Singularity Point

by Brian Smith

  On the bridge, Captain Winters picked up a phone to flag plot and reported that the Dogstar was secure aboard. RADM Sir Edward Branch ordered the signal passed to TF50.5 that all units were to engage their Federov drive and “form line astern.”

  Far enough from Terra that deception was no longer needed, Murasame and Reuben James throttled down their torches and engaged their newer systems. The two ships veered effortlessly out of the larger formation, forming up behind Vanguard. Then, on the flag’s order, the TF50.5’s three vessels vanished into the black, carrying human beings faster than they’d ever gone before.

  USS Ranger

  A.J. McClain surveyed the faces assembled in the ready room. The squadron was full-strength again, even augmented, from a certain point of view. Their AI drones were sidelined for now, so the human complement of six pilots had been increased to eight. That would give McClain two divisions of four manned fighters instead of the six-eighteen standard mix of manned and drone craft.

  Two of his four replacements were experienced pilots transferring in from elsewhere. One of these was 1LT Chloe “Cici” Cardon, his new exec. The other was 2LT Allison “Cajun” Devereaux, who he assigned as Skate’s wingman. He knew that he’d miss having Hess on his wing, but with half the roster being new, a shuffling of assignments was necessary. Skate was formerly the Five-Two’s junior surviving pilot; he’d upgraded her to section leader. From what he’d observed during their time in training down at Ross Station, Devereaux was a lot like Hess in terms of ambition and ability, but with less sass and attitude, and no actual combat time. They’d either become fast friends or gouge each other’s eyeballs out in a ready-room catfight; McClain knew he’d have to watch them for a while to see how they gelled as a combat team.

  The two nuggets were fresh out of the Fleet Replacement Squadron (FRS). They’d been assigned to VMF-52 and transferred to Ross Station right afrer qualifying on the Moray, where they subsequently had to relearn most of what they’d just been taught. McClain wasn’t happy about having two raw nuggets assigned to what was arguably a “special” unit, but it spoke directly to the severity of the Corps’ personnel shortage in the wake of both December first and Operation Ares. The four newcomers to the Five-Two had been with the squadron almost since the start of their training-and-upgrade program on Ross Station. Although they’d flown simulated combat together in virtual, all of them were aware that virtual training was a different animal from a hot war fought for real. They were functioning together smoothly enough to satisfy McClain in peacetime, but this wasn’t peacetime.

  McClain’s new wingman was one of the nuggets: Tyson “T-Rex” Recinto. Together with Skate and Cajun, they would form the squadron’s first division. Cici Cardon would lead the second division with the other new nugget on her wing, and the remaining Five-Two veterans as her second section. It would have been fairly easy to assign all four replacements to one division, keeping the core of the “old” Five-Two together in the other. McClain resisted the impulse, though, no matter how tempting the arrangement—it would have been a bad decision in about six different ways.

  TF50 was underway for Saturn, headed into harm’s way. Their destination was currently 9.4 AU from Earth, and the plan called for a standard 1-g hard-burn—which equated to a transit time of about nine days. Realistically, it might take a few days longer depending on how cautious the admiral was on the approach or if they were engaged by the enemy in transit. In contrast, McClain knew that with their prototype Federov drives the three ships of TF50.5 could accelerate to 0.2 c—twenty percent of the speed of light—within a few minutes and then cover the same distance to Saturn in under seven hours.

  There was a part of him that wondered if the 5th Fleet re-formation and deployment wasn’t all a big sideshow—a feint designed to draw enemy attention away from its own back yard so that TF50.5 could slip in and drop the hammer on Titan unannounced. He didn’t have access to the same intelligence that Costello did, but McClain wouldn’t be surprised if the bulk of the fleet saw no action at all, at least until they swung back around to Mars for Phase II of the campaign. Of course, there was no way he was going to say that to his squadron—he wanted them sharp.

  McClain took a breath before he began his briefing, self-conscious of the fact that they were writing a new chapter in the storied history of the U.S. Marines. That history ran from the Corps’ origins in Tun Tavern, to Tripoli and Belleau Wood, from Guadalcanal to Da Nang, from Fallujah to the Spratly Islands. Now it was from Terra to Titan, in the First Interplanetary War. He wondered if they’d add a new verse to the hymn when it was all over.

  As McClain stepped behind the podium, he resisted the urge to hum experimentally to himself the words he had in mind: From the methane lakes of Ti-i-tan, to the dusty sands of Mars . . .

  He began his briefing.

  July 11, 2094 (Terran Calendar)

  Dogstar One

  5th Fleet Refueling Station, Calypso;

  Hyperion

  Here goes nothing, Ashburn thought as the Dogstar rapidly closed on the tiny moon Calypso. Saturn dominated the sky out the left side of the cockpit, the planet’s rings almost invisible from their edge-on perspective and standing nearly vertical relative to the craft’s attitude.

  “Recorders on,” he ordered.

  “Recorders are on,” replied CW2 “Worm” Albrecht, his copilot. “Good visuals. Standing by to go active. Keps are entered for hard-burn.”

  Ashburn saw his HUD’s astrogation cues shift slightly in response to the new keplers. As the timer counted down in the corner of his vision, he used the RCS thrusters to realign his HUD crosshairs, marrying them to the cue once more.

  “Course laid in,” he reported. “Throttling up on the mark. . . . Three . . . two . . . one . . . Mark!” he called, commanding throttle-up. A torch plume erupted behind Dogstar One and she began rapidly adding velocity to the significant amount she’d started with relative to Saturn. Vanguard had launched them “dark” at about 1,200 kilometers per second and then dropped back to trail them on their run. Given that Calypso was all of fifteen kilometers across, the moon would appear only as an AR tag in their HUDs until they flashed past it; it was unlikely they’d even spot it with the naked eye. Not that it mattered: high-resolution optical scopes were padlocked onto it, and onto the refueling station. As they approached and passed, radar and lidar would be actively scanning as well, and the electromagnetic-surveillance gear would be monitoring for enemy lidar and radar stations tracking them as they passed, or for any other active emissions.

  “Switch over to active scanning,” Ashburn directed. “Hold jammers in standby.”

  “Roger. . . . We’re active on lidar and radar,” Worm reported. “Well, Dakota, we showed ’em our ass. Let’s see what shakes loose, eh?”

  “Yeah,” Ashburn replied. “Keep an eye on the threat receivers. And here comes the first reply!” he added almost without a break.

  Sensors painted a trio of enemy torpedoes closing rapidly, fired from somewhere in the vicinity of Calypso Station ahead of them. A postmission analysis should pinpoint the exact firing point—that sort of data was the entire reason for this sortie. Their job was to show up and let the enemy know they were in the neighborhood, and to begin mapping enemy sensors and defenses as their adversary responded.

  If that computer is dumb enough to show us all its cards, . . . Ashburn thought to himself. However, if OURANIA were as smart as predicted, it almost certainly wouldn’t do that. “Jammers on,” he ordered.

  “Jammers on. Good optical lock on lead vampire,” Worm reported. “Cannon is set to defensive autofire. Engaging,” he added a moment later. A red-orange particle beam split the void, briefly linking Dogstar One with the incoming torpedoes. The targets were successfully engaged and destroyed in rapid succession. Another salvo was launched, four missiles this time, and successfully intercepted and destroyed the same way.

  “No return jamming,” Worm reported. “We got that going for us, anyway!”
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br />   “The first chink in the armor,” Ashburn grinned.

  His heart rate was high, but he felt good—more excited than scared at this point, although he was plenty of both. It helped that they were sitting comfortably in a standard gravity, courtesy of the inertial dampeners; there was no acceleration stress on their bodies at all. For a pair of endo/exo combat pilots, that was a completely new and very welcome experience.

  Dogstar One was still accelerating at 40-g as she blew past Calypso. This time a cloud of eight torpedoes was launched at her at the last possible second, attempting an intercept that left no reaction time to avoid the attack. Fortunately, Ashburn had been expecting something like this. He pitched Dogstar One up and rolled her slightly away from Calypso at almost the same instant the weapons fired. Given the torpedoes’ 25- to 30-g acceleration capability starting from a relative standstill, they didn’t have the capability to catch the jinking craft. Dogstar One caught the pursuing weapons in a near-futile stern chase even before they corrected onto their pursuit trajectory.

  Ashburn popped out two KC—“kinetic countermeasures”—cannisters, small pods that used tiny RCS jets to maneuver directionally opposite to the ship’s velocity vector before blowing open and releasing a large, expanding cloud of dense spheres, each one barely a half centimeter in diameter. If a pursuing weapon (or a ship) hit one (or several) at combat accelerations, the kinetic-energy release would result in a hard kill of most weapons, and severe damage to larger vessels. The spheres were made of a material somewhat opaque to lidar and designed to gradually sublimate away in a hard vacuum. They would dissolve down to trace gases over several hours, leaving no permanent hazard for future vessels in the area.

  The cannisters Ashburn released caught the pursuing weapons dead-on. The torpedoes shredded themselves as they flew through the debris cloud at 30-g of acceleration.

  Ashburn put Dogstar One back on her base course and cut thrust once they were out of the threat envelope. Now that they were past Calypso, their trajectory would take them on a flyby of Hyperion, the next target.

  Much of the “new industry” in and around Saturn’s moons was now suspected to have originated from OURANIA itself, through proxies, in the same way Bill Campbell had built Janus Station and the Omni Systems factories. Dejah Thoris’s last run had been to Hyperion, carrying the materiel needed to build some sort of construction dock. The brass was interested in this facility and, more important, what might be coming out of it.

  The two moons were presently about 1.6 million kilometers apart; Dogstar One would pass Hyperion in just over thirty minutes at her present speed. In the meantime, Albrecht shut down her jammers but kept everything else active, tempting OURANIA or its synth minions to scan the ship in return, jam her, or fire on her. Although Ashburn and Albrecht remained alert for the unexpected, several empty minutes elapsed as Dogstar One crossed the interval between Calypso and Hyperion. Worm was cycling back through the shots taken by the optical imagers and perked up suddenly.

  “Here, Dakota—take a look at this one,” he said, sending it to Ashburn’s helmet HUD. Ashburn blew the image up in virtual, just like he could with snoopers, and took a look. His mouth pressed into a thin, angry line.

  “That’s Olvia Marthis,” he remarked tightly.

  “Olvia Marthis? I’m not familiar.”

  “Big Class II commercial job, similar to my Thuvia. Olvia-M was one of ours—I mean, Barsoom Traders’—commercial fleet. She was one of the three that went missing on December first, right as the attacks were happening out on Mars. Looks like she’s taking on deuterium at the fueling depot.”

  “They’ve turned her into a blockade runner, then,” Worm commented.

  Ashburn shook his head under his helmet. “I doubt it—she’s too big to slip by the Mars blockade. They’re probably running her back and forth between here and the belt or Jupiter. I’m sure that AI monster on Titan still has all sorts of projects running out here, and business in the outer system hasn’t died out entirely.”

  “Think any of Olvia’s crew are still alive?” Worm asked.

  “Not a chance. It’s only a question of whether the brass lays on an operation to cut her out or they just decide to nuke her.” Worm didn’t have anything to add to that. Ashburn looked at the image for another minute before angrily closing it on his HUD. At least they didn’t get my ship! Bastards!

  “Dakota, we’ve got multiple ESM lines dead ahead. We’re being painted again by active radar and lidar. Fire-control sets, as well.”

  “Stand by to throttle up. Reactivate jammers and set all sensors for the next pass.”

  Ashburn put thoughts of Thuvia out of his mind. Time to get back to work.

  HMS Vanguard

  “Well, Ell-Tee, all I can say is that you’re lucky Vanguard has a Federov drive, or you and Mr. Albrecht would be goners. With the speed you’d built up when you were hit, no other kind of ship could have recovered you before you were dried-out skeletons halfway to freakin’ Pluto!”

  “Better lucky than good, eh, chief?” Ashburn quipped.

  He and Worm stood with the maintenance chief, looking through an external imager at the spot on the tail of the Dogstar where a powerful particle beam had sliced through and sheared off a good third of the torch bell.

  The pass over Hyperion had been a little hotter than the one past Calypso; apparently the enemy felt there was more at Hyperion worth protecting. Ashburn had dodged, jinked, danced—pulled out of the bag every trick he had. They’d almost gotten by clean, but the bottom line was that nobody could outrun the speed of light—at least not yet. They’d found Hyperion protected by a pair of powerful combination-lidar/radar arrays, each networked to a trio of “shore battery” particle-beam turrets that had greater power output than the big guns carried by the largest naval torchships. Although jammed by the Dogstar’s superlative equipment, Hyperion’s defenses had almost gotten them anyway. If the particle beams had hit just a little farther forward, the Dogstar would have gone up like a small sun. At the speeds involved, one could say it was either a miracle they’d been hit at all or a miracle they hadn’t been flat-out vaporized.

  At the moment, Ashburn was acting casual and nonchalant about the risks they’d just faced, but inside he was wondering what the hell had ever prompted him to volunteer for this. When Dogstar One had been hit, he was too busy to even notice—with the inertial-dampening field unaffected, there was no physical cue to indicate when thrust was cut. That was a dangerous side effect of the KF-1 mod which needed to be addressed in the future. Pilots relied on tactile feedback and kinesthesia—the lack of them had cost him situational awareness at a critical moment.

  In any case, he and Worm had accomplished the mission. They had their captured imagery of the Hyperion construction dock, along with a good map of the facility’s defenses.

  After being hit, Dogstar One had coasted past and out into space at almost a full percentage point of the speed of light, rapidly fading into the background of her own jamming until she passed out of the threat envelope entirely. Vanguard was waiting to pick them up on the far side of Saturn; she was forced to alter course and accelerate after them, but catching up had been effortless for the Federov drive-equipped cruiser.

  Now that they were safely back aboard, the admiral’s staff up in flag country were already sifting the intelligence they’d brought back.

  “What do you say, chief? Can you patch her up? It’d be a shame if we were one-and-done.”

  “Oh, sure, Ell-Tee! It was a clean hit that got the bell, but it didn’t touch anything else. We can print replacement parts and get her patched quick-smart. Give us about ten or twelve hours and we’ll have her up and running again.”

  “Can you print me a new pair of skivvies as well?” Worm joked, chewing nervously on a fingertip.

  “Sure,” the chief guffawed. “Just gimme me the blueprints—without the skid marks!”

  The three men belly-laughed over that, and then the pilots received a summons
to flag country. Ashburn and Worm delayed only long enough to spruce up a little; they’d found their Royal Navy counterparts to be a little pricklier about things like that than the U.S. Navy, even during combat operations. When they arrived, they found a small powwow going on that included Admiral Branch and Captain Winters. The latter looked over the two American pilots as they entered the space.

  “Close shave, what? Are you chaps all in one piece?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ashburn replied.

  “Good show, then. You closed the mouths of some of the skeptics,” Winters added with a sharp look at the admiral’s flag lieutenant. “There were those who thought the Dogstar was a complete waste of time and effort—that we could have just sent Reuben James in to do the reconnaissance on her own, faster and easier. Eh, leftenant?”

  “I stand corrected, captain,” the flag lieutenant replied stiffly.

  Ashburn nodded. “We would have lost her, probably,” he said. “In our case, it was the smaller size of the ship and our own jamming that saved us. A frigate-size ship surprised by those shore batteries . . . The Federov drive may give you unlimited acceleration and delta-v, but it can’t move you fast enough to dodge energy weapons. Even with the KF-1 mod, jamming, and 40-g of smack laid on, they almost got us.”

  “It was worth it,” Branch told them. “That construction dock at Hyperion—it’s empty right now but wide open, which gave us a good look at the inside. It’s very advanced. I’m going to recommend a change to the ops plan and suggest that we try taking the place intact after the principle action on Titan. Leftenant Ashburn, do you suppose it’s similar to the Gateway dock the Crandall Foundation built on Phobos?”