Stargods

by Ian Douglas

  “Parasites!” Truitt said over the private channel. “The Tok lords are parasites!”

  Gray blinked. “How is that even possible?”

  “Admiral, something like forty percent of all terrestrial life is parasitic in one way or another. Why shouldn’t that be the same of exobiological species?”

  It made sense, of a sort. Humans had encountered alien parasites before—the giant worms inhabiting the gas-giant living balloons of the H’rulka; the tiny males living as ectoparasites on the bodies of spider-like female Agletsch; the hive-mind organism dubbed Paramycoplasma subtilis that had shaped and directed Sh’daar history and off-world policy . . .

  They choose us, and we give them life.

  Okay . . . this was starting to make sense.

  But the exact nature of the biological relationship, Gray decided, was unimportant, at least for now.

  “These Masters,” he said, addressing the aliens again. “Did they tell you to fight us?”

  No answer.

  “Did they tell you to go with the Russians?”

  “Ruh—seeans . . .”

  “Humans, like us . . . but with a different government, a different language. It was Russians who rescued you from Osiris. Their leader was called Oreshkin.”

  “There were no lords left on Osiris.”

  “So they didn’t order you to surrender?”

  “The Nungiirtok do not ‘surrender.’” It sounded uncertain of the word’s meaning.

  “It sounds to me,” Gray told the two beings, “like the Tok Iad are using you. They parasitize you in ways I can only imagine. They tell you what to do, who to fight, and in the end they abandoned you on the world of Osiris—”

  The reaction was sudden and completely unexpected. Both Nungiirtok hurled themselves forward, their lower jaws snapping out as they slammed the tips into the transparent acrylic. Gray took an inadvertent step back as the two blows hammered at the transparency with a deafening double bang.

  Then again.

  And again . . .

  “Sir!” one of the Marines yelled. “Behind us!”

  The acrylic wall gave way under the assault, part of it shattering, part peeling back as both Nungiirtok tried squeezing through the opening. The Marines closed in front of Gray and opened fire, white plasma searing into the tangle of alien limbs and bodies.

  “Don’t—” Gray yelled.

  But it was too late. In seconds, both Nungiirtok were reduced to large, charred, lifeless cinders, leaving Gray with very nearly as many questions as he’d had before he’d come here.

  But just possibly, he’d learned enough to help them figure out the Nungiirtoks’ relationship with the Russians.

  Chapter Sixteen

  25 April, 2429

  Deep Space

  Sol System

  1223 hours, FST

  The Nungiirtok fleet had advanced slowly after the destruction of that first, unarmed spacecraft or station, spreading out in order to frustrate human attempts to concentrate their forces. The force consisted of eight craft fashioned from planetoids. The command vessel, the Ashtongtok Tah, was the size of a small dwarf planet; the others, moving off to either side, ranged from half that down to the relatively tiny Krestok Nin. They drifted forward slowly, watching the gathering human forces ahead.

  The Tok Iad commanding the force was known to others of its kind as 4236 Xavix, and it was worried. The humans had shown themselves to be formidable opponents over the years, and there were at least sixty of their warships assembling in a loose cloud fifty chag ahead.

  It was worried, but not enough to run away.

  Opening a channel to the cyborg Tok wired into the ship computers, 4236 Xavix gave the order to attack.

  USNA CV Yorktown

  Mars Orbit

  1224 hours, FST

  Captain Laurie Taggart leaned forward in her command chair—as far forward as the chair’s embrace would allow her, at any rate. The targets were moving, deploying into what looked like a combat formation.

  “All weapons at the ready, Mr. Mathers,” she told the ship’s combat officer. “I want a salvo of nukes at maximum yield in the railgun tubes.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  She was still trying to get used to the sudden turn of events. Taggart had walked onto the bridge of the USNA Yorktown less than an hour ago. For two years, now, she’d been flying a desk in the intelligence division at the naval HQ facility on Mars, but then at 0930 this morning she’d been offered the sudden and totally unexpected chance to take command of the star carrier Yorktown.

  Supposedly, she’d been tagged because of her experience commanding the USNA Guadalcanal. Both the Yorktown’s captain and first officer had been off the ship, and HQ wanted the Yorkie on the battle line now.

  In fact, she suspected the electronic hand of Konstantin behind the opportunity, which had been offered as a chance to volunteer rather than as orders. She’d accepted, of course—anything to get out from behind that desk!—but Konstantin would have known she would take the offer. The super-AI had been lying low of late, and she hadn’t heard from it directly, but she thought she recognized Konstantin’s subtle touch.

  The Yorktown was a brand-new warship just off the ways, commissioned three months ago and sent to Chiron and back for her shakedown cruise. So far, her bridge crew seemed well trained and well prepared, but it would be the coming combat that would prove that one way or another, as only combat could. The three thousand men, women, and AIs in her crew would be watching her just as closely to see if she four-o’d their inspection, qualifying for the command seat on a Constellation-class star carrier.

  Speaking of the Constellation—the lead ship of her class was in position a thousand kilometers high and to starboard, invisibly small to the naked eye but visible in-head and on the bridge repeater screens. Admiral Kevin Rasmussen was the fleet commander, ensconced on the Connie’s flag bridge. She’d served with him before, at Kapteyn’s Star and elsewhere. A good man, she thought, experienced and sharp.

  She just wished Trevor Gray was here with the America. The ship was old, but her value lay far more in who commanded her than in the date of her commissioning.

  “Enemy is opening fire, Captain,” Yorktown’s combat officer announced. “The Monongahela’s been hit.”

  “What kind of weaponry are we looking at, Commander?”

  “A fist, Captain. A big one. Gravitic induction, but I’ve never seen this sort of range on those things. Or power.”

  Humans had encountered that weapon before in their struggle against the Rosette Consciousness. Its general principle was well understood. Human starships could project a momentary zone of intense gravitic induction ahead of a ship, creating a drive field, but the Rosetters’ advanced alien technologies could project such an effect across thousands of kilometers and use it to crush a target vessel. How they managed that trick was still a big unknown, however, and the largest asteroid ship ahead had just crippled a light cruiser, the Monongahela, at the astonishing range of half a million kilometers.

  The planetoid starships advanced with surprising speed, closing the range rapidly. “All units,” Admiral Rasmussen’s voice said over the intrafleet command link, “target that big son-of-a-bitch, designated Target Alfa. We can mop up the small stuff later.”

  Taggart wasn’t entirely sure the “small stuff” would be all that amenable to a later mopping, but it made sense to go all-out against the largest asteroid, a 250-kilometer monster roughly as large as the asteroid Juno in Earth’s solar system.

  It would not be easy, however. According to the ship’s sensor department, that largest planetoid massed something like 3 x 1019 kilograms. Take a roughly spherical divot out of the Earth about the width of the state of West Virginia or the nation of Scotland, and that was the enemy vessel . . . except that it was made up mostly of nickel-iron instead of sandstone. You could slam nuke after nuke into that mass and not even get their attention.

  “Let’s put our squadrons into
space, CAG,” she told Captain Philip Palmer, the officer in command of Yorktown’s fighter squadrons. “Target Alfa—nukes and nano-D.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  Moments later, the first of Yorktown’s fighters spilled into space alongside the carrier, forming up by squadron. Yorktown carried six fighter squadrons in addition to two recon units and a SAR squadron. They would be going in at maximum dispersal, the idea being that the enemy would be faced with a large number of widely scattered targets rather than a close-packed group; no one knew how large an area of effect that gravitic weapon projected, but the humans did not intend to make it easy for them.

  As the last squadron formed up in a broad echelon formation, they began moving toward the Tango-Alfa object.

  They would make contact in scant minutes.

  Lieutenant Michael Cordell

  VFA-427, The Renegades

  Mars Orbit

  1226 hours, FST

  Mike Cordell felt the steady flow of incoming data humming in his brain, felt the kinesthetic sense linked through his SG-420 Starblade fighter convincingly letting him feel that he physically was the fighter falling through open space. Within his mind, he could see the vastly magnified images of the aliens—massive, potato-shaped rocks, some with minute buildings or other structures gleaming in the wan light of a distant sun.

  Cordell could see some slight, shifting distortion to the rocks and structures as they moved, as though he were viewing them through rippling water; evidently, each ship was gravitationally distorting space around it—throwing out defensive shields protecting them from incoming beams and warheads. That was going to make things interesting.

  “Okay, Renegades,” the squadron CO called over the combat channel. Commander Jenna Forsley was sharp and competent; she had the complete respect of Cordell and all of the other Renegade blade drivers. “Form up on me. Wide dispersal. We don’t want one nuke to get us all.”

  Nukes Cordell knew and understood. This alien gravitic weapon, though, was an unknown, and a scary one. It simply reached out and crushed the target vessel, and since space itself was what was being crushed, there seemed to be no way to shield against it.

  Far off to Cordell’s portside, the Vladivostok was launching fighters as well, and he wondered if Katya Golikova was among them.

  Then Forsley gave the order to boost, and Cordell was too busy to think about anything, or anyone, else.

  Nungiirtok Fleet

  Mars Orbit

  Sol System

  1227 hours, FST

  The Nungiirtok raiders had been slowing as the human fleet approached, and as clouds of fighters began emerging from the star carriers, they slowed further still. Despite many years of fighting the humans, little was known about their military capabilities, and 4236 Xavix wanted to invite the Earthers to attack first in order to reveal both their strength and their tactical understanding. Unfortunately, the human fleet was slowing as well, a wall of ships numbering in the hundreds, steadily spreading out to either side, and above and below.

  “What is the range?” he demanded of Ashtongtok Tah’s weapons specialist.

  “Forty chag, Lord.”

  Still too far for the Tok weapons to be effective against the enemy’s main body.

  The Tok Lord thought it saw a possible strategy, however, one that would take advantage of the humans’ dispersal.

  “All ships,” it said. “Advance, slow walk.”

  USNA CV Yorktown

  Mars Orbit

  1228 hours, FST

  “What the hell are they up to?” Captain Taggart said, eyes narrowing as she studied the main tactical screen.

  “If I didn’t know better,” Mathers said, “I’d swear they were begging us to englobe them!”

  “A little too easy, huh?”

  “Englobement means squeezing in closer, Captain,” Mathers said. “And that puts us within easy reach of their fist.”

  What, she wondered, would Rasmussen do? Hold back? Or advance?

  A destroyer, the Bartold, was maneuvering close to the stricken Monongahela, trying to take on board several lifepods ejected within a few moments of the ship’s encounter with the alien fist. Battlespace drones transmitted constant visual feeds back to the other ships in the fleet, and Taggart could see the Bartold’s small SAR tugs grappling with the drifting pods.

  She felt a chill at that. The Bartie was clearly within range of the alien weapon, and there was a good chance that the enemy would not distinguish between a humanitarian mission and a combat maneuver. Her breath caught in her throat . . .

  . . . and then the invisible hand closed around the Bartold and squeezed, crumpling her forward section, including her huge, egg-shaped water reservoir, into twisted wreckage. Water sprayed into space as an expanding cloud of glittering ice crystals . . . an interesting bit of data, Taggart thought. If the fist literally collapsed space, what happened to water, which conventionally was not compressible? That might be a clue to how the weapon functioned, there.

  “All capital units.” Rasmussen’s orders came through her cerebral link. “Decelerate, then fall back slowly and do not engage! Fighters, continue your attack. Focus on Target Alfa.”

  Taggart passed the command on to Yorktown’s helm. She approved of the admiral’s order and felt considerable relief that he wasn’t ordering the capital ships in close. If those alien asteroids could crush a target vessel at long range, the human fleet was going to need to tiptoe into this engagement or risk being annihilated.

  That made it damned hard on the fighter squadrons, though. They had no defense whatsoever save for speed and dispersal, and the enemy wasn’t going to simply sit still while an angry swarm of hornets buzzed into killing range.

  She wondered if any of the fighters would survive.

  Lieutenant Michael Cordell

  VFA-427, The Renegades

  Mars Orbit

  1228 hours, FST

  Cordell accelerated his Starblade to relativistic speeds, watching space around him grow strange as his velocity warped the incoming light of stars and other ships and compressed them into a hazy ring of starlight directly ahead. He was relying on his fighter’s onboard AI to time his acceleration; he could no longer see the alien planetoids, radar and lidar were useless at these speeds. The only good thing about it was that the enemy would have trouble tracking him as well. Radar would reflect from his fighter without a problem, but he would literally be on top of the enemy before they realized he was approaching.

  He felt the AI apply deceleration, and the ring of light ahead dissolved, the stars that had created it returning to more reasonable positions. And the alien planetoids were . . . there!

  He’d targeted the largest one, and it loomed ahead of him now, over two hundred kilometers across and gleaming in the distant sun. Something like a city embraced a patch on the surface; thousands of pinpoint lights shone from isolated patches across the dark gray surface of the rock, like stars somehow arrayed in geometric patterns—lines and triangles and concentric circles.

  Reflex took over. He thoughtclicked a command, and a pair of VG-120 Boomslang missiles slid from his Starblade’s belly, the warheads already set to maximum yield—something just in excess of 600 megatons. “Fox One!” he announced over the tactical channel, the warning that he’d just loosed smart-AI missiles.

  Each Starblade carried thirty-two VG-92 Krait space-to-space missiles, plus six of the massive Boomslangs, known as “planetbusters” to the fighter crews. The twelve Starblades of the Renegades alone carried twenty-four of those monsters, but as Cordell stared into the fast-growing face of the planetoid, he realized with sick certainty that it would take more to stop that thing.

  A lot more.

  But their orders were to press home the attack. Besides—who could guess what might happen? Enough VG-120s detonating in the same spot might crack the planetoid wide open or send destructive shock waves through that mountain’s internal structure. It was certainly worth a try.

 
Cordell juggled his grav drive and his ship’s attitude, decelerating sharply and swinging wide. A skilled pilot with a high-grade AI could nudge and twist a Starblade through maneuvers that made it seem that the fighter was in atmosphere . . . and some, like stopping in a deceleration-less instant or pulling a right-angle turn, would have appeared starkly impossible to the fighter pilots of an earlier age. By jinking back and forth in what Cordell hoped was an unpredictable manner, he hoped to confuse the enemy’s fire control programs.

  In his mind, his fighter counted off the seconds until his missiles detonated. Three . . . two . . . one . . .

  A single white flash, far brighter than a sun, blotted out the sky to Cordell’s left. Had one of his missiles failed to reach the target? Or had both gone off so close together that two nuclear fireballs blended into one?

  It scarcely mattered. The target planetoid now had a new crater—glowing bright orange, its interior filled with molten rock.

  “Fox One!” Jerry Bannerman called over the tactical channel. “Missiles away!”

  His AI tracked the incoming missiles, and he checked to make sure he was going to be clear of the blast. He was; Bannerman’s missiles struck the asteroid right next to the glowing patch of lava.

  Two by two, Boomslang missiles continued falling in from space, and the area around the planetoid was filled with Starblade fighters flashing past the enemy’s close-in defenses. Lieutenant Frank Taylor’s fighter crumpled into a small, extremely dense block of twisted metal and plastic, hurtling in to impact on the drifting mountain’s surface. All of local space was filled with fast-maneuvering fighters and the flash of incoming missiles.

  Lieutenant Howard Ortega’s fighter crumpled as an invisible fist of gravitational distortion surrounded it and squeezed. The enemy was fighting back, was getting too many hits. It looked as though dispersing the Starblades was working to hold down casualties, but the butcher’s bill, he thought, was still going to be too damned high.