Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three Read Online Free PDF

Chinese—were unknowns.
    “Sir,” Gray said, “we’re not going to fight them, are we?”
    “I don’t know, son. Possibly they don’t know either. They’re probably going to try to bluff us, and the old man is going to call them on it.”
    It seemed like utter lunacy. The North Americans comfortably outnumbered the European warships, but an exchange of fire would cause a lot of damage on both sides, something the human fleet simply couldn’t afford this far from home. Damn it, the Sh’daar and the Turusch and the H’rulka were the enemies . . . not the damned Europeans!
    “We expect the French carrier Jeanne d’Arc to attempt to close alongside of the America ,” Wizewski continued. “The fighters are going to block her, because we can’t afford to let a ship with her firepower get close enough to fire a broadside. One hundred thousand kilometers. That’s the minimum stand-off distance. Understand?”
    “I think so, sir. Are . . . are we authorized to fire?”
    “ Only on my command, or on the command of Admiral Koenig himself.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “We’re going to try our damnedest to talk our way out of this. If we can’t . . .”
    He left the thought unfinished.
    “I understand, sir.”
    On the tactical display, the Jeanne d’Arc and her consorts were still almost a full astronomical unit away, but they were on a convergent course, closing with the America . The American ships were positioning themselves in a tight globe around the carrier, with the heavy cruisers Valley Forge and Ma’at Mons , along with a number of frigates and destroyers squarely between the approaching French flotilla and the USNA carriers. The Ma’at Mons , particularly, was a heavy bombardment ship . . . but she’d expended a lot of her warload against the A1-01 orbital factory. Gray wondered if she had enough munitions on board to keep the Europeans at a healthy distance.
    Civil war.
    Gray had little use for the Terran Confederation. Hell, as a Prim living out on the USNA Periphery, in the ruins of Old Manhattan, he’d had little use for the United States of North America, either. So far as he could tell, the argument between them involved a difference of strategy. The Confederation wanted to talk with the Sh’daar, and perhaps accept terms, while Koenig wanted to draw the enemy off into deep space, away from Earth and her colonies. Gray didn’t understand how the two could be mutually exclusive, or how Koenig could get away with setting Confederation military policy.
    If forced to choose between the two, though, Gray would go with Koenig, if only because he was doing what he thought was right, and to hell with the politicians and rear-echelon second-guessers in Geneva or in Columbus.
    Koenig was a fighter, and that was enough for Trevor Gray.
    CIC
    TC/USNA CVS America
    Kuiper Belt, HD 157950
    98 light years from Earth
    1358 hours, TFT
     
    “Do you think they’ll fight, Admiral?” Captain Buchanan asked.
    The voice spoke inside Koenig’s head, since America ’s commanding officer was on the ship’s bridge, forward from the Combat Information Center, which was the central brain for the entire battlegroup. Koenig was looking down into the tactical display tank, where a cloud of green, amber, and red icons drifted toward a seemingly inevitable collision.
    “I don’t know, Randy,” Koenig said. “I don’t know Giraurd. Can’t get a handle on him.”
    He’d called up every bit of biographical data on Francois Giraurd that he could find in the Fleetnet database, but found little that was useful. Giraurd was only fifty years old, remarkably young for a grand admiral. Born in 2344, he’d been twenty-three, an engineering major at the Sorbonne, when the Sh’daar Ultimatum had come down through their Agletsch proxies. He’d entered the French Acádemie d’Astre as a midshipman cadet in 2368, the year of the disaster at Beta Pictoris, the opening round in the Sh’daar-Confederation War.
    His first