by Ian Douglas
Not again! Allyn thought, desperate, stressed to the point of screaming. I can’t go through this again!
“CAG,” she called. “Lightning One-zero-one…this is Red Bravo Five. Private channel.”
“Go ahead, Red Five,” Captian Dixon’s voice replied.
“CAG, we’re down by half. We have to break off!”
“Commander, we are going to keep hammering at these bastards until they break and run, or until our expendables run dry and our PBPs are melted into slag. When that happens, we will begin ramming the sons of bitches if we have to! Is that understood?”
“Understood. Sir.”
Allyn’s mind was reeling. She was afraid…yes—it was impossible not to be afraid in such a position—but more pressing was the overwhelming feeling of frustration, of failure, of helplessness in the face of such an enemy. They’d been hammering at the Turusch fleet, to use Dixon’s word, for a full three hours now. They’d lost half of their own fighters…and managed to destroy or badly damage perhaps twelve enemy capital ships and twenty-two Toad fighters. An excellent tactical trade-off, perhaps…but essentially useless when you realized that there were still nearly ninety Turusch ships out here, not counting the swarms of fighters. The vessels had been appearing out of the Outer System night for three hours now, catching up, rendezvousing with the main fleet, joining them in their stately procession toward the Inner System.
Thirty fighters, almost all out of Krait missiles, most running low on KK rounds, with nothing but their Blue Lightning particle beams to use as weapons. PBPs were sometimes called “infinite repeaters” since they couldn’t run out of ammo so long as they were connected to a quantum power tap, but they did have a finite life. Allyn’s beam projector was already giving her trouble, cutting out now and again as the system overheated. If the circuitry got hot enough to melt, even her nanorepair systems wouldn’t be able to keep her in the fight.
And for all she knew, Dixon wasn’t kidding with his threat to start ramming the enemy.
The plan, of course, was to cause enough damage to the Turusch fleet that they’d be vulnerable to attack by the main fleet elements waiting back in the Inner System.
Swinging around for yet another pass, she lined up on a Turusch mobile planetoid, triggering her charged particle beam from fifty thousand kilometers out, continuing to fire as she flashed past at a relative speed of nearly five thousand kilometers per second. The planetoid’s surface was still partially shielded, though a number of shields had evidently collapsed. Neither she nor her AI could tell whether they’d managed to hit any of the exposed surface installations, or if her fire had been absorbed or deflected by the gravitic screens. The enemy’s particle beams reached out toward her; her jinking pattern, random course shifts implemented by her AI, avoided the incoming fire, but something struck her aft shields and jolted her hard. A quick check of her system diagnostics—no damage, thank God.
But her PBP was overheated, a red warning light showing on her panel and in her mind.
“My God!” Hennessy cried out. “Look at that!”
On her display, the asteroid ship she’d just attacked was firing.
Not at her. The projectile appeared to be a KK missile, accelerating at high-G and likely carrying simple mass as a warhead, a lot of it. It wasn’t aimed at any of the fighters attacking the Turusch fleet. Instead, it appeared to be accelerating hard for the Inner System, toward Earth or Mars or the Confederation warships waiting there.
“It’s the bombardment!” Lieutenant Malvar of the Rattlers called out. “They’ve started bombarding Earth and Mars!”
Other Turusch warships were firing as well, hurling warheads toward the tiny, shrunken sun in unending streams, some massing as much as a ton, some as little as a kilogram.
“That’s it,” Collins said. “I’m fucking out of here. We’ve lost….”
And the America deep-recon flight, what was left of it, began to fall apart.
Chapter Twenty-Four
18 October 2404
Green Squadron
Outbound, Sol System
1015 hours, TFT
“It ain’t gonna work, Lieutenant!” Lieutenant j.g. Mark Rafferty insisted. “Sand grains are tiny. They’ll hit hydrogen atoms on the way…protons in the solar wind, that sort of thing. They’ll all get zapped into plasma!”
“Sand grains are tiny,” Gray agreed, “but they’re a lot bigger than protons. Some might be ablated, turned to plasma…and so what? You can’t destroy mass, and it’s the mass traveling at near-c that does the damage. You ever hear of an A-7 strike package?”
“Yeah, but…that doesn’t make…sense.” It sounded as though he was thinking about it, trying to wrap his mind around the idea.
“First-year Academy physics, Rafferty. Matter and/or energy cannot be created or destroyed, except as allowed by the very special case of quantum power taps. Besides, even if all the sand at the leading edge of the cloud did get turned to plasma, it would just sweep out a tunnel for the rest of the sand following along behind. Like a lightning bolt burning a vacuum channel through the atmosphere. One way or the other, the sand will get there.”
“There’s another problem, sir,” McMasters pointed out. “At this range, it’ll be like firing a shotgun. We might hit the Turusch ships, but we’ll hit our own fighters as well.”
“There’s a chance of that, yes,” Gray conceded. “But we’re going to be broadcasting a warning ahead of our release. Our fighters are a lot more maneuverable than the Turusch, even their Toads. They’ll have time to sidestep the volley.”
“But if we did hit our own guys—”
“Enough, people. I’m in charge, the responsibility is mine.” He checked his display a final time, an abstract representation of the enemy fleet seen bow-on…or how the enemy fleet was probably laid out, now some sixteen AUs ahead.
McMasters was right. This was like firing a shotgun at long range. Precision of aim, thank God, wasn’t necessary.
“Okay,” he told his AI. “Transmit the warning.”
“Transmitting.”
“And transmit a complete log to America. They need to be in the loop.”
They may need it, he thought, with a sudden stab of gloom, for the court martial. Despite the transmitted warning, despite the maneuverability of Starhawk and War Eagle fighters, of course it was possible that some would be caught in the blast.
And the first rule of warfare was—friendly fire isn’t.
“We will fire in volleys,” Gray told the others. “By the numbers. Group one, ready…fire!”
And from each of six Starhawk fighters, two AMSO missiles dropped and streaked into blackness, accelerating at two thousand gravities. “Fox Two!”
The idea was hardly a new one. As Gray had mentioned, the A-7 strike package used for long-range planetary or fleet bombardment used the same concept. The twist was using AMSO defensive fire as an offensive weapon—a weapon of decidedly mass destruction.
“Group two, ready…fire!”
Twelve more AS-78 missiles slipped from Starhawk missile bays and engaged their drives, vanishing into the twisted strangeness of near-c space. “Fox Two!”
“Group three, ready…fire!”
The missiles had been reprogrammed. They would not automatically detonate, scattering their matter-compressed lead-grain warloads a few seconds after firing. Instead, they would detonate when their onboard radars picked up the first enemy ships ten light seconds ahead. The sand clouds should still be fairly tightly packed in that distance, still carry a staggering kinetic punch.
Gray knew there’d been experiments with using sandcasters as offensive weapons. The idea had been dropped years ago, primarily because it was such a blind, area-effect, deadly weapon; fire one of the things at near-c in the general direction of Earth, and you might find you’d accidentally scoured away the continent of Africa, and wrecked the planet’s weather patterns for the next couple of centuries.
But in this particular tactical se
tup…why not? The only thing in that direction was the star Alphekka. Maybe a few grains of sand or hot plasma would sizzle into that star system seventy-five years or so from now, still traveling at 99.7 percent c, and maybe by then the interstellar medium would wear the individual grains down to nothing and absorb the plasma’s kinetic energy.
“Group four, fire!”
He felt his own Starhawk lurch as his missiles slid off the launch rails. “Fox Two!” he called, adding his cry to the fox calls of the others.
In the meantime, seventy-two AMSO missiles packed with sand-sized lead BBs were going to burn their way through the oncoming Turusch fleet. Their shields would stop a lot of the attack…but this was a lot of mass traveling at relativistic velocities.
Handfuls of sand, turned into weapons of mass destruction.
Relativistic shotgun blasts.
Gray prayed that he hadn’t just made a cataclysmic error in judgment.
Red Bravo Flight
America Deep Recon
Inbound, Sol System
1031 hours, TFT
Marissa Allyn was shaking. It was happening again, her entire unit, wiped out.
The surviving Confederation fighters were breaking away from the Turusch fleet now, individual ships spreading out in all directions. Their best efforts had worn away at the massive, inbound enemy force, but the remaining Turusch warships still outnumbered the fleet waiting for them in the Inner System, vastly outnumbered the handful of ships in the America battlegroup, and had just fired salvo after salvo of high-G impactor warheads. Accelerating at two thousand gravities, those kinetic-kill projectiles would reach near-c velocity in just over three hours, and the vicinity of Earth and Mars less than three hours later.
How accurate that hivel bombardment would be was anyone’s guess. The Turusch had spent a lot of time out at the thirty-AU shell and beyond, and would have been gathering volumes of data on the orbital velocities of the planets, the locations and vectors of ships, even the precise positions and orbital details of factories, shipyards, military bases, deep-space habitats, and other large facilities, both those circling planets and those in solar orbit.
The infalling salvo could well devastate the technological infrastructure throughout the Inner System, could leave the cities of both Earth and Mars in smoldering ruins.
And the handful of America’s fighters hadn’t been able to do a thing to stop it.
“Regroup!” Captain Dixon was yelling over the tactical channel. “All fighters, regroup!”
What the hell was the point? They, all of humankind, had lost….
On her tactical display, she saw red pinpoints, clouds of them, sweeping out from the Turusch warfleet, Toad fighters in pursuit of the fleeing Confederation fighters.
Allyn struggled to stop the shaking. Those Toads were relentlessly hunting down individual fleeing Confederation fighters, trying to sweep them from the sky. There were only twenty-three fighters left now, twenty-three out of the initial fifty-seven.
A pair of Toads was dropping onto Dixon’s six, dogging him, closing on him…
“I’ve got two on my tail!” Dixon called.
Allyn threw her Starhawk into a sharp one-eighty, as tight a turn as she could manage as the tidal forces generated by her drive singularity threatened to pull her and her ship to pieces. Then she was hurtling back the way she’d come, heading straight for the CAG and the Turusch fighter now five hundred kilometers behind him.
“Hold your vector, CAG!” she called. She didn’t want him pulling a sudden maneuver and crashing into her. She lined up on the nearest Toad and triggered a long burst from her KK cannon, sending a stream of compressed, depleted uranium slugs slamming past Dixon’s fighter and into the enemy ship. The Toad had dropped its forward shields to get a clear shot at the CAG, and the impact opened the enemy craft as if it had been unzipped.
And then her weapon ran dry, the last of her KK projectiles gone. She targeted the second Toad as she flashed past Dixon…but in the instant she fired, the Toad fired its particle beams at the CAG’s ship.
She hurtled past the Toad at a relative velocity of some hundreds of kilometers per second, too fast to see if she’d hurt it. On her display, however, Captain Dixon’s Starhawk flared up in a brilliant fireball, then faded out.
“CAG! CAG, do you copy?”
Maybe his transponder was out. Maybe…maybe…
“CAG, do you copy?” There was no reply.
And a new thought struck Allyn, struck her and shook her and left a hard, cold knot behind her breastbone. The CAG was dead…and so was Commander Jacelyn, the skipper of the Impactors and the wing’s deputy CAG.
Commander Fremont, CO of the Death Rattlers…dead.
Commander Murcheson, skipper of the Star Tigers…dead.
Commander Burnham, CO of the Nighthawks…out of control, missing, presumed dead.
Marissa Allyn was the last squadron commander left, even if she no longer had a squadron…and her rank had just put her in command of the surviving fighters.
And somehow she was going to have to bring them out of this.
Between the Squadrons
Sol System
1032 hours, TFT
AS-78 Anti-Missile Shield Ordnance, or AMSO missiles, accelerated at two thousand gravities. Normally they popped—scattering their warload of compressed, depleted uranium micropellets—a few thousand meters ahead of the firing ship, dispersing the sand in a fast-moving and expanding cloud that could refract incoming lasers, absorb particle beams, and explode or ablate missiles, creating a cheap, simple, and reasonably effective defensive shield.
They had to be used selectively and with tactical precision, of course. If the firing ship changed course, the sand cloud kept moving on the original vector, vanishing uselessly into space. And explosions and particle-beam hits tended to disperse the cloud, or transform much of it into expanding plasma, so a few incoming shots rendered it ineffective.
By reprogramming the missile guidance, Gray had set them to proximity detonation—“proximity” in this case being a rather broad term that included ten light seconds, approximately three million kilometers. Radar signals transmitted when the warhead was twenty seconds from the target took only ten to make the trip back, since the warhead itself was also traveling at very close to the speed of light.
The missiles had been accelerating at two thousand gravities the entire time. Without Alcubierre capabilities, however, the extra acceleration nudged the projectiles a bit closer to the speed of light, but essentially only added to the warhead’s relativistic mass.
Five and a quarter AUs out from Green Squadron, some sixty minutes after launch, the lead AS-78 salvo picked up a return within ten light seconds and detonated. What Gray had not allowed for was the possibility that the target itself would be traveling close to light speed, and was approaching the AMSO warheads just behind the reflected radar signals that triggered the sandcaster firing. Six missiles exploded. Five missed, the sand clouds still tightly packed as they streaked past the oncoming KK impactor rounds fired by the Turusch fleet.
One sand cloud caught one impactor, however, and the results were…spectacular. Grains of sand—perhaps as much as one gram out of the ten kilograms in the missile’s warhead—traveling at close to c hit a one-ton projectile traveling in the opposite direction at close to c. The combined velocity of that impact, of course, was not twice the speed of light, not if Einstein knew what he was talking about, but it did release a nontrivial flash of energy.
A lot of energy.
The alignment of the two converging salvos of impactor warheads and sandcaster rounds was not perfect; all of the AS-78s detonated as they passed within three million kilometers of the Turusch impactors, but the fast-moving sand clouds were gone, hurtling on at .998 c, long before the blast front reached them. And the Turusch impactors, an hour after launch, were scattered enough that not all were caught in the sudden, supernova flare of released kinetic energy.
But many were.
And the flash of that one impact burned for long seconds in the darkness of the Outer System, the wave front spreading out in all directions at the speed of light.
Red Bravo Flight
America Deep Recon
Inbound, Sol System
1115 hours, TFT
“Incoming transmission,” Allyn’s AI told her. “Source, Green Squadron.”
“What the hell is Green Squadron?” she asked…but just the possibility that reinforcements were on the way out from Earth made her immediately accept the signal.
Help was on the way…twenty-four more Starhawks straight from Oceana, and under the command of Lieutenant Trevor Gray. And they had launched…great God in heaven!
“All fighters!” she yelled over the tactical channel. “All fighters! We have near-c incoming! Clear the battlespace!”
And a moment later, a flash appeared, briefly outshining the sun.
The survivors of America’s five-squadron deployment had already begun clustering together, ahead of and several thousand kilometers off the line of the Turusch fleet’s advance. By forming up together, they could better protect one another from attack runs by Turusch Toads; for some time now, however, the enemy had seemed content to leave the Confederation fighters alone, to watch them, to match their course with a group of Toads pacing them from a few thousand kilometers away.
Perhaps the Turusch had been hurt more badly than Allyn’s wing had realized. Perhaps they were sick of the blood-letting as well.
Or perhaps the handful of remaining Confederation fighters simply didn’t matter any longer.
“My God!” Collins said over the tac channel as the light flash grew brighter, grew larger. “What the hell is that?”
“At a guess…it’s sandcaster rounds hitting the Trash impactors. Hivel kinetic release.” Allyn didn’t trust herself to even guess at how much energy was represented by that brilliant star. It had appeared on their inbound flight path, and was shining within a few degrees of the distant sun. It wasn’t more than a star, a pinpoint of light, but it hurt to look at it with unshielded optics, and for a moment or two, Sol was blotted out by its glare.
