Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three by Ian Douglas

laughter from the waiting Dragonfires. The odd patterns of Agletsch speech and their constant use of the phrase “yes-no” was well known to everyone on board America by now.
    “Sounds like we have an Agletsch loose in the squadron,” Rostenkowski said, laughing. “Since when did they start driving Dragonfires?”
    “Dragonfires, PriFly,” Wizewski’s voice broke in. “Is there a problem?”
    “Negative, CAG,” Gray replied. “No problem.”
    “Can the chatter in there and focus on your finals. Emergence in three minutes. Drop in sixty seconds after that.”
    “Aye, aye, sir.”
    No sense of humor, that one.
    He was glad the newbies in the squadron could laugh, though. They’d been training hard in sim, but the real deal was never like electronic simulations, no matter how bad-assed realistic the downloads.
    If they could enjoy a joke now , they ought to be okay.
    He hoped. . . .
    CIC
    TC/USNA CVS America
    Outer System, Texaghu Resch System
    112 light years from Earth
    1103 hours, TFT
     
    Emergence .
    The star carrier America dropped into normal space as her Alcubierre bubble collapsed. Since she’d been motionless relative to the volume of space wrapped up inside the Alcubierre field, she emerged traveling at a velocity of only a few kilometers per second—the difference in relative velocities between this patch of space, and the space within the Kuiper Belt of HD 157950. The transition released a great deal of potential energy as light and hard radiation, a flaring burst spreading into and through the new star system at the speed of light.
    Koenig studied the new system, both represented by icons within the tactical tank, and as revealed by optical sensors across the bulkhead viewalls of the Combat Information Center. They’d emerged ten astronomical units from the local star—a little farther than Saturn was from Sol. There were planets—five visible immediately, and there likely would be others as the ship’s navigational AIs scanned local space.
    “Admiral?” a familiar voice asked. “This is CAG. So you still want to launch fighters?”
    “Wait one,” Koenig told him. “We need to see what we’re launching to .”
    Data continued to cascade in from the AIs scanning the system. Two inner rocky planets, small enough and close enough to their primary that they likely were too hot for Earth-type life. Planet III, 1.5 AUs from the star, was a small gas giant, about the size of Neptune. Beyond that, at 3 and 5 AUs, were two more rocky planets, both dazzlingly bright and probably encased pole to pole in planet-wide sheets of ice.
    “Astrogation,” Koenig called. “Give that gas giant a close look. Maybe it has Earthlike moons.”
    He was thinking of Alchameth, circling the star Arcturus, and its moon Jasper.
    “We’ve been looking, Admiral. We’ve spotted several small moons—rocks, really—but nothing like a real planet.”
    “Carry on, then.”
    He felt a small bite of disappointment. Because of this system’s listing in the Turusch Directory, he’d assumed there would be an inhabited planet here—if not one with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and temperate climes comfortable for humans, than one with the reducing atmosphere and hot, sulfur-laden conditions enjoyed by the Turusch.
    The truth of the matter, though, was that habitable worlds of either type were painfully few and far between within that sliver of the galaxy explored so far by Humankind. The chances that a world of near-Earth mass would just happen to lie within the band of liquid-water temperatures around a star were slim; the fact that the Confederation had discovered as many as twenty where humans could walk unprotected—Chiron and Circe and Osiris and the others—spoke more to how many stars were out here, not to how common other Earths might be.
    Texaghu Resch was a G2-type star almost identical to Sol . . . but it simply hadn’t won the planetological crapshoot that would have led to its possessing a planet