kilometers per second and closing.
At this point, the fighters would be trailing the enemy by . . .
He let the calculations run themselves through: 65 million kilometers. With a closing velocity of 30,000 kps, that meant an intercept in another thirty-six minutes.
Like a dog chasing a hovercraft, though, what they would be able to do with the alien once they actually caught it was still unknown.
And it was still all based on the “if ” of moving closer to the speed of light.
USNS/HGF Concord
4-Vesta
0056 hours, TFT
Commander Terrance Dahlquist read the message as it came through, direct from Admiral Gray and the star carrier America . He wasn’t quite sure how he should feel about this . . . or what he was going to do about it.
Originally a branch of the North American military, the High Guard had been established in the wake of the Wormwood Incident in 2132, when a rogue Chinese squadron had dropped a small asteroid into the Atlantic Ocean. Later, official control had been handed over to the Earth Confederation, since it was operating in the defense of the entire planet. Concord ’s mission was to monitor operations near asteroids, and to stop unauthorized attempts to manipulate their trajectories. In those cases where either asteroids or ore samples were legally being injected into Earth-approach orbits, the Guard tracked them, double-checked the calculations, and tried to make certain that Earth or other population centers across the solar system weren’t endangered.
Further, the High Guard made sure Vesta was always closely watched. The site of a large, mostly automated mining facility, the asteroid possessed a set of ten-kilometer-long magnetic launch rails designed to fire canisters of nano-extracted and -processed ore from the jumbled, frozen crust into low-energy transit loops that would bring them within capture range of Earth-based capture vessels within three to five years, depending on the constantly changing angles and distances between worlds. Fearing that terrorists or other rogue forces might easily change the launch parameters and turn the launch rails into titanic long-range weapons ideal for planetary bombardment, the High Guard was stationed there as protection against that scenario. In truth, it was not very likely to happen. For one thing, it would be a high-risk, low-reward endeavor, since incoming canisters were closely followed by radar and lidar, and intercept missions could easily nudge them into harmless orbits. But Earth’s governments remained nervous about falling rocks, especially deliberately chucked falling rocks, almost three centuries after Wormwood Fall, and High Guard frigates like the Concord were there to provide some measure of reassurance.
They were not designed to engage alien starships of unknown potential.
Dahlquist wanted to shoot a message back to Gray. The problem was that the High Guard, though technically a part of the USNA Navy during the current hostilities with the Confederation, was not under Navy jurisdiction, and a line officer like Gray did not have the authority to order High Guard assets off station.
Of course, the real reason he was hesitating had more to do with Gray’s background.
Like most USNA Guard and Naval officers, Dahlquist was a Ristie. The United States of North America was supposed to be a classless society, but that was fiction and always had been. Always there were “haves” as distinguished from “have-nots.” Money was not as big a factor in modern society as it once had been; the nanotech revolution had long ago made wealth-based distinctions largely irrelevant. But power , especially the power available to those with better technology and better access to information, was another matter altogether. Nowadays, those who had more advanced electronic implant technology, those who had life extension and better nanomed support, those who had connections in the larger “have” networks of government and the military— those
At this point, the fighters would be trailing the enemy by . . .
He let the calculations run themselves through: 65 million kilometers. With a closing velocity of 30,000 kps, that meant an intercept in another thirty-six minutes.
Like a dog chasing a hovercraft, though, what they would be able to do with the alien once they actually caught it was still unknown.
And it was still all based on the “if ” of moving closer to the speed of light.
USNS/HGF Concord
4-Vesta
0056 hours, TFT
Commander Terrance Dahlquist read the message as it came through, direct from Admiral Gray and the star carrier America . He wasn’t quite sure how he should feel about this . . . or what he was going to do about it.
Originally a branch of the North American military, the High Guard had been established in the wake of the Wormwood Incident in 2132, when a rogue Chinese squadron had dropped a small asteroid into the Atlantic Ocean. Later, official control had been handed over to the Earth Confederation, since it was operating in the defense of the entire planet. Concord ’s mission was to monitor operations near asteroids, and to stop unauthorized attempts to manipulate their trajectories. In those cases where either asteroids or ore samples were legally being injected into Earth-approach orbits, the Guard tracked them, double-checked the calculations, and tried to make certain that Earth or other population centers across the solar system weren’t endangered.
Further, the High Guard made sure Vesta was always closely watched. The site of a large, mostly automated mining facility, the asteroid possessed a set of ten-kilometer-long magnetic launch rails designed to fire canisters of nano-extracted and -processed ore from the jumbled, frozen crust into low-energy transit loops that would bring them within capture range of Earth-based capture vessels within three to five years, depending on the constantly changing angles and distances between worlds. Fearing that terrorists or other rogue forces might easily change the launch parameters and turn the launch rails into titanic long-range weapons ideal for planetary bombardment, the High Guard was stationed there as protection against that scenario. In truth, it was not very likely to happen. For one thing, it would be a high-risk, low-reward endeavor, since incoming canisters were closely followed by radar and lidar, and intercept missions could easily nudge them into harmless orbits. But Earth’s governments remained nervous about falling rocks, especially deliberately chucked falling rocks, almost three centuries after Wormwood Fall, and High Guard frigates like the Concord were there to provide some measure of reassurance.
They were not designed to engage alien starships of unknown potential.
Dahlquist wanted to shoot a message back to Gray. The problem was that the High Guard, though technically a part of the USNA Navy during the current hostilities with the Confederation, was not under Navy jurisdiction, and a line officer like Gray did not have the authority to order High Guard assets off station.
Of course, the real reason he was hesitating had more to do with Gray’s background.
Like most USNA Guard and Naval officers, Dahlquist was a Ristie. The United States of North America was supposed to be a classless society, but that was fiction and always had been. Always there were “haves” as distinguished from “have-nots.” Money was not as big a factor in modern society as it once had been; the nanotech revolution had long ago made wealth-based distinctions largely irrelevant. But power , especially the power available to those with better technology and better access to information, was another matter altogether. Nowadays, those who had more advanced electronic implant technology, those who had life extension and better nanomed support, those who had connections in the larger “have” networks of government and the military— those
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