by Ian Douglas
There was simply no way the human fleet could attack the entire alien network at once; to do so would require millions of warships, not a mere hundred or so. Gray was trying to keep the fleet moving, to keep hitting the enemy hard . . . and was waiting for the arrival of Reeve’s fleet once they got word that the America battlegroup had made it through.
The heavy cruiser Northern California shuddered and rolled to port, water spraying from its shield cap in a cloud of instantly freezing droplets as the Rosetter gravitic weapon closed around her and squeezed. BT-1 was on the move, now, smashing its way through the human fleet as nuclear warheads continued to flash in pinpoint flares of brilliance across its surface.
The gravitic weapon reached out again across ten thousand kilometers, crushing the escort carrier Mountbatten and two destroyers flying close alongside.
“Spread out!” he called. “Everyone spread out! And keep up the fire!”
Gray checked his internal time readout. The message drones launched by both the Plottel and by the America should have reached him by now.
He hoped that Reeve would be arriving soon with reinforcements . . . and a lot more firepower.
VFA-211, Headhunters
Bravo Romeo One
Omega Centauri
2046 hours, TFT
“That looks like a hatch!”
Meier and Schaeffer killed their excess velocity and drifted in closer to the megastructure’s side. The Bishop ring’s outer rim, a gray-white cliff face rising to port like an immense wall, blotted out half the sky. The surface, Meier saw, was complex and busy, covered with domes and crenellations, with towers and bunkers and whole cityscapes of mysterious structures.
None of them, however, appeared to be shooting at the two Starblades . . . or even to notice that they were there.
“What do you think?” Schaeffer asked. “Should we go in?”
“Hell, it’s big enough for a squadron of Starblades.” He hesitated, considering the possibilities. “You stay here. I’ll drift inside and see what’s there.”
“And leave me out here by myself? Uh-uh. We’ll go in together!”
Meier briefly thought about ordering her to stay behind . . . then thought better of it. He certainly didn’t outrank her, and she was a determined and self-assured young woman who liked to do things her way. He doubted that she would appreciate being told what to do.
“Okay, then,” he said. He couldn’t resist adding, “Stay close! I’m letting America know what we’re doing. . . .”
Side by side, the two Starblades drifted into the opening, a ship bay entrance a good three kilometers wide and half that tall. It could have accommodated the America, much less a couple of single-seat fighters. The opening was moving—the Bishop ring was rotating at a rate of about once per day, generating spin gravity. Inside, a cavernous void opened around them, brightly lit by banks of spotlights. The structure was so massive it actually generated its own gravity independently of its spin—a tenth of a G or so—and Meier’s AI had to juggle the Starblade’s gravitic drive to counter the gentle tug inward.
There were hints in the distance of vast and shadowy structures . . . machinery the size of a city, perhaps, or alien ships that would dwarf a Navy star carrier. Meier was looking for a landing area of some sort, or possibly a storage bay for ships, but saw absolutely nothing that he could recognize.
“I don’t see . . . I don’t see a clear direction in here,” he told Schaeffer. “I can’t see where we’re supposed to go.”
“It looks like it goes on forever,” she replied. “Maybe we should turn around and get back to the battle.”
“At least no one’s shooting at us in here,” Meier said. “That could be a good thing. . . .”
“I’ll go with no shooting. . . .”
“Wait. What’s that up—”
And everything changed.
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
2049 hours, TFT
America accelerated as clouds of disassemblers stalked her. Despite the fleet’s steady, long-range bombardment of Bravo Romeo One, the alien artificial moon continued to pump out more and more of the tiny machines. Each of the ships in the human fleet was being forced to divert more and more firepower to point defense as well as continuing to hammer the swarm nodes; there were simply too many targets to deal with, and more and more of the destructive micromachines were getting through.
“Sir,” the comm officer called. “Two of our fighters are getting ready to enter Bravo Tango One.”
“What fighters?”
“Headhunter Three and Headhunter Five. Range . . . three light minutes. They transmitted their intention three minutes ago and we just now received it.”
“Very well. Captain Gutierrez?”
“Admiral?”
“Take us in toward BR-1.”
“Romeo-1?”
“That’s right. We have a couple of fighter pilots actually going inside that thing. I want to be on hand to offer support if they need it.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
A dazzling flash of white light appeared aft . . . followed by another . . . and another.
“Thank the gods!” Gray said. “It’s Reeve!”
Explosions of brilliant light continued across the distant backdrop of stars as ship after ship dropped out of Alcubierre Drive, the energy of their transitional shift stored in the fabric of space until the drive field collapsed and they emerged in a blaze of photons.
There’d been talk during the planning of this op about trying to enfilade the enemy, to catch the Rosetters between the two fleets, but, ultimately, the command staff had decided that it would be too difficult to coordinate the movements of two fleets . . . especially when the enemy’s positions would be unknown.
Admiral Reeve’s fleet came out of FTL within half an AU—four light minutes—of Gray’s contingent. The light Gray was seeing was already four minutes old, but the ships would be hard on its tail, hurtling in with a grim fury.
“Message coming through from the New York, Admiral.”
“Let me hear it.”
Static buzzed and crackled on America’s flag bridge. “. . . your position within five minutes,” a ragged voice said through the hiss. “Repeating . . . this is Task Force New York, approaching the Rosette in normal space. Admiral Gray, please respond. We should be arriving at your position within five minutes. . . .”
“Make to the New York,” Gray said. “Tell them, ‘Welcome to the dark Rosette. Good to see you, Admiral Reeve. Be aware that we have about eight days before something very dangerous comes through the Rosette. Our friends in the N’gai Cloud are sending a blue-giant star through the wormhole, and it’s not going to fit. I expect it will get very violent on this side, probably like a supernova, maybe worse . . . and we’re going to want to pull out of here before that happens.’ Transmit that along with the vid records of what we saw in N’gai, and keep repeating until you get an acknowledgment.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
“CAG, order all of our fighters in closer to Bravo Romeo One.” He was laying out the fleet disposition in his head. If the Rosette entity followed America toward BR-1, maybe they would expose their flank to the oncoming ships of Task Force New York.
It wasn’t much, but it was all they had now.
VFA-211, Headhunters
BR-1
Omega Centauri
2050 hours, TFT
Meier gave a long, low whistle. “What the hell was that?” he asked. “What happened to us?”
“I think . . . I think they brought us inside the structure,” Schaeffer said. “Onto the inner rim, I mean. It’s like a fairyland!”
The two Starblades were on the ground, resting side by side on an alien plain covered with what looked like orange moss. There were low, spreading, flat-topped growths that might have been trees in the distance, and beyond those, buildings—towers and spires in pastel colors that did indeed look like some sort of fantasy realm.
Few fantasy castles, though, Meier reasoned, reached a couple of kilometers into the sky.
Two horizons, directly opposite one another, were dominated by . . . walls was the only word that came to mind. Walls rising straight up and fading into the brightly lit mist overhead. Walls covered by the patchwork of orange and yellow and violet and aqua-blue that Meier had noted earlier from space. He was now on the interior of the Bishop ring’s cylinder; the two walls were the farther parts of the inner rim. Directly overhead, a blindingly brilliant sun shaped like a needle ran across the zenith at right angles to the vertical walls. The artificial sun was white . . . but with just a hint of a blue-green hue to it. A mist hung about the sun; with the appropriate filters, Meier could just barely make out the far side of the rim behind the haze and the bright glare.
An instant ago they’d been in hard vacuum. Meier’s sensors indicated an atmosphere outside, at a pressure of seven tenths of a bar and uncomfortably cool—nine degrees Celsius. His readouts told him that the gas mix was high in oxygen but also dangerously high in carbon dioxide. If they were going to get out of their fighters, they would need breathing masks.
“What just happened to us?” Schaeffer asked.
“Teleportation, I think,” Meier replied. “One moment we were there, the next here. Or . . .”
“Or what?”
“Or our hosts are playing with time again. Maybe our clocks zipped forward so fast we didn’t notice it.”
“I don’t think so, Jason. If they messed with time, it would affect both us and our ships, right? When they changed time for America, everything seemed normal to us. It was just the outside universe that seemed to pass us by.”
“Who knows what these bastards can do?” Meier asked. He focused his thoughts, and a helmet materialized around his head, connected to a small air processor on his chest. Another thought, and the Starblade unfolded around him, its nanomorphic hull melting away to release him onto the alien plain. Standing, he flexed his knees a couple of times, confirming by feel what his instrumentation had already told him. The local gravity was slightly more than one G. Nearby, the cockpit of Schaeffer’s Starblade melted away, freeing her from its embrace. Meier looked around, uncertain. Someone, something, had brought them in here quite deliberately. He was expecting a welcoming committee.
He turned . . . and saw a cloud of glittering, golden spheres moving toward them. They floated like soap bubbles and exhibited the telltale deliberation and order of intelligent direction.
And behind those . . .
Meier’s eyes widened . . . and he screamed, a long, ragged scream of pure terror.
VFA-96, Black Demons
Approaching BR-1
2050 hours, TFT
“Launch fighters!”
Lieutenant Donald Gregory felt the surge as he went into free fall, his Starblade dropping smoothly from Republic’s rotating flight deck. Outside, space was a blaze of brilliant stars shining in every direction. Other ships of Task Force New York hung in space around him, all of them under acceleration toward the very center of the cluster. The Marine CVE Guadalcanal, newly returned from Kapteyn’s Star, drifted in emptiness sixty kilometers to port. Around him, the other Black Demons dropped into space and slowly moved ahead of the Republic.
“Form up on me,” Mackey called.
“Affirmative,” Gregory replied. “Demon Four copies.” He boosted his ship slightly, drifting into the loose chevron formation of Black Demons forming up ahead of the Republic.
Gregory wondered if he should feel more . . . confident, more certain of a successful outcome. Of course, there was absolutely no way you could be completely certain of anything involving combat, but the squadron had proved itself against them before, at Earth, hadn’t it?
But Gregory was trembling inside, and he recognized the symptoms of pure terror. The aliens were so unlike anything he’d been trained to face before, and their technology was literally magical. He wasn’t sure how they’d bested the entity at Earth.
All he knew was that he was going up against them again . . . and the chances were excellent that he would not survive the encounter.
VFA-211, Headhunters
BR-1
Omega Centauri
2050 hours, TFT
He continued screaming for what seemed like hours, though it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. During his career as a Navy pilot, Meier had seen a number of alien beings . . . very alien, most of them. He’d met and conversed with a few, including spidery Agletsch traders and some of the nightmare horrors of the N’gai Cloud. He’d always thought the Glothr were the worst—translucent pillars held upright on tentacles, looking like immense jellyfish beneath a rippling, transparent mantle. Evolving in a liquid water ocean locked away beneath a thick layer of ice on a Steppenwolf world wandering between the stars, the Glothr were not even remotely human.
These . . . these writhing horrors were worse. Much worse.
Each one towered above the orange landscape, twenty, perhaps twenty-five meters tall, moving on squat, thick legs like barrels, with a pale gray body like a mountain of fat, layered in drooping folds and wattles. Tentacles hung from a kind of fleshy collar near the thing’s top, constantly in motion, writhing and coiling and uncoiling again. Some slender tentacles sported black orbs that might be eyes; others ended in more mysterious organs. The slenderest tentacles, like long and twisting hairs, branched at the ends into multiple fingers.
Meier couldn’t see a mouth or imagine how the thing breathed.
Hell, he couldn’t imagine how it moved. The gravity here was a bit higher than one standard G. Those towering masses of flesh must mass many thousands of tons. More to the point, though, what kind of brain could coordinate the movements of hundreds of tentacles and dozens of legs with anything like the precision necessary for a thinking creature?
And it was the way that massive body was in constant, oozing motion, the surface quivering like gelatin, the grayish ooze flowing down every surface, the way sensory organs appeared at the ends of twisting tentacles only to be reabsorbed again that spurred his terror. The thing seemed so liquid, so fluid that Meier decided that he was looking at something like an immense amoeba. The legs appeared solid enough, constant enough, but the rest . . .
The upper half of the thing’s mountainous body appeared to be constantly dissolving. It had the glistening, necrotic appearance of decaying flesh, with a greenish, iridescent sheen to the surface; pieces kept sloughing off and sliding down the wet surface only to be somehow reabsorbed.
A small bolt of lightning crackled across half a meter of the thing’s surface. A weapon? Meier had no idea.
Somehow . . . somehow he stood his ground. Schaeffer, a gibbering corner of his brain noted, had not screamed. She’d moved across the ground separating her Starblade from Meier’s and was standing beside him, staring up at the looming monster made of wet flesh. His heart racing, his breathing coming in gasping pants, he looked up at the thing and struggled to control his fear.
Several tentacles drooped from the top of the thing like outsized trunks of the long extinct elephants of Earth. Black spheres formed at the ends, gleaming in the harsh light of the needle sun overhead, each one the size of his head. If those things were eyes, he and Schaeffer were being scrutinized very closely indeed.
Ten meters away, on the fleshy cliff of the thing’s body, a spark played, with a crackling pop. Something was taking shape there. Meier watched, fascinated, terrified, transfixed by what he was seeing.
In a moment, his own face, ten meters tall across the thing’s lower body, stared down at him.
He almost screamed again, but Schaeffer’s presence steadied him. Stand your ground, he told himself. If they wanted to kill you, they could have done so before they brought you in here!
He blinked . . . and his face in the flesh wall blinked in response.
“I think,” Schaeffer said, her voice remarkably steady under the circumstances, “that they might want to talk to us.
. . .”
Chapter Twenty-four
6 March 2426
VFA-96, Black Demons
Approaching BR-1
2052 hours, TFT
Gregory heard Meier’s scream.
The network linking together all of the fighters in local space let him hear it. Normally, the multiple links were a background murmur of radio chatter, but a sudden shout of warning could be transmitted instantly to all fighters and to the combat command center of the controlling capital ship.
Meier’s short, sharp yelp of surprise and fear cut through the chatter like a Krait, and gave him Meier’s name, his ID, and his location. The guy appeared to be inside the Bravo Romeo object, and it sure as hell sounded like he was in trouble.
“Form up on me,” Mackey ordered. “Let’s see what we can do.”
The five surviving fighters of VFA-96 shifted vector in a burst of acceleration and closed on the monstrous cylinder with its intricate pattern of orange land and aqua seas. The structure loomed in front of them, colossal and enigmatic. Gregory could no longer hear Meier above the background chatter. When he called up personal bio data on the other pilot, though, he saw that the man was still alive—breathing and heart rate elevated . . . but alive.
“Let’s get closer,” Mackey ordered. “We’ll see if there’s a way inside.”
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
2058 hours, TFT
America drifted through open space toward Bravo Romeo, which from half an AU out was visible only as a star, one among millions. A magnified image, however, showed the structure as a cylinder gleaming in starlight. Gray’s first thought was a question, one that had been bothering him for some minutes now. Why the hell does something like the Rosette entity have a physical world on which to live?
