by Ian Douglas
The battle at the stargate was still raging strong…and not going well for the good guys.
* * * *
UCS Hermes
Stargate
Aquila Space
1248 hrs GMT
“Okay,” Taggart said, grim. “There’s our opening!”
Alexander could see the moment as it shaped itself. The MIEF ships had slowly moved past the Xul ships, abandoning their englobement technique and placing themselves—most of them, anyway, between the Xul ships and the stargate.
“I see it,” he said.
“You do know, I trust, that this is going to leave us ‘way out on a limb’….”
“And the Marine fighters, too,” Alexander replied. “But if this thing works, we wouldn’t survive on the other side.”
“Yeah. The question is how long we survive on this side. The Xul may not care if the rest of the fleet goes through. They may decide to stay here and stomp on us.”
“It’s all we have, Liam. Let’s do it.”
Taggart gave the mental command, putting the MIEF in motion. At the same time, Alexander issued a command of his own, ordering Jonah to commence his run.
Mars and Ishtar leaped forward, under high acceleration, with the injured Chiron lagging along after. Their spinal-mount main batteries were pointed uselessly ahead at the center of the gate, but their turret-mounted secondaries lashed out in all directions, slashing and shearing through the nearest Xul hunterships.
The trio of planet-class battlecruisers was followed by the other MIEF capitol ships—all save the Hermes, which lacked the Alcubierre Drive, and the fleet carriers Chosin and Lejeune, which would remain on this side of the gate with their fighters. Those three hung back, then began accelerating clear of the battlespace. The hope, of course, was that the Xul warships would ignore them, focusing instead on the greater threat of what the larger MIEF flotilla might do on the other side, at Starwall.
Following in cone formation, the rest of the redeploying MIEF fleet accelerated toward the gate, the cone’s apex at the three battlecruisers. The formation was ragged and incomplete; three destroyers and a light cruiser were left behind, helplessly adrift, sections of their hulls white-hot from the tunneling of enemy weapons, clouds of debris adrift around them.
A final check. The Gate’s tuning was still set to Starwall. In Alexander’s mind, the two flotillas pulled apart from each other, three ships and a cloud of fighters staying behind, the other thirty-seven surviving ships of the MIEF battlefleet moving toward the Gate under their gravitics, faster…still faster…and faster still before plunging through.
And Hermes, Chosin, and Lejeune, attended by their attendant fighters and remote combat drones, remained alone.
“Okay, everyone,” Taggart said over the Net. “Now we see if this is going to work!”
The Xul ships didn’t react at first to the sudden exodus, and for a horrible moment, Alexander thought that the enemy force was going to ignore it entirely, to stay instead and continue pounding the ships remaining in Aquila Space. There were five Xul vessels in all—the Nightmare-class monster, a larger Type II, and three Type I’s. All five showed some indication of the pounding they’d been taking, at least, and the Type II and one Type I showed serious damage.
All five were definitely still in the fight, however. Hermes shuddered as a string of five microsingularities snapped through her hull, tunneling through in an instant in searing blasts of x-radiation. Alarms sounded in his head. One of the four Atlas-class tugs mounted on Hermes’ hull had been badly hit, her power plant off-line, her gravitics drives down. Damage reports were flooding back. Hermes was venting atmosphere, radiation levels were climbing. At least two hundred of her crew and passengers were dead already.
And it was going to get worse.
“I think…” Taggart said, somewhat tentatively. “I think they’re starting to go for it.”
The Nightmare Xul ship was definitely moving toward the Gate, now, following the vanished MIEF. Two…no, all three of the Xul Type I hunterships were following as well, one of them limping well behind the others.
The Type II, though, clearly was not joining the others. It was outbound from the Gate, closing in the Hermes.
“All ships, focus on that Type II,” Taggart ordered. “Take him down!”
Hundred-terawatt lasers snapped out from turrets mounted on Hermes’ hull, and the equivalent of 20-kiloton nukes sparkled across the Type II’s hull. The Xul hull material was so thick and strong that those blasts had little effect overall. Still, in places the gunners and AI directors were able to concentrate on gaps in that charred armor, and when the laser fire burned into the vessel’s dark interior, bursts of gas, of broken hull fragments and other debris spewed into space like tiny geyser plumes. Alexander could see sullen, interior glows here and there through gaps in the outer shell, as portions of the interior structure became molten under the barrage.
Again, microsingularities lashed out from the enemy vessel, striking the Hermes and passing clean through. Damage-control parties were overstretched as it was, using nanotech repair robots to patch the holes and stem the loss of internal atmosphere.
“Why haven’t they used their force weapon?” Alexander asked Cara. That was the deadly signature of the Xul hunterships—that seemingly magical means of reaching out and crumpling a target vessel into a tiny black hole. The Type II was definitely in range, now, for that weapon….
“Analyses of the timing of past uses of the weapon suggests that there are constraints in power usage or availability,” Cara told him. “They may need a sizeable recharge time.”
“I’m glad there are some constraints to those things,” Alexander said, watching the monster’s approach. Hermes’ laser batteries continued slashing into the thing, but were having little obvious effect. “You don’t have hard figures for us, do you?”
“I am sorry, General, but no.”
“We’ll keep pounding the bastard,” Taggart said. “Maybe we’ve damaged the weapon already. Or maybe we can kill them before they get it working again.”
“Gods willing,” Alexander said. “Right now, I think they’re trying to ram us!…”
But Taggart had already given another command, and the Hermes was pulling back as fast as the straining gravitics of her three remaining tugs could move her. Both of the carriers had pulled well off to the side, and were adding their volleys to the firepower now playing across the Xul ship’s hull. The Xul ignored them, following the limping Hermes.
“Is Jonah on the way?” he asked.
“Affirmative,” Cara told him. “He departed the Euler planetoid three minutes, five seconds ago, just before the MIEF went through the Gate.”
Then we just need to hold on a little longer….
* * * *
Jonah
Cygni Space/Starwall Space
1252 hrs GMT
Garroway waited in an absolute blackness.
Three minutes before, the order had come through and Jones had passed it on. “You’re clear to launch! Good luck!” He’d thought-clicked a command, and the ship, propelled by something similar to the gravitics drive used by the Commonwealth, had slid up and forward into the night, the planetoid falling away and vanishing astern in seconds. In open space, he gave the necessary commands, followed by a final thought-click…and the universe winked out.
From the Euler planetoid, Garroway needed to fly a two-legged path, the first leg to line himself up squarely with the stargate, so that the ring was facing him full-on, and the second leg, to bring him to his jump-off point. He would not attempt to thread the gate’s eye under drive, because no one knew if that would work. Technically, the ship was not in normal space while under Alcubierre Drive, but enclosed within its own tiny, pocket universe; whether that pocket universe would be affected by the gravitational twisting at the center of the gate, whether it would pass through to Starwall or be destroyed or not be affected at all, no one knew.
Jonah would go through t
he gate at sublight speeds.
The actual timing of the maneuver would be handled by Achilles2, a subset of the platoon AI traveling with him, since as soon as he switched on the drive he’d be cut off from the rest of the platoon.
Minutes dragged past, and Garroway waited them out in the enveloping and absolute dark. This first jump—moving fifteen light-minutes at five times the speed of light—would take 3 minutes. During that time, he was completely cut off from everything except what was already in his head—the downloaded flight-control program, and the waiting, reassuring presence of Achilles2.
He remembered when Sandre had taught him how to switch his platoon AI off, and wondered how he could ever have contemplated such a thing. Achilles2 was a part of him, an important part, and right now he was damned glad he was there.
And then the stars were back. If Achilles2 had gotten the timing right, the trigger ship had just shifted across fifteen light-minutes.
“Do you see the gate?” Garroway asked the AI. All he could see were stars—one, the system’s primary, a dazzlingly brilliant blue-white pinpoint off to his left and slightly behind.
“I have the navigational telemetry,” Achilles2 told him. A green curser marked an otherwise empty bit of sky. “The gate is there, range eleven light-minutes.”
“Okay, send a signal. ‘Waypoint Alpha reached, okay.’”
“Transmitting.” They would get the word back at the planetoid in fifteen minutes, after he was long gone.
Using his mind, Garroway gentled the trigger ship into a new orientation. Controlling the thing was much like controlling his own body, a sense of nudging himself that way, and having the body turn in response. A targeting crosshair thrown up against his visual field showed the precise aim point of the ship. When that intersected with the green cursor, he thought-clicked again, and, again, the universe winked out.
The timing needed to be excruciatingly precise. Two minutes, twelve seconds at five times the speed of light would take him eleven light-minutes. But at that velocity, if the timing was off by a hundredth of a second, he would over-or under-shoot by 15,000 kilometers—a distance considerably greater than the diameter of the Earth. Achilles2, he knew, was working at the nanosecond level. If the AI missed by a nanosecond, he would only overshoot by…what? He pulled down the figures. One and a half meters.
No human mind could hope for that degree of precision.
The universe winked back into existence. The stargate was there, hanging in space dead ahead, a golden ring with a thread-slender rim. Nearby, off to starboard and below at this orientation, was the UCS Hermes. Farther off were the carriers Lejeune and Chosin.
To port and high was the vast, slender blade of a Xul huntership, needle-slim forward, swelling at the stern into bulging protuberances and sponsons a hundred meters long.
The Xul ship was hurt, and badly. Vast craters showed in that geometrically patterned surface, and the hull was enveloped in a silvery mist, part debris, part clouds of nano-D and remote drones. Nuclear explosions flashed and flickered, like the popping of strobes, along the damaged hull surface, as the Hermes slashed at it with barrage after barrage of nuke-tipped missiles and 100-terawatt laser blasts.
But Hermes was injured as well. The double rim-to-rim-saucer of the former Skybase had been repeatedly hit by Xul singularity weapons, and portions of its dark gray hull showed a thick scattering of puckered craters and had been blackened by searing temperatures. As he watched, blue lightning played across the Hermes’ hull, blasting away a cloud of fragments.
“Private Garroway,” a voice said in his head. “Welcome to Hell. This is General Alexander.”
“Yes, sir!” Garroway responded, surprised. What the hell was a general doing talking to him?
“We’re all counting on you, son,” Alexander said. “The rest of the fleet’s gone through the Gate, as planned, and most of the Xul with them. We’re all of us counting on you now to carry out your mission.”
“I won’t let you down, sir.”
“I know you won’t. Listen up, now. On the other side, you’ll make contact with Captain Michael Angi. He’s the skipper of the Mars, and he’ll be…uh!”
The transmission was briefly interrupted, as another Xul barrage struck home.
“Hermes? Are you there?”
“We’re here, Garroway. Okay, the skipper of the Mars is coordinating the operation on that side. If the Mars has already been destroyed, your contact will be Captain Gerald Baumgartner, of the Ishtar.”
“Right, sir.”
“Better get a move on, son. They’re waiting on you, but they won’t be able to hold out for long.”
Garroway engaged the craft’s gravitic drive, and watched the Gate loom huge across his view forward. “On my way, General.”
“Godspeed, son. And semper fi.”
“Semper—”
But before he completed the farewell, the alien starship snapped through the gate interface.
His view forward blurred sharply, then suddenly sprang back into sharp relief. The thin, background scattering stars of Aquila Space was gone, replaced by a wall of mottled night and light.
The panorama was breathtaking, and magnificent. It was like looking at a towering cliff, hundreds of meters high—but instead of rock the cliff face was made of stars, of millions, of billions of stars massed and piled high and thronging deep, a wall of blazing stars interlaced through with the snaking tendrils of black, obscuring dust clouds, and with the shining radiant clouds and delicately hued sheets of reflective nebulae, their tattered edges gilded by starlight.
Billions of stars, the majority red or orange in hue, the massed suns of the central bulge of the spiral galaxy that was the Milky Way.
“Private Garroway,” Achilles2 said. “We need to adjust course.”
Shaking himself, Garroway tore his gaze away from that incredible starfield vista, and looked instead for the local star. He knew it should be that way, since part of his mission download had included data brought back from Marine recon flights into this space.
And there it was…a mottled, red-orange disk easily three times larger in apparent size than Sol appeared from Earth, its light stopped down by the alien vessel’s optics—or by Achilles2—to keep his eyeballs from frying. Garroway nudged, and the alien trigger ship responded, swinging to bring the crosshairs over the star.
“Jonah, this is Mars,” sounded in his mind. “Do you copy?”
“I hear you, sir.” He shifted his attention around to the other side, where brilliant flashes of light were sparkling in the distance, off to one side of the Gate. The Mars was quite close—several kilometers, her scarred hull clearly visible by the ruddy glow of the local star. The other ships of the MIEF were scattered across the sky, attempting to avoid the relentless approach of some twenty Xul hunterships of various shapes and sizes. Twelve light-seconds away, sunward, his sensors showed a large, stationary complex of some sort…obviously a large Xul orbital fortress. More Xul ships were emerging from it as he watched.
“Okay,” Captain Angi’s voice said. “We have you on lidar. Your range to the local sun is now seven point one-three light-minutes. The flight profile calls for you to go through at five c…so that puts the detonation at one point four two six minutes, that’s one minute, twenty-five point five six seconds. If all goes well, the star blows and the wave-front reaches us seven minutes and eight seconds after that…so call it eight and a half minutes after you engage your drive. We will time our maneuver from that moment.”
“Right, Captain,” Garroway replied. All of this had been downloaded to him already, but the confirmation—being certain that everyone was operating on the same wavelength—was vital.
“With luck, you’ll pass through the star and emerge on the other side. Just keep your drive on long enough to clear the radiation front, and you should be okay.”
He could hear the unbelief in Angi’s mental voice. The guy was whistling in the dark. Or he was convinced that Garroway was on a su
icide run, and lying to spare Garroway’s feelings.
“I was told to hold my speed at five c and to stay in warp for an hour after I hit the core,” Garroway said. “That will put me five light-hours from the star, which should be plenty of space.”
There was no reply at first. More Xul Type I’s and Type II’s were converging rapidly on the MIEF squadron, and the Mars had just taken a savage burst of particle-beam fire. The battlecruiser lurched, rolling heavily to starboard, already slewing to port to return fire with her main gun.
“You’d better get going,” Angi told him. “Good luck, Marine. God go with you!”
“You, too,” Garroway said. “Looks like you may need Him more than me.”
He checked his targeting cursor, which was centered perfectly on the red-orange globe of the local star. “Are we set, Achilles?”
“All systems on-line,” the AI said. “Ready at your command….”
He gave the thought-click order, and the universe—MIEF fleet, Xul attackers, red-orange star, and that incredible background vista of star clouds all blinked out of existence….
26
1012.1102
Jonah
Cygni Space/Starwall Space
1258 hrs GMT
Garroway took careful note of the time—1258 hours, nine seconds. From the instant Achilles2 engaged the Alcubierre Drive to the center of the star, the flight time should be one minute, twenty-five seconds. An abstract part of his mind wondered about acceleration; did a ship under this alien version of the Alcubierre Drive leap instantly to 5c? Or, as with human ships, did it take a few minutes to build up to speed from a standing start?
Then he realized that the flight profile called for a mean velocity of five times the speed of light. It might well take seconds or even as much as a minute to build up to speed, but if so, Achilles2 would take the craft up to more than 5c in order to compensate for the lost time at lower speeds. He started to set the problem up—a simple enough bit of calculus—then decided it really didn’t matter. He didn’t know enough about the trigger ship’s capabilities. Gods willing, Achilles2 did. If he didn’t, they were all in a lot of trouble.
