B009NFP2OW EBOK

by Douglas, Ian

  They might as well have been on the far side of the galaxy, impossibly distant, utterly beyond reach.

  No matter. The ship’s AI was counting down the nanoseconds until emergence, the precise timing necessary to ensure that all of the vessels in the Confederation fleet came out of Alcubierre Drive within very roughly the same volume of space. There was always some scattering on emergence, of course, but it was important that the fleet lose as little time as possible forming up on the other side.

  “What do you think, Dean?” Gray asked. He was staring into the tank, a 3-D holofield projection based on the ops orders transmitted by Delattre moments after he’d come on board.

  Commander Dean Mallory was America’s chief tactical officer, the head of the Tactics Department, which planned operations with an eye to maximizing the battlegroup’s efficiency and getting the CBG’s individual ships to work together.

  “Precise and by the book, Captain,” Mallory replied. “Maybe a bit too by the book.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Emergence at forty AU,” Mallory said. “Fighter launch at E plus sixty seconds, deployment in standard wedge formation . . .”

  “Like you say, by the book.”

  “Yes, sir. And what if the Slan have read the book?”

  “That hardly seems likely.”

  “No, sir. But we don’t yet know their capabilities. And the ghost signals have me worried.”

  Ghost signals was the term used for the whispers and stray radio-frequency signals Naval Intelligence had been picking up on the outskirts of Earth’s solar system for the past few months. There’d been speculation that the Slan were deploying drones in Sol’s Kuiper Belt that would help them track ship movements in and out of the system.

  “So what do you recommend?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. I’d like to have some tactical flexibility worked into the deployment, though.”

  “I understand.” And he did. Gray had been thinking about this problem for some time, now, ever since they’d departed Quito Synchorbital, in fact. There was only one way to address the problem that he could see, and the decision would put his head on the chopping block if anything went wrong. “If we hold back . . . say . . . two squadrons of fighters . . . would that help?”

  “Maybe.” Mallory didn’t sound enthusiastic, however. “Two squadrons may not be enough to protect the ship . . . and four squadrons might not be enough for the main effort.”

  CVS America carried six squadrons of strike fighters—three of SG-101 Velociraptors, one of SG-112 Stardragons, and two of the older SG-92 Starhawks. The battle plan, as presented by Admiral Delattre, called for sending all six of those squadrons in ahead of the main fleet, accelerating to near-c and flashing through the targeted battlespace around 36 Ophiuchi AIII, smashing everything possible during the brief instants of their passage. Again, this was standard tactical doctrine with star carrier strike fighters; the high-speed pass would cause enough damage and confusion that the main fleet, arriving at a somewhat more sedate velocity hours later, would be in a position to mop up a shattered enemy while taking little in the way of return fire.

  That was the idea, at any rate. Generally, battlegroup commanders held back one or two fighter squadrons to provide close space support for the capital ships, just in case there was an unpleasant surprise. The limitations set by the speed of light meant that maneuvers by enemy ships at a distance wouldn’t be noticed right way. Forty astronomical units was five and a third light hours, a distance dictated by the need to enter or leave normal space in a reasonably “flat metric,” far enough from the local star that there was a minimum of gravitational interference. Any defending Slan ships close to Arianrhod wouldn’t notice that the Confederation fleet had arrived for some five hours and eighteen minutes after they’d actually emerged from metaspace. By the same token, though, there would be a speed-of-light delay before the incoming ships would be able to see what the defenders were doing in reply.

  Modern naval tactics all were predicated on these elements—emergence from Alcubierre Drive at least 40 AUs from the target system’s star, a high-velocity fighter strike, and a follow-up attack by the main fleet. Gray knew that this wasn’t the only way to do things, but current Confederation technology sharply limited the options.

  The biggest question always was about the enemy’s technological levels . . . about how far advanced the technology of any new and unknown species would be beyond that of Earth.

  Perhaps, Gray thought, Humankind owed the Sh’daar a debt of gratitude. They were why the various alien civilizations Earth had been fighting since 2367 were within a century or so of human technology, and not thousands of years ahead . . . or millions. Their fear of the Technological Singularity seemed to be behind the limits they put on the technologies developed by their client species. The ultimatum they’d delivered fifty-seven years earlier had required Humankind to curtail all the so-called “GRIN” technologies—genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology. For centuries, now, these had been seen as the driving force behind the coming Singularity. Confederation Intelligence assumed that the Sh’daar were attempting to stop other technic species from entering their respective Singularities and evolving into . . . something else.

  Stargods . . .

  As a result, Sh’daar client species tended to be somewhat in advance of human technology—especially military technology—but not so far ahead that they possessed an impossible advantage in combat. Their weapons systems were similar to human weapons—with an emphasis on particle beams and kinetic-kill projectiles. Human forces at least had a chance against the Turusch, the Slan, and all the rest, even if they were usually badly outnumbered.

  Sometimes, Gray thought, it felt like Humankind stood completely alone against a hostile galaxy.

  Slan warship

  Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

  2015 hours, TFT

  Lieutenant Megan Connor stumbled as the monster dragged her away from the broken shell of her fighter. She had a blurred impression of something large holding her, but at first her brain wasn’t able to assemble a coherent picture. Brown, purple, and wet were all she could see. Her surroundings were . . . dark. Utterly and completely dark.

  She was completely disoriented, exhausted, and weak, so weak she could scarcely stand in what her suit told her was a 1.9 G gravity field. She’d been trapped inside her dead Stardragon for four days, at least according to her in-head timekeeper. Her suit’s nanorecyclers had kept her fed and hydrated, but her e-links to the ship’s sensors and onboard AI carried nothing but static. She’d been unable to move or see as hour followed empty, dragging hour.

  She’d maintained a wavering grip on her sanity by running docuinteractives stored in her cerebral implant memory. There were several propaganda pieces of the “Why We Fight” variety; she’d saved them in her CIM because they included quite a bit of information on various Sh’daar client species, especially the Turusch, the Nungies, and the weird, drifting H’rulka. Unfortunately, there was nothing on the Slan, a species that she’d heard of, but never seen in person.

  There was also a rather simplistic role-playing game, a fantasy with an epic quest to complete, hideous monsters to slay, and a kingdom’s throne to win. She hadn’t liked the hideous monster part, because there was every possibility that she was going to encounter real monsters if the Slan detected her disabled fighter.

  They had. She’d felt the bumps and slight acceleration as something big had grappled with her ship. A probe with a nano-D tip had penetrated her cockpit, evidently sampling the internal atmosphere and environmental conditions. There’d been a long wait after that . . . several hours. With the ship’s nanomatrix hull no longer responding to her thoughts, she couldn’t get at the fighter’s emergency survival pack behind her seat, which included a small hand-laser weapon.

  And if she had gotten her hand on the laser . . . what
then? She wouldn’t be able to fight them off.

  Maybe she could take her own life.

  She wasn’t ready—quite—to consider that option.

  And then the Dragon’s cockpit had ripped open fore and aft at the touch of a brilliant light, and she thought at first that her bubble helmet had turned opaque in response. It took a moment for her to realize that the darkness wasn’t in her helmet’s polarizing circuitry, but in the room itself. Something dragged her through the opening; her feet found the deck, but her legs gave way and she crumpled. She could feel heavy ropes encircling her arms and legs, lifting her.

  Her skin suit utilities had a powerful lightpanel at her throat, just below her helmet. She triggered it with a thoughtclick.

  Somehow, she managed not to scream. . . .

  That was when she got her confused impression of brown and purple, and it took a moment more for the thing’s actual shape to begin making sense. A two-headed monster . . .

  The body was squat and round with a hump in the center, with skin like wrinkled rubber. It appeared to slide along the deck on its belly, and was surrounded by a writhing mass of tentacles ranging from hair-thin to as thick as a man’s leg. Whether it was gliding on its stomach, moving along on a layer of tentacles, or in fact had very short legs hidden by the squat body, she couldn’t tell. The heads were large, blunt, and cone-shaped, attached to the base of the central hump by a pair of 2-meter necks, rubbery and bonelessly flexible. She assumed they were heads and necks. She didn’t see any eyes or mouths or anything else she recognized as a sense organ. No . . . wait. On either side of the body were thin, membranous flaps of tissue that could open, twist, or lie flat. At first, she thought they might be involved in the creature’s breathing, but the more she watched them, the more she thought that they might be external ears, capturing and focusing faint sounds.

  Connor tried to concentrate on her environment. She would need to know about it if she was to survive for very long. Her skin suit was feeding readouts to her in-head display. The outside temperature was hot—55 degrees Celsius—and the humidity was 100 percent. The air, in fact, appeared to be filled with a mist that captured the light from her suit and turned her surroundings into a thick, white haze. Her transparent helmet was by now covered with droplets of water, as were the glistening bodies of the massive beings around her.

  The atmosphere, she noted, was high in oxygen compared to the air of Earth—28 percent—and the carbon dioxide was high—over 5 percent—with enough ammonia, methane, and hydrogen sulfide that she didn’t want to have to try the air without a respirator. The pressure was high, too, about five times that of sea level on Earth, a thick, hot, and poisonous soup.

  Interesting. The pressure was close to that of Arianrhod at the surface, the gas mix was roughly similar, if different in its component percentages, the gravity felt similar, and even the temperature was only a bit higher than Arianrhod’s upper extremes at the equator. The Slan environment was a lot closer to Arianrhod’s than it was to Earth’s. Was that why they were here? A land grab?

  The Slan, she thought, were likely as curious about her as she was about them.

  She just hoped that they didn’t plan to peel her out of her skin suit just to see if she could breathe the air.

  Chapter Eight

  11 November 2424

  Slan Protector Vigilant

  Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

  2029 hours, TFT

  Clear Chiming Bell didn’t quite know what to make of the alien. How could it possibly see?

  Held upright by a Slan soldier, it tottered into the control chamber on two stumpy, awkwardly stiff tentacles, and gave the impression of being constantly about to fall over. It had two more tentacles on the upper end of its body which branched at the ends; curiously, these protrusions appeared to be stiff and jointed as well. The creature must be nearly crippled in its lack of dexterity.

  The upper end of the being was a perfectly round, smooth, and sonically opaque ball perhaps two k’k’t!! across which was almost certainly artificial, though it might have been some sort of natural shell. Clear Chiming Bell increased the frequency of its sonar scans, and managed to get a vague image of an interior air space, within which a smaller, roughly spherical organ rested. At first, Clear Chiming Bell thought that this might be the creature’s sound projector, its !k’ch’t’t organ, but there was no sound coming from it—nothing coherent and focused, at any rate—and with only a single projector it would be unable to see in three dimensions. Unless, perhaps, it could judge distances through minute time delays in its echolocation? That was possible but seemed far-fetched, and it would really work only for fairly distant objects.

  Clear Chiming Bell turned its sonar to focus on and into the rest of the creature’s body. It appeared to be wearing some sort of fabric, apparently nanotechnically grown, with various devices wired into it, all clearly artificial. Beneath that, the creature had a smooth integument . . . though even here there were signs of some sort of bioengineering . . . minute wires and patches of circuitry grown in or beneath that extraordinarily thin and smooth skin. Deeper still, Clear Chiming Bell could see internal organs and cavities—a rapidly pulsing muscle that might circulate bodily fluids; two spongy masses to either side that appeared to be porous and full of air; a kind of twisting, close-folded tube that was probably associated with digestion; and lots of other organs of unknown purpose. The brain was probably that . . . a large and massive organ tucked into the right side of the body halfway down, partially enfolding and covering the muscular organ that most likely was a stomach.

  After a long inspection, Clear Chiming Bell finally decided that the sound-producing organs were the twin globes of fatty tissue protruding somewhat from the creature’s upper body, just to either side of the pulsing circulation pump inside. They were roughly spherical, somewhat flattened, but cone-shaped enough to be analogous to Slan !k’ch’t’t, and tipped by small, rough-skinned patches with central protuberances that might serve to focus sound beams. They did not appear to be as mobile as Slan projectors, however, attached as they were to the creature’s torso instead of being mounted on slender, twisting necks. Indeed, Clear Chiming Bell didn’t see how the creature could aim them with any accuracy at all. In fact, if the roughened patches of skin at the tips were any indication, the creature wasn’t even aiming them in the same direction.

  And while Clear Chiming Bell could hear the thump of the creature’s fluid pump, and a periodic rasp that might be respiration, it heard neither the squealing and rapidly pulsing chirps of scanning sonar, or the squeaks, buzzes, and clicks that might be speech. How did the creature communicate?

  And above all, how did it see its surroundings?

  “Have you tried to communicate with it?” Clear Chiming Bell asked the soldier holding it by its upper tentacles. The creature writhed and twisted in the Slan’s grasp, and appeared to be in discomfort.

  “It does not respond to speech at all, Lord,” the soldier replied. “We have picked up radio frequency transmissions, however, though these appear to be generated by artificial means, not by the creature’s organic substance. The transmissions do not appear to convey information, however.”

  “We may simply not understand the code.” Clear Chiming Bell considered the creature a moment longer. “That covering it wears is clearly artificial, probably grown as a nanotechnic matrix. Likely it is an environmental suit, and therefore self-sealing. Take it to the medical labs and get a sample. We need to know the thing’s environmental and metabolic needs.” Clear Chiming Bell reached out with a pair of medium tentacles and touched what it suspected were the strange being’s sound projectors, eliciting a sharp, violent struggle as the thing tried to pull away. Interesting. “I suspect that these swellings are its !k’ch’t’t,” it said. “They consist of fatty tissue much like our own sonic projectors. Monitor them closely, for signs that it is trying to image its environment.” />
  “Yes, Lord.”

  “Tell the lab-Dwellers in Night that we must understand this being’s biological makeup and environmental needs if we are to learn anything about this alien species.”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  Knowing that the aliens were Trafhyedrefschladreh was not enough. Not by far. A species could use oxygen to metabolize foods and water as a transport medium and solvent, and still be impossibly alien both in their biochemistry and in the way they perceived the universe. The Slan must learn how these aliens thought, what drove them, what brought them into deep space to colonize worlds to which they clearly were not adapted.

  Clear Chiming Bell dismissed the soldier, which glided out of the chamber, its struggling captive in tow.

  Another oddity, it noted. Slan were radially symmetrical, while the alien appeared to be bilaterally symmetrical, a right side mirrored by a left side. If those two prominent swellings were what Clear Chiming Bell thought they were, the creature must have a preferred front end, a side toward which it always moved, and its paired !k’ch’t’t would indicate that directionality.

  It didn’t appear to like being dragged backward.

  A very strange concept. Alien . . .

  Clear Chiming Bell gave the equivalent of a shrug—a deliberate rippling of the finer tentacles all the way around its circumference—and returned to the more pressing issues at hand. The alien fleet, it knew, would be here soon . . . possibly within just a few more t’k’k’k’cht’t, and it intended to be ready for their arrival.

  12 November 2424

  TC/USNA CVS America