B009NFP2OW EBOK (27 page)

“Make to all ships. Initiate deceleration and engage the enemy at non-rel velocities. Order the strike fighters to decelerate immediately and rejoin the fleet in battlespace.”

“Aye-
aye
, sir!”

“We are still heavily outnumbered, Captain Gray,” the AI pointed out with emotionless reserve. “Besides the fourteen undamaged warships, there are twenty-five damaged Sh’daar vessels. While the damaged ships are having difficulty maneuvering, most appear to have their weapons systems intact.”

“I know,” Gray replied. “But this is our chance to
end
this thing, once and for all! It’s why we’re here!”

“Understood. We have passed through the battlespace, and are now initiating deceleration. The other ships of the battlegroup have acknowledged the order, and are decelerating as well.”

CBG-40 began the cumbersome evolution of reversing course.

Astern, the enemy slowly and clumsily maneuvered to meet them.

Chapter Twenty-Three

16 November 2424

Slan Protector
Vigilant

Extended Orbit, 70 Ophiuchi AII

0723 hours, TFT

Damage to the
Vigilant
, it turned out, was relatively slight. Clear Chiming Bell had at last made it to the deck by snapping its ear flaps shut, then slowly opening them, using puffs of expelled air to waft itself back to its control station. Shortly after that, the ship’s artificial gravity was restored, and the weapons came back on-line.

Vigilant
was again ready for combat.

The human fleet had devastated the assembled Sh’daar forces. There was still a chance to pull things together, however,
if
the Sh’daar Masters could pull some organization out of the chaos of multi-specific discordance.

The Sh’daar, as the Slan experienced them, existed as a kind of electronic network nestled within the linkages between minute computers implanted within billions of individuals of a number of mutually alien species. The net at the star the humans called 36 Ophiuchi had been relatively small, non-sentient, and limited in scope to observing and recording events. The net here at the staging area was larger and better realized, with hundreds of computer nodes in the various ships and on the surface of the planet.

The problem the Sh’daar faced, however—their single, sometimes overwhelming weakness—lay in that mutual alienness of their subject species. The Slan could understand the H’rulka fairly well—titanic gasbags evolved within the atmosphere of a gas giant world who communicated using natural radio. The Turusch, dual-brained beings that thought and spoke in harmonies that gave rise to nested meanings, were far more difficult to relate to. A third Sh’daar-dominated species, the Agletsch, had developed a kind of
lingua franca
allowing interspecies communication with a wide variety of Galactic cultures, but in fact that worked only with beings physiologically capable of working within a certain range of sounds locked into a claustrophobically narrow band of frequencies.

It was unlikely that even the Sh’daar themselves, whatever they really were, fully understood their subject races, that they understood them well enough to truly communicate with them. They nudged, they urged, they suggested . . . but they couldn’t
lead
.

Nor could they explain. Clear Chiming Bell knew from its few times of direct linkings with the Sh’daar that something about the humans terrified them. Something had happened that had led to a truce, of sorts, with the humans . . . but then something else had happened, forcing the Sh’daar to, once again, attempt to destroy them.

The nature of the threat, however, appeared incommunicable. For a species that used sound both to communicate and to reveal its surroundings in precise detail, that failure of clarity was bewildering, a failure verging on . . . sin.

The Masters had shown the Slan the stars. They’d helped the Slan leave the world, the caverns of their birth, and cross the aching emptiness to other worlds. They’d shown the Slan worlds similar enough to their birthworld—like the humans’ Arianrhod—that they’d become a truly Galactic species, potentially immortal, spreading across hundreds of Slan-friendly worlds.

Were they also capable of
k’!k’t!’cht’!k’!kt’!!!k
?

Were they in fact withholding or distorting information in an immoral way?

Or were the Sh’daar literally incapable of communicating clear and precise meaning about the humans?

Either possibility was . . . disturbing.

The enemy vessels appeared to be decelerating. They would be returning to the death-blasted gulf around the planet to complete what they’d begun.

Clear Chiming Bell gave the orders for the Slan contingent to meet them.

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

Osiris Space, 70 Ophiuchi AII

0725 hours, TFT

The orders had just come through: they were re-uniting with the battlegroup, then returning together to Osiris! Gregory’s deepest longing, a need that had been driving him, gnawing at him since the age of eight had just been handed to him by an arbitrary decision made out of the blue by the brass back on board the
America
, and the realization left him weak, almost paralyzed.

The fact that it had been handed to him hard on the heels of Jodi’s death had plunged him into a swirling emotional black hole from which there seemed to be no escape whatsoever.

Home
.

The word scarcely carried meaning for Gregory any longer.

Somehow, he’d managed to wall off the shock of Jodi’s sudden death, but he still felt an all-embracing numbness that left him moving along on auto-pilot. As he’d continued hurtling out-system, away from the fire-blasted horrors of Osiris, he’d stopped thinking about home and family. Right now, he didn’t want to think about
anything
. . . .

Gradually, as minute followed relativistically compressed minute, the numbness receded, replaced by a fierce and unrelenting fury.

Was home something he could fight for if Jodi’s death had been the price?

And would it be home any longer? It would be, he realized with a sick twisting in his gut, a home that had been occupied by enemy aliens for twenty years, a world where home and loved ones might well have been incinerated two aching decades before.

Despite this, he found that he welcomed the decision by
America
’s command staff. Apparently the destruction wrought by
Altair
’s sacrifice, by the high-velocity passage of four fighter squadrons, and by the fly-by of the battlegroup itself had, all together, hurt the enemy enough that Captain Gray had decided to stay and fight.

“So, Nungie,” Kemper said over the tactical channel. “You get to go home after all, huh? Heh. I wouldn’t count on your relatives waiting at the spaceport for ya, though!”

“Leave him alone, Happy,” Nichols snapped. “Stop riding him.”

Ted Nichols and Gregory hadn’t been particularly close. He was a quiet and somewhat reserved pilot from Ottawa and a member of the Navy’s aristocratic elite, and that alone always had put up a barrier between him and the colonial from Osiris.

But he
had
known that Gregory and Jodi were . . . involved.

“Fuck, I ain’t riding the poor bastard, Teddy. The fact is, colonials are as bad as Prims. They shouldn’t be wearing fighters in the first place!”

And that, Gregory thought, was the overwhelming weakness of the Confederation space-fighter arm, that twisted sense of better-than-thou privilege, of
elitism
that separated pilots into “us” and the have-not “thems.” The sheer, fucking aristocratic arrogance of most of the pilots infuriated Gregory, left him shaking inside . . . and, very slowly, it helped him focus.

He wouldn’t let them win, wouldn’t let them put him down or Prims like Jodi. He was as good as any of them, and by God he would prove it.

He was going
home
, and whether home and family were still there or not, he would help kick the aliens off Osiris and make the place his home once more.

“Eat my fucking wake, Kemper,” he growled. “I’ll see you at Osiris.”

TC/USNA CVS
America

Osiris space, 70 Ophiuchi AII

0729 hours, TFT

It would take almost fifty minutes for the
America
battlegroup to kill its forward velocity, by which time it would have traveled almost 450 million kilometers . . . or three more AUs. Call it three more hours before they would be able to re-engage the enemy. The fighter squadrons, well out ahead of the fleet, nonetheless would be able to cancel their forward velocity in about five minutes and, boosting at fifty thousand gravities, would be able to make it back to the planet and match local vectors in something less than another eight minutes.

But the fighters would be low on expendables—missiles, AMSO rounds, and KK projectiles—having dumped as much in the way of munitions as possible during the brief moments of their Osirian fly-by. They would still be able to generate laser and particle beams, of course, so long as their quantum power plants were still functioning, but they would be at a serious disadvantage with an enemy that could magnetically shield against incoming charged particles.

And so Gray had directed Connie Fletcher to bring the squadrons back on board America. There would be some tricky maneuvering involved; the fighters would have to pass
America
on the outbound leg of her flight path, turn around, accelerate to catch up, then dock while
America
killed her own acceleration in order to accommodate the trapping squadrons. They would lose some time, too, since the carrier could not be under acceleration while fighters were landing. There were just too many vector variables involved in an operation where a mistake of a tenth of a percent would still result in a difference in relative velocities of hundreds of kilometers per
second
and a staggering release of kinetic energy that would vaporize the fighter and cripple the star carrier. Safer by far to have
America
cut her acceleration for the time necessary to bring her chicks back on board.

The squadrons would re-arm, then launch again during the return flight.

And this time they would stay within the battlespace until the big boys joined them.

For Gray, the real agony lay in the big unknown. Would enough of the battle-damaged Sh’daar warships be able to repair themselves during those intervening three hours to put the human battlegroup at an impossible disadvantage when the fight was rejoined? There was no clear answer to that. The enemy had nanomatrix hull construction—or its alien equivalent—allowing them to repair damage in fairly short order. The Slan HQ ship had suffered serious pressure loss in the fight at Arianrhod, but had repaired the damage, at least to an extent, by the time the Marines boarded her.

The problem was that comparing technologies between mutually alien cultures was not a comparison of apples and oranges, which at least were both related as fruit. Human technology was different from Turusch technology which was different from Slan technology not only because the latter two were more advanced, but because the thinking, the ways of looking at the universe, and the histories of the steps leading to the present in each culture were different as well. A being’s language, sophontologists argued, helped shape how it perceived the universe and how its brain worked at a basic, quantum level. Mutually alien technologies, it seemed, could be compared only in certain gross and relatively inefficient ways—by measuring the relative energy outputs of starship drive arrays, for example. The Slan could do that trick of accelerating at high-G inside the 40-AU limit of a star’s gravitational matrix, a clear advantage over human vessels, but, if anything, their beam energy outputs in combat were a bit less than the human equivalents. They also seemed to have a different philosophy about warfare—for them, it was more of a test of strength and will between two able parties than it was one of enforcing one’s political will over another—and that appeared to have a bearing on their technology as well.

No, not apples and oranges. Stars and sea cucumbers, maybe.

And that left Gray wondering how good the enemy force would be three hours hence, when battle was rejoined. Damn it, the human force needed an advantage, something to help tip the scales in their favor.

He had one hidden ace, in the
Shenandoah
, and the wrinkle he’d explored already with Linda Alvarez, her skipper.

And just maybe he had another one as well.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto, Ontario

United States of North America

1005 hours, EST

“My God, they made a job of it, didn’t they?”

President Koenig sat before the monitor, watching the scenes being transmitted from a cloud of news-camera drones swarming over the former capital of the United States of North America. What had been the center of the city of Columbus was now pocked by a gigantic bowl-shaped crater nearly three kilometers across and almost half a kilometer deep. A ring around the crater reaching another five kilometers had been burned out by the fireball. There was no radioactivity as there would have been in a nuclear strike, but the damage nevertheless was appalling.

The Scioto River tumbled now over the smooth curve of the crater’s northwestern edge, a waterfall vanishing into steam clouds deep inside the crater’s depths. Other rivers on the east side of the city were vainly attempting to fill the hole as well. It would be a while before the crater’s depths cooled enough that the infalling water no longer flashed into steam on the way down. When that happened, the crater would slowly become an almost perfectly circular lake.

Geneva’s strategy, Koenig’s advisors thought, had been to fire a succession of nano-D warheads into the crater, creating a cascade of destruction that would have eaten all the way down to the Executive Towers’ deepest, most heavily armored basement and devoured it. Fortunately, only one warhead had struck, and the trillions of nano-disassemblers it had unleashed had run through their limited lifetime before they’d gotten beneath the half-kilometer mark.

In any case, the president, his cabinet, and much of the USNA Congress was no longer in the underground bunker. Shortly after the destruction of the city above, they’d been hustled onto a special maglev train that had zipped them silently away through an evacuation tunnel running deep and straight through the Earth’s crust, traveling the 500 kilometers northeast to the city of Toronto in less than ten minutes. Still the capital of Ontario and the largest city of the Canadian provinces, Toronto’s downtown York Civic Complex had office space enough to accommodate the USNA government, at least for the time being. It would be crowded—Koenig’s own staff was packed into small offices three and four to a room, and his own office was smaller than Marcus Whitney’s office back in D.C.