1 PROLOGUE-1

Lieutenant Liam Spencer stood on the observation deck of the Terran Star Fleet carrier Telemachus, looking out of the darkened chamber at the bright Inkeren night.

The Inkeren star system was situated in a much more densely starred region near the center of the galaxy than his own planet far out on a spiral arm of the Milky Way. The sheer number of stars filling the surrounding space, the closeness of one star to another, for light-year aftet light-year, made for that much more illumination, enough to make space—what on Earth everyone thought of as the blackness of space—appear to glow.

The sight still had its fascination for him.

"Ten hundred hours, standard time," someone said behind Tom. Liam turned in the direction of his voice, saw Ed standing in the doorway, a rectangle of light in the side of the darkened room. "We're wanted in the briefing room."

"All right, coming," Liam said, and checked his com. Everyone was supposed to have his com switched on at all times, but he preferred to leave it off during his downtime. Most of the time there wasn't a problem, since what his commander didn't know couldn't hurt him. But downtime had officially ended a while ago, and he'd forgot to turn it back on. Wordlessly he walked with Ed off the observation deck, down the passageway to the briefing compartment, discretely switching on his com. Down a ladder, to the passageway below, and five hatches on and to the right there they were, in the theater-style briefing compartment room already mostly full (arriving any later they would have been noticed and chewed out), where they barely found their seats and settled into them before the briefing got started. First came the weather briefing, which didn't last very long: no solar flares and no meteor showers anticipated in the area in the coming hours. The skies, and the electromagnetic spectrum, would be as clear as they ever got. Then they got to the actual mission. A hologram flickered to life in the center of the room. It was a representation of the asteroid belt, revolving slowly to enable everyone to take it in from every angle.

Early in the war the Outer Planets of the Inkeren system had fought their way into the asteroid belt and dug in. They'd got into the rocks, planted sensors and positioned mines and blasted hangars into them, setting up stations from which they could launch fighters or refuel ships which were exceedingly tough to dig out, even after the OPs had lost so many of their heavy ships that they were unwilling to risk a major fleet action.

And the Inner Planets were paying for that initial failure to keep the OPs from getting into the belt. Fully sixty percent of the Inner Planets' interstellar trade went through the Invari wormhole on the far side of the asteroid field and even overflying the thick of the belt their shipping was continually sniped at and ambushed, forcing them to resort to a convoy system, with all its inefficiencies.

Since then Earth had come into the war on the side of the IPs, dispatching the battle group centered on the Telemachus—just as the Podradhatu Dominion was known to be backing up the outer worlds, to have fed them the ships and missiles and logistical machinery which enabled them to win their early victories.

"Zoom in, Sector 7-G," the Intel officer handling this section of the briefing said. The chart swam as the designated point portion of the three-dimensional image leaped out to form a second picture.

"Zoom in, Asteroid 4051-K." A third hologram leaped out of the second, the named asteroid emerging from among the mass. "Magnify four," he added, making the image of the named asteroid quadruple in size.

"This imagery was taken by a recon drone only twelve hours ago," he said as it became clear why he was drawing their attention to it. A pair of massive doors had been blasted into the rock, the silhouettes, just barely visible at this level of magnification, momentarily highlighted in neon green. "We believe this asteroid is a base for two squadrons of enemy fighters involved in some of the recent attacks on convoys heading to and from the Invari wormhole. And we're going to take it out. Two flights loaded out with Penetrator missiles, two others packing mixed loads and so able to provide a measure of cover."

"Pretty risky, don't you think?" Ed asked. "We could easily get overwhelmed if it came to a fight."

"As you can see, 4051-K is in the middle of the belt. If we're going to smear it, we'll have to get in close, and the simulations we've run show that no major combatant can negotiate the narrow openings, or maneuver close enough to avoid detection." Hologram #2 quadrupled in size, a flight path modeled on the anticipated distribution of rock, ice and metal through the sector illuminated in white. "In fact, we'd have a tough time controlling even a fighter force larger than a squadron, which will need to hit them before they can swarm out or shift position. Don't forget, their doctrine calls for heavy point defenses at bases like that."

That made for a total load-out of thirty-six missiles, which would be concentrated against the blast doors they saw in the imagery. In the worst-case scenario, they figured they could get in a half dozen hits. Not enough to wipe it out, but at least to put it out of action for a good long while, and should circumstances allow, a second strike to mop up.

"So it's either going in quick and sneaky, or dispatching a battle fleet to hit them head-on, and the brass would prefer to avoid a bloodbath over this objective, if that is at all possible," the Intel said. "Any questions? Dismissed."

Spencer's squadron headed for the ready rooms and geared up, then took off in their fighters, leaving the carrier behind for the asteroid belt, which contained about four times as much matter as the one back in the Sol system. And while that still left it pretty sparse next to any planetary surface, the extraordinary speeds involved in a sortie like this one kept them maneuvering constantly, accelerating and decelerating to steer clear of rocks as big as mountains or moons making their way around the system's sun.

That made for a great deal of hairy flying, but no close calls. That was, at least, until Spencer felt a fireball burning up his spine, a feeling he'd had before when his squadron had been jumped while escorting a convoy. But all he had seen in the displays showing the readouts from his sensors had been ghosts—signatures so faint and inconsistent as to almost certainly be meaningless. Especially in the middle of an asteroid field when there was so much clutter, and so much else demanding a pilot's attention.

So maybe the signatures merited a second look. Liam called up a second display, replayed the sensor record of the past several minutes, speeded up but with the app for flagging even the faintest potentially relevant signature running.

There was nothing there. Not even the ghosts he was sure he had seen. As if they'd been scrubbed from the record.

Liam keyed the com.

"Sir, our equipment's been tampered with," Spencer said to the squadron commander.

"What? How do you know that?"

"I . . . caught ghosts on my sensor display, sir," Liam said. "I ignored them but then something made me check them over again and they were erased from the record."

"I see." There was a brief pause. The squadron commander checking his own systems. "My sensor records show nothing also. Is that all you have to go on?"

"Yes sir . . . I mean, I don't know how I know, sir, but I'm sure there's more to this than what I just saw." He sighed audibly. "Recommend we abort, sir."

"Negative, negative, we will not abort," the squadron commander shot back. "All units will proceed with the sortie. All units. Is that understood flight commander?"

"Understood, sir." Damn it.

It crossed Liam's mind that he should check in with his wingmen, but he decided against it. If his flyers saw that anything was up, they should have chimed in and he didn't want to put any ideas into their heads . . . no, it was best not to bother them, to let them focus on the task at hand.

And maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was just jitters. But why should he be jittery? He'd flown forty sorties in this campaign, and those missions hadn't been uneventful. He'd tangled with the bad guys; he'd discharged his weapons in anger and he'd been shot at himself. And he couldn't think of anything that had happened lately to get his back up, an accident, an inconsistency in the intel.

"Missile launch!" someone shouted.