by Ian Douglas
Damned few enemy ships had survived that encounter.
Was using nano-D any less moral or ethical than throwing near-c sand at someone?
She doubted very much that Gray would have seen much of a difference there.
“Okay,” she said. “Load the first two nano-D rounds, spinal mount,” she said. “CAG! Tell our people out there what’s happening and make sure they get the hell out of the way!”
“Yes, Captain.”
According to the most recent set of regulations, ship captains were supposed to get permission from higher military authority to launch nano-D weaponry. There was a loophole, though. Sometimes, the speed-of-light time lag was just too long to make checking in with headquarters possible.
But . . . heaven help you if you were wrong.
“Okay. How far is the objective from Earth?”
“It’s currently crossing the orbit of Jupiter, Captain,” the helm officer reported. “But at an oblique angle. Call it eight light-minutes.”
Too far, in other words, for her to ask permission.
She took a deep breath. “Notify Earth of my intent to launch nanotechnic disassembler warheads at the target once the tactical situation is clear.”
It would have to be a case of shooting first and asking permission later. But such was the nature of deep-space combat.
Chapter Five
1 February 2426
New White House
Washington, D.C.
2045 hours, EST
“She’s going to what?”
President Koenig wasn’t angry so much as startled. Sara Gutierrez, so far as he’d known the woman through reports and after-action briefs and discussions with Trevor Gray, had always struck him as a cautious and somewhat conservative ship commander. She was a consummate professional, meticulous and very good at what she did.
Unlike Gray, she wasn’t one for dramatic gestures or surprises. Certainly, he’d never expected her to be the sort to unleash nanotechnic hell on the enemy.
“The report gives no details, Mr. President,” Marcus Whitney, Koenig’s White House chief of staff, said. “Captain Gutierrez simply said she would use the weapons once the tactical situation had cleared.”
Koenig knew all too well where Gutierrez was coming from. He’d been there himself more than once a couple of decades ago when he’d commanded the America battlegroup. A ship captain observing a battle light-seconds or even light-minutes away in fact was looking into the past. The tactical situation could be “cleared” only by getting closer . . . and receiving more up-to-the-moment intelligence.
Of course, the problem was even worse for would-be micromanagers watching from almost a full light-hour away. Gutierrez likely had already moved in close and launched her deadly attack . . . or she was about to, and there was no way that Koenig or his staff back on Earth could deliver up-to-the-second orders or advice. The fog of war had always been a problem for commanders on the battlefield; that murk became impenetrable when you added the dimension of time, and the difficulties created by communications limited by the speed of light.
“We have other warships across the solar system,” Admiral Armitage told him. “The Essex, the New York, and the Kauffman are leaving SupraQuito now, along with their support groups. Varyag, Putin, San Francisco, and Champlain have just left Mars orbit. Komet will be pulling out of Ceres in another ten minutes. We’ve sent emergency recalls to eighteen vessels on High Guard patrol, out at Neptune orbit . . .”
“Bottom line,” Koenig said, waving a hand in curt dismissal. “How long before we can set up an effective defensive line between Earth and those . . . things?”
“The defensive line will take several hours to establish, Mr. President. The first ships—a Pan-European carrier group transiting from Jupiter to Earth—should join the America within the next twenty minutes. In another two hours, we may be able to muster another fifteen vessels.”
“Our time or theirs?” Koenig thoughtclicked an in-head icon, bringing up a 3-D display filling a quarter of the Oval Office with translucent, glowing images. There were dozens of military vessels scattered across the solar system, from the Mercury power facilities tucked in close to the sun to High Guard patrols scattered through the Kuiper Belt, maintaining a watch against infalling comets. America and a red icon marking the alien intruders hung near Jupiter’s orbit, though that gas giant was currently on the other side of the sun.
The problem, as always, was that Sol System was so freaking big. Even with near-c velocities and high-G accelerations, it would take time, far too much time, to assemble them all in one place.
“The task force will join America at 1805 hours, fleet time,” Armitage told him.
“So, basically,” Koenig said slowly, “it’s up to America to hold the Rosetters where they are until the others get there.”
“Yes, sir.”
Koenig shook his head slowly. “God help us all.” He glanced at Whitney. “Anything from Tsiolkovsky?”
The chief of staff shook his head. “Nothing good, Mr. President. I talked to Dr. Lawrence on the AI Center staff. They say there’s no response from the system. It’s like Konstantin isn’t in there at all.”
“That makes no sense,” Armitage said. “Where would it go?”
“Konstantin must have created a bolt-hole for himself,” Koenig said. “The Rosetters appeared to be . . . feeding, for lack of a better word, on the digital uploads of the various Sh’daar beings out at Kapteyn’s Star, and that would include their AIs operating inside their virtual reality. Konstantin must have had an escape hatch in case the Rosetters came here. And he’s smart enough that we’re not going to find it.”
“So it’s hiding from the Rosetters, you think, sir?”
“Almost certainly. Let’s just hope they can’t find that hiding place either.”
Bridge
TC/USNA CVS America
Outer Asteroid Belt
2053 hours, TFT
Captain Gutierrez studied the inflow of data with grim determination. “How much longer before Task Force Ritter gets here?”
“They’re within extended launch range now, Captain,” Commander Mallory told her. She could see the computer graphics unfolding within an in-head window—the advancing wall of red light marking the Consciousness microcraft, the tiny knot of oncoming human ships, the retreating clusters of fighters. “Twelve minutes . . .”
“Sensors!”
“Yes, Captain!”
“How big is that thing? How massive?”
“The cloud is roughly half an astronomical unit across, Captain,” Lieutenant Scahill replied. “Mass . . . it’s tough to tell when it’s that diffuse, but I’m guessing something on the order of two times ten to the thirty grams.”
“That’s as big as Jupiter!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
And how the hell did you fight something as massive as the gas giant Jupiter?
Gutierrez shifted her attention back to the fighter screen, and to the teeming swarm of microcraft beyond. She was juggling a number of variables—maintaining distance from the leading edge of the cloud but moving slowly enough away from that cloud that the fighters could catch up. The fighters, too, were engaged in a kind of complex three-dimensional dance, continuing to fire nuclear warheads in front of the cloud, causing it to slow, to spread out, to break into separate masses, while staying ahead of the swarm and closing with the carrier. One squadron, VFA-190, the Ghost Riders, had already caught up with America and was currently recovering back aboard.
Despite her message to Earth, Gutierrez had not yet loosed the one ace she had hidden up her sleeve. Once she began firing nano-D at the approaching alien cloud, that region of space would become deadly for America’s fighters, and she wanted to get her people back on board before initiating the new tactics.
It seemed more and more likely, however, that she was not going to have the chance. America’s sensors were already picking up incoming fireflies slipping past the carrier’s outer h
ull. They didn’t appear to be doing any damage; they weren’t disassembling America’s hull or otherwise posing an immediate threat to the ship.
But they were proof that the human defensive force was losing the race.
Another fighter, a Black Knight with VFA-215, flared into an incandescent blossom.
“Weapons officer!” Gutierrez ordered. “Ready two disassembler rounds for immediate railgun launch!”
“First two rounds are loaded and ready,” Commander Kevin Daly, America’s new weapons officer, replied. “At your command. . . .”
“Target inside that cloud. Have them detonate at least half a million kilometers beyond the farthest Starblade.”
“Aye, aye, Captain. We’re locked and loaded.”
“Fire!”
The star carrier mounted two magnetic-launch railguns running most of the length of the kilometer-long vessel’s slender spine, emerging in side-by-side ports at the center of the broad, massive shield cap forming the vessel’s prow. The ports opened . . . and two one-ton projectiles hurtled into space, accelerated in an instant to nearly 1 percent of the speed of light.
Recoil nudged the immense carrier . . . hard. Gutierrez’s seat jerked back, yanking her along. “Helm! Compensate!”
“Got it, ma’am . . .”
“Reload!”
“Reloading!”
“CAG! Pass the word to our fighters to lay down everything they have left around the periphery of that cloud.”
“Captain? . . .”
“I want to force it to move through the center.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
“Weapons!”
“Weapons, aye.”
“Mr. Daly! Hold your fire. In a few minutes I expect that cloud to begin contracting toward its center. When it does, I want you to slam as many nano-D warheads into that center as you can!”
“Aye, aye, Captain!”
She leaned forward, staring into the CGI panorama ahead. She could see white points of light moving swiftly out from the fighters, warheads swinging out and to the sides. Blinding flashes marked the detonations, and, sure enough, the cloud began to contract. Thermonuclear blasts were ravaging the outer edges of the alien swarm, and the individual microcraft responded by moving toward the center.
“Very well, Mr. Daly. Fire! And continue firing!”
“Firing. . . .”
Two more warheads packed with nanotech disassemblers slammed out of America’s bow. And two more . . . and two more . . .
VFA-211, Headhunters
Outer Asteroid Belt
2059 hours, TFT
Meier and the rest of the Headhunters—those who were left, at any rate—continued to fall back toward the America, now just ten thousand kilometers distant. The Ghost Riders had already been taken aboard. The Black Knights were retreating alongside the Headhunters, all semblance of an ordered flight formation lost in the melee in front of the alien cloud.
He triggered his last pair of Kraits, sending them streaking into darkness. The order had come through from CIC moments before to fire all remaining missiles at the cloud’s perimeter, and Meier was doing so, though so far he’d seen little sign that the target was even aware of the barrage.
All he had left were his six Boomslangs.
He thoughtclicked a mental icon, triggering the release of his last missiles, sending them well out to one side of the cloud before looping them in for the kill. Kraits could be dialed up to a hundred megatons or so. VG-120 Boomslangs used focused bursts of vacuum energy to amplify the detonation to the equivalent of as much as a thousand megatons of high explosives. Generally, they were reserved for planetary or asteroid fortifications or extremely large and hardened military emplacements. The fireball flash of a VG-120 was eight kilometers across.
That, he thought with a grim finality, ought to get that swarm’s attention!
And that was it. His missile magazines were dry. He still had particle beams and a high-speed Gatling that fired depleted uranium, but those were popguns in the face of that incoming swarm.
It was definitely time to head back to the barn.
The Consciousness
Outer Sol System
2059 hours, TFT
In a sense, the Consciousness was carefully feeling its way into this star system, unsure of what was here. It was awash in data. Literally billions of sensations flooded through its laser-sharp awareness second by second, sensory input carrying gigabits of information about the density of the local interplanetary medium, about temperature, about the local gravitational matrix, about radiation, light, and magnetic moment. It sensed the eternal dance of vibrating hydrogen atoms and the wrack of lifeless, drifting dust charged with searing radiation; the sharp pulse of thermonuclear detonations; the shrill keening of hundreds of millions of radio frequencies, some heterodyned with encoded meaning, most of it empty noise.
It sensed spacecraft, it sensed the minute and insignificant flickers of warmth and electrical activity that were organic beings, it sensed the far faster and more information-rich pulses of electronic intelligences.
Local space was, for the Rosette Consciousness, a kind of maze, with flares of hard radiation appearing and dissipating in seemingly random patterns ahead of it. Each flash of heat and light annihilated some hundreds of millions of the microcraft making up the entity’s physical form, but there were tens of trillions of the craft linked into its network, and the loss of a thousandth of 1 percent of the machines was trivial, a minor ablation to be expected as it moved through the relatively dense space of a typical star system such as this. The Consciousness allowed itself to flow in those directions that offered the least resistance. An opening appeared in the radiation storms . . . there. . . .
It sensed two spacecrafts, guided by simple-minded electronics, piercing the outer reaches of its diffuse body.
Then, shockingly . . . horrifically . . . the Consciousness sensed something, a dizzying sense of loss and diminution, something that just possibly might be described as pain.
TC/USNA CVS America
Outer Asteroid Belt
2059 hours, TFT
“Captain!” the weapons officer called from his station in CIC. “The swarm is reacting!”
“I see it, Commander.”
Gutierrez watched, fascinated, as the swarm, painted in red both on her main screen and in the open window within her mind, sharply contracted and began folding back within itself. There could be little doubt that it was reacting to the nanotechnic disassemblers fired into its heart. The only question was . . . would they be enough?
The cloud’s forward advance had stopped, at least for the moment. “CAG!” she called. “Now’s our chance. Bring our people back on board.”
“The Headhunters are recovering now, Captain. We’ll have everyone back on board in . . . call it ten minutes.”
Gutierrez checked other data feeds and noted that Task Force Ritter was now just six minutes away. They had fighters out, now, coming in well in advance of the light carrier Wotan. Missile trails reached out from the Pan-Euro fighters, probing the alien cloud.
The cloud seemed to be reacting less to the fresh barrage of missiles than it was to the steady drumbeat of nano-D searing into its central core. It was flowing backward now, as though trying to escape the burning touch of the nanodisassemblers, and seemed to be compacting itself.
A sphere. It was collapsing down into a smooth, black sphere. . . .
“What the hell is happening to that thing?” Gutierrez asked.
“We’ve seen this sort of technology before, Captain,” Lydia Powell said. Powell was the new head of America’s xenosophontology department, replacing Dr. Truitt. “At the Rosette, in Omega Centauri . . . at Kapteyn’s Star. Those micromachines can join together in millions of different ways.”
“Right now,” Gutierrez said, “they appear to be making a planet the size of Jupiter.”
“A J-brain, Captain . . .”
“What’s that?”
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�A jovian world made of solid computronium. It would possess an artificial mentality of staggering power.”
“What would such a thing be for?”
“I doubt humans would be able to grasp the reasoning of minds that powerful, Captain,” Powell told her.
“I just want to know why it’s quietly turning itself into a planet,” Gutierrez said. “We already know it was intelligent, a super-AI of some sort. Why change from a cloud half an AU across to that?”
“Power, Captain,” Mallory said from CIC. “As a diffuse cloud, each distinct unit was producing its own power . . . probably from the local magnetic field. As a single sphere one hundred forty thousand kilometers across, it could assemble internal structures to draw vacuum energy.”
“It could build some pretty hellacious weapons, too,” Gutierrez said. As she watched the forming sphere ahead, she felt a deep stirring of fear mingled with awe. “Helm . . . let’s increase our separation from that thing.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“Message coming through from the Pan-Euros,” the bridge communications officer reported. “Admiral Ritter . . . for you.”
“What’s our c-lag?”
“Five seconds, Captain. Two-way.”
“Put him on.”
She counted down the time lapse as a laser-com beam raced out from America . . . with another delay as the reply lanced back.
“Captain Gutierrez,” a voice said in her head at last, cultured and slightly accented. “I’m Admiral Jan Ritter, on board the carrier Wotan. What is the tactical situation?”
“Hello, Admiral. Captain Gutierrez of the star carrier America. Here’s an update.” Gutierrez transmitted the bridge log recordings for the previous forty minutes. “We have not been able to more than distract that thing,” she added. “Our fighters have expended their weapons and are now recovering back on board. We are continuing to fire high-velocity nano-D canisters into the object. We are not yet sure if this is having any direct effect.”