by Ian Douglas
“Hellstreak One, this is Dragonfire One,” Gray called. “Do you copy?”
“Copy, Dragon One,” the voice of Commander Gregory Claiborne answered. “Go ahead.”
Claiborne was the skipper of the Hellstreaks off the Abraham Lincoln, and the senior-ranked officer among the three squadrons. As such, he was in command of the overall mission, though, in fact, the Hellstreaks, the Meteors, and the Dragonfires were flying independently on this op. Except for a few short training flights back at Alphekka, the three squadrons had had little practice working together. Hell, most of the newbies in the Dragon fighter pilots were so raw, Gray wasn’t sure they would be able to stay in single-squadron formation, much less mesh with all three.
“Five minutes to intercept, sir,” Gray said. “What kind of closing velocity did you have in mind?”
If they continued pulling fifty-K Gs, they would arrive at the objective motionless relative to the TRGA. But in grav-fighter combat, as with the atmo-fighters of four centuries before, speed was life. By tweaking their decelerations, the fighters could arrive at the objective with a left-over velocity of anything from a few meters per second to thousands of kps.
But choosing the closing velocity was a juggling act of tactics and guesswork. Too slow, and the bad guys up ahead would eat the incoming fighters for breakfast. Too fast, and the fighters’ on-board AIs would not be able to track or lock on to the enemy.
“The Meteors and the Hellstreaks will go in first,” Claiborne decided. “A thousand kps. You copy that, Spel?”
“Copy,” Lieutenant Commander Phillip Spellman, skipper of the Meteors, replied. “Adjusting our delta-V to comply.”
“Prim, you and your people will be in reserve. One hundred kps.”
Gray’s lips compressed into a thin, hard line behind his helmet faceplate. Prim, that hated nickname again. He’d thought he’d gotten past that after that witch Collins had ended up in sick bay, damn it.
Somehow, word had gotten around.
“Do you copy, Dragon One?”
“Yeah, copy,” he replied. “But the Dragonfires are at the head of the pack already.”
“And most of you don’t know your mass from a hole,” Claiborne quipped. “At least the crews of the Lincoln and the United States have been training together. So don’t give me a Primie attitude, and adjust your delta-V.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Gray said, seething. “Adjusting delta-V.”
He didn’t like it, but he knew how to follow orders.
And it did make sense to have one of the squadrons hang back a little, to serve as a strategic reserve, and to be ready to capitalize on any mistakes the enemy might make. Not only that, the first fighters into the TRGA battlespace were going to be up against a numerically superior enemy with unknown flight stats and capabilities, not a good tactical situation in which to find oneself. If Claiborne wanted that honor for himself, he was welcome.
Prim . . .
When someone like him or Shay used the term, it was okay, somehow. In the mouth of a “risty,” though—the term was a pejorative derived from aristocrat—it grated. Somehow, no matter how close to c he pushed, he just couldn’t leave his past behind. Most officers in the USNA Navy were risties, and the bastards would never let you forget where you came from.
The Dragonfires, taclinked together, continued to decelerate as the other fighters, decelerating but at a slightly lower rate, passed VFA-44 and moved into the van. Gray considered pointing out to Claiborne that the Dragonfires had more recent combat experience . . . but he knew that wouldn’t change anything. Specifically, only four of the Dragonfires had been through the crucible of Alphekka; the other eight had never been in combat before. At least the squadron pilots of the Hellstreaks and the Meteors had seen combat during the Defense of Earth, if not since. Claiborne might actually know what the hell he was doing.
But Gray still didn’t like it one bit.
He buried his simmering resentment and studied the tacsit now unfolding within his in-head display. Just a couple of million kilometers ahead, now, the enemy fleet appeared to be maneuvering in front of the TRGA artifact. He did a quick channel search, found the transmissions from several battlespace drones, unmanned craft launched by Recon One and so far ignored or undetected by the enemy, and got his first look at the unknown hostiles.
Of Recon One, however, there was no trace.
Once, during his initial Navy training several years before, Gray had downloaded a docuinteractive that had let him experience swimming in the bright, clear waters above a coral reef in the western Pacific. The literally immersive e-experience had been purely entertainment, though no doubt it had also been part of the program to educate an ignorant squattie Prim from the Periphery.
In any case, at one point in the download he’d encountered a living, shimmering wall of silver light—hundreds of thousands of individual fish moving together in such tight harmony, flashing right to left, then reversing as one with such startling suddenness, to move left to right, that they gave the appearance of acting and reacting as a single, solid creature. The fish, he’d been told, sensed one another’s movements through subtle changes in water pressure picked up by their lateral lines, enabling them to move together, but the effect had been dramatic and spectacular.
What he was seeing on the drone feed seemed to be something similar, thousands of individual spacecraft moving in exquisitely close concert. Each hostile ship appeared to be a bit smaller than a Starhawk fighter . . . and his AI so far had counted some 4096 of the things, plus eight more craft that appeared to be larger and wrapped up in bundles of what could only be kinetic-kill projectiles.
Odds of more than 130 to one were not good. “Hellstreak One, Dragon One,” he called. “I suggest that we thin the bad guys out a bit before we get there.”
“Already on it, Prim,” Claiborne replied. “Hellstreaks and Meteors, arm Kraits. Six missiles apiece, maximum yield, three degree dispersal, proximity detonation, in three . . . two . . . one . . . Fox One!”
The VG-92 Krait space-to-space missile was an AI-guided high-velocity ship killer tipped with a variable-yield thermonuclear warhead. Each Starhawk carried a warload of 32 VG-92s. The call of “Fox One,” derived from ancient aerial combat, indicated the launch of a smart missile like the Krait. On his tactical display, Gray could see the missile tracks spreading out from the lead squadrons—126 of them in all, accelerating fast.
The response from the enemy ships was rapid and dramatic. From a tightly woven close formation in front of the TRGA, they began dispersing in mathematically precise paths out from a single, central point. As they spread out into a broad, slightly concave disk a hundred kilometers across, they began firing beams of some sort—tightly focused bursts of high-energy particles.
The missiles hurtled closer—twenty thousand kilometers, now, from the TRGA cylinder and its guardian fleet. One by one, the incoming Krait missiles began to wink out of existence. In another moment, those unknown beams began reaching past the missiles, searching out individual Starhawks among the two nearest squadrons. As the lead Starhawks reached the thirty-thousand-kilometer mark, half a dozen of them vanished in as many seconds.
“Hellstreak One!” Gray called. “Hellstreak One! Break off!”
There was no immediate response. Three more SG-92s disappeared—no flash, no fragments, no explosions that Gray could pick out across the gap between them and the Dragonfires.
“All fighters!” Claiborne’s voice called out. “Launch—”
And the voice was cut off as another SG-92 was wiped from the sky. The other Starhawks were scattering, performing wild, jinking maneuvers in an attempt to avoid the touch of those deadly beams.
“What the hell is that they’re using?” Gray wondered aloud.
“Unknown,” his AI replied in his ear. “But the lack of explosion suggests the targeted fighters are dropping into their own onboard singularities.”
“Couldn’t be,” Gray replied. “Something as big as a St
arhawk can’t get eaten by a black hole the size of a proton in an eye blink.”
“We do not have sufficient data for analysis.”
In horror, Gray watched two more Starhawks reach the thirty-thousand-kilometer mark and wink out. “There’s your data, damn it! Dragonfires! Spread out, maximum Gs!”
Several tactical points had impressed themselves on Gray in the few seconds of battle so far. The enemy was using beam weapons of some sort . . . and almost by definition those would be more accurate at close range, where speed-of-light time lag wouldn’t be as much of a factor in tracking and aiming. The KK projectiles, clearly, were for threats at longer ranges—say, at a guess, farther out than a tenth of a light second—about 30,000 kilometers.
“Incoming KK projectiles,” Gray’s AI warned. “Evasive maneuvering . . .”
Gray’s vector, currently, was toward the TRGA cylinder at about 5,000 kilometers per second, and he was still 300,000 kilometers out—about one minute’s flight. His AI was now applying full gravitational thrust to one side, giving the spacecraft a lateral component to its vector in order to avoid the cloud of KK slivers now streaking out toward him.
The projectile cloud, expanding as it moved, passed him. A few thousand kilometers distant, the Starhawk piloted by Lieutenant Miguel Zapeta detonated in a brilliant flash and a spray of hurtling fragments.
“I’m hit! I’m hit!” That was Lieutenant Pauline Owens, her Starhawk crippled and tumbling, now, out of control.
Two more gone.
“Listen up, Dragonfires!” Gray called out. He hoped his voice was calmer than he felt right now. “Everyone program all Kraits for indirect targeting, maximum yield!”
Each remaining Starhawk carried thirty-two nuke-tipped Kraits. Programmed for indirect targeting, the smart missiles would swing wide around the enemy’s flanks, coming in from the side or rear instead of from straight ahead.
“Dragonfires! Go Fox One on all Kraits!”
The surviving fighters in the squadron began dumping missiles, releasing them two at a time in rapid-fire volleys. Even Owens’ crippled fighter began dropping missiles as she tumbled straight toward the enemy formation now one light second away.
The enemy clearly was using some form of tactical net or linkage that gave them superb command and control, essentially allowing a fleet of four thousand spacecraft to function as a single unit. That meant the enemy was superbly quick, that he would respond to threats with super-human speed and precision. The fact that the alien formation numbered 4,096 of one type of ship, according to the inhumanly rapid counting abilities of his AI, and eight of another, had not been lost on Gray. That first number was a power of two—212—as was the second, 23. That suggested binary notation . . . and that, in turn, suggested computers.
It was possible, even likely, that they were up against an artificial intelligence.
The thought chilled, prickling the hairs at the back of Gray’s neck for two reasons. It meant they were up against an enemy with literally super-human reaction times, and it was just possible that the three fighter squadrons had now, for the very first time in thirty-eight long years of war, encountered the almost mythical Sh’daar.
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Inbound, Texaghu Resch System
1750 hours, TFT
“The fighters should be engaging now, sir,” Commander Sinclair told Koenig.
“I see it,” Koenig replied.
The tactical display was showing what should be happening now—a swarm of thirty-six Starhawk fighters closing in on the enigmatic spinning cylinder in close orbit around the local star.
In fact, though, the information unfolding in the CIC tactical tank was seventy-six minutes out of date. It had taken that long for the light to crawl out to the fleet from the TRGA artifact.
Koenig had to make his decision without knowing the precise situation in there, a decision that might mean abandoning the three squadrons to save the rest of the carrier battlegroup.
“The objects we saw emerging from the TRGA represent a technology we have not yet seen.”
The voice was that of Karyn Mendelson. The brain behind it was the AI that served as Koenig’s personal secretary, using the voice and personality he’d programmed into it.
Karyn, he once again reminded himself, was dead.
“Yes,” he said, subvocalizing.
“That technology represents an unknown military capability. An unknown threat to this carrier battlegroup.”
“Yes. But in a way, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
The decision, Koenig thought, was a foregone conclusion. If he broke off now because he didn’t want to risk his fleet against an enemy of unknown strength and capabilities, all of the sacrifice, the battle deaths, the struggling and the striving up to this point would be thrown away. The crews of the other ships in the carrier group were volunteers; the ones who’d been most set against following him had gone home on board the Karlsruhe, the Audace, the De Grasse, or on one of the four Chinese ships. They were here because they wanted to be, because they’d believed in him and in what he was trying to do—to buy time for Earth by bringing the war home to the Sh’daar.
If he broke off and returned to Earth now he would be betraying the men and women who’d believed in him, people who were risking their own careers and well-being to follow him out into the Void against the orders of their world’s government. The chances were good that only he would answer to charges of treason if they returned or, at worst, it would be him and the fifty-eight ship captains in the docket back home.
And that, actually, was an argument for breaking off. If the battlegroup returned to Earth now, the captains of these fifty-eight ships might never again hold a ship command, but Koenig would bear the responsibility for his actions far more than they would. At least they would be alive, along with their crews. By a strict numerical analysis, clearly, it was worth it to trade thirty-six pilots already thrown against the enemy and save the nearly fifty thousand crew members of the CBG.
But . . . no. Quite apart from betraying those three squadrons of plots, it would be a betrayal of the trust of the entire fleet to cut and run now. And, more than that, it would be a betrayal of Earth, of the Confederation and, more, of all of Humankind. Koenig believed, with an unshakable, rock-solid conviction, that humanity would not survive another thirty-eight years of a defensive war against the Sh’daar and their allies. They needed to find the Sh’daar and to confront them, and that confrontation, whatever the tactical outcome, would have to shake the alien enemy so badly that they pulled back to regroup and to reconsider.
That was why they were here.
“Admiral?” It was Buchanan, America’s CO and Koenig’s flag captain. “We need your final go/no-go.”
“Yes.” Briefly, he considered asking Buchanan what he thought . . . but dismissed the impulse immediately. The responsibility was Koenig’s, and no one else’s. “We will maintain course and acceleration.”
“Very good, sir!” Buchanan didn’t smile, but there was a light in his eyes, and an enthusiasm in the way he said it that told Koenig that Buchanan approved.
He thought a moment, then thoughtclicked a new display into the tactical tank. Fifty-eight glowing icons, ranging from the smallest frigate to America herself, appeared in orderly ranks, grouped by ship type.
“The battlegroup will divide into two combat sections, van and main,” he continued, as the ship icons began resorting themselves under his direction. “The main will consist of the carriers, the supply and support ships, the railgun and long-range bombardment ships . . . and let’s include the Chinese contingent as well, as security, plus, let’s make it ten frigates and five destroyers as a forward screen.”
“Yes, sir. You’re holding the Chinese back?”
Koenig grinned. “I’m still not certain whether they’re here to help us or to keep an eye on me. In any case, the Zheng He is a carrier and will be in the main group. If we put the others in the va
n, it’s going to give us command-control headaches.
Cheng Hua was a cruiser, the Haiping a destroyer, while the Jianghu and the Ji Lin both were classed as frigates. If those four weren’t absolutely committed to Koenig’s strategy, he didn’t want them in the rough-and-tumble of the van, where every ship would have to support every other. If he kept them back with the carrier Zheng He and under Admiral Liu’s direct command, he would have only one unknown to contend with within his own ranks.
“The rest,” Koenig continued, “will be in the van. Mostly cruisers, destroyers, and frigates. The lights will be the best ones equipped to deal with those alien fighters.”
He wasn’t convinced that the cloud of tiny vessels he’d seen emerging from the TRGA artifact were what the Confederation thought of as fighters. For all he knew, they were the alien equivalent of star carriers, launching fighters the size of his outstretched hand, but if he went by simple estimates of size, they read as very large fighters, similar in mass to Turusch Toads, or perhaps a little larger. Frigates and destroyers, while not much good against major capital ships, were designed to spot, track, and destroy fighters, and were generally deployed on a fleet’s perimeter to serve that purpose.
“Sounds good, Admiral.”
“I don’t know about good. It’s the best we can do with limited intel. A lot will depend on how the fighters do against the unknown hostiles.”
“I’ll give the orders, Admiral.”
And Koenig was left alone again with his thoughts.
VFA-44
Approaching TRGA
Texaghu Resch System
1753 hours, TFT
As the Dragonfires spread themselves out thin, Gray thought about the possibility that they were up against a machine intelligence. Was there anything there they could use, an advantage, a tactic, a weapon?
Humankind did not rely on AI combat units, and there was good reason for that. Within the Terran Confederation, among all of the polities of Humankind, in fact, AIs were designed with deliberate limits to their function, possessing what was called limited purview. The AI running his fighter’s systems, for instance, was very good at navigation, maneuvering, and even weapons tracking and control, but while it was classified as sentient it had absolutely no interest in, say, politics, human history, or the fine points of applied nanoengineering.
