Star Strike: Book One of the Inheritance Trilogy (The Inheritance Trilogy, Book 1)

by Ian Douglas

  “Private Garroway,” Achilles2 said. “We need to adjust course.”

  Shaking himself, Garroway tore his gaze away from that incredible starfield vista, and looked instead for the local star. He knew it should be that way, since part of his mission download had included data brought back from Marine recon flights into this space.

  And there it was…a mottled, red-orange disk easily three times larger in apparent size than Sol appeared from Earth, its light stopped down by the alien vessel’s optics—or by Achilles2—to keep his eyeballs from frying. Garroway nudged, and the alien trigger ship responded, swinging to bring the crosshairs over the star.

  “Jonah, this is Mars,” sounded in his mind. “Do you copy?”

  “I hear you, sir.” He shifted his attention around to the other side, where brilliant flashes of light were sparkling in the distance, off to one side of the Gate. The Mars was quite close—several kilometers, her scarred hull clearly visible by the ruddy glow of the local star. The other ships of the MIEF were scattered across the sky, attempting to avoid the relentless approach of some twenty Xul hunterships of various shapes and sizes. Twelve light-seconds away, sunward, his sensors showed a large, stationary complex of some sort…obviously a large Xul orbital fortress. More Xul ships were emerging from it as he watched.

  “Okay,” Captain Angi’s voice said. “We have you on lidar. Your range to the local sun is now seven point one-three light-minutes. The flight profile calls for you to go through at five c…so that puts the detonation at one point four two six minutes, that’s one minute, twenty-five point five six seconds. If all goes well, the star blows and the wave-front reaches us seven minutes and eight seconds after that…so call it eight and a half minutes after you engage your drive. We will time our maneuver from that moment.”

  “Right, Captain,” Garroway replied. All of this had been downloaded to him already, but the confirmation—being certain that everyone was operating on the same wavelength—was vital.

  “With luck, you’ll pass through the star and emerge on the other side. Just keep your drive on long enough to clear the radiation front, and you should be okay.”

  He could hear the unbelief in Angi’s mental voice. The guy was whistling in the dark. Or he was convinced that Garroway was on a suicide run, and lying to spare Garroway’s feelings.

  “I was told to hold my speed at five c and to stay in warp for an hour after I hit the core,” Garroway said. “That will put me five light-hours from the star, which should be plenty of space.”

  There was no reply at first. More Xul Type I’s and Type II’s were converging rapidly on the MIEF squadron, and the Mars had just taken a savage burst of particle-beam fire. The battlecruiser lurched, rolling heavily to starboard, already slewing to port to return fire with her main gun.

  “You’d better get going,” Angi told him. “Good luck, Marine. God go with you!”

  “You, too,” Garroway said. “Looks like you may need Him more than me.”

  He checked his targeting cursor, which was centered perfectly on the red-orange globe of the local star. “Are we set, Achilles?”

  “All systems on-line,” the AI said. “Ready at your command….”

  He gave the thought-click order, and the universe—MIEF fleet, Xul attackers, red-orange star, and that incredible background vista of star clouds all blinked out of existence….

  26

  1012.1102

  Jonah

  Cygni Space/Starwall Space

  1258 hrs GMT

  Garroway took careful note of the time—1258 hours, nine seconds. From the instant Achilles2 engaged the Alcubierre Drive to the center of the star, the flight time should be one minute, twenty-five seconds. An abstract part of his mind wondered about acceleration; did a ship under this alien version of the Alcubierre Drive leap instantly to 5c? Or, as with human ships, did it take a few minutes to build up to speed from a standing start?

  Then he realized that the flight profile called for a mean velocity of five times the speed of light. It might well take seconds or even as much as a minute to build up to speed, but if so, Achilles2 would take the craft up to more than 5c in order to compensate for the lost time at lower speeds. He started to set the problem up—a simple enough bit of calculus—then decided it really didn’t matter. He didn’t know enough about the trigger ship’s capabilities. Gods willing, Achilles2 did. If he didn’t, they were all in a lot of trouble.

  He wondered what the star’s name was. No one had told him. But then, Starwall Space was supposed to be eighteen thousand light-years away from Sol. You wouldn’t even be able to see this star from Earth, save as a part of the misty backdrop of the Milky Way, somewhere in the constellation of Sagittarius.

  The data he possessed did say that the star was a Type K0 IV giant, with a diameter of about three times that of Earth’s sun—make it 4, no, 4.2 million kilometers. That would be…he ran a quick calc, and blinked with surprise. Fourteen light-seconds. That was big….

  And at 5c, it would take his trigger ship just under three whole seconds to pass all the way through the star. Somehow, when they’d told him he would be flying faster than light through the heart of a star, he’d thought he would be in and out so fast he wouldn’t even notice. He’d had no idea it would take that long to make the passage.

  Thirty seconds to go….

  He did wish he could see out. There was no sensation of movement or acceleration whatsoever, and not a glimmer of light from the outside. Considering where he was about to go, this was a good thing, he knew. If that glimmer was able to reach him, by the time the trigger ship hit the star’s photosphere the energy would be enough to vaporize the ship.

  Ten seconds.

  He wondered if he would feel the star’s gravity. No…gravitational effects should be shunted aside by the warp bubble as well. According to the experts, he ought to be so completely cocooned in that bubble that he would feel nothing at all…in another five…four…three…two…

  In fact it felt like hitting a brick wall. He felt a violent shock, so hard the interior of his armor instantly embraced him in something like a thick, gelatinous foam to take up some of the impact.

  And the shock continued, dragging on for what seemed like an eternity, and which in fact lasted less than three seconds.

  Garroway was unconscious by the time he emerged from the star….

  UCS Hermes

  Stargate

  Aquila Space

  1259 hrs GMT

  “Okay,” Alexander said, as his internal clock flickered past 1259 and thirty-four seconds. “Time.”

  A QCC message flashed over from the Mars had given them the word. Garroway had switched to Alcubierre Drive at 1258:09 and vanished; at 1259:34 he should have reached the center of the target star. As the seconds continued ticking, Garroway would be hurtling out the other side, and the star should be rebounding in upon itself after the hyper-c shockwave of the passing warp bubble tunneling through its heart.

  A second clock was now counting down from seven minutes, eight seconds. That was how long the wave-front would take to reach the stargate from the detonating star.

  The problem was, they were operating in unknown territory, here. The passage of the warp bubble should trigger a nova, yes. The Eulers had done this sort of thing at least five times before in their past. But the explosion probably—emphasis on probably—wouldn’t be instantaneous. Theory said the wave of compressing, then expanding space within the star’s core would create a massive shockwave that would force the star to begin collapsing upon itself. At some point, the star’s mass would rebound, hurtling outward as a titanic explosion…but just how long would that take? Several seconds? A minute? Hell…a week?

  They didn’t have a week, of course. The Xul Type II was still bearing down upon them. Hermes shuddered under another direct hit.

  “Tug Four is gone,” Taggart said. “We’re more adrift now than under power.”

  Alexander was studying the tactical situation.
The Xul ship was still 500 kilometers away, almost directly between the Gate and the retreating Hermes. The Hermes was accelerating outbound from the Gate, but slowly, slowly, as enemy fire continued to rake her.

  “Just how hard up are we?” he asked Taggart.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Look, it may be a bit late, but something just occurred to me. The blast from that nova is going to hit the other side of that gate just seven minutes from now. Do we want to be here when it does?”

  “Oh, my God….”

  “I suggest, Admiral, that we find a way to put some lateral acceleration on this thing, see if we can nudge ourselves out of the line of fire….”

  “You’re right.” A pause. “Damn.”

  “What?”

  “General, I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

  “Can we translate?”

  “I was just checking that. The quantum tap converters are junk. We barely have enough battery and capacitor power right now to keep firing.”

  “Can we change the Gate’s tuning?” If the stargate was open to another region of space—back to Puller 659, for instance—the Gate would effectively be closed when the energy from the exploding star reached it.

  “No go. Navigation says they think the Xul are overriding our signals somehow. They tried to connect, and couldn’t. We signaled both Lejeune and Chosin, and they couldn’t get through, either.”

  “They may have locked the Gate open, so that if our people come back through, they know they arrive here.”

  “Good possibility.”

  No one had any idea what would happen when the star blew on the other side of the Gate. The immediate effect would be light and hard radiation, a very great deal of both. Traveling at the speed of light, they would hit the Gate seven minutes and a few seconds after the star exploded.

  The second effect would actually be worse. Heavier particles and white-hot plasma would be following that initial wave front, lagging behind by about twenty minutes. Finally, the main body of stellar debris—a fast-expanding shell of intensely hot plasma—might take a day to reach the Gate. The light and radiation of the first front, though, would be more than enough to cause a great deal of hurt if it was able to pass through the open Gate.

  “We may still have one chance,” Alexander said. “Let’s try something….”

  UCS Mars

  Stargate

  Starwall Space

  1306 hrs GMT

  Captain Angi checked his time readout. “Okay, everyone,” he said over the FleetNet. “Heads up, now. If that Marine did his job, the star should have blown and the wave-front ought to be on its way. We have thirty more seconds to go.”

  The battle continued to flash and flame around them as the Xul ships closed in. Commanding the flotilla, Angi had directed all surviving ships to align themselves in a particular direction, aimed at the stars. Navigational officers on every ship in the fleet had their full attention focused on the local star, which continued to burn peacefully in the distance.

  Strange to think that, if all had gone as planned, the star was already destroyed, already a blazing nova.

  The light just hadn’t reached them yet.

  Fifteen seconds.

  For this to work, they couldn’t just slip into Alcubierre Drive at the seven minutes, eight seconds mark. No one knew just how long it would take for the star’s core to rebound and detonate, and, evidently, the Eulers hadn’t been able to explain that part.

  That meant that human eyes and AI senses would be studying the star intently, and the word would not be given until some sign of instability was detected.

  How long that would be was anybody’s guess.

  The UCS Alcyone was gone, crushed from existence by the unseen fist of a Xul force weapon. The Hera and the Salamone both were drifting, helpless wrecks. Other ships were taking hellish damage.

  This could not go on much longer….

  “Ares? Give me a count, please.”

  Ares was the Mars’ shipboard AI, and Angi’s personal assistant. “Five seconds,” the AI murmured in his thoughts. “Four…three…two…one…mark. And counting. Plus two…plus three…plus four…”

  “Never mind the second-by-second rundown,” he told the AI. “Is everyone ready to go at the word?”

  “All ships, all stations, report ready, Captain.”

  “Okay. Commence acceleration, but gravitics only. Ten gravities.”

  “Accelerating, ten gravities. Aye, aye.”

  But not all of the survivors of 1MIEF could manage ten gravities. The destroyer Ganga was barely able to make two. Two of the Valkyries, Skuld and Radgrid, were close in against a Xul Type II, pounding away at the monster at point-blank range. Either they didn’t get the word, or their drives were dead. They weren’t moving.

  Angi stared into the sullen image of the star. Do something, damn it, he thought. Do some—

  “Spectral shift in the star!” a voice called over the Net. “Going to blue!…”

  “It’s going!”

  “All commands,” Angi yelled. “Execute! Execute! Execute!”

  And in rapid succession, the MIEF warships began winking out of existence.

  UCS Hermes

  Stargate

  Aquila Space

  1306 hrs GMT

  “Captain Angi just gave the execute order,” Taggart said.

  “Here it comes, then,” Garroway said. “How are we doing?”

  “Not good, but we’re moving….”

  Hermes massed some two million tons, the carrier Lejeune just over 87,000 tons, but the carrier’s gravitics were still in good shape and she packed a hell of a lot of thrust. Admiral Forsythe, the Lejeune’s skipper, had brought the carrier up to Hermes’ massive flank, pressed her blunt nose up against the hull, and begun pushing, hard.

  They’d only had time for a couple of minutes of thrust, and the Xul ship appeared to be trying to target the carrier now deliberately…but the vast bulk of the Hermes was moving out of a direct line with the stargate’s lumen.

  This might all be for nothing, Garroway thought, lying in the Ops couch and waiting for death as the Xul ship fired a final volley, or death as a star exploded through the Gate. One of the minor mysteries of the Gate was that light and other radiation did not normally pass through the central opening. That was why you couldn’t signal through an open gateway with radio, or look through from one side to see an entirely different starscape on the other. The physics boys were still arguing about that one; the favored theory was that the gate was open in tiny, discrete instants of time. Why that would block visible light and not a slow-moving starship, though, was not translatable into something approaching standard Anglic.

  The face of the Stargate, the space within the rim, was starting to glow.

  Maybe it just took a lot of light….

  The Gate’s face grew brighter, taking on the aspect of a shining, flat disk. Hermes and Lejeune were almost out of the shaft of light emerging from the Gate, now, almost but not quite. Damage control reported radiation levels rising in the illuminated portion of the ship.

  The Xul Type II was still squarely in front of the Gate, one side of its hull sharply illuminated now by the rapidly increasing glare, the other half in utterly black shadow.

  “Make to the Lejeune!” Alexander told Cara. “Give us more thrust!”

  “Captain Forsythe reports he is at one hundred twenty percent power now. His power tap feed is threatening to overload.”

  “Tell him it won’t matter if we can’t get the hell out of the way!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lejeune’s thrust increased. Alexander could actually feel a slight shudder passing through the couch beneath his back, a kind of steady, building thrum as the carrier served as an immense tug, maneuvering the Goliath Hermes aside.

  “We’re clear, General….”

  “Thank God!”

  The Xul vessel had stopped firing, had stopped accelerating, and now was drifting i
n that hellfire glare.

  Probes still within the shaft of light from the stargate reported soaring radiation levels…and then, in rapid succession, they died.

  “Make to Samar,” Alexander said after a long, exhausted moment. “Tell them…tell them PFC Garroway has successfully completed his mission.”

  Cygni Space/Starwall Space

  1307 hrs GMT

  Nova light flooded circumambient space.

  Type IV giant stars do not, as a rule, possess planetary systems, and this one was no exception. It did possess a fair amount of asteroidal debris, and the commune of intelligence known as We Who Are, millennia before, had used that material to build one of their primary nodes.

  Circling the star at various distances were no fewer than three hundred fortress-like structures, each the size of a small moon. Thousands of ships of all types, including many not yet seen and catalogued by human observers, were moored at docking bays, or orbiting in the star’s somber red light…some being readied for patrol, some undergoing a periodic refit and updating, some being constructed out of the available local raw materials.

  And, of course, there was the stargate itself.

  The Lords Who Are of this region of space had long been considering what to do about the troublesome life form known as Species 2824, and its originating system, 2420–544. Some, indeed, had moved at a most unseemly haste in their urgency to do something about the offending life form. The recent return of a galactic picket with word that one of the aliens’ sublight ships had been taken, patterned, and destroyed, had accelerated that haste.

  Perhaps that urgency was even justified. Species 2824 had proven to be unexpectedly resourceful. Evidently, they had allied with another troublesome species—designated 3990—and learned that species’ techniques for destroying stars.

  The battle with the intruding fleet had been raging for some time out near the system’s stargate, and victory had been assured when, suddenly, shockingly, the entire enemy battlefleet had vanished.