by Ian Douglas
With no atmosphere, there was no shock wave . . . though the expanding spheres of hot plasma caught his Starblade and swept it along in a sudden tumble. St. Clair urged his craft around, lining it up with the battlecruiser, now less than five hundred kilometers ahead.
Time seemed to stretch out interminably. . . .
At linkmach 5 in his connection with his Starblade’s intelligence, St. Clair’s mind had in some ways slipped into the world of the machine. He was aware of everything in sharp detail, including items in his peripheral vision, and with an overlay that showed him what was happening behind, below, and above as well—he visualized the full interior of a complete sphere. Data coming in from his AI he perceived directly, not as words heard or read on an in-head screen, but as a nonverbal awareness of what the machine was telling him.
Perhaps strangest of all, his perception of time had been drastically altered. His mind, his thoughts were racing now far, far faster than was normal for an unaugmented human. He was aware of this boost in thoughtspeed primarily through what he was perceiving around him. The combatants—his own fighter and the enemy ships both—seemed to be moving much more slowly than they would be otherwise. As he closed with the Turusch battlecruiser, his data readouts indicated that he would collide with the huge enemy vessel in 0.41 seconds . . . and yet that fractional second felt like almost a full thirty seconds as his fighter crawled across intervening space toward the enemy.
Throughout history, people in combat felt like their perception of time was altered, and the old cliché of a person’s life flashing before their eyes in the instant before they died was proverbial. This effect, however, was real . . . a brutal distortion of perceived time based on the increased efficiency of his neurons.
His speed of thought was still held back somewhat by strictly biochemical limitations: it took time for the synapses of his neurons to recharge each time they fired, and St. Clair was distantly aware of the delay, a feeling of sluggishness as he absorbed the avalanche of incoming data, made decisions, issued orders . . .
St. Clair was almost impatient as he waited for the perfect alignment with his target.
He’d always found it interesting that in the transition toward the machine end of the spectrum, he didn’t lose the one aspect of mind that seemed, to him, at least, to be completely organic: emotions. In fact, studies going back five centuries had demonstrated again and again that emotion gave the warfighter an edge, speeding reactions, focusing attention, and giving him a reason to fight. Artificial intelligences had long been able to convincingly mimic emotions, but most human AI specialists agreed that they hadn’t evolved them for real.
Not yet, at any rate.
When you sanitized warfare to the point that emotions no longer played a part, a significant warfighting advantage was lost. The deadliest fighters weren’t machines, but humans—humans upgraded and enhanced by close links with machines.
Someday, perhaps, machines would develop emotions of their own. When that happened, war machines might at last lose their human pilots once and for all.
For now, however, Ed St. Clair was still very much a part of the fight, twisting his Starblade fighter in; rolling clear of an oncoming enemy missile; lining up with the slowly approaching Turusch capital ship; and at a range of a few tens of kilometers, thoughtclicking on the in-head icons that sent a five-spread of Krait missiles hurtling through emptiness. Anti-missile particle beams snapped out, seeking the shipkillers; at the first touch of destructive energies, a VG-10 missile detonated, sending out a fast-spreading smear of hot plasma and microscopic debris, as well as a powerful surge of electromagnetic radiation.
The missile had not detonated in vain; the cloud of hot microscopic particles from its own vaporization served to momentarily mask the remaining four missiles, just for an instant. Too, the EMP bent incoming beams of charged particles, ruining their precise targeting. One more missile was hit by a proton beam, which vaporized it in a searing flash of energy, but the surviving three missiles reached the lumbering Turusch battlecruiser and detonated with savage ferocity.
The forward half of the Turusch warship was vaporized, shredded away and reduced to white-hot plasma. The ship staggered, rolled, and began to drift back the way it had come: toward the looming maw of the titanic TRGA cylinder.
Dazzled momentarily by the flash, his external sensors overloaded, St. Clair swung his fighter through ninety degrees, decelerating as hard as he could.
Time crawled.
“Great shot, Scotty!” Blue Two yelled. “You nailed him! You nailed him!”
St. Clair bit off a savage reply. He hated the nickname Scotty; that was a different clan altogether, damn it. The stupid North Americans didn’t know the difference, or they didn’t care.
“Watch it!” Blue Three called. “He’s going to hit the Triggah!”
The damaged battlecruiser—perhaps it was already a lifeless hulk—was tumbling, trailing a ragged string of debris and drifting toward the whirling rim of the TRGA.
What happens when a piece of spacecraft debris massing some tens of thousands of tons touches a surface that is whirling at close to the speed of light? St. Clair didn’t know . . . and he didn’t want to be close enough to find out. He thoughtclicked a control, urging his Starblade to go to full acceleration, hurtling clear of the hazy sphere of battlespace and into the open.
And then space behind him lit up.
Chapter Sixteen
6 August, 2425
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1821 hours, TFT
They saw the flash from America’s flag bridge, a dazzling sunburst of raw light engulfing the TRGA’s mouth, a flash so brilliant that the AI handling the ship’s sensors and display systems had to dim the feed strength. An instant later, tracking sensors picked out chunks of metal hurtling out through the USNA fleet at velocities of a quarter c and more . . . fragments accelerated by their contact with the rotating TRGA shell.
“What the hell . . . ?” Gray began.
“A disabled Turusch ship bumped into the TRGA,” Mallory reported. “Instant conversion to energy, with some bits and pieces left over.”
“CAG!” Gray snapped. “How many—”
“We’ve lost telemetry from two more fighters,” Captain Fletcher told him. “It could have been a lot worse. . . .”
“Substantial damage to several of the tangos,” Mallory reported. “None of our caps are reporting damage from the blast.”
“CAG, Gray. How are our fighters doing in there? I can’t see. . . .” It was increasingly tough to follow the unfolding tactical situation.
“Four casualties so far, Admiral,” Fletcher told him. “Three destroyed, and one streaker. We’re doing pretty well so far.”
“Good. Make sure the SAR team keeps that one in sight.”
“Copy that, sir.”
Streakers were ships, whether fighters or capital ships, badly damaged while traveling at high velocity. With drives or power systems knocked out and unable to maneuver, they would continue hurtling clear of battlespace, ultimately to be lost in deep space unless friendly SAR tugs could catch up to them, lock on, and decelerate them or at least rescue the crew.
The problem, of course, was getting a SAR tug out to a damaged ship while a battle was still going on. Too long a delay, and streakers could vanish, lost forever in the unfathomably vast emptiness of space.
At the moment, America had three full fighter squadrons in space—the Death Rattlers, the Lightnings, and the Impactors, while a fourth, the Merry Reapers, were in the process of launching. The star carrier’s fifth strike squadron, the Black Demons, was still in toward the objective planet, possibly near Invictus, possibly en route back to the carrier. Gray definitely wished that they were closer at hand. The Marine carrier transport Marne carried two more squadrons—the Devil Dogs and the Death Deale
rs—and those were launching now as well. With six squadrons fully deployed, the USNA task force would have seventy-two fighters spaceborn—minus the four knocked out of action so far.
The USNA capital ships were blasting away at the Turusch cluster now with everything they had—particle beams, high-energy lasers, and volleyed clouds of missiles. They’d been taking heavy fire. Three battlecruisers—Sonora, Victoire, and Ontario—had been badly hit, as had been the battleship New York. Two destroyers and three frigates had been wrecked by concentrated Turusch missile fire, and a third destroyer, the Howard, was drifting out of control, leaking atmosphere and water.
But modern space fleet combat depended on fighters. Ship-to-ship combat was deadly and merciless; a couple of cruiser-sized ships exchanging beam and missile volleys across short range—a couple of thousand kilometers, say—would likely pound one another into fragments within seconds. A fighter could do almost as much damage and do it almost as quickly as a capital ship, was far more maneuverable and difficult to target, track, and destroy, and if it was destroyed only a single human pilot and his AI were lost. Fighters also had the advantage of being able to slip in super-close to deliver their deadly payloads literally at point-blank range, something a kilometer-long monster like America or New York simply couldn’t manage.
So, space-fleet tactics generally required that an enemy fleet be hit by fast-moving fighters first, their formations broken up, their capital ships destroyed or damaged, and their defending fighters eliminated or neutralized; only then could the larger warships move in and mop up.
Unfortunately, in this case the Turusch had forgotten to read the space-tactics manual. Emerging from the TRGA almost directly alongside the USNA fleet, they began engaging the Earth warships at close range without either side having had the opportunity to soften up the enemy.
But Task Force One’s advantage was beginning to tell, as their position allowed them to partially englobe the Turusch warships as they emerged at dead-slow speed from the TRGA. Their concentrated missile fire was wreaking havoc, and the nova-flare vaporization of that wreckage had swept through the Turusch warships like a scythe.
But there was one more tactical card Gray hoped to play. If only—
“Flag, this is Lattimer.” Excellent! That was what he’d been waiting for. Captain Charles Lattimer was skipper of the railgun cruiser Farragut.
“Go ahead.”
“Sir, we have a good shot with a beach lined up . . . but the small fry’re in the way. Can you do something to clear them out?”
“Very well, Farragut. Wait one.” He shifted channels. “CAG? Can we move the fighters out of the battlespace?”
“Affirmative, Admiral. I’ll pass the word.”
A good shot with a beach . . .
Lattimer had very specialized versions of AS-78 sandcaster rounds—missiles loaded with dense, sand-grain-sized spherules of lead fired in high-velocity clouds to take out incoming missiles—at the ready. It was similar to Gray’s tactic that had gotten him his nickname, but scaled up.
Scaled up a lot.
VFA-31, The Impactors
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1823 hours, TFT
St. Clair swung his Starblade around, readying for another pass. Several hundred kilometers clear of the tangled melee of destruction in battlespace, he had an astonishing view of the TRGA and the ships clustered about it, and, beyond, the vast sweep of the galactic arms.
He needed AI-enhanced vision to make out details of the various ships at this range. Half a dozen of the USNA capital ships had been hit—the battlecruisers Sonora and Ontario especially, along with several destroyers and frigates. Even as he glanced at the display, Sonora exploded with a searing flash.
“All fighters, all fighters,” called a voice from America’s FC3, her Fleet Combat Command Center. “Move clear of the core battlespace immediately! They’re getting ready to throw a beach at you!”
St. Clair needed no further encouragement. Local space was about to become filled with very small but very fast grains of lead, and he wanted no part of that.
“FC-Three, Blue Seven,” he called. “Acknowledged.”
He’d been lining up with another big Turusch warship, but he broke off the approach immediately, swinging around his projected singularity and accelerating hard. A pair of enemy fighters rolled onto his six. He flipped again, continuing on his new vector, but flying backward as he cut his drive, then loosed two Krait missiles. Nuclear fire flared, a silent blossom. One Turusch fighter emerged from the light tumbling and smashed; the second managed a sharp vector change and broke off pursuit.
And then St. Clair was clear of the tangle of alien warships and wreckage. It felt . . . empty out here, with no worlds, no stars . . .
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1824 hours, TFT
The Farragut waited as the fighters cleared the way. It was about to send ten-ton canisters filled with lead spherules at the enemy. Fired like a shotgun, these canisters would disperse a wave of sand-sized lead much like the AS-78 would disperse sand. With that much “sand,” it had been humorously noted once that it was like throwing a beach at the enemy.
Life’s a beach, Gray thought.
In Gray’s in-head display as well as on the big forward bulkhead screen on the flag bridge, fighter icons were sweeping up, out, and away from the tangle of Turusch warships, responding to orders from America’s CAG in the Combat Command Center. As he watched, Turusch missiles closed in on one of those fighters—Green Three of the Reapers—merged with it . . . and flared in a sphere of searing energy.
“Green Three is dead,” Fletcher’s voice said. “Damn . . .”
“Battlespace is clear, Admiral,” Dean Mallory said.
“Farragut,” Gray said, “you are clear to fire.”
“Copy that, America. Firing.”
Twelve thousand kilometers from America’s port side, the long and angular shape of the railgun cruiser fired, the warshot marked on the display screens by a white egg shape that expanded as it hurtled toward the Turusch fleet. An instant later, the cruiser’s volley intersected with the alien vessels, and eight of them flashed white.
“Hits!” Mallory called. “At least eight solid hits . . . and damage to several more!”
“Nice shooting, Farragut,” Gray said. “You are clear to continue the bombardment.”
“Copy that, America. Recycling for a second shot.”
It took time to recharge the massive accumulators along the length of Farragut’s railgun in readiness for another shot.
The question was whether Task Force One could hold together as an effective combat force long enough to wear down the enemy. Sonora, Kearny, and Howard had been destroyed; New York, Northern California, Valparaiso, and the heavy cruiser Clinton had been badly savaged. The Turusch fleet continued to hammer at the USNA vessels with beams and missiles both. The enemy was hurt, but was still more than capable of inflicting hurt of its own.
“Farragut . . . firing . . .”
A second cloud of lead sand seared through the tightly packed Turusch warships. Several were in fragments now, tumbling in random directions. One detonated in a silent flare of nova light.
As nearly as Gray could judge, the battle was still an even balance, with neither side yet holding a clear advantage.
But then several volleys of missiles swept around and in on the Farragut, detonating one after the other in a savage fusillade of nuclear destruction.
And now it appeared that the Turusch had the upper hand. . . .
USNS/HGF Concord
Unknown Spacetime
1825 hours, TFT
Concord hurtled through a space and time twisted by relativity. At better than 99 percent of c, space was weirdly compressed into faint bands of color forward, and time proceeded at a snail’s pace.
Had they been inside the galaxy still, the surrounding stars would have been blurred and squeezed into a clearly visible starbow—concentric rings of color with a void at the center into which the ship appeared to be moving. The effect still was not well understood, since the infrared radiation of stars ahead should have been blue-shifted into visible wavelengths without being split into rainbow spectra. As it was, with no nearby stars, the only visible light sources out here were the softly shining spiral of the galaxy, together with a scattering of faint, remote blurs—other galaxies far off in the emptiness of space. The galaxy was blurred and stretched by Concord’s velocity off to one side, its colors broken into rainbow hues, but substantially muted.
Whatever the reason, the effect reduced the ship’s seven-hour drift time to thirty-seven and a half minutes.
For Commander Dahlquist, linked in to Concord’s command center, the main concern was not relativistic time dilation, but the way the Glothr seemed to accomplish the same thing by technological means. He fled now through velocity-compressed space as though the hounds of hell were after him. Indeed, he would have preferred hellhounds to what he’d glimpsed as Concord had begun accelerating: a cloud of ships emerging from the rings encircling Invictus.
“I think it’s okay, Skipper,” Ames told him. “Even they can’t do more than tack on a few more thousandths of a c.”
“Maybe,” Dahlquist said. “But they might go FTL and catch up with us.”
“Impossible, Captain. I don’t care how good they are, they can’t see out of a warp bubble.”
It was an old argument, the sort kicked around by naval personnel at spaceport bars and officer’s clubs over a couple of drinks. Just how good could faster-than-light technology get? Could an alien craft with superior technology catch up to a ship plowing ahead through normal space by going FTL, then drop out of metaspace precisely enough for an intercept? Conventional wisdom said no way in hell; faster-than-light travel by definition meant wrapping yourself up in a tight little gravitational pocket of metaspace, your own private and inaccessible universe . . . which meant that no one outside the pocket could see you, and you couldn’t see out.
