Stargods by Ian Douglas (best summer books TXT) 📕

“I sincerely hope so.” Michaels smiled with what he hoped looked like warm sincerity. “I live only to serve Humankind.”

Chapter Twenty-four

29 April, 2429

USNA CVS America

Admiral’s Office

Quito Synchorbit

1534 hours, FST

“What the hell are the Russians up to?”

Admiral Gray was in his office, sensor data flowing through his head and feeding him information on each one of the shipscurrently in Earth orbit or moving through cislunar space. There were hundreds of targets—749, to be precise—with more enteringthat volume of space every moment. Most were gathered in a swarm at the Quito Synchorbital, assisting with rescue and repair.

America had dispatched a number of SAR and work vehicles to assist with rescue and damage control, and when the captured Moskva had limped into port late last night, the Russians had been put to work as well. Oreshkin appeared to be cooperating withhis captors, but Gray didn’t trust the man. Things would be even more complicated—read dangerous—once the captured Russki destroyers arrived. That would happen sometime this evening. USNA fleet elements were already positioning themselves to escort the ships . . . just in case.

“They don’t appear to be threatening us, sir,” Mackey said. “That’s a blessing, at least.”

“Not yet.” Gray broke the data feed and looked at his flag captain. “Do you believe that the Moskva was rogue?”

“That’s what the news feeds are saying, Admiral. Oreshkin was a full-blown anti-alien fanatic, and his faction didn’t wantus talking to the Sh’daar.”

“I’d be more willing to believe that if we could have downloaded Oreshkin’s in-heads and known what he was really thinking.As it is, things are just a little too pat.”

“Oreshkin has already validated that statement.”

“And I wouldn’t believe Oreshkin if he told me which way was up in a one-G gravitational field. I think Moscow told him what to say, and he’s following orders.”

Gray had been spending a lot of time since their visit to the N’gai Cluster thinking about why the Russians had attacked themand about what really might be going on.

There was precedent for the idea that Moskva’s commander had gone off on his own. In 2132, during the Second Sino-Western War, a Chinese ship had dropped a small asteroidinto the Atlantic, causing economic and physical devastation that had seriously weakened the then–United States, forcing heramalgamation into the newly formed Earth Confederation. So horrific an attack might have been grounds for the obliterationof the Chinese Hegemony as an independent state, but Beijing had insisted that the so-called “Wormwood Incident” had beena rogue act by a rebel ship commander, that Beijing had had nothing to do with it. With the Hegemony too powerful for anymeaningful retaliation, the Confederation and the world community at large had accepted Beijing’s word and let the claim stand.

Now the Russians were claiming that the Moskva, under the command of Captain First Rank Oreshkin, had followed and attacked the America because Oreshkin was an anti-alienist who feared Gray was going to betray Humankind to the Sh’daar.

“Okay . . . but why don’t you believe them, Admiral?” Mackey asked.

“For starters, what were those Nungiirtok doing on board the Moskva?”

“They claimed they were being taken back to their home planet.”

“That sound like something an anti-alienist would do? Give enemy combatants a free lift home?”

Mackey thought about that. “Well, he might. There’s a Russian community on Osiris, and the Moskva might have been trying to help them . . . you know, get rid of the local riffraff.”

“Ha! Riffraff is right!”

“Or, according to Oreshkin, he’d gotten the Nungies to surrender by promising them a ride, then talked them into showing himwhere their homeworld was. We still have no idea where it might be. Knowing the identity of an actual or a potential enemy’shomeworld is always an important strategic consideration.”

Gray had to agree. The Nungiirtok obviously had known the location of Earth, and look at what a disaster that had been. But was Yuri Oreshkin that creative? That diligent, when it would have been easy to simply space those twenty-fivealiens with no one the wiser?

Or had he been following orders from Moscow? Gray was willing to believe that the attack on America had been the result of orders handed down by an anti-alien faction at the Kremlin, but just how high up did the order-givinggo?

“I don’t know, Mack,” Gray said. “Based on what we know now about the Nungiirtok, they’re a warrior culture that doesn’t believein surrendering . . . ever.”

“We could be wrong about that, Admiral. They’d been stranded on Osiris for twenty years. That’s a long time to hold a grudge!”

“True. And those Nungies didn’t have their Tok Iad with them for all that time. Maybe that made them more, I don’t know, amenable to the Russian offer. The thing is, I don’t buy the party line. I think Oreshkin was acting under orders. We don’t know the whole story yet, and I wish to hell we did.”

“With respect, Admiral, I’d suggest that you’re overthinking this. Occam’s razor, right? The simplest explanation is probablythe correct one.”

“We have a carrier battlegroup—Moskva and four destroyers—coming back to Earth. Suddenly they divert and follow us out and back to the N’gai Cluster. That’s notsimple. They were following orders!”

“Sure. Oreshkin’s.”

“I’ll grant you that Russian naval command doctrine is somewhat, ah, authoritarian. Disobey orders, even question orders, and you’re likely to find yourself taking a walk out the nearest airlock, sans spacesuit. But there were four thousandcrew on the Moskva, another thousand on those destroyers. Are all of them going to quietly accept Oreshkin’s orders and launch what might well be the first attack of a new war?”

“Yes.”

“Mack . . .”

“The Russians? Yeah, they’d obey, no question. Anyway, he could have told them the orders came from Moscow. How would they know otherwise?”

Gray thought about that. “I suppose you’re right. But I still think we’re missing something.”

“Well, Moskva’s crew is being offloaded to Skyport now, and I imagine the DD crews will join them there. Naval Intelligence is debriefingthem. We might know something more soon.”

Skyport was part—a very large part—of the formerly interconnected SupraQuito Synchorbital Station. A twenty-kilometer-long collection