by Ian Douglas
“You okay in there?” Gray asked Ryan.
“Yeah. A little shook up, is all.”
“I’m coming in again.”
“Damn it, Gray, you’re not a freaking tug.”
“Well, SAR tugs are in kind of short supply right now. Brace yourself.”
He approached the other fighter again, once more nudging it with the body of his own ship. The impact this time was a heavy, dull thud, and the vector lines on his internal display vanished save for the big one showing Ryan’s downward plummet.
“Still okay?”
“Uh. What are you doing, slamming my cockpit with a hammer?”
“Worse. I’m using my ’Hawk. I think I’ve about got that spin neutralized, though.”
“So I’ll auger in nose first, nice and neat. You can’t pull my ship out of this fall. I just ran the numbers. You can’t.”
Gray was looking at the same numbers, as his AI fed them through his IHD. A Starhawk massed twenty-two tons unloaded. The projected artificial singularities used for acceleration and for turns were precisely balanced in both virtual mass and in distance. If a fighter was too close to a singularity by even a matter of meters, tidal forces could stretch it and its pilot in the so-called “spaghetti effect,” resulting in both being ripped into their component atoms. Gray was asking his AI if it could handle the changes necessary on the fly to project a turning singularity that could accommodate both fighters together, a combined mass of over forty-four tons.
The results coming back were not encouraging.
He’d gone into this thinking that he might be able to lock the two fighters together with mooring lines, his ship above, hers below, then project a turning singularity forward and above, causing both fighters to go nose-high, turning away from the planet looming ahead. The hull structure of an AG–92 simply wasn’t up to that much stress. If the mooring lines broke as the fighters went into the turn, hers would be flung “down” and into the gas giant, while his fighter had a good chance of being nudged the other way, and into its own singularity.
He ran the numbers for simply holding onto Ryan’s fighter with mooring cables and throwing a deceleration vortex astern, slowing the two of them. Again, the forces involved were far too great for the mooring lines Gray had available. Ryan’s fighter would continue to fall—a bit more slowly, perhaps, but still with more than enough speed to slam into the planet’s atmosphere within a matter of minutes.
He couldn’t project a singularity through the other fighter in order to draw both onto a new vector.
Damn it, there had to be something. . . .
Alchameth had grown noticeably larger in the past minute, sliding off to one side. The two fighters were dropping beneath the sharp-edged plane of the outer rings now, Ryan’s Starhawk nestled in spoon-fashion beneath Gray’s fighter and between its drooping wings. They would plunge into significant atmosphere, Gray saw, in six more minutes. Damn it, the infalling vector was close. With only a small boost applied in the right direction, they could change vector enough to skim above Alchameth’s horizon, rather than plunge beneath it.
He looked at firing his maneuvering thrusters in such a way that he could nudge both fighters higher on their descent path. The amount of reaction mass he still carried for his plasma-jet maneuvering thrusters, however, was limited. He looked at combining his reaction mass with what was left in Ryan’s tanks. Still not enough. The numbers were close, tantalizingly close . . . but just not close enough.
Just a little nudge . . .
“Got it!” Gray said. He had the AI run through the numbers again, checking the new configuration. There was a way . . . hairy, but it gave them a chance.
“There’s no way, Trevor!”
“Trust me.” Reaching out to the touch pad, he fired a mooring line from his fighter’s belly into the dorsal surface of Ryan’s Starhawk. The tip imbedded itself in her hull’s nanomatrix, anchoring the two together.
With his AI’s constant help and finely calculated assistance, Gray used his maneuvering thrusters to reorient the two falling Starhawks, then start them tumbling nose over tail once more.
“Trev! What are you doing?”
“Trust me! This is going to work!”
He hoped.
He ran the calculations past the AI a third time. Human reactions would not be fast enough to pull this off, and it was entirely possible that the stresses he was setting up would render both humans unconscious. But his AI would remain aware. . . .
The tumble increased. Centrifugal force was tugging hard at Gray now, a steadily increasing sensation of out-is-down weight, of fast-growing pressure threatening to force the blood out of his legs and torso and up into his head. His vision blurred, becoming red.
The AI was in control now as Gray slipped across the ragged edge of consciousness.
And at a precisely calculated instant, Gray’s fighter released the mooring cable, and the two ships, their connection broken, hurtled apart. Both were still falling toward Alchameth at seventy thousand kilometers each second, of course, but the spin-and-cut maneuver had imparted new vectors to both craft, which were now flying apart from each other.
Of course, the maneuver had added energy to Ryan’s fighter, and that energy had been taken from Gray’s. His new trajectory was plunging him deeper and deeper into Alchameth’s gravity well.
Gray was unconscious . . . but his AI recognized the danger and engaged the fighter’s gravitational singularity drive.
A fiercely powerful knot of compressed spacetime appeared ahead and to one side of his Starhawk’s prow, and the fighter, under AI control, whipped around it in a ten-G turn.
CIC, TC/USNA CVS America
Arcturus System
1409 hours, TFT
This is always the hardest part, Koenig thought, staring into the tactical display tank. Waiting while other people are out there dying. . . .
America was now traveling at 53 percent of the speed of light, with another two hours before they began deceleration, nine hours to go until they reached Alchameth and Jasper. In the tank, both red and green icons had drifted apart from one another, filling the display with flecks of colored light. For some reason, he found himself thinking about the Solstice celebration weeks before, at the eudaimonium.
Of the thirty-six fighters sent in with the first assault, thirteen had been destroyed. Many more had been disabled, were on straight-line trajectories out of battlespace, maneuvering and grav drives out, unable to get back into the fight.
By now, many, too, would be out of expendable weaponry.
On the plus side of the tally sheet, both Beta-class battleships and both of the red-flagged mystery cruisers had been destroyed or badly damaged, and half of the smaller ships had been knocked out as well. There were still a lot of Turusch fighters hunting down individual Confederation Starhawks, but overall, the enemy fleet had been badly bloodied. One small group of five Turusch cruisers and destroyers had fallen into a tight formation and was accelerating out-system, well away from the incoming battlegroup. They would be light hours away by the time America reached circum-Alchameth space, and well out of the fight. The rest, many of them damaged and adrift after the fighter swarm’s assault, had been left behind.
And now it was up to the battlegroup.
The original battle plan had called for the carrier battlegroup to accelerate for nine hours before beginning to decelerate . . . but at thirteen hours after they’d left the emergence point, they would have come booming through the Alchameth-Jasper system at ninety thousand kilometers per second. With the Turusch fleet shot up by the fighter assault, the fleet’s heavies would have no problem mopping up. Many of the ships in the battlefleet were already positioning themselves to launch high-velocity kinetic-kill weaponry that would sweep through the battlespace before their arrival, targeting the drifting survivors.
The discovery by
an AI probe that there were human survivors—prisoners of war, presumably—on board Arcturus Station changed everything.
Under the original plan, the CBG would have swept through the Alchameth-Jasper system at high speed, destroying everything they could reach, then would have slowed, performed a difficult turning maneuver, and returned at more sedate velocities to pick up the fighters . . . or have the fighters rendezvous or dock while the carrier was still under way. Disabled fighters, the ones drifting helplessly now without drives or maneuvering thrusters, would have to be tracked down and rescued by SAR tugs.
Success in battle often required a certain bloody-minded tenacity. You created the best plan you could, practiced it, and stuck with it, no matter what . . . because to change plans in the middle of a fleet action was absolutely guaranteed to screw everything to hell and gone.
But even more often, success in battle went to the fleet best able to adapt to changing circumstances, the most flexible fleet, the fleet with the greatest number of viable options.
“Okay,” Koenig said after a long moment’s thought. “Oplan Gamma. Here’s how we’re going to play it through.”
The strategic overview in the display tank vanished, replaced by schematics of the thirty-five ships of the America battlegroup, each model-sized and to scale, arrayed in orderly ranks. Koenig waved his hand, and the two largest ships moved off to opposite sides of the display. “The battlegroup will be divided into two squadrons,” he continued. “America and Kinkaid. MSU–17 and the supply ships will stay with us. Kinkaid will lead a group of eight cruisers and ten destroyers.
“The America squadron will stick with the original plan, beginning decelerating at the halfway point, which will have us entering Alchameth space after fourteen hours. The Kinkaid’s squadron will accelerate for nine hours total, passing through Alchameth space at boost-plus-thirteen hours, and with a relative velocity of ninety K kilometers per second.”
Koenig had worked through the details while they’d been waiting at Point Percival weeks before. Plan Alpha had assumed the enemy was at least as strong as the reconnaissance probe had indicated, allowing the entire CBG to pass through battlespace at high speed, slow, and return to pick up the fighters. Plan Bravo had assumed that enemy numbers in the Arcturus system were significantly greater than expected, so much greater that the battlegroup would have to withdraw from out-system without even making the attempt.
Oplan Gamma gave a third option, allowing the transports and carriers to decelerate to a rendezvous in Alchameth-Jasper space after fourteen hours, and one hour after the battlegroup’s big guns had passed through.
“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy,” a voice whispered in his mind.
It took him a moment to realize that the voice was Karyn Mendelson’s, his personal assistant. God, he missed her. . . .
The words, of course, were five and a half centuries out of the past, the famous aphorism of Generalfelldmarschall Helmuth von Moltke the Elder.
“The key,” Koenig added, “is for both squadrons to stay flexible, for both to keep their options open in order to be able to adapt to anything the enemy might still be able to spring on us.”
And yet, each decision he made, each change in the original battle plan, threw more variables into the mix, and made a decisive blunder more likely. Koenig’s order would divide the fleet, never a good idea in the face of a situationally aware opponent.
“The Kinkaid’s squadron will take time to decelerate and rejoin the CBG, of course,” he continued. “The Marine fighters off the Nassau and Vera Cruz will help cover the America’s squadron while we’re at Arcturus Station.”
“Almost a thousand POWs,” Lieutenant Commander Charles Hargrave said. “Where are we going to put them all?” Hargrave was with America’s tactical department, which meant he was already juggling ships, supplies, and personnel in his mind. “I think we’ll have to use the Mars.”
As he spoke her name, one of the ship images on the America side of the tank glowed with its own bright halo. She was a combat stores ship, an AFS, a clumsy-looking vessel half as long as America and massing nearly seventy thousand tons unloaded. Her pressurized cargo decks would be uncomfortable, chilly, and in zero-G for the three-week flight back to Earth, but the nanoreplicators on board would keep a thousand rescued prisoners supplied with air, food, and water for as long as necessary.
“Offload her supplies,” Koenig continued, “distribute what you can through the rest of the fleet, and load the POWs on board her for the trip back to Earth.”
“Mars,” Commander Morgan said. He was the CBG’s logistics officer. “That’s Captain Conyer. I’ll talk to her and her AI about setting up a transfer schedule.”
“Good. Do it.”
“We may not be able to save all of the supplies, though. It could leave us short.”
“The most critical stores,” Koenig said, “are expendable munitions. We can find plenty of iceteroids and carbonaceous chondrites along the way for food, air, and water.” He looked up. “General Mathers?”
“Sir.” Joshua Mathers was the CO of the battlegroup’s Marine contingent, some twelve thousand men and women assigned to MSU–17. He and his command staff were present electronically, since they were at the moment on board the Nassau, the command vessel for the Marine assault force. Their images above the display tank were virtual avatars projected by America’s CIC AI.
“I leave it to you to put together an assault plan for Arcturus Station. You’ll need to burn your way on board, rescue the prisoners, and get them off onto the Mars as quickly as possible. Your two major headaches, not counting enemy forces on the station, will be the time it’s going to take to transfer supplies off of the Mars, and the fact that the prisoners are going to need breathing apparatus. According to our intel from the recon probe, only the mess hall-rec space has a breathable atmosphere. The rest of the station has an excess of CO2.”
“Yes, sir,” Mathers said. “We can set the replicators to cranking out breather masks, with simple filters to screen out the carbon dioxide. If we can set up a ship-to-station through-hull, we should be good to go.”
“Coordinate that with Captain Conyers, please.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
“Okay . . . the rest of you, be looking at the tacsit and tell me what I’ve missed.”
“There is one thing, Admiral,” the CIC operations officer, Commander Katryn Craig, said. She sounded reluctant to bring it up.
Koenig gave a wry smile. “You’re about to mention that H’rulka warship.”
“Yes, sir. The recon probe last month spotted it inside the gas giant’s atmosphere. It followed the probe back to Sol, and we beat it off. Did it come back to Arcturus? Or are there more of them down in Alchameth’s deep atmosphere?”
“That,” Koenig said, nodding, “is a great question and I wish to hell we knew the answer.”
He had a feeling, though, that they would be finding out quite soon.
“All we can do is keep an eye out, and hope the H’rulka didn’t come back here,” he said. He shrugged. “If she did, we take her out. Any way we can.”
Dragonfire Nine
Alchameth-Jasper Space
Arcturus System
1413 hours, TFT
Prodded by his AI working through his cerebral link, Gray struggled back to consciousness. His body ached. Despite the padding provided as his acceleration couch had flowed over his body, he felt like someone, a very large someone, had worked him over with a length of plasteel pipe.
But a quick look at his instruments showed that his Starhawk was under power and under drive, hurtling across the face of Alchameth. His fighter had plunged into atmosphere and slowed sharply; he could feel the steady shudder as the craft plunged through roiling atmosphere. His AI had slowed him to prevent the incineration of his Starhawk, and he was now traveling at a mere few tens of
kilometers per second. His fighter’s broad, forward-curving wings were generating lift.
The cloud tops were still far below him. Gas giant atmospheres—mostly cold hydrogen—tended to extend some thousands of kilometers above the highest of the colored cloud bands, which were rolling past far beneath him. He was over the night side of the planet, but a ghostly luminescence—and reflected light from bright Jasper—made the clouds eerily visible below. He could see the maws of vast, swirling storms, the sheer cliffs carved from clouds falling into dark depths thousands of kilometers deep. Lightning pulsed in those depths, flickers and flashes softly diffused, masked by the night-shrouded clouds.
And ahead and below he saw . . . lights.
At first, Gray thought he was seeing lightning, but these lights remained stubbornly steady, a rigid and tightly spaced constellation, like city lights on Earth, but spread out across a far vaster background. They appeared to delineate a structure of some kind; he had to remind himself that gas giants like Alchameth had no true surface, that the atmosphere itself kept going down deeper and deeper and deeper, becoming hotter and hotter, and under increasingly crushing pressures. Somewhere down there, deep inside the planet, gaseous hydrogen turned to a kind of semi-solid hydrogen slush at fierce pressures and temperatures. Those lights, whatever they were, had to be floating near the cloud tops.
And something large was rising from the lights.
Gray and the other pilots had been briefed on the data brought back by the recon probe a month before, and they’d watched tactical feeds of the H’rulka vessel during its incursion into the solar system. Gray didn’t know if this was the same or a different H’rulka vessel, but it was definitely of the same sort—bulbous, a flattened sphere in shape some twenty-two kilometers across.
The sheer scale of the thing was daunting, but so, too, was the scale of the planet from which it was rising. That titanic city or base, or whatever it was, lit by hundreds of starlike lights, must be more than two hundred kilometers across, but it was all but lost against the enormity of the world above which it drifted.
