrograde, circling Saturn east to west. The intruder was currently flying against the flow, as it were, meaning it was not attempting to match course and velocity with any of those hurtling mountains.
Yet .
Over two and a half centuries before, the Second Sino-Western War had been fought both on Earth and in space. Toward the very end of the conflict, a Chinese ship, the Xiang Yang Hong , had used nuclear warheads to nudge three two-kilometer asteroids into trajectories that would have landed them in the Atlantic Ocean, one right after the other; the resultant tidal waves would have devastated both the eastern seaboard of the United States and much of the European Union, as well as much of Africa and South America. Had the attempt succeeded, there was little doubt but that the Chinese Hegemony would have emerged, not merely victorious, but as the single most powerful nation on the planet.
Beijing had claimed that Sun Xueju, the Xiang Yang Hong ’s captain, had gone
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