B009NFP2OW EBOK (15 page)

On the other hand, Gregory thought, the Slan AIs couldn’t be that far ahead of human systems. The Sh’daar control of the technologies developed by their client systems meant that they couldn’t have much of an edge there.

And that meant that they
could
be beaten.

The question was how?

A chain of nuclear blasts strobed in a nearly straight line across the sky 20,000 kilometers distant, one VG-10 Krait after the next detonating in open space. The cascade maneuver had been designed to penetrate tough enemy defenses. The lead Krait would detonate well short of the target, and the expanding plasma fireball provided cover for the next Krait in line, which would fly through the expanding gas cloud to detonate closer to the target . . . followed by the next . . . and the next. . . .

The last two Krait missiles either struck the Stiletto or came quite close to it; the Slan fighter vanished in the double fireball, emerging as a spray of half-molten debris.

“Kill!” Gregory shouted, exultant. “Scratch one Stiletto!”

“Thanks, Nungie!” Esperanza called. “Arming Krait cascade and a Fer-de-Lance . . . target lock . . .
Fox One
!”

Esperanza released a cluster of Kraits followed by the bigger Fer-de-Lance . . . but the Kraits were swept from the sky by a fusion beam from the clumsy-looking target. The Fer-de-Lance, with a more powerful onboard AI, survived a few seconds longer, jinking and weaving back and forth as it bore in on its target . . . and then an electron beam fried its circuits and reduced it to a lump of dead metal and plastic. Esperanza’s Starhawk rolled left and accelerated, falling out of its path toward the Slan warship . . . and then a fusion beam from the target caught the fighter and vaporized it in a searing flash of light.

Shit . . .

Gregory programmed a flight of Kraits to take independent and divergent paths to the target, then broke off, the sky tumbling wildly about him. Maybe with a dozen missiles all coming in from different directions at once, he would have a chance in hell of getting at least one twenty-megaton blast on-target. His Stiletto kill of a moment ago might have happened only because the pilot was focusing too hard on Esperanza’s Starhawk, and not enough on what was going on in other parts of the sky.

Something struck his fighter, a savage shock, and then he was tumbling helplessly through strangeness. For several horrifying seconds, Gregory lost all input from his AI. That meant that his corrected visual systems were down, and he was looking at the sky as it really was . . . everywhere a black and impenetrable emptiness, with a tightly smudged glow of colored light squeezed into a 60-degree cone forward. The Starhawk’s AI took incoming light and used mathematics to reverse-engineer the panorama, showing what the surrounding sky would look like without the relativistic distortion, and drew in such finicky details as the locations of both friendly and enemy ships, exploding missiles, and energy beams that otherwise would be invisible to the human eye.

He also couldn’t tell how badly damaged his ship was. Life support appeared to still be functioning, along with emergency power and the basic visual feeds from scanners on the fighter’s outer hull, but he was tumbling, clearly, and his primary power plant and singularity drive both were down. If he couldn’t fix them, he would continue drifting at a hair beneath the speed of light, unable to decelerate and re-enter the nonaccelerated universe. Commo was down, so he couldn’t call for help.

A few terrifying seconds later, though, the AI came back on-line, initiating a damage-control reset, and the cosmos around him became again understandable. His singularity power plant came back on-line, and an instant later his drive indicators winked green, showing them powered down but ready for operation. His communications feeds came back as well, and he no longer felt quite so lonely.

He was drifting through the center of the Slan squadron, apparently unseen or at least unrecognized. His Starhawk was still tumbling, so possibly it was giving a good imitation of a derelict hulk or a lifeless piece of debris. One massive green, black, and red craft was closing with him at a few hundred kilometers per hour, would pass him by at a range of only a few kilometers.

Gregory realized that chance had presented him with an invaluable opportunity. The question was how best to make use of it.

TC/USNA CVS
America

In transit

36 Ophiuchi A System

0856 hours, TFT

Two Ballistas and ten Sabers were penetrating the human fleet, fusion and positron beams stabbing and snapping in a savage storm of destruction.

“The railguns aren’t doing shit,” Gray said. “Damn it, they’re mopping us up!”

As if to underscore that realization, something hit the
America
, something huge and massively powerful, slamming Gray and his bridge crew to one side in their protectively enclosed seats. For a moment he couldn’t move; his command chair had folded itself around him, absorbing excess energy, muffling the shock before releasing him. A shrill roar sounded in Gray’s ears, and the air grew suddenly frigid. Alarms sounded:
pressure loss, bridge tower . . .

Twisting in his seat, Gray looked back over his shoulder at the pressure-sealed doors leading to the flag bridge, and found himself staring into black emptiness.

The flag bridge was . . .
gone. . . .

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

36 Ophiuchi System

0856 hours, TFT

“My God, look at
America
!” Kemper’s voice howled over the communications net.

“She’s been hit!” Mason added.

“Cut the babble, Demons!” Mackey called. “Keep focused on the hostiles!”

America
was too distant to be seen with the naked eye, of course, but Gregory’s AI showed him a long-range image when he asked for it. The star carrier
America
—a long, dark gray umbrella shape was in a slow tumble, out of control. He couldn’t see any damage at first, but a telltale wisp of fog behind and beneath the sheltering reach of the forward end cap suggested that atmosphere was venting into space, and his AI’s analyses of the carrier’s status brought up a dozen red, blinking flags—communications network down, hull protective shielding down, power systems off-line, singularity drive off-line, weapons down, atmosphere breach in the bridge tower . . .

Things were freaking
bad. . . .

The Slan warship ahead changed course slightly, obviously vectoring toward the stricken carrier. It would still pass damned close to Gregory’s fighter, however, close enough for him to slam a full load of warheads up that thing’s ass. The resultant detonations would kill him, he knew . . . but he stood an excellent chance of killing the Slan warship as well.

Or was there another way?

He consulted with his AI, his thoughts and the electronic responses of his fighter’s computer network flashing back and forth so quickly that there were no words, no reasoning, just
awareness
, and at speeds far greater than mere organics could ever attain. His AI warned that the maneuver Gregory had just suggested was extremely dangerous . . . and had a high probability of ending with the Starhawk’s destruction in a collapsing singularity.

But the AI had also detected a power build-up in the Slan craft as it readied its weapons to fire into the helpless star carrier behind them. It was less than a thousand kilometers distant, now . . . definitely knife-fighting range.

Gregory thoughtclicked an override, then gave a quick series of commands.

And his fighter’s power plant and singularity drive switched on. . . .

TC/USNA CVS
America

In transit

36 Ophiuchi A System

0856 hours, TFT

As the air pressure on the bridge dropped, Gray’s shipboard utilities reacted automatically, sealing themselves off. A black nanofilm flowed from his cuffs to cover his hands, as close-fitting as paint, while his collar expanded, puffed out, then ballooned up and over his face, enclosing his head completely in a transparent shell that rapidly hardened into diamond-hard transparency. Designed for emergency use only, the suit had a small environmental unit positioned at the small of his back that would provide him with about fifteen minutes’ worth of air, and power enough to keep him from freezing for the next hour or so.

He released himself from his chair and pushed up into the center of the bridge compartment, floating free. Slowly, the port bulkhead swung up and connected with his feet; the ship was in a slow and ponderous tumble, creating a very low-G illusion of gravity. The other bridge personnel appeared uninjured, their own utilities transitioning from normal uniform to air-tight space suits within the space of a few seconds.
“Damage control!”
he thought.
“How bad is it?”

Data flooded into his mind.

“
America
has been hit by a positron beam,” the ship’s AI told him. “Most of the blast was deflected by our magnetic shielding, but the bridge tower has suffered a hull breach and major internal damage. Drives and weapon systems knocked off-line. Life support at fifty percent. Magnetic shielding at ten percent. Casualties unknown, but light. Ship is initiating repairs.”

As he listened to the ship’s AI, he read the damage reports coming in from each of the ship’s departments, a litany of off-line systems and relatively minor damage.
America
, in fact, had only been grazed by the Slan positron beam. The only serious damage had been to the bridge tower, which extended from the ship’s spine just forward of the rotating hab modules and docking bays, and just aft of the shield cap. Light casualties, Gray realized, might well mean only the officers and crew who’d been on the flag bridge a moment ago—Admiral Steiger and his staff, Admiral Delattre and
his
staff. . . .

And with a sharp, inner Jolt, Gray realized that with their deaths, he, as Steiger’s flag captain, was now in command not only of the stricken
America
, but of the entire battlegroup as well.

Not that there was a damned thing he could do about that right now. With ship communications down, he couldn’t talk to the other ships of the fleet, couldn’t coordinate the defense, couldn’t even receive the tactical feeds that would tell him what the hell was going on outside.

In fact, they’d come hellishly close to losing the ship’s bridge as well as the flag bridge. The power surge through the bridge tower’s electrical nexi and control systems had been the reason for most power systems being knocked off-line.
America
, however, possessed a sophisticated self-repair ability, the logical outgrowth of current nanotechnology in ship systems and structure. When he looked aft toward the flag bridge again, he could see a dense webwork of crisscrossing threads already stretching across the ragged tear where the bridge pressure doors had been, and as he watched, each thread doubled, then redoubled every second or so. The webwork grew thicker and thicker until, within a couple of minutes, the breach had been sealed, and air was pumping once again onto the bridge.

The bridge crew kept their emergency suits on, however, and a couple of ensigns moved from person to person, sailing across the middle of the compartment to reach each station, handing out larger backpack units that would provide air, power, and water for up to twelve hours.

The question was whether they
had
twelve hours.
America
was helpless, a kilometer-long target slowly tumbling through space, and outside, unseen, the Slan warships would be closing in. . . .

Chapter Twelve

12 November 2424

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

36 Ophiuchi A System

0856 hours, TFT

Gregory accelerated his fighter, closing with the oncoming Slan warship—one of the two Ballistas. What he was about to try had never been done, as far as he knew.

At least, if it
had
been done, the pilot had not lived to tell about it in debriefing.

He would only have an instant to wait. At his current velocity toward 36 Ophiuchi A, several seconds would pass literally in the blink of an eye. His AI, working at superhuman speed, was now controlling everything.

The singularity drive used by human ships projected a severely distorted sphere of spacetime ahead of the craft, essentially collapsing it into a micro-black hole powerful enough to gravitationally attract the ship at tens of thousands of Gs. The projection flickered, turning on and off thousands of times per second, always staying just ahead of the ship, which began falling—literally in free fall—toward the ever-receding microsingularity. A finessing of the fields collapsing the sphere of space distorted it to avoid the nastiness of tidal effects, and it was possible to project them closer or further from the ship’s prow in order to fine-tune the acceleration.

Drive engineers referred to it as “bootstrapping,” and since a ship—or its crew—did not feel
gravitational
acceleration, it had opened up, first, the solar system, and then access to the stars by allowing ships to boost to the near-light velocities required for Alcubierre FTL in minutes rather than a year or more.

The technology was not without some serious dangers, though. An engineering failure could drop a ship into a black hole of its own making, too fast a whip-turn around the singularity could generate centrifugal force enough to pulp a fighter pilot . . . and “dustballs,” clouds of dust, hydrogen gas, and micron-sized debris collected by the singularities during the course of a long boost could end up hurtling off into space at near-
c
. . . where they might well pose a random navigational hazard millennia in the future and light years away.

And the plan Gregory had just proposed to his AI was juggling all three of those threats.

The Slan Ballista reacted to his sudden power-up and acceleration; Gregory’s AI warned of weapon systems building up power, but his fighter had already leaped across the intervening distance, the green, black, and red hull of the alien ship expanding to form a massive cliff blurring across his sensor field.

His Starhawk’s singularity projector switched on, and the fighter swung sharply as though turning on a hinge. The singularity field sank into alien hull metal, and there was a jolt, a hard one that slammed Gregory forward against the embrace of his seat . . .

. . . and then he was hurtling into emptiness once more, his fighter now spinning slowly end for end.

Behind him, the flank of the Slan Ballista seemed to unzip, spilling debris and gas in a plume of freezing vapor. His flickering drive singularity had buzz sawed through the Slan armor, ripping through hull metal and shredding internal structure. In that same eye’s-blink instant, Gregory’s AI had triggered the fighter’s beam weapons; with the alien vessel’s hull shields and magnetic defenses down, the Starhawk’s particle beams had burned deep into the massive vessel’s core, causing savage and unrelenting destruction.

To get close enough to the Slan warship, he’d had to act like an inert lump of debris—harmlessly adrift through battlespace. Once his drive had engaged, the Slan defenses would react to him as they did to any incoming missile, but his AI had been able to time things so tightly that the enemy had been unable to respond until it was too late.

Now, though, he needed to bring his fighter back under full control. A pair of Sabers were vectoring in, looking for blood. Gregory punched his singularity drive to put some distance between him and incoming retribution. Fusion beams snapped across intervening space, but he was already accelerating, jinking back and forth randomly to make it tough for Slan fire control computers to predict his course.

He continued to monitor the damaged Slan vessel, however. There was a chance, if its weapons were still on-line, that it could lash out at him as he hurtled into the darkness.

The alien craft clearly had other problems, however. While the Starhawk’s singularity projector had been flickering on and off several thousand times per second, the
last
projected black hole had been released intact inside the target’s hull. Traveling with the same velocity as the passing Starhawk, it was eating its way now through the ship’s structure, devouring everything it encountered.

After a few seconds, the Slan Ballista began to crumple. . . .

TC/USNA CVS
America

In transit

36 Ophiuchi A System

0857 hours, TFT

“Ship systems are coming back on-line,”
America
’s AI whispered in Gray’s mind. “Fifty seconds until full power is restored.”

Fifty seconds was an eternity in combat, but
America
’s magnetic shields were coming back up, and plasma jets were already firing to correct her gentle tumble. In a circular pit in the forward part of the bridge deck, a combat tank repeated the display from the ship’s Combat Information Center. One of the CAP fighters had just made a very close passage of a Slan Ballista, apparently disemboweling the far larger alien vessel with its singularity drive.

“Get me the ID on that pilot,” Gray told the AI. Data appeared within his in-head. Lieutenant Donald Gregory, a colonial from Osiris. That boy was going to get a medal out of this . . .
if
he survived. If
any
of them survived.

“CIC, Bridge,” he said over an open tactical channel. “Pass the word to focus everything we can bring to bear on that one remaining Ballista. Fighters too.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Commander Margery Holmes, the CIC boss, replied. “The fighters are already vectoring for the Tango One Ballista. They just might beat us to it.”

Indeed, according to the combat tank, the seven surviving Starhawks of the Black Demons were swarming toward the remaining Ballista, releasing clouds of nuclear-tipped missiles. Mackey had obviously already had the same idea—kill that remaining Ballista and Tango One might be crippled, forcing the rest to break off.

Might
. It was a long shot, but, at the moment, it was all the hard-pressed human fleet had.

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

36 Ophiuchi System

0858 hours, TFT

“Ferdie, set for launch. Fox one!” Gregory called. A Fer-de-lance dropped from his fighter’s belly, the drive ignited, and the black sliver streaked toward the remaining Ballista, now 100,000 kilometers distant. “That’s my last nuke!”

Chains of detonations were showing now ahead, working their way toward the Slan warship. Expanding clouds of plasma served both to make targeting the remaining incoming missiles all but impossible, but also tended to disperse fusion beams or positron bursts. The Black Demons were on a steep learning curve, adapting their tactics from moment to moment to counter each new Slan defense.

The use of large numbers of nuclear warheads appeared to be having an effect. Three of the Sabers had been destroyed already, their defenses overwhelmed . . . and now the surviving Ballista was twisting and jinking in a desperate attempt to escape the incoming missiles.

The missiles—Fer-de-lance and Lanceheads, mostly, but with a few of the big space-to-surface Boomslangs and Taipans as well—streaked through the expanding fireballs of a dozen VG-10 Kraits. Several were knocked out by the Ballista’s antimissile defenses . . . but then a VG-44c Fer-de-lance slashed through the plasma cloud and exploded within a few meters of the Ballista’s hull. A quarter of the enemy ship’s bulk was vaporized in an instant; the rest began dissolving as warhead after warhead slammed home and detonated, until nothing was left of the massive alien warship but a cloud of white-hot gas.

“Kill!” Mackey yelled over the tactical channel. “Scratch another Ballista, two for two!”

Two larger missiles, the so-called planet-busting Taipan, and the slightly smaller Boomslang, flashed through the plasma cloud and began to circle.

“Kemper! Del Rey!” Mackey called to the pilots who’d fired those missiles. “Get your warheads under control. See if you can go after some of those Sabers!”

“On it, Mack!” Kemper replied.

“Black Demons, this is CIC,” a voice replied from the ship. “The rest of Tango One appears to be withdrawing. Do not, repeat, do
not
pursue.”

“Copy that, CIC. We’ll be good. . . .”

In the distance, Kemper’s Boomslang detonated, filling emptiness with light. Gregory couldn’t tell if the shot had taken out any of the surviving Tango One warships or not.

There were five Sabers left in the sky, half of the original complement of ten, and they were definitely on the run now, accompanied by a school of the much smaller Stilettos. A moment later, the alien Sabers blurred . . . and were gone. The Stilettos continued accelerating, dwindling into the distance.

“Woo-hoo!”
Kemper keened. “
Run
, you bastards!”

A couple of other fighter pilots joined in, but Gregory kept silent. The stark nightmare of the situation was that the twelve alien vessels of Tango One—the equivalent of ten Confederation destroyers and two light cruisers—had destroyed six capital ships and damaged four more, including the star carrier
America
, all in the space of a handful of seconds. Half of the Black Demons were gone as well. The alien beam weapons had been incredibly powerful, more powerful than anything the human ships could match.

And the fleet was still falling toward the inner system of 36 Ophiuchi A at near-
c
, with far more Slan warships—and larger ones—waiting for them there.

Worst of all, the enemy had demonstrated a disturbing capability: making tactical microjumps in apparent defiance of the gravitational curve of local, intra-system space.

Ever since the first encounter with a Sh’daar client species—the Turusch, at the disastrous Battle of Beta Pictorus more than fifty years ago—humans had been at a serious disadvantage. The Sh’daar philosophy that limited certain technological developments within the space they controlled still meant that most of their clients possessed military technologies some decades in advance of human capabilities. The divide was informally known as the miltech wall.

At a guess, however, Slan technologies might be centuries ahead of Earth. Comparing technologies between technic species too often was a matter of apples and oranges, since differences between cultures, philosophies, and languages made an understanding of alien science and engineering all but impossible. But the ability to pull off an in-system FTL transit was
huge
.

The miltech wall might simply be too high this time.

TC/USNA CVS
America

In transit

36 Ophiuchi A System

0859 hours, TFT

“The enemy is in full retreat, Captain,” Commander Holmes said. “They have cleared the battlespace at FTL speeds.”

“Very well,” Gray replied. “Keep an eye on them.”

“Full power is restored to the ship,” the AI told him.

“Helm, correct course to put us back on attack vector.”

Though
America
had continued to travel at near-
c
toward Arianrhod even when she’d been disabled, she’d acquired some lateral drift during the attack. If that went uncorrected, she would be off-target when she arrived at her destination.

“Correcting course to attack vector, aye, sir.”

“Comm. Open a channel to all ships.”

“Channel open, aye, sir.”

“This is Captain Gray, on board
America
,” he said. “Admiral Steiger and Admiral Delattre are KIA. As flag captain of this squadron, I am formally assuming command. All vessels are to adjust their vectors to maintain an attack approach on the target.”

Acknowledgements began coming in, from the USNA ships first, but then from several of the Confederation vessels.

“Captain, Comm,” the communications officer said. “I have a private call for you, tight channel, from the
Napoleon
.”

Here it comes
, Gray thought. “Very well. Put it through.”

“Captain Gray,” a new voice said in his mind. “This is Captain Lavallée. As Admiral Delattre’s flag captain, I remind you that
I
am in command of the fleet.”

“With respect, sir,” Gray replied, “Admiral Delattre transferred his flag to this vessel two days ago. The
America
is the flagship of this fleet, and I
am
hereby taking command.”

“I regret, sir, that you see things that way. . . .”

It was the supreme nightmare of joint fleet operations, a breakdown in the normal chain of command that determined who was in charge.

“Look, Captain,” Gray said. “The worst thing we can do is get into an argument in the middle of an assault. I suggest—”

“No suggestions, Captain Gray.
I
am in command. The fleet will execute a near-
c
fly-by of the objective, then reorient for an immediate return to Sol.”

Gray bit off an angry reply. It would be better if he knew exactly where he stood.

“Is he right?” he asked the ship’s AI. “Does the chain of command go from Delattre to him?”

“That is unclear,” the AI replied, “and beyond my provenance. The question will need to be settled by the Confederation courts.”

“The Hague is twenty light years away. What does the Act of Military First Right have to say about it?”

“Nothing about this particular situation, Captain. The Act, as passed by the Confederation Senate, allows the Confederation Government to assume command of USNA fleet assets such as CBG-40, but the battlegroup was under the direct command of Admiral Delattre, who designated
America
as the flagship for the entire fleet. There is precedent for Lavallée to assume overall command, but there is precedent for
America
to remain the fleet flagship, with you in command. In addition, your rank of captain was confirmed August 7, 2419. Justin Lavallée was confirmed captain on November 15, 2419. You have seniority, Captain, by over three months.”