Black Fleet Trilogy 1: Warship by Joshua Dalzelle Page A

from the planet's com drone platform, a massive, automated construct that was now apparently gone.
    The information was sparse. Xi'an was a fairly unimportant world in the AU save for the fact that it had a naturally stable environment that could support humans. In recent years they had begun to move some ship construction projects to the planet to encourage their citizens to move to the remote world and to take advantage of the slightly lower gravity. There wasn't any sort of political discord as the planet had less than two million people total and most of them were temporary workers setting up the shipbuilding facilities.
    The com logs were equally unhelpful as the last drone from the planet had been captured and downloaded only a week ago. Nothing in the package it carried would indicate the planet was suffering some sort of calamity. As best as he could tell, everything on Xi'an was normal as of eight days ago.
    On a whim he pulled up a local area star chart and began looking at the corridor that ran between the Asianic Union and the Warsaw Alliance. There was certainly no love lost between the two enclaves, but an overt and unprovoked act of war seemed almost unthinkable. He saw that Xi'an was close to the accepted border, but still well within AU space. Besides, after centuries of relative peace would the Warsaw Alliance really launch such a devastating attack without even approaching the Confederate Senate first?
    Following that line of thought, he pulled up the nearest Alliance planet: Oplotom. Like most Alliance worlds, this one showed evidence of heavy industrialization and resource mining. The CIS synopsis he had on Oplotom said that it was a world that developed most of the weaponry for the Eight Fleet and, more disturbingly, weapons for another fleet of warships that the Alliance had begun to field with no affiliation to the Confederacy or any ties to CENTCOM's command structure. Many of the enclaves had small defense forces for internal security, but the class of ships coming out of the Alliance shipyards would give anyone pause. What in the hell were they arming up for?
    Jackson had stretched out on the couch in his office with the intent of only resting his eyes for a few minutes, but the stress of the day caught up with him and the next thing he knew his comlink was chirping to let him know he would be needed back on the bridge in an hour. He stood up with a groan, irritated at himself for falling asleep for hours when the ship was in potentially hostile space. Straightening his uniform, he hustled down to his quarters to get cleaned up and change uniforms so he could make it to the officer's mess before being stuck on the bridge for what would likely be a very long watch.
    ****
    It was six hours after Jackson walked onto the bridge when they began to get their first view of Xi'an on the long-range optics. Unfortunately they couldn't garner any real details from that distance. There looked to be increased cloud cover, but nothing wildly out of place.
    "We're close enough that preliminary sensor sweeps are indicating that the atmosphere is ten degrees above normal on average," Ensign Davis said. "The surface temperature appears to be more uniform than normal, even at the polar regions."
    "Whatever it is that’s creating that cloud cover could explain that," Jackson said. "Our sensors can't see past that down to the surface. Tactical, begin another series of high-res sweeps. Map out the debris field and then start trying to figure out what it's all from."
    "Aye, sir."
    "We'll be entering our first transfer orbit in three hours," Celesta said. "Decel burn will begin in ten minutes."
    "Understood," Jackson said. "Ensign Davis, you have ten minutes to finish collecting thermal data before the mains reverse thrust and distort your optics."
    "Yes, sir," Davis said, seemingly unconcerned.
    Each MPD nacelle actually housed two engines, a forward and reverse thrust motor capable of equal amounts of power. While most