by Ian Douglas
Okay . . . how do you counter something like that? Gregory thought about the sandcaster rounds in his Starblade’s weapons bays. Surely the kinetic energy carried by a cloud of lead spherules traveling at high velocity couldn’t be finessed away by the throwing of a switch.
Or . . . maybe it could. The equation describing Newton’s second law of motion read force equals mass times acceleration, and acceleration was defined as the change of velocity over time. Stretch out the time, and you reduced acceleration . . . right?
No! Where the hell was all of that energy going? Something wasn’t right, here.
Fuck it. There had to be some way of hitting the Glothr time bender. . . .
Place of Cold Dreaming
Invictus Ring
1639 hours, TFT
“Seven-one-cee-eight! Our time-twister vessel is in danger of being overwhelmed! Pull it back to where it can be properly supported by our swarmers!”
“Very well, Swarm Leader Nine-nine-gee-kay.”
Glothr society was not built upon hierarchies, and there was no overall leader as such, nor was there a specific class of officers within the military. Individual Glothr recognized that someone needed to call the shots in some circumstances, and that others needed to obey orders to get things done, but the process was largely instinctive, arising from elements of Glothr biology and psychology. The first individual Glothr who recognized a need simply stepped into the place of command . . . and others followed, obeying the unspoken dictates of billions of years of social evolution.
The Glothr themselves were colony animals, organisms composed of hundreds of billions of smaller and, individually, unintelligent creatures each specialized to perform certain tasks in a unified whole. They were an extremely ancient race, one evolved in the unimaginable depths of deep time, with eons to hone and shape their social organization until it was a seamless and smoothly functioning whole. Each Glothr assumed the role necessary for the moment, whether that might be starship commander, shopkeeper, swarm leader, or laborer.
Based on chemical cues, any single Glothr could become any of four distinct sexes—male, female, caretaker, or colony defender. At the moment, Seven-one-cee-eight was of the latter class, sexless but shaped by instinct to protect its homeworld and all others of its species. Recently, it had commanded the expedition to Earth . . . but upon its return it had assumed responsibility for interrogating captured humans, and now it was assuming partial responsibility for defending Invictus against the threat of a human fleet. Its experience as a leader meant that it assumed a leadership role more often than not . . . but there was no ego involved. Tomorrow, Seven-one-cee-eight might easily find itself taking on the role of a dockworker within the Invictus rings . . . or of a mother deep within the homeworld’s vast oceanic abyss.
Under Seven-one-cee-eight’s guidance, the time-twister began falling back toward Invictus, followed by a storm of alien missiles. The robotic device’s defenses could be overwhelmed by such an attack, and it was up to Seven-one-cee-eight to make sure that they were not. Data flooded back from the robot: tracking, status, and sensor information updated from millisecond to millisecond. Seven-one-cee-eight needed to get the vehicle back to where it could be properly covered by the defense robots now hurtling clear of the rings.
A nuclear warhead detonated, but far enough away from the time-twister’s hull that the blast was not strongly affected by the temporal distortion. That was not good. If the aliens observed what had happened, and drew the right conclusions . . .
Seven-one-cee-eight requested that the robotic fleet put on more speed.
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1639 hours, TFT
“That’s the answer!” Gray shouted, freezing an image and highlighting an expanding nuclear blast in red brackets. “Do you see it?”
“What’s the answer?” Taggart asked.
“That Glothr ship weakens nearby explosions by increasing time, right? Same energy spread over more time means less energy in a given instant. Another way to say that: the energy’s wavelength is red-shifted, made longer.”
“Ye-esss . . .” She hadn’t seen it yet.
“The field they’re projecting . . . it must be pretty short-ranged, a hundred meters or less, from what it looks like. We need to find the sweet spot . . . the range from the alien’s hull where the high-energy EM stuff gets red-shifted down to heat, lots of heat . . . close enough to cause damage to the hull, but far enough that there’s still some kick to the blast when it goes off.”
“We can try proximity detonation . . . at what, sir? Two hundred meters?”
“Try it. No, try a salvo, with detonations at one fifty, two hundred, and three hundred meters. CAG!”
“Yes, Admiral!”
“Pass that on to the fighters.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“But snap it up! Looks like they’re pulling that thing back.”
On the flag bridge display, the silvery cigar had decelerated to a dead stop, then begun accelerating back the way it had come. In the distance, hundreds of objects were swarming out from the dark planet, each larger than a fighter but considerably smaller than a capital vessel.
What were they?
Gray wanted to take out that big ship before those other vessels reached the fleet. Glothr tactics suggested that they worked together, with a linkage as good or better than that of the human vessels. Likely, the time bender was intended to immobilize a human capital ship, holding it helpless while those smaller ships came in for the kill. He would assume that was their goal, at least, until they gave him something more to go on.
Long seconds passed, the task force continuing to close on the Glothr ship. Then the lead fighters began firing missiles, single shots at first, then in twos and threes. Again, nuclear fireballs flared . . . and as Gray had suspected, the more distant the explosion from the alien’s hull, the faster the fireball swelled, brightened, then faded. The alien vessel lurched suddenly as white radiance bathed it—burned it—and then it began tumbling.
“That’s it,” Gray ordered. “Hit ’em with direct shots, now. Take them down!”
More missiles reached out from the task force, and, moments later, the vanguard of the task force swept through an expanding cloud of hot plasma, all that remained of the time-bending alien vessel. The “sweet spot” he’d been looking for appeared to be two to three hundred meters out from the hull. The time-slowing effect seemed to reach that far, but it only slightly stretched the action of the explosion, resulting in a much greater output of heat and hard radiation within a given period of time. The alien vessel’s reflective hull shielded it from a lot of the radiation, but multiple explosions tended to burn that silver surface black. Once that happened, repeated detonations had slammed the vessel, cooking it—and leaving it vulnerable to a direct hit.
Gray also suspected that the time-bender ship was relatively uncommon within the Glothr fleet. It had been carried aboard the larger Glothr vessel that had gone to Earth as a kind of special, add-on weapon. Out here, it was operating on its own, but so far they’d seen only the one. It might be that altering the local flow of time took an extraordinary amount of power, or the equipment was unusually costly. It scarcely mattered. The important thing was that it was unlikely that the swarm ahead could pull the same sort of trick.
At least Gray fervently hoped that that was the case.
“Comm! Send another message. Tell them we have no wish to harm their world. Tell them to cease hostile actions against us and agree to talk.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The alien cloud was swiftly getting closer.
Place of Cold Dreaming
Invictus Ring
1644 hours, TFT
“Seven-one-cee-eight! We are getting another message from the primitives. They want us to halt the combat. They want to communi
cate.”
What . . . negotiate? Now? That made no sense. The humans must believe that they held the combat advantage now, but if that was so, the proper course was to strike and continue striking, not bluster and make threats. Perhaps they were sending threats because they were weaker than they seemed, and knew it.
Or was there something else behind the impenetrable alien psychology?
“Ignore them,” Seven-one-cee-eight ordered. “We will see if they still wish to communicate once their warships have been crippled or destroyed.”
VFA-31, The Impactors
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1648 hours, TFT
St. Clair sat encased within the womblike embrace of his new-grown Starblade, watching the unfolding battle outside and awaiting the order to launch. His fighter was tucked into one of the launch-bay tubes in the rotating hab modules, but in his mind’s eye he was hurtling toward the enemy, watching as the Black Demons, the Nighthawks, and the Dragonfires took on the alien swarm.
The Earth fighters were badly outnumbered.
“C’mon, CAG!” he called over the command channel. “When are you gonna let us get in on that furball?”
“Keep it iced, Blue Seven,” Fletcher replied from Pryfly. “We’re sending you out after bigger prey.”
“Our people are getting chopped to bits out there!”
“Yeah, CAG,” Blue Two, Lieutenant Thom Vandermeyer, added. “We could catch ’em by surprise.”
“Belay the chatter, Impactors,” Fletcher said, her voice cold. “The Admiral has a plan. . . .”
It had better, St. Clair thought, be one hell of a plan. The fighters deployed ahead of the task force were outnumbered four or five to one right now. The alien ships were . . . something new. Strange. Each was different; each looked like a small building or a collection of angled blocks and rectilinear shapes, and each was about ten times the size of a Starblade, so it was tough to decide whether they were very large fighters or small capital ships, similar in scale to human frigates. They were clumsy and slow—the fighters could literally flit rings around them—but they were powerful, possessing particle beams that were devastating when they struck.
And St. Clair noticed something else about them as well: they tended to move in units—tight-knit groups of two or three—and they seemed to move according to programmed responses, with a given type of attack generating a specific response. St. Clair couldn’t be certain, but it felt like he was looking at robots . . . and not particularly bright ones, either.
They were suckers, he noted, for close-inside knife work—the so-called Nungie maneuver. That was a somewhat new fighter tactic, one invented by a Black Demon pilot in a close fight with the Slan last year at 70 Ophiuchi. A fighter would pivot to face the alien ship as it swung by and actually chew up the enemy’s hull with its forward-projected singularity. The tight-knit point of intense gravitational energy—flickering on and off at thousands of times a second—ate its way through anything, releasing a blaze of X- and gamma rays. The maneuver was dangerous in the extreme, requiring absolute precision between the human pilot and the fighter’s linked AI, but that was what the Starblades were specifically designed to do, and, more and more, they were laying the alien building blocks open, spilling their contents in glittering cascades into space.
Perhaps just as important, the aliens had trouble hitting fighters that were moving that close and that fast to both them and other Glothr ships.
But when they did manage to connect, the fighter would flare like a moth caught in a blow torch.
And there were so hellishly many of the aliens.
They were leaking through, shoving their way past the human fighters and engaging the larger vessels of the task force.
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1649 hours, TFT
“Eight minutes to contact with the ring, Admiral,” Gutierrez told him.
“Thank you, Captain. Deploy long-range drones now, if you please. They’re to scan for any sign of the Concord and the Pax.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral. Drones away.”
“Admiral!” Mallory called. “The alien ships are beginning to hit the main fleet.”
“I see it. CAG, order the fighters to break off.” He didn’t want to hit any of his own people in that confused tangle ahead.
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
“Commander Taggart, you may fire when the opportunity presents itself.”
“Yes, sir!”
The task force’s vanguard was a rough cone of frigates and destroyers, moving just ahead of the three battleships, Illinois, Northern California, and New York. A Glothr phalanx of at least thirty alien ships slammed through the cone, taking terrible damage, yet not returning fire. They seemed determined to break through and get at the big boys clustered a few thousand kilometers beyond the fleet’s sharp leading point.
In modern space combat, frigates are light combatants designed for an anti-fighter role, with a special emphasis on missile weaponry as opposed to beams. Destroyers are larger and slower than the nimble frigates, but with more firepower, usually built around a spinal-mount particle gun, together with plenty of turret-mounted kinetic-kill accelerators.
As the angular Glothr craft poured into the task force’s van, they were hit by defensive salvos from the frigates and destroyers. Nuclear fireballs flared and pulsed; lasers and particle beams were invisible to the naked eye, but painted in by AI graphics on the flag bridge, showing the defenders coordinating their fire. The destroyers Hobart and Lackland caught a large Glothr ship in a deadly crossfire, pinning it with ultraviolet HEL beams—high-energy lasers—that peeled back its outer layers of hull before it erupted in a plasma blaze of blue-white light.
Then a Glothr vessel, tumbling and out of control, slammed into the Lackland’s port side. Huge fragments of twisted metal snapped off, and the Lackland heeled over to starboard, gently rolling with the impact.
But most of the incoming Glothrs were already through the shell of frigates and destroyers, and were closing now on the battleships.
Battleships were bigger, more heavily armored, and carried more heavy weapons than the smaller escorts. Numerous modern strategists were convinced that the battleship was obsolete now when it came to fleet actions, since it was less maneuverable than the sleeker battlecruiser. This battle, however, was fast turning into a slug-fest like the earlier engagement with the Turusch, with two fleets pounding at each other with every weapon that could be brought to bear. And here, the heavies—the old-fashioned battleships—were in their natural element. Generally relegated nowadays to a bombardment role for planetary assault, battleships could still bring hundreds of weapons to bear in space combat, from kinetic-kill magnetic railguns to heavy particle accelerators to HEL-guns, while their point defense system used smaller versions of those weapons to lay down a devastating field of fire designed to take out any enemy vessel that managed to make it in to the ship’s innermost killing field.
The remaining Glothr warships hit the battleship fire zone and began dying.
“CAG,” Gray said quietly, watching the pulse and throb of nuclear fire ahead. “Have the fighters in the vanguard continue sweeping in toward the planet. Let them know we’ll be coming in hard on their six.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
Gray was not dismissing the oddly shaped Glothr craft, but he had scaled back the threat in his mind. There were lots of them, yes . . . but they were not showing much of a tactical sense: no trying to englobe USNA ships, no attempts to gang up on a lone warship and overwhelm it with firepower. They were moving in more or less straight lines and engaging any ship that happened to be within range, and to Gray’s mind that suggested an AI, and not a very smart one at that. There was no passion in this attack, and so long as the task force could maintain superior firepower locally, it looked like they would be abl
e to fend off the attack without too much of a problem.
This, actually, was something of a surprise. The Glothr were clearly superior to humans in terms of technology, especially with that time-bending trick of theirs, but all things considered, they weren’t that much better.
As he had always thought: passion could count for a hell of a lot in a firefight.
“Five minutes to contact with the ring.”
“Thank you, Captain Gutierrez.”
“Admiral?”
“Yes, CAG?”
“The squadrons in reserve are asking when they can get into the thick of things.”
“Let them know they’ll have their chance very soon now.”
VFA-96, The Black Demons
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1652 hours, TFT
Gregory watched another of the frigate-sized aliens explode, its angular hull crumpling and distorting at the touch of the nuclear fireball. While there were a few stragglers ahead, most of them were already behind the fighters, and the way in to Invictus was wide open.
The planet itself was hard to see unless it was silhouetted against the sweep and swirl of the galaxy beyond. As Gregory’s Starblade drew closer, his angle of view shifted, and the night-black world slid off the dusting of blue-white starlight across the distant galactic backdrop and faded against darkness.
The rings, though, were still crisply visible, pale gray and gray-brown, made of flat, sharp-angled blocks of various odd shapes. Gregory was reminded of massed office complexes on Earth, except that these didn’t have windows and weren’t brightly lit.
Of course, many human buildings didn’t have windows either. Wallscreens were more efficient and could be programmed for other views than the building’s immediate surroundings, or double as vidscreens or news feeds or even internal lighting. But Gregory had the feeling that the Glothr ring’s lack of windows had more to do with alien psychology than it did with esthetics. If sight wasn’t the Glothr’s primary sense, as he’d heard, they might not have the human need to see outside . . . even when the view was as spectacular as this one.
