by Ian Douglas
None of that mattered in the least.
Trevor was over there, wherever or whenever “there” might be.
And she was going in after him.
“Dragonfires!” Donovan called. “Launching in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . drop!
Her Starhawk fell through the tube and emerged in open space. The local star glared to starboard, partially eclipsed by America’s bulk. She swung her Starhawk 90 degrees as she cleared the carrier’s shield cap and accelerated, moving out ahead. Other fighters filled space around her, creating a cone-shaped formation ten kilometers ahead of the carrier.
Directly ahead, a hundred kilometers distant, the tunnel awaited them, too distant to be visible to the naked eye, but easily brought up on a magnified feed. She was looking down the thing’s throat, at a tiny patch of shining white starlight on the other side.
Face-to-face with the thing, she felt a growing, gnawing terror.
So why the hell am I doing this? Shay asked herself.
Two reasons, really. One, the more practical of the two, was that she had as much chance of dying, as she saw it, riding out the battle inside America’s sick bay as she did of buying it in an all-out fighter furball.
The impractical reason—but the more pressing, so far as she was concerned—was that Trevor Gray was on the other side of the TRGA. No one knew if he was alive or dead right now, though smart money suggested that he was dead. But of every man and woman on board America, Gray had been the one friend out of thousands of shipmates and fellow pilots. Like her, he’d been a Prim, and like her, he’d endured the jokes and the name-calling and the anti-Prim prejudice that still darkened Confederation and naval society.
And once, off Arcturus Station, he’d risked his life to stay with her, when her crippled fighter had been falling toward the gas giant Alchameth. He’d saved her life by nudging her ship into a new vector.
And Shay, like most Prims, was savagely loyal to friends.
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
TRGA, Texaghu Resch System
1345 hours, TFT
“Fighters away,” Wizewski reported.
“All ships report ready for acceleration,” Commander Sinclair added. “Looks like we’re good to go.”
“Very well.” Silently, Koenig had Karyn open a channel that would carry to every man and woman in the fleet.
“Link open, Admiral,” she told him.
“Attention all hands,” he said. “This is Admiral Koenig.
“We are about to take a blind leap into the unknown. The alien artifact we’ve been calling the Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly, the TRGA, or ‘Triggah,’ will lead us to the heart of a star cluster, which we believe to be over eighteen thousand light years from Earth. We’re not sure what will be waiting for us on the other side, but we can assume the enemy will be waiting for us, and in large numbers.
“We are employing what General Mathers has called ‘door-kickers,’ our three bombardment vessels, which will shepherd their nukes through the tunnel and detonate them at the far side of the tunnel just before they emerge. We believe that massed thermonuclear detonations will both confuse any waiting enemy ships and seriously reduce their numbers . . . but I must emphasize that we do not have a tactical view of the far side, and we will have to pass through the tunnel and emerge before we can track and target the enemy.
“We believe that if we succeed, we will find ourselves inside the enemy’s backyard, quite close to the homeworld of the Sh’daar, and at the very least deep inside the central regions of Sh’daar space. From there, we hope to negotiate a settlement with the Sh’daar government, and end the war that has threatened our worlds and the lives of our families for the past nearly four decades.
“It is a terrible risk, and we will be facing terrible odds. But I believe it is a risk worth taking, because we have here a golden chance to end the war within the next few hours.
“You, the men and women of this battlegroup, have followed me this far, some of you all the way from the Defense of Earth. Most of you have friends and family still on Earth, or among Earth’s colonies, and by following me you have risked the possibility of never seeing them again. And now, I have this one, final sacrifice to ask of you, this final challenge. Together, we will pass through the tunnel to Omega Centauri cluster, we will face the Sh’daar at last, and we will win peace for our worlds and for our species.
“And if we die in this attempt, I can think of no nobler cause.
“All ships of the assault formation! Acceleration in three . . . two . . . one . . . initiate, ahead slow. . . .”
And the carrier battlegroup began moving forward, toward the waiting maw of the tunnel.
Chapter Sixteen
30 June 2405
Lieutenant Shay Ryan
VFA-44
TRGA, Texaghu Resch System
1348 hours, TFT
It was too late now for doubts or self-searching. The fighter swarm accelerated.
Shay Ryan had little to do but watch. Her fighter’s AI was controlling her approach to the tunnel’s opening, keeping her rigidly locked in tight formation with the other Dragonfires.
“Stick to the oplan,” Donovan said over the squadron tactical channel. “Let your AIs thread the way through. Be prepared for a blackout. Your screens will switch to maximum, all wavelengths, three seconds before you emerge. Once your screens drop, keep your eyes open and be careful of your targets. No own goals.”
Shay worked to calm herself, to steady the trembling inside. It was going to be confusing as hell when they broke through, and no amount of training, no number of sims, no number of hours in the cockpit could possibly prepare you for the reality. Every fighter engagement she’d been in over the past months had been terrifying . . . and she knew that this one would be worse by far.
“Hey, Prim!” Lieutenant Kuhn called. “You should have stayed in sick bay!”
“Silence on-channel!” Donovan snapped.
Shay ignored the attempt at banter. Prim had been Trevor’s hated nickname. The bastards couldn’t even wait until he was officially declared KIA before handing out his squadron handle to someone else. . . .
No . . . focus on the mission. Kuhn and the others were her squadron mates. In a few more moments they’d be fighting the Sh’daar together . . . maybe dying together. . . .
The opening of the tunnel expanded rapidly . . . and then Shay was hurtling down a long tube with dark gray walls blurred by their rotation into a haze that hurt the eye. Time seemed . . . wrong. At her velocity, she should have traversed the tunnel in less than a second, but the seconds dragged on and on as the distant patch of shining stars very slowly grew larger.
She waited for her screens to switch to full. . . .
Bridge
TC/USNA CA(M) Ma’at Mons
TRGA, Texaghu Resch System
1348 hours, TFT
Captain John Grunmeyer sat on the Ma’at’s bridge, his acceleration chair overlooking the navigational systems station, the helm, and the weapons stations, as the hazy dark blur of the tunnel’s interior wrapped itself around them. Deck, bulkheads, and overhead currently all projected imagery gathered from the shield cap forward, creating the illusion that the bridge was open and exposed to empty space. “Release Volley One,” he said.
This was the tricky part . . . well, the first of several tricky parts, the biggest of which would be simply surviving the next few minutes. But it was the first step.
The Ma’at Mons possessed four rotating modules evenly spaced about her spine. Two were hab modules for the ship’s crew of eighty-four. The other two were missile stores and launch bays. Like the fighters dropped from America’s rotating bays, missiles could be released gently from the cruiser, set free into open space with an outward velocity of about five meters per second—the impulse derived from a rotational acceleration of half a gravity. With one complete rotation, a string of Boomslang missiles was put into place, a necklace encircling th
e bombardment vessel like a ring.
Data sent back from the hapless America fighter pilot who’d already fallen through the tunnel and reported back by message drone had told the mission planners what to expect—the strange apparent elongation of the tunnel as the Ma’at accelerated down its length, approaching at last the speed of light. The tightly clustered stars ahead had gradually smeared out into a high-velocity starbow, and still the tunnel seemed to go on and on and on. The boomslangs reached optimum separation from the ship, and their onboard AIs took control of their flight programs, arresting their outward drift, then beginning to move them forward, sliding past Ma’at Mons’ forward shield and into the space ahead. According to the data from Lieutenant Gray, they still had another ten subjective seconds.
At seven seconds, the missiles’ AIs punched it, accelerating at fifty thousand gravities, which, since they were already moving at near-c, meant they slowly dragged their way forward one kilometer . . . ten kilometers . . . fifty kilometers ahead of the bombardment vessel.
Then they hit the programmed screen engagement point, with five seconds to go, and the ship’s screens slammed to full.
Despite the fact that all incoming electromagnetic radiation was now being blocked by the vessel’s electromagnetic screens, the image of the tunnel’s weirdly distorted interior remained. Telescoping antennae mounted around the shield cap’s rim and extended above the hull-hugging flow of the ship’s defensive screens continued to send in visual images from outside, distorted by the high velocity.
Grunmeyer didn’t expect that to last for much longer, however. In another few seconds . . .
Four VG-120 Boomslang missiles approached the far end of the tunnel and detonated in perfect unison, mutiple fireballs erupting within the kilometer-wide confines of the TRGA opening while they were still traveling at within a percent or so of the speed of light. The blast—radiant heat and hard radiation, together with the plasma that originally had been the eight-meter-long hulls of the missiles themselves—emerged from the tunnel in a star-hot eruption of apocalyptic white fury. The detonation was like a shotgun blast, and any Sh’daar ships or facilities in front of the TRGA opening would have been vaporized in an instant.
Those first four warheads had been precisely timed to explode just inside the TRGA cylinder’s entrance, before they could be crumpled by the enemy’s matter-compression weapons. The next twelve missiles emerged in a ring just less than a kilometer across, entering a searing storm of high-energy plasma that in effect masked them from the enemy’s momentarily blinded sensors. Much of a Boomslang’s mass was in its shielding, which was designed to let it penetrate planetary atmospheres from orbit at high velocity without burning up and disintegrating. That shielding, along with their electromagnetic screening, protected their internal circuitry and the resident AIs from the surrounding firestorm for the precious second or two necessary for each missile to swing onto a new course, swinging around through 90 degrees and traveling out at right angles from the length of the rotating cylinder.
Koenig and his tactical staff had decided that the likeliest location of any Sh’daar warships, fortresses, or guardian monitors protecting the Omega Centauri end of the TRGA would be beyond and even behind the opening. As each missile emerged from the expanding cloud of radiation, their sensors picked up the nearest potential military targets and accelerated, hard. They’d lost much of their velocity as they emerged from the tunnel into normal space, a phenomenon similar to the velocity bleed-off of ships emerging from the bubbles of the Alcubierre Drive. The course change and high-grav boost sent them streaking into the clouds of waiting alien starships faster than organic senses could have recorded it.
The missile AIs, operating far more swiftly than organic nervous systems, located and identified the enemy targets, homed in on them, and detonated. Fresh nuclear firestorms erupted in empty space, blotting out the star-packed sky and etching in the TRGA cylinder in harsh, actinic radiance.
And alien warships began dying in the thousands, the tens of thousands, before they could react and trigger their own weapons.
Grunmeyer and his officers could only wait and watch from the bridge of their missile cruiser, able only to glimpse what was happening through the signals relayed back from the Boomslangs ahead. They saw the flashes, glimpsed massed hosts of enemy vessels . . . and then Ma’at Mons had passed through the tunnel opening and plunged into the expanding nuclear fireball engulfing a fifty-kilometer sphere of space beyond.
“Multiple targets!” Commander Hugh Conrad called. But the imagery surrounding the ship’s bridge was already failing, flickering out in large sections, as the antennae mounted on the ship’s shield cap burned away in the fireball.
“Volley fire!” Grunmeyer yelled in response, and missiles, dozens of them, spilled from rotating weapons bays, or lanced into darkness from launch tubes mounted beneath the shield cap and radiating from the vessel’s spine. The bridge projection screens were completely dark, now, the ship in effect cut off from the universe outside.
Seconds trickled past, and then the bombardment vessel’s EM screens went partially transparent again. The bridge team looked back into unimaginable nuclear chaos. As expected, there were vast numbers of alien ships—most of them the silver-gray leaf shapes moving in enormous, twisting sphere formations . . . but other vessels were visible as well, alien designs never yet seen and catalogued by humans.
Visible too was a trio of massive structures fifty kilometers from the tunnel and spaced about it equidistantly, armored planetoids positioned as semi-mobile space fortresses to cover the tunnel mouth. But Ma’at Mons’ missiles were striking home, blast upon blast upon utterly silent and fiercely radiating blast, consuming ships and structures in a rippling wave of devastation. One of the fortresses had been badly hit already, and white flashes were hammering at the others.
And even as they watched, more missiles emerged from the tunnel opening, curving around to home in on the surrounding enemy fleet.
“Independent fire,” Grunmeyer called. “Pour it on the bastards!”
The enemy, clearly, had been caught by surprise, but they were recovering now. A second missile cruiser, the Gurrierre, emerged from the tunnel, her velocity damping down to almost nothing in a flash of light momentarily brighter and more dazzling than the fireball of nuclear plasma around her, her hull obscured by the white radiance sleeting off of her screens and shields. As Grunmeyer and the other bridge officers watched, half of the Pan-European ship’s shield cap vanished, crumpled by Sh’daar matter-compression beams. Water exploded from the sheared-off wreckage as the Gurrierre, its gravitic drive disabled, began to tumble, trailing streams of broken wreckage.
“We’re under attack, Captain,” Conrad reported. “Multiple targets, incoming.”
“Keep firing! Everything we have!”
The Ma’at Mons shuddered, the bridge lights dimming for a moment before coming back on-line.
“Hit to our main drive complex,” Lieutenant Anders, at the damage control station reported. Her voice was steady and calm. “Main singularity inducers off-line.”
“Point defenses operational and on automatic,” Conrad added.
At this point, there was painfully little for Grunmeyer or his staff to do, save monitor the battle’s progress. The Ma’at herself was fighting the engagement now, her AI controlling the ship’s defensive fire suites while continuing to release and direct her fast-dwindling store of nuclear-tipped missiles. The last of her Boomslang warload was gone; now she was firing the smaller VG-92 Kraits, the same anti-ship missiles that were carried by fighters. Massed banks of hull turrets loosed invisible laser and charged particle beams and clouds of anti-missile sand at the oncoming alien fighters.
The Ma’at Mons shuddered violently as she took another hit. In the distance, other ships were emerging from the tunnel. The Cheng Hua emerged close on the heels of the Gurrierre and immediately began taking heavy fire from the circling cloud of enemy ships. Behind the Chinese bombardme
nt vessel, the destroyers Trumbull and Ishigara dropped into normal space, dumping energy in a blaze of light, and two more destroyers, the Santiago and the Fletcher, emerged close behind them.
The three bombardment vessels were loosing volley upon volley of nuclear-tipped missiles; the destroyers mounted heavy missiles as well, but were targeting the three fortresses with particle beams and laser fire. The fireball by the mouth of the tunnel by now had dissipated, expanding rapidly into ragged invisibility, but fresh nuclear detonations flashed and strobed in an expanding ring encircling the TRGA opening. It was imperative that the enemy fighters closest to the tunnel be destroyed before the big carriers started coming through. The fighters should emerge first. . . .
And there they were! Flying in close-knit formation, Starhawk fighters whipped around their singularities to fall into new vectors, hurtling into the densest clouds of alien vessels. Both sides, Grunmeyer could see, were taking heavy casualties.
And then the Ma’at Mons came under direct attack from a squadron of four alien vessels. Grunmeyer didn’t recognize them; they weren’t listed in the Ma’at’s warbook, though their mass and overall length—one to two hundred meters—suggested that they were similar to Confederation frigates or destroyers. A savage explosion vaporized a portion of the Ma’at’s shield cap as she turned to face the new threat, and alarms shrilled throughout the vessel.
This would not, could not go on for very much longer.
Lieutenant Shay Ryan
VFA-44
TRGA, Texaghu Resch System
1349 hours, TFT
“Here we go!” Donovan’s voice called over the tactical net, the words slightly garbled by the relativistic distortions within the wormhole’s shaft. “Lights out!”
