Free Mindscape: Book 2 of the New Frontiers Series by Jasper T. Scott Page B

Now it’s up to Earth.”
    “Aye, sir,” Cardinal said. “They have twenty minutes to intercept, but by now they should have been able to put themselves ahead of the targets and reduce the angle of deflection. They won’t have the same problem that we did.”
    Alexander sighed. “I hope you’re right.”
    “Admiral—” McAdams began in a whisper. “What if those missiles go evasive?”
    Good question. Relativistic missiles were hard enough to hit without adding randomly varying angles of deflection. It wouldn’t take much maneuvering to throw off intercepting fire. “Let’s hope they’re not programmed for evasion, Commander. Maybe they’ll need all of their available thrust to guide them to their targets, like what happened with the Moon attack. We shot down seven out of ten missiles. If there’d been another ship there with us, we’d have got them all.”
    McAdams looked ready to object, her lips frozen halfway to forming words. “Maybe,” she conceded.
    Alexander knew what she’d left unsaid. Those missiles didn’t need to hit a very precise target like a city in order to do damage on Earth. Just about anywhere they hit would be devastating.
    Chapter 7
     

    C aptain Grekov watched the bracketed red target box glowing dead center of the N.W.A.S. Washington’s main holo display. Each ship in the fleet had its own target to focus on. Countless drones and fighters raced out in a diffuse cloud ahead of the fleet, aiming their weapons at the incoming ordnance from slightly larger angles of deflection. Grekov glanced up at the clock at the top of the display. Five minutes and five seconds to intercept. That time was based on when the destroyer’s trajectory would line up exactly with that of the missile they were targeting rather than on any kind of specific weapons range.
    “Five minutes to target, sir,” Lieutenant Carver announced from the gunnery station.
    “This is the worst game of chicken I’ve ever played,” Grekov’s XO, Commander Clark commented. “If we miss, that missile is on a collision course with us.”
    Grekov turned to his XO with one eyebrow raised. “The collision course you should be worried about is with Earth, not our ship. We have less than one hundred crew, but if that missile gets by us, it will take out many millions on Earth.”
    “Obviously that would be worse, sir. I meant that it would be nice if no one were in the line of fire.”
    Grekov frowned. Westerners were always looking out for number one. People from old Confederate states like him were better citizens. The Alliance might span the entire globe now, but all the idealogical and genetic differences that had divided the East and West still remained. Parents still chose what traits to engineer into their children, and the old Confederate states still chose all of the same community-minded ones as before. Likewise, western states were still choosing to make their children more individualistic and independent. Of course, now with the ubiquity of the Mindscape, it almost didn’t matter. It was rare for anyone to actually have children anymore, so the status quo was likely to remain, leaving Grekov to feel like a stranger in a strange land for the rest of his immortal life— good book, he thought, smirking at his unintentional use of the title.
    Now that he’d been promoted to captain and given his own ship, it seemed that attitudes were changing. But rather than become more united, Earth had simply re-drawn the line that divided people. Instead of dividing the East from the West, that line ran between Human League districts and Utopian ones. The world was poised to split into a thousand political pieces. If they were lucky, maybe these attacks would delay the inevitable and unite people against their common enemy—whoever that might be.
    “One minute to firing, sir,” the gunnery officer announced.
    “Drones and fighters opening fire!” Lieutenant White reported from the fighter control station.
    Grekov