The Synchronicity War Part 3 Read Online Free Page B

He could tell her where Resolute went and what it needed
to do when it got there. She would decide how the crew could best carry out his
orders, and he was entirely okay with that. By the time he got back to the
Command Station, the lunar recon drone was close enough to get grainy video of
the main lunar base which was still bathed in sunlight.
     
    "Damn!" he said in a low voice. The base clearly
had been attacked by high-energy lasers. The scene reminded him of what the
Nimitz base in the Avalon system looked like when Johansen's ship had gone
there to check things out. There might be salvageable equipment in that rubble,
but it might not be worth the time to look for it. In any case, that decision
would have to wait for another mission. TF92 didn't have time for anything like
that now.
     
    "At least we can be sure now that the enemy did come
here at some point, CAG,” said Valkyrie.
     
    "What about the boneyard?" asked Shiloh.
     
    "Coming into view in 18 seconds, CAG."
     
    Shiloh held his breath and waited. The 'boneyard', a term
left over from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, referred to a place
where military vehicles were parked when no longer in use. When all the A.I.s
had been evacuated from Sol, cargo capacity was in short supply, and all the
fighters had set down at a small base next to an open flat area of the moon.
Because they were designed to operate continuously in the harsh environment of
space, they didn't need any kind of shelter or atmosphere. If the enemy had not
destroyed them on the ground, then it would be relatively easy to re-activate
them at some future point. When the 18 seconds were up, Shiloh saw to his
surprise that all of the fighters seemed to be intact. If and when they were
recovered, they might need to be refueled with heavy hydrogen in order to bring
them onboard the carrier. The alternative was to send maintenance people in
spacesuits out to the fighters to retrofit ZPG power sources to them there. In
any case, there were 175 fighters that could be re-activated and brought back
to Site B at some point.
     
    "Those fighters would be handy to have now, CAG. We
still have almost 100 A.I.s that are sitting around twiddling their quantum
thumbs," said Valkyrie.
     
    "I agree. It would be great if our idle A.I.s had
fighters to keep them amused. We WILL recover them, but that will have to wait
for another trip. Let's start scanning the moon for alien detection gear,"
said Shiloh.
     
    "Roger that, CAG. Search pattern has commenced."
Scanning the moon's entire surface would take hours. In the meantime, TF92
would gradually move closer to the Earth while staying in its shadow, and
they'd get a good look at the planet via other recon drones. A few minutes
later Valkyrie said, "I'm getting usable images from our Earth drones,
CAG. Here's what drone 1 is seeing." The main display showed a planet that
didn't look like Earth at all. Instead of white clouds, blue ocean and green or
yellow land masses, the planet was almost a uniform slate grey.
     
    "What the hell?" exclaimed Shiloh.
     
    "My spectral analysis suggests that the atmosphere is
full of dust particles. The only known explanation for so much dust to be pushed
into the atmosphere in the time since we last had contact, is that the planet
has been impacted by one or more substantial asteroids," said Valkyrie.
     
    "How is that possible? We knew where all the
potentially dangerous asteroids were and their vectors. None of them were on a
collision course."
     
    "Unless the enemy gave them new vectors," said
Valkyrie.
     
    "Son of a bitch! I'll bet that's just what they
did!" said Shiloh. "It makes sense from their perspective too. They
make the Earth as uninhabitable as it's possible to do with a relatively modest
effort. Damn! That much dust will block so much sunlight that all plant life
will die, and temperatures will drop to below freezing everywhere. How can
anyone survive that?"
     
    "They couldn't, unless they went underground