by Ian Douglas
“Maybe a little,” she admitted. “You were so wrapped up in yourself . . . so intense. Brooding. It didn’t look healthy.”
“I suppose you’re right.” He looked away, taking in the other Headhunters seated in the room. Walther . . . Lakeland . . . they seemed steady enough. Esteban was okay. Dougherty looked nervous . . . but he was just a kid, another newbie, like Veronica. Kraig looked angry.
Damn, Meier thought. Was he the only one of the squadron’s survivors who felt this way?
“You’ve been thinking of the people we lost?”
“Yeah.”
“Kelly, Malone . . . who was the new one?”
“Porter.” He said the name with more anger than he’d intended. “Veronica Porter.”
“Were you two close?”
“No. I’d just met her.” He sighed. “You’d think I’d be used to it by now . . . the butcher’s bill, I mean. We all know the odds. Someone calculated that fighter squadrons lose on average between one and three pilots every time they go into combat. That’s eight percent casualties in your unit if you’re lucky. Twenty-five percent if you’re not. And that’s every fucking time you drop into hot battlespace!”
“Well, we did know what we were getting in for when we volunteered, right?”
“I don’t know about you, Lieutenant. But all they told me was about the glory.”
That, Meier thought as soon as he’d spoken the words, was not entirely true. His recruiter had told him it was dangerous when he’d been selected for fighter training and decided to volunteer.
Maybe he simply wasn’t cut out for this.
“Attention on deck!”
Commander Leystrom strode into the ready room, accompanied by Lieutenant Commander Brody, his adjutant. Schaeffer and Meier came to their feet, along with the other five Headhunters in the room. Three more pilots, a woman and two men, walked in behind them and took positions standing near the front.
“As you were,” Leystrom said. He gestured at the new pilots as the others resumed their seats. “I want you to meet three Pan-Euro fighter pilots. Leutnants Ulrike Hultqvist, Karl Maas, and Jean Araud. They were among the people off the Wotan we recovered after their carrier was destroyed. They’ve been assigned to VFA-211 to . . . ah . . . make up for our losses.”
Meier felt a sharp slap of anger. Damn it, you couldn’t just shoehorn new people into a combat squadron like that, not and expect them to fit in smoothly from the get-go. What the hell was America’s CAG thinking?
Leystrom continued, “I know I speak for the whole squadron when I say, ‘Welcome aboard.’ ”
The three gave a mumble of assent as they took seats.
“Normally, of course,” the commander went on, “we’d all want a period of joint training to integrate new personnel into the unit. We do not, however, have the luxury of time. The Rosetter is out there just a couple of AUs distant, and we are the only thing standing between them and Earth.”
A holographic field switched on at Leystrom’s thought, showing CGI graphics of America and the handful of ships with her, drifting opposite the enigmatic and highly protean alien vessel. Other ship icons were moving up in support . . . but then Meier remembered that the Rosetter was bigger, more massive than the planet Jupiter. How were they supposed to face a thing like that? It was insane.
The representation shifted to a real-time image from a battlespace drone just a few tens of thousands of kilometers from the monster. The alien device seemed to fill the entire front of the ready room. No longer spherical, it had unfolded somehow into a much larger series of nested shapes, more like a geometric form sculpted from a cloud of dark gas than anything solid. The central core of the thing was illuminated, but the shapes around that glowing core were so complex and so ordered that Meier was having trouble understanding what he was seeing. The patterns looked fractal in nature, with each set of curves and angles and projections repeated again and again at smaller and smaller levels. A tiny speck of gleaming silver debris tumbled past, hinting at the vast scale of the monster beyond.
“Earth has sent us a new weapon,” Leystrom told them. “It’s called Trinity, and it’s an updated version of the Omega Code we used before. We stopped the thing once this way. This should stop them again.”
“It didn’t stop them for long, did it, sir?” Walther put in.
“Every delay we can win,” Leystrom replied, “is another chance to make meaningful contact with it. Another chance to talk.”
“I’m not sure,” Lieutenant Maas said quietly in thickly accented English, “that talking is what is called for here.”
“Well we’re damned sure gonna try,” Lakeland growled.
“That . . . that thing wiped the Wotan clean out of the sky,” Araud said quietly. “Three thousand people, our comrades, gone. . . .”
Meier could hear the pain in Araud’s voice. He’d lost friends . . . and closer than friends . . . in the Wotan disaster.
“What’s the problem, Frog-Kraut?” Paul Kraig said. “No stomach for it?”
“That will be enough!” Leystrom snapped. “Lieutenant Kraig, you’re way out of line!”
“Sorry, sir.” But Kraig did not sound at all sorry. “I was just wondering about proper enemy identification, y’know?”
“The enemy,” Leystrom said with a deadly calm, “is there.” He pointed into the fractal geometry of the entity. “And right now we can use all the help we can get! You have a problem with that, Mister?”
Kraig hesitated, then shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Good,” Leystrom said, giving one last hard look around the room. “Okay—we’re going to go out there again, but this time we’re taking along something special.”
Meier listened as Leystrom described what he called the Trinity Torpedo—a converted Boomslang missile carrying a powerful triple AI, three sets of consciousness nested one within another. “The way they explained it,” he said, “is that as one AI penetrates the Rosetter’s defenses, it’ll open a kind of electronic doorway for the next AI in line.” Curved green paths appeared on the graphic of the alien structure. “We’ve been given the optimum approach paths and release points. We’ve copied Trinity and downloaded it into hundreds of converted VG-120 missiles. Every fighter on board the America is going to get a chance to put a couple of these in where they’ll do the most good.”
“Assuming they let us get that close to begin with,” Jaime Esteban muttered nearby.
Leystrom ignored the interruption. “We launch in fifteen minutes. Any questions?”
There were none.
“Good. Pilots, man your fighters.”
Moments later, Meier was sealing himself into his SG-420 Starblade, which flowed over and around his seat to enclose him like a soft, dark cocoon. The other pilots were strapping on their fighters as well, as deck crew bustled about making the final preparations for launch. A pair of Boomslang missiles was being folded into each ship, along with a complete complement of more conventional warload munitions.
He connected with the squadron channel. “Hunter Three, linking in.”
“Copy, Three,” the voice of CAG in PriFly replied. “Stand by . . .”
Minutes dragged past. What the hell was going on?
“PriFly, Headhunters One,” Leystrom called. “Request permission to power up.”
“One, PriFly, please hold.”
“PriFly, One. What’s the holdup?”
“All fighter squadrons, please hold. . . .”
Curious, Meier opened a window in his mind and called in a tactical feed. He saw the tiny umbrella-shaped graphic of America, with three other ships within a couple of thousand kilometers. Everything looked . . .
He pulled back on the window’s zoom and saw the Rosetter looming huge.
Damn.
Bridge
TC/USNA CVS America
Outer Asteroid Belt
2235 hours, TFT
Captain Gutierrez leaned forward, staring into the vast, geometric complexitie
s of the Rosette entity.
“What the hell?” She wasn’t entirely sure what she’d just seen. “It just . . . blinked!”
“It jumped, Captain. Almost two astronomical units.”
The image from the battlespace drone had vanished. A second image, viewed from the America herself, still showed the Rosette entity as a point of light embedded in a kind of misty web over fifteen light-minutes away . . . but it also showed the Jupiter-sized alien artifact that had just materialized only a few thousand kilometers away. Moving swiftly, blotting out the light of its older, more distant image along with half a sky’s worth of stars, the entity descended on the America and her consorts like an oncoming storm cloud.
“All back!” Gutierrez yelled. “Helm! Take us all back! . . .”
The oncoming construct loomed vast across America’s forward sensors. Blue-violet aurorae flickered and shifted across the cloud. A thousand Earths, Gutierrez thought, numb. That thing is big enough to hold over a thousand Earths. . . .
“CAG!” she yelled. “Launch the fighters!”
“Aye, aye, Captain!”
Maybe . . . maybe a few could escape. . . .
And then darkness engulfed the star carrier.
VFA-211
Within the Rosette Entity
2238 hours, TFT
“Launch!”
Meier’s fighter dropped into darkness.
He’d expected to be flung into space a couple of astronomical units away from the Rosette object, but in those last terrifying instants he’d seen the enormous structure wink into existence almost directly on top of the America. It was as though the thing had suddenly leaped forward, attempting to swallow the star carrier whole.
And it looked as though it had succeeded. America and a handful of fighters were adrift in a darkness unrelieved by stars or sun. Radar and lidar both showed the fuzzy outlines of geometrically precise structures in the distance, but there was no visible light at all save for the wink-wink-wink of America’s running lights, and the acquisition strobes on the fighters.
Correction, Meier thought. As his fighter drifted out from behind America’s broad, dome-shaped shield cap, the distant heart of the alien object came into view—a dull red-and-orange glow muffled by thickly banked clouds almost half an AU away. By its ruddy, flickering light, he could see the illuminated edges of America hanging nearby in space, but somehow the light was just enough to emphasize the all-encompassing darkness.
“Headhunter Two,” Lieutenant Commander Philip Brody called. “Who all do we have out here?”
“Hunter Four,” Karl Maas said. “Ready for acceleration.”
“Hunter Seven, good to go,” Lakeland said.
“Hunter Three,” Meier said. “Go.”
“Hunter Eleven!” Dougherty called, his voice sounding tight. “I’m here!”
“Hunter Five, go,” Schaeffer called.
“Is that it?” Dougherty asked. “Where’s the skipper?”
“Half of the squadron launched before the Rosetter got to us,” Brody replied. “Commander Leystrom must be outside the cloud.”
“Shit,” Lakeland said.
“Simmer down, people,” Brody said. “Pull it together! We have our orders. The Rosetter just made ’em a bit easier to carry out!”
Meier had to admit that that made sense. When the squadron had been outside the Rosette entity, there’d been a question as to whether their missiles could penetrate its outer shell, or survive contact with the encircling dust clouds. Now, however, six of them were inside the alien structure. There were still dust clouds—precisely structured shapes and geometries somehow patterned by the dust, rather—but smart missiles should be able to avoid those and reach the core of the object.
“PriFly handing off to CIC,” Brody called. “VFA-211 accelerating . . .”
Meier kicked in his gravs and boosted toward the glow at the object’s heart. His eyes were adapting to the darkness . . . or perhaps the light was incrementally brighter. He couldn’t tell . . . but he could make out a surreal landscape ahead of and around him. Like the spires, pillars, and arches, and cliffs, ledges, and canyons of Badlands National Park out west, all of them seemingly carved from dense clouds of dust. The center of the structure appeared to be a bit more than a quarter of an AU distant—about 40 million kilometers. As the six fighters accelerated, America dwindled into invisibility astern . . . but the walls and cliffs ahead appeared to be shifting.
“Damn, I think they’re reacting to us!” Meier warned.
“He’s right!” Schaeffer added. “They’re moving! They’re closing in!”
The nearest substantial mass was still tens of thousands of kilometers away, but the sheer size of the internal structures was vast enough that the object’s interior was beginning to feel distinctly claustrophobic. Meier could hear the steady, sharp ping of tiny objects clattering off his fighter’s hull. Local space had plenty of isolated dust grains . . . and they were swiftly growing thicker.
“Weapons free, Headhunters!” Brody called. “Fire your Trinities!”
The first converted Boomslangs slipped from beneath two of the Starblades and boosted hard. Both vanished an instant later in dazzling flares of light up ahead as they slammed into dust clouds under fifty thousand gravities of acceleration.
“It’s no good, America!” Brody called. “The dust in here is too thick!”
“Try clearing a path!” Meier replied. “Line up a series of Kraits and send the Boomslangs in through their wake!”
“We detonate nukes in here and the Rosetters are gonna get pissed!” Lakeland said.
“So?” Meier asked. “What have we got to lose?”
“He’s right,” Brody said. “Arm Kraits! Fire ’em off one at a time! I’ll go first!”
A VG-92 Krait slid from his fighter and streaked into the distance. A second later, it detonated, a dazzling flash of white radiance that illuminated the nearest dust clouds with a harsh pulse of light like lightning. A second Krait was already following the first, followed by another . . . and another . . . and then a dozen more shipkillers in trail formation. The squadron’s tactical link guided them all, positioning each, directing the line through the growing chain of blossoming nuclear fireballs.
Each explosion sent a pulse of heat and radiation rushing into the void, sweeping aside dust particles and caving in the nearest dust-cloud structures. The light from those blasts kept blossoming out, illuminating more and more of the vast internal structure of the alien. Half an AU was four light-minutes; it would take that long for the light to reach the far side of the structure. But the Badlands landscape nearest the explosions was swiftly being recurved by hard radiation, and Meier wondered how much actual damage they were doing to the guts of the thing.
“Firing Boomslang!” Meier called. His fighter’s AI had just informed him that enough VG-92s were in flight that a tunnel should soon be open all the way to the Rosetter’s heart. A longer, more massive VG-120 arrowed clear of his fighter. Mentally, he gave its AI a final set of instructions, directing it to fly slowly. Those fireballs lined up ahead were hot, raw plasma, clouds of charged particles racing out from their detonation points fast enough that they could ablate, even vaporize high-speed hulls attempting to punch through them. By limiting his craft’s speed, his Boomslangs might have a chance of making it through.
Of course, that meant it would also take time to reach the target . . . a lot of time. Two light-minutes . . . 40 million kilometers. At a relatively sedate acceleration of five hundred gravities, it would take over sixty-six minutes to punch through to the core.
But as blast followed blast, drilling deeper into the Rosette entity’s depths, blossoming spheres of radiation swept more and more of the dust clear even as the plasma shells thinned, cooled, and dispersed.
Yes! He ordered his Boomslangs to open up, to accelerate at full power into the entity’s heart. It would take minutes for the telemetry to get back to him, to tell him if they’d successfully breached the
core. But the faster they traveled, the less time they would be hanging out in the open, vulnerable to whatever defenses the entity might be deploying.
He checked his internal clock. His first two Boomslangs with the Trinity virus would be entering the entity’s glowing core now. Other Boomslangs were reaching the distant target as well . . . Lakeland’s . . . Schaeffer’s . . . That was six. The German’s missiles . . . what was his name? Maas. Strange to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a damned Pan-Euro . . .
He waited for some response, some sign that the shots had been effective.
And waited . . .
Chapter Seven
7 February 2426
Crisium Base
Earth’s Moon
1225 hours, TFT
President Koenig leaned back in the deeply padded seat of the mag-lev hyperloop car, looking up through the transparent ceiling at the horror high in the black lunar sky. Not long after taking him down to the ’proof, far below the buildings of Washington, D.C., his Secret Service detail had decided that nowhere on Earth was truly safe, and they needed to put him . . . someplace else. A mag-tube car had whisked him off to Edwards Spaceport, where a high-acceleration private shuttle had been waiting for him.
Six hours later, he’d been on the moon.
And the very next day, he’d watched helplessly as the Rosette entity engulfed the Earth.
“Mr. President?”
“Yes, Marcus?”
His chief of staff came up behind him and stood in the aisle. “A message from Dr. Lawrence, sir.”
“Still no luck, I take it.” If Lawrence, at the SAI-Center at Tsiolkovsky, had been able to crack the alien defenses against electronic incursion, that nightmare cloud up there would have dispersed. Its stubborn continued presence spoke volumes.
“No, sir.”
Koenig sighed, then nodded. “Tell him to keep at it.” It was all they could do.
“Yes, sir.”
Koenig didn’t like working through human channels directly without electronics, as opposed to receiving reports directly in-head. It was clumsy and it was slow . . . but it was also necessary. There was a possibility that if the aliens could tap into human communications, they would be able to zero in on Koenig himself directly, hacking the implants in his brain. That was an unpleasant prospect, on several levels.
