B009NFP2OW EBOK (14 page)

America
’s orders had been clear enough so far, but Gregory’s suggestion, intended lightly, wasn’t completely out of the blue. It wouldn’t be the first time a commanding officer had claimed communications difficulties in order to ignore orders he felt were unwise, or worse.

There was a long hesitation, and then Mackey said, “By the book, ladies and gentlemen. Adjust acceleration by minus two hundred Gs to let
America
close with us.”

Gregory started to say something, then thought better of it.

After all, there wasn’t much they could do about it, one way or the other.

TC/USNA CVS
America

In transit

36 Ophiuchi A System

0852 hours, TFT

Gray was fuming, helplessly furious. Someone on Admiral Delattre’s staff had spotted Mackey’s squadron pulling ahead and to port—obviously with the intent of screening the carrier from Tango One. The order had come from Delattre himself.
Get those fighters back in formation, close abeam of
the ship!

The order was emblematic of a basic difference in space combat tactics as interpreted by the Confederation and by the more daring fleet commanders of some of the Confederation’s member states.
The book
said in no uncertain terms: keep your force together and intact, with each fleet element positioned to give support to all other elements. That included the tactical fighter squadrons flying CAP, as well as the various support vessels in the fleet, the destroyers, gunships, and light cruisers.

Official tactics, both within the Confederation at large and within the USNA Star Navy, tended to abide by this rule, and for an excellent reason. In the vast and empty depths of planetary space, with ships moving on various vectors at high speeds and under brutal accelerations, it was far too easy for a fleet to become scattered. Once scattered, individual ships could easily be attacked by small groups of fighters or by hunter-killer packs of light capital ships, and their defenses overwhelmed.

But some commanders were more relaxed than others in exactly how they read the book. Koenig had been one such; he’d been notorious, in fact, for bending rules and regs. People under his command held that the only reason he’d not been court-martialed during his tenure as CO-CBG was because his tactics had been so successful. And Gray had tried to emulate him.

Both men were long-time students of history, including the history of naval warfare going back to long before humans had taken their wars into space. Some six hundred years earlier, during the Age of Sail, naval military doctrine had decreed that ships should adhere to the so-called Fighting Instructions, and with a similar reasoning. Ships had been expected to proceed in strict line-ahead formation to present massed broadsides to the enemy, and to avoid being surrounded. Admiral Horatio Nelson had ended the age of the Fighting Instructions when he’d broken the rules—and the Franco-Spanish line at Trafalgar.

While Gray didn’t consider himself to be a Nelson, he did wonder why modern tacticians seemingly remained blind to the one absolute of military planning:
tactics must change with evolving technology
.

History was filled with examples—disasters, blunders, and pigheaded shortsightedness of epic decisiveness. During the American Civil War, troops had continued to maneuver and advance in solid blocks of infantry, despite rifled muskets and massed artillery. In World War I, commanding officers had continued to order mass frontal attacks against machineguns and entrenched troop positions. In World War II, naval air power had ended the reign of seagoing armored battleships.

In the modern age, technology continued to advance with breathtaking speed and complexity, ever moving, ever unfolding into new and more intricate forms. Twenty years ago, the singularity drive on a capital ship like
America
could give her an acceleration of around five thousand gravities, which meant it took over an hour and a half to boost up to near-
c
. Improvements in the way the singularity-induced warping of space was projected and shaped around the ship meant they could manage ten thousand gravities today, and reach 99.7 percent
c
in about fifty minutes. Reducing the time required to get from the emergence point to the inner regions of the target star system had changed both the strategic and tactical pictures. Battles had become more fluid and more far-ranging, with higher ship speeds, and enemy vessels such as the dozen or so ships of Tango One had become more dangerous to a fleet’s deployment.

But that thinking, evidently, hadn’t percolated up to Geneva’s military high command yet . . . or been embraced by senior officers like Delattre and his staff.

Gray glanced up at the main screen wrapped around the forward half of the bridge. Fifty minutes after they’d begun accelerating, the fighters and the larger ships they were protecting had reached 0.997
c
. Operating under linked navigational programs, the flickering drive singularities on all vessels, both the capital ships and the fighters on CAP, now switched off.

For some minutes, now, the universe outside had been transformed into strangeness.

Starbow
.

They called it the Pohl Effect, after a pre-spaceflight writer who’d first described it. Physicists later had proven why the starbow could
not
exist . . . and were still arguing over why it appeared anyway in defiance of astrophysical law. A mathematical assessment of the shifting wavelengths of dopplered starlight showed that the colors visible inside each fighter’s cockpit shouldn’t change much, if at all.

The geometries of relativistic flight dictated that the entire sky be compressed forward by the physics of chromatic aberration—that was well understood. Also understood was the fact that wavelengths coming from stars up ahead would blue-shift far up the spectrum, while those coming from astern would red-shift into the far infrared. The light they were now seeing from the star ahead was 36 Ophiuchi A’s deep infrared radiation, normally invisible to human eyes, blue-shifted now to visibility.

But as the ships inched ever closer to the unattainable goal of
c
itself, the starlight seemed to smear and stretch, and as the individual light sources were further compressed into a near-solid ring of hazy light 60 degrees forward, the distortion seemed to act like a prism, with the ring becoming a gloriously colored band, deep violet at the inner edge around the black disk of emptiness directly ahead, deep red at the outer edge, fuzzing off into invisibility, where it trailed into the emptiness to either side and astern.

According to the physicists, the starbow shouldn’t be . . . but it
was
, ethereal, eerily beautiful, and mysterious.

America
’s AI pinged him through his in-head link. A targeting square against the starbow ahead and to port flashed red, indicating a change to Tango One’s status. Relativistic distortions made it impossible for the human eye to track movement against velocity-smeared starlight, but the fighter’s AI was watching the mathematics of incoming radiation rather than the light-generated image of the distant Slan warships.

Gray checked the elapsed time on both clocks—objective and subjective, scowling.
Time does fly
, he thought,
when you’re having fun
.

It also flies when you’re traveling at close to the speed of light.

He needed the in-head link with the ship’s AI to untangle the relativistic effects, and to figure out what exactly was happening. The faster a ship traveled, the slower time ran, an effect called time dilation well-known from Einstein’s relativity equations. The first fifty minutes of acceleration—fifty minutes objective, as measured for an at-rest observer—had for Gregory felt like a bit more than thirty-seven minutes, with his time running slower and slower the faster he was moving. Now, cruising at 0.997
c
, time passed at a rate of thirteen to one. That meant that a full minute for the outside universe passed for
America
and her crew in only 4.6 seconds. It was like everything in the rest of the universe was moving thirteen times faster than it ought to, and in combat that was a deadly handicap.

“Give me an estimate on their course,” he told the AI. “What are they up to?”

In his head, a new window opened, showing a three-dimensional schematic of the battlegroup’s course—a bundle of green lines growing through emptiness. Ahead, a blue cone showed all the possible paths for Tango One. The cone would narrow as more data was received and processed, but right now it looked like a time to intercept of nearly thirty minutes.

Tango One was suddenly—
magically
—in two places at once.

And the nearer of the two was less than 30 million kilometers away. . . .

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

36 Ophiuchi A System

0852 hours, TFT

From Gregory’s vantage point, Tango One appeared to have popped into existence only a hundred light seconds away, moving at very nearly the speed of light. He felt a terrible sinking feeling in his gut; the enemy spacecraft shouldn’t be that close yet—shouldn’t even be moving, not when they had only just seen the light from the Earth fleet moments before.

And yet . . . they were
here
. . . .

“Enemy spacecraft!” Mackey shouted over the tactical link. “Break port! Break!
Break
!”

With a thought, Gregory rolled his fighter left, his fighter responding to his mental command over the neural link. Twelve targets, spreading out . . . and the image he was seeing in his mind, he had to remind himself, was a minute and a half old.

Worse, far worse, a hundred seconds in objective time was only a hair more than seven seconds at this velocity.

And everything was happening at once. . . .

Chapter Eleven

12 November 2424

TC/USNA CVS
America

In transit

36 Ophiuchi A System

0853 hours, TFT

“Bring all weapons on-line,” Gray ordered. “Secure all pressure bulkheads.”

How . . .
how
? There was no way the enemy ships could have made the transit from the point at which they’d been lurking off to one side of the Confederation fleet’s line of flight to here, where they could actually attack . . . not unless they were able to engage in
tactical
faster-than-light travel. The fact that
America
’s sensors were now showing Tango One to be in two places at once argued that this was, in fact, exactly what was happening.

Using Alcubierre Drive to travel faster than light between star systems was what was known as strategic FTL.
Tactical
FTL, also known as microjumps, was something else entirely. Human technology couldn’t do it, and if the Slan had it, it meant trouble. Both faster-than-light Alcubierre Drive and the singularity drive used for intra-system travel and maneuvering worked by using projected gravitational fields, carefully shaped to avoid tidal effects, to sharply bend space. Alcubierre Drive, however, bent local space so sharply that the ship to all intents and purposes dropped out of the universe altogether, into a spacetime bubble of what was glibly called metaspace. The effect was unpredictable, however, when used too close to major natural gravitational effects—the gravity field of a sun, for instance. That was why—depending upon the mass of the local star—incoming starships switched off their Alcubierre Drives and emerged within the target system at some tens of AUs out from the star.

But there was a far more basic reason that ships didn’t zip at faster-than-light speeds from, say, Earth to Mars in an instant. When a ship was wrapped up in its Alcubierre bubble,
it was impossible to see outside
. . . and precise navigation became a nightmare. Ship AIs could predict the locations of planets and moons across distances of a light second or more with a high degree of accuracy, but if the time delay inherent in the speed of light was too great, predicting the positions of star ships, fighters, and orbital facilities or bases with the requisite accuracy became all but impossible. If the navigational and control systems on those Tango One ships had been off by even a few nanoseconds, they might have emerged within the Confederation fleet—a disaster for
both
sides—or they might have emerged too far from the fleet to do anything at all except play a game of catch-up with the advantage of surprise lost.

And yet, somehow, Tango One had moved within minutes of the light from the Confederation fleet’s emergence reaching them, apparently dropping into their version of Alcubierre Drive and jumping to within two light minutes of the fleet in an instant. It could be chance . . . but in the middle of so much emptiness, Gray didn’t believe in chance. The only alternative was that the Slan had a significant technological advantage over Humankind, one that might well mean that the Confederation could not beat them.

“Weapons!” Gray called.

“Weapons, aye.”
America
’s weapons officer was Commander Laurie Taggart, a tough, no-nonsense AAC woman from Chicago. The Ancient Alien Creationists believed that Humans had been genetically uplifted by aliens hundreds of thousands of years ago, and Gray sometimes wondered if the AACs in the Navy were afraid they were fighting their creators. Taggart, at least, had never let her beliefs interfere with her duty.

“Primaries on the largest Tango One warship,” he said, “as soon as it’s in seventy percent range.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

At near-
c
velocities, targeting an enemy warship could be tricky. The target would have moved in the time it took light to crawl back and forth between the two vessels, and even the best AI could not predict a target’s course if the target was making periodic course changes to avoid incoming fire. Seventy percent meant that Taggart was to take a shot whenever her weapons system AIs predicted a seventy percent chance of scoring a hit.

America
began to swing to face the enemy. Her primary weapons were her spinal mounted railguns, twin linear magnetic accelerators running for much of the vessel’s length that could slam one-ton projectiles into an enemy ship with the kinetic energy equivalent of a hundred-megaton warhead. The carrier had not yet completed her turn when the enemy ships
blurred
. . . and then they were past the perimeter defense destroyers and within the Confederation fleet. The German destroyer
Mölder
flared into a tiny nova of searing light, her bow and stern tumbling off in opposite directions. An instant later, the
Worden
, a USNA heavy cruiser, took a hit that vaporized her aft-drive modules and left her a shattered hulk, leaking atmosphere and water in glittering clouds of ice crystals.

The Confederation fleet was being cut to pieces before it could even begin to respond to the threat.

“I want an analysis of those weapons,” Gray said, addressing
America
’s primary AI. “What are they hitting us with?”

“We are detecting 511 kilo-electron volt radiation,” the AI whispered in Gray’s mind, “which is characteristic of positronium annihilation.”

“My God . . .”

Positronium was a so-called “exotic atom,” a negatively charged electron in a bound quantum state with its antimatter opposite, a positron. Normally, the balance of the two as they orbited each other was unstable, decaying and bringing about a matter-antimatter release of gamma rays after a very brief interval of time—either 125 picoseconds or 142 nanoseconds, depending on the relative spin states of the two particles. By beaming positronium with particle velocities extremely close to the speed of light, however, it was possible to extend that short life span through relativistic time dilation.

That was the theory, at any rate, but human technology had not been able to turn theory into a working weapon. The Slan, evidently, had done just that. An energy fingerprint of 511 keV for the gamma quanta released identified the Slan weapon as para-positronium, the antiparallel spin variety with a lifetime of 125 picoseconds.

The European Union star carrier
Klemens von Metternich
appeared to stagger under a terrific impact, her 500-meter-broad shield cap shredding away in a vast, silvery burst of freezing water.

“Electrical potential cascading across the
Grant
’s hull suggests a different weapon,”
America
’s AI continued, “likely an electron beam of some sort.”

Electron beams were a more conventional technology, well understood and in use both by human warships and man-portable weapons. Shielding against them required negatively charged hull fields, but there were ways to smash through a ship’s repulsive shielding, with a particle beam accelerated to high-enough velocities.

The fleet was up against one hell of a technological wall. . . .

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

36 Ophiuchi A System

0854 hours, TFT

Since the fleet was now in the coast phase of its flight path, with all singularity drives switched off, all of the fleet’s ships appeared to be hanging motionless within the black vault of a weirdly distorted universe. The wreckage of the stricken vessels, the
Mölder,
the
Worden,
and the
von Metternich
, continued to pace the fleet, their velocities still matching that of the other ships. A fourth vessel—the USNA gunship
Ulysses S. Grant
—was hit by an invisible weapon that seemed to claw at her hull, shredding it. Gregory’s instrumentation showed a surge of electrical potential searing across the stricken ship’s hull, arcing into hard vacuum.

“Close and fire, Demons!” Mackey yelled. “Get in close!”

The Tango One alien vessels were incredibly maneuverable. Gregory rolled onto a new vector that put one enemy warship directly ahead . . . then watched it blur and vanish from his screens just as he fired his particle weapon. The beam missed, and in response a fusion beam slashed across his bow. He jinked hard right, changing course and acceleration constantly and randomly. Closer . . . he had to get
closer
if he was going to have a chance of hitting one of those things. . . .

His naked eyes would have been useless, of course, in the weirdly twisted skies of relativistic velocities, but his fighter’s AI could tease data from the distortion and present it through his in-head links. He could see details of the alien hulls, now, within an open window in his mind, as warbook data scrolled up the side of the display. The largest ships—two of them—were Ballistas, according to the warbook—awkward, boxy-looking affairs with ugly, blotched paint schemes that looked like random slashes of green, red, and black. No two Ballistas were exactly the same, Gregory noticed; the designs of their hulls looked as random as their paint jobs. Each was around 300 meters long, all angles and sharp edges. The other ten ships had been designated as Sabers, leaner, squatter versions of the Ballistas painted black and red, each a third the length of their more massive consorts. Confederation Military Intelligence equated the Sabers with human destroyers, the Ballista with cruisers.

Stiletto fighters, like finned knife blades, spilled from several of the Slan warships, spreading out through nearby space. Fusion beams seared into the Confederation fleet, blasting comm channels with harsh static. The
Vladivostok
and the
Bhatkal
both were hit, the smaller
Bhatkal
vanishing in a silent flash of dazzling light, the bigger
Vlad
crumpling as the miniature black holes housed within her quantum power plant drifted free and devoured the Russian cruiser from within.

Gregory selected two of his Fer-de-lance missiles, targeting one of the Ballistas now just 20,000 kilometers ahead, and thoughtclicked the launch command. The missiles streaked away from his fighter and he spun the craft through 80 degrees, seeking another target. Silent explosions flared and blossomed within the distorted sky. As he twisted and turned, the starbow shifted with his movements, always centered on the direction the fleet was moving and stretching across some 60 degrees of view, but showing local distortions as his Starhawk changed vector.

Demon Five, Lieutenant Tammi Anderson’s ship, vanished in a direct hit by a positron beam, a moth winking out in the light of a laser torch. Lieutenant Randy Gibb’s fighter vanished an instant later in a fusion beam from an alien Stiletto. The European Union heavy cruiser
Cassard
was hit, her forward shield cap ripped apart, the remaining wreckage spinning end for end as it wheeled through space.

Neither of Gregory’s missiles got close to its target. A fusion beam wiped them out of the sky.

Damn it, the Confederation fleet was
losing
.

TC/USNA CVS
America

In transit

36 Ophiuchi A System

0855 hours, TFT

“Fire!”

At Gray’s command,
America
’s twin kinetic-kill launchers hurled a pair of warheads at the nearest of the oncoming Ballistas, but the clumsy-looking Slan craft blurred and shifted to one side, easily avoiding the KK missiles. The technological wall they faced might well be insurmountable.

So far, most of the alien clients of the Sh’daar possessed technologies within a century or two of Earth’s. This almost certainly was due to the Sh’daar penchant for limiting the technologies of their subject races, especially in the GRIN arena—but those technologies in turn fed others, including gravitics, ship drives and power plants, and beam weapons. The maneuverability of the Slan warships, coupled with the power of their weapons, meant that fighting them was like pitting ancient fabric-and-wood biplanes with piston-prop engines against modern fighters with gravitic drives and high-energy lasers.

The human fleet didn’t stand a chance.

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

36 Ophiuchi A System

0855 hours, TFT

“Cover my ass!” Lieutenant Nathan Esperanza called over the squadron tactical channel. “I’m gonna take this to knife-fighting range!”

“Copy that, Nate,” Gregory called back. “I’m on your six!”

Gregory dropped onto Esperanza’s tail about 80 kilometers behind him, the two Starhawks arrowing toward a haphazard 200-meter collection of flat surfaces and sharp angles painted red, green, and black. A Stiletto peeled away from an enemy formation and closed on Esperanza from the flank; Gregory ordered his AI to program a cluster of Krait missiles for a cascade release, then triggered the launch.

In close space combat, you
had
to fight through the senses and the reactions of your AI. Everything in the sky right now—capital ships, fighters, Krait missiles, expanding clouds of white-hot plasma—was traveling in more or less the same direction at close to the speed of light, so Relativistic Temporal Differentials didn’t figure into things . . . not yet. Within the unaccelerated universe outside of battlespace, time was proceeding some thirteen times slower than it was for Gregory and the others in the battlegroup, which meant that more enemy ships might be arriving in very short order.

But even ignoring RTDs, the relative velocities among attackers and defenders were so high that merely human reaction times were far too slow to manage events. The artificial intelligences on board the human ships, however, perceived, recorded, and reasoned many thousands of times faster than organic systems, even than electronically enhanced organic systems, and that fact alone made such combat possible.

Of course, the enemy must have AIs as well—or an alien equivalent. Slan technology was not at all well understood. The way the hostiles were maneuvering, snapping back and forth far too quickly for human perceptions to record or react to them, they
must
have some pretty good computer tech over there, either as independent AIs or as cybernetic blends of organic and machine intelligence.