by Ian Douglas
“Good. Keep me informed.” This was the eighth streaker brought back by the SAR tugs after the fighter assault on the TRGA defenders. The Search and Rescue teams were reporting no more contacts out there . . . none still living, in any case.
It was time to initiate “Trigger Pull.”
That was the operation name with which the battlegroup tactical departments had come back. Koenig had given them a problem: Was there a way to get through the TRGA bottleneck without subjecting the fleet to devastating and concentrated fire?
And his staff had come back with an unqualified . . . maybe.
The actual idea had come from General Joshua Mathers, in command of the fleet’s Marines. “What we need,” Mathers had said, “are some door-kickers.”
The Marines of MSU-17 were there to seize enemy orbital fortifications, bases on moons or planetoids, or even, if necessary, grab a beachhead on an alien planet. Trained in CCBT—close combat boarding tactics—they could also be employed to storm enemy hard points, capture weapons positions, secure landing zones, or rescue prisoners. “Door-kicker” was a term from centuries before, referring to the man on point who would take down a locked door so the rest of the assault team could storm through. Tactics varied with the situation and the door; historically, they included the use of explosives, a shotgun, a battering ram, or a low-tech application of shoulder or foot.
What Mathers had suggested was the use of explosives—specifically of high-yield nuclear explosives. CBG-18 possessed three ships designated as heavy missile carriers, or bombardment ships. The Ma’at Mons was a veteran of the battles of Arcturus and Alphekka, under the command of Captain John Grunmeyer.
The other two had joined the fleet after the confrontation with Grand Admiral Giraurd at HD 157950. There was the Pan-European missile carrier Gurrierre, Captain Alain Penchard in command.
And there was the Chinese Hegemony vessel Cheng Hua, officially designated as a cruiser, but in fact designed as a missile bombardment ship. She was under the command of Shang Xiao Jiang Ji.
A typical missile bombardment vessel was a third the length of the America—around 350 meters long and massing perhaps 100,000 tons. The Chinese cruiser was a little smaller—312 meters in length. All had the same general layout dictated by the physics of high-velocity travel—a forward cap filled with water that served both as reaction mass and as a shield against particulate radiation—and a relatively slender spine mounting drives and a set of rotating habitation modules tucked into the cap’s shadow. Each ship housed massed batteries of launch tubes and carried some hundreds of nuclear-tipped missiles. The Confederation arsenal included both VG-92 Krait space-to-space missiles and the larger, more powerful, and heavily shielded VG-120 Boomslang, for space-to-ground bombardment. The Hegemony had their own versions of nuke-tipped smart missiles that filled the same niches.
Each missile possessed a limited-purview AI, making it smart enough to evade enemy defenses and choose the best moment for detonation. They carried variable-yield nuclear warheads—up to a megaton for Kraits, and a hundred times that for Boomslangs. And the bombardment vessels’ fire control suites could fire, track, and direct hundreds of missiles simultaneously.
The Ma’at Mons had used up much of her missile inventory at Alphekka, but reloads had been cranking through from the fleet’s manufactories on board the various stores and munitions ships with the fleet. The Ma’at’s tubes were up to 70 percent readiness, now, while the Gurrierre and the Cheng Hua both were at 100 percent.
Usually, a bombardment vessel had plenty of room in which to operate. Her missiles had a range of anywhere up to 100,000 kilometers, and were designed to steer themselves on wide sweeps around the flanks of battlespace, in order to come in on the enemy from as many different directions as possible. This time, however, they would be firing their warloads while hurtling down the narrow confines of the tunnel.
There’d be precious little room for error. The bombardment vessels would have to guide their missiles ahead of them into the tunnel’s opening, keep them tightly corralled as they traversed the tunnel’s length, then detonate them with absolutely precise timing instants before the ship emerged at the other end.
“Admiral Koenig,” his AI said. Karyn’s voice . . .
“Yes.”
“All battlegroup elements report readiness to accelerate,” the voice told him. “However, Admiral Liu and Captain Jiang are requesting that you include the Cheng Hua in the vanguard assault.”
“I see. . . .”
“Liu requested that I forward to you a message.”
“Very well. Let’s hear it.”
“ ‘Admiral Koenig,’ ” Karyn’s voice continued, “ ‘this is Admiral Liu of the Hegemony contingent. Please consider this: the outcome of this action will affect us as much as you, will save or destroy the Hegemony to the same degree that it will save or destroy the Confederation. Please reconsider. Captain Jiang and his crew have volunteered to be with the vanguard of the assault. This operation, by rights, should be one for all humans, for the survival of all Humankind.’ Message ends.”
“I see. It’s just the Cheng Hua they want to send with us?”
“Yes, Admiral.”
“Damn . . . I need to think about that.”
Admiral Koenig didn’t like the Chinese.
Since they’d joined the battlegroup at HD 157950, the Chinese had posed a problem for him. They were, in a sense, outcasts. . . .
The Chinese Hegemony was not a full member of the Confederation. They sent representatives to Geneva, but they were nonvoting, with observer status only. The reason for this was enmeshed in history, and in the creation of the Confederation itself.
More than two and a half centuries earlier, in 2132, the Chinese had launched the first-ever asteroid strike against nations of the Earth. The Second Sino-Western War was winding toward a close, with the Chinese colonies on the moon overrun, Japan in rebellion, and invading armies advancing on Beijing itself. A Hegemony ship, the Xiang Yang Hong, had detonated nuclear weapons to nudge three small asteroids onto a collision course with the Earth.
The Hegemony government claimed that the vessel’s captain, Sun Xueju, had gone rogue, that he’d not been operating under Beijing’s orders. Whatever the true story, a U.S.-European attempt to deflect the oncoming mountains had succeeded with two of the mountains, but failed with the third.
The media called it Wormwood, from the Bible’s description of Armageddon. A two-kilometer-wide boulder had slammed into the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and Brazil. Half a billion people had died, tidal waves had smashed cities from New York and Washington to Cape Town and Rio, and sea levels, already on the rise with global warming, had surged precipitously. Coastal cities had flooded—and with a further rise in temperatures, the flood waters did not fully recede. The half-submerged ruins of Washington and New York City and Boston and thirty other major cities all dated from the Fall of Wormwood.
The vengeance wreaked by the Allies on Beijing, itself partially flooded by the rising seas, had been terrible.
With the war’s end, the victors had established the Pax Confeoderata, creating the Earth Federation. The High Guard had been created specifically to protect Earth against future attempts to use asteroid missiles against Earth, and to attempt such would be deemed the ultimate crime against Humankind. Foreign troops had occupied Chinese territory for fifty years longer . . . and even now the Hegemony was viewed with mistrust—the nation-state that had attempted to destroy the Earth.
For her part, China, savaged by brutal trade embargoes and commerce legislation, blocked from Confederation membership, treated as a pariah among nations, had responded in kind. There’d been numerous skirmishes and brushfire wars with China or with China’s clients, from Africa and Indonesia to their extrasolar colony at Everdawn.
And so, when Admiral Liu had requested to join the Battlegroup America after the clash with Giraurd, Koenig had accepted, but with serious reservations. He’d had to assume that the Chin
ese were operating with their own agenda, that they wanted to keep an eye on the rogue battlegroup, since CBG-18’s actions out here beyond the limits of human galactic exploration might well have a direct impact on Earth, one far greater and potentially more devastating than Wormwood.
As his tactical teams had put together the details for Operation Trigger Pull, Koenig had decided that the Hegemony contingent would remain on this side of the tunnel—a rear guard, along with a dozen Confederation ships. It was important that the portion of the fleet that went through the tunnel to the other side have a safe avenue of retreat should things go bad over there. Admiral Liu had protested, and Koenig had overridden him.
And now Liu was making a final plea, asking that Hegemony forces be included in the assault.
Why? To keep an eye on the battlegroup’s actions on the other side? The problem with that was that the first ships through—the bombardment vessels—were quite likely on a suicide mission. If the enemy concentrated on the other end of the tunnel didn’t destroy them the instant they came through, the door-kickers might well perish in the nuclear fury they themselves were about to unleash.
“Patch me through to Admiral Liu,” he said.
“Yes, Admiral.”
A window opened in Koenig’s mind. Admiral Liu’s face appeared, bland, expressionless. “Admiral Koenig. You heard my request?” The movement of his lips appeared to match the English words. The translation software took care of appearances as well as language.
“I did, Admiral.” He hesitated. “Admiral Liu . . . you do realize that this may well be a death sentence for every man and woman on board the Cheng Hua?”
“Do you realize, Admiral, that this attempt may be a death sentence for every man and woman alive? If we do not exterminate the Sh’daar, they may well decide we are too dangerous to incorporate into their empire. They will exterminate us.”
“Are you arguing against the attempt?”
“No, Admiral. As it happens, I agree with you. That is why I . . . why we are here.”
“For honor?”
Liu frowned. “Honor has little to do with it. Pride, rather, perhaps. And because we are human. Whether this expedition saves humanity or witnesses humanity’s destruction, we will be a part of it.”
Koenig nodded. “Then thank you, Admiral. America’s AI will feed you the updated tactical plan, so that you can coordinate with the other missile carriers.”
“Thank you, Admiral.” Liu nodded a dignified bow. “And death to our enemies.”
Over the next hour, the fleet continued maneuvering in preparation for the assault. The Cheng Hua threaded her way through the mass of gathering starships to take her place astern of the Ma’at Mons and the Gurrierre, positioned now in line ahead, at the van of the fleet. Behind the Cheng Hua, the destroyers Trumbull, Ishigara, Santiago, and Fletcher formed up two by two. They would follow the Cheng Hua through the TRGA tunnel in order to exploit whatever gains the bombardment vessels made.
And behind them . . .
“CAG,” Koenig said. “You may commence fighter launch operations. . . .”
VFA-44
Hangar Deck, TC/USNA CVS America
TRGA, Texaghu Resch System
1315 hours, TFT
“My God, Shay. Why?”
Lieutenant Shay Ryan stood at attention in front of Lieutenant Ben Donovan, though the squadron’s new CO tended to be relaxed and informal even at the most ceremonious of times. “Because we’re going in after Trevor . . . Lieutenant Gray, sir,”
“Don’t ‘sir’ me, Shay. They goddamn made me the skipper. They didn’t promote me.”
Shay relaxed, very slightly. “I want to come too.”
“You have a downgrudge on your med record,” Donovan told her gently. “No duty.”
“So? Rules are made to be broken. Sir.”
“You’ve been adrift in a crippled ship for . . . how long?”
“Seventeen hours. Sir.”
“And you picked up a nasty dose of radiation poisoning while you were out there.”
“And they shot me full of antirad. I’m fine, sir, really.”
“You look like hell.”
And, in fact, Shay was swaying slightly as she stood there on the hangar deck. Antirad—vast numbers of nanomedical haemobots—were swarming through her circulatory system now, homing in on both radioactive particles and on damaged molecules broken by passing gamma and neutron radiation. She had a good chance of pulling through, but she would be weak and feeling woozy for the next week or so, and would require additional nanomed injections, as well as periodic flushes of her entire blood volume to extract any radioactive isotopes created by neutron radiation before they could be concentrated.
Right now she felt like hell.
“Sir . . . Ben. I’m coming along. You order me to stay, and I’ll grab a spare ship and follow you. You throw me in the brig, and I swear I’ll chew through the bulkhead.”
Donovan appeared to consider this. “Well . . .”
“Please! . . .”
He sighed. “Ship 836 is free,” he said.
“Thanks, Ben.”
“Don’t thank me, Ryan.” He shrugged. “At least you’re already dosed with antirad.” The fighter pilots on this op had all received prophylactic injections of haemobots. The mission profile suggested that they would be flying into hellfire, and the antirad would help them stay alive, conscious, and functioning until they could be picked up.
Assuming a pickup even took place. It seemed like long odds on that happening right now.
“I regret it already. If you pass out on me out there, I’ll have you transferred to the fleet so fast you won’t know what hit you.”
By long tradition, Navy pilots didn’t consider themselves part of the fleet. That was for less glorified billets—the personnel and admin officers and the CIC and bridge crews. Considering how many men and women in what was left of VF-44 were, in fact, replacements sent up from exactly such departments, Shay doubted that Donovan’s threat was all that serious.
According to the latest squadron downloads, the Dragonfires were flying today with just five people: Calli Loman, Lawrence Kuhn, Rissa Schiff, Will Rostenkowski, and Ben Donovan.
Six, now. Shay would be going in too.
But of them all, only Donovan and Shay had actually started off as fighter pilots an eon or two ago. The rest were replacements, though after the skirmish with the Pan-Euros at HD 157950 and the desperate battle in front of the TRGA this morning, they were now thoroughly experienced replacements.
So many had been lost. Miguel Zapeta. Tammi Mallory. Jamis Natham. Pauline Owens. So many . . .
America’s Hangar Deck Two was a pulsing, frantic labyrinth of activity, as Starhawks and War Eagles were prepped for launch. A spare Starhawk, Number 836, was already being hauled out from the storage hangar by one of the robotic deck grapplers and positioned above the black patch of nanoseal that would grant the ship access to her drop tube. Elsewhere, skin-suited pilots clambered into their yawning cockpits, which immediately flowed shut around them, and deck officers and crew personnel swarmed around fighters making final checks and walk-arounds. The first fighters—belonging to VFA-31, the Impactors—were already sinking down into their launch tubes, the nanoseal flowing around their ships and closing above them, maintaining the hangar deck’s atmospheric pressure. The Impactors would launch first, followed by the Black Lightnings, then the six Dragonfires.
Shay slapped the touch control for her skin-suit utilities, and they shifted around her body into the flight-suit configuration, with ship jacks at the base of spine and neck, and contact circuitry at the palms of her gloves. A member of the deck crew helped her on board. “Good luck, Lieutenant!” he called, giving her a jaunty salute. “Kick their slimy asses the hell out of our galaxy!”
She nodded as her cockpit closed over her, sealing her from the outside. It occurred to her that no one even knew if the Sh’daar even had asses, slimy or otherwise, or even if it was the Sh’d
aar against whom the Dragonfires would be deploying.
But she appreciated the thought.
As she connected with her fighter, cascades of data flowed through her brain—fighter readiness, weapons status, squadron status, fleet status. . . .
She’d been given the designation Dragon Six.
Shay checked the oplan readout. She’d not even had a chance to more than glance at it before coming down here from sick bay.
Damn. Hellfire was right.
Everyone was launching from the drop tubes, using the carrier’s hab module rotation to put them into space. They would not be using America’s twin spinal launch tubes; there was no need in this op for high velocity; the fighters would be entering the tunnel just ahead of the carrier and, once America was through—assuming she survived—she would be using her spinal launch tubes as railguns against any target that presented itself.
“Okay, Dragonfires,” Donovan’s voice came through her fighter’s comm link. “Drop in five minutes. Final check.”
Shay ran through her checklist for a final time. All green . . . power at 100 percent, weapons go, life support go, communications go, AI engaged, navigational and acceleration routines engaged and on standby.
Her visual feed showed darkness outside her craft, but she felt the ship rotate through 90 degrees, so that she was facing down within the artificial gravity of the carrier’s rotating hab modules. Ahead and below, now, was a narrow opening, as black as the tube surrounding her, but with stars sweeping steadily past.
The final minutes crawled by. What was waiting for them on the other side of the Triggah, as the other pilots were calling that thing out there? They’d faced millions of the silver-gray leaf things on this side. Presumably there’d be more of the same on the other side as well . . . but what else? They were saying that the tunnel led to a globular cluster, but some of the scuttlebutt she’d been hearing in sick bay was impossibly wild: the tunnel led to another galaxy entirely . . . or even to another time entirely. That last sounded ridiculous, but apparently, rotating Tipler cylinders were supposed to open gateways through time as well as through space, and that had led to some of the weirder stories circulating through the carrier.
