by Ian Douglas
Starhawks carried two types of battlespace monitors—tiny, finger-sized units that simply watched and transmitted data, and the larger VR-5s, a bit larger than a human head, that could be programmed to take specific action or even display a measure of independent thought when used for reconnaissance. In this case, the probe would make its way back to the local TRGA cylinder and attempt to thread its way through the wormhole and back to the fleet.
Gray wasn’t even sure that it could be done, but it was one of only two actions open to him at the moment.
And then the alien ship arrived.
It was . . . huge. And utterly unlike any ship design Gray was familiar with, all sweeping curves and clustered spires, more like a tiny world than a spacecraft. What appeared to be a tiny opening on the smoothly rounded forward end of the thing turned out to be a hundred meters across as it closed over and around Gray’s fighter.
He thoughtclicked the command to destroy himself and the ship . . . then screamed when nothing happened.
Still alive, Gray was drawn inside. . . .
Chapter Twelve
30 June 2405
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Inbound, Texaghu Resch System
0004 hours, TFT
“All ships,” Koenig said, giving the command. “Fire!”
Throughout the fleet, volley upon volley was loosed—high-speed nuclear-tipped missiles, kinetic-kill railgun projectiles, and even—borrowing from the tactics employed by one of the Starhawk squadrons launched earlier—sandcaster rounds. The bombardment lasted for precisely one minute, before targeting AIs gave the order to cease fire. At this range, they were firing almost blind, firing at where the AIs predicted the targets would be when the rounds actually reached them.
Whether those volleys would have any effect at all remained to be seen.
More than six hours had passed since Koenig had decided to continue with the oplan, having the Fleet follow the three advance fighter squadrons in to the TRGA artifact rather than aborting and running for home.
Details of what had happened to the three squadrons were still sketchy. The squadron CO of the Dragonfires had employed massed volleys of nukes to break up the Sh’daar formation, that much was clear, but after that, things had become confused. All three squadrons had suffered heavy casualties, and tracking data had been transmitted on the vectors of a number of streakers. Telemetry from the fighters, acquired as the battlegroup continued to bear in toward the system’s star, indicated that they’d expended all of their munitions, then gone dark, scattering across that region of space and dropping into silent near-invisibility to await the fleet’s arrival.
The fleet wasn’t there yet. They were now fifty-one minutes out at their original projections, and traveling at 15,300 kilometers per second. Remote probes launched an hour earlier had already entered the TRGA battlespace and were transmitting what they saw back to the incoming fleet with a seventy-eight-second time delay.
What they’d reported was chilling. The initial enemy formation had been savaged by the fighter strike, but more of the ships identified by the Agletsch as Sh’daar “ghosts” had come through the spinning cylinder in the hours since, filling local space with flashing, shifting sheet formations of the alien vessels, gleaming in the harsh light of the close-by sun. From their vantage point just over 23 million kilometers out, Koenig and his command staff watched the probe transmissions, could see the alien formations rippling and pulsing as if they were part of a single unit. According to the fleet AIs recording the scene, the enemy now numbered more than 33 million of the small vessels, or some 224, plus a couple of thousand or so left over after the three fighter squadrons had struck hours earlier.
With luck, the one-minute bombardment would thin those alien ranks a bit . . . but Koenig knew better than to count on that too much. The fleet was going to have to go in there toe-to-toe, with the outcome anyone’s guess.
“Three squadrons ready for launch at your order, Admiral,” Wizewski told him, seconds after the long-range bombardment had ceased.
“Thank you, CAG.” Koenig checked his internal time readout. “You may commence launching CSP. Inform the other carriers in the battlegroup, if you please.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
One of America’s six squadrons, the Dragonfires, had been sent in ahead of the fleet; three more were readied now in the carrier’s drop tubes—VFA-51, the Black Lightnings, VFA-31, the Impactors, and VFA-36, the Death Rattlers. All flew the newer SG-92 Starhawks. The two remaining squadrons, the Star Tigers and the Nighthawks, flew the older SG-55 War Eagles, and so Koenig had elected to hold them in reserve.
All of America’s remaining fighter squadrons were flying short today. They’d been badly shot up at Alphekka, and even folding in the survivors from several other squadrons as replacements hadn’t brought their rosters up to full strength. All things considered, Wizewski had done an incredible job of making do with what was left . . . but now his patchwork efforts were going to be put to the ultimate test. The three Starhawk squadrons he’d thrown against some four-thousand Sh’daar had been shredded; exact figures couldn’t be calculated yet, but a good guess was that twenty of the thirty-six fighters going in had been destroyed, and another ten were disabled and streaking. And the odds they would be facing now were far, far worse.
For that reason, Koenig was going to employ the fleet’s fighters in an unusual way, putting them into space as an integral part of the carrier group, rather than as long-range strike craft. The idea, his hope, really, was that a few hundred fighters mingling with the fifty-eight capital ships would cause major headaches for the enemy’s targeting systems. Throw them at that wall of silver-gray alien craft and most of them would be destroyed. Keep them with the fleet, and perhaps fighters and capital ships could provide close combat support for each other.
It was not an accepted tactic in the fleet manual for the Confederation Navy, which emphasized the need to use strike fighters across multiple-AU ranges in order to wreak maximum damage to an enemy formation before the slower, less maneuverable capital ships could come into range. Cripple the enemy fleet with fighters, then mop up with the heavies—that was the accepted maxim of modern space-naval warfare.
Koenig decided that today he was going to rewrite the manual. So far as he knew, the Confederation had never come up against this enemy, or these tactics; old and established strategies would end with the battlegroup destroyed, the survivors hunted down one by one. If they were to come through this with any hope of winning, they needed to try something new.
“Admiral, request cessation to thrust,” Wizewski said. “The Black Lightnings are ready for drop.”
“Make to all vessels in the battlegroup,” Koenig ordered. “Cease thrust.”
If America did not stop her deceleration, the fighters would emerge from their drop tubes one by one . . . and one by one smash into the underside of the carrier’s forward shield cap at over a thousand meters per second. Steady velocity was okay; he wanted the fleet to have some residual momentum when it reached battlespace. Speed is life.
“The fleet has ceased decelerating,” Commander Sinclair said. “Velocity estimated at fifteen thousand kps.”
“Very well.”
“Fighters have commenced launching,” Wizewski added.
On one of the CIC monitors, a drone image of America showed the fighters dropping from the carrier’s rotating hab modules, aft of the mushroom cap. Ten fighters in the Black Lightnings. Eleven apiece for the Rattlers and the Impactors.
Six fleet carriers were currently deployed with CBG-18. Besides America herself, there were the two Lincoln-class fleet carriers, the Lincoln and the United States, each with five grav-fighter squadrons, plus the smaller Jeanne d’Arc, Illustrious, and Zheng He, with three squadrons apiece.
On phosphor, that suggested a total of three hundred fighters, but the reality was not so promising. From the three largest carriers, 36 fighters had already been engaged. Of those rem
aining, nine squadrons were SG-92 Starhawks—theoretically 108 ships, though the actual number was 102. The rest were either SG-55 War Eagles or the similarly outdated KRG-17 Raschadlers and BAe Drakes. The Xian J-220 Chen fighters launching off of the Zheng He were an unknown quantity, but the design was ten years old, and thought to be similar in performance to the Pan-European craft. Two more CBG carriers, the Marine assault transports Nassau and Vera Cruz, each carried two squadrons of SG-86 Rattlesnakes, but those were designed for close-in ground support, not deep-space fighter combat.
So . . . the fleet was able to deploy 100 Starhawks, plus about twice that number of obsolete or less maneuverable fighters. Against . . . all of those. . . .
He continued watching the transmissions from the battlespace drones showing close-ups of a few of those millions of alien craft.
“Admiral Koenig?” The voice coming over his implant was that of Commander Lucas Franklin, America’s senior S-2 officer, the head of the CBG’s intelligence unit.
“What do we have, Commander?”
“Sir . . . we’re picking up a close-range transmission.”
“One of our fighters?”
“No, sir. Not exactly, any way. It’s from a VR-5, and it claims to have launched from one of our Starhawks.”
“Okay . . .” This was not exactly vital intelligence. Lots of drones would have been launched during the battle earlier.
“Sir, this one claims to have come through the TRGA, and to have data about the other side.”
That was significant. “Have you downloaded the data yet?”
“We’re working on it. The drone has been damaged and the transmission rate is very slow. Apparently it can’t send more than a repeating pickup beacon.”
“How badly damaged?”
“We’re not yet sure. Evidently, the Sh’daar ships spotted it coming through and opened up with their beams. The probe performed evasive maneuvers, but still lost its drives and power plant. It’s working off batteries.”
Which explained why the probe hadn’t simply homed in on America and requested that it be taken aboard. It would also explain a weak signal and low transmission rate for the data.
“Who programmed it?”
“Lieutenant Trevor Gray, sir. The Dragonfires.”
Gray again. The Prim from Manhattan who’d helped win the Defense of Earth. If that boy kept popping up in official dispatches like this, he was going to earn an early promotion.
“Okay. What do you need from me?”
“Permission to divert the ship to pick up the probe, sir. It’s about 5 million kilometers away, and off our line of flight.”
Koenig opened a window in his mind and looked at the numbers, bringing up a series of projected courses and intercepts.
Not good. The probe’s velocity relative to the incoming CBG was enormous. It could be done, but not without screwing up the entire formation. They would have to pick it up with auxiliary craft with high-boost capabilities.
“No . . . but we can dispatch a SAR tug to pick it up.” He’d been planning on dispatching some of the SARs in any case, to begin retrieving the stranded pilots in crippled fighters scattered all over this part of the sky.
“Good enough, sir. When we have the probe on board, we can link it directly to our AIs and retrieve everything it’s carrying.”
“I want to see the raw data, Commander. The moment you have it.” Normally, intel data went through vetting and analysis to clean it up before it was passed on up the chain of command. But if Gray had sent a message torpedo back across the TRGA from the other side, he must have a pretty damned good reason for doing so. If nothing else, the battlegroup needed to know what was over there, and where all of these millions of ships were coming from.
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
Koenig passed on the orders to launch a SAR tug immediately, then turned his full attention back to the images of battlespace, searching for a weakness, an edge to use against a foe with such vastly superior numbers.
Several things had become clear to Koenig as he’d watched the transmissions, both now, and the ones from the fighters earlier. The enemy was technologically advanced, yes, but they appeared to be relying more on numbers than on technology in combat.
Their primary weapon was a beam of unknown type that caused complete nuclear collapse in the atoms of whatever it touched. America’s physics department was still working on the analysis, but at a first guess, the beam greatly increased the strong nuclear force within each atomic nucleus, causing the nucleus to collapse and merge with other collapsing nuclei.
Partial control of the strong nuclear force allowed human power plants and gravitational drives to create artificial singularities, tiny and short-lived black holes that drew energy from the quantum vacuum, or bent space to propel a ship. The Sh’daar, however, seemed to have taken things a lot further, turning the technique into a weapon that could collapse a target vessel into a microscopic black hole at a range of thousands of kilometers.
Evidently, the screens and gravitic shields of the fighters had provided little if any defense against the weapon. America’s physics department had suggested, however, that the shields of the capital ships would be more effective in deflecting those beams. Koenig hoped that would be the case.
Right now, his battlegroup was outnumbered by roughly half a million to one, and they would need every advantage they could scrape together just to survive.
Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra
SAR 161 Lifelines
Texaghu Resch System
0010 hours, TFT
“SAR Blue-Sierra, you are clear for launch.”
“Copy, PriFly.” Lieutenant Commander Jessica LeMay ran through her electronic checklist one final time. The outer doors were open, the hangar in hard vacuum. Stars shone through the bay access, hard and unwinking. “Launch in five . . . four . . .”
“SAR Blue-Sierra, abort your launch.”
Shit! She thoughtclicked the hold icon. “Blue-Sierra aborted. What the hell is going on up there?”
“Blue-Sierra, wait one.”
That maddeningly calm voice was Commander Corbin, the CO of one of America’s two SAR squadrons, the DinoSARs. He was up in Primary Flight Control—PriFly—and he was the one calling the shots.
Jessica LeMay had an extremely low tolerance for micromanagement, however.
Until six years ago, LeMay had been a grav-fighter pilot, a member of VFA-60, the Fighting Hornets, off of the star carrier Saratoga. Her War Eagle had been nudged by a Turusch toad above Sturgis’s World, Zeta Herculis BII. She’d spent the next forty-eight hours in bitter cold as her life support failed, her crippled fighter tumbling away through the darkness, a streaker. Helpless, she’d watched as the Confederation line was broken, as the Sara vanished in a nuclear fireball, and as one by one, the other members of her squadron were destroyed.
She’d been rescued, though, by a SAR tug off the Iwo Jima, a Marine assault carrier working to evacuate some of the Sturgis’s World colonists. She’d made it home, somehow . . . but she’d failed her psych eval and lost her combat-flight status.
She’d fought her way back, however. When she couldn’t win a replacement slot with a fighter squadron, she’d put in for Search and Rescue training and eventually won a billet with the DinoSARs. Her first deployment as a SAR pilot had been at the Hegemony colony of Everdawn, a year and a half ago.
She knew, with the hard, cold certainty of personal experience, what it was like to be trapped in a disabled fighter, tumbling through the void. There were a number of pilots out there now in the same situation, and she was going to do what she could to bring them back in. She did not need the stay-at-home brass telling her how to do her job.
“SAR Blue-Sierra. Unlock for an AI download.”
What the hell? “PriFly, what’s this all about? I’ve got an AI.”
“Something special, Jess,” Corbin told her. “They need you to retrieve a damaged VR-5. The AI will check it out and relay the data.”
“And since when do machines take precedence over people, damn it?”
“Since now,” Corbin replied. “This is critical. Are you going to follow orders, or do I scratch you from the roster and send someone else?”
She thoughtclicked an icon. “Okay, okay. I’m open. Send it.”
She didn’t fully understand the order. Lifelines, her rescue vessel, was an old UTW-90 Brandt-class space-dock tug, ugly and clumsy-looking, but refitted and updated for SAR work. The AI was a Gödel series 1400, not top-of-the-line, but better than the AIs routinely run on Starhawk systems.
In fact, all AI systems were much the same at the most basic level, with identical software providing the personality matrix, the basic intelligence, and the complex ability to interface seamlessly with humans. The AI on board Lifelines was focused on finding inert pieces of junk in the darkness and getting in close to them, with an emergency medical and diagnostic routine that rivaled those in America’s sick bay. Some of those facilities were being deleted now, she saw, to make room for some fairly elaborate software with access locked behind security codes that she didn’t have.
“PriFly, Blue-Sierra. This thing just killed my medical protocols.”
“Only temporarily,” Corbin’s voice replied. “Just trust me on this one, Jessica. We need to know what’s on board that probe.”
Lifelines carried an enormous computer memplex, larger than necessary for the software she usually ran. This AI was taking nearly three-quarters of it, and sequestering the rest as storage.
“Download complete,” the new AI told her. It sounded exactly like the old one.
“You are now clear for launch, Blue-Sierra,” Corbin told her. “Good luck!”
“Copy, PriFly. I hope this package of yours is worth it!” She checked her navigational readouts. Shit! This thing was 5 million kilometers out and had a hell of a velocity difference. She brought her ship’s power plant up to full. “Roger that. Launching in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . go!”
