Singularity Point

by Brian Smith

  Ashburn was looking over the imagery as the admiral spoke. “Maybe more advanced, sir,” he finally allowed. “It’ll be interesting to have a look at the Gateway dock as well, when we wrap this up and get back to Mars. Dejah Thoris hasn’t come out since December first—she’s still in there. God knows what the MIM are doing to her.”

  “Quite. Too bad the flyby attacks missed her,” Branch added quietly.

  The admiral didn’t notice the quick, slightly sharp glance Ashburn directed at him for that remark. Of course, there was no way for the man to know the connection between Ashburn and the ill-fated Deety.

  “What’s the status of the Dogstar?” Branch asked.

  “Damaged torch bell, sir. My maintenance chief says half a day, maybe less.”

  “Well, normally I’d raise holy hell and demand a six-hour job, but the point’s moot. I’m afraid we’re going to have to suspend the planned mission over Titan.”

  “Something unexpected come up?” Ashburn asked.

  “It looks that way,” Winters replied, calling his attention to another screen. “Fortunately you were able to keep a couple of telescopes on Titan as well, even at extreme range. Remarkable optics on the Dogstar, I daresay! See these visual contacts here?” he asked.

  There were a dozen of them, visible in a vaguely wedge-shaped formation silhouetted against Titan itself. If they hadn’t been between the moon and the telescope, they’d have been invisible. Ashburn watched as two ships left the formation and vanished from sight as soon as they were no longer silhouetted by the moon.

  “I’m not seeing any torch plumes on the ones that are maneuvering,” he said grimly.

  “Spot on,” Winters replied. “Obviously, OURANIA has put a Federov-style drive into production as well. That bodes very ill for us, I’m afraid.”

  “We’ve found your navy’s missing Copeland,” Branch added. “She’s the same class as Reuben James, and the biggest warship they’ve got that we know of. The rest appear to be corvette gunships: C4-F1 Triglav-class variants similar to what the MIM—or OURANIA—have utilized in the past. There’s one other larger vessel as well: Night’s Minnow, a Cyprin-class corporate courier, obviously heavily modified. All things being equal, they don’t stack up well against the 5th Fleet. However, having a dozen Federov-drive-equipped ships makes a difference—a corvette with a Federov drive will punch far above her actual weight.”

  “Add to that the fact that OURANIA’s fleet will fight as an integrated single unit, with complete sensor-fusion and cooperative-engagement capability, and we have a problem,” Winters added.

  “Basically, I see two options here,” Branch said. “OURANIA’s primary objective is to preserve itself: it must prevent an attack on Janus Station. To that end, I anticipate that the AI’s fleet of gunships will soon depart and engage our forces en route. They’ll hit our forces at their midpoint turnover, when they’re at maximum velocity. The gunships don’t have to destroy our fleet outright—all they need is to hit the torch bells and the reactors, and that’s it—with Federov drives the enemy will have the comparatively unlimited speed and maneuverability to pull it off. If our ships can’t slow down, they’re mission killed at the very least and will miss Saturn, drifting up-well at high speed where they can be picked off at leisure. In the meantime, our defensive cordon at Terra is relatively stripped of ships, and eventually one of those planetary strikes is going to get through and finish the job.

  “Our one advantage at the moment is that OURANIA doesn’t appear to be aware of the existence of this squadron. So my first option is to wait for OURANIA’s fleet to depart before engaging ours. Once those ships are a few hours away, we can sweep in and hit Titan, perhaps unopposed. The problem is that we cannot assume we’ve accounted for all of OURANIA’s ships, and we haven’t yet mapped the defenses at Titan.

  “Our other option is to pursue the enemy force and hit it as it hits ours, in the hope that we can take that enemy force by surprise and annihilate it before it can wipe out or mission-kill the balance of our own. I have a gut feeling that our three ships alone aren’t going to be enough—we’ll have a difficult time just taking down Hyperion, and we’d be fools to think that OURANIA’s site isn’t the best-defended location in the space around Saturn.”

  “‘A ship’s a fool to fight a fort,’” Winters grunted, quoting naval wisdom harking back to Nelson himself.

  “Seems like an easy choice, then, sir,” Ashburn opined. He understood full well that the admiral wasn’t asking his advice but using him and the others as a sounding board for his own deliberations.

  “What I don’t understand is how those gunships can have Federov drives,” Worm chimed in. “Copeland? Sure, if we could put one on Reuben James. But a Triglav? They’re too small.”

  “Our own design came from OURANIA,” Winters shrugged. “The computer has probably refined it a bit further, that’s all.”

  “It’s just an engineering problem,” Ashburn agreed.

  “I wonder why OURANIA didn’t wait?” Worm wondered aloud. “It’s got a shipyard, maybe two, factories for the new synths, and all this tech. If OURANIA had given itself another two years before starting the war, we never would have had a chance.”

  “I rather think we have you Yanks to thank for that,” Branch replied. “Reuben James, specifically. If she hadn’t managed to fight off her own tender and get away, OURANIA would have had a whole frigate squadron and a tender, with none of us the wiser. I think Reuben James forced OURANIA’s hand, as did the Crandall Foundation’s learning about the computer and mandating that it be shut down. The concept that ‘no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy’ is a double-edged sword—it applies to the enemy as well—even one as brilliant as a living supercomputer. OURANIA was certainly rushed into this war faster than it planned, and it almost won anyway.”

  “It hasn’t lost, either. Yet. . . . Sir,” Worm added weakly. Ashburn thought he could see the mental grimace radiating off his copilot from the foot-in-mouth remark.

  Branch smiled thinly. “We’ll have no defeatist talk in flag plot, chief warrant. Saying that we’ll achieve the victory may be a conceit, but it’s a damned healthy one, what?”

  “No other outcome bears thinking about,” Winters added gravely. He looked to Branch. “Your decision, admiral?”

  “I’m not prepared to knowingly sacrifice Costello’s force without hard intelligence on Titan and the Buzzell Planitia. We’ll shadow the enemy flotilla. If they move to intercept Costello down-well, we’ll follow and hit them at the most opportune moment. If they lie in ambush here, we’ll do the same and perhaps take an opportunity to send the Dogstar over Titan. They won’t wait, though—OURANIA won’t want that force anywhere within striking range.”

  “Yes, sir,” Winters replied. Although he didn’t voice it, it was obvious he concurred with the flag’s decision. Ashburn did too, for whatever the opinion of a reserve lieutenant was worth.

  Branch turned to his flag lieutenant. “Signal the squadron, leftenant, by LOS tight-beam maser. Pass the data on the enemy force and signal our intent to shadow and pursue. Reuben James is ordered to temporarily detach and run an intelligence dispatch to Admiral Costello before returning to station. We need to warn them, and we can’t trust long-range communications from here.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Chapter 21

  July 14, 2094 (Terran Calendar)

  Task Force 50

  USS Ranger

  En Route to Titan

  “All units throttled down,” the battle-watch captain reported to VADM Costello. “All units have reported Condition I set. TF50 is at battle stations.”

  “Very well. Signal to Hornet and Invincible: commence flight operations. Signal all units: maintain defensive englobement of high-value units and precess to optimize unmasking of batteries for engagement. All units to commence active radar and lidar scanning and electromagnetic countermeasures. Defensive maneuvering is authorized in accordance with the fightin
g instructions. ROE warning is red, weapons are free. I repeat, weapons free: engage any unit not positively identified as friendly.”

  The watch captain repeated the order, and the signals were sent by abbreviated codes transmitted on tight-beam line-of-sight maser links. There was no combat network, no fusing of sensors or other sharing of data other than straight voice communications, and even most of the systems within the ships themselves were denetworked from one another. It was the most crippling, degraded mode in which they could fight, like a boxer with a hand tied behind his back, wearing a blindfold and earmuffs. Their only advantage was in numbers and tonnage. Fortunately, they had a serious advantage with both.

  There were three command ships in the task force: USS Ranger, USS Hornet, and HMS Invincible. They put a total of sixty-four manned fighters into the sky without any drone wingmen; the fighters spread out ahead and along the flanks of the fleet to screen for the enemy and increase their sensor and jamming footprints. The area to the rear of the fleet’s velocity vector was sanitized by the liberal dispersal of large KC cannisters, deployed by every ship in the task force just a few minutes before they cut thrust and assumed free-fall trajectories. Midpoint turnover and the deceleration hard-burn for Titan were postponed; Reuben James had briefly returned to the fleet as a courier, warning that the enemy was coming.

  Costello leaned back in his seat, feeling a little helpless and sidelined. His ability to direct this fight would be limited once it started. Individual captains would be responsible for fighting their commands in accordance with his stated intentions and the fighting instructions he’d issued. No modern fleet action should ever devolve into a massive free-for-all like this was about to, he thought, but, then again, humanity had never anticipated facing an opponent like OURANIA.

  VMF-52

  “All right, Bulldogs, assume formation as briefed,” A.J. McClain ordered his squadron. “Throttle up on the mark,” he added, and gave a spoken three-second countdown.

  Eight torch plumes erupted behind the Morays of the Five-Two, accelerating them in advance of TF50 at 10-g of thrust. Inertial dampeners were switched on as the squadron accelerated through a half-g, leaving them light, comfortable, and alert in their cockpits. With the KF-1 mod giving them much greater range, acceleration, and delta-v than their stock counterparts, the mission of Ranger’s Marine squadrons was to act as advance scouts, searching for approaching enemy vessels on lidar.

  Major Khatri, still double-hatted as the DCAG and CO of VMF-51, had them spread out in a gradually expanding wall formation, advance rapidly, and conduct their active-sensor search. Enemy ships with Federov drives could take any line of approach they chose, but it was still important to monitor the fleet’s line of advance against an unwelcome surprise, which is exactly what they encountered.

  “Bulldog Lead, this is Bulldog Five. Lidar contact, twelve o’clock. Range, 600 megameters. Belay! Multiple lidar contacts! Classify as passive torpedo minefield! I’ll be into them in two mikes!”

  There was no networked plot to look at, only what McClain’s sensors were pointed at. In his head he had a picture of where everyone was at present, but as soon as anyone started maneuvering, his situational awareness was going to fall off the cliff.

  Here comes the fog of war, he bitched to himself.

  “Copy, Bulldog Five,” McClain replied. “Take your wingman and penetrate the minefield cloud. Commence jamming and try to decoy them into a chase-and-counter profile, just like we gamed it. T-Rex, close up on me. We’ll cover their six. Everyone else hold formation and continue lidar scanning for more of them.”

  McClain precessed with his RCS, and his Moray arced onto an adjusted vector. Almost immediately he picked out the thirty contacts that constituted the minefield: a swarm of beehive-networked, AI-controlled torpedoes that were passively lying in wait. OURANIA’s fleet must have deposited them here ahead of the advancing force; with no torch plumes visible to give away their approach, laying such a trap was accomplished without early counterdetection. What was more, the Federov-driven ships placing the minefield had been able to approach from Titan, effortlessly reverse course, and seed the weapons with a velocity vector optimized for a coordinated strike against his own fleet.

  Had the task force executed its midpoint turnover and commenced deceleration hard-burn on schedule, the torpedoes would have been in perfect position for stern-quarter attacks on individual units and would have afforded almost no reaction time. It was a perfectly planned bushwhack, foiled by the intelligence brought back by the Dogstar and the timely warning from Reuben James. Costello knew the enemy force was planning some sort of ambush—hence his unexpected pause and the assumption of a battle posture.

  Bulldogs Five and Six passed within detection range of the torpedoes, their jammers at maximum output. The AI algorithms controlling the weapons saw fighters—not capital ships; the AI brains of the weapons knew their mission, and chasing fighters wasn’t it. The torpedoes sat still, biding their time—the real targets were still coming.

  That decision was reevaluated at machine speed when particle beams from the two fighters lased out and blew apart two of the weapons. An attack signal was immediately sent, and two torpedoes promptly pivoted under RCS thrusters and ignited their powerful miniaturized torches to run down and destroy the offenders before they could degrade the minefield any further.

  “We got their attention!” Bulldog Six announced.

  “Go! Kick it up!” Bulldog Five barked.

  The two Morays pitched up quickly and accelerated, surprising the AIs of the pursuing weapons. The Morays weren’t supposed to be able to exceed about 10-g without killing their own pilots, but the Marine fighters accelerated at 25-g, drawing the pursuing weapons into a direct tail chase. Still, with a 5-g acceleration advantage, the overtake was inevitable before the weapons used up their reaction mass. The torpedoes didn’t have the fine lidar resolution to spot the small KC pods ejected by the Morays. The controlling AIs winked out of existence as the torpedoes ran full-speed into countermeasure clouds and were shredded to pieces.

  “Splash two vampires!” Five called.

  “Good work,” McClain answered back. “Reverse and regroup on me. T-Rex, select EMP—single-round salvo into the center of the formation.”

  “Selected.”

  “On my mark . . . Fire!” he ordered. Two EMP-tipped missiles jetted off the Morays as they closed on the minefield, just as two more enemy torpedoes activated and came straight at them. There wasn’t much time to react—McClain let his combat system autotarget the vampire and cut loose with the particle-beam cannons; the torpedo was destroyed before it could close to kill range and detonate its nuclear warhead. His wingman’s fighter did the same.

  “Splash two more,” Recinto called excitedly.

  On McClain’s order, the two fighters cut thrust, flipped end for end, and throttled back up to maximum acceleration, slowing their advance on the minefield and giving their EMP rounds some lead time. The two missiles flew into the minefield cloud and detonated, wreaking havoc on the torpedoes’ electronic systems.

  These were stock weapons being used by OURANIA, either purchased on the black market or salvaged from captured vessels, not more advanced weapons the computer had designed and manufactured itself. As RADM Branch had observed a few days before, there were limits to what the supercomputer had managed to accomplish prior to the start of the war.

  Twenty-four torpedoes were still showing on lidar, but they appeared to be electronically dead to the two sections of Morays that closed in from offset vectors. “I think you fried ’em, skipper,” Bulldog Five transmitted.

  “Maybe. Give ’em a dose of EMP from your end—both sections will match velocity within the field and lase the cripples.” McClain listened to the acknowledgments and ordered Recinto to cut thrust. The section of Morays flipped nose-on to the minefield again, scanning it intensely with lidar as they watched two more EMP missiles enter the cloud and detonate. Those two McClain could see, ou
t there in the void ahead of him. He let his lidar track the minefield long enough to compute its keplers relative to his own, and then had the computer run a trajectory-matching solution, which he passed to his wingman.

  Bulldog Five was doing the same for her section, and together the four Morays converged and came to a relative stop in the middle of the ravaged cloud of torpedoes. The whole formation was still heading up-well for Titan at almost 4,000 kilometers per second—peak velocity of the fleet at turnover—but with respect to each other they were motionless in a brilliant sea of stars.

  On McClain’s orders, the fighters began burning the minefield to cinders with their particle-beam cannons.

  USS Reuben James

  “Combat, optics. Are you seeing this okay?” the recently promoted LTJG Tanner called from astrogation on the bridge. “I can’t tweak the resolution any further.”

  “We’ve got it, optics,” Ford replied from CDC. On his scope, he watched the odd, indigo-blue flash as four EMP weapons detonated at short intervals. Four tiny torch plumes decelerated into the same region by pairs and then cut thrust. Shortly thereafter, particle-beam fire could be seen arcing out in multiple directions as the Bulldogs put the kibosh on the enemy’s planned ambush.

  LTJG Yoon was currently the Tactical Action Officer, responsible for fighting the ship under Ford’s direction. He was also fixated on the optical display. “Shouldn’t be long now,” he muttered, sounding a little grim and savage.

  Ford silently agreed with him. They’d shadowed the enemy fleet out here when it finally abandoned Titan to intercept TF50—a very difficult task, given the lack of torch plumes. Remaining covert themselves, TF50.5 had lost visual contact with the enemy force, but they felt they had a good estimate of the enemy’s position: directly ahead, between themselves and the minefield. If the ambush had gone as planned, the fleet would have been decimated within seconds. The enemy force could then have eased up on the sterns of the decelerating survivors and finished the job. The problem for the enemy was that the fleet hadn’t begun its deceleration hard-burn. Instead, it was coasting in free fall, arrayed in the best defensive formation it could manage, with its guns literally run out for battle.