Battlespace

by Ian Douglas

  “Uh, no, Sarge. Why—”

  “Regulations,” Corporal Vinton said. “When the fleet went to battle stations, we were ordered in here. This is our battle station.”

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “Didn’t you know, kid?” Cavaco asked. “This here transfer pod is our fuckin’ lifeboat.”

  “That’s right,” Sergeant Houston told them. “If anything happens to the Pecker, they can jettison us before the whole ship goes up.”

  “That’s the idea,” Cavaco said. “And just between us, I don’t care much for the idea of being burned alive inside a transport, no way out and no way to fight back.”

  “Burned…burned alive?”

  “Sure! Oh, I guess it would be quick enough if the bad guys used a nuke on us, but scuttlebutt says they’ve already picked off some of our robot probes with lasers. Or maybe we’d just decompress. But the smart money in the pool says the plastics on board get heated to such high temperatures that the whole hab section of the ship just bursts into flame at something like a thousand degrees Celsius or so. Course, once the air leaks out, the fire goes out, but that doesn’t exactly help the survivors, right?”

  “Sure,” Houston said. “So they’re doing us a favor, see, kid? We get to escape while the brass stays behind and fries.”

  “Yeah,” Cavaco said with a chuckle. “Now, that doesn’t exactly help us personally, of course. You can just imagine…there we are, adrift in space, eight and a half light-years from home, our only way of getting back to Earth…gone.”

  “So how much air do we have in one of these things?” PFC Tremkiss asked. The conversation, Garroway noticed, was fast becoming a round of old hands against the newbies.

  “Oh, enough to last…whatcha think, Wes? Maybe forty-eight hours, including what’s in our suits? At least we won’t have to worry about starving to death.”

  “If we take turns breathing in shifts, yeah, about that,” Houston agreed.

  “Aw, c’mon, guys!” PFC Loren Geisler said. He was another newbie to the platoon and, along with Sergeant Cavaco, was in Garroway’s three-man fire team. “You can only pull the leg so far!”

  “Who’s leg-pulling?” Cavaco asked. “We are very much on the sharp pointy end of the stick, here. We don’t know anything about who we’re fighting. We have no strategic reserve and no backup. Our only way home is the Pecker. And two robot transports don’t have consumables enough to keep over a thousand people alive for very long, even with nanoconverters. We are way up Shit Creek here, gentlemen, and using our helmets to bail.”

  “Do we really not know anything about the enemy?” Tremkiss asked. “I heard scuttlebutt that said they were just An, only they still had starships.”

  “That’s a scary thought,” Garroway said, joining the conversation despite a desire to keep to himself. “They did enough damage with spears. I’m not sure I’d care to meet them in spaceships.”

  “The point is,” Cavaco said, pushing ahead, “maybe the bad guys come pick us up to interrogate us—and maybe they don’t. Maybe some of the other ships in the fleet survived, though, of course, they don’t have the space or the consumables to take us on board.”

  “The Ranger does,” Houston told him.

  “Nah. Not for cybehibe. Not enough tubes. You need an IST for that.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s right.”

  “What I heard,” HM2 Phillip K. Lee put in, “was that if the IST was crippled, they’d pack all of the surviving Marines onboard the Ranger. Nine out of ten would go into the converters to provide food and water for the rest. First they’d ask for volunteers, then the command AI would choose the rest. See, without cybehibe, the ones who were left have to survive on very tight rations for the ten-year trip back home.”

  Several of the others, including Garroway, chuckled at that one. There’d been, of course, a lot of good-natured razzing of the lone Navy man assigned to the platoon, but the corpsman seemed able to give as good as he got.

  “Leave the poor newbies alone,” Corporal Vinton put in. “They have enough to worry about without thinking about cannibalism!”

  The female members of the platoon, Garroway noticed, had not joined in with the hazing. Was that because they were less likely to pile on a guy who was being picked on? Or were their motherly instincts kicking in?

  On second thought, her comment about cannibalism carried its own form of sadism. Arhipov, Tremkiss, and the half dozen or so other newbies in the section must be terrified by now, even if they weren’t buying a word of it.

  “So…why bother putting us in the pods, if it doesn’t matter?” Arhipov said. Garroway could hear the edge to his voice…fear and protest mingled with stress.

  “So we can fight if the bad guys come get us, of course,” Houston told him. “We’re Marines. That’s what we do, right? We fight! We take out as many of the bastards as we can!”

  “Ooh-rah!” Cavaco said. Half a dozen other voices joined in.

  “So if we get cast loose in the next few hours…and if the Pecker buys it and we’re adrift all alone…you just be ready to kill anything that grabs us and takes us aboard, right? I heard the bad guys are really horrible monsters. Three meters tall…six eyes…and the sweet disposition of a Parris Island DI on a bad day.”

  “That bad?” Garroway asked.

  “Worse!” Cavaco laughed, a dry and strained rasp. “Hey, these critters already snatched the Wings of Isis and had the crew and passengers for lunch.”

  Garroway had been enjoying the banter—not to mention the traditional hazing of the FNGs—but that last comment stopped him, made him pull back into his self-imposed shell. He’d been planning on marrying one of those passengers on the Isis—and not even knowing what had happened to her continued to gnaw at him.

  Was there any chance, any chance at all that she’d been alive in alien captivity for the past twenty years?

  It wasn’t likely, and, in fact, he very much hoped she’d died, clean and fast, before having to endure something like that.

  “All right, belay the chatter!” Gunnery Sergeant Dunne ordered. “As you were!”

  Silence returned.

  Then, “Garroway?” It was Dunne. “You okay, son?”

  “Yeah, Gunnery Sergeant. I’m okay.”

  “Good. Stay focused on now, right?”

  “Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant.”

  Dunne, of course, knew about Lynnley. Garroway had talked about the woman often enough over the past few subjective months. He was impressed that the platoon sergeant was concerned about the emotional state of individual men and women in his unit.

  But it only made sense. Dunne was responsible for the combat performance of First Platoon, Alpha Company. He was probably on another private channel right now, checking to make sure that the FNGs hadn’t been scared out of their FNG minds.

  Garroway felt a sharp bump and a surge of acceleration. “Uh-oh,” Houston said. “This may be it!”

  But zero-G returned after only a moment. The Chapultepec must have been performing some minor course correction, and was not entering battle.

  Garroway wished he knew what was going on outside.

  SF/A-2 Starhawk Cassius

  Approaching Stargate Sirius

  2155 hours, Shipboard time

  Cassius continued to receive, record, and retransmit the data from the far-flung network of BMS devices as he piloted the Starhawk slowly above the surface of the huge structure. “Infrared and magnetic scans suggest some type of hatch or entryway bearing one-one-seven, range fifty-five meters, and there are suggestions of a network of passageways beneath the outer hull structure,” he reported. “There may be enough vibrational data to construct a crude seismological map of the objective’s interior structure.”

  There was no reply to any of this from the fleet, of course. After a moment more, however, an order came through on a needle-thin beam, orders from Cassius Prime. “We require a sample of the structure’s surface.”

  “Very well. There has been
no obvious response to my presence. However, the sampling may be construed as an attack.”

  “Affirmative. The fleet is repositioning itself against that possibility.”

  Cassius I-2 could sense the movement of the distant fleet, the vessels drawing farther apart from one another, the smaller warships gently moving closer, a screen between the objective and the Ranger, Chapultepec, and the two transports.

  “Stand by,” he said. “I am about to perform a spectroscopic analyses of the surface material.”

  The surface looked like dark, slightly pitted metal of some sort, but the only way to tell was to zap it with a laser and take a spectroscopic reading as it flashed into vapor. The danger, of course, was that boiling even a centimeter or so of hull metal could easily be interpreted as an attack.

  “Firing now.”

  The Starhawk’s chin laser pulsed—eight hundred megawatts. A puff of metallic vapor expanded into space and Cassius began transmitting the analyses. He’d expected the surface to be some exotic, possibly unknown material, simply because the fast-circling singularities inside the enormous hoop of the gate must create incredible stresses throughout the structure.

  Nickel iron. There were other materials present as well in an unusual amalgam that included traces of manganese, titanium, carbon, and cobalt, but the surface of the object was ninety-seven percent nickel-iron, identical to that found in a typical iron asteroid.

  Cassius’s motion sensors caught the opening hatch seventy meters away and his EM monitors sensed a growing, prickling sensation of fast-building magnetic fields. He fired the Starhawk’s port maneuvering thrusters a tenth of a second before giving full power to the main drive. The radio spectrum howled in an explosion of static, and a powerful magnetic pulse rippled through the Starhawk’s hull.

  He was almost fast enough. The antimatter beam caught the Starhawk’s port wing, melting through it in nanoseconds. Secondary radiation backscattered from the blast cascaded through the Starhawk’s hull. Stars alternated with the black mass of the stargate in a frenzied whirl as the fighter tumbled through space. Cassius tried firing the maneuvering thrusters, calculating each burst to bring the tumble back under control.

  He almost had it….

  Combat Command Center

  UFR/USS Chapultepec 2156 hours, Shipboard time

  “The Starhawk is gone, General,” Anderson reported, her voice level.

  “My iteration appears to have gone through the stargate,” Cassius added. “I am no longer receiving data from him.”

  Ramsey blinked, startled. Cassius sounded almost sad…though AIs could not feel emotion. Was that a programming effect, he wondered…something added by the original programmer to make Cassius seem more human?

  “We’ve got vehicles emerging from the structure,” Admiral Harris said, his voice sharp.

  “Goddess!” Ramsey breathed. On the screens and in his mind, it looked as though the stargate was dribbling away pieces of itself…each piece a ship of decidedly alien design.

  “I think,” Harris added, “we can assume the fleet is under attack.”

  11

  30 MARCH 2170

  Combat Command Center

  UFR/USS Chapultepec

  2157 hours, Shipboard time

  “Admiral Harris,” Dominick said, “I suggest we deploy for combat.”

  “We’re as deployed as we can be, General…all except the fighters.”

  Hours ago, Harris had ordered the two frigates Daring and Courageous to move out ahead of the main battle group. They were in the van, now, creating an outer defensive line in front of the battle group.

  “General Ramsey? What about your fighters?”

  Ramsey thought-clicked to the Marine aerospace channel. “Colonel Nolan? Status, please.”

  Charles Nolan was the CAG—Commander Aerospace Group—for the two squadrons of Marine fighters stationed onboard the carrier Ranger, 5-and 7-MAS.

  “Five-MAS is on ready five, General,” Nolan voice replied over the command network. Five-MAS was the sixteen Marine Starhawk fighters of the Fifth Marine Aerospace Squadron, a space-based fighter group informally known as the Redtails. Ready five meant they were ready for launch on five minutes’ notice. The pilots had clambered into their craft and plugged themselves in when the fleet went to battle stations, some three hours ago.

  “We can launch one squadron in five minutes, General Dominick,” Ramsey told him. “The other I’d like to keep in reserve for close-fleet support.”

  “I have completed a full analyses of the objects launched toward us from the stargate,” Cassius said. “Two hundred seven objects mass less than fifty kilograms and do not appear to be capable of independent acceleration. They may be automated probes or battlespace sensors, similar to our Argus probes. Twelve are significantly larger and appear to be independently maneuverable. They are probably spacecraft, possibly manned, and may represent a significant threat to this battlegroup.”

  “Thank you, Cassius,” Dominick said. “Gentlemen…ladies…I think it’s time to launch the fighters. General Ramsey?”

  “Agreed, General. The farther off we stop them, the better.”

  “I concur. Tell your Colonel Nolan he may launch.”

  “Aye aye, General. The countdown is beginning, t-minus five minutes.”

  “The military mind,” Dr. Franz said with a growl after a moment, “will never cease to amaze me. You don’t understand something…so you kill it.”

  “I might point out, Dr. Franz,” Ramsey replied, “that they started it. Destroying several probes and our Starhawk were not exactly acts of friendly diplomacy.”

  “But we don’t know how they are perceiving us,” Franz insisted. “They could simply be reacting to the Starhawk’s sampling of the stargate’s surface!”

  “Maybe so,” Dominick put in. “For right now, though, we have a number of…objects heading our way at a relative velocity of almost six kilometers per second. They may be missiles. They may be fighters. Hell, they could be peace envoys, for all I know, but until we have more information, our first priority is to safeguard the battle group.”

  If we can was Ramsey’s unvoiced addition to Dominick’s words.

  SF/A-2 Starhawk Talon Three

  Launch Bay 1, CVS Ranger

  2158 hours, Shipboard time

  Captain Greg Alexander, call sign Pooner, ran through the prelaunch one final time, letting the checklist scroll up through his consciousness. Talon Three was hot, taut, and ready.

  He was sitting in a near-darkness relieved only by the green glow of his instrument panel. The fighter didn’t have a canopy with a physical view of the surroundings; the pilot relied on a direct data feed through his interface to see what was going on around him. At the moment, however, there was nothing to see in any case. Talon Three was resting inside its launch tube, its flight surfaces folded tight about the fuselage like a black shroud.

  “Okay, chicks,” a voice said over the squadron command channel. He was Major Lucas Gauthier and he was the commanding officer of the Fifth Marine Aerospace Squadron. “We’re up. Launch in five mikes.”

  “About freakin’ time, Talon Nine,” Lieutenant Maria Oliviero grumbled. “I think my ass just welded itself to the seat.”

  “Hey, skipper?” Alexander said. “Just what are we up against?”

  “PriFly is opening the tactical feed now. Take a look.” PriFly was Primary Flight Control, the command group for all aerospace operations off the carrier.

  And access to the tactical feed meant they now could see outside of their pitch-black launch tubes. Alexander thought-clicked a command and opaque walls faded into invisibility. It was as though he were adrift, suspended in the depths of space.

  What he was seeing was, in fact, more simulation than reality. Several Argus probes and a large number of BMS devices were still functioning in the immediate vicinity of the stargate. With the loss of Cassius I-2, those devices had lost their link with the fleet, but the Argus probes were smart enough
to create a new data network, select one of their own as a relay, and continue transmission. The MIEU’s tactical computers onboard the Chapultepec analyzed the data and created a picture of what was probably out there, together with a percentage of confidence in the result.

  Alexander scowled as he watched the oddly shaped spacecraft suddenly disperse from the stargate. It appeared as though they’d been hidden there, disguised as part of the ring structure. Flying free, they appeared in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes, from angular fragments smaller than a Starhawk, smaller even than a Marine Wasp, to things the size of a fair-sized building, as massive, roughly, as one of the fleet’s frigate gunships. The hulls were black, very black. The smooth, seemingly organic curves and the way those hulls drank light suggested an advanced stealth technology and even the technically augmented human eye had difficulty tracking them.

  The image was less than perfect, with digital dropout noise and a grainy look that contrasted sharply with the crystal-clear sharpness of the stars and illuminated dust fields beyond.

  “Sixty-five percent confidence?” Alexander said over the squadron channel. “Why not just say they don’t know what the hell those things are and be done with it?”

  “Stow it, Pooner,” Gauthier replied. “Stand by for acceleration.”

  They were in zero-gravity at the moment. Like the Cha- pultepec, Ranger possessed rotating hab modules to provide out-is-down spin-gravity for crew and passengers, but the launch bays were located along the long spine aft, two blocks mounted like outriggers, with the launch tubes parallel to the carrier’s backbone and aimed aft, past the drive venturi. Earlier space carriers had been designed with rotating launch bays designed to “drop” fighters using spin gravity, but improvements in plasma propulsion technology allowed a slicker and more efficient means—momentarily channeling the plasma drive’s magnetic impulse into the launch tubes. Some hours earlier, Ranger had maneuvered so that she was pointed stern-first at the stargate, now a hundred thousand kilometers distant, her two fighter squadrons aimed at the structure like waiting bullets in a giant gun.

  Minutes crawled, as Ranger’s fusion reactor built up the power necessary for launch. There were two moments in every space carrier aerospace op that every aviator hated and feared, and this was one of them.