Singularity Point

by Brian Smith

  “Coming up on initial point,” Worm called a while later. “We’re slow.”

  “Throttling up. Watch our hull temps, will ya?”

  “Got it. There’s the initial point. . . . Mark! We’re on the run! Imagers are rolling. Jammer output. . . . Well, it’s been maxed out the whole damn time. Let ’er rip, boss!”

  Ashburn let out a whoop as he took the Dogstar supersonic-bordering-on-hypersonic. Outside, a rosy red glow broke the blackness as the outer hull of the Dogstar began heating up as if she were in the reentry phase again. Worm could see it, but Ashburn couldn’t, because Ashburn was in virtual; the picture he was seeing was being generated artificially. The last thing he needed at the moment was the distraction, in any case.

  Ashburn turned his head to the left and looked out at the far horizon. The kinetic rounds had all struck the coordinates of Janus Station and OURANIA’s node web some time ago. Now it was a matter of seeing whether the deed was actually done or not. He thought he discerned a dim, cherry-colored glow out there in the murk—which made sense. Each hit would have been like a small nuke; he didn’t see how Janus Station could possibly have survived it.

  “Well? Anything breaking out?” he asked Worm impatiently.

  “Looks funny,” Worm grunted. “Take her up a bit, Dakota. Give me a little more down-angle on the imagers.”

  “Roger,” Ashburn replied. He took the ship up to a thousand meters and began hawking the threat receiver.

  “Take a look at this,” Worm prompted. “Tell me what you make of it.”

  “Your flight controls. Watch the threat box,” Ashburn ordered.

  “My controls,” Worm replied.

  Ashburn came out of virtual and took a look at the imagers. Instead of where he should have seen nothing but a new field of craters, a large area encompassing Janus Station was showing up null on lidar and radar as if the area were a dead spot, or he was scanning vacuum out to maximum range. Ashburn understood that it meant the lidar and radar beams were being absorbed—there simply wasn’t any return at all—when Titan’s surface should have been plainly visible. On infrared, a warm glow showed in the general shape of a flattened, ellipsoid dome that covered the entire site. As he watched, the heat levels slowly dropped back toward ambient. He wondered how hot they’d been in the moments immediately after impact.

  “Well?” Worm prompted him.

  Ashburn cursed. “I don’t think we did any damage. I—”

  “We’ve got company,” Worm interrupted. “Two fast movers coming up our cornhole.”

  “Missiles?”

  “Fighters. Or spaceplanes. Something. They’re coming in hot.”

  “My controls,” Ashburn replied immediately, taking them and shifting back into virtual.

  He winced as a particle beam split the darkness to port, slashing down and under them. He reacted without thinking and cut thrust as he pitched them back, sending the Dogstar clawing momentarily for altitude. He used the RCS jets to flip the ship onto her back and then throttled up hard and simultaneously rolled her back to level. The Dogstar suddenly converted from a rear-aspect sitting duck to a hard-charger in a game of chicken. It was a move that would have overstressed and destroyed any spaceplane that didn’t have the KF-1 mod, so the maneuver was completely unexpected by the enemy.

  Both pursuing spaceplanes—and Ashburn could see now that they were simply smaller spaceplanes converted into makeshift fighters; they were not actual fighters—broke in opposite directions in a panic to avoid a collision. Dogstar One blew through their vacated track like a bull in a china shop.

  Now that Ashburn had the bandits thoroughly in disarray, he eased the Dogstar into the vertical and increased her acceleration. The ship was pulling 16-g in the climb and not feeling a thing, thanks to the inertial dampeners. Her pursuers, on the other hand, sluggishly pitched up after the Dogstar and were probably howling in their straps under the 7-g they were managing—especially if they’d been spending their down time in Titan’s weak gravity. . . . unless they’re piloted by AIs or synths, Ashburn thought a moment later.

  Dogstar One left their pursuers behind as if the bandits were standing still; Worm slewed the cannon around and tried to score his first aerial victory, but they were opening the range too rapidly and his shot was a clean miss. He let out a frustrated curse as Dogstar One broke Titan’s atmo.

  Ashburn checked their position against plotted threats, chose a safe vector, and put on the whole 40-g. Titan receded visibly behind them as the Dogstar rapidly picked up speed, heading generally outbound from Saturn on a somewhat random tangent. They still had more than two-thirds of their reaction mass—and they were hours away from being even remotely fuel critical, even with combat-level mass expenditures.

  Once they cleared the threat area, Ashburn cut thrust and began working on the keps for rendezvous with Vanguard. He felt a little dumb for doing it; once the ship spotted them heading back, she’d just close and match velocity and they’d simply dock. He didn’t need anything approximating a precise trajectory calculation anymore—all he really needed to do was head in Vanguard’s general direction and she’d detect their EM emissions and have an immediate bearing line on them.

  Old habits die hard, he thought—it just felt sloppy not to do it.

  Once the Dogstar was on course for home, Worm pivoted casually toward his partner. “What was that you were saying about ‘no damage’?”

  “The heat from the impacts was uniform across that dome shape, but there wasn’t anything solid there. Lidar and radar were blank, which means they were being absorbed. Without getting all technical, that says ‘energy screen’ to me, or ‘force field,’ or some damn thing like that. Janus Station is still sitting pretty underneath it, is my guess.”

  “Well, crap,” Worm grunted. “Guess the war ain’t quite over yet, then, is it? Say— How the hell is something like that even possible? Force fields? What the hell?”

  Ashburn blew out a tired sigh. “It’s just an engineering problem.”

  July 19, 2094 (Terran Calendar)

  Task Force 50

  5th Fleet Refueling Station, Calypso

  “That’s a lot of sweet, sweet jamming,” T-Rex Recinto called as the Five-Two closed on Calypso. “That Dogstar rocks it!”

  “I’m not going to tell you again, Bulldog Two—button it!” A.J. McClain snarled over the radio. His new wingman had an unfortunate tendency to deal with stress by running off at the mouth.

  “Bulldog Lead, DCAG. You good on the target sort?”

  “Affirm.”

  “Follow me in, then. Bengal Leader, commit.”

  “Acknowledged. Bulldog Leader, commit.” The Marine squadrons throttled up on the mark, peeling off by pairs and accelerating for the first attack run on Calypso.

  Following the engagement at midpoint turnover four days before, what remained of TF50 was low on reaction mass, and unless they wanted to wait days for tankers from cislunar space, they needed a local refueling depot. Retaking Calypso had always been planned as a side operation, but it was originally tasked to HMS Invincible and her embarked commando of Royal Marines, to be handled after Janus Station was dealt with. Again, the realities of warfare were forcing everyone to modify their plans and schedules. Janus Station was proving a much tougher objective than anticipated, and the fleet needed deuterium sooner rather than later in order to conduct sustained combat operations.

  The damaged Invincible was scheduled to attempt her first deceleration burn today; she was already well past Saturn and drifting farther up-well every minute. Vanguard was standing by to go after her and tow her, depending on how well Invincible’s repairs held up; VADM Costello was seriously missing her firepower and flight decks, given the latest change in circumstances on Titan.

  In the meantime, the operation to retake the Calypso fuel station had fallen to USS Ranger, her MAG, and her company-size Marine detachment.

  Calypso was a small, oblong, potato-shaped asteroid with a mean radius of approximat
ely ten kilometers and no gravity to speak of. Situated around the moon were several lidar and radar stations, some of which could provide targeting data for the “big gun” particle-beam turret spotted by Dogstar One on her first reconnaissance about a week prior.

  Former Barsoom Traders torchship Olvia Marthis was suspiciously absent. She’d moved off at some point during the midpoint-turnover engagement, when all TOA forces were several AU distant. An extensive optical search of the surrounding space hadn’t turned up her torch plume; she had either briefly accelerated away with her torch and “gone dark” to stay stealthy, or she was retrofitted with a Federov drive. If it were the latter, then she remained a one-ship “fleet in being” almost as dangerous as any warship.

  Night’s Minnow had been conspicuously absent from the previous action as well, and command knew she was retrofitted with a Federov drive. Hijacked torchships Issus and Janai remained unaccounted for as well—neither had been sighted at all since December first.

  The fleet’s best hope was that they could deal with any further surprises OURANIA had for them as these occurred, but it was clear that the final outcome of this campaign was nowhere near decided. In the meantime, they needed the Calypso depot—intact.

  “Bulldog Lead to all sections, commence attack runs. Lead is in hot,” McClain directed, throttling up. His squadron followed him in, and targets came up in his HUD—bracketed, prioritized, and locked in. He selected the kinetic rail pods attached to his inboard-wing hardpoints. When he fired, a dozen miniature tungsten lances salvoed one after another. In rapid succession. The pod slewed slightly between each shot, sending each lance on a slightly different trajectory. Around and behind him, his squadron fired their lances as well.

  The pod-firing mechanisms weren’t true railguns but depended on the “starting velocity” provided by the fighters themselves to impart their killing energy. They were purely ballistic weapons, for use in specific environments and circumstances. They couldn’t be jammed, hacked, or spoofed, which was their real utility right now. They arced in unerringly, on trajectories computed as precisely as those used by a torchship.

  One by one the lances hit their targets, literally blasting them to fragments with sheer kinetic force. The enemy’s sensor net surrounding Calypso and speckling the moon’s surface was taken down inside of a minute. Bulldogs Seven and Eight, the last section to make the pass, fired EMP rounds that detonated around and against the fueling station itself—the worry was that it might be manned by Omnisynths or had been remotely rigged to self-destruct if attacked, and would thereby deprive the fleet of its utility.

  McClain had thought the likelihood of an enemy self-destruct order was high, but Costello was betting on the notion that OURANIA still thought it could win and that OURANIA ultimately needed the depot as much as TF50 did. In any event, the hope was that the EMP saturation would wreck any remote detonators—or synths.

  Unfortunately, enemy optical sensors were harder to spot and destroy, because they were totally passive in nature—they didn’t radiate any form of detectable emission. Somewhere on Calypso, such an optical sensor locked onto a Moray of the Five-One as the ship made its firing pass. Although she was being careful to stay out of the engagement arc of the large surface emplacement, it was impossible to avoid it entirely. The turret suddenly came to life, pivoting and firing in one motion.

  Not far away, McClain saw the twin particle beams split the void, lancing out and touching Bengal Three. The Moray blew apart brilliantly, although the vacuum of space snuffed the conflagration almost as quickly.

  McClain seized the moment without conscious thought—it was a warrior’s reaction, pure and simple. He instinctively knew that the turret was pointed away from him for the next second or two. There wasn’t time to do anything like check the numbers. He simply reacted, taking manual control of the Moray and adjusting trajectory by eye, throttling his acceleration up to the max: 30-g. The location of the turret was already plotted, thanks to the prior reconnaissance work of Dogstar One. He swung the Moray’s particle-beam cannon around, locking on and opening up even before he came over the curved horizon and into line of sight.

  Fortunately, the attacking Morays had already taken down the sensors that would have provided any advance warning of McClain’s approach from over the horizon. If an optical sensor had already picked up his desperation run, then it would be a race to achieve firing position before the turret could track and fire.

  McClain’s particle beams cut a straight stitch in the regolith of Calypso as he came into LOS; his imagers were “padlocked” onto the turret. He saw the twin barrels swing toward him when his beams cut into it cleanly, and barely remembered to cease firing before his flight path could walk his fire into the fueling depot itself—not an acceptable outcome.

  The turret sparked and ruptured in an impressive secondary explosion, splitting almost in two and jarring halfway off its mount. The padlocked imagers swung as McClain passed over, conducting an immediate BDA. It was a hard kill. Taking down the large surface weapon was one of the sticking points of the operation, and McClain had just solved it for them all.

  Ooh-rah! he cried exultantly to himself.

  “Homer, break left! You’ve got two trailers!” Recinto called desperately, using McClain’s well-known but rarely used call sign.

  McClain swore and reefed the Moray into a widely arcing turn; there was no such thing as a hard break when accelerating at 30-g. “KC twice!” he warned, firing two KC pods as he said it. It was a heads-up call since the countermeasures posed as great a threat to his trailing wingman as they did to the enemy. McClain proceeded to jink at random—once, twice, three times, expecting to be consumed in a brief explosion of heat and fire anytime in the next few eyeblinks.

  Recinto had been taken by surprise; he had watched aghast as Bengal Three was obliterated. Next thing he knew, his section leader had peeled away at full throttle without a word of warning, the torch plume burning behind his Moray as bright as a blue-white sun.

  Recinto had gone after McClain, but well in trail, due to his late reaction; he saw McClain take out the turret, and the two drone fighters rise from the piping of the fueling depot and accelerate after him like torpedoes.

  Recinto called the threat and began maneuvering to cover his leader’s six—just like he’d learned in the weapons phase of his recent FRS training. One of the trailing drone fighters hit the countermeasure cloud and vanished in a brief explosion; Recinto understood what had happened even as McClain called it and adjusted his own flight path to avoid the threat.

  McClain’s Moray twisted and writhed defensively, akin to the eel for which it was named, as his torch plume swung wildly around the sky. The drone fired a particle beam that missed so narrowly that Recinto originally thought it had hit. When McClain’s fighter didn’t burn up, Recinto made the necessary mental adjustment. In the meantime, his lidar boresighted and locked up the bandit; he fired his particle-beam cannon before it even finished tracking onto target. The red-orange beam split space, adjusting unerringly onto target, and cut into the drone, blowing it away.

  “Splash two!” Recinto called excitedly. “Cut thrust, skipper! Your tail is clear!”

  “Multiple bandits, coming off the depot,” they heard Skate Hess call a moment later. “Commit! Three is engaged offensive!” A slew of other calls came as well, from both Bengals and Bulldogs. McClain’s heavy burst of acceleration and wild maneuvering had him falling rapidly away from Calypso; Recinto was still with him.

  McClain precessed to point his nose back at the furball; he painted a half dozen stock-drone bandits against more than twice as many Morays—long odds for even an AI enemy, when pitted against two Marine squadrons in KF-1 modded fighters. He cut in a hard-burn to move back to Calypso and reengage, with Recinto wordlessly sliding out into a combat spread. By the time they were back in firing range, it was over.

  Bulldog Seven was down, as was Bengal Four, but so were all the drones. There was a pregnant pause of a
minute as they all came to the gradual realization that the battle for the space around Calypso was finally over.

  “CAG, this is strike leader,” MAJ Khatri called. “You’re cleared in.”

  LTCOL Anderson, the group commander, was a dropship pilot. He was currently standing off nearby with two dropships loaded with Marines. “On our way. Deploy your squadrons to englobe Calypso and provide cover for the assault. Well fought, Devil Dogs,” he added.

  “Ooh-rah!” Recinto screamed in reply—right over the channel.

  McClain mentally gritted his teeth but realized he was actually grinning from ear to ear. He was feeling a little giddy himself—giddy at surviving the last five minutes. He tamped down his first impulse, which was to rip his wingman a new one right on the radio. T-Rex had just saved his ass, after all. He mentally filed away the matter of comm discipline for now—he’d deal with it later.

  Then, under MAJ Khatri’s orders, both squadrons moved to surround the tiny moon, which really didn’t rate as more than a small asteroid.

  CAG Anderson took his dropships in unmolested, and two full platoons of Marine Corps infantry assaulted Calypso, but without their usual drone augmentation. The refueling depot was secured within ninety minutes following a fierce, zero-g firefight between the landing force and a small group of determined but heavily outnumbered, outgunned Omnisynths. The latter were destroyed down to the last unit.

  When it was all done, the Marines symbolically raised the Stars and Stripes over the recaptured U.S. territory. They’d brought Old Glory with them just for the occasion.

  Chapter 22

  July 20, 2094 (Terran Calendar)

  Task Force 50

  Saturnian System

  VADM Costello leaned back in his seat in flag plot and sipped at a bulb of coffee. Calypso was secure; he had already issued the order to his operations officer to begin shifting the fleet there.

  It was an easy stationkeeping position, since Calypso itself was at the L5 point behind the moon Tethys. The fleet could refuel, and he intended to fortify that position while they figured out how to handle the force field—or whatever it was—protecting Janus Station and OURANIA. His fighter squadrons had “peeled the onion” and systemically taken down all orbiting lidar and radar stations the enemy had deployed in Saturnian space. He figured OURANIA must be feeling pretty blind right now. Less than a full day after decelerating into the area, he had secured his fuel supply and eradicated most (if not all) of the enemy’s space-based active-sensor capability. Hyperion was still a problem, but as an objective it remained secondary. Circumstances had forced Costello to go after Calypso, and his Marines had come through for him in a big way. Slowly but surely, he was isolating Titan and OURANIA.