Stargods

by Ian Douglas

  “C’mon, people!” Captain Palmer called from Yorktown’s PriFly. “Swing around and hit ’em again! Target that same spot!”

  “You got it, CAG,” Commander Forsley called back. “You heard the man, Renegades! Line ’em up and knock ’em down!”

  Cordell circled back and around, lining up on the planetoid ship and telling his AI to home the next salvo of Boomslangs directly at the orange-glowing crater punched into the crust. He felt the AI’s acknowledgement, felt the warheads being armed. He held his course, arrowing back in toward the target, then thoughtclicked missiles away. “And Fox One!”

  White plasma blotted out the sky ahead, a continuous flaring of multiple warheads detonating in rapid succession. Some of the missiles, he saw, were being intercepted by the enemy’s gravitic defenses, but the majority were getting through and flaring into searing balls of starcore-hot plasma, cratering the planetoid’s surface.

  He repeated the maneuver one more time, unloading the last of his payload of Boomslangs dead-on the target. The pool of lava on the planetoid’s surface was larger, now . . . but so far as Cordell could tell, they hadn’t even come close to cracking that egg.

  There was nothing for it, now, but to press the attack, using the smaller Kraits.

  Nungiirtok Fleet

  Mars Orbit

  Sol System

  1229 hours, FST

  4236 Xavix sifted through the flood of data pouring through his link to the ship’s intelligence, searching for tactical patterns within the human attacks. Their missiles were not particularly worrying; the rock of Ashtongtok Tah could stand up to their relatively small impacts for a long time without a problem. There seemed to be no solid rationale in their assaults. The Nungiirtok knocked down fighter after fighter, but the rest continued swarming in, loosing more missiles despite their losses. Xavix noted that the attackers had shifted to smaller, lower-yield weapons. Was it possible that they’d expended their supply of the larger warheads?

  It was all so futile.

  The point of this raid had been simply to punish the humans for their presumption in abducting Nungiirtok personnel. Ashtongtok Tah and her consorts possessed gravitic weapons that could scour the surface of the planet ahead down to the mantle, reducing the world to a lifeless husk, but so far he’d been holding back. It had not been Xavix’s plan to destroy the human homeworld, but he was realizing now that that might be the only option left open to him.

  Perhaps, though, there was one other option short of planetary genocide . . .

  “Weapons!” he ordered. “We will use the relativistic cannon.”

  “Yes, Lord!”

  “Stand by to fire . . .”

  Lieutenant Michael Cordell

  VFA-427, The Renegades

  Mars Orbit

  1228 hours, FST

  Cordell swung his fighter into an achingly close passage above the planetoid, flipping his ship around in a one-eighty so that he was flying backward as he began releasing a stream of Krait missiles. By flying in reverse, he wouldn’t fly into the fireballs, and he could fire volleys of them into targets selected by the Starblade’s AI as he passed over them. A blur of white to his left caught his attention: a patch of domes and low rectangles in the rock, some sort of city or defensive facility. Whatever it was vanished in a pulse of nuclear fire brighter than a sun, and he prayed that it had been important.

  Below and behind him, something like a door or a hatch almost a hundred meters across yawned wide in the object’s face.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked his ship, but the AI had no answer. He assumed it was some sort of launch bay hatch, that the enemy was about to release a swarm of fighters to engage the human squadrons beak-to-beak.

  “Renegade Flight, this is Ren-Three!” he called over the tactical channel. “I see an opening in this thing—maybe into a flight deck or fighter bay! Let’s get some warshots down that thing’s throat!”

  “Copy, Ren Three!” Forsley replied. “You heard the man, Rennies! Pile on!”

  But as Cordell approached the opening, something—something very big and very massive and very fast flashed out and into the void, too fast to register on merely human senses, but captured and enhanced by the Starblade’s instruments.

  “What was that?” he demanded.

  His AI could only give him a stream of rough data, but whatever that flash had been had massed several tons and was traveling at close to seventy percent of the speed of light.

  Cordell’s blood ran cold when the AI showed him the thing’s course.

  It was headed directly toward Earth, now just some 90 million kilometers behind the fleet.

  Its speed would bridge that gulf in just seven minutes.

  Nungiirtok Fleet

  Mars Orbit

  Sol System

  1229 hours, FST

  Ashtongtok Tah’s Tok Lord regretted the necessity of opening fire on the human home planet, but told itself that it was not aiming at the world, but at the complex ring of structures in planetary synchronous orbit. It was quite likely that some of the projectiles would pass through the structure, shredding it, and impact on the planet’s surface, but the humans had to be properly chastised or they would forever be an impossible nuisance.

  Tok Iad psychology had been deeply shaped over millions of years by their parasitism of the Nungiirtok. For a parasite, after all, their host species—and by extension all other species—exist to be used, and if they can’t be used as food or as incubators, they can be ignored, discarded, or obliterated at the Iad’s whim. Xavix admired the persistence of the humans even as he was amused by the futility of their swarm attack, but if they could not be brought to heel swiftly and efficiently, they would be eliminated.

  The first round from the gravitic cannon hurtled toward the alien world at seven-tenths the speed of light.

  A pity, really.

  Synchorbital Naval Command

  SupraQuito Facility

  Synchorbit

  1232 hours, FST

  “Sir! We have incoming!”

  Admiral of the Fleet Jonathan Christie looked up from his workstation in the Naval Command C&C, angry. “What is it?” he demanded. “Give me some ID!”

  “Unknown, sir,” the sensor watch officer replied, shaking his head. “It was just ejected from the largest alien craft. It’s big, it’s massive, and Doppler shows it in approach at point seven-one c. It’ll reach us in four minutes!”

  “All stations go to full alert, Mr. Buckley.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Christie could see the object highlighted by CGI on his monitor now, a single point of light still tens of millions of kilometers distant. Its course was bang-on target for the synchorbital ring, a fragile and intermittent string of factories, shipyards, storage facilities, and slowly turning hab modules hanging just under 36,000 kilometers above Earth’s equator. His gut told him it wasn’t a ship, but a weapon—specifically a kinetic-kill weapon, a projectile that used mass and velocity to inflict serious damage on its target.

  “Commander Clayton! Focus every weapon you can bring to bear on that incoming.”

  “Already done, sir.”

  “Then fire!”

  “Firing, aye, aye, Admiral.”

  Lasers and particle beams stretched out invisibly across the fast-dwindling gulf between base and object. On his monitor, the object grew suddenly brighter. They were hitting it.

  “Keep firing! Knock it down!”

  But the projectile was a multi-ton lump of nickel-iron, and the beam weapons could not ablate the material quickly enough to make a difference. The nukes reached the target a couple of minutes later, and Christie wondered if they could deflect it enough to make a difference.

  At the speed it was traveling, though, probably not. Debris would still reach them in another . . . sixty seconds now. If they did push it off course, it would miss the ring but hit the Earth, and Christie didn’t want to think of the effect of even a one-meter fragment impacting the Earth at 2
10,000 kilometers per second.

  Thirty seconds.

  Twenty seconds.

  “Vapor, sir!” the sensor officer reported. “We’re ablating it. . . .”

  But too little, and too late. Nuclear fireballs flashed and winked close about the projectile, and still it came.

  Five seconds . . .

  Three . . .

  A supernova erupted across the synchorbital, shredding delicate traceries of pylons and struts, vaporizing structure, obliterating a huge swath of the naval base.

  Christie never felt the impact that killed him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  25 April, 2429

  SupraQuito Facility

  Synchorbit

  1236 hours, FST

  Explosions wracked the synchorbital base, sending glittering shards of debris outward in an expanding, twinkling sphere. F=MA, which meant the force impacting the delicate orbital facility equaled roughly 420 giganewtons, or more than twelve hundred times the liftoff thrust of the Saturn V rocket that had first taken humans to the moon.

  The incoming two-ton projectile had punched cleanly through the structure, and the intense heat radiation was largely confined by vacuum. The ring was not destroyed by any means. A two-kilometer section of the main SupraQuito Synchorbital was shredded, however, and nearly five thousand people—perhaps half of them naval personnel—were killed.

  The projectile, already badly stressed by beam and warhead detonations on the way in, fragmented with the impact, the pieces continuing on for another 37,000 kilometers, briefly heating in Earth’s atmosphere, and becoming a rain of high-velocity meteors. Their path came in at an oblique angle, striking SupraQuito and almost missing the planet altogether.

  That angle of approach saved Ecuador, Brazil, and Peru. The smaller fragments burned up; the larger ones, those larger than grains of sand, were traveling so fast they were through the atmosphere in an instant, impacting the planet’s surface at over two hundred thousand kilometers per second.

  A vast swath of the Pacific Ocean southeast of the Galapagos vaporized with the release of kinetic energy. No one was killed by the impact itself, but the rising plume of superheated vapor rapidly swirled into a hurricane more powerful than any ever seen before on the planet. Thousands more would die when the superstorm made landfall near the city of Tumbes, then carved its way inland and north toward Guayaquil.

  In the savaged orbital facility overhead, a thousand desperate struggles for survival played themselves out, as some people managed to reach emergency suits or intact airtight compartments, and others did not.

  For those who did not, death came quickly as they fell into emptiness or struggled to breathe in fast-thinning air. Rescue attempts were hindered by clouds of fragments and debris. Naval vessels berthed at the spaceyards were mostly intact, but most were still awaiting supplies and personnel that now would never arrive.

  And on the world below, a stunned populace tuned in to the Global Net channels to watch the unfolding disaster in the skies overhead.

  Command Bunker

  New White House

  Washington, D.C., USNA

  1258 hours, EST

  President Walker glowered at his Chief of Staff. “Damn it, Don, what the hell am I looking at? What’s going on?”

  Phillips was linked to the same news channel data feed as the President. “A shitstorm, Mr. President. White-hot debris, clouds of ice crystals from ruptured water tanks and freezing atmosphere, metal vapor—”

  “The bastards destroyed our orbital port!”

  “Not all of it, sir. The projectile went through the C3 center—that’s command, control, and communications,” he explained to the President who had never served, “and took out some of the civilian factories and habs as well. They missed the shipyards, and most of the ships report ready for space. Some are already under way. We’ve already released the tethered asteroid, you’ll recall, so what’s left isn’t being dragged up and out into space. Most of it should stay in orbit.”

  “Most of it?”

  “A lot of junk got shaken free, Mr. President, and lost some of its orbital velocity. It’s falling. We can expect some pretty spectacular meteor showers over the next few weeks.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about meteor showers! What can we do?”

  “We wait and see how our fleet manages to deal with the alien planetoids, sir. We get more ships out there as we can, and we hope to God the aliens don’t have any more of those relativistic projectiles in their back pockets. Until then, there’s nothing much else we can do.”

  Walker sagged back in his chair, eyes closed. Reports were coming in, fragmentary and confused, of a two-hundred-kilometer steam cloud engulfing the ocean near the Galapagos. Some of that steam was already condensing out as rain—near-solid walls of water dumping from the sky. Meanwhile, tidal waves were racing out from the impact site in all directions, big enough and fast enough that they would hit eastern Asia and Australia in another few hours.

  “Don,” Walker said suddenly, “that was a warning shot!”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “They deliberately targeted our naval command center. Probably homed on the communications relays. That shot almost missed the Earth completely.”

  “You’re saying the Galapagos strike was an accident?”

  “I’m saying we’re dealing with a technology so advanced they can strike us anywhere and anytime they want, and there’s not one damned thing we can do to stop them! This time they took out our synchorbital command center. Next time they could drop a rock on the White House lawn!”

  “All we can do is wait out the fleet action out at—”

  “No. There’s nothing they can do.” He opened an interior channel. “Mrs. White!”

  Anna White was the White House Director of Communications. “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “We need an open global channel, every national leader you can nail down, and we need it now!”

  “That will take some time, Mr. President.”

  “Trust me, every leader on this planet is watching what’s going on up there. They’ll be expecting this call.”

  “Right away, Mr. President.”

  Walker continued watching the inflowing flood of information.

  Surrender. It was the only option.

  Surrender, before it was too late.

  Lieutenant Michael Cordell

  VFA-427, The Renegades

  Mars Orbit

  1308 hours, FST

  “This is Ren Seven! Ren Seven! It’s got me! I’m breaking u—”

  “Watch it, Ren Leader! Don’t get too close!”

  “Renegades, CIC! That opening is their weak spot! See if you can mass up and send a few nukes straight down their throat!”

  “CIC, Renegade Leader.” Forsley’s voice was tight, grim. “You are aware that that’s the muzzle of a fucking gun?”

  Cordell swung his Starblade around until he was pointed directly into the gaping maw of that alien weapon. If the Nungies decided to fire the thing now, he wouldn’t even be a stain on the surface of the rock that hit him.

  Radar and lidar indicated that the bore of that tunnel was deep, that it very nearly ran through the entire 250-kilometer diameter of the planetoid spaceship. The aliens evidently knew how to manipulate and project gravitational forces of unimaginable power, enabling them to reach out and crush attacking ships at a range of several thousand kilometers. The technology also, it would seem, allowed them to take chunks of rock and accelerate them to relativistic speeds up the bore of that titanic cannon.

  They could bombard the Earth until its entire surface was a single glowing, lava ocean.

  His sensors could pick up nothing down that hole that he could target. He released a swarm of Krait missiles and hoped for the best.

  Around him, other Starblades of several squadrons maneuvered for position, seeking to drop their own warloads into the depths of the cavern. Nungiirtok defenses were sporadic; the mass bombardment by Yorkto
wn’s squadrons had eliminated a number of gravitic projectors in the enemy’s defensive weaponry, reducing their volume of fire.

  But far too many of the attacking fighters had been slashed out of the sky. And those that were left were fast running low on the nuclear warheads in their inventories.

  Light flared deep within the cave as Cordell yanked his fighter in a long, low trajectory scant meters above the rocky surface of the planetoid.

  “Renegade Three, Ren Leader.”

  “Ren Three. Go ahead.”

  “Be advised there’s a Marine landing party close to your position . . . bearing three-five-niner relative. Don’t run them down!”

  “Copy that, Renegade Leader. I have them on my screen.”

  What the hell did the Marines hope to accomplish down here? The icons on his fighter’s sensor screens showed three Mk. II Ravens settling onto the surface less than fifty kilometers away.

  “Ren Three, we’re picking up small craft that might be enemy fighters approaching the Marine beachhead. You’re closest. Pop over there and give them some cover.”

  “Copy that, Ren Leader.”

  He shifted his fighter’s course to comply.

  Behind him, space twisted and snapped, as a second hundred-meter rock hurtled from the gravitic cannon, headed for an Earth seven minutes distant.

  His nukes had done nothing inside that cave.

  In Transit

  USNA CVS America

  Brig

  1444 hours, FST

  Two more days to home.

  Gray and Dr. George Truitt sat just outside one of America’s holding compartments in the brig, sitting on the other side of the acrylic transparency from one of the hulking warriors of the Nungiirtok Collective. Was the prisoner sullen? Afraid? Disdainful? There was no way to tell, not from alien body language or halting speech patterns.

  But Gray thought they might be making progress.