by Ian Douglas
“What possibility is that, America?” Captain Connie Fletcher, the carrier’s CAG, asked.
“That Humankind won the war, and purchased security for a time—centuries, perhaps. But such a situation would likely not be stable. There would be another war . . . and another . . . and perhaps another . . . and sooner or later Earth’s civilization would be overwhelmed, or it would elect to join the far more powerful and technologically advanced Sh’daar Collective.”
“You,” Gray said, “are just chock full of happy thoughts today, aren’t you?”
“He’s right, though, Admiral,” Commander Roger Hadley said. He was the task force’s intelligence officer, and head of America’s Intel Department. “We’ve known all along that the Sh’daar were so very much bigger and more powerful than we were. If the warfare continues, sooner or later we will get worn down to nothing, or we will become a part of the system.”
The network continued speaking, relentless. “Other possibilities, though of considerably lower probability, include, first, that the Sh’daar were banished from Humankind’s region of the galaxy, or, second, that the planet Invictus represents a last survival of the Sh’daar after a human victory. A third possibility is that humans—if they still exist as human in this epoch—are in a state of peaceful co-existence with the Sh’daar. A fourth—”
“That’s more than enough for us to chew on for right now, America,” Gray said. “Thank you.”
“What does he mean,” Vonnegut asked, “ ‘if they still exist as human?’ ”
“Just what it said,” Dr. George Truitt said. He was the civilian head of America’s Xenosophontolgy Department. “Twelve million years is a long time. By now, humans may well have evolved into something quite different. We could be in a post-human epoch.”
“So,” Fletcher said, “do we look them up? Our descendents, I mean?”
“For now, we need to focus on the Sh’daar,” Gray told them. “On the Glothr va-Sh’daar, rather.” He checked his internal clock. “If we begin boost on sched, in another—make it ten minutes—we should arrive in circum-Invictus space by 0310 hours. At that time, we will make contact with the ambassador and see where we’re at.”
“Anyone else notice an interesting coincidence?” Truitt said.
“What’s that?” Gray asked.
“It took twelve million years for Invictus to get out here, after being flung out of its birth system. And that’s how far in the future we happen to be.”
“Meaning . . . Invictus got the boot back in our present,” Gutierrez said, thoughtful. “Interesting.”
“We’ll file that as ‘interesting but not germane,’ ” Gray said. “Besides, when you’re dealing with millions of years, you tend to overlook a few thousands . . . or tens of thousands . . . or even a couple of hundred thousand. Invictus could have gotten kicked out of its system in 50,000 BCE . . . or it might not happen for another hundred thousand years after our own time.”
“I suggest that it will be worth a check, though, Admiral,” Truitt said. “I always mistrust coincidences, especially when they’re as blatant as this one.”
“What are you saying, Doc?” Mallory said, chuckling. “That we sent Invictus hurtling out of the galaxy? I don’t think our technology is quite up to that just yet!”
An alarm sounded in Gray’s head, a signal relayed through America’s main AI. “Heads up, people. We have company!”
The AI was showing him an image—pulled from a battlespace drone—of the mouth of the TRGA cylinder, currently some five thousand kilometers off. And ships were emerging from the opening.
Alien ships.
Lots of alien ships . . .
VFA-96, The Black Demons
In transit
1812 hours, TFT
The two Starblades accelerated through strangeness, crowding light itself.
Somewhere astern of them, Pax and Concord had begun accelerating at 1630 hours, boosting at ten thousand gravities. It would take fifty minutes at that acceleration to get up to cruising velocity—.996c—and they would then coast the seven light-hours between planet and TRGA, with a turn-around and fifty-minute deceleration at the end. They would approach the TRGA eight hours, forty minutes later . . . at 0110 hours.
Able to boost at fifty thousand gravities, the two Starblade fighters could reach near-c in about ten minutes. Though time for the two pilots seemed much shorter under the effects of relativistic time dilation, they’d so far covered eighty light-minutes—10 AUs. They would arrive at the TRGA some forty minutes ahead of their two larger consorts.
“Do you think they can . . . ?” Gregory asked.
“Say again,” Meg Connor replied. “I didn’t copy.”
The words were static-blasted and twisted by speed, acceleration, and the intense warping of spacetime ahead by the fighters’ projected gravitic singularities. At least they could communicate, though. Blasting a message by laser com from one fighter to another required miracles of synchronization and wavelength adjustment, techniques long impossible. The Starblades’ AIs could manage the feat, however, so long as the two fighters’ vectors were perfectly matched. Gregory’s voice had a harsh, metallic edge to it, but she could understand him.
“I said, ‘Do you think they can catch up with us?’ ”
Meg Connor considered the question. “The only way they could catch up is to shave some more decimal points off the c-value,” she said at last. “We know they can’t go faster than that.”
“Not and stay out of metaspace.”
“I don’t think even the Glothr could synch up an Alcubierre bubble with a sub-light fighter,” Connor said. “They wouldn’t even be able to detect us out here from inside the warp bubble.”
“Roger that.”
“Besides, they’d encounter the High Guard ships first. We left them back there in our wakes, remember?”
“So we push on . . . and hope the rest of the task force hasn’t popped through the TRGA yet.”
“If they have?”
“We’ve got big, big trouble.”
“Roger that.”
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1813 hours, TFT
“I know those ships,” Gray said, staring at the display within his mind. “Damn it! They’re Turusch!”
Humans had engaged the Turusch more than once. Gray had faced them when he’d been a fighter jock twenty years ago, back in 2404. Their ships, both the big capital warships and their fighters, appeared oddly organic, like lumpy potatoes, painted in broad swaths of either black and green or black and red.
The Turusch were still poorly understood, mostly because communications with them were so difficult. Turusch lived as closely matched pairs, twins connected with each other neurologically. When they spoke, they spoke simultaneously with a kind of buzzing hum; the two voices together generated harmonics that constituted a third message revealing deeper levels of meaning. Even with that bit of linguistic code cracked, however, translations of Turusch meaning were problematic. They didn’t think like humans, and following their meaning in a trialogue could be tough.
In any case, the Turusch had been involved at Arcturus and Eta Boötis, but after that they’d vanished, and had been off the human radar for twenty years, except for a couple of brief, chance sightings. No one knew where they’d gone, or why . . . but after Koenig had struck a deal with the Sh’daar of the N’gai Cloud, they’d not been seen again.
Until now.
The immediate question, of course, was whether these newly arrived ships were hostile.
The nearest large Turusch warship opened up with a particle beam, slashing at the battlecruiser Sonora.
Question answered.
VFA-31, The Impactors
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1813 hours, TFT
“We’r
e under attack!” Lieutenant Commander Edmond St. Clair yelled. “Form up! Form up! Come around and face them!”
The twelve Starblades of VFA-31 whipped around their projected gravitic singularities in unison, still drifting away from the TRGA cylinder, and slowing, but pointed, now, at the sudden, oncoming threat.
Like so many of his shipmates in America’s space wing, St. Clair was new to the squadron and to the ship. He’d started off as a short, wiry Scotsman, born and raised in Glasgow and with his alligience sworn to the Scottish Republic. The United Kingdom, consisting of the Irish and Scottish Republics as well as Britain, was still nominally part of the Pan-European Union which, in turn, was part of the Earth Confederation . . . but that membership had never been particularly strong. In fact, Scots, Brits, and Irish alike all felt little loyalty to the old dream of a united Europe, making the argument that they’d been fighting off attempts by the continent to take them over since the Spanish Armada had tried it in 1588. Early in the period of worsening relations between North America and the Confederation, several British squadrons—including Scottish ships—had point-blank refused to attack USNA forces, and there were even cases, not many, but a few, where UK ships had joined North American ships against Confederation units.
Five years before, St. Clair had been stationed on board the Brit pocket star carrier Centaur when her captain had defected, ship and all, to the USNA. There’d been no active fighting at the time, nothing hotter than a very warm cold war . . . and both ship and the majority of the crew were returned to Pan-Europe. But a number of officers and men had elected to stay in the USNA, and applied for asylum.
Their new hosts, it had turned out, hadn’t entirely trusted them. Then Lieutenant St. Clair had spent two years flying a Virsim link in Columbus while Military Intelligence dug through records and, eventually, through his brain, looking for even a hint of evasion or deception on his part. He’d been transferred to Oceana just before Columbus had been nano-nuked, though several of his compatriots had been caught in the attack and killed.
Eventually, and after Intelligence had been through his brain damned near one neuron at a time, he’d been allowed to fly again. He’d been flying the older Starhawks with VFA-27, the Red Riders, but he hadn’t seen action. When Pan-European Jotuns had attacked Washington and Boston, the Riders had been held in reserve.
It seemed they still hadn’t trusted the handful of volunteers from the far side of the pond.
But by that time, North America was feeling the bite of ever-increasing casualties, especially among trained pilots. The carrier America had been particularly roughed up fighting the Slan and, later, the Grdoch, and at one point had barely been able to put together two combat squadrons. Two months ago, St. Clair had been promoted to lieutenant commander and transferred to VFA-31, the Impactors, as the new squadron CO.
But, damn it, they’d still kept him out of the fighting during Operation Fallen Star! He’d ended up escorting Choctaws down from orbit while six of his squadron mates went after the Pan-European gun positions on the ground. St. Clair had been on a slow burn ever since. It wasn’t fair, treating him like some sort of goddamn pariah!
Finally, though, America was far away from the stifling petty politics of world government, of civil war, of questions of loyalty to the USNA or to Pan-Europe. He glanced again at the vast, spiraling sheet of stars in the distance, the galaxy, and thought again of just how far away he was right now, in both space and time.
A long, long way . . . long enough that the humans of the tiny task force would have to stick together and pull together and fight together no matter what their origins or politics. They were fighting as a species, not a nation.
“All fighters, this is Pryfly,” the voice of America’s CAG said over the combat channel. “Close with the enemy and synch to full Mach. I say again, get in close at full Mach. It’s your best chance!”
In twenty years, human weapons and tactics had improved enormously. Careful studies of each alien species, of their cultures, their weapons, and their technologies, had resulted in detailed assessments on how best to fight each.
For the Turusch, sound combat tactics involved standing off from the enemy at a distance and concentrating missile fire from several warships. Their warships—even their squat and ugly fighters, code-named “toads” by military intelligence—tended to be larger and more massive than their human-designed counterparts, with higher accelerations but lower maneuverability. Their hides were thick and tough, heavily shielded against laser or particle-beam fire, but unable to stand up to concentrated volleys of nuclear warheads on smart missiles. Their beam fire could effectively track and destroy incoming missiles at ranges of more than a few thousand kilometers, but they had a lot of trouble targeting missiles launched from close in—at ranges of a few hundred kilometers or less.
In modern space combat, “several hundred kilometers” counted as point-blank range . . . and fighters twisting in that close to volley-fire nuclear weapons could easily get caught in the blasts. The only way to prosecute attacks that aggressive was to closely merge the organic brain of the fighter’s pilot to the AI running within the machine.
Once, centuries earlier, fighter pilots had used the term Mach number to represent the velocity of their aircraft, “Mach 1” being the speed of sound. Named for the physicist who’d first described supersonic motion in projectiles, Mach numbers as a multiple of the speed of sound were meaningless in hard vacuum. Over the past few years, however, “Mach” had acquired a new and quite different meaning. Added to the word link, it represented the level of synchronization between an organic brain and the machine to which it was linked: linkmach.
“Linkmach 1” represented the basic connection possible between a human brain equipped with cerebral implants and a typical AI. People in virsim linkages experienced about three times that volume of incoming data—linkmach 3.
As St. Clair fully engaged his Starblade’s AI, and felt the incoming tide of data engulfing him, filling him, sweeping him up and along like a towering ocean wave, he hit linkmach 5.
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1814 hours, TFT
“All ships!” Gray ordered over the fleet tactical link, “spread out . . . and focus your fire on the area directly in front of the Triggah! We want to keep the bastards concentrated.”
For the moment, the Earth forces held an important tactical advantage. The Turusch were emerging one at a time from the TRGA’s mouth, and they were moving slowly, no more than a few meters per second relative to the TRGA itself. Fifteen Turusch ships were now gathered within a tight sphere less than kilometer off the TRGA’s mouth, the smaller fighters forming an outside shell for five larger vessels at the center.
“CAG!” Gray snapped. “Get our fighters into that sphere. Coordinate with fire control!”
“They’re already on the way, Admiral. Contact in thirty seconds!”
“Another hit on the Sonora,” Mallory reported. “Hit on the New York . . .”
“Launching missiles,” Taggart announced. “Full spread!”
“Hit on the Victoire . . .”
“All ships!” Gray said. “Disperse! Spread yourselves out! Pour it on!”
Thirty ships pounded at the growing sphere of Turusch vessels. Those thick, brightly painted alien hides drank up incoming laser and particle-beam fire, but by now the first Krait missiles were streaking into the enemy formation and detonating with savage, utterly silent flares of violence. Chunks of the Turusch hulls were vaporized in the holocaust, contributing to a rapidly expanding cloud of hot plasma surging out from the alien fleet like an exploding sun.
As the concentration of alien ships grew, with more and more Turusch vessels emerging from the TRGA and unable to fire at the human ships without hitting their own, the human vessels began spreading out, giving every ship a clear shot at the enemy.
; And then the fighters were among them.
VFA-31, The Impactors
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1815 hours, TFT
“Blue Three! You’ve got a Toad on your six at two hundred!”
“Can’t shake him! Can’t shake him!”
“Three, Seven! Hold on! I’m on him!”
St. Clair rolled his Starblade into a slashing approach, skimming in close behind the enemy fighter that, in turn, was following Blue Three. He thoughtclicked an icon, sending a Krait shipkiller snapping toward the enemy and rolling clear just as it detonated in savage, starcore fury.
“Hit! Good shot, Blue Seven!”
“Thanks! Cover me while I close on one of those big tangos!”
Tango was the Navy shorthand for Turusch vessels.
The Toads were providing close support for the real targets: the big Turusch battlecruisers looming just ahead like fat, multicolored potatoes. St. Clair twisted his fighter through the shell of alien fighters, selecting one of the big warships as his target.
Anti-fighter missiles reached out for him, dozens of them, accelerating . . . closing . . .
“Seven, One! Watch out for those missiles!” Blue One yelled over the tactical channel. Hell, the sky was filled with missiles, each one marked by a glowing icon as it drew its own trail across the sky . . . and right now it felt like every one of them was swinging around to close with him. Turusch tactics leaned heavily on missiles. They tended to dump them out by the hundreds, letting them seek out targets on their own and lock on for the kill.
“Blue Six!” he called. “I’m lining up with Tango Seven! Cover me as I go in!”
St. Clair twisted his Starblade around, flashing at high speed past another looming enemy Toad. Flipping his fighter end for end, he triggered a three-spread of VG-10 shipkillers, sending the missiles toward and slamming into the Turusch ship at point-blank range. Nuclear fire blossomed in silent spectacle, filling the sky.
