Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three sc-3

by Ian Douglas

  Apparently, a certain large, critical number of the leaf ships were necessary to produce the beam in unison. Knocking down that number as quickly as possible gave the Confederation fleet its best chance of survival.

  The Badger was completely out of action now, her port side crumpled from her shield-cap bow almost to her stern. Water sprayed in a silvery cloud into vacuum; X-rays flooded nearby space, the death shrieks of matter falling into the seething swarm of black holes now devouring her interior.

  The enemy ship-cloud turned its weapon on the Frederick der Grosse next, but by this time the nuclear-tipped missiles launched moments earlier were beginning to flare around and within the leaf-ship school. Instantly, the school began scattering, dispersing into individual ships. Apparently, they could learn quickly as well.

  At 1614 hours, the KK projectiles launched minutes before from America’s railguns began slamming into the large structure in the near distance. The facility, apparently some sort of deep-space dock or supply depot, was shredded by the massive incoming rounds, and the ships still moored there were smashed by the hi-vel projectiles coming in at better than fourteen kilometers per second.

  Secondary explosions detonated within the disintegrating docking facility.

  The cruiser attacking America and her escorts was in trouble as well, as internal gases erupted into empty space through house-sized breaches in her pressure hulls. The Fitzgerald was badly hurt, now, tumbling slowly, wreckage trailing from her spine. America’s particle-beam turrets continued to track and fire at the Sh’daar cruiser, slamming bolt after searing bolt past her failing shields and into her internal works. A savage, brilliant explosion finished the job, tearing the stricken vessel into hurtling half-molten fragments.

  At this point, there was little for Koenig to do but watch the battle continue to play itself out. The United States was coming under heavy fire now, as was America herself. As the two largest and most massive vessels in the Confederation fleet, they were obvious high-priority targets for the enemy. The Kinkaid was taking heavy fire as well, both from enemy warships and from the remaining surface defense structures on AIS-1.

  “How are the Marines doing?” Koenig asked his AI.

  “All Crocodiles are down,” the AI replied. “Murcheson reports that Objective Gold has been breached, and the Marines are entering the facility. It appears to be defended by armored combatants in large numbers—possibly combat robots. Casualties are high.”

  How long, Koenig wondered, should he press the attack? The tactical teams had discussed the possibility of having to break off and retreat. The problem was that at this point, retreat meant abandoning the Marines now on the dwarf planet’s surface. That was not an option, so far as Koenig was concerned, unless the alternative was complete annihilation for the entire naval assault group.

  The scattered swarm of leaf ships, working with an astonishing degree of coherence and coordination, had come back together, and had turned its meson beam against the United States of North America. The carrier’s shield cap appeared to pucker near one rim, and a moment later a torrent of water, stored reaction mass and shielding, gushed into space in sparkling droplets that simultaneously boiled in hard vacuum and froze in the carrier’s shadow.

  “Make to Adams and Trumbull!” Koenig called. “See if they can help the United States!”

  A second burst of coherent meson radiation slashed through the United States, crumpling the center of her shield cap, striking through and beyond to rip through her spine near her stores decks and power plants.

  Nuclear detonations again tore through the leaf-ship cloud, its numbers dissolving in thermonuclear blasts of heat, light, and hard radiation.

  But the damage had been done. As the United States’ quantum-tap power plants failed and her shields collapsed, other Sh’daar warships closed on her like hungry pack predators, firing into her unprotected hull. Her hab modules broke off, ejecting, with their crews, clear of the wreckage.

  But her almost one-kilometer length was being consumed in the raging inferno of megaton detonations. . . .

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  1 July 2405

  Colonel John Murcheson

  Objective Gold, AIS-1

  Omega Centauri

  1616 hours, TFT

  The enemy troops in this dark and cavernous place seemed to move and respond like machines rather than organic beings, machines with lightning-fast reactions. Each was huge, standing ten meters tall when they stood on two legs, half that on four or six. The uppermost pair of limbs appeared to double as legs or as arms. Weapons, however, were built into the smooth surface of that massive armor; electron beams snapped from outstretched gauntlets like lightning, eerily silent in the hard vacuum, devastating when they struck Marine armor.

  The Crocodile was no use in here. Guided by the flash of a Navy emergency transponder, the Marines had homed in on something like an immense dome of red metal eight kilometers across, a thick-walled fortress topped by spires and blisters and towers rising from the ice in a bristling forest. Radar and X-ray scatter mapping during their approach had revealed far more of the structure buried beneath the ice. The structure, evidently, was an enormous ship of some sort, a design utterly unknown to the Confederation grounded on the surface of the dwarf planet.

  Weapons turrets on the surface had obliterated one of the four incoming Crocodiles with a bolt of artificial lightning, but the other Marine assault craft, coming in at extremely low, ice-skimming altitude and weaving back and forth, had managed to close with the grounded ship, been able to slip in so close that the enemy’s weapons could not be brought to bear.

  Under the cover of a barrage of particle-beam fire, the three surviving Crocodiles had slammed into the main body of the alien ship close together, their docking collars swiftly melting through a meter of solid metal and ceramic alloy to breach the hull and gain access to the interior. The breaching tunnel at the Crocodiles’ bows had dilated open, and Murcheson and his Marines rushed through. They’d emerged inside an immense cavern, its overhead some twenty meters high, the far walls over a quarter of a kilometer distant.

  The armored alien forms had attacked moments after the Marines gained entry.

  “Spread out! Spread out!” Gunnery Sergeant Charlie McKean yelled. “Plasma gunners! Put fire on those black hats at two-one-one!”

  Murcheson let the gunny do his job, using his M-64 laser carbine to snap off a quick quartet of shots at one of the armored giants. So far as he could tell, the weapon had no effect whatsoever.

  There weren’t many of the giants, thank the gods, but that armor, gleaming silver and highly reflective, was tough. It was just possible that the enemy troops carried some sort of screen generator as well; they certainly were big enough to do so. The assault team carried a mix of armaments—M-446 laser rifles and the heavier M-18 squad plasma weapons, for the most part, backed up by hand torches and pulse grenades.

  The enemy troops were something like the Nungiirtok, another Sh’daar client species the Marines had clashed with more than once, but these were obviously of a different species and were carrying higher-tech gear. They moved with a smooth, flowing grace that seemed impossible for beings their size, and with a glittering precision that suggested highly sophisticated machines.

  The Marines were at a considerable disadvantage here. The surface gravity of AIS-1 was only four tenths of a meter per second—about .04G. A Marine who together with her combat armor weighed 180 kilos on Earth weighed only 7 kilos here, but she still possessed 180 kilos of mass. Worse, things fell here with agonizing slowness, and when a Marine tried to dart for cover, he tended to launch himself into empty space and take a couple of seconds to drift back down.

  And as they drifted, they were easy targets.

  Within a moment or two, the Marines were scattering, taking shelter behind various odd-looking pieces of machinery or conduits growing between deck and overhead. Under the concentrated fire of a plasma gunner and three Marines with laser rifles,
one of the giants was burned down, but the others were advancing steadily, laying down a heavy and relentless fire. Five Marines were down . . . six . . . and then it began to look as though the Marines had run up against more than they could handle.

  Colonel Murcheson wondered if it would even be possible to pull back to the Crocodiles and break off the attack.

  Trevor Gray

  Omega Centauri

  1617 hours, TFT

  “That wormhole tunnel,” Gray yelled into the darkness, “it’s a kind of inside-out Tipler machine! It’s a shortcut through space . . . but it’s also a shortcut through time, isn’t it? It brought us back in time! Maybe a long, long way into our past! And now that we’re here, we could really screw your future! Isn’t that right? . . .”

  There was no response from the impenetrable darkness.

  “Where are they?” he asked his AI.

  “Unknown.” The AI seemed to hesitate. “However, you should know that Confederation Marines have penetrated the chamber within which we are being held. A battle is being fought nearby.”

  Gray felt an electric thrill at the news. “Let me see!”

  A window opened in his mind. The chamber within which the Starhawk had been trapped for the past twenty-two hours remained pitch-black . . . but flashes of light sparked and flickered in the distance, perhaps a hundred meters distant.

  “Three Marine boarding craft penetrated the wall surrounding us—likely the hull of the large spacecraft that captured us yesterday. A number of Marines have entered this chamber and are engaged in combat with armored beings of an unidentified species.”

  Gray watched for several minutes as the AI directed high-magnification scanners at different scenes of the engagement. From his vantage point, it was difficult to see the Marines, but he did note several of the large defending figures, six-limbed and clad in bulky armor, revealed in infrared false colors.

  “Can you pick up the Marine radio channel?”

  “Affirmative.”

  He heard a click, then a confused tumble of voices. “Over here! Over here!”

  “Watch it, Kaminski! Silver clunker moving on your position!”

  “Plasgunners! Hit ’em! Hit ’em!”

  “Take cover! The fuckers’re getting too close!”

  Gray heard a piercing scream that bubbled away into silence.

  “Shit! Shit! Dougherty’s down!”

  “Corpsman, front!”

  “Devon! McBride! Put down some fucking covering fire!”

  Gray dialed back the channel volume. It sounded like the Marines were in a hell of a tight spot. “How is auto-repair coming along?” he asked, thoughtful.

  “Power plant, life support, and defensive screens are at one hundred percent,” his AI told him. “Our maneuvering thrusters are at one hundred percent, but our gravitic drive projectors are showing readiness at twenty-five percent, no more. Nanomatrix hull morphing is inoperable, and we are frozen in combat mode. All missiles have been expended. PBP weaponry is inoperable. We have 793 KK Gatling rounds remaining.”

  “Can we hover?”

  A pause. “Affirmative.”

  “Can we drift forward . . . turn . . . maybe change altitude?”

  “Affirmative. But I would advise against attempting to fly this spacecraft inside the Sh’daar ship.”

  “Why? There’s enough room. . . .”

  A plan was coming together in Gray’s mind.

  But it might mean the end of his attempts to communicate with the Sh’daar.

  CIC

  TC/USNA CVS America

  Omega Centauri

  1617 hours, TFT

  “Colonel Murcheson is reporting that the Marines have been stopped just inside the hull of Objective Gold,” Sinclair told Koenig. “Major Hegelmen reports slow progress inside Objective Blue.”

  But Koenig scarcely heard. He was watching the final destruction of the United States of North America.

  The carrier was wheeling end over end, falling past AIS-1, as parts of the hull, wracked by savage internal explosions, continued to fold and crumple into high-G singularities scattered across its broken and ravaged structure. The hab modules had gotten clear before the end, carrying perhaps half of her crew, but for personnel trapped in the spine, there’d been no possible escape. Carrier bridge towers were constructed with jettison rockets allowing emergency evacuations, but the destruction had overcome the United States too quickly for Captain Whitlow and his bridge and CIC crews to abandon ship. The United States of North America was a lifeless hulk.

  It was a fate that America might soon share.

  Elsewhere, the ships of CBF-18 exchanged fire with enemy warships at practically point-blank range. Fighters continued pursuing the leaf-ship swarms each time the formations began to re-form. Capital ships stood toe-to-toe with Sh’daar vessels, which in space combat meant anything less than ten thousand kilometers, and slugged it out with hivel guns, PBP and plasma cannon, and high-energy lasers.

  How much longer should they stand their ground? . . .

  Trevor Gray

  Omega Centauri

  1618 hours, TFT

  “Main drive start-up!” Gray said, thoughtclicking an in-head icon. “Give me manual control. Just don’t let me slam into anything.”

  “Monitoring attitude,” his AI replied. “You are clear for lift and hover.”

  The Starhawk stirred, then lifted off the internal deck of the alien vessel. Local gravity, Gray noted, was only about four hundredths of a G; he needed only a trickle of power from his quantum taps into his drive projectors, focused at a point several meters above his head, to nudge the fighter, massing 22 tons but now weighing only 880 kilos, into the vast, dark emptiness of the huge chamber. He could feel the faint buzz of vibration as the microsingularity flickered on and off thousands of times per second, bootstrapping the fighter along, then holding it perfectly balanced between matching gravitational fields.

  Five meters off the deck, he rotated his ship, bringing the prow around to face the combat now raging a hundred meters away. His ship was still in its combat configuration, molded into a flattened, dead-black fuselage with down-sloped wings to either side. His port-side wing had been chewed up pretty badly by the fringe of the Sh’daar matter-compression beam—the likely reason that both his particle beams and hull-morphing capability were down—but he was able to limp forward, silently drifting in the space between decks.

  “Targeting! KK cannon!” he called, and a window opened in his mind, showing Sh’daar ground troops in false-color greens and yellows. A red targeting cursor closed on the nearest armored form and locked there, following it as it bounded across the deck in low, sprinting leaps.

  “Check me!” he told his AI. “Quarter-second burst,” he ordered. With fewer than a thousand rounds in his mass-shielded magazine, his weapon’s twelve-rounds-per-second cyclic rate would exhaust his ammo in about one minute of steady firing. The AI, with faster reflexes than Gray’s, could limit his bursts and conserve his ammo.

  Gray thoughtclicked the trigger. The Starhawk’s spinal-mounted Gatling RFK-90 kinetic-kill cannon spit three 400-gram slugs, each the size of Gray’s little finger, giving the hovering fighter a sharp recoil nudge. In space combat, the weapon’s muzzle velocity of 175 meters per second typically was added to the fighter’s current speed, giving it a substantial load of kinetic energy. In here, with the fighter drifting nearly motionless, 175 mps was a pitifully weak offering . . . considerably less than the velocity of an old-fashioned rifle bullet.

  The depleted uranium rounds each were considerably more massive than a rifle bullet, however, and they struck the target almost together, slamming into the armor.

  With little effect. The Sh’daar trooper whirled, searching for the source of the triplet of rounds that had struck it. A moment later, Gray’s screens flared with the impact of a bolt of high-energy electrons from the soldier’s weapon. Other Sh’daar soldiers stopped their advance, turned, and added their firepower to the salvo
.

  “We need to boost muzzle velocity!” Gray yelled. “Dial it up!”

  “I recommend against—”

  “Just fucking do it! Firing!”

  The Starhawk’s KK Gatling could be powered up to slam out projectiles at anything up to five thousand meters per second. In normal space combat, with combatants traveling at tens of thousands of kilometers per second, such a high muzzle velocity was dangerous. It tended to overload critical weapon circuitry, and the recoil could throw a fighter badly out of control. And with the muzzle velocity added to the fighter’s forward vector, the lower number was usually adequate.

  Gray’s KK Gatling spoke again, and this time the recoil was savage, shoving the fighter backward like a rocket burst. His AI compensated, juggling the gravitic projection to wrench the ship back under control before it could slam into something; three hi-vel rounds struck the targeted Sh’daar soldier with the sort of energy generally released only in combat in open space, punching through armor with the force of a small detonating warhead.

  The armored figure came apart in a haze of vaporizing metal. Gray was already jockeying the fighter around, centering the target cursor on another moving, false-color figure and triggering a second burst. And a third. And a fourth . . .

  Colonel John Murcheson

  Objective Gold, AIS-1

  1618 hours, TFT

  “What the fuck was that?” a Marine yelled, ducking as fragments of high-velocity metal sparked off the deck and a nearby bulkhead. In front of her, one of the hulking, silver giants had just exploded, the upper half of its body disintegrating in hurtling bits of shrapnel.