by Ian Douglas
Somewhere, he thought, somewhere far below him—a hundred kilometers or more if the theories he’d heard about Invictus were correct—there was warmth enough to keep a vast ocean liquid. There, life had evolved, and intelligence, and an advanced, star-faring civilization. The Glothr eventually had escaped the icy prison of their world and built the incredible ring system overhead, and traveled now between the stars and across time itself.
He wondered if there was any way of attracting the notice of Glothr living in the world ocean underneath the ice. Probably not. His AI didn’t seem to have any ideas.
At the current rate of heat loss from his Starblade, he would start to feel the cold in an hour or two, would be frozen into a solid block of ice in four. He was wearing a pressure suit, but if he opened the Starblade’s nanomatrix hull and stepped out into that frigid hell, it wouldn’t keep him alive more than a couple of minutes.
Don Gregory quietly contemplated the certainty of death, thought about Meg, and prepared to die.
Connor
VFA-96, The Black Demons
Invictus surface, T+12 MY
1725 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Megan Connor pulled her fighter up, trying to avoid the time-slow field somehow being broadcast from the sleek Glothr ship ahead. Her ship jolted . . . then slowed—slowed a lot—and she realized that she’d been caught in the alien temporal field.
“Watch out!” she called over the squadron channel. “That time-twister shit is active!” She’d thought it was switched off, but apparently they’d turned it on again. Or, rather, it appeared that they could project that field several hundred meters in one direction or another. Damn . . .
“Copy, Demon Three,” Mackey replied. “Get your ass out of there!”
“Trying . . .”
Tears had gathered on her face and she’d not been able to wipe them away, not without opening her helmet . . . but now she felt the pull of gravity against her as the ship dragged through the temporal field and she shook her head, hard, trying to dislodge the gleaming droplets of liquid. She detested the tears, the weakness . . . but was still having trouble getting past the fact that Don was gone.
That, of course, was the biggest single problem with forming emotional attachments to other pilots, or to other shipmates in general, for that matter. It was one thing when you knew your loved one was back on Earth or a colony world, waiting for your return. It was quite something else when that loved one was flying off your wing, and was in just as much danger of being killed as you.
She and Don had discussed it, of course, but it had always seemed so fucking theoretical. They’d thought they’d come to grips with the possibility of losing one another, thought it was all right. Hell—it hadn’t even been all that serious. Fuck buddies, that was all they’d been. Friends with benefits, as the old joke had it. Recreational sex wasn’t supposed to get so damned serious.
But now his Starblade was lost, singed by a near hit and sent hurtling off into emptiness, and she knew that she’d been fooling herself. America’s SAR units would be deployed in a search, of course, but the chances of finding one small nanomatrix fighter out there in all that nothingness were somewhere between remote and nonexistent.
Assuming, of course, that he was even alive now. The odds of surviving as a fighter pilot in all-out ship-to-ship combat were not good to begin with. Worse, the SAR tugs wouldn’t be deployed until the battle was over and then only if the human fleet had won.
Connor screamed, a sonic burst of pent-up rage and frustration. If the battle had to end then, damn it, she would end it. She lined up with the alien time bender, now drifting slowly past her bow a hundred meters below, and loosed a stream of depleted-uranium KK projectiles from her ship’s high-speed Gatling.
“Take that, you fucking bastards!”
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1728 hours, TFT
“Admiral Gray? Truitt here.”
“Make it quick, Doctor. We’re a little busy up here.”
“I understand that. But I’ve been going through the data we picked up a month ago from Surat. There’s something here you should see.”
Gray very nearly dismissed Truitt with a sharp “tell me later.” The head of America’s xenosoph department was acerbic and difficult, a true genius with indifferent social skills and no patience at all for what he perceived as stupidity in others.
But he was undeniably brilliant, and if he’d just run into something he felt was important enough to disturb him during combat—it was a damned good idea for Gray to at the very least find out what it was.
“What have you got for us?”
“A complete bio-profile on the Glothr. Apparently, the Confederation xeno people at Surat were in the middle of doing a complete workup when the Glothr ship lifted off.”
“And?”
“Have a look.”
Data streamed down the link, translated from Hindi. There was a lot . . . including speculation on Glothr natural history, their evolution in an under-ice ocean, their transition from a marine species to dry land some millions of years ago—even the possibility that that evolution had been directed by another sapient species.
Those damned stargods again.
But that wasn’t what Truitt wanted him to notice. Gray’s eyes went to where the doctor had flagged the information about Glothr senses.
“While the Glothr possess organs sensitive to light, especially at shorter wavelengths and extending up into the ultraviolet, vision does not appear to be their primary sense. Instead, they appear to rely on an electro-sense similar in certain respects to the sense employed by sharks, rays, and other terrestrial marine species. Their primary means of determining the shape and content of their surroundings would seem to be the electro-sense. . . .”
“What’s your point, Dr. Truitt?”
“I should think that would be obvious, Admiral. The Glothr may be susceptible to an EMP.”
“Check that,” he told the ship’s AI. Returning to the open channel with Truitt, he asked, “Delivered how?”
“A large enough particle-beam weapon would do it.”
“We’ve been hammering them with pee-beeps and nukes all evening, and they don’t seem to mind it at all.”
“If you can get through their shielding, Admiral, get in close, you might find differently.”
Data was coming back from the AI now. “Let me check it out, Doc. I’ll talk to you later.”
There was something to what Truitt had suggested.
In fact, America’s AI had already come up with the same damned idea.
VFA-31, The Impactors
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1729 hours, TFT
For half an hour, St. Clair had fallen into the night.
His terror had grown through the course of those thirty minutes until he’d thought his fast-pounding heart would explode, and sweat poured down his face inside his pressure helmet, blinding him.
He’d been able to see through his in-head displays, though, and he’d stared into that ultimate night, unable to switch it off despite the hammering, nightmare fear. Alone . . . alone in the night . . .
America’s psych department had checked him out thoroughly, of course, immediately after his rescue. And in fact he’d not thought he’d needed to be checked out. When he’d been singed in the tangle with the Turusch, he’d been knocked unconscious, and he’d not come around until he’d been back on board America, in the star carrier’s sick bay. That had been . . . what? Just fourteen hours ago.
But something had happened, because he was feeling inexpressible terror now as, for the second time in twenty-four hours, his Starblade fell through emptiness into the intergalactic Void.
He checked to make sure his crippled fighter was broadcasting an emergency signal. He’d been picked up by a SAR
tug once; maybe they could do it again. If they didn’t, he would die a hideously cold and lonely death, out here thousands of light years away from the nearest star.
His vector, he noticed, was taking him past the black disk of Invictus. Maybe they would pick him up. . . .
Something brushed his mind.
“Wait,” he said aloud. “Wait . . . what was that?”
His AI reached out, struggling to collect and amplify an impossibly weak signal. There! It wasn’t much, but it sounded like another distress signal, just a whisper, coming from the surface of Invictus.
Well, major fighter battles always resulted in streakers. Evidently, one had made it safely down to the surface of the rogue world. There wasn’t a lot that St. Clair could do about it right at the moment.
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1730 hours, TFT
On Gray’s in-head display, he could see a graphic schematic of the battle inside the ring structure. There’d been a report from one of the Black Demon pilots that the Glothr time benders were using their temporal weapon again. He’d already given orders to the ships already inside the ring structure to concentrate their fire on those two vessels, to try to put them out of the fight.
He would have to assume that his forward units would be able to do that, to open the way for the heavies coming in now.
“New York,” he said. “Northern Cal, Illinois, you stay put and provide long-range cover. We’re going in.” Acknowledgements snapped back through his in-head link.
He thought more about Truitt’s “revelation.” He smiled a bit, knowing the AI had proposed this possibility days ago. Gray had struggled figuring out a way to use it, though . . . until now.
EMPs—electromagnetic pulses—were surges of electrons that could be natural, such as in a lightning bolt, or artificial, from a charged particle weapon or a nuclear detonation. Effects of EMPs had been understood since the mid-twentieth century and the development of atomic weapons. In one famous experiment carried out in 1962, dubbed Operation Starfish Prime, a 1.4-megaton hydrogen bomb was detonated four hundred kilometers above Johnston Island, in the Pacific. The EMP from that blast was much more powerful than expected, knocking out three hundred streetlights in Hawaii, almost fifteen hundred kilometers away, killing a telephone microwave link, and disrupting intra-island phone service. The explosion also generated brilliant auroras. The electron flow tended to damage unprotected electrical equipment, though systems were well-shielded nowadays. In warships, especially, which used nuclear warheads and particle beams as weapons, such shielding was absolutely vital.
It had been assumed, of course, that the Glothr, too, knew how to shield their vessels against EMP effects, since they used beam weapons similar to those used by humans. And the barrages launched by the human vessels so far, while effective, had not caused any obvious problems for the enemy from pulses of electromagnetic radiation.
But, as America’s AI had reminded Gray hours before, it was all a matter of degree. Load the energy shields encasing the Glothr ships with a big enough charge, and it should be possible to burn through with a monster EMP . . . one that would not only damage equipment, but affect the aliens directly. If their electro-sense was indeed analogous to human sight, as the biological studies completed so far suggested, a strong EMP would be similar to dazzling a human with a brilliant spotlight, or even, at high enough levels, a high-energy optical laser aimed at the eyes.
The Starfish Prime pulse had burned out circuits fifteen hundred kilometers away, but Gray assumed they would need to get much closer than that to burn their way through the Glothr magnetic shields. The ship’s AI agreed; if possible, they needed to get a couple of the heavies—two of the three battleships, if possible—right alongside the Glothr circuits.
The fact that those circuits were well inside the massive ring structure ahead was daunting, but the fighters, the destroyers and frigates, and the assaulting Marines appeared to have taken out defensive positions inside that vast cavern. The two Glothr time benders were edging forward now, but were taking the full brunt of the fire being laid down by the human forces.
Both battleships possessed four electron cannon turrets, while America herself mounted one. A combined barrage at point-blank range ought to overwhelm any magnetic defenses the Glothr had in there, and take down their shields.
That, at least, was the idea.
“Captain Gutierrez,” Gray said quietly. “You may take us in there.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
She didn’t sound happy about it.
USNS/HGF Concord
Invictis Ring, T+12 MY
1731 hours, TFT
“Be careful of the good guys!” Dahlquist snapped. “I don’t want any own goals!”
“If the target explodes,” Denise Ames warned, “there may be . . . collateral damage, sir.”
“I know. But we’ve got to help!”
“If we limit our fire to the pee-beeps,” she told him, “we should be able to damage those things, but not to the point where they explode or release rogue singularities.”
“What about our lasers?”
“Not a good idea, sir. The aliens’ hulls are as shiny as mirrors.” Ames brought a set of cursors across the alien vessel, highlighting a damaged section. “There appears to be a hull breach in this area, however. The local shields have been weakened.”
“Very well. Target that area. Turret Three. Fire!”
“Firing Turret Three, sir.”
A beam of coherent protons lanced out, catching the slender cylinder drifting above the Concord amidships. The aliens were shielded, of course—with magnetic fields that could be flipped positive or negative at the instant of a hostile beam’s touch. They also could project something like the human gravitic shielding, literally bending space just above their vessels’ hulls to fold hostile beams back, or disrupt incoming missiles.
At a range of less than a hundred meters, though, Concord’s beam clawed at the enemy’s defenses, focused on a small patch where a fighter’s KK projectiles had slammed into the hull moments before . . . and some of that torrent of energy managed to burn through before the alien mag shield could repel the incoming protons. Some of the hull projectors at that point were vaporized by the intense heat, and a portion of the Glothr ship’s shielding, already weakened, went dark.
“Again!” Dahlquist yelled. “Hit them again! Same spot!”
Mirror-bright hull material, made of an ultra-hard plastic coated with a highly reflective polyester film, blackened and crinkled, then puffed out into vacuum in a cloud of hot plasma.
“Hit!” Ames called. “Burn through!”
“Yeah, screw with our time now, you bastards!” Dahlquist said.
Marines in nearby space saw what was happening to the alien, and began turning their weapons on the ship’s hull as well, and a destroyer and two frigates entering the cavern several kilometers overhead added their fire to the fusillade. The Pax had joined in as well, hurling proton beams at the time bender still hovering alongside her.
But something appeared to be wrong. With a sense of growing horror, Dahlquist became aware that the distant USNA ships were . . . jittering, moving back and forth in erratic, rapid jumps, as though they were station keeping, but far, far too quickly.
The time benders were using their unique weapons again, slowing time for the Concord, and also for the nearest Marines, drawing them all into a field where the passage of time was far slower than it was for ships outside the area of effect. The frequency of energy weapons fired within that field dropped as time slowed, until even direct hits did very little damage at all.
Damn it, they wouldn’t be able to break free if they were frozen in time! And the Marines outside were obviously struggling with the area effect as well, moving back and out of range before they, too, were frozen like insects
trapped in amber.
“Hit them!” he yelled. “Keep hitting them!”
But minutes had already passed, and felt like a bright-edged instant as they did.
VFA-31, The Impactors
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1733 hours, TFT
When his AI had at last reported that his fighter was again operable, St. Clair had very nearly passed out. The terror, the loneliness, the sheer nightmare fear gripping him as he streaked into emptiness had been growing steadily, threatening to overwhelm him. Then his fighter’s drive was on-line, safe, and ready to engage. His first instinct had been to switch on his gravitic drive, flip his Starblade end for end to align with the task force, and accelerate hard, heading back to the human fleet as quickly as he could.
But he kept remembering that fragment of a distress call, and wondered who it was. The signal had been too weak to carry with it an electronic ID tag.
Not that it mattered. It had been a human voice he’d heard, so it was another pilot with the task force. And he was down on the surface of Invictus, alone and likely freezing to death.
For a grim minute, St. Clair stared into the night ahead, trying not to think about it . . . and then with a savage curse he flipped the Starblade around its drive singularity once more, lining the ship up with the curve of the planet.
“AI!” he said. “Do you still have that distress signal?”
He felt the computer’s affirmative.
“Show me.”
A red cursor winked on against the planet’s disk, marking the spot where the signal had come from.
He sighed. SAR wasn’t a part of his job description, but he couldn’t leave that unknown pilot out there to freeze. He couldn’t.
He accelerated.
Chapter Twenty-three
7 August, 2425
Connor
VFA-96, The Black Demons
Invictus surface, T+12 MY
1733 hours, TFT
Connor’s Starblade began accelerating again, steadily but gradually . . . as though time was a flowing river, slow at the shorelines, faster out in the middle, and she was cutting across the current. The alien temporal technology appeared to envelope the Glothr ship or machine, but could also be projected. Evidently—and fortunately—they couldn’t project it in all directions at once, and as they redirected their attention elsewhere, Connor’s Starblade edged through molasses and out into the clear once more.
