by Ian Douglas
That built-in tunnel vision made them somewhat less flexible and adaptable than humans, which was why grav-fighters still had human pilots. AI-piloted warships and fighters were certainly technically possible—that’s what drones and Krait missiles were, after all—but humans had chosen centuries before to keep themselves in the technological loop, a guarantee that humans would retain control of their own creations.
There were arguments, Gray knew, to the effect that such attempts at staying in control were futile in the long run. Artificial intelligences were very fast, far faster than human brains and nervous systems. More, they could program and direct themselves—within certain broad parameters, true, but intelligences that powerful would be able to find a way around the barriers if they really wanted to. The trick was channeling those intelligences so that they didn’t want to take over from humans, a thought that, for an AI, was literally unthinkable.
Within the anti-technology communities of the Periphery, Gray knew from personal experience, there were people who held to the theory that artificially sentient machines were already the true rulers of the human species, but that they were staying behind the scenes for reasons of their own. Gray personally had had to overcome that in-grown prejudice during his period of training with the Navy. AIs, digital sentients on all of their myriad shapes and types, were personal assistants, secretaries, weapons, or ship guidance systems—even extensions of one’s own brain—not Humankind’s potential masters.
The tightly maneuvering hostiles out there represented something new. They might be under the control of an organic intelligence, might be nothing more than human-designed AIs with better command-control abilities . . . but Gray could not escape the idea that he was watching the mental processes of a digital intelligence as it analyzed threats and responded to them.
Every technic alien species encountered so far by humans possessed a unit for measuring time similar to the second. The concept of time measurement was unknown to dolphins or the floaters in the ice-locked Europan ocean and a few other intelligences that had never developed technology, but every species that built things measured time, and something approximating one second was a useful basic unit. The Agletsch, he knew, had the shu, which measured roughly .87 of one second. Those flashing movements as the aliens shifted their formation seemed to be happening in tightly parsed-out fragments of seconds, much faster than humans or Agletsch could handle with purely organic brains.
Computers, however . . .
The slaughter of the Hellstreaks and the Meteors continued, as some of the human fighters struggled to break clear, as others accelerated in an attempt to break through and past that wall of guardian spacecraft in front of the TRGA. A few of the Kraits launched earlier reached the enemy intact—the hostiles were not infallible or omnipotent, thank God—and began to detonate in silent, blossoming flashes of light.
And the hostiles began dying, with great, empty voids opening in their formation as warhead after warhead released megatons of high-energy fury within their ranks.
But not enough. The enemy had spread out so thinly, now, that a single thermonuclear detonation was taking out only a handful of targets, and there were thousands, still, remaining.
Gray looked for a weapon he could use.
And then he thought he might know of one. . . .
Chapter Ten
29 June 2405
VFA-44
En route to TRGA
Texaghu Resch System
1755 hours, TFT
“All Dragonfires! Arm AMSOs and orient your vectors toward the enemy!”
AMSO, or anti-missile shield ordnance, was the Confederation Navy’s catchall acronym for a family of weapons popularly known as sandcasters. Each Dragonfire Starhawk was carrying a warload of eighteen AS-78 missiles, each mounting a warhead loaded with several kilograms of tightly packed lead spherules the size of grains of sand.
Kraits were smart missiles, guided by miniature AIs programmed to evade enemy defenses and strike with maximum effect. Sandcasters, on the other hand, were decidedly dumb weapons, accelerating in a straight line and releasing their warloads in clouds that continued traveling in a straight line, combining their acceleration velocity with whatever residual velocity the fighter had imparted to them upon launch plus whatever velocity component the target possessed at impact. No evasive maneuvers, nothing fancy—just fire the thing and forget about it. Generally, sandcasters were used as missile defense systems. The enemy equivalent of a Krait encountering a cloud of sand grains at several thousand kilometers per second simply ceased to exist, save as a smear of hot, expanding plasma.
But eight months ago, at the Defense of Earth, Gray had written a footnote in the Naval Academy downloads for space fighter tactics by turning AMSO sandcasters against enemy warships. The idea, in retrospect, was perhaps an obvious one . . . but the obvious was not always clear to hidebound risty chair pilots unable to think outside the closely set parameters of classical military training. In the Confederation Navy, you got ahead by following the rules, doing what you were told, and going by the book. In the Periphery, though, survival often required original thought, not to mention a carefree willingness to break the rules when necessary.
Gray had received a commendation for his original thinking, which had been an important factor in disrupting an incoming Turusch strike fleet out at the orbit of Uranus. Using sandcaster warheads to clear a path through enemy fighters had allowed the Terran defenders to concentrate on the bad-guy heavies.
It was not a tactic easily adapted to the realities of modern space warfare, however, and some of his squadron mates still kidded him about throwing handfuls of sand at the enemy. “Sandy Gray,” they called him.
At least it was better than “Prim.”
But this situation looked like it was made for the same tactic. The enemy, while in motion, was staying relatively put in front of the TRGA. More, the fact that thermonuclear warheads had taken them out suggested that, if they possessed defensive shielding at all, it was fairly low grade and easily overwhelmed. In space combat, screen referred to the electromagnetic sheathing that turned aside radiation or charged particle beams, while shields were grav-induced distortions of the space immediately around a ship that could turn aside incoming matter, whether KK projectiles, missile warheads, or the star-hot plasma released by the nearby detonation of a nuke.
Or a cloud of high-velocity sand.
“Set for release at thirty thousand kilometers from the target!” Gray continued. “Fire when ready!”
“Fox Two!” Ben Donovan called a moment later, as the AS-78s began emerging from the keel of his fighter two by two. Fox two was the call sign for a dumb-weapon release, and a warning to all fighters in the vicinity that they might have to take evasive action.
Gray released his own sandcaster warheads, giving the obligatory “Fox two!”
In rapid succession, the other Dragonfires launched their anti-missile defenses as well. According to his tactical scans, more KK slivers were on the way from the enemy ship-wall, but those could be avoided at this range easily enough by jinking, a problem that could be left to his AI.
“Shouldn’t we be holding some of these things in reserve?” Ryan asked him. Half of her missiles were already accelerating toward the enemy.
“Negative! Give ’em all you’ve got! The idea is to overwhelm their defenses!”
And there was another reason as well, one he didn’t mention. Hold on to a reserve of missiles for later, and you ran the risk of not being able to fire them at all if your number came up on an enemy crowbar or beam.
Don’t think about that! Just dump your missiles and stay alive! . . .
Traveling at a thousnad kilometers per second, the first PC-S 78s reached the thirty-thousand-kilometer mark and detonated, releasing their deadly clouds of sand. Enemy beams were finding many of the incoming sandcaster rounds, causing them to wink silently off the tactical display, but once a round reached that 30K line and released its load of sand
grains, the enemy’s defensive fire could have little effect. Thirty seconds later, the first clouds began reaching their targets.
Gray had an excellent close-in view transmitted from one of the battlespace drones near the TRGA—a single enemy ship, silver and gray and shaped like a flat leaf. The sand cloud, widely dispersed now, was still thick enough to cause the enemy vessel’s prow to flare bright red, then orange. The glow faded swiftly, however, and the vessel did not seem otherwise affected. An energy beam—invisible at optical wavelengths but picked out by the AI graphics program as a dazzling streak of emerald green—snapped out from the vessel. Clearly it was still in the fight, and Gray sagged inwardly.
It didn’t work. . . .
And then the smart missiles, sent on roundabout courses and coming in from behind, many seemingly straight out of the glare of that nearby sun, began to strike.
The entire wall of enemy ships, stretched across hundreds of kilometers, was engulfed by dazzlingly brilliant fireballs, expanding spheres of hot gas rapidly merging with other spheres close by, growing, swelling, coalescing, forming a sheet of radiance too brilliant to look at with unshielded optics.
The plasma clouds thinned and faded rapidly, and enemy fighters began emerging from the glare . . . but not in the thousands, not in the thousands, thank God!
The space-warping shields that protected starships were created by gravitic projectors extending out from a vessel’s hull just a few centimeters. They could be melted away by a nearby thermonuclear blast—or by the sandblasting from a high-velocity AMSO round—and when that happened, that section of shield would fail, exposing the ship’s hull to incoming missiles or energy. The double volley launched by the Dragonfires—Kraits and AS-78 AMSO rounds—had wreaked a terrible destruction across that gleaming wall of alien warships.
“I have counted eight hundred forty-six vessels emerging from the fireballs,” Gray’s AI told him, its voice as complacent as though it were discussing the weather. “Others have survived, but are not moving and appear to be damaged. They may be undergoing auto-repair.”
Ships with active-nanomatrix hulls, like Starhawks, could grow new parts to replace pieces burned or blasted away if the damage wasn’t too extensive. How quickly those damaged alien vessels came back on-line would tell Gray a lot about their level of technology.
More than eight hundred of the alien ships remained, however, and the Dragonfires, plus the survivors of the other two squadrons, remained badly outnumbered.
“Okay, Dragonfires,” Gray told the others. He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. “That cut them up pretty good. Let’s finish them. Independent vectors . . . break!”
The Starhawks, already widely dispersed, began shifting both courses and velocities, passing the thirty-thousand-kilometer mark as separately vectored fighters instead of as a formation.
That gave them their best chance of survival, at this point, and a chance to mix it up ship to ship with the enemy fighters.
The Dragonfires were still badly outnumbered, but there did appear to be a chance, now. The surviving aliens appeared to be trying to regroup their formation, but they seemed hesitant, even awkward in their maneuvers. The remaining Meteors and Hellstreaks were merging now with the enemy ship-cloud, and sharp, strobing flashes were punctuating the darkness as ships on both sides died.
With both his Krait and AMSO missile lockers empty, Gray now had only two weapons remaining in his arsenal, the Starhawk’s StellarDyne PBP-2 particle beam projector, affectionately known as a “pee-beep” by gravfighter pilots, and a Gatling RFK-90 KK cannon. Both weapons were for short-range work—a few thousand kilometers for the particle gun, closer still for the kinetic-kill rounds. To use them he would have to close to knife-fighting range, and that meant getting well inside the 30K boundary of the enemy’s primary weapon.
That weapon, though, was not much in evidence now, possibly because the enemy’s formation had been disrupted, possibly because they’d lost their inter-ship tactical web, the electronic link that let them work together in close formation. That was the hell of being the first to come up against an unknown technology; you didn’t know the enemy’s strengths or his weaknesses, and had to find successful ship-to-ship tactics essentially by trial and error.
And in this game, error generally meant you ended up dead.
Accelerating hard, he arrowed into the melee now twisting about in front of the alien cylinder, lining up on a lone hostile and triggering a tenth-second burst of artificial lightning, a tightly focused beam of protons powerful enough to overwhelm enemy radiation screens and boil off armor.
A hit! The enemy vessel flared in a dazzlingly brilliant flash and began tumbling, half of its length, visible in the high-mag imagery downloading into Gray’s in-head display, charred and curdled.
Another enemy ship flashed across his vector, right to left, and he pivoted his Starhawk to track it. The turn brought the sun directly into his field of view. His fighter’s optics adjusted to protect his vision, but for a terrifying moment he couldn’t see anything, and he was flying blind.
The AI picked out the nearest enemy ships, however, and he locked on to one, firing his PBP twice, two brief bursts. The first missed; the second burned off the trailing couple of meters of the alien in a white flash, putting it into a slow tumble.
The Dragonfires twisted and turned, maneuvers possible only for light ships possessing high-performance gravitic drives. The tangle of battling ships was known as a furball, a term left over from the era of atmo-fighters and classic dogfights.
It was also what fighter pilots were pleased to call a “target-rich environment,” with hundreds of the brightly reflecting silver and gray ships swarming like angry and somewhat confused hornets throughout the volume of battlespace. Gray lined up one ship and blasted it, then moved on to another, and then to a third, knocking them out of action with rapid-fire pulses from his PBP. Comm chatter sounded in his ears, pilots calling back and forth as they coordinated their maneuvers.
“Dragon Three! Dragon Three! You’ve got one on your tail!”
“Copy! I see him! Pulling a one-eighty . . . got the bastard!”
“Dragon Eight! This is Five! Break left high!”
“Five, Eight! Rog!”
“Watch it, Two! There’s one close on your six! One on your six!”
A Starhawk a thousand kilometers away twisted suddenly, nicked by an enemy’s deadly beam. The aft portion of the grav-fighter snapped off, then vanished, leaving the rest of the ship to tumble helplessly amid an expanding cloud of glittering fragments.
“This is Dragon Two! I’m hit! I’m hit!”
“Copy Two,” Gray replied.
“Shit! Drive’s out! I’m streaking!”
Dragon Two was Shay Ryan’s ship, and streaking was grav-fighter slang for hurtling out of battlespace without power, without drives, unable to slow or maneuver.
And there wasn’t a damned thing Gray could do about it, except . . .
“Two, this is Dragon One!” Gray added, thoughtclicking on the icon marking Ryan’s crippled fighter. “I’ve got you logged! Sit tight. The SAR tugs will be after you in a few hours!”
Data on Ryan’s vector, her course and speed, had just been logged by Gray’s AI, and would be transmitted over the local tactical net. When the fleet arrived, the Search and Rescue vessels would have a good idea of where to look for her.
If the fleet arrived. Gray was realist enough to know that there were no promises there. By now the battlegroup’s tactical planners had some idea of what was waiting for them here at the TRGA cylinder. Admiral Koenig might well have decided to turn the fleet around and head back for Earth.
But . . . no. Koenig wouldn’t do that. There were plenty of Confederation naval officers who would cut and run, Gray knew, but not Koenig. The man, in Gray’s estimation, was not your typical risty. He cared about his people, and he wouldn’t abandon any of them if there was any way in heaven or earth to avoid it. At the very least, he wou
ld wait to see the outcome of this furball, and he would save the fighters if he could.
Assuming there were any fighters left to save when the fleet got here in another seven hours or so. Nineteen grav-fighters were left in the fight, now, out of the original thirty-six, and while they were doing better now that they were actually in close among the enemy ships, they were still outnumbered by fifty to one. How long could they keep this up before the bad guys wiped them from the sky, one by one?
Ten thousand kilometers away, a group of enemy ships was trying to re-form. Gray’s AI counted sixty-four of them—there was that power of two again—and they were drifting into a formation like a broad, circular wall of ships, a dish shape like the one the Dragonfires had already broken up.
This time, there were no more Kraits and no more AMSO rounds.
“All ships!” Gray broadcast. “Listen up! We’ve got an enemy formation grouping up near the cylinder’s mouth! Let’s move in close and burn them!”
Gray had no idea, at this point, if he had overall command of all three squadrons—what was left of them—or not. The skippers of the Meteors and the Hellstreaks both were dead, though, so it was a fair assumption. There was no time to check on commission dates or find out if anyone else with a higher rank was still in the fight. Leadership, at this point in the dogfight, was a matter of pointing, waving, and shouting “Follow me!”
He brought his Starhawk into a fast, broad turn, throwing his projected singularity out to port and letting the flickering gravity field draw him around, his straight path becoming a curve as it passed through gravitationally bent space. Maneuvering a fighter in space wasn’t at all like flying an atmo-fighter; with no atmosphere to provide lift or drag, the only way to change vector was to project singularities nearby, submicroscopic black holes that curved space just enough to redirect the ship’s course.
