by Ian Douglas
There was a long silence as, presumably, the machine consulted with others up the chain of command. “Very well, Ms. Ashton. A ground shuttle will be along momentarily to take you to base command center.”
“Thank you.”
She was ushered through the gate and led to a sheltered waiting area. The wind was blowing harder, lashing her with intelligent grit. God it was cold. . . .
Ashton hoped they found a place for her.
A warm place . . .
USNA CA New York
Cislunar Space
1722 hours, TFT
“President Koenig?” the fleet admiral said. “Welcome aboard, sir. This is . . . a surprise, to say the least.”
“I’m not here to screw up your chain of command, Admiral Reeve,” Koenig said. Koenig, Reeve, and members of their staffs were standing just inside the New York’s combat information center, the CIC. “Pretend I’m not here. If I can help in an advisory capacity, I am at your service.”
“I appreciate that, Mr. President,” Anthony Reeve said. “We’ve set up a station for you here in CIC. But . . .”
“But?”
“Sir. It’s going to be damned tough for you to follow what’s happening if you’re off-line.”
“You’re telling me? It’s like being alone—really alone—for the first time in my life. But I’ll manage.” Koenig grinned. It sounded like Reeve was having trouble grasping the idea of being off-line, unplugged from the fleetnet.
Koenig couldn’t blame the man. These days, kids were nanotechnically implanted with neural seeds at the age of four or five. By the time they were six, the seeds had sent nanofibers across the surfaces of their cerebrums, and they could begin downloading school programs and chat with their friends on-line. By the time they were eighteen, they were downloading major enhancements and, if they were entering the military, they were growing military-issue neural hardware that did everything from linking in with other personnel to downloading tactical updates and briefings.
Most military personnel actually had their cerebral hardware removed during recruit training, forcing them to learn how to do without. A lot of recruits washed out at that stage; doing without their interface software was incredibly stressful for some.
Koenig didn’t like having his hardware switched off, but he was getting along okay without it. For many, going without their cerebral implants was literally unimaginable. But he’d known Prims, and they got along surprisingly well.
He could do this.
Reeve gestured, and an attractive young woman stepped forward. “This is Lieutenant Commander Taylor, from my staff. She’ll be your liaison and can keep you up to date on whatever is happening.”
“Excellent. Ms. Taylor?”
“It’s wonderful to meet you, Mr. President.”
“Okay. I take it from the preparations that you’re proceeding with Hell’s Light.” The name “Operation Hell’s Light” had been taken from Helleslicht, the German name for the computronium module holding advanced AI software. Koenig was fairly sure the Pan-Euros had additional Helleslicht modules available. If the fleet outside of Earth’s shroud was able to make contact with the forces still on the planet, perhaps those modules could be deployed to allow full communication with the Rosette entity.
“Yes, sir. We still don’t have contact with anything inside that cloud, but we expect that forces trapped in there might join the attack if we manage to break through. Maybe we can take them both from the inside and the outside.”
“You have sufficient stores of nano-D?”
“How much is sufficient, sir? We won’t know until we engage the enemy. But we do have a lot of the stuff, about half a million rounds, brought in from the munitions yards at Mars.”
“Excellent. I suggest you quit gabbing with me and carry on.”
“Aye, aye, Mr. President.”
The New York’s CIC was a huge, circular compartment filled with link seats, display monitors, and deck-to-overhead viewall imaging. LCDR Taylor led him to a command seat at the center of the complex, then took the couch next to his. “I’ll be linked in, Mr. President, but I’ll be able to tell you what’s happening.”
“Very well, Commander.”
She looked at him with concern. “Are you okay with that, sir?”
“Yes, yes. I just don’t like being coddled, is all.”
“Well, I could—”
“Just carry on, Commander. I’m just not used to being spoon-fed. I like my data hot and raw, not dribbling in by way of a staff officer. But I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.”
Could the damned Rosetters actually pick him out of some hundreds of human officers linked into the fleetnet? Pick him out and attack him somehow? Maybe . . . maybe not. But if there was even the smallest chance of them using his in-head cybernetic hardware against him or the fleet, he had to stay off the net.
He would have to take in his data the old-fashioned way . . . by listening and watching.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Reeve’s voice sounded from an overhead speaker, “we are commencing our attack run.”
And the New York, along with nearly a thousand other human vessels, began accelerating toward the immense cloud girdling Earth.
Chapter Eight
7 February 2426
CA New York
Cislunar Space
1738 hours, TFT
President Koenig watched as the New York plunged toward the outer fringes of the alien cloud. Around him, naval officers lay strapped into their link couches, outwardly asleep but in fact wired into the ship’s tactical and command networks. Unable to link in, Koenig felt useless, a supernumerary forced completely out of the loop.
And he didn’t like the feeling one bit.
“The admiral just ordered the launch of our fighters, sir,” Taylor told him. “They have clearance to release their nano-D warloads.”
“Thank you, Commander.”
They’d called up a repeater screen hanging in the air above his couch, displaying computer graphic images of the human fleet as it attacked the cloud. Koenig once again thought about how difficult it was to engage such a target; capital ships like the New York, fighters, and even nanodisassembler warheads were all designed to attack full-sized ships, not what amounted to intelligent dust.
On the screen, the dust fields, shaded a deep, translucent red, were being relentlessly penetrated by strings of nuclear detonations, by stabbing lasers and beams of charged particles, and by cone-shaped shotgun blasts of nanotech weaponry. The idea, worked out in hasty planning sessions mere hours ago, was to bore tunnels into the dust clouds through which fighters could penetrate in order to release even more weaponry.
Unfortunately, the alien dust was mobile, meaning that as gaps were carved into the mass, surviving machines immediately began drifting in to fill them. The trick was being done with directed magnetic fields, somehow. The result was that throughout the entire immense cloud there was an eerie mimicry of life.
All the human forces could do was continue to blindly blast away at the cloud and hope that they might be able to reduce the mass of the dust cloud so much that its intelligence failed.
Or to hurt it so badly that it became willing to communicate.
That, in any case, was what Koenig was hoping . . . that they would be able to communicate with the thing using the Pan-European Helleslicht probes. The process, he thought, was a lot like repeatedly kicking the alien where it hurt until it acknowledged them, without getting it so mad that it simply swatted them all out of existence.
They were deeper into the cloud, now, with particles in the ragged outer edges clanging and rattling off the New York’s hull. The ship’s hull temperatures soared as she plowed forward, encountering more and more of the alien microdevices. Ahead, Koenig saw, the cloud was taking on a kind of internal form and organization . . . shells and layers, great curved beams and arches, a phantasmagoric montage of geometrical shapes, planes, soaring connectors, and looping filaments so ghostly and
translucent it was difficult to be sure they were there.
Alien craft were rising from deep within the cloud to meet the human fleet. Most were larger than human fighters, but all were considerably smaller than frigates and gunships, the smallest human capital vessels; naval intelligence believed that they were similar in concept and action to the human immune system, deployed automatically to deal with minor threats.
The human fighters deployed to meet the oncoming threat.
“Admiral Reeve has ordered a nano-D barrage,” Taylor told him. “Successive ND-40X rounds at five-second intervals. Firing in three . . . two . . . one . . . engaging. . . .”
On the screen, the icon representing the New York released a bright white star, which hurtled into the void ahead. The ND-40X was a specially designed nanodisassembler warhead massing over one hundred tons. The canisters were launched at a high fraction of the speed of light and were programmed to trigger as they entered the denser portions of the cloud. Koenig watched as the first star expanded into a shotgun blast of brilliant light on-screen, eating its way through the cloud and slowly evaporating as it moved deeper into Earth’s gravity well. The trick, here, was to have the disassemblers deactivate themselves before they reached Earth’s surface . . . or, indeed, before they began taking apart ozone molecules high within the planetary atmosphere.
Another disassembler round followed the first . . . and then another . . . and another, the repeated detonations opening up a vast concavity in the spherical cloud’s side.
And the fighters plunged into the opening.
Ad Hoc Planet Defense Squadron
Above Washington, D.C.
1750 hours, TFT
Shay Ashton lay on her back as her SG-92 Starhawk shrieked skyward. The Starhawk was an old fighter design, now obsolete by most standards, though it had been the mainstay of manned Navy fighters for many years. But Andrews Spaceport was somewhat limited in what they could put into space; all of the newer Starblades, ’Raptors, and Skydragons had already been deployed, either to other theaters or into the gathering swarms of ships attempting to fight the alien cloud. Ashton was one of ninety-seven pilots who’d shown up at the base outside of D.C. volunteering to fly against the cloud.
As it turned out, they’d had fighters enough for only fifty-two of the volunteers. Andrews base control had organized them into four plus-sized squadrons of thirteen ships each, designated Alpha through Delta. Ashton had been assigned to Bravo Squadron, under the command of Captain Sergei Jamison.
Four squadrons of outdated fighters against a cloud the size of the planet Jupiter. It was tough to feel anything remotely like confidence as they boosted into the stratosphere.
She did feel terribly alone.
Through her fighter’s senses, she could see Washington twisting away below, already shrouded in the gray overcast of the alien. Above, the faint shapes of alien structures within the cloud could barely be glimpsed, enigmatic and vast. What the hell are they doing to our planet? she wondered. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. . . .
It was tough to see ahead. Her drive singularity, projected just in front of her fighter’s nose, was devouring molecules of air as she accelerated. Molecules that the microsingularity couldn’t swallow were shredded and flung aside—shrieking X-rays and bright blue-white light. It created a sphere of haze forward as she climbed, forcing her to rely on instruments and her on-board AI.
Her Starhawk jolted as it hit something at Mach 9. None of her alarms went off, so she let the craft’s damage control handle any issues and concentrated on programming a spread of Krait missiles, looking for the best dispersal to wipe as much of this high-tech sand out of her sky as she could. “This is Bravo Four,” she called. “Six Kraits armed, firing in three . . . two . . . one . . . launch!”
The missiles streaked out from her Starhawk, arcing up and away as they homed on their detonation targets. White light blossomed in dazzling displays, unfolding in kill zones and obliterating alien dust motes by the uncountable billions. Other flashes pulsed against the murk above, throwing the enigmatic shapes into brief, stark relief.
Alarms shrilled, her fighter’s AI warning that the hull was growing desperately hot. She could feel the shudder, hear the clatter as her Starhawk plowed through thicker and thicker masses of the alien cloud; as she accelerated to five kilometers per second, the raw friction of the sky itself began stripping the outer skin of her fighter’s hull.
“Bravo Flight!” she yelled over the squadron’s communications net. “Cut back your speed or you’ll burn up!” She cut her own speed, letting friction slow her craft as she rose past the Karman line, the official edge of space one hundred kilometers above Earth’s surface. How much higher did this cloud extend anyway? Attempts to measure it from the ground so far had failed, the radar waves absorbed by the incoming swarms of micromachines. Judging from the size of the original mass, though, the outer edge of this planet-engulfing swarm might well be seventy or eighty thousand kilometers farther out.
There weren’t enough thermonuclear warheads in all of human space to clear that much enemy away.
CA New York
Cislunar Space
1754 hours, TFT
President Koenig studied the computer-generated graphics of the volume of space centered on Earth, watching the structures within the Rosette alien cloud grow and shift and writhe. There was no way at all to tell what the shapes were for or what they were doing. Koenig had at first assumed that the micromachine cloud represented some trillions of nanodisassemblers, that the aliens were seeking to dissolve Earth into its constituent atoms, or at least to disintegrate the man-made structures around it. That, however, did not appear to be the case. The fleet’s chief strategists now believed that the cloud might be some sort of far-flung system for information collection, that it was recording or possibly digitizing everything from Earth’s orbital facilities and space elevators to the Earth itself.
Whatever the structures were for, they didn’t appear to have anything to do with communication.
The New York continued to hurl massive nano-D canisters into the alien cloud, each one detonating like an immense shotgun blast designed to sweep the approach lanes to Earth clear. The individual nanotech loads had been programmed, Koenig knew, to deactivate if they latched on to molecules of Earth’s atmosphere or of Earth itself, and to avoid ships with electronic identification marking them as friendlies.
Still, no ID system was perfect, and there was the very real danger that the human fleet was scoring own goals. Koenig was particularly worried about the three space elevators whose ground-anchor points girdled the planet, and all of which were now invisible, submerged deep within the cloud. Those elevators consisted of carbon-diamond monofilament woven into massive cables several meters thick. If enough of the nano-D struck those cables, they could eat them away and trigger what was euphemistically referred to as a catastrophic engineering failure. Worse, even if human nanodisassembler weaponry didn’t degrade the space elevator cables, there was a good chance that the particles making up the alien cloud would. Doppler radar probes of the cloud showed that parts of it were moving at high speed in an internal rotation, generating a “wind” of some hundreds of kilometers per hour.
Just what would happen if a space elevator cable snapped? The question had been debated for over three centuries, since well before the opening of the Quito space elevator in 2120. Much depended on where the break occurred. Anything below the break and below the synchorbital structures would probably fall out of orbit, most of it burning up as it entered Earth’s atmosphere. Everything above the break, including the synchorbital facilities, would be pulled outward by the asteroid anchor.
Such an eventuality would be a disaster, though one Humankind would be able to recover from quickly enough. But the cost to Earth’s technological infrastructure would still be catastrophic. Millions of both humans and AIs lived and worked within the various orbital habitats, goods manufactured in space flowed down to the planet i
n unending streams, and orbital energy generation augmented Earth’s surface helium-3 fusion plants and zero-point energy production centers. The fall of even one of those towers was damned near unthinkable.
“We need to clear them away from Quito Synchorbital,” Koenig told Taylor. “There are ships in the dockyards that could add their firepower to the attack.”
Taylor concentrated for a moment, passing the message on. “I’ve told them, Mr. President. They agree that that’s a good idea.”
More likely they resent an old Navy man putting his nose in where it’s not wanted, Koenig thought. Especially since I can’t tell them how to carry the action out. He had no idea how the fleet might be able to brush the cloud away from the synchorbital facility . . . especially how they might do so without destroying the structure.
Damn it! Being cut off from the technology like this, being forced to rely on a human intermediary . . . this was sheer torture.
He watched, feeling sour inside, as fighters from the task force plunged deeper into the depths of the cloud, angling toward the Quito elevator. Alien combat machines swarmed in front of them, trying to block them.
Fighters died in flares of white light. . . .
Ad Hoc Planet Defense Squadron
Approaching SupraQuito Synchorbital
1759 hours, TFT
Shay Ashton had already turned the navigation of her outdated fighter over to the Starhawk’s AI. She was well above Earth’s atmosphere now and still climbing. The haze of light in front of her fighter had dissipated now, but the tic-tic-tic of sand grain–sized particles continued to rattle off her outer hull. Was there no end to this crap?
“Bravo Squadron, Bravo One!” sounded over her tactical link, weak and static-blasted. That was Captain Jamison, the guy they’d put in charge of the flight. She didn’t know the guy, but his profile said he was a combat vet, a Marine who’d served aboard the Nassau, and right now that was good enough for her. “My AI is picking up a feed from cislunar space! All available fighters are being vectored to SupraQuito!”
