Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (31 page)

Inside the carrier’s crumpling spine, merging black holes had opened a floodgate of energy from the Void, a torrent that was feeding the singularities, making them grow, turning them into ravenous monsters intent on devouring the entire ship.

Damn it, he had to do
something
.

But at the moment he didn’t have the slightest idea what that something might be.

Himmel-Paradisio Camp

Vulcan

40 Eridani A System

1554 hours, TFT

Connor brought her hand laser up and tried to fire it again. The weapon gave a weak flicker of energy—not enough, she thought—to light a candle—and then went inert. The three Grdoch, wounded and cautious, kept coming, rolling toward her slowly, spreading out across her line of sight, but closing on her position with a grim relentlessness.

She considered her options. She could run, which might buy her some time . . . but which might also result in some of the prisoners being hurt or killed if these monsters began firing indiscriminately. Or she could stand her ground . . . maybe try to wrestle one of those odd-looking weapons away from one of them and use that.

Or she could surrender.

None of those options particularly appealed to her. The horror of her experience with the Slan four months earlier had her thinking she would rather die than submit to another alien interrogation. It was also possible, if Delgado and Commander Fuentes were to be believed, that they would simply devour her alive. It depended on whether the Grdoch thought she had useful information, most likely, and from the descriptions she had heard, it didn’t sound like the Grdoch were interested in
anything
concerning humans, save dinner.

She pulled her survival knife from her sheath. It was a pathetic weapon against three of those rolling horrors—especially when they were carrying ranged weapons of some sort . . . but at least it was
something
. The question was how to use it effectively. She would have to get in close—so close that two of the Grdoch wouldn’t fire their weapons for fear of hitting the third.

And that made her hesitate. Did the Grdoch even have that kind of sentiment among themselves? Obviously, they worked together . . . but they might be more than willing to sacrifice one of their number if it meant frying one rebellious prisoner.

Running might be the best choice after all.

Her decision was taken out of her hands.

She’d been so fixed on the approaching Grdoch that she hadn’t noticed a group of human POWs off to her left, men and women clutching a variety of stakes, spears, and clubs, crouched low to the ground and advancing on the aliens from the flank. She saw them when they rose as a single body and charged, screaming something that might have been a battle cry, might have been nothing but mindless shrieks of rage.

How, Connor wondered, did you sneak up on a creature with eyes positioned all the way around its rotund body? The Grdoch to Connor’s left saw the rush, and rolled to bring its weapon into line with this sudden, new threat. The mob of humans scattered from their tight cluster but kept charging; the Grdoch weapon fired and several of the attackers shriveled, blackened, and smoked.

Connor couldn’t stay there behind her fighter and watch the slaughter. Screaming a mindless shriek of her own, she vaulted the downed Starhawk and rushed at the oncoming Grdoch, brandishing her knife.

She went a little mad.

The Grdoch on the right saw her coming and fired its weapon. She felt the snap of superheated air as the beam seared past her . . . and then she launched herself in a headlong dive, arms outstretched, knife seeking scarlet flesh.

The crowd of humans hit the left-side Grdoch in the same instant, using six-foot poles sharpened at the tips, hardened in fire, as spears, thrusting them at the rubbery body. Now it was the alien’s turn to shriek, a shrill, high-pitch chittering as one spear entered through a mouth-snout and penetrated deep inside.

Connor hit the Grdoch in the middle, which appeared to be unsure which threat was deadlier, which target to shoot. It was twisting back to bring its weapon to bear on Connor when she hit it full force, the knife in her right hand puncturing tough hide and sliding in, wet and hot. The hide, she found, was like leather or heavy rubber and the knife had nearly rebounded . . . but the survival blade carried a hardened, monoatomic nanocarb edge that could carve through steel and with Connor’s full, airborn mass behind it, it punctured the hide and her arm slid into the thing’s body up past her elbow.

For a horrid, queasy moment, Connor was pressed up against the thing full length, could feel its lashing, questing,
biting
snouts, each like the toothy business end of a terrestrial lamprey. Gripping the knife unseen, now, she twisted and slashed, trying to do as much internal damage as she could. She understood that the alien thing could take a hell of a lot of damage . . . but she
had
to be doing it serious harm.

One of the crooked, clawed legs descended on her, grasping her from behind, yanking her back,
shaking
her as a man might grab and shake a small and angry dog. Her arm slid from the gaping wound, bright orange-red and slippery now with blood.

A naked man rammed a spear against the creature, but the fire-hardened point failed to penetrate. A woman at his side tried the same, and this time the spear found a weak spot, one of the repulsive, writhing mouth-trunks, pushing past teeth and mouth cavity and plunging a meter into the thing’s body.

It screamed, shuddered, and dropped Connor. The Grdoch hand weapon—no,
mouth
weapon—clattered onto the ground nearby. Hitting the ground hard, Connor dropped her knife, but managed to roll to her right and scoop up the alien weapon.

It was heavy, and not at all designed for a human hand. She hoped to hell there wasn’t much of a learning curve with the thing. It was shaped something like an egg carton, with a fist-sized knob that the Grdoch held inside one of its mouths, a black orifice on the other end with something like an antenna emerging from within. Okay . . . easy enough to tell which end was which, and that was the most important thing to know about a strange weapon . . . that and how to actually fire the damned thing. Raising it, she pointed the antenna end at the Grdoch looming above her. The trigger . . . damn it, where was the
trigger
?

They fired the things with a mouth, so they must just bite down, must apply force to the knob somehow, must
squeeze
 . . .

The alien had just grabbed the woman with the spear in one crooked arm and was lifting her high overhead.

She squeezed the smooth and rounded grip as hard as she could with both hands, aiming up at the Grdoch looming above her.

A portion of that thick hide directly in front of her blackened, curdled, then peeled itself open in a bloody crater. Softer tissue inside exploded in a wet, scarlet spray. The Grdoch dropped the woman it was holding and rolled backward, comical in its attempt to get clear. Maria Fuentes was there, standing on the heaving thing, plunging a spear into an eye. It bucked, throwing her aside.

“Watch out!”

The Grdoch snapped out one leg, its claws raking down across Maria Fuentes’s torso. Fuentes screamed and Connor fired again into the writhing Grdoch, watched it shrivel . . . then shifted aim. The third Grdoch, apparently wanting no part of this mob assault from its dinner, was in full, rolling retreat.

Connor didn’t want
any
of the things to get away. . . .

VFA-96, Black Demons

Vulcan Orbit

1555 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Gregory knew he was out of time.
America
’s stern was a crumbling, white-hot mass of dissolving hull structure and plasma, and the fast-rising radiation levels showed that the merging black holes inside were gulping down energy and matter alike and working their way forward, following the ship’s internal mass.

He saw only one way to stop the disaster, and it was definitely a kill-or-cure treatment. Linking in with his AI, he armed his Starhawk’s last remaining VG-10 Krait missile, locked on to
America
’s spinal column just forward of the dissolving power tap module, and thought-clicked the firing icon.

“Target lock-on failed,” his AI told him. “The selected target is too—”

“Override! Lock on!”

His AI balked. “I require confirmation,” its voice said in his mind. “The selected target is—”

“Confirmed! Override safeties! Fire!”

The missile slid clear of its launch bay, accelerating, ignoring the host of safeguards and cut-outs that prevented the VG-10 smart missile from targeting a friendly vessel . . . or detonating inside the kill zone of its warhead. At a range of just under 100 meters, the missile detonated almost immediately, a deadly blossoming of hot plasma and twisted, molten fragments of starship.

The VG-10 carried a simple fission warhead of about ten kilotons’ yield . . . smaller than the devices that had annihilated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost five centuries before. While it was true that the effects of a nuclear explosion were significantly reduced in vacuum, an explosion equivalent to the detonation of ten thousand tons of high explosive was still deadly at close range. While there was no way for a shock wave to be transmitted through hard vacuum, the expanding plasma fireball itself provided a shock-wave medium, a shell of hot, subatomic particles rushing out at high speed, swatting Gregory’s fighter like a circling insect and sending it tumbling away.

Himmel-Paradisio Camp

Vulcan

40 Eridani A System

1556 hours, TFT

Connor fired the alien weapon again, holding it in a two-handed stance to steady its unfamiliar weight. The fleeing Grdoch twisted, shuddered, then slumped. Fifty more POWs swarmed toward it, picking up the weapon it had dropped, pinning it to the earth with sharpened poles.

The prisoners were streaming in from all over the compound, a few armed, most not, but the sudden battle had loosed a storm of emotion among some thousands of humans who, until that moment, had been beaten down and helpless. They were releasing that emotion now on the bodies of the Grdoch, and within a few moments, all three had literally been torn to shreds.

Connor was at Maria Fuentes’s side. “Commander! Are you okay? . . .”

“It . . . hurts . . .”

Fuentes was bleeding, bleeding badly, a deep incision slicing her from throat to stomach. Connor tried to stop the bleeding, but she had nothing with which to work, no nanohemostatin, no skin sealant, not even something she could use as a bandage. In moments, Fuentes was gone.

Delgado was beside her. “We tried attacking them before,” he said. He was panting, his eyes wild, and both of his arms were slick with scarlet blood. “Always, they were too tough, their hides too tough, for us to get anywhere. But you injured them enough . . .”

“Not soon enough, Governor. Not soon enough for
her
.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry for your friend.”

In fact, Connor had never known Maria Fuentes, a woman who, after all, was the exec of a different ship. But finding her
here
, on a hostile world, had been like finding a long-lost friend, a
sister
. . . .

And now that sister was lost again.

“I’m just glad we were able to bring them down together,” Connor said. Standing again, she hefted the captured weapon in one hand. She wasn’t sure what kind of weapon it was, but strongly suspected that it was some kind of maser, a laser using microwaves that could cook a target at a distance. Heat something fast enough and it would explode, like the chunks out of the fuselage of her Starhawk. Aim it at flesh and it cooked. Nasty . . .

What kind of power supply did it have? She had neither the tools nor the time to find out . . . and the weapon was far more valuable to them now intact than it would be in pieces.

“We need to get out of here,” she told Delgado. “Out of this . . . this prison.”

“I agree. But how?”

“Follow me. Get everyone together, everyone, and
follow me
. . . .”

Chapter Twenty-two

13 March 2425

USNA CVS
America

40 Eridani A System

1557 hours, TFT

The second shock was savage and violent, strong enough to convince Gray that
America
had just been shot a second time. He tried several channels, looking for an open comm line, but there was nothing . . .
nothing
. . . .

Knocked from his command chair, Gray was floundering about in midair, almost weightless and lost in complete and absolute darkness. Clearly,
America
’s power plants had been knocked out, and the damage was pretty bad because the automatic backups hadn’t immediately come on-line. He couldn’t reach the ship’s AI, either, or get in touch with any of the other parts of the ship.

“Who else is in here?” he called into the darkness. “Is everyone okay?”

Ten men and women had been with him on the flag bridge when the lights went out—Dean Mallory, Roger Hadley, Harriman Vonnegut, Gary Kepner, and six enlisted technicians. Swiftly, people began calling out their names and status.

“Vogel! Okay!”

“Hadley! I’m okay!”

“Shapiro. I . . . I think my arm is broken . . .”

“Mallory. Okay. . . .”

“Newton. No problems.”

Like hell, no problems
, Gray thought, but he didn’t interrupt the roll call. The eleven of them were okay, save for bumps and bruises—and that one possible broken arm. Gray didn’t think about the one obvious health threat they all faced. He’d felt the tingling burn that meant the flag bridge, despite heavy shielding, had been bathed in hard radiation. If they got out of this, if they could get medical attention, get anti-rad nano injections—maybe even complete blood replacement—they had a good chance.

If not, they all were likely to get extremely ill over the next few hours and—depending on the dosage they’d just received—they would then die, hours or at most a few days after that.

“Anyone here cross-trained as a corpsman?”

“I’ve had advanced first aid, Admiral,” a male voice said in the darkness.

“Who’s that?”

“Kelly, sir.”

“See if you can help . . . Shapiro, was it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Light would help. Anyone have a light?”

There was an awkward silence, then a female voice spoke up. “Admiral, Nav Tech Second Class Anderson here.”

“Go ahead, Anderson.”

“I have liquid light full-body tattoos that will help. Permission to switch them on, sir?”

“Granted. Do it.”

Historically, as society had moved more and more away from the classic taboos against nudity, body adornment—tattoos and dermal nanimations had become both more and more popular and technologically elaborate. In the old wet navies of the world, of course, many sailors had sported tattoos—the heavily tattooed sailor had become something of a stereotype, in fact—but body art now was frowned on by the military on the grounds that it was distracting and tended to interfere with uniformity in ranks. Body art was tolerated if it was hidden by the uniform . . . and nowadays the implanted inks of most tattoos were powered by either body heat or by a tiny electrical charge pulled from the body itself, and could be switched on and off easily.

Liquid light images were more complex and used more power, but they were essentially the same—luminous dyes injected into the skin that drew power from the body’s own heat, which could be switched on or off, and which, when activated, radiated anything from a dull glow to a brilliant haze of luminescence.

Light flared in the dark compartment, dazzling to dark-adapted eyes. NT2 Anderson appeared in the center of the light, which grew steadily brighter as she peeled off her shipboard utilities, exposing more and more of her body. Gray had seen the fashion before on Earth—people, especially women—who at fancy-dress occasions “wore” nothing but shoes and a translucent sheath of light. Such “lightgowns” had long been favorite items of fashion for women in Europe and the Americas.

Distracting indeed. No wonder Navy regs specified that you kept the stuff switched off when you were on duty.

Nude, now, Anderson drifted in the center of the compartment, her body aflame and throwing weirdly shifting shadows across the bulkheads, the dead overhead display, and the instrumentation. Able to see now, at least dimly, Gray oriented himself, then glanced forward.
America
’s command bridge was located just forward of and a few steps down from the flag bridge, but the opening between the two had been sealed off by a sliding panel when the ship had entered combat. Captain Gutierrez, Commander Taggart, and a number of other ship’s officers were on the far side of that six-centimeter-thick wall of beryllialumisteel.

Gray looked about the flag bridge in frustration. Damn it, they needed power, and they needed it
now
. He didn’t know how bad the damage to the carrier was—he had to assume it was
extremely
bad—but until internal communications were restored, at the very least, damage assessment and control were virtually impossible.

He found himself wishing that they could plug a power lead into Anderson and charge up the external displays, or at least a radio. He wanted to know what was going on outside almost as much as he wanted to know the extent of damage to the ship.

The battle would continue without his input, of course. There was a chain of command within every task force and carrier battlegroup; in the case of Task Force Eridani, command would have transferred immediately and automatically to Captain Wade Harmon of the
Constitution
—
America
’s sister ship—as soon as communications with
America
had been cut off. Harmon was a good officer, sharp and experienced. He would see things through.

But Gray’s view on the cosmos had suddenly been narrowed to a single sealed and darkened shipboard compartment . . . and survival, he knew, was going to be a bit of a problem.

He was not, he noted, in complete zero gravity. Some moments after the lights went out, his back had bumped up against a bulkhead. The ship, he realized, must be slowly spinning, generating enough centrifugal force to create a very slight illusion of gravity.
America
’s bridge and flag bridge, together, were located in a squat tower extending out from the ship’s spine 40 meters aft of the belly of the shield cap, and therefore quite close to the vessel’s center of gravity. The farther out on the rotating ship’s spine, the stronger the spin-gravity. The faster the spin, the stronger the spin-gravity. Gray estimated that the ship was rotating about a point up inside the shield cap at a rate of once every four or five minutes . . . a slow and stately spin, and one yielding an approximation of the surface gravity of a fair-sized asteroid. A thousandth of a G? Something like that.

With Anderson as a light source, Kelly had found an emergency first-aid kit in a bulkhead storage compartment and was immobilizing Shapiro’s left arm. The gauze he was wrapping around Shapiro’s limb would go rigid when he touched it and transmitted a thoughtclick, serving as a splint. They would worry about setting the bone later.

If there
was
a later.

Some of the ship’s basic functions ought to still be working, so long as they weren’t drawing solely from the main power plants. Emergency airtight doors, for instance. You needed to be able to operate them—either close them or open them—in an emergency, and so they were powered by small batteries imbedded in the bulkhead. Gray pushed off, drifting across the compartment until he bounced up against the sliding panel separating flag bridge from ship’s bridge. Grasping a handhold, he searched up the frame of the door until he found the touchpad.

He didn’t open it immediately, though. Instead, he placed the palm of his hand on a datanet pad. There might be a raging fire on the other side of the door . . . or hard vacuum. He needed to know before he opened anything.

Again, powered by emergency batteries, the pad fed him the information he needed: no fires, an atmosphere at standard temperature and pressure, no poisonous gases. Only then did he transmit a thoughtclick to open the door.

It slid aside, and the first thing Gray saw was Laurie Taggart, floating upside down relative to Gray on the other side of the doorway. “Sandy!” she exclaimed. “Thank God!”

He managed to refrain from embracing her, as much as he wanted to. “Are you okay, Commander?”

She nodded. “Everyone in here is fine. What the hell happened to us?”

Captain Gutierrez materialized out of the darkness and clung to a bulkhead handhold. “No power, obviously,” she said.

“We got hit at close range by a Grdoch X-ray laser,” he said. “I don’t know how bad the damage is. I suspect, though, that we’ve lost containment aft, and the singularities have gone rogue, probably with a vacuum-energy cascade to feed them.”

Gutierrez nodded. “The radiation. Yes, we felt it. That makes sense.”

“We’ll be okay if we can get off the ship,” Gray said.

“You . . . you’re ordering us to abandon her, Admiral?” Gutierrez sounded combative, like she didn’t approve and was about to give him an argument.

And Gray knew how she felt. He’d been captain of the
America
under Rear Admiral Jason Steiger . . . and there was no way to describe how
possessive
a captain felt about his ship even long after he’d moved on.

He was also aware, as she was, that it was the
captain’s
responsibility to give the order to abandon ship, and no one else’s . . . not even the admiral’s.

“Not yet, Captain,” he replied. “That’s your decision, of course . . . but I hope you’ll indulge me by not giving the order until it becomes absolutely necessary.”

“What the hell else has to happen for it to be necessary?” Taggart asked.

“We need to give the rest of the crew a chance.”

Large capital ships like the
America
had a kind of built-in escape pod: the entire bridge tower, containing both flag and command bridges and the CIC could be jettisoned. The hab modules, too, rotating about the ship’s spine aft of the tower could be released, the centrifugal force of their rotation carrying them clear of the ship. Finally, Prifly—the carrier’s Primary Flight Control—was located in a sponson aft of the hab modules, where it could oversee fighter launches and traps, and that could be jettisoned into space as well.

But there were other shipboard sections—especially engineering—located within the spine, and for
America
that meant almost a thousand men and women whose only possible escape was in the life pods mounted at the ends of escape passageways in the hull. Until emergency intraship communications could be re-established, allowing the order to reach
everyone
through their in-heads, neither Gray nor Gutierrez was going to be anxious to order a bug-out.

Of course, it might be necessary for every member of the crew to make their own decisions, if things got bad enough and communications could not be restored.

A deep-voiced, booming rumble sounded through the bridge, followed by a drawn-out grating squeal and a metallic clatter.

It was the sound, Gray knew, of a starship
in extremis
, stressed beyond all reasonable design limits and beginning to break up. “We need to get the IC working,” he told the others.
“Now.”

Himmel-Paradisio Camp

Vulcan

40 Eridani A System

1615 hours, TFT

The crowd, numbering now in the hundreds—quite possibly the thousands—reached the northern perimeter of the prison compound, surging across the open meadow like a huge and living amoebic creature. Connor was in the lead, making for one of the perimeter towers.

Delgado had explained them to her. When the Grdoch had taken over on Vulcan, they’d relied on nanotechnology to create a quick and dirty fence. Floaters, alien vehicles drifting just above the ground, had circled the perimeter, planting rice-sized seeds that had immediately begun converting dirt and rock into a wall. Once the wall was fully grown, smooth-sided and sloping like the interior of an immense bowl, they’d cut a five-meter gap in one section and installed the gate.

There’d been no need for watch towers or guards. The curving wall reached varying heights around the circle, but nowhere was lower than seven meters, and the nanufactured surface of the barrier was so smooth that it looked like polished stone. There was simply no way that the prisoners, naked and without tools or weapons of any kind, were going to get up
that
.

But now they had weapons—three of them. Connor called Delgado and another man, Siegfried Koch, to her side. Koch appeared older—perhaps in his sixties, though with anagathic treatments, nowadays, it was impossible to accurately judge anyone’s true age. He’d picked up the third Grdoch weapon moments ago and been unwilling to relinquish it. “I have experience,” he’d told her.

“Tell your people to move well back,” she told them. “If the wall explodes, we don’t want people getting hit by hot gravel flying at high speed. Now . . . you see how these things work?”

“Point . . . and squeeze here,” Koch said. “Seems simple enough. A maser?”

“I think so. Whatever it shoots, it focuses intense heat on or in the target. I suggest we fire together from a prone position.”

As the crowd edged back, the three of them lay down in the yellow moss, aimed at a single point in the wall half a meter above the ground, and fired. The resultant explosion was sudden, sharp, and remarkably satisfying: a flash and a crack of shattering material that did indeed send fragments of stone hurtling above their bodies.

Two more shots were necessary to widen the gap enough, and then Delgado shouted
“adelante,”
and the crowd surged forward.

“Watch the sides!” Connor yelled as they passed. “Don’t touch them! They’re hot!”

She, Delgado, and Koch waited as the crowd streamed through the opening. A runner arrived, breathless, to tell them that Grdoch, a
lot
of Grdoch, were entering the compound now at the gate in the east.