by Ian Douglas
This was the tricky part of the operation, getting the fortytwo Commonwealth warships that had already come through the stargate, along with over a hundred aerospace fighters and minor combatants, back through to Carson Space without being overwhelmed by the Xul counterattack. The Xul, as the Commonwealth had learned over the years, tended to be cautious. Swat their noses hard enough, and they might not follow up on an enemy raid for years. Still, the toughest part of any op, whether in space or on a planet’s surface, was in the withdrawal phase, when the last few ships or men covering a retreat were left to face overwhelming numbers alone.
The Marines were used to that situation, the Navy less so.
The Xul Type II was collapsing upon itself, now, dwindling with eerie rapidity as the black hole within swallowed it from the inside out. But AI scans of battlespace data indicated that there were as many as two thousand Xul warships in this system. Cluster Space, as was well known, was a major Xul node and operations center.
At the moment, the biggest question was whether or not the Xul would try to follow 1MIEF back through the stargate to Carson Space.
Hermes, largest of the ships of the human fleet, as well as the slowest and most clumsy, completed her reversal maneuver and began making her way back toward the gate.
About her flashed swarms of smaller craft, including the retreating Marines of the initial assault force. Alexander flashed an order to Pappy. “Make sure you track every damned one of those M-CAPs,” he said. “Coordinate the withdrawal with Smedley.”
“Affirmative, General,” Pappy’s calm voice replied. “We will leave no one behind.”
Of course, how the hell did you guarantee something like that? Battlespace was a bewildering soup, of ships large and small, of retreating M-CAPs, of aerospace fighters, Ontos transports, drones, sensor and communications probes, missiles, and drifting chunks of white-hot wreckage. Many of the fighters and Marine assault capsules were damaged, some disabled completely and adrift in emptiness.
But they had to try.
Green One,
AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks, Cluster Space
0722 hrs, GMT
“Pull out, Skipper! Pull out!”
Wayne’s voice shrieking in her mind wasn’t helping. Lee blocked it off and focused instead on urging her Wyvern to exert maximum lateral thrust, and then some, as she flashed toward the loom of the Xul monster.
It was a Behemoth, the code name for the Xul Type IV huntership. It had been noted and photographed at several Xul node- bases, but for a long time the assumption had been that it was a fortress, immobile.
In fact, Commonwealth Intelligence wasn’t sure whether the Xul themselves differentiated between fortress and warship. All that really was known about the Behemoth was that it was big and deadly—a slightly flattened spheroid five kilometers across—and that it was often posted as a sentry near Xul-controlled stargates or worlds, but that it could move under its own power when necessary. The Xul equivalent of the Alcubierre Drive gave it FTL capability, and there was evidence that it possessed a space-matrix translation capability akin to that of the MIEF’s Hermes and other extremely large Commonwealth ships.
Moments ago, this Behemoth had dropped out of FTL almost directly between the Shadow Hawks and the stargate, emerging into normal space with the signature burst of light bent and focused along its wake of warped space. Lee had ordered her surviving fighters to disperse and accelerate, getting past the Behemoth by using antimatter missiles as screens.
Major Lee’s weapons bays were empty, but she could go into an attack approach anyway, seeking to draw off some of the defensive fire from the enemy batteries.
Thank God, she thought, for the AIs. . . .
AI- piloted aerospace fighters never stretched the envelope. They flew conservatively . . . and fought conservatively as well, and here was a perfect example: the Shadow Hawks’ AI fighters still had missiles left in their weapons bays. Expending antiship missiles on distant targets with a low probability of hitting with them just so you didn’t need to take them back to the carrier was a human way of thinking and fighting, not one of intelligent software.
She was damned glad three AI-piloted Wyverns in her formation had survived, though. Their remaining missiles probably wouldn’t destroy the enemy vessel, not without some extraordinary luck, but they would give them a chance to get past the Behemoth. Antimatter explosions blossoming against the Xul hull would screen the hurtling fighters from enemy sensors. She had ordered Green Five to loose its two remaining AM-98 ship-killers going in. Seconds later, twin blue-white flares of light had erupted against the Xul huntership’s hull like a close pair of hot suns just ahead. Now, Lee’s Wyvern was hurtling toward the fast-expanding bubbles of plasma and vaporizing debris as her wingman screamed at her to pull up.
Her Wyvern hit the shell of fast-moving plasma with the shock of striking a solid wall, but her inertial dampers cushioned her through the worst of it. She could feel the burn of hard radiation, though, as it seared through her shields, and then she was in a tumble, spinning nose-for-tail a few meters above the tortured metal and ceramic landscape of the Xul Behemoth as alarms shrieked and flashed over the Wyvern’s link with her brain.
The jolt had been enough to knock her out of a trajectory that would have sent her slamming into the huntership’s hull, however. In an instant, she was past the alien vessel’s bulk, struggling with her ship’s mind-linked thrusters to bring the tumbling fighter back under control. Damage alerts shrilled at her, and with a thought-click she silenced them. She knew she was in trouble, damn it, and didn’t need the irritating reminder. . . .
The universe spun past her awareness. “Pappy!” she cried. “Let’s have some help, here!”
The AI was already helping, and she knew it. She considered, then rejected, the idea of having him stabilize the wildly spinning view of her surroundings being fed into her brain. Pappy2 had enough on his electronic mind at the moment. She concentrated instead on trying to slow the fighter’s spin, letting Pappy work through her to precisely balance the firing of her thrusters.
Two of her stabilizing thrusters were off-line, which made it tricky. Her comnet, her connection with the other ships in her squadron, was down as well. Other electronic systems were beginning to fail in cascade.
And then, without further warning, Pappy went off-line as well. It took her a few moments to realize that he was down, and when she did, she bit off a sharp curse. Without the AI’s help, she was going to have a hell of a time navigating to the stargate, if she could get her essential ship’s systems on-line and working again.
The damaged Wyvern continued its nose-over- tail tumble into the night. . . .
UCS Hermes
Stargate
Cluster Space/Carson Space 0727 hrs, GMT
The distant curve of the stargate flattened as Hermes approached the oddly distorted space at the gate’s center, until it was a golden straight line bisecting the encircling sky. An instant later, Alexander felt the faint, internal shiver and disorientation as Hermes passed through the stargate.
The flattened pinwheel of the Galaxy, the reddish beehive of the globular cluster, the advancing Xul armada all vanished, wiped from the sky.
The Marine expeditionary force was back in Carson Space. Or most of them were, at any rate. Fighters and Marine assault pods were still coming through. Alexander opened a channel to the commanding officer of CVW-5, Samar’s fighter wing.
“How many fighters did we lose, Reg?” Alexander asked. COCVW-5 was Colo nel Regin Macalvey, a tall, lanky Marine from EarthRing’s Skyholme Sector. He was currently in his F/A-4140 Stardragon, regrouping his squadrons as they came back through the gate.
“All together, General? Or are you asking about the
Shadow Hawks?”
“Both.”
“We’re still tallying, sir. Losses for the whole wing might
be as high as twelve percent. We’re still waiting for some stragglers to report in.”
&
nbsp; “And the Shadow Hawks?”
“Four ships have reported in so far, General. Out of sixteen. There may be some more, though, still on the other side of the gate.”
“I see.”
“We’ll want to go back across and have a close look, General. Once this little dust-up is settled.” He didn’t add that fighters stranded on the far side of the gate were going to have some trouble when the star over there blew. If it blew. . . .
“If we can, CAG,” Alexander replied. “CAG” was an ancient term for a carrier’s aerospace wing commander, a relic of the days when he was called “Commander, Air Group.”
An assessment probe was going to be vital after this op, Alexander reflected . . . but that assumed that the red star went nova, that the Xul node on the other side of the gate was destroyed, and that 1MIEF wasn’t going to have to destroy the gate to keep the bad guys out.
A lot of assumptions. The next few minutes were going to be very busy indeed.
“Sir, we have Marines and AIs both still on the Cluster side of the gate. Alive. We can’t leave them, there.”
“I know that, CAG. And you know there are no promises.”
“But—”
“Get your people squared away, Colo nel.” Alexander was watching the data feed update itself. Every few minutes, another reconnaissance drone would slip through the gate with a tactical update to the fleet communications net. As the data flowed through Alexander’s link, he could see the Xul fleet massing on the other side, still approaching the gate. “We might have some visitors very soon, now.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Macalvey sounded bitter. Like any good Marine CO, he genuinely cared about the men and women under his command, cared even about the AIs. His personnel record mentioned that Macalvey was a member of the Church of Mind. It explained a great deal, not that explanations were required here. Alexander himself was a long-lapsed Neopag, but he had the Marine officer’s deeply ingrained concern for his people.
In any case, there were sound practical reasons for getting back into Cluster Space when this was all over. The three Euler Starblasters were still on the other side of the gate, if they’d survived, along with a large menagerie of smaller probes and drones. He wanted to recover them if at all possible. The more the Commonwealth could learn about the ways and means of blowing up stars, the better. It was their primary weapon, now, against the Xul hordes.
He sensed Admiral Taggart’s awareness. “Our fleet is in position, General,” Taggart told him. “If they come through . . .”
“With luck, they’ll wait to think things through,” Alexander told him. The slowness of Xul tactical responses was proverbial, though it never did to rely too much on their past performance. The enemy had been known to pull a surprise move from time to time in the past.
“Yeah. The question is whether that pipsqueak sun over there will pack enough of a bang to get them all.”
“Or if they’ll be warned by their friends closer in.” The Xul, it was known, possessed FTL communications. A base or ship close to the exploding sun might have time to transmit a warning to other Xul vessels farther out before it was engulfed.
So many unknowns.
Alexander checked the time. One minute more until the big question was answered. If the star had exploded on schedule, the nova’s wave front was nearly to the gate by now.
The last recon drone imagery showed seven of the massive Xul hunterships less than a thousand kilometers from the gate, and still closing with it. The red dwarf star continued to burn in the distance, casting a bloody glare across their sunlit surfaces. Deeper in the system were hundreds, no, well over a thousand more, pinpointed by the X-ray and gamma radiation loosed by their black-hole power plants.
If that entire enemy fleet managed to come through the gate into Carlson Space, 1MIEF would be finished.
Space within the ring of the stargate shimmered. Abruptly, with the suddenness of nightmare, the long, slender prow of a Xul Type I, gleaming gold in the light of the Carson sun, emerged from the empty space inside the gate’s ring.
“All ships!” Admiral Taggart commanded over the combat link. “Fire!”
Still emerging from the warped space of the stargate, the Xul huntership was caught in a web of high-energy beams and exploding missiles. Taggart had positioned the re treating Expeditionary Force fleet to take maximum advantage of the tactical bottleneck; the Xul ships could only emerge into Carson Space through the twenty-kilometer lumen of the stargate ring, and over a hundred combatant vessels of 1MIEF could focus all of their fire on that one tiny region of space.
The incredibly tough ceramic and metal alloy of the Xul warship’s outer hull withered, rippled, and peeled away beneath that blast, as high-velocity kinetic-kill projectiles slammed into it at an appreciable fraction of light speed and plasma bolts seared into it at star-core temperatures. Moments later, the first nuclear and antimatter warheads began slamming into it, and the area immediately in front of the gate opening was blotted out by expanding spheres of plasma.
Under that ferocious onslaught, no material substance could remain intact for long. The Xul ship’s fiercely radiating, needle-shaped hull continued moving into Carson Space, but its drive and weapons systems were dead. Pieces of its internal skeleton were visible now, and the remnants of its hull cladding were softening and streaming away as metallic vapor.
But even as it drifted clear, four more Xul ships were emerging from the gate interface.
Thirty seconds to go . . . an eternity in the lightning-quick stab and parry of space-naval combat.
Major Lee,
AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks, Cluster Space
0731 hrs, GMT
It had taken several minutes, but at last she’d been able to stabilize her tumbling spacecraft. The vast sprawl of the Galactic spiral was at last no longer sweeping across her mind’s eye. Behind her, the local sun, a ruby pinpoint, continued to burn in the far distance.
The situation was damned bad. Com and nav systems both were out, as was her link with Pappy2. And there was worse. When she oriented her Wyvern to line up with the stargate and thought-clicked her main drive, nothing happened.
Stifling the sharp surge of fear, she began running diagnostics. Like other aerospace fighters, the Wyvern’s main drive drew energy from a ZPF quantum power transfer unit, using quantum entanglement to transmit power from one point to another without actually having to cross the space between. Enormous zero-point field taps on board large capital ships sucked potentially unlimited power out of the sub-fabric of space itself and routed it directly to field-entangled power receivers on board individual aerospace fighters.
The advantage, of course, was that fighters didn’t need to carry their own power generating systems for drives or weapons. The down side was that the carriers and big Marine transports had to be closely protected, since the destruction of a carrier would shut down all of her fighters. Briefly, Lee wondered if the Samar had been destroyed, and that was why she wasn’t drawing any juice.
But . . . no. Samar was back in Carson Space. She’d come through the gate, released her fighters, then returned—safely, so far as the battlespace telemetry could report. The problem, obviously, was on her end of things.
It was tempting to assume that something was blocking or intercepting the energy transmission, but Lee knew that wasn’t the way things worked. She shook her head, frustrated. It still felt a bit strange to her . . . knowing that she should still be drawing energy from a Marine transport some thirty thousand light years away.
That was part of the technological magic of zero-point energy taps. The energy wasn’t so much transmitted as it was simultaneously co-existent in two separate places, on board the transport and inside the QPT receiver of her drive. Some day, the techies claimed, that bit of quantum-physics magic might make possible the ancient dream of teleportation from point to point; in the meantime, it was enough that her fighter could draw energy from her mothership even at this range. When it d
idn’t work, the human mind tended to fall back on what felt like common sense. If energy wasn’t coming through, something must be blocking it.
The truth was that some essential component in her own quantum power tap receiver must be down. She might pick up the cause through her diagnostics, but the system was complex and a full set might take hours.
Damn it. If Pappy2 had been up and running, he’d be able to track the information down in no time. Her own personal AI was little more than a secretary, able to sort through incoming data and present it in a way that made sense, but unable to show much in the way of initiative or creativity.
She hated feeling this helpless.
She considered the Wyvern’s suicide switch.
All Commonwealth fighters carried the things, a means
of exploding a small antimatter warhead located beneath her seat. There were five steps to go through before the thing could be unsafed and triggered, but once she made the final connection—a manual button accessed underneath a lockdown cap rather than a thought-click—she would never feel a thing. The system had been installed in all fighters and most small military craft as a means of avoiding being patterned by the Xul . . . or for situations such as this one, where battle damage had rendered the craft inoperable and there was nothing to look forward to but suffocation or radiation poisoning.
