by Ian Douglas
The Chinese monitor almost made it.
The ovoid shape was still ten thousand kilometers away from the Hunan when the Chinese vessel shuddered, rolling hard to port . . . then crumpled away as though relentlessly crushed by an unseen hand.
“Target that alien ship!” Mackey called . . . but the monster vessel was already thinning . . . evaporating as the nanobots making up its substance streamed off into space and resumed their separate existences. A dozen capital ships were firing into the cloud, now, from just outside, and the fighters off the Republic had joined in, sending salvo after salvo of nuclear warheads into the gray haze ahead. Pinpoints of light twinkled and flashed in those sinister depths . . . but the cloud was so vast, no amount of nuclear hammering, it seemed, could do it serious harm.
The Chinese Hegemony carrier Guangdong was releasing a stream of fighters—sleek and deadly Taikong Ying, their newly developed Space Eagles. Fighters were still launching when the invisible fist crunched the carrier’s shield cap into a tiny, crumpled ruin within a vast and expanding cloud of silvery droplets of water quick freezing into ice.
“The Rosetters are aiming for the largest ships,” Gregory called. “Tell them to pull the caps back!”
The forward half of the powerful Russian heavy cruiser Varyag was smashed into wreckage; a second later the rest of the cruiser crumpled as well. Gregory couldn’t tell how the enemy was pulling that off, but he suspected the Rosetters were somehow directly collapsing small volumes of spacetime and trapping the human vessels, or pieces of them, in the crunch.
“They know,” Mackey replied. “But they have to get in close . . . and so do we! Form up, everyone! We’re gonna hit ’em again!”
Other fighters, Gregory noticed, were joining the strike squadrons off of the Republic. There were the Taikong Ying off of the crushed Guangdong, a number of tactical fighters from several Marine transports orbiting farther out, Russian Skora fighters off the light carrier Putin, and several mixed-bag squadrons that had come up from Earth. In all, according to Gregory’s AI, some four hundred fighters of various types were assembling in local space. The New York had transmitted the VFA-96 opplan, and the fighter AIs were electronically tagging one another, creating a unified combat network.
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends . . .” Mackey called out with a melodramatic cry. His fighter accelerated hard, leading the way as fighter after fighter fell in behind him in formation. Gregory thought he recognized the quote and pulled it up in his personal RAM. Yeah, he’d thought so . . . Shakespeare’s Henry V. Unbidden, the next line caught his inner eye, nagging: Or close the wall up with our English dead.
Lovely thought with which to engage a seemingly invulnerable enemy . . .
He accelerated, holding his Starblade on course as the Rosetter haze again closed around him. This time he was moving at only a few tens of kilometers per second as he entered the cloud. There was a shock . . . and his hull temperature began climbing, but not to the same extent as his earlier passages. Beams and planes and whole alien geometries of light flared around him . . . the enigmatic evidence of an utterly alien science and technology. Ahead, pinpoints of light flickered and strobed as the human fleet continued its relentless bombardment. Most of his view forward was still obscured by the swollen event horizon of his drive singularity, but at non-relativistic speeds his surroundings were not crammed into a circle of light ahead, and he could see what was happening around him.
He plunged deeper, and the dark closed in around him.
TC/USNA CVS America
CIC
Within the Rosette Cloud
Time and date uncertain
Captain Sara Gutierrez stared out into the darkness. Those stars were . . . new.
She was floating in America’s combat information center, studying a display that filled one bulkhead from deck to overhead. For days, the ship’s external optical scanners had picked up only a dark gray and utterly opaque haze.
But now . . .
According to the ship’s clock, they’d been trapped inside the Rosette cloud for six hours, but the ship’s AI had managed to get a fix on navigational beacons on the moon. With the cloud enshrouding them they couldn’t see the Earth at all, much less the moon, and the radio signals were filtered down to a whisper of their usual strength.
Still, the AI had picked up enough to report that time had somehow been drastically distorted within the cloud’s depths, probably by a factor of something like twenty-eight to one. It had also recorded voice transmissions from outside the cloud, estimating that they were speeded up by the same factor . . . confirmation that a full week had passed since America had entered the cloud.
Their AI had also managed to filter signals from Earth and from several of the synchorbital habitats, showing that they were also within a field of severely distorted spacetime. Transmissions they’d picked up from Earth’s surface seemed slower and more drawn out compared to life on board the America by a factor of nearly one hundred to one.
Evidently, the deeper into the cloud you went, the more the passage of time was slowed.
What made it worse was the knowledge that America seemed to be moving through the temporal field, which meant that the degree of distortion changed constantly. The ship’s physics department could estimate that a week had passed since their capture but could not give her a precise figure.
But where time was fluid, space here was not. America remained stuck in place by unimaginable forces, trapped like an ancient insect frozen in amber.
And there was not a thing in the universe Gutierrez or her crew could do to change that.
At least, she thought, they were now certain that the cloud had moved them from the asteroid belt in close to Earth. They couldn’t actually see the planet . . . but snippets of radio transmissions picked up by America’s scanners, both from Earth and from the moon, had proven this to be the case.
But what the hell were those stars?
“What are you staring at so hard, Captain?” Dean Mallory said, floating up behind her.
“Those stars, Commander. They weren’t there a moment ago.”
“For an undefined value of the term moment,” Mallory replied. He sounded angry. The inaction, she decided, was gnawing at him.
The stars in question had only just appeared a moment ago. There were three of them spaced within a couple of degrees of one another, and they were small and dim. They were not real stars, of course. The ship’s AI had almost immediately pointed out that they had appeared out of darkness in the same direction as the invisible Earth, and so must lie between Earth and the trapped star carrier. Slowly, very slowly, they were growing brighter.
“Computer,” Mallory said. “Give us an analysis of those stars.”
“They are not stars, Commander,” the computer replied.
“We know that,” Mallory snapped. “Tell us what we don’t know!”
“Analysis of the light indicates that they are thermonuclear detonations within roughly fifty thousand kilometers of our current position, but red-shifted by the effects of the temporal distortion.”
“Thermonuclear—” He stopped, the surprise clear on his face. “Who’s shooting?”
“Unknown, Commander.”
A fourth star appeared in the darkness, and then a fifth, both barely visible to the naked eye.
“Wait,” Mallory said. He looked like he was having trouble wrapping his brain around the concept. “We’re seeing . . .” He stopped, then shook his head. “I don’t get it. Nuclear fireballs dissipate pretty quickly.”
“If I had to guess, Commander,” Gutierrez said, “I’d say that either someone outside the cloud is bombarding the Rosetter entity . . . or the missiles are coming up from Earth. In either case, they’re going off much deeper within the cloud than our current position . . . so we’re seeing them in slow motion.”
“We are picking up the opposite manifestation of the temporal field on the other side of the ship,” the AI told them.
&
nbsp; “Show us,” Gutierrez said.
The cloud was as darkly opaque on the starboard side of the ship as to port, and at first Gutierrez thought there was nothing to see in that direction but the darkness. However, as she stared into the display, she became aware of a faint but insistent flickering, as if hundreds of minute points of light were flashing on and off.
“More nukes?” she asked the AI. “We’re seeing nukes speeded up by the field?”
“Precisely, Captain. I estimate that most of the visible flashes are fusion fireballs with yields of between one hundred and three hundred megatons, and that they represent an extremely heavy bombardment of the Rosetter cloud by human forces outside the alien cloud.”
“Son of a bitch!” Mallory said in a shaky whisper.
“It’s nice to know we haven’t been abandoned,” Gutierrez said.
“They probably don’t know our precise position, Captain,” Mallory replied. “How could they? They may not even be aware that we survived after the cloud swallowed us.”
Gutierrez grinned. She felt a touch manic . . . but passed it off as a natural reaction to the knowledge that someone was trying to fight the cloud. “What’s the matter, Commander? Afraid of a little friendly fire?”
“The first rule of combat, Captain,” Mallory replied. “Friendly fire isn’t.”
“I’m just delighted to see that someone outside is taking an interest, Commander.”
“Computer!” Mallory called. “How far away are those blasts?”
“It is quite difficult to give a precise answer, Commander,” the AI replied, “without precise data on the absorptive properties of the cloud. However, I estimate that those explosions are taking place throughout a volume of circum-Terran space between ten thousand and one hundred fifty thousand kilometers.”
“Slow down the display rate,” Gutierrez ordered, “by a factor of twenty-eight. And highlight the flashes for me.”
“Very well, Captain.”
Immediately, the rapid-fire flickering slowed to a more stately succession of silent detonations against the night. With the computer AI enhancing the image, she could see the blasts as rapidly expanding disks of light, growing larger . . . then fading away.
“What are you looking for, Captain?” Mallory asked her.
“I want a feel for the pace of that bombardment. It’s pretty fierce.”
“Yes . . .”
She looked at her tactical officer. “What does it tell you?”
“Well . . . I don’t think they’re just trading potshots with the Rosetters. They might be trying to open up a hole in the alien defenses. . . .”
“If that were the case, Commander, they would be focusing their bombardment in one area, not lighting up half the sky.”
His eyes widened. “You’re right. They’re following some sort of plan, there.”
“We’ve already guessed that the Rosetter cloud is an entity. Like a single vast brain, with the equivalent of neural pathways running through its substance.”
“And the bombardment is trying to cut some of those pathways! That’s brilliant!”
“Computer.” She indicated a part of the display directly in front of them. “Enlarge this section, please.”
That part of the display enlarged. With it magnified, they could see much tinier, steadier stars moving across the display.
“Entry trails?” Mallory said, hazarding a guess. “Fighters burning through the cloud particles?”
“In a way. I think those are fighters, yeah . . . and they’re using their singularity drives as . . . as snow plows, scooping up the Rosetter particles.”
“Which would fit the idea of trying to disrupt their neural network,” Mallory said, nodding.
“Exactly. CAG!”
“Here, Captain,” Connie Fletcher replied in her head.
“I want all fighters prepped for immediate launch.” America had managed to recover all of her fighters launched six hours . . . no, damn it, seven days ago. There was no point in sending fighters out into that temporal nightmare outside, knowing that the farther they moved out from the America, the more time they might gain or lose relative to America’s clocks. Better to keep them all on board and aging at the same rate.
But if a major attack was shaping up outside the cloud, America’s fighters just might be able to lend a hand. The single major problem was that difference in time rates. By the time America’s squadrons could scramble and launch, the attack outside might already be over.
But Gutierrez knew that they had to try.
“Two squadrons are ready for immediate launch,” Fletcher told her. “The rest . . . five more minutes.”
Five minutes in here would be two hours and twenty-some minutes out there.
“Launch what you can, Connie,” Gutierrez told her. “Send the rest after them when they come on-line.”
“Copy that. Beginning to drop the Headhunters into the black now.”
“Have them try to make contact with the main fleet,” Gutierrez told her. “They’ll be working to an opplan with specific objectives, maybe specific vectors in mind. We want to work toward those goals, whatever they are.”
“Understood, Captain.”
“And God help us all. . . .”
Chapter Seventeen
7 February 2426
VFA-96, Black Demons
Near Earth Space
1732 hours, TFT
Gregory’s fighter drifted above the pall of alien cloud enshrouding a hidden Earth. Eight times, now, the three Republic squadrons had penetrated the alien cloud and re-emerged. There were only five Black Demons remaining now . . . only nine Hellfuries, only seven Star Reapers. Gregory felt as though he’d been reduced to an automaton, going through the prescribed motions, reacting to threats, carrying out the dictates of training, but with all emotions throttled down to a dulled sense of detached awareness.
He was exhausted, the stress of the past hours dragging at him like the high-G hunger of a black hole. How much longer would this, could this go on?
The strain was showing on all of the Starblade pilots. Warshots were limited and being rationed. Gregory was down to his last five missiles: four Kraits and one VG-120 Boomslang. The fighters were hoarding their remaining few Boomslangs, mostly for fear of scoring an accidental own goal on the synchorbital facilities deep within the cloud or, worse, on Earth itself. But as they chewed through their dwindling munitions stores they’d became more and more picky about their shots, reserving them for the titanic structures and engineering lying within the murk rather than turning them on the cloud itself. Soon, their only available weapons would be beam weapons—less than highly effective against the microbots making up the alien cloud—and, of course, the jury-rig expedient of the fighter drive singularities.
Gregory wasn’t sure that plowing contrails through the giant alien brain along twisting and crisscrossing vectors was having any effect whatsoever. Glowing shapes continued to form or dissolve all around them, continued to loom out of the darkness with inscrutable menace, continued to conduct and direct titanic energies of unknown purpose. Human ships continued to vanish above the cloud, crushed down into microscopic specks by unseen but irresistible forces projected from the cloud’s heart.
“CC says we have a clear way all the way in,” Mackey called to what was left of the squadron. “Bearing three-one-five by minus seven-one, eighty-five kps. Form up on me and stay tight!”
“CC” was shorthand for combat command—essentially the military staff on board the railgun cruiser New York, and, in effect, a direct reference to President Koenig. The New York had access to a far bigger picture than did the Republic fighters, and they could coordinate the ongoing attacks against the Rosetter cloud. For several long minutes, now, the tacticians on board the New York had been coordinating a planned strike deep within the central realm of the Rosetter brain. Missiles launched both by the fighters and by the gathered fleet of capital ships outside the cloud had been precisely targeted, gradually focu
sing in on clearing a pathway through the murk and into the cloud’s center.
Lieutenant Gregory adjusted his course slightly to match the new vector, holding his position in the wedge-shaped Starblade formation. The dark clouds opened ahead to receive them, and they hurtled in, plunging now through a roiling tunnel of night. That tunnel was strangely illuminated with the ongoing Rosetter light show, and flashes of light, like vast fields of lightning, continued to edge the clouds with short-lived highlights of quicksilver.
“Everyone switch on your transponders,” Mackey ordered. “They need to track us outside the cloud.”
“Where the hell are we going?” Lieutenant Caswell called. “I can’t see a damned thing in this soup.”
“We’re going to take a close pass by SupraQuito,” Mackey replied. “CC wants to know if we have survivors in there.”
“What do we do if we find them?” Gregory asked. “It’s not like we can pack everybody on board our fighters and evac them out of there!”
“One damned thing at a time,” Mackey replied. “See if they’re in there and what’s happened to them and worry about what to do about them later.”
Deeper into the cloud . . . and deeper . . . and still deeper.
“Hey . . . Commander?”
“What is it, Don?”
“The back transmission from the New York. It’s dopplering!”
“I’ve got that too,” Caswell added. “Like we’re entering an intense gravitational field!”
“Roger that. We’re confirming the Rosie temporal field.”
Of course. Gregory didn’t know how they were pulling it off, but somehow the deeper they went into the cloud, the more time was being warped, slowed from the point of view of ships outside the cloud. Everything felt normal in the cockpit, and his chronometers were running normally, but time here was moving at a snail’s pace. The only way to accurately measure this was to use the radio transmissions between the fighters and the ships outside. From Gregory’s point of view, the New York was speeding up. From the New York’s vantage point, the fighters appeared to be slowing down.
