by Ian Douglas
As the seconds passed, however, and the oncoming vessel grew larger, she realized that this was an entirely new class of Xul ship.
It was enormous. . . .
“Transmit the AI message,” she ordered. An artificial intelligence programmed with everything Humankind knew about Xul language, technology, and computer net protocols would initiate contact.
“Already transmitted, Senator.”
How big is that thing? she wondered.
Her personal AI, linked into the combat network, provided an answer. “Approximately twenty kilometers across, Senator, and fifteen thick. We have never encountered a mobile Xul ship of this size.”
“It’s too close!” Admiral Brooke said. “It’s going to hit us!”
“Turn us around!” she yelled. “Back us off! . . .”
. . . but then something blinked, as though the universe itself had just winked out.
And Cyndi Yarlocke was awake on the link couch back in her office in SupraQuito EarthRing, as Reality itself twisted and tore within her mind.
She was shrieking mindlessly as machines and servants rushed to her side. . . .
19
0605 .1102 Ops Center
UCS Hermes
Core Space
0040 hrs, GMT
“She’s . . . gone!” a young naval officer seated at one of the Ops Center consoles said. She sounded shocked beyond reason.
“What do you mean, ‘gone?’ ” Alexander demanded. “What’s happening?”
“Sir! A large ship was coming out from that thing at the center . . . and then we lost all signal!”
Alexander watched over her shoulder as she replayed the image, transmitted back to the Hermes via Pax’s on-board QCC network.
“Damn. Looks like The Wings of Isis all over again, General,” Admiral Taggart said.
“We have to assume so,” Alexander said. “Do we have other viewpoints in the area?”
“Pax should have released drones, General,” the communications officer said. “But they’re not QCC. We won’t get an image for another . . . nineteen minutes, twenty seconds.”
“They must know what direction the Pax came in from,” Alexander said. “They’ll have FTL ships on the way by now. Pass the word, Admiral. Everyone stand ready, full alert.” “Aye, aye, General.”
“Make sure our fighter screen gets the word. They’ll be in line to spot incoming hunterships first.”
“Right.”
A minute dragged past. “Um, General?” Taggart asked at last. “Are you implementing Starfire?”
“Not yet. I want confirmation that the Pax is destroyed.”
“Christ, what more confirmation do you need? That ship coming out of the Core must have been twenty kilometers across!”
“Right. And it might have swallowed the Pax and cut off her signal.”
“May I remind the General,” Taggart said carefully, “that there is no signal transmission in Quantum-Coupled Communications? No signal to be cut off, and it can’t be screened or blocked.”
“I know that, Admiral.” The words snapped. “Damn it. Sorry, Liam. But everything is riding on this encounter. I don’t want to start the shooting if what we have here is some kind of misunderstanding.”
“Marty, you can’t be serious. You can’t believe that!”
“Not really. But we’re going to be sure.” He was still churning through the possibilities. Maybe Pax’s QCC gear had simply gone down. Maybe the Xul knew something humans didn’t, something along the lines of how to screen off QCC communications. Maybe the Pax had been destroyed, but only because the Xul had been late in getting the AI peace message, and even now were composing an apology. . . .
Yeah, right , he thought. If the damned Xul even knew what the word peace meant, he’d be the most surprised Marine in the fleet.
But he had to know. Hell, Cyndi Yarlocke must be fuming back in EarthRing, wondering why she’d been cut off, maybe even suspecting the Marines of having pulled the plug. The QCC link with Earth was still open. They would be watching, watching and recording everything.
He didn’t want to bring Yarlocke into this. As of a minute ago, this had become a purely military operation, and the responsibility to shoot or to stand pat was his.
But she should be in on this. “Cara,” he said, summoning his personal AI aide. “Patch me through to Senator Yarlocke’s private link channel, via QCC. She probably would like to know what’s going down.”
“Right away, General.”
“Patience, Admiral,” he said aloud. “We’re going to wait until we see the bastards and know they’re gunning for us. I don’t want to give Cyndi Yarlocke ammunition for my firing squad.”
“I hear you there.”
“But pass the word to Starfire. Stand by to launch.”
They wouldn’t have long to wait now.
Marine Regimental Strike Team Firebase Hawkins, S-2/I
Core Space
0043 hrs GMT
“Word just came down from Ops,” Gardner said. “They’re getting the triggership ready for firing.”
“Shit!” Huerra said. “They’re gonna do it! They’re really fuckin’ gonna do it!”
“What does it mean?” Chaffee asked.
“It means,” Garroway said quietly, “that the Xul decided not to talk peace. There’s a good chance the Pax just got vaporized, and that there’s a major shooting war starting a few hundred kilometers above our heads!”
“God . . .”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“No such things as atheists in foxholes,” Gardner told him. “You should know that.”
“Yeah. Only too well. . . .”
The alert was spreading now throughout the regimental command net. Behind the four Marines, several large, black spheres rotated smoothly in deep sockets, elevating the business ends of multiple hypervelocity mass cannons into line with the zenith. Elsewhere, smaller weapons—particle guns, plasma weapons, and high-energy lasers began powering up.
If the Xul came down on S-2/I, they’d find the Marines ready and waiting for them.
How long the Marines would be able to hold out, however, was anyone’s guess.
Ops Center
UCS Hermes Core Space
0043 hrs, GMT
“Here they come!” Admiral Taggart cried.
Alexander saw the Xul vessels on the main Ops screen, three of them decelerating out of FTL so abruptly they seemed simply to appear out of empty space. In the center was the monster glimpsed by the Pax seconds before her disappearance, a squat, flattened sphere that looked quite similar to Xul fortresses encountered in the past in both shape and surface structures, but which obviously had been improved by the addition of both normal- space and FTL drives.
“All stations!” Alexander snapped. “Hold fire!”
Technically, the squadron was commanded by Admiral Taggart, but as commanding officer of 1MIEF, Alexander had a certain amount of leeway in the orders he gave. Officially, he could advise, and holding fire until the Xul intentions were known for certain was the best advice he had to give at the moment. They could sort out the difference between a suggestion and a direct order later . . . if there was a later. . . .
The other two Xul ships were Type IV Behemoths, each a quarter the size of the monster they accompanied. The trio were moving toward the Hermes now, closing at a thousand kilometers per second, and still fifty thousand kilometers distant.
They were closer to the light carrier Chosin, released by the Pax just before she’d set off for GalCenter. One of the Behemoths was only ten thousand kilometers away as it drew abreast of the Chosin, and still the Xul held their fire. Maybe. . . .
And then lances of white plasma speared from the Xul ship, savaging Chosin. . . .
Nightstar 442 Core Space
0045 hrs, GMT
Lieutenant Charel Ramsey saw the Xul giants drop out of FTL only a few thousand kilometers ahead. Gods, they were close . . . and big! His orders we
re to observe, report, and hold fire . . . but to be ready for an attack at any second.
Then one of the Behemoths opened fire on the Chosin, spearing the light carrier with beams of starcore fury. Chosin returned fire, launching a salvo of high-velocity missiles armed with thermonuclear warheads. Most of those missiles were intercepted by the enemy vessel’s defenses well short of the target, but three detonated within ten kilometers of the Xul warship’s hull—one of them very close, at a range of perhaps half a kilometer—and white suns pulsed into harsh radiance, one after another flaring, brightening and expanding, then fading away.
“That’s our cue,” Major Steve Treverton, the Raptor’s squadron leader, announced. The engage order was flooding through the squadron’s tactical net. “Hit the bastards!”
Aerospace fighters operating in vacuum couldn’t peel off and dive the way aircraft operating in atmosphere could. They had to kill their forward velocity by flipping end for end and applying full thrust in the direction of their drift, then align themselves with the target and accelerate again. Nightstars, however, with full inertial damping and GTE-5660 main drives, made ultra-high-G maneuvers appear nearly as effortless as those of any atmospheric fighter. Four of the Raptor Nightstars were traveling in formation within a thousand kilometers of one another. As the nuclear blasts hammered at the Behemoth’s hull, all four began simultaneously killing their forward velocity and accelerating toward the Xul monster.
“Those explosions have thrown up a hell of a lot of space fluff,” Treverton told the others. “We’ll come in behind the blast screen where they can’t see us.”
“Shit, doesn’t that mean flying through the rad zone, skipper?” Lieutenant Karl Mayfair pointed out. “We’re gonna get cooked!”
“What’s the matter, Mayfly?” Ramsey asked him, using his squadron handle. “Forget your radiation screening?”
“Nah . . . but the background count is redlining now.”
“That won’t be anything compared to what it’ll read if Hermes or Cunningham get fried,” Treverton told him, “and we have to stay out here.”
“Point,” Mayfair said. “Sir.”
The nuclear detonations from Chosin’s salvo had thrown out huge, blossoming clouds of highly radioactive debris . . . most of it in the form of tiny bits of radioactively hot metal vaporized in the blasts and re-cooled as micron- sized flecks. As they thinned, the clouds became invisible at optical wavelengths, but they played hell with most sensors, especially those operating at radio or infrared wavelengths.
Ramsey’s own sensors showed little ahead but a uniform haze of white-noise snow, as he navigated on the Xul Behemoth’s expected position. The enemy ships were decelerating, which meant that the screening radioactive clouds would drift on ahead of them in another moment; the Raptors needed to hit the enemy ship before the screening effect was lost.
Linked in with the three other Nightstars, Ramsey accelerated at full boost.
Ops Center
UCS Hermes Core Space
0046 hrs, GMT
“Battle has been joined, General,” Taggart told him. “Yes.”
What else was there to say? Battlespace drones relayed
intimate details of the struggle back to the Hermes’ Ops Center—the Chosin adrift and found ering, her squat hull nearly cut in two by Xul high- energy weapons; the nuclear detonations alongside the nearest Xul huntership; the plunge of Marine aerospace fighters into the melee . . .
There was a horrid inevitability to it all—Yarlocke’s peace offer, the instant and deadly Xul response, and now eleven MIEF capital ships, a handful of fighters, and a few hundred Marines faced utter annihilation.
Alexander was cycling through the options in his mind, even as the battle unfolded in strobing flashes of nuclear light on the Ops Center’s main screens.
The destruction of the Pax Galactica had sharply limited his viable choices. Pax and Hermes together had brought eight smaller warships into the S-2 system, while the Intrepid had brought one—the Cunningham. Out of those nine transported vessels, four, at least, were doomed without the Pax if the battle in Core Space turned against them. While they could travel faster than light on their Alcubierre Drives, flying back to Commonwealth space under their own power would take years, and they didn’t have the on- board supplies necessary for such a voyage.
They possessed, therefore, only two options for getting back home in less than decades; either they went out through a stargate—and the gates in Core Space appeared to be very well defended, or they had to leave as they’d arrived, translating out on board a larger, translation-capable vessel, like the vanished Pax. Now there was only Hermes, and she would require two jumps, at least, to take them all out.
As for Intrepid, her kilometer-long bulk would not fit on board the Hermes. She had to get out either through a gate, or by means of a long, long FTL voyage. She, at least, was large enough to be able to manufacture nanoassemblers in numbers enough to convert carbonaceous asteroids into food and water for the humans on board.
All of this had been anticipated in the planning for Heartfire, of course. Very few in the operational planning constellation had seriously believed that the Xul would agree to peace terms, and the possibility that Pax would be destroyed in the first few seconds of the encounter phase of her mission had always loomed quite large in their minds. The squadron’s principle options were two . . . fight or run. If the choice was running, the plan called for losing any pursuing Xul vessels in the starclouds and nebulae of the Core, finding a place where Hermes or the Intrepid could carry out the delicate gravitometric readings necessary to measure the shape of local space. Once that happened, Hermes could make as many translations back and forth between Core and Sol as were necessary to get all of the ships except Intrepid—but including Intrepid’s crew—back to safety.
It was that or launch an assault on the fortress guarding the stargate through which they’d entered Core Space. With Intrepid’s firepower plus several capital ships, it might be possible to destroy the fort and allow the survivors to escape through the gate.
Might . . .
Alexander tried not to think about yet another alternative. In a battle with these gargantuan Xul vessels, not all of the Commonwealth warships were going to survive. Chosin was already crippled, leaking atmosphere and losing power. Much more of that and Hermes might be able to take all of the survivors back to Sol in one translation . . . if, of course, Hermes herself survived what was coming.
One of the Xul behemoths was reeling beneath an attack by Marine aerospace fighters. They still had a chance . . .
He considered ordering a full and immediate launch of Heartbreak, but shoved the thought aside. Patience. . . .
The ops plan as currently running had been worked out in long simulations back in AresRing over the past year. Dubbed “the Cometary Option,” it offered the squadron a slender chance of survival, and promised to draw Xul forces away from the Marines guarding the triggerships on S-2/I.
It had been his suggestion, originally—drawing off any Xul ships in the system by directly threatening GalCenter, and, just incidentally, picking up some badly needed intel on the way. As the trio of Xul vessels continued approaching, it was becoming a better and better option . . . one on which he was going to have to stake his life, and the survival of the squadron, in one throw of the dice.
“General,” Cara said in his mind. “You have an incoming communication from EarthRing.”
“Right,” he said. “The Warlock . . .”
“No, sir. Senator Yarlocke appears to be . . . indisposed. The communication is from George Stahl, her chief aide.”
Curious. “Put him through.”
“General Alexander?” Stahl’s virtual icon appeared in Alexander’s mind, a radiant nimbus with a lined, human face.
“Yes, Mr. Stahl. You must understand that we’re a little busy out here right now.”
“I understand that. General . . . the Senator appears to have been . . . attacked.�
�
“Attacked? How? What do you mean?”
“She was linked with the Pax Galactica when a large spacecraft emerged from the GalCenter Dyson cloud. The connection was broken somewhat abruptly. The Senator appears to have suffered some sort of massive psychic trauma.”
“I . . . see . . .” Alexander held back his initial, dismissive thought. Massive psychic trauma was a kind of pop ular catch phrase long common in entertainment sims and even the news media, but which had no place in real life. The assumption was that when a person was linked through their cere bral implants to a remote location, occupying a teleoperated sensory unit, for example, or jacked into a distant computer net, they ran a partic ular risk. If that connection was suddenly snapped, the person could literally lose his or her mind—as if the person’s mind had actually been occupying the distant net.
Fictional sims made heavy duty use of the notion, but the whole idea was nonsense. The optic nerves that brought sensory data to the back of the human brain were several centimeters long; the chains of neurons carrying information from a person’s left foot could be almost two meters long. Teleoperation and cere bral linkage had long ago demonstrated that it didn’t matter how long the distance was between sensor—whether eye or camera—and the brain that assembled the data into a coherent picture. A person who lost his eyesight didn’t also lose his mind; nor did a person who suffered an interruption in his sim-link with a teleoperated submarine at the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench or while remotely probing the sulfuric, high-pressure hell of the surface of Venus. The remote explorer simply woke up back on his or her link couch, confused, perhaps, but none the worse for wear.
