by Ian Douglas
Koenig watched the graphic of Moskva’s course, closely following the path America had taken less than an hour before. The Russian Federation ship was accelerating.
“God help them,” Koenig thought.
Beside him, Marta snuggled closer, caressing him.
And all Koenig could think was how much he wanted to be out there. . . .
Scoutship Krestok Nin
Asteroid Belt
55 million kilometers from Earth
2348 hours, TFT
Gartok Nal swiveled two massive, stalked eyes to face his second-in-command. There were only the two of them on board the tiny spacecraft, but nevertheless, the proprieties must be observed. “Contact was exceedingly brief,” he said. “Did you pick up anything more?”
Shektok Kah closed a number of his feeding palps, a gesture indicating negation. “Just that momentary contact call, and a definite request for help,” he replied. “Thirty-six of our people are being held captive aboard that human vessel.”
“And they were being brought to the human’s home system . . . then suddenly the ship turned away, our people still prisoners on board!”
“We cannot go after them. Our ship is too weak.”
“No, but we can bring help. I believe our long vigil here is at an end.”
The Krestok Nin had been adrift in this debris field for almost two thousand tarn, monitoring the human homeworld, their radio traffic, and the movements of their various fleet assets. It had been a long, claustrophobic, boring watch, but their species was inured to such conditions. At need, they could have maintained their watch for fully twelve thousand tarn, with little food, with minimum water, existing in a state of twilight awareness until called to full presence by alarms or changes in the environment.
Gartok Nal was no longer bored.
Both organisms in the tiny scoutship cabin possessed within their bodies what were commonly referred to as seeds—minute shells a few millimeters across containing colonies of an alien life form known to humans as Paramycoplasma subtilis. Many members of the Sh’daar Collective possessed these; among other things, they permitted direct mind-to-mind communication across relatively short distances. The human warship Moskva had briefly passed within several million nesch of the scoutship, permitting a burst of minimal information about the thirty-six warriors.
“Set course for home,” Gartok Nal told his subordinate. “But slowly . . . slowly. We don’t want the humans detecting our gravitational anomaly.”
“As you say, Commander. Ahead slow . . .”
The Krestok Nin rotated in space, aligning with a particular patch of sky, then began moving. Only after slipping silently clear of the human solar system did they fully engage their drives, accelerating rapidly until they were crowding the speed of light.
“It will be good,” Shektok Kah said, “to be able to kill humans again . . .”
Chapter Five
12 April, 2429
USNA CVS America
Penrose TRGA
79 light years from Earth
0817 hours, FST
Admiral Gray sat on the flag bridge, watching the final approach to the Penrose TRGA. Hazy and indistinct, blurred by its own rotation, the Penrose gate appeared to be a perfect circle five kilometers wide with a dark interior within which you could occasionally glimpse stars.
The patterns formed by those stars, however, did not match those of locally visible constellations.
Ever since these enigmatic spinning cylinders were discovered, xenotechnologists had begun naming them after famous physicists throughout history. This one was named after Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist of three centuries ago who’d helped develop an understanding of the principles of quantum mechanics and relativity, as well as the quantum nature of consciousness. Gray had used this gate before to reach the N’gai Cluster, 876 million years in the past and thousands of light years above the galactic plane.
Dozens of TRGAs were now known, though who had constructed them and when was still a complete mystery. Somehow, the mass of the sun was compressed into a tube of pure neutronium a few kilometers long, with Jupiter-massed black holes counter-rotating within the tube’s walls. Those masses together twisted the fabric of spacetime inside the gravitationally tortured lumen of that cylinder, creating an unknown but very large number of pathways across space and across time. Whoever it was, they were far, far advanced beyond what humans were capable of.
We’re worried about the Singularity, but that would be a drop in the bucket in terms of technological advancement, Gray thought.
“Captain Rand,” he said. “Let’s put a fleet of smartdrones in there.”
“Already prepped and ready for launch, Admiral. On your order.”
“Do it.”
The small, robotic devices would create a detailed picture of surrounding space, or as in this case, would act as instruments that could fly into the maw of a TRGA and return to give the starship an up-to-the-moment map of the tangled web of pathways through space and time. America was releasing a stream of drones now, numbering in the hundreds. Most would be destroyed. A few, however, should return.
That, at least, was the idea.
America waited.
Flag Bridge
CIS CV Moskva
Approaching Penrose TRGA
1225 hours, GMT
“Everyone stand ready!”
Oreshkin leaned forward in growing, nervous anticipation as the voice of an AI droned through the countdown: “Pyat . . . chetyre . . . tri . . . dva . . . adin . . . vsplyvat!”
The Alcubierre bubble surrounding the Moskva fluttered . . . then evaporated in a spectacular blaze of photons. According to Koroshev, the navigator, they should have emerged within a few light-minutes of the Penrose TRGA.
There was always some uncertainty about the maneuver. While you were cocooned inside your own private universe under drive, you couldn’t see out, and the usual navigational reference points—a scattering of pulsars across the heavens—could not be seen. The timing for releasing the FTL field was critical. Miss your mark by a thousandth of a second and you could zip past it by several thousand kilometers. Emergence timing, then, was always left to the ship AI, faster and more powerful than even enhanced human capabilities by a factor of tens of thousands or more.
But even with the best super-AI at the helm, there was an inherent fuzziness to the vessel’s precise location that made emergence more dependent on a throw of the dice than on rigorous mathematics. The local curvature of space, the mass of the ship, the efficiency of the drive all contributed to that uncertainty—one good reason that ships operated their FTL drives only at distances greater than 40 AU from the local star, about the average distance of Pluto from the sun.
“We are in normal space, Captain-first,” Kulinin reported. “All normal.”
“Range to the TRGA?”
“Sir!” the senior sensor officer called back. “One point two-two astronomical units to objective! That’s ten light-minutes!”
“Any sign of our quarry?”
“Yes, sir. America and her consorts are a few hundred kilometers from the TRGA.”
Ten minutes to the North American carrier. Perfect.
“Release the chicks,” Oreshkin ordered. “Fighters and destroyers! Open formation and prepare for acceleration!”
Aft, six Russian Cossack-class destroyers dropped free from Moskva’s slender spine. Each vessel was two hundred meters long and carried a crew of ninety. Hawk fighters began slipping from their launch tubes, gathering ahead of the carrier.
“All units to battle stations,” Oreshkin ordered. “Fighters commence maximum acceleration! Attack!”
The Hawk fighters flashed into the void ahead, two squadrons of them.
“All ships accelerate,” Oreskin said. “Weapons ready!”
Moskva had just managed to pull a piece of tactical magic from its hat. The American ship was ten light-minutes away, so the image Oreshkin was now seeing on his main screen was
ten minutes out of date. At this point in time, the Americans could not see the Russian squadron at all, because their view of this part of space also lagged by ten minutes . . . and ten minutes ago Moskva had still been under Alcubierre FTL Drive. Moskva now had the unparalleled opportunity of rushing toward the American ship at near-c, arriving only moments behind the flash of their emergence.
Oreshkin checked his chronometer. It had been just one minute and forty seconds since Moskva had emerged from warp.
They had seven minutes, twenty seconds before the Americans would be able to see them.
USNA CVS America
Penrose TRGA
79 light years from Earth
1228 hours, FST
“This is looking like a total bust, Admiral,” Rand reported to Gray. “Four hours, and not a damned thing has come back!”
“We’ll wait a little longer, Captain,” Gray replied. But he was already pretty sure that something inside the twisted spacetime of the TRGA was terribly wrong.
The smartdrones were designed to trace out some of the open pathways within a TRGA, map them, then return to their starting point to report. Such surveys could take months, even years, because the number of paths was so high. The problem was, Gray was looking for one particular pathway that was already recorded, stretching from the Penrose TRGA and time now to the Omega Centauri Cluster TRGA. All of the drones America had launched this morning were programmed to trace out that one path, and a round trip shouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes.
The delay suggested that the globular cluster was impassable . . . or that the TRGA itself was not working right . . . or that something on the other side of Penrose was eating drones. Gray thought that last possibility the more likely. The hypernova three years earlier had devastated both the core of the N’gai Cloud and at least touched the central regions of Omega Centauri—they were, in fact, the same physical volume of space, albeit separated by almost a billion years.
Carol Conyer and others in America’s astrophysics department had assured Gray that the radiation would have died down to tolerable levels after three years—time passed at the same rate on both sides of the TRGAs—and the TRGA there ought to be safe for incoming ships.
Ought. There were a hell of a lot of unknowns in the equation.
And what if the Sh’daar themselves had posted robotic sentinels to pick off drones as they emerged from elsewhere? It was possible. After their spectacular attack on the Rosette Consciousness, they might not be feeling particularly sociable right now. The possibility that the Consciousness was alive and out for revenge must be preying on the minds of the N’gai Refusers.
“Admiral?” Rand said. The captain was standing next to the sensor display suite on the main bridge.
“Whatcha got, Captain?”
“A ship coming out of Alcubierre Drive. Ten light-minutes astern.”
Gray glanced at the chronometer: 1232 hours. “Can you make them?”
“At this distance . . . no, sir. But it’s big. I’d like to sound general quarters, just as a precaution.”
“Absolutely.” Until they knew what that vessel was—who was running it, and why they were out here at the Penrose gate—it would be a good idea to be prepared. The chances that two ships should show up at a TRGA at almost the same time was . . . remote.
The alarm klaxon went off, bringing America to full readiness. Gray stared at the sensor data on the flag bridge repeater, trying by sheer force of will to drag more information from the screen. That ship out there was big . . . over half a million tons, at least, which put it roughly in America’s class. And it was probably human. The drive signature matched most human FTL drives more closely than it matched any of the alien signals recorded in the ship’s sensor library.
“I’m getting additional targets out there, sir,” Lieutenant Brandon Vasquez, the sensor officer, reported. “We may be looking at a carrier dropping fighters.”
“Very well.” Gray was thinking with furious speed. The squadron might very well be under attack, though they had no way of knowing who was attacking or why. Standard tactical doctrine dictated that America launch her fighters. When the attacking vessels reached the America, enough fighters would be in space to throw a serious wrench into the enemy’s planned tactics. At the same time, the escorting vessels, Arlington, Birmingham, and Seare, would take up screening positions to protect the carrier, blocking the enemy’s approach.
But it would take time to launch the fighters. America currently had two squadrons on ready-five, meaning it would take just five minutes to get them out into space . . . but if those strangers out there were deploying for an assault, they would arrive when America’s fighters were still launching. They’d not put up a combat space patrol because there’d simply been no need for it, and they would have had to recover the fighters before proceeding through the TRGA.
There was a need for it now.
“Unknown fighters are accelerating, Admiral,” Vasquez announced. “Blue doppler! And . . . into the ultraviolet!”
The blue and UV shift meant they were accelerating all out, the light he was seeing shifted by their velocity to the blue end of the spectrum. Fighters could manage gravitational accelerations so high they could nudge the speed of light in just under ten minutes. However, Gray thought it unlikely that these would come zipping past his squadron at c, because they would be blazing in too fast to do very much at all. More likely was that they would accelerate for half the distance, or a little more, then decelerate to kill their velocity.
So . . . allowing for the time lag, those fighters had begun accelerating ten minutes ago. If they came past at c, they would be here any second now. But if, as was far more likely, they pulled a mid-course deceleration . . . well . . . make it eight to ten more minutes before they arrived.
That gave the USNA squadron a little—a very little—time to prepare for the assault.
“Are you tracking them now?” he asked.
“Just barely, sir,” Vasquez replied. “They’re masked by their grav projectors. But we can see them.”
Of course. Gray had taken advantage of that effect himself more than once, back when he’d been a Starhawk driver. The drive field projected ahead of a fighter severely warped local spacetime, making tracking the craft from ahead extremely difficult. But at least America’s sensors should be able to keep a lock on the enemy ship’s mass.
“CAG!” Gray ordered. “Launch your ready-fives! And put three more squadrons on ready status.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
“Captain, I’d be obliged if you would position the ship in front of the TRGA opening . . . make it, oh, say ten kilometers from it. I want us to be ready to thread the needle when the time comes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Lieutenant West!”
Janice “Wild” West was the flag bridge communications officer, in charge of keeping the tiny squadron connected and in touch. “Yes, Admiral!”
“Give me a channel to Captain Ferguson.”
“Right away, Admiral.”
James Ferguson was the skipper of the T-AOE fast supply vessel Acadia. His voice came through within Gray’s in-head a moment later as West opened the channel. “Yes, Admiral?”
“I’ve got a special mission for you, James.”
“You’ve got my full attention, Admiral.”
“Yeah, well . . . I don’t think you’re going to like this.” Gray then explained what he had in mind.
He heard Ferguson’s whistle of surprise when he’d finished. “Yessir, we can do that. But . . .”
“I know it’s nuts.”
“That doesn’t begin to cover it, Admiral. I do see how you got your handle, though.”
“Get on it, Captain. Time is critical.” He thoughtclicked to another link. “Lieutenant West? Let me talk to Birmingham, Arlington, and Seare.”
“Aye, sir.”
The captains of the three fleet escorts checked in—Captains Roberts, Chavez, and Messinger. “Form
ation Delta,” he told them. “When the bad guys come past, I want you to hit them with all we’ve got—HELs, pee-beeps, and AMSOs. We’ll accelerate for the TRGA as soon as we know we’ve blunted the assault.”
The replies came back stacked on top of one another.
“Copy that.”
“Right.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
“And when I give the order to move,” Gray continued, “then move. Follow the America through the triggah right on her coattails!”
“Admiral!” That was Rand. “Missiles! We have KK missile launch from the fighters! Speed of approach . . . point eight-three c!”
“Confirm that!”
“Confirmed, Admiral! KKs on the way in! Impact in . . . I make it three minutes seventeen!”
And that was the final confirmation he needed. Up until that point, it was at least possible that the unknown ships out there were simply trying to catch up with America. Maybe they intended to deliver an ultimatum—don’t enter the TRGA or else!
But the missiles made that unlikely. “KK” stood for kinetic kill. The missiles weren’t nukes, but they were coming straight for the USNA squadron at better than three quarters of the speed of light. Anything they hit at that velocity would be transformed in a literal flash into hot plasma and hard radiation.
“Right, everybody,” he transmitted. “We have confirmed KK warshots inbound. Everybody who can do so, lay down a pattern of AMSO rounds. Let’s stop those things before they get too close!”
AMSO stood for Anti-Missile Shield Ordnance and referred to AS-78 or the newer AS-90 sandcaster missiles, projectiles capable of some thousands of Gs of acceleration loaded with tiny lead spherules that could be fired into space like shotgun blasts. Gray’s successful use of sandcaster rounds in a battle a couple of decades ago had earned him the moniker “Sandy,” a handle he was quite proud of.
The question was whether his people could lay down enough expanding cone-patterns of AMSO sand to intercept those inbound rounds. Was there anything he was missing? He thought he’d covered it all. He hadn’t wanted to fight in the first place, but the oncoming ships weren’t going to give him an option.
