William H. Keith - Warstrider 06 by Battlemind

Author:Battlemind
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-06-09T15:29:20+00:00

Chapter 14

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

—Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, XVII

JOHN DONNE

C.E. 1624

Dev uploaded from the University of Jefferson, transmitting himself as a burst of digitized information across the thirty-six-light-year I2C linkage from the 26 Draconis system to Eridu, Chi Draconis V. From there, he routed to a commercial channel, waited 312 microseconds for the passage of a particularly large block of priority data flagged for ViRcom routing, then uploaded once again across the twenty-nine-light-year I2C link to Chiron. From Chiron, after another brief pause, it was just four and a half light years to Sol—less than the blink of an eye for the quantum-paired electron arrays of the communications facilities at Alpha Centauri A III and Earth.

His incoming pattern was routed through the commercial traffic buffers at the communications array on Luna, where Dev waited for several seconds, surveying the electronic ground. If message traffic had been growing stronger and more urgent than normal at New America, almost fifty light years away, it was frantic here. Reaching out with the downloaded pattern of his mind, Dev sampled some of the messages flooding through near-Earth space.

“… God, I’ve never seen anything like it! There must be hundreds of them coming out of K-T space, and they’re filling the sky.…”

“Negative! Negative! It’s not K-T space. We don’t know how they’re arriving, hut they’re coming in fast. “

“Mayday! Mayday! Am under attack by unknown forces! They’re just coming out of empty space, more ships than I can count!…”

“Imperial Fleet Command Control Center, this is Perimeter Defense Facility Evening Calm! The enemy is materializing out of empty space from the direction of Aquila. Bearing right ascension, one-nine hours, three-five minutes, zero-four seconds, declination plus one-four point two degrees, range three-one-point-seven a.u. They appear to be moving in-system at high acceleration. Can’t determine yet whether their target is Earth or the Sun.…”

“Hello! Hello! Is anyone reading me? Hello!…”

“Mayday! Mayday! This is the transport Yoku Maru. I’ve been hit by something! Power out. Life support down. I’m tumbling and losing pressure. Can anybody hear me?…”

Earth’s solar system was filled with spaceborne traffic, some military, most of it commercial shipping. Earth and Dai Nihon, after all, were the hub of a titanic commercial empire as well as a military one, an empire spanning the entire Shichiju and reaching all the way out into the Periphery states. As emergency and priority radio and I2C traffic flashed from ship to ship and among the various planetary and deep space communications facilities across the system, panic was spreading.

“Perimeter Defense Facility Evening Calm, this is Imperial Fleet Command Control Center.

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