by Ian Douglas
How far, he wondered, would this go?
His fighter’s AI alerted him to a new target. When he saw the mass readings, he blinked . . . then opened a private channel to Mackey. “Hey, Commander!”
“Go ahead, Don.”
“I’m getting a reading at one-five-nine by plus seven-three. You see it?”
“Negative. I’ve got . . . wait a sec. Yes. At the extreme range of my sensors. My God . . .”
“That mass figure . . .”
“Nine hundred fifteen thousand, eight hundred tons. Almost precisely the mass of an America class star carrier with a shield cap full of water and her power-tap microsingularities engaged.”
“You think it’s the America?”
“The word from New York was that America got swallowed by this damned cloud a week ago. None of her sister ships are in-system. What do you think?”
“That you’ve spotted the America.”
“We should check her out, Skipper.”
“I’m thinking . . .”
“No, sir! We’ve got to check her out! If she’s still operational, maybe we can bust her out of here!”
“Okay . . . I’ve just been given a tactical advisory by the New York,” Mackey told the squadrons. “They’d like to know if that really is the America . . . but they don’t want us to risk all three squadrons. We need to get a recon flight in there and check it out. Free her if we can . . .”
“If there’s anything left to free,” Caswell added.
“Volunteers only,” Mackey said. “You can hang back if you want.”
“The hell with that,” Caswell replied. “A chief in America’s maintenance department owes me money!”
Mackey arrived at a decision. “You game, Gregory?”
Gregory was surprised to find out that he was. His depression, it seemed, had burned away in the intense minutes of combat over the past hour, leaving him exhausted . . . but determined to see this through.
A chance to save the America and everyone on board . . . assuming they were still alive.
“I’m in, Commander.”
“Okay. Caswell. And . . . who else?”
“Me, sir,” Tanner snapped back. Like Caswell, Lieutenant Edward Tanner was one of the Black Demon newbies.
“Ballinger? Lewis?”
“Yessir!” The two were with VFA-90, the Star Reapers.
“Okay! I’m attaching you all to Lieutenant Gregory. He’s in charge. The five of you veer off and check out this contact.”
The coordinates for the presumed star carrier appeared in Gregory’s mind. They were over fifty thousand kilometers ahead, outside of synchorbit but not by much. “Right, gang,” he called. “Goose it!”
Veering to starboard, they immediately plunged back into the particulate cloud, and Gregory’s Starblade began shuddering and bucking once more as it left the confines of the clear-swept tunnel. His drive singularity flared as it plowed ahead through the murk.
He increased his speed. . . .
His hull temperature soared as he streaked deeper into the cloud.
TC/USNA CVS America
CIC
Within the Rosette Cloud
Time and date uncertain
“Captain!” Commander Mallory called. “Hard to be certain . . . but I think we have fighters approaching on a direct intercept course!”
“Ours or theirs, Commander?” Captain Gutierrez said, looking up from her personal screen.
“I don’t think the Rosies bother with fighters, ma’am. There’s a hell of a lot of interference . . . but I make it three . . . no . . . make that four fighters. Starblades, I think.”
“Comm! Open a channel to those singleships!”
“Working on it, Captain. There’s a lot of static. . . .”
“Helm! Do we have power yet?”
“No, Captain,” Keating replied. “Something about this cloud is sucking power away as fast as we can make it. We have life support and station-keeping . . . and that’s about it.”
“Damn.”
Gutierrez wasn’t at all sure why the Rosetters were simply holding them here, when it would be so easy to reach out and crush the star carrier like a toy. That, she thought with a grim smile, was the problem with working with super-powerful alien entities. Their methods, their reasoning, their reasons for doing anything were utterly inscrutable, utterly alien in every sense of the word.
But in the meantime, America continued to drop her fighters, seeds planted within the Void. The hab modules containing her flight decks and launch bays were still rotating once every twenty-eight seconds—the power that kept them going part of the ship’s life support systems—and so the fighters could be flung into space through the agency of the centrifugal force generating the modules’ spin gravity. All that was needed was to release the magnetic grapples holding the fighters in place and kill the nanofields at the outer ends of the drop tubes, and the fighters slid gently into space at five meters per second.
Gutierrez hated sending single-seat fighters out into that night, though. The nightmare darkness enshrouding America and the Earth were terrifying in their implied power and technology.
So far, the Rosetters had done little but keep them there, prisoners of advanced technologies both invisible and overwhelming in their scope and power. Gutierrez wondered what single-seat fighters could do from inside the Rosetters’ time field. That twenty-eight-to-one differential put the carrier, already hampered by the aliens’ near-magical technological superiority, at an overwhelming disadvantage.
The moral of the story, she thought, was that it just didn’t pay to fight against the gods.
Nevertheless, Gutierrez knew they had to try.
VFA-211
Within the Rosette Cloud
Time and date uncertain
“Hunter Three, take point,” Commander Leystrom ordered.
“Copy,” Jason Meier replied, accelerating his Starblade. “Moving to twelve.”
He adjusted his position . . . and Lieutenant Karen Lobieski’s fighter drifted into the wing position, to starboard and just a little astern. The America, he realized with a start, had already vanished astern . . . lost in the pea-soup haze.
Cloud microparticles clattered off his hull, and the temperature of his outer skin began to climb. He considered opening up his drive singularity, expanding its protective shield of light, but decided against it. Puffing up the singularity too much could cause its event horizon to go unstable, and he did not need to have his drive fail out here. America’s SAR vessels could search for him out here for a year and not see him in this murk.
Meier led the way up through the cloud, his AI stretching out with all of its superhuman senses to connect with the fighters approaching from outside. Communicating with them was impossible at this point. The differences in time frames distorted electromagnetic frequencies, both radio and laser com, and the cloud itself created interference, reducing transmissions to static.
Within the interference, diamond-hard, lay another signal . . . something seeming to materialize out of the endless mist. The fighter’s AI sketched out its rough dimensions and image in his mind . . . a flattened sphere or ovoid the size of Earth’s moon, 3,500 kilometers across, blocking the way a few thousand kilometers ahead. The shape appeared translucent . . . and made of light.
“Pull up!” Meier yelled over the tactical channel, slewing his fighter sharply around his drive field. “Hunters, pull up!”
And in that same instant, two of the Starblades in his squadron were crushed into oblivion.
VFA-96, VFA-90
Near Earth Space
1742 hours, TFT
Gregory saw the translucent spheroid seem to materialize out of light directly ahead, and knew that the Rosetters had just drawn a line in the metaphorical sand.
And he knew he and the four Starblades with him were going to have to cross that line to reach the America.
“What is that?” he asked his fighter’s AI. “Some kind of warship?”
/> “The Rosette entity does not seem to think in terms of warships or weaponry,” his AI replied. “It manifests specific tools to address specific tasks.”
“Okay . . . so what kind of tool is the size of Earth’s moon?”
“The indicated structure is probably more like one of our heavy monitors, with no drive and minimal maneuvering capability. Infrared and mass-gravitometric data suggests that it is being used to immobilize one of our star carriers.”
“America . . .”
“Unknown. But the mass of the unidentified vessel beyond this structure—”
“I know! I know! How can we take this thing out?”
“Total destruction of the target is probably not possible with the weaponry on hand.”
“Screw that!” Gregory thought about the problem for a moment. “Okay people!” he called over the tactical channel. “Listen up! Everyone arm all remaining VG-120s, dial ’em up to maximum yield, and slave them to my AI!”
A chorus of acknowledgments came back. The readout inside Gregory’s head showed a total of six VG-120 Boomslangs remaining among five fighters.
It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.
“Computer! We’re going to try to pile drive this volley. One on top of the other.”
“Affirmative. With what goal?”
“To punch a hole through that thing . . . all the way through if we can manage it.”
“That seems unlikely, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah, but maybe we can disrupt the hell out of whatever that thing uses for guts.”
“Program complete and running.”
“Targeting!” Gregory called, arming his last Boomslang. “And . . . Fox One!”
The missile slid from its ventral launch bay, drive flaring in the thick mist. He slowed his fighter and shifted his vector a bit to the right and high.
“Fox One!” Tanner yelled, and a second VG-120 Boomslang hurtled into darkness.
“C’mon! All of you!” Gregory called to the entire flight. “Pour it on! No holding back!”
Four more Boomslangs streaked through the cloud as the Starblades loosed the last of their VG-120s.
“That does it for us,” Lieutenant Gary Ballinger, of the Reapers, called. “We’ve got a few Kraits on the rails, but that’s the last of the heavies.”
“Copy that,” Gregory replied. “It’ll be worth it . . .”
If, he added silently to himself, it works.
Gregory’s VG-120 passed through the outer surface of the sphere as though it was insubstantial, plunging a hundred kilometers in behind the dazzling star of its drive singularity. When it detonated, the silent flash lit up the surrounding clouds and mist like a small and swiftly fading sun.
Because Gregory’s VG-120 had not gone off in hard vacuum, but in a kind of thin atmosphere of micromachine particles. The initial explosion vaporized hundreds of millions of those machines, sending out a shock wave roiling through the expanding wall of star-hot plasma.
Tanner’s Boomslang entered the blast front hard on the energy wake of Gregory’s missile, punching through the plasma wall and streaking across the relatively empty interior of a brilliant sphere growing inside the far larger Rosetter structure. Punching through the opposite side, it continued deep into the structure before detonating seconds later.
A savage cavity had been ripped from the side of the alien structure. The rest of the missiles continued in-line, exploding in utter silence one after the next, the blasts stacking up, boring a cone-shaped tunnel with white-hot walls in and down through the center of the alien structure.
And as the last denotation flashed and opened like a blossoming flower of flame, the five Starblade fighters entered the Rosette structure through the gaping maw burned open by Gregory’s Boomslang.
Around them, on every side, aurorae flared and shifted along the cloud’s edges as charged particles whipped through intense and shifting magnetic fields. The structure was still channeling light through its translucent inner geometries . . . but in fits and starts as portions of the internal structure failed and winked out. Gregory’s fighter shuddered as it slammed into patches of distorted space . . . but the alien sphere appeared to be falling apart, its internal structure dissolving, its light dimming, flaring briefly, and then dying.
“Free singularity!” Ed Tanner yelled. “I’ve got a free singularity at two-seven-four by plus nine-five!”
Gregory pulled up an enhanced view of the indicated portion of the sky. Highlighted within red brackets thrown up by his Starblade’s AI, he could see the tiniest of bright white pinpoints . . . a minute star.
Okay . . . he’d been expecting this, or something like it. Different people had been describing the Rosetter cloud as having both the mass and the diameter of the gas giant Jupiter . . . but it couldn’t possibly be both. The interior of the Rosetter cloud was a thin gas, far thinner than Earth’s atmosphere at sea level, while Jupiter was so dense that its core had been compacted by its own gravity into what amounted to a solid mass of metallic hydrogen.
The only way to reconcile the Rosetter’s stats with those of the planet was if the cloud included masses that had been compressed into such tiny volumes that they were microscopic. The Rosetter might be as big across as Jupiter, but most of its mass was squeezed into gravitational anomalies of microscopic size.
Human starships used artificial singularities the size of protons to suck energy from the vacuum. When a ship was destroyed, those singularities remained, deadly missiles to any other ships that might hit them. Fortunately, they evaporated quickly in open space.
The Rosetter’s mini-black holes posed substantial danger to human ships and to Earth itself. This one, fortunately, appeared to be moving out and away from the planet with a velocity of fifteen kilometers per second, well above escape velocity . . . but there were certainly others.
Mass readings showed that this black hole contained roughly the mass of the entire Earth, compressed in volume down to an object less than a centimeter across.
“AI!” Gregory said in-head. “Extrapolate that object’s course and warn the fleet outside.”
“Affirmative.”
The interior of the sphere, meanwhile, carved out by the string of nuclear explosions, had taken on the appearance of some titanic Gothic cathedral, with expanding wisps of gas standing in for arches and vaults and sculpted galleries, the whole bathed in rich blue and white and golden light. A blessed silence engulfed him as he moved through space evacuated by the blasts moments before. Then he struck the far wall, his drive flared brilliantly, and his Starblade again bucked and shuddered with the impact of the minute, drifting machines.
“We killed it!” Lieutenant Caswell yelled over the tactical channel, exultant. “We fuckin’ killed it!”
“Maybe that was the brain of the thing!” Tanner added. “Ya think maybe? . . .”
“Don’t worry about it,” Gregory told them. “Hold your vector! Let’s just get through this thing and out the other side!”
The alien sphere had indeed been destroyed, Gregory thought, but if the Rosette entity could think, it used its entire mass for the process, a single, titanic brain. That sphere might have been some sort of local control node, but it was 3,500 kilometers across compared to the entire entity’s diameter, which was forty times greater. The destruction of the translucent sphere had been a pinprick in terms of actual damage to the larger structure.
But there was no denying that the Rosette entity had been hurt.
TC/USNA CVS America
CIC
Within the Rosette Cloud
Time and date uncertain
“Captain!” her helm officer cried as the carrier jolted. “We’re free!”
“Free how? What’s happened?”
“Still trying to figure that one out, Captain,” Mallory told her.
But Gutierrez was already in conversation with America’s AI, an echo of the larger and more powerful Konstantin.
“Our sensors picked up a stri
ng of six powerful nuclear detonations bisecting the alien structure holding us here,” the AI told her, “coming toward us from the far side of the object. I believe those five fighters we’ve detected punched a hole through the alien object and forced the Rosetter to release us.”
“Forced it how?”
“The spherical object incorporated both artificial singularities and unknown technologies that fold and distort empty space. Those fighters caused enough disruption to flatten out the distortions and release the singularities. The Rosetter’s ability to bend space has been interrupted, at least temporarily. It may be having trouble channeling data as well.”
“Well, it won’t take them long to come up with a response. Keating! Get us under way! Full power!”
“Aye, aye, Captain. It’ll take us a few moments to bring the power taps up to full output. . . .”
Slowly, ponderously, the star carrier began sliding forward, accelerating through the surrounding cloud of alien artificial mist.
“Our shield cap is heating up, Captain,” Keating told her. “Friction with the . . . the local atmosphere.”
Star carriers like the kilometer-long America had never been intended for maneuvers inside an atmosphere, even an atmosphere as thin as this one. The faster the great ship moved forward, the more the microscopic Rosetter machines smashed themselves against the slightly curved five-hundred-meter surface of the ship’s protective shieldcap.
“Can you boost the shields?”
“Not enough to handle this stuff.”
America possessed both positively and negatively charged fields designed to shunt aside stray particles as she moved through space, and they could be used as protection against some types of beam weapons and even against micrometeorites . . . but they could do little against this incoming tide of dust-speck machines.
“CAG!” Gutierrez called. “Have our fighters join up with those people out there. Suggest that they vector toward SupraQuito.”
