by Ian Douglas
2018 hours, TFT
“They’re swarming!”
“I see it,” Gray said. He glanced at Vasilyeva. “You can stay on the bridge if you want, Elena. Just stay out of the way.”
“Of course.”
Gray’s full attention was on the swarm of alien machines. They appeared to be coming from one of a number of much larger Rosette constructs . . . fortresses or monitors the size of Earth’s moon. They reminded him . . .
The human body, Gray thought, responded to an infection or other invaders by pouring out large numbers of specialized defenders called white cells, a purely unconscious response of the immune system. He wondered if the formidable Rosetter defenses were something similar . . . an automated and completely unconscious response to an outside threat.
That might well explain why the Rosette Mind didn’t seem even to be aware of human ships.
It was a humbling and disturbing thought.
“We have an incoming transmission, Admiral,” the comm officer said. “One of our pickets, USNA Plottel.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“. . . frigate Plottel on forward picket. Come in, please!”
“Plottel, this is the carrier America. Go ahead.”
“America, Plottel. This is Commander Ranier. Welcome to Omega Centauri! We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Thank you, Plottel. Admiral Gray, here. Why don’t you come over and join the party?”
“Copy that, America. We’re on our way in. Do you have a fix on that big mother of a fortress?” A string of coordinates followed the reference.
“We’ve got it. It’s putting out a cloud of swarmers now. Be sure to stay clear of it on your way in.”
“Copy, Admiral. That stuff could take out a frigate in one gulp.”
“We’re deploying our fighters against it. We’ll see how they do against that thing. . . .”
VFA-211, Headhunters
Omega Centauri
2021 hours, TFT
“Hunter Three!” Meier called over the squadron channel. “Lining up the shot . . . and . . . Fox One!”
The VG-92 Krait missile slid from its launch rail, streaking into the dust cloud ahead. Guided by its rather simple-minded onboard AI, it curved in toward its target—a node within the alien network—and then the pulse-focused warhead detonated at maximum yield, a terrific white flash that obliterated millions of Rosetter micromachines.
“Hunter Seven!” Lakeland called. “Fox One away!”
“Hunter Two, firing . . .”
One by one, the pilots of VFA-211 loosed their war shots, setting off a string of deadly white blossoms of thermonuclear fire through the heart of the alien cloud.
“That thing damned well better have felt that!” Meier said over the channel. He swung his Starblade onto a new vector, angling toward the big target designated Bravo Tango One. “I don’t fucking like being ignored!”
For Meier, that was the worst part about the Rosetters, their aloof, arrogant disdain for mere humans, as though humans weren’t even worth the bother of talking down to them. During the briefing on board the carrier just an hour ago, the Headhunters’ skipper Commander Leystrom and America’s CAG Connie Fletcher both had stressed the need to get the Rosetters’ attention. The admiral, he gathered, had something in mind, though he was damned if he knew what that was.
The cloud, he saw, was reacting.
Once, an eternity ago on Earth, Meier had seen vids of some kind of bird in mass flight. He couldn’t remember the species now, but whatever they were, they’d moved together in vast, swarming clouds, thicker here, thinner there, the whole constantly shifting and changing position and even seeming to turn inside out as tens of thousands of separate creatures moved as a single immense organism.
The Rosetter clouds were like that . . . though the constituent parts were far smaller, the numbers far, far larger. He could see the alien swarm moving out from Bravo Tango One, shifting, unfolding, concentrating in some areas, thinning to invisibility in others.
The trouble was . . . that nearest cloud was a part of the Rosetter, yes . . . but a vanishingly tiny part. The main cloud, Meier thought, might not even be aware of the pinpricks here; this entire swarm could be destroyed, wiped away, and it would harm the Rosetter whole, the totality of the swarming organism, no more than an ant bite on a human’s great toe.
That made for a difficult set of operational orders . . . and not much chance of carrying them out.
Maybe, though, if they could press home the attack on Bravo Tango One . . .
“Targeting Bravo Tango One!” Meier called out. “Boomslang select . . . times two . . . Fox One!”
Two massive Boomslangs streaked out from Meier’s fighter. A hundred kilometers to starboard, Karl Maas loosed a second pair of the so-called planetbusters . . . and then a dozen more heavy missiles were streaking in toward the immense gray egg.
That egg, Meier saw, had a long axis of almost three thousand kilometers, a narrow axis of just over two thousand kilometers, making it only a little smaller than Earth’s moon. The detonations of five-hundred-megaton nuclear warheads against a body that size were literal pinpricks; tiny points of light appeared on the surface as the missile barrage slammed home, then faded out without causing any apparent damage.
Bravo Tango One began fighting back. Dougherty’s fighter twisted in the grip of the alien’s gravitic weapon, then crumpled in an instant into a fist-sized scrap of debris. It was moving now, slow and ponderous, drifting in the direction of the Black Rosette. An attempt at escape? Or something more dangerous for the attacking fighters?
There was no way to tell. VFA-211 continued to press their attack.
TC/USNA CVS America
The Black Rosette
2023 hours, TFT
“The fighters aren’t making much headway, Admiral,” Connie Fletcher told him. “Our weapons just aren’t powerful enough.”
“I see that, CAG,” Gray told her. “Order them to back away from that thing and focus on slamming Rosetter data nodes. Their AIs should be able to pinpoint those, show them what to target.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
It was all too easy in the heat of battle to wade in swinging at the big targets, the obvious targets . . . but after the Battle of Earth Gray knew that a far better strategy was to try to disrupt the totality of the Rosetter mind. The alien entity probably wasn’t feeling any of this, but take down enough of those nodes and something was bound to give.
“Commander Mallory.”
America’s tactical officer looked up from his workstation. “Yes, Admiral?”
“Make to all vessels. Wide dispersal . . . fifty thousand kilometers if possible.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
“And forget Bravo Tango One. Maintain fire at the data nodes.”
“Roger that.”
Space fleet combat often was a delicate balance between concentrating your ships in order to concentrate their fire and scattering them as widely as possible so that enemy weapons couldn’t take out more than one at a time. In this case, Gray had decided to go with scattering. The Rosetter gravitic weapons were still something of an unknown, but appeared to affect large volumes of spacetime, crushing everything within. Half the fleet focusing all of its firepower on that Luna-sized fortress, or whatever it was, might not be enough to more than ruffle its feathers, but a widely dispersed fleet would be in a good position to target as many data nodes in the alien cloud as possible.
“We have a new object, at one-two-one by plus one nine,” Mallory said. “Range . . . about two astronomical units.”
“A ship?”
“Looks like a Bishop ring. We’re designating it Bravo Romeo One.”
“Show me.”
His in-head window opened on a structure made toylike by distance, a hollow cylinder with an inside-out landscape around the inner surface. A Bishop ring, obviously . . . a huge artificial habitat named for the engineer who’d first proposed the idea at the end of t
he twentieth century. A vastly scaled-down version of the science-fictional Ringworld. This one was a couple of thousand kilometers across, rim to rim, and about five hundred kilometers wide. Gray ran the figures through his in-head processors to find that the object had an inner surface area of roughly three million square kilometers . . . about the same as the nation-state of Argentina, on Earth.
The thing was tilted, so that Gray could look into the open interior. Rugged hills rose at each end to support the rim walls. The dry land appeared to be a ragged patchwork of oranges, yellows, and purples. Starlight glittered off vast, aqua seas.
Or was that effect caused by something else?
A datastream showed that this was the ring spotted by the battlespace drone off the Plottel.
“Captain Gutierrez!”
“Sir!”
“That target . . .” He fed her the coordinates. “Let’s get in closer to that thing.”
What possible use, Gray was wondering, would electronic beings like the Rosetters have for an artificial habitat designed for biological life forms?
He damned well was going to find out.
Chapter Twenty-three
6 March 2426
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
2029 hours, TFT
America accelerated, warping space ahead and astern to move herself across the light-minutes toward the Bishop ring in the distance. Ten astronomical units off to port, the Black Rosette was an energy source made invisible by distance, its location tagged by computer-generated brackets. Nearby space was becoming thick with Rosetter craft—mostly the swarming disassembler dust particles and fireflies, of course, but there were larger objects as well, including spacecraft massing up to ten thousand tons.
Their weaponry was a mixed bag, including both positive and negative particle beams as well as antimatter beams; lasers in optical, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray frequencies; and clouds of submicroscopic disassemblers that could literally take a ship apart atom by atom. Humans had been developing effective counters for all of these ever since they’d first encountered the entity, but the larger alien vessels possessed that deadly space-warping gravitic weapon. Navy weapons specialists referred to it now as the “fist,” comparing its effect to that of a giant, invisible fist that closed around the target vessel and crumpled it.
There was still no counter to the fist other than maneuvering . . . and praying that the fist didn’t reach out and grab you.
So the idea, especially for the larger human vessels, was to keep moving. Gray’s attention now was held by Bravo Romeo One, the Bishop ring hanging in space a few AUs distant.
He rattled off a string of orders to the fleet. The human ships were to continue to maneuver but to center their maneuvers on that enigmatic megastructure. Was it important to the Rosetters? How was it connected to them? . . . and it must be connected to the Rosette entity somehow, or it wouldn’t be drifting here at the core of Omega Centauri.
“CAG,” Gray called. “Have our fighters close in on that Bishop ring. I want close-in vids of its surface, its outer structure, everything they can get.”
“Affirmative, Admiral. You’ll have it. Should they attack it?”
Gray thought about that, then shook his head, deciding.
“Negative, CAG. Not unless it fires on them first.”
“That, Admiral, is a hell of an order.”
Having pilots close with an alien megastructure without firing . . . waiting for it to fire at them? Yeah. He heard the anger in Fletcher’s voice.
“I know, Connie,” he replied. “But that thing might be the key to this entire operation.”
That toylike ring in the distance was a tiny, glittering mystery. If it was a habitat, chances were that any inhabitants would be connected somehow to the Rosetters. If it was as vulnerable as it appeared, not attacking it might provide the human fleet with options.
Gray was still determined to find a way to make the Rosette entity talk to him.
VFA-211, Headhunters
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
2032 hours, TFT
As it happened, Meier and Pam Schaeffer were the closest pilots to the new objective when America’s CAG passed down the order to investigate it. “What the hell is that thing?” Schaeffer asked.
“An artificial habitat. Like an O’Neill cylinder, really, but upsized from huge to monstrous.”
“Is that a planetary landscape inside?” She sounded incredulous.
“Sure is. Forests, seas, rivers, mountains, and room for hundreds of millions of inhabitants, all rolled up inside a tube two thousand kilometers across. C’mon. Let’s goose it and take a closer look.”
Side by side, the Starblade fighters arrowed in closer, until the immense cylinder opening filled the entire sky ahead. Meier had his AI on the lookout for power surges or other signs that weapons on the tube’s exterior might be targeting them and about to fire, but there was no sign that they’d even been spotted, much less targeted.
“I don’t like it,” Schaeffer told him. “I feel naked out here.”
Meier thought about Pamela Schaeffer naked . . . and angrily pushed the image aside. “Me too, Pam.”
“Looks like they make their own sunlight,” Schaeffer said. A slender needle was positioned running down the exact center of the wheel like an axle. Half of it, from end to end, glowed with an intensity that made it difficult to look at directly. The other half was dark, and it was obvious that by rotating the axle half of the landscape around it would be in light, the other half in night. It appeared to be anchored in place by nearly invisible threads stretched between the axle and the habitat’s rim.
“Well, there’s no nearby star, so it’s got to produce both its own day-night cycle and its own warmth. Let’s see if we can get closer.”
“Copy that.”
The two fighters veered yet closer, lining up a trajectory that would take them inside the cylinder, halfway between ground surface and the shining hub. At the last moment, though, Meier saw a minute flash, appearing for a fraction of a second . . . and then the faintest of reflections skated across the seemingly empty opening of the cylinder. He hauled his fighter into a 90-degree turn. “Break off!” he called. “Break off, Pam!”
Schaeffer’s fighter followed his. “What is it? What did you see?”
“I’m not sure.” He communicated with the fighter’s AI for a moment. “Okay . . . there’s something like a membrane stretched across the cylinder’s opening. Completely transparent to electromagnetic radiation . . . which is why it didn’t show up on radar or lidar. I happened to notice a flash, though . . . probably when a bit of meteoric debris hit it. That caused a slight ripple outward from the impact, and that did reflect some starlight. Not much, but enough to catch my eye.”
“A meteor screen?”
“Well, they’d need something along those lines, wouldn’t they? And a membrane would provide a better way to keep atmosphere inside than just relying on those rim walls.”
“They might also not want to have visitors flying in among those guy wires,” Schaeffer suggested. “That could get messy.”
“Roger that. Let’s survey the outer rim and see if we can find a way inside that doesn’t involve slamming ourselves into invisible membranes.”
Decelerating, they drifted closer to the megastructure.
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
2039 hours, TFT
America was under heavy attack, but her defenses so far were holding. Rosetter constructs had materialized out of emptiness close by Bravo Tango One, reinforcing Gray’s idea that the Rosette entity manufactured automated defenses when it needed them, like antibodies responding to an infection. The Rosetters would be using larger constructs like BT-1 as command and control centers . . . or else coordinating the smaller ships and weapons through the interlinked data nodes that the human fleet was trying so hard now to disrupt.
“Keep slamming tha
t thing!” Gray ordered, addressing all of the vessels in his fleet. America had turned to face BT-1, now less than twelve thousand kilometers distant, and was using her twin magnetic launch rails to accelerate fighter-sized warheads at the object, boosting them to extremely high velocities. Each AMat-24 warhead held a sizeable mass of antimatter in a magnetic containment bottle; when it struck the target, matter and antimatter came together and annihilated one another in a terrific flash of X-rays and hard gamma. It was a new weapon, one developed specifically to counter the growing Rosetter threat, with the first of them coming on-line only a few days before. America had only limited numbers in her weapons lockers; more would arrive with the main fleet, which included several heavy railgun cruisers carrying AMat-24s.
The fleet was using older weapons as well . . . including swarms of AS-78 AMSO rounds. The acronym stood for anti-missile shield ordnance, and each missile carried several kilos of what was essentially nothing more than sand. Fired like a missile and accelerated to a high percentage of the speed of light, AMSO sandcaster rounds fired their payloads in relativistic clouds that released incredible amounts of energy when they struck anything in their path.
So America continued slamming away at BT-1 with AMat rounds, while using AMSO missiles to sweep broad swaths out of the Rosetter clouds of combat machines. Lasers and particle beams focused on enemy command nodes, as her fighters plunged deeper and deeper into Rosetter space, launching hundred-megaton nukes to silently flash and blossom against the night.
It was anyone’s guess at this point which—if any—of the weapons in the human arsenal were going to hurt the enemy. Konstantin’s ongoing analysis of the enemy’s disposition suggested that they were causing extensive damage, and that the Rosetter electronic network was already significantly degraded.
But that was here in this part of Omega Centauri, in a tightly localized portion of the Rosetter cloud only a couple of hundred AUs across. The Rosette entity’s light show seemed to fill the entire cluster; certainly, it extended well beyond the cluster’s heart and far out into open space . . . possibly for as much as several hundred light years.
