by Douglas, Ian
As the lights faded, Koenig switched back to a north-rim camera view. “What the hell?”
“Radiation analyses suggest that the Confederation forces are using AM counterbattery fire,” Konstantin told him.
Antimatter, magnetically suspended within a shell fired either by railgun or small-caliber missile. When the warshot slammed into normal matter, the magnetic suspension failed, and the antimatter came into contact with its opposite, liberating a small nuke’s worth of heat, light, and hard gamma radiation.
Koenig opened his channel to Whitney. “Marcus? The bastards are using AM on our Marines.”
“That’s against international law! Do you want me to send a formal protest to Geneva, sir?”
“Negative. But I want this transmission beamed real time to the Joint Chiefs, every department head and staff AI in the Hexagon, and to every news feed that will accept it. As of right now, we are at war.”
Marine Perimeter
Tsiolkovsky Crater North Rim, Lunar Farside
0849 hours, EST
“You okay, LT?” Ames sounded worried.
“I’m fine,” she replied. Swiftly, she checked through her suit systems. She was fine . . . though the shockwave had given her a nasty tumble across the rocks. “A little singed. What the hell hit us?”
“Antimatter warheads,” was Ames’s grim reply. “I think those bastards mean business.”
“Let’s show them we mean business too.”
“Aye, aye, sir! Platoon! Stand ready for a second round!”
She checked the platoon feed, wondering how bad it was. Three names had gone black—Blakeslee, Matloff, and Wood—dead or their comm equipment had been fried.
But her sensor net was showing six of the Confed behemoths out there had been killed as well. That didn’t necessarily mean that almost a third of the enemy troops were out of action as well, of course. Battlespace drones were showing a lot of movement out there . . . probably battlesuited troops who’d bailed out of crippled personnel carriers.
But it was a start.
“You ready to jump, Lieutenant?” Salvatore asked her. She and Duncan had set up their kinetic-kill semi-recoilless once again, and were targeting another dust cloud on the far northern horizon.
Modern ground combat resembled a kind of macabre dance, with small fireteams armed with heavy firepower firing at enemy targets many kilometers away, then moving—fast—to avoid the inevitable incoming storm of CBF. Antimatter. Shit. The only thing worse would have been pocket nukes . . . and Burnham didn’t think the sons of bitches were that crazy.
“Ready,” she said. “Fire when you’ve acquired your target.”
“Fire in the hole!”
She jumped, and again the sky exploded around her in silent white light.
Executive Office, USNA
Columbus, District of Columbia
United States of North America
0850 hours, EST
Koenig continued to watch the battle as it unfolded, feeling mildly guilty that he was doing it from the safety of the Executive Tower, 380-some thousand kilometers away.
Not that he imagined himself safe, by any means. If Geneva was desperate enough to use AM warheads at Tsiolkovsky, there was a possibility that they could launch a general attack on the USNA. It was unlikely; reducing North America plus a fair percentage of Europe and Asia to rubble served no one’s interests.
His advisors had already recommended that he leave the city as a precaution, but the Executive Office—though its viewall usually showed the view over the Freedom Concourse from eighty stories up—was actually buried well beneath the main building, nearly half a kilometer beneath the streets of Columbus. If he wasn’t safe here, he wasn’t safe, period . . . and maybe that would atone in some small part for watching men and women die while carrying out his orders a quarter of a million miles away.
So far, there was no sign that the Confederation was planning anything other than the base grab at Tsiolkovsky. The timing of the attack, however, was illuminating.
Koenig was tempted to wonder whether the fleet deployment to 36 Ophiuchi had been planned solely for the purpose of getting the USNA fleet out of the way. There were no capital warships available at all closer than Chiron, four and a half lights away, and only a handful of USNA fighter squadrons in-system. There were some USNA ships on High Guard, of course, but they were a good five hours away in the outer system.
He’d already given orders to the 516th Fighter Wing on Mars to get to Luna as quickly as possible. They were scrambling now, but Mars was currently twenty light minutes away and on the far side of the sun. It would be a couple of hours before they could reach Tsiolkovsky. He’d also ordered several reserve wings called up here on Earth, besides the ones out of Oceana, but it would be hours before they would be in the air.
The worst of it all, though, was the gnawing possibility of some kind of double-cross—the idea that Geneva had planned an outright attack on the carrier battlegroup almost twenty light years from Earth. He wanted to warn Steiger . . . but how? While Koenig could watch events on the moon unfold with only a bit more than a second’s time-lag delay, there was no way to learn what was happening at 36 Ophiuchus in less than twenty-five hours, the minimum time for a passage at maximum Alcubierre warp.
Well . . . no. That wasn’t entirely true, was it? A robotic HVK-724 high-velocity scout-courier could do considerably better, with a top Alcubierre speed of something like 360 light years in a day . . . or just over fifteen lights per hour. The problem was that HVK-724s required a lot of prep time and there weren’t many of them in the USNA inventory. Worse, it would be a five-hour flight, minimum, to get one out to the outer solar system, where there would be a flat-enough metric to allow it to transition to FTL.
But it would be worth it to send a robot out to 36 Oph with an encrypted warning to let Admiral Steiger know what was going down back home.
Koenig checked his inner clock. According to the plan, the battlegroup would have emerged at 36 Oph A about an hour ago. By now, they would be well along on the acceleration in to Arianrhod.
Koenig opened a channel to the USNA naval base at Mars. They ought to have an HVK-724. How long would it take to get one ready to boost?
And could it get to 36 Ophiuchi in time to make any difference at all?
Lieutenant Donald Gregory
VFA-96, Black Demons
36 Ophiuchi A System
0851 hours, TFT
They’d reach 0.97 c and, operating according to standard ops procedures, cut their drives in unison. The combined fleet—along with the fighters flying CAP—hurtled starward through the misshapen sky.
“CAP One, CIC.” Static blasted over and through the terse words from America’s Combat Information Center.
“Go ahead, CIC,” Mackey’s voice answered.
“Orders from CO-Big. You are out of position. Adjust your vector to return to Delta-one-five starboard, immediately.”
“CIC, Demons, wait one.”
Shit. They’d been caught. CO-Big was fighter slang for “Commanding Officer Battlegroup,” in this case, Delattre himself, or someone on his staff.
“I don’t know, Commander,” Gregory said over the squadron’s tactical channel. “I think we’re getting some bent-space interference, here.”
Both the fleet and the accompanying fighter CAP had been accelerating at ten thousand gravities for the past fifty minutes, and were now traveling at a hairbreadth less than the speed of light. Relativity—the bizarre distortions of space and time predicted by Einstein five centuries before—had taken hold some minutes ago. From the point of view of each ship in the squadron, the entire sky seemed to be crowding forward into a hazy mass of stars encircling the bow, and with a vast, empty blackness everywhere else.
Since fighters and fleet were both accelerating at the same rate, relativistic disto
rtions to the communications links between them were minimal still, but local space was also severely distorted by each fighter’s drive singularity, which put a dimple into spacetime just ahead of each Starhawk large enough to swallow the entire ship. The static of laser comm links through distorted space made voice communications increasingly difficult.
America’s orders had been clear enough so far, but Gregory’s suggestion, intended lightly, wasn’t completely out of the blue. It wouldn’t be the first time a commanding officer had claimed communications difficulties in order to ignore orders he felt were unwise, or worse.
There was a long hesitation, and then Mackey said, “By the book, ladies and gentlemen. Adjust acceleration by minus two hundred Gs to let America close with us.”
Gregory started to say something, then thought better of it.
After all, there wasn’t much they could do about it, one way or the other.
TC/USNA CVS America
In transit
36 Ophiuchi A System
0852 hours, TFT
Gray was fuming, helplessly furious. Someone on Admiral Delattre’s staff had spotted Mackey’s squadron pulling ahead and to port—obviously with the intent of screening the carrier from Tango One. The order had come from Delattre himself. Get those fighters back in formation, close abeam of the ship!
The order was emblematic of a basic difference in space combat tactics as interpreted by the Confederation and by the more daring fleet commanders of some of the Confederation’s member states. The book said in no uncertain terms: keep your force together and intact, with each fleet element positioned to give support to all other elements. That included the tactical fighter squadrons flying CAP, as well as the various support vessels in the fleet, the destroyers, gunships, and light cruisers.
Official tactics, both within the Confederation at large and within the USNA Star Navy, tended to abide by this rule, and for an excellent reason. In the vast and empty depths of planetary space, with ships moving on various vectors at high speeds and under brutal accelerations, it was far too easy for a fleet to become scattered. Once scattered, individual ships could easily be attacked by small groups of fighters or by hunter-killer packs of light capital ships, and their defenses overwhelmed.
But some commanders were more relaxed than others in exactly how they read the book. Koenig had been one such; he’d been notorious, in fact, for bending rules and regs. People under his command held that the only reason he’d not been court-martialed during his tenure as CO-CBG was because his tactics had been so successful. And Gray had tried to emulate him.
Both men were long-time students of history, including the history of naval warfare going back to long before humans had taken their wars into space. Some six hundred years earlier, during the Age of Sail, naval military doctrine had decreed that ships should adhere to the so-called Fighting Instructions, and with a similar reasoning. Ships had been expected to proceed in strict line-ahead formation to present massed broadsides to the enemy, and to avoid being surrounded. Admiral Horatio Nelson had ended the age of the Fighting Instructions when he’d broken the rules—and the Franco-Spanish line at Trafalgar.
While Gray didn’t consider himself to be a Nelson, he did wonder why modern tacticians seemingly remained blind to the one absolute of military planning: tactics must change with evolving technology.
History was filled with examples—disasters, blunders, and pigheaded shortsightedness of epic decisiveness. During the American Civil War, troops had continued to maneuver and advance in solid blocks of infantry, despite rifled muskets and massed artillery. In World War I, commanding officers had continued to order mass frontal attacks against machineguns and entrenched troop positions. In World War II, naval air power had ended the reign of seagoing armored battleships.
In the modern age, technology continued to advance with breathtaking speed and complexity, ever moving, ever unfolding into new and more intricate forms. Twenty years ago, the singularity drive on a capital ship like America could give her an acceleration of around five thousand gravities, which meant it took over an hour and a half to boost up to near-c. Improvements in the way the singularity-induced warping of space was projected and shaped around the ship meant they could manage ten thousand gravities today, and reach 99.7 percent c in about fifty minutes. Reducing the time required to get from the emergence point to the inner regions of the target star system had changed both the strategic and tactical pictures. Battles had become more fluid and more far-ranging, with higher ship speeds, and enemy vessels such as the dozen or so ships of Tango One had become more dangerous to a fleet’s deployment.
But that thinking, evidently, hadn’t percolated up to Geneva’s military high command yet . . . or been embraced by senior officers like Delattre and his staff.
Gray glanced up at the main screen wrapped around the forward half of the bridge. Fifty minutes after they’d begun accelerating, the fighters and the larger ships they were protecting had reached 0.997 c. Operating under linked navigational programs, the flickering drive singularities on all vessels, both the capital ships and the fighters on CAP, now switched off.
For some minutes, now, the universe outside had been transformed into strangeness.
Starbow.
They called it the Pohl Effect, after a pre-spaceflight writer who’d first described it. Physicists later had proven why the starbow could not exist . . . and were still arguing over why it appeared anyway in defiance of astrophysical law. A mathematical assessment of the shifting wavelengths of dopplered starlight showed that the colors visible inside each fighter’s cockpit shouldn’t change much, if at all.
The geometries of relativistic flight dictated that the entire sky be compressed forward by the physics of chromatic aberration—that was well understood. Also understood was the fact that wavelengths coming from stars up ahead would blue-shift far up the spectrum, while those coming from astern would red-shift into the far infrared. The light they were now seeing from the star ahead was 36 Ophiuchi A’s deep infrared radiation, normally invisible to human eyes, blue-shifted now to visibility.
But as the ships inched ever closer to the unattainable goal of c itself, the starlight seemed to smear and stretch, and as the individual light sources were further compressed into a near-solid ring of hazy light 60 degrees forward, the distortion seemed to act like a prism, with the ring becoming a gloriously colored band, deep violet at the inner edge around the black disk of emptiness directly ahead, deep red at the outer edge, fuzzing off into invisibility, where it trailed into the emptiness to either side and astern.
According to the physicists, the starbow shouldn’t be . . . but it was, ethereal, eerily beautiful, and mysterious.
America’s AI pinged him through his in-head link. A targeting square against the starbow ahead and to port flashed red, indicating a change to Tango One’s status. Relativistic distortions made it impossible for the human eye to track movement against velocity-smeared starlight, but the fighter’s AI was watching the mathematics of incoming radiation rather than the light-generated image of the distant Slan warships.
Gray checked the elapsed time on both clocks—objective and subjective, scowling. Time does fly, he thought, when you’re having fun.
It also flies when you’re traveling at close to the speed of light.
He needed the in-head link with the ship’s AI to untangle the relativistic effects, and to figure out what exactly was happening. The faster a ship traveled, the slower time ran, an effect called time dilation well-known from Einstein’s relativity equations. The first fifty minutes of acceleration—fifty minutes objective, as measured for an at-rest observer—had for Gregory felt like a bit more than thirty-seven minutes, with his time running slower and slower the faster he was moving. Now, cruising at 0.997 c, time passed at a rate of thirteen to one. That meant that a full minute for the outside universe passed for America and her crew in only
4.6 seconds. It was like everything in the rest of the universe was moving thirteen times faster than it ought to, and in combat that was a deadly handicap.
“Give me an estimate on their course,” he told the AI. “What are they up to?”
In his head, a new window opened, showing a three-dimensional schematic of the battlegroup’s course—a bundle of green lines growing through emptiness. Ahead, a blue cone showed all the possible paths for Tango One. The cone would narrow as more data was received and processed, but right now it looked like a time to intercept of nearly thirty minutes.
Tango One was suddenly—magically—in two places at once.
And the nearer of the two was less than 30 million kilometers away. . . .
Lieutenant Donald Gregory
VFA-96, Black Demons
36 Ophiuchi A System
0852 hours, TFT
From Gregory’s vantage point, Tango One appeared to have popped into existence only a hundred light seconds away, moving at very nearly the speed of light. He felt a terrible sinking feeling in his gut; the enemy spacecraft shouldn’t be that close yet—shouldn’t even be moving, not when they had only just seen the light from the Earth fleet moments before.
And yet . . . they were here. . . .
“Enemy spacecraft!” Mackey shouted over the tactical link. “Break port! Break! Break!”
With a thought, Gregory rolled his fighter left, his fighter responding to his mental command over the neural link. Twelve targets, spreading out . . . and the image he was seeing in his mind, he had to remind himself, was a minute and a half old.
Worse, far worse, a hundred seconds in objective time was only a hair more than seven seconds at this velocity.