by Ian Douglas
But he still hated the fact of it.
Right now, however, he had a new set of decisions to make. His fleet had been reduced to seventeen capital ships, and eight of those were so badly damaged they couldn’t move. He’d just received word that the Pax and the Concord were in trouble, and there was an excellent chance that the Glothr were now on the way. They could not take on an entire planet with just nine intact warships, nor would it do to hare off to Invictus and leave the damaged ships helpless and vulnerable to a Glothr attack.
But the surviving Turusch were also an unknown, and a deadly one. At least ten Turusch vessels had vanished back into the TRGA. Some of those might have been too badly shot up to re-engage, but others could easily regroup on the other side of the cylinder, then come back through again, quite possibly bringing with them reinforcements. The nature of TRGA physics suggested that the Turusch fleet had not come from the same area of spacetime as the USNA fleet. They might be from twelve million years ago, but a different part of space entirely from the Beehive cluster—a different TRGA altogether, or they could be from somewhere and somewhen quite different. Speculation at this point was meaningless, but Gray knew he had to at least allow for the possibility that Turusch ships might come pouring in through this TRGA at any moment.
And if they did, what was left of Task Force One would be trapped, caught between them and the oncoming Glothr ships from Invictus.
So what options did he have? The first was that he could protect the helpless ships until they managed to cobble together enough repairs that the whole task force could limp back to the Beehive TRGA. They would return to Earth, having suffered a clear defeat.
And . . . that was okay. Not palatable, perhaps, not pleasant, but . . . okay. When fleets engaged with one another, generally one was the winner, one the loser, and there’d certainly been no shame in this loss. He would return to the Beehive, then to Earth, and offer Koenig his resignation because clearly he wasn’t suited for fleet command. That much, at least, was abundantly clear.
But it would mean that more than ten thousand humans had died . . . for nothing.
A part of Gray’s mind simply refused to accept that. In terms of material loss, the Battle of the Invictus TRGA—as Fleet Intelligence was now calling it—had been a draw. But if the USNA task force abandoned the tiny volume of space it had carved out for itself on this side of the TRGA, then the battle, and all of those losses, would be a resounding defeat—meaningless.
And he would not accept that. He couldn’t. Even though not dismissing that option increased the very real and serious risk that his remaining ships and crews would be sacrificed as well, he wasn’t able to choose that path. The question was Do I have that right?
But there was more to the equation. To repair the most badly damaged of the task force vessels, they needed to find a source of raw materials, this in a volume of space completely empty of such. And making those repairs—including finding the necessary materials—required time.
Time, though, was the resource now in shortest supply. Either or both the Glothr and the Turusch might be here literally at almost any moment.
The key, then, was finding a source of raw materials. A single hundred-meter asteroid was all they would need, especially if it was a type S, containing both metals and lighter elements, as well as water.
He could send out scouts to look for asteroids adrift out here. That, Gray knew, was the longest of long shots. Unless there were a few rocks being dragged along in Invictus’s gravitational train, such bodies would be very few and far between.
Or he could send the Vulcan back through the TRGA. The Beehive cluster was young, 600 million years, or so, and filled with gas and dust, and rich in the debris associated with building stars and worlds. It wouldn’t take long to find the necessary asteroids back there, disassemble them, and reload Vulcan’s empty storage bays.
Could they afford to temporarily lose the Vulcan, however, while she went back to mine A-ram? She was also engaged in manufacturing complex circuits and repair modules, as well as maintaining life support and rebuilding shattered interior structure. That work would stop if she returned to the Beehive.
Damn . . .
The answer, of course, had been staring Gray squarely in the face the whole time. There was a source of raw material here, and quite a large one. He realized it was the only possible option.
“Commander Mallory . . . Mr. Talbot . . . pass the word to Vulcan, and to the rest of the fleet. We will cannibalize the wrecked ships in order to repair the damaged vessels.”
“Cannibalize, sir?” Talbot said. He sounded shocked.
“Exactly. The Turusch ships are like mini-asteroids to begin with. And our own ships already have supplies of nicely differentiated elements, plus large supplies of water . . . those that haven’t leaked it out already.”
“We may not get much out of our ships, Admiral,” Mallory said. “Most of them were vaporized. There’re just small globs of resolidified metal spinning off through space now.”
“We’ll use what we can.”
“What about radiation?”
A good point. Most of the wrecks, both human and Turusch, had been made that way by repeated thermonuclear explosions. Much of the wreckage—especially the metal—would be heavily contaminated.
“The recovery process will mostly be handled by robots and nano clouds,” Gray said, thinking hard. “Vulcan can build enough nanodecon chambers to take care of the rads as the raw material comes through. We should have had enough practice with that sort of thing by now.”
Which was true. Handling intense radiation fields had been a necessity since the first Mars and Lunar colonies in the twenty-first century, and building the first space elevator had required some efficient decon techniques just to build habs in and above the Van Allen Belts.
“Do Turusch ships have onboard water reservoirs?” Talbot wanted to know.
“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We do have one other issue here, Admiral,” Mallory said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s . . . kind of a religious issue. What do we know about Turusch customs and beliefs about their dead?”
“Ah. As in, what do we do with their bodies?”
“That . . . and just taking apart their ships. We don’t want to be accused of war crimes here.”
“So far as I know, Mr. Mallory, the Turusch are not signatory to any instrument concerning treatment of the dead or salvaging their ships.”
In a war involving just humans, certain actions could be considered grounds for war crimes trials . . . and that included mistreatment of enemy dead. Laws with roots in treaties going back to the twentieth century required combatants to respect enemy dead, as well as the enemy’s taboos and rituals concerning them. There were even provisions in certain circumstances prohibiting the salvage of warships, lest the dead be disturbed. The wet-navy battleship USS Arizona still rested at the bottom of Pearl Harbor as tomb and memorial to more than 1,100 sailors and Marines who’d died aboard her almost five centuries earlier.
But Gray had already decided that such niceties didn’t apply here. They couldn’t. Earth had no treaties with the Turusch; Gray didn’t even know what their death rituals, customs, or taboos might be like. Using the wreckage of Turusch ships was the only real option open to the USNA fleet . . . even if, as was likely, Turusch bodies were going to end up in the mix of raw materials going into the Vulcan storage bays.
To be fair, he did pause for a moment. Was there any way to program the disassembly nano so that it would take apart the alien ships, but ignore the alien bodies?
In a coldly realistic way, he supposed, it didn’t matter. A carbon atom was a carbon atom, whether it came from a wooden desk or a lump of artificially cultured meat or a piece of what once had been a living body. There could be no thought
of contamination, not when Turusch bacteria or anything else that might conceivably taint the raw material was itself nothing but atoms—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen . . . CHON, the basic building blocks of organic chemistry.
Even so, he thought it would be a good idea not to let humans in the fleet know where the atoms that would be showing up in the ship’s food-replicator system over the next few weeks had actually come from.
In any case, the range of acceptable behaviors among sapient species was . . . enormous. He thought, momentarily, about the alien Grdoch: highly intelligent beings, fellow star-farers, who kept their immense food beasts alive so that they could be eaten—alive—a little at a time. The sight of one of those helpless, blind titans being torn open by gleefully ravenous Grdoch still gave him nightmares. . . .
So . . . what was a little technocannibalism among interstellar enemies?
“Be very careful,” Gray said, “to check those hulks for any Turusch that might still be alive.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“But tell Vulcan to get on this fast. I want the fleet put back together again before the Turusch come back . . . or the Glothr show up from Invictus.”
Gray stared for a while longer at the galaxy and the emptiness beyond. That emptiness, that sense of loneliness, was preying on him, gnawing at him. He felt trapped.
He wanted to get this mission the hell over with, and return to the light of Sol.
VFA-96, The Black Demons
Docking approach
USNA Star Carrier America
0142 hours, TFT
Don Gregory guided his Starblade, decelerated now to less insane velocities, toward the star carrier America. From out here, she was an umbrella shape, shield cap and spine, tiny and dark gray against the velvet emptiness of intergalactic space. Winking navigational lights, red and green and white, helped him pick her out against the blackness.
“It’s good to be home, Don,” Connor said.
“Damned straight, Meg. I’ll be happy to peel off this stinking fighter.”
In fact, the seven-hour voyage out from Invictus had been only a bit less than forty minutes subjective, thanks to relativistic time dilation, but it still felt much longer.
“Do you think the Guarders made it?”
“Dunno. We kind of had a head start on them. I hope so, though.” Gregory hesitated, then double-checked to make sure they were on a private channel. “Meg? I’d like to . . . uh . . . to see you again. Soon.” Even on a private channel he was a bit circumspect. The rest of the squadron didn’t need to know about him and Meg.
“A shower and some dinner first?”
“Of course.” He checked the fleet time. “Geez . . . it’s almost oh-two hundred. Didn’t know it was that late . . . or early.”
“It’s the damned time dilation,” Connor replied. “Still feels like eighteen hundred or so to me.”
“Roger that.”
“They’ll probably put us on evening duty tonight, so we can sleep through the day. But maybe my quarters before that?”
“I was thinking more of the Observation Deck.”
“That sounds inspired. You’re on!”
“Good.”
“Black Demon Flight, this is America Pryfly,” a new voice said, and Gregory jumped. Had they been listening in? “You are clear for approach and trap, Bay Two.”
Good. Primary Flight Control was just establishing the link for the landing back on board America.
“Copy that, America. Uh . . . is there any sign of pursuit?” America’s sensors and her far-flung network of battlespace drones could detect an approaching enemy at a much greater range than a couple of lone fighters.
“Negative on that, Demon Flight. Thank you for not leading them back home.”
“Pryfly, they may still be on the way,” Connor announced. “Keep your long range peeled.”
“Copy that.”
Still slowing, Gregory’s Starblade was perfectly aligned now with the carrier’s rotating hab modules, and the stern-facing openings, popularly known as the “barn doors,” in each. His AI took over the final approach, nudging the Starblade’s velocity just enough that Bay Two’s barn door would be sweeping across his line of approach when he got there. America’s power modules and aft sponsons blurred beneath his keel, there was a last-instant bump to starboard as the ASI made a final course correction . . .
. . . and then he flashed across the threshold into Bay Two, coming to a smooth but definite halt a second later. Robotic handlers maneuvered his Starblade onto the black surface of a nano pressure seal. With a lurch, his fighter began sinking into the deck, which closed around him to prevent the atmosphere on the flight deck from leaking out into the hard vacuum of the landing bay. To his left, Connor’s Starblade hurtled into the bay thirty seconds behind him, eased to a halt, and began sinking into the black rectangle on the deck as well.
They were home.
Sick Bay
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
0250 hours, TFT
“He should be awake now,” the sick bay’s AI voice announced. “Go ahead, Captain.”
“How are you feeling, Scotty?”
Lieutenant Commander Edmond St. Clair opened his eyes . . . then widened them. Captain Connie Fletcher was leaning over his bed. “CAG!” he said, and tried to sit up.
“At ease, Commander,” she said, laughing. “Take it easy.”
“What . . . happened?”
“You kind of got shot up fighting the Tushies. A SAR tug snagged you and dragged you home.”
“We’ve had you in an artificially induced coma for several hours, Commander,” the AI told him. “We’ve checked you out, and you appear undamaged.”
“God . . .”
He bit off the word. As a Pan-European, he knew how sensitive the North Americans were to religious comments. He amended the thought: former Pan-European.
“Don’t worry,” Fletcher said. “You’re not offending anyone.”
“I was feeling . . . pretty lost, out away from the ship.”
“I can imagine. It’s damned empty out there. You feeling up to going back to duty status?”
“I . . . think so.”
“We’re growing new fighters but we’re damned short of pilots right now, and the Admiral is taking us into hell. How’s that for a religious statement?”
“I’ll promise not to report you, CAG.” He swung his legs out of the sick bay rack. He felt weak, and a bit woozy . . . the effects of whatever nanodrugs they’d pumped into him.
“Proceed carefully, Commander,” the AI told him. “You should be feeling fully recovered within ten minutes.”
“How’s my squadron, CAG?” he asked.
“Four dead. One more streaker we haven’t recovered yet.”
“Who?”
“Blue Nine. Atkinson.”
He closed his eyes, and almost sagged back on the rack. Jess Atkinson—sweet and fun and a great romp in bed . . . and a hell of a fighter pilot in combat. Jess Atkinson, who had a tendency to let slip religious exclamations herself. Shit . . .
“We’re still looking for her, Commander,” Fletcher told him. “We’ll find her if we can.”
If we can.
But the Void was so very empty and deep.
St. Clair could feel it closing on him, like a black and smothering shroud.
Observation Deck
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
0225 hours, TFT
“So . . . beautiful . . .”
“Yes. You are.”
Connor gave Gregory a playful punch against his bare chest, and the two of them drifted slightly apart. That was the trouble with zero-G lovemaking; the dead hand of Isaac Newton still reached in from the remot
e past: every action has an equal but opposite reaction. A thrust resulted in a backward push. A caress responded with a nudge.
“Idiot!” Connor said, laughing. “I meant the view.”
He looked her up and down. “So did I.”
They both were naked, adrift in the observation dome, located high atop America’s bridge tower. Once, the compartment had been a duty station linked in with Primary Flight Control, a place where human eyes could watch incoming fighters lining up for traps in the rotating hab modules aft, but machine eyes did the job faster, and with far greater accuracy. The dome now served as recreational space, its instrumentation and consoles stripped out, its deck given nanoreactive furniture that could be summoned with a thought . . . a place for crew members to come and watch the surrounding depths of space with their own eyes, instead of through scanners and cerebral feeds.
And also, quite often, it was a place where lovers met. The zero-gravity added a certain spice to such encounters, even if the participants needed to use elastic ties to hold themselves together, or anchor their bare feet to the nanomatrix of the deck.
With practice, it could be done—the docking maneuver, to use the old and popular space-faring term. And Gregory and Connor had been getting a lot of practice here of late.
The galaxy hung huge and gorgeous beyond the dome, and Gregory was forced to admit that, yes, it was beautiful. Its glow, the accumulated illumination from 400 billion stars, was a lot softer and more delicate than he’d imagined it would be. Visual feeds, including those in his Starblade, tended to intensify the light a bit. Here, with the naked eye, that vast spiral seemed to blend in with the blackness of intergalactic space beyond, in places becoming nearly invisible. You had to really look to see the detail.
But the more you looked, the more you saw.
“I wonder if what we’re seeing,” Connor said, “is any different than it was back in our day?”
They were still getting used to the revelation, passed through the fleet hours before, that the task force had emerged from the TRGA roughly 12 million years in the future.
