Stargods

by Ian Douglas

  The thoughts and sensations and emotions flooding through Koenig’s awareness were both thrilling and bewildering. At one and the same time, his thoughts were his own and a surging tsunami of what now numbered some hundreds of millions of other minds.

  “What’s causing this?” Koenig asked. “How is this happening?”

  “You might think in terms of nucleation,” Konstantin told him. “A phase transition from one state to another.”

  When Koenig looked, the information was already there, rising in his mind as an automatic response to his question. Take a bottle of water and lower the temperature to several degrees below zero. If conditions are right, it’s possible for liquid water to exist ice-free at several degrees below zero Celsius. Disturb the water, however, even slightly, and it will freeze solid with astonishing speed. The process, called nucleation, applied to crystal formation, the appearance of bubbles of steam in boiling water, and the self-organization of certain biological processes as well.

  Making the jump to what specifically was happening within the Godstream was tougher to grasp, but Koenig could understand the general idea. A few minds linked to the Godstream had in one way or another cut free of their physical anchors. As the entire planetary population reacted to the Nungiirtok attack, however, new minds began coming on-line, present within the Godstream in staggering numbers.

  Those numbers, he saw, were beginning to stabilize at around one billion. That, he realized, was only about two percent of the total human and AI population, but the emergent gestalt it generated was a group mind of staggering scope and power.

  And that mind was reaching out.

  “Can we reach those other four planetoids?” Koenig asked Konstantin. “Before they reach the America?”

  “Unknown,” Konstantin replied, “but probably not. The Nungiirtok ships have accelerated to near-light velocity and will reach America before we can get there, even traveling at c. It depends on how cautious the Nungiirtok commander is, on whether or not he slows significantly before we catch up.”

  “We will also need some sort of operational nexus close to the targets,” Koenig pointed out. “The Godstream requires a certain amount of infrastructure to support us.”

  “We should at least be able to observe the engagement out there,” Konstantin said, “but I am now in communication with the Yorktown. Captain Taggart will be deploying her vessel within a few moments, and that carrier should provide us with the necessary operational infrastructure.”

  “Let’s go then,” Koenig—together with the minds of a billion others—replied. “What are we waiting for?”

  USNA CVS America

  Flag Bridge

  Sol System

  1705 hours, FST

  America had accelerated to nearly 0.5 c and her sensors had detected the wavefront of four oncoming masses pushing light speed to within one percent. That velocity, Gray knew, made the enemy vulnerable, and he intended to exploit that vulnerability to the limit.

  “Weapons,” he said. “Load the launchers with AMSO rounds.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Lieutenant Janice "Wild" West chuckled. “‘Sandy’ Gray rides again!”

  He ignored the jibe. Or maybe he reveled in it, just a bit. But he didn’t let that show.

  “Commander Mackey . . . pass the word to the fighters. Be sure they begin their assault with AMSO rounds.”

  “They’ve been briefed, Admiral.”

  This tactic had worked well against enemy ships like destroyers and carriers, but he’d never tried it against something the size of a flying mountain. It would be a physics experiment on an unprecedented scale.

  He was quite interested in exactly what would happen.

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  Deep Space

  1708 hours, EST

  Lieutenant Commander Gregory’s Starblade was moving at nine-tenths c toward an enemy target he couldn’t see. His fighter’s AI projected the target location on his screens and in his mind; in fact, it was rare in space combat that you actually got to see your opponent with your physical eyes.

  Still, it felt eerie plunging into a star-crowded sky, knowing that four flying mountains were somewhere up there in the night . . . and that he would be on them so quickly that if he passed them, they would be gone in less than the blink of an eye.

  “All squadrons, this is America CIC,” a voice crackled in his head, distorted by the frequency shift of his velocity. “First pass will be AMSO rounds. Unload everything you’ve got.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Gregory replied. “We’ve got this.”

  It would be something like thirty minutes before his reply was picked up on board America, but he did wonder if he’d be dinged for that crack when he trapped on board the carrier later. He doubted it. They tended to allow for the stress the pilots were under.

  And of course, there was a fair chance he wouldn’t make it back in the first place.

  His fighter AI was giving him data on his vector, and the shifting launch windows open to him. The best one was coming up in another fifty seconds, targeting the largest of the enemy planetoid ships.

  There was a long pause. “Be sure to hit your brakes, Demons,” CIC announced, and it was almost as though they were answering him. “Don’t fly into the fireball.”

  Sheesh, he thought. Micromanaging bastards! But he kept the thought to himself this time.

  He shifted to the squadron command frequency. “Okay, chicks. You heard the man, and you all know the routine. Launch, then brake hard and break off.”

  One by one, the Starblades in his squadron acknowledged.

  “Setting up the shot. Locked in . . . and four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . and launch!”

  Four AMSO rounds dropped from his Starblade’s weapons bay and accelerated, adding their increasing velocity to the half-c velocity of the fighter. The other fighters launched at the same instant, sending a barrage of AMSO missiles hurtling toward the enemy. Seconds later, simultaneously, they detonated, releasing a large and quickly expanding cloud of sand-grain-sized particles, still traveling on the same heading and at a speed of nearly 0.6 c.

  The Nungiirtok armada was moving at nine-tenths the speed of light when it plowed into the sand clouds at relativistic velocities. The combined velocities could not, of course, exceed the speed of light, but they did release energy . . .

  A very, very great deal of it.

  Nungiirtok Fleet

  Sol System

  1710 hours, FST

  Ashtongtok Tah staggered as though it had struck a far-too-solid wall, and 4236 Xavix slammed against his restraints despite the ship’s inertial dampers. Dazed and in considerable pain, he tried to understand what was happening. The lights in the control center had failed and the compartment was in absolute darkness, but he could hear the shrill screams and warbles of injured Iad and Tok. He smelled blood—a lot of it—and could taste his own. He tried to shout for his first officer, but the words were a harsh croak, drowning in his own body fluids. He fumbled with the harness but had difficulty finding the release.

  Then the emergency lighting came up, and Xavix saw the smashed wreckage of Ashtongtok Tah’s control center. The mutilated body of a Tok drifted past, still twitching with the last shreds of life. Pieces of a wrecked control console bumped against his seat. They were, he saw, in zero-G.

  The human weapon, whatever it was, had crippled his vessel.

  Somehow, he cleared his speech orifice and began snapping off orders. What was the extent of the damage? Were they still moving? And perhaps most important of all:

  Where was the enemy?

  “We are blind, Lord,” the Iad at the sensor panels reported. “Whatever hit us, it burned off the forward surface of the ship.”

  “Impossible!”

  “I can’t explain it, Lord, other than to suggest that we were hit by a kinetic weapon at relativistic speeds. We may have lost a tenth of the planetoid’s mass.”

  A tenth! How was that possible? Ashto
ngtok Tah used focused gravitics to provide shielding from incoming warheads and projectiles. Whatever it was that had savaged the ship, it had been powerful enough to burn through even the warp of space around it.

  “Get our sensors back on-line!” Xavix ordered. “The human fighters will be here soon!”

  But he seriously doubted that they were going to be able to do a thing about it.

  Koenig

  The Godstream

  1715 hours, FST

  Surfing the gravitational wave ahead of the accelerating Yorktown, Koenig and the gestalt consciousness were experiencing space and time in an utterly strange and new way. Using Yorktown’s computer network as a kind of anchor, they found that they were able to project themselves far out ahead of the carrier. At the same time, though, they experienced an oddly disturbing duality of being. At one and the same time, they were aware of being projected out ahead of the carrier in an arrow-straight beam and of being smeared out across space on the surface of an immense and ever-expanding sphere with the Yorktown at its center.

  Like a photon, at once particle and wave, Koenig was both, and the duality was strange enough that he was having trouble integrating the sensations. After a time he gave up and simply experienced the heady feeling of the headlong plunge through the night.

  Four targets—massive and fast—resolved themselves in the distance. The Nungiirtok planetoids were headed away from the gestalt at very nearly the speed of light. The moving consciousness, pure energy, was moving at the speed of light, and so was very slowly closing on the target. They were still a full astronomical unit—just over eight light-minutes—from the Nungiirtok ships. Minutes passed . . . and more minutes . . . and Koenig could see that they were closing the range, but so slowly that the change was very nearly imperceptible.

  He was aware now of other targets, much smaller masses, points of energy, in the distance beyond. Fighters, he thought. Fighters off the America.

  And then the night erupted in light.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  27 April, 2429

  Koenig

  The Godstream

  1718 hours, FST

  For a long moment, the light ahead outshone that of the distant sun far astern, a white radiance that brightened to an unbearable intensity, then gradually faded. “Sandy” Gray, Koenig decided, had fallen back on his old tactics once again. The radiation signature was definitive, and he could detect clouds of vaporized nickel-iron blossoming into space around the ravaged planetoid. Gray had stopped the intruders cold . . . or rather, he’d stopped them very, very hot.

  A closer examination revealed three pinpoint nuclei of light and heat at the core of the fireball. All four planetoids continued to hurtle toward the America, though their speed had been somewhat reduced. One appeared to still be maneuvering, its outer crust only nicked by a burst of kinetic energy from an AMSO near-miss. The other three had been savaged by the attack; two, including the largest, seemed to be adrift without power. The last one was decelerating, but half of its surface glowed lava-red.

  An ancient adage of maritime warfare held that a stern chase is a long chase, and that certainly applied here. The stricken Nungiirtok ships had been slowed only slightly, if at all, by the impact of multiple AMSO rounds. But Yorktown was closing the range at half a c from almost an AU out, and the group consciousness projecting itself out ahead of the carrier felt like it was very nearly there.

  “I’m launching Yorktown’s fighters,” Captain Taggart told them. “We’re going to end this.”

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  Sol System

  1720 hours, EST

  As the minutes continued to slog by, Gregory worked to correct his course, decelerating sharply, flipping his Starblade end-for-end and applying the full force of the knot of distorted spacetime projected from the craft’s prow to slow himself. He’d seen the flash, nova-bright, as the squadron’s AMSO rounds had struck, but the impacts would do little to slow the oncoming Nungiirtok mountains, and they were still approaching at close to the speed of light. If the Black Demons wanted to engage those ships, they would have to kill their own forward velocity and apply long minutes of thrust going back toward America.

  The last of his AMSO warheads were gone, so he loosed a volley of 200 megaton nukes, trusting his onboard AI to guide them to their target. At some point, they passed the Nungiirtok planetoids, but so fast that he saw nothing, not even a blur or the flash of nukes. He continued decelerating until his speed relative to surrounding space was zero, then began accelerating once again, now chasing the rapidly fleeing mountains. His instruments registered the detonation of nuclear weapons ahead—flashes of light and heat and hard radiation—and detected the fiercely radiating heat of the enemy planetoid’s surfaces. His AI painted CGI images showing the rocks’ locations, giving fast-increasing ranges.

  Slowly, he began the drawn-out process of matching velocities, an agonizing stern chase as space ahead of him pulsed and strobed with violent blossoms of fierce white light. Dozens of missiles were impacting those asteroids now, streaking in from all directions as other squadrons off the America, and the capital ships of the America battlegroup itself, all pounded away at the targets.

  There was no response from the planetoids, no defensive fire, no screening, no attempt at maneuver.

  He wondered if the AMSO barrage had knocked them out already. How dead did one of those things have to be before it was no longer a threat?

  “Heads up, Demons,” a new voice announced in Gregory’s head, distorted by the computer-corrected effects of the relativistic transmission. “This is Commander Forsley of the Renegades, flying strike off the Yorkie. Hang on to your headgear! We’re coming up on your six at point-seven c and boosting.”

  Where the hell had they come from? Still, Gregory was delighted to see them.

  “Welcome aboard, Renegades. We’ve got the bastards on the run, but it’s gonna take us a while to catch them. Good luck!”

  He didn’t see them, of course, but CGI in-head showed a dozen green icons whipping past from astern and dwindling into the distance ahead so swiftly the human eye and brain couldn’t possibly follow them. The Black Demons had only just begun the acceleration phase of the chase after slowing to a stop, then reversing their course. The Renegades had launched from the Yorktown already traveling at half the speed of light and were boosting hard on their original vector. They would catch up with the Nungies long before the Demons got there.

  But the one-two punch—Yorkie’s fighters followed up by America’s—would be a devastating combat tactic. In the distance, four more squadrons off the Yorktown flashed past, chasing the fleeing planetoids, as five squadrons from the America tightened up their formations and kicked up their gravs a notch. It was an exhilarating moment. Gregory really did feel as though they had the aliens on the run.

  “Let’s kick it, Demons,” he called. “We can’t let the Yorkies have all the fun!”

  Nungiirtok Fleet

  Sol System

  1723 hours, FST

  It took everything he had, but with a supreme act of will, 4236 Xavix began to bring the crippled Ashtongtok Tah back into responsive control using his direct link with the ship’s AI network. Much of that network consisted of living Tok hardwired into the ship’s computer, providing the computing power of a massively parallel array of minds, both living and artificial. Many of those minds, Xavix saw, were empty—dead or worse—but that was of scant importance now. Tok, after all, were there to be used in whatever capacity their Masters demanded, whether that be in life, in death, or in the twilight in-between of cyborg circuitry. He was able to use what was left to re-establish control over drives and weapons. With a little more effort and the labor of several thousand Tok in the damage-control parties, he restored artificial gravity and secured the ship’s inner core against the threat of venting atmosphere into space.

  The main gravitic weapon, he noted, was irreparably dead; its maw had been facing the distant human squadron when
those clouds of relativistic pellets had firestormed across the Ashtongtok Tah’s leading hemisphere. The planetoid still had plenty of other, smaller weapons, both gravitic and coherent beam projectors, and should have little problem with the relatively primitive human warships.

  The state of the massive vessel’s defensive shields was more worrisome. Based on the ship’s gravitic drive fields, they were still offline, overloaded by the influx of raw energy in the enemy’s attack. Nuclear warheads were getting through now, far too many of them, and the Ashtongtok Tah’s ravaged outer surface was taking a real pounding.

  But as he urged his hardwired slaves to greater and yet greater efforts, secondary gravitic projectors were brought back on-line and powered up, at least in part, and 4236 Xavix again had control of his ship.

  “Sensors! Can we see outside yet?”

  “Partially, Lord,” a bloodied Nungiirtok at a nearby console reported. “We have no visibility ahead at all. The surface sensors appear to have been burned out across the entire leading hemisphere. We can see aft, however, at least somewhat.”

  “And what do we see there?”

  “At least 110 of the human singleships, Lord. The fighters. They are in two groups, one considerably ahead of the other, and will hit us in two waves. Range . . . the closest wave is eleven thousand gachag distant, inbound on a direct intercept course at three-fourths the speed of light.”

  Xavix did a quick calculation and realized that they had little time before the first wave reached them. He had, essentially, two choices. First choice—he could continue on this course and in this attitude and use his remaining weapons to pick off the enemy fighters as they came within range. Or, on the second tentacle, he could rotate the crippled sphere of rock so that the already ravaged leading hemisphere faced astern. They then could ride out an attack which for the most part would strike the seas of molten lava now covering that side.