B009NFP2OW EBOK

by Douglas, Ian

  And everything was happening at once. . . .

  Chapter Eleven

  12 November 2424

  TC/USNA CVS America

  In transit

  36 Ophiuchi A System

  0853 hours, TFT

  “Bring all weapons on-line,” Gray ordered. “Secure all pressure bulkheads.”

  How . . . how? There was no way the enemy ships could have made the transit from the point at which they’d been lurking off to one side of the Confederation fleet’s line of flight to here, where they could actually attack . . . not unless they were able to engage in tactical faster-than-light travel. The fact that America’s sensors were now showing Tango One to be in two places at once argued that this was, in fact, exactly what was happening.

  Using Alcubierre Drive to travel faster than light between star systems was what was known as strategic FTL. Tactical FTL, also known as microjumps, was something else entirely. Human technology couldn’t do it, and if the Slan had it, it meant trouble. Both faster-than-light Alcubierre Drive and the singularity drive used for intra-system travel and maneuvering worked by using projected gravitational fields, carefully shaped to avoid tidal effects, to sharply bend space. Alcubierre Drive, however, bent local space so sharply that the ship to all intents and purposes dropped out of the universe altogether, into a spacetime bubble of what was glibly called metaspace. The effect was unpredictable, however, when used too close to major natural gravitational effects—the gravity field of a sun, for instance. That was why—depending upon the mass of the local star—incoming starships switched off their Alcubierre Drives and emerged within the target system at some tens of AUs out from the star.

  But there was a far more basic reason that ships didn’t zip at faster-than-light speeds from, say, Earth to Mars in an instant. When a ship was wrapped up in its Alcubierre bubble, it was impossible to see outside . . . and precise navigation became a nightmare. Ship AIs could predict the locations of planets and moons across distances of a light second or more with a high degree of accuracy, but if the time delay inherent in the speed of light was too great, predicting the positions of star ships, fighters, and orbital facilities or bases with the requisite accuracy became all but impossible. If the navigational and control systems on those Tango One ships had been off by even a few nanoseconds, they might have emerged within the Confederation fleet—a disaster for both sides—or they might have emerged too far from the fleet to do anything at all except play a game of catch-up with the advantage of surprise lost.

  And yet, somehow, Tango One had moved within minutes of the light from the Confederation fleet’s emergence reaching them, apparently dropping into their version of Alcubierre Drive and jumping to within two light minutes of the fleet in an instant. It could be chance . . . but in the middle of so much emptiness, Gray didn’t believe in chance. The only alternative was that the Slan had a significant technological advantage over Humankind, one that might well mean that the Confederation could not beat them.

  “Weapons!” Gray called.

  “Weapons, aye.” America’s weapons officer was Commander Laurie Taggart, a tough, no-nonsense AAC woman from Chicago. The Ancient Alien Creationists believed that Humans had been genetically uplifted by aliens hundreds of thousands of years ago, and Gray sometimes wondered if the AACs in the Navy were afraid they were fighting their creators. Taggart, at least, had never let her beliefs interfere with her duty.

  “Primaries on the largest Tango One warship,” he said, “as soon as it’s in seventy percent range.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  At near-c velocities, targeting an enemy warship could be tricky. The target would have moved in the time it took light to crawl back and forth between the two vessels, and even the best AI could not predict a target’s course if the target was making periodic course changes to avoid incoming fire. Seventy percent meant that Taggart was to take a shot whenever her weapons system AIs predicted a seventy percent chance of scoring a hit.

  America began to swing to face the enemy. Her primary weapons were her spinal mounted railguns, twin linear magnetic accelerators running for much of the vessel’s length that could slam one-ton projectiles into an enemy ship with the kinetic energy equivalent of a hundred-megaton warhead. The carrier had not yet completed her turn when the enemy ships blurred . . . and then they were past the perimeter defense destroyers and within the Confederation fleet. The German destroyer Mölder flared into a tiny nova of searing light, her bow and stern tumbling off in opposite directions. An instant later, the Worden, a USNA heavy cruiser, took a hit that vaporized her aft-drive modules and left her a shattered hulk, leaking atmosphere and water in glittering clouds of ice crystals.

  The Confederation fleet was being cut to pieces before it could even begin to respond to the threat.

  “I want an analysis of those weapons,” Gray said, addressing America’s primary AI. “What are they hitting us with?”

  “We are detecting 511 kilo-electron volt radiation,” the AI whispered in Gray’s mind, “which is characteristic of positronium annihilation.”

  “My God . . .”

  Positronium was a so-called “exotic atom,” a negatively charged electron in a bound quantum state with its antimatter opposite, a positron. Normally, the balance of the two as they orbited each other was unstable, decaying and bringing about a matter-antimatter release of gamma rays after a very brief interval of time—either 125 picoseconds or 142 nanoseconds, depending on the relative spin states of the two particles. By beaming positronium with particle velocities extremely close to the speed of light, however, it was possible to extend that short life span through relativistic time dilation.

  That was the theory, at any rate, but human technology had not been able to turn theory into a working weapon. The Slan, evidently, had done just that. An energy fingerprint of 511 keV for the gamma quanta released identified the Slan weapon as para-positronium, the antiparallel spin variety with a lifetime of 125 picoseconds.

  The European Union star carrier Klemens von Metternich appeared to stagger under a terrific impact, her 500-meter-broad shield cap shredding away in a vast, silvery burst of freezing water.

  “Electrical potential cascading across the Grant’s hull suggests a different weapon,” America’s AI continued, “likely an electron beam of some sort.”

  Electron beams were a more conventional technology, well understood and in use both by human warships and man-portable weapons. Shielding against them required negatively charged hull fields, but there were ways to smash through a ship’s repulsive shielding, with a particle beam accelerated to high-enough velocities.

  The fleet was up against one hell of a technological wall. . . .

  Lieutenant Donald Gregory

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  36 Ophiuchi A System

  0854 hours, TFT

  Since the fleet was now in the coast phase of its flight path, with all singularity drives switched off, all of the fleet’s ships appeared to be hanging motionless within the black vault of a weirdly distorted universe. The wreckage of the stricken vessels, the Mölder, the Worden, and the von Metternich, continued to pace the fleet, their velocities still matching that of the other ships. A fourth vessel—the USNA gunship Ulysses S. Grant—was hit by an invisible weapon that seemed to claw at her hull, shredding it. Gregory’s instrumentation showed a surge of electrical potential searing across the stricken ship’s hull, arcing into hard vacuum.

  “Close and fire, Demons!” Mackey yelled. “Get in close!”

  The Tango One alien vessels were incredibly maneuverable. Gregory rolled onto a new vector that put one enemy warship directly ahead . . . then watched it blur and vanish from his screens just as he fired his particle weapon. The beam missed, and in response a fusion beam slashed across his bow. He jinked hard right, changing course and acceleration constantly and randomly. Closer . . . he had to get
closer if he was going to have a chance of hitting one of those things. . . .

  His naked eyes would have been useless, of course, in the weirdly twisted skies of relativistic velocities, but his fighter’s AI could tease data from the distortion and present it through his in-head links. He could see details of the alien hulls, now, within an open window in his mind, as warbook data scrolled up the side of the display. The largest ships—two of them—were Ballistas, according to the warbook—awkward, boxy-looking affairs with ugly, blotched paint schemes that looked like random slashes of green, red, and black. No two Ballistas were exactly the same, Gregory noticed; the designs of their hulls looked as random as their paint jobs. Each was around 300 meters long, all angles and sharp edges. The other ten ships had been designated as Sabers, leaner, squatter versions of the Ballistas painted black and red, each a third the length of their more massive consorts. Confederation Military Intelligence equated the Sabers with human destroyers, the Ballista with cruisers.

  Stiletto fighters, like finned knife blades, spilled from several of the Slan warships, spreading out through nearby space. Fusion beams seared into the Confederation fleet, blasting comm channels with harsh static. The Vladivostok and the Bhatkal both were hit, the smaller Bhatkal vanishing in a silent flash of dazzling light, the bigger Vlad crumpling as the miniature black holes housed within her quantum power plant drifted free and devoured the Russian cruiser from within.

  Gregory selected two of his Fer-de-lance missiles, targeting one of the Ballistas now just 20,000 kilometers ahead, and thoughtclicked the launch command. The missiles streaked away from his fighter and he spun the craft through 80 degrees, seeking another target. Silent explosions flared and blossomed within the distorted sky. As he twisted and turned, the starbow shifted with his movements, always centered on the direction the fleet was moving and stretching across some 60 degrees of view, but showing local distortions as his Starhawk changed vector.

  Demon Five, Lieutenant Tammi Anderson’s ship, vanished in a direct hit by a positron beam, a moth winking out in the light of a laser torch. Lieutenant Randy Gibb’s fighter vanished an instant later in a fusion beam from an alien Stiletto. The European Union heavy cruiser Cassard was hit, her forward shield cap ripped apart, the remaining wreckage spinning end for end as it wheeled through space.

  Neither of Gregory’s missiles got close to its target. A fusion beam wiped them out of the sky.

  Damn it, the Confederation fleet was losing.

  TC/USNA CVS America

  In transit

  36 Ophiuchi A System

  0855 hours, TFT

  “Fire!”

  At Gray’s command, America’s twin kinetic-kill launchers hurled a pair of warheads at the nearest of the oncoming Ballistas, but the clumsy-looking Slan craft blurred and shifted to one side, easily avoiding the KK missiles. The technological wall they faced might well be insurmountable.

  So far, most of the alien clients of the Sh’daar possessed technologies within a century or two of Earth’s. This almost certainly was due to the Sh’daar penchant for limiting the technologies of their subject races, especially in the GRIN arena—but those technologies in turn fed others, including gravitics, ship drives and power plants, and beam weapons. The maneuverability of the Slan warships, coupled with the power of their weapons, meant that fighting them was like pitting ancient fabric-and-wood biplanes with piston-prop engines against modern fighters with gravitic drives and high-energy lasers.

  The human fleet didn’t stand a chance.

  Lieutenant Donald Gregory

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  36 Ophiuchi A System

  0855 hours, TFT

  “Cover my ass!” Lieutenant Nathan Esperanza called over the squadron tactical channel. “I’m gonna take this to knife-fighting range!”

  “Copy that, Nate,” Gregory called back. “I’m on your six!”

  Gregory dropped onto Esperanza’s tail about 80 kilometers behind him, the two Starhawks arrowing toward a haphazard 200-meter collection of flat surfaces and sharp angles painted red, green, and black. A Stiletto peeled away from an enemy formation and closed on Esperanza from the flank; Gregory ordered his AI to program a cluster of Krait missiles for a cascade release, then triggered the launch.

  In close space combat, you had to fight through the senses and the reactions of your AI. Everything in the sky right now—capital ships, fighters, Krait missiles, expanding clouds of white-hot plasma—was traveling in more or less the same direction at close to the speed of light, so Relativistic Temporal Differentials didn’t figure into things . . . not yet. Within the unaccelerated universe outside of battlespace, time was proceeding some thirteen times slower than it was for Gregory and the others in the battlegroup, which meant that more enemy ships might be arriving in very short order.

  But even ignoring RTDs, the relative velocities among attackers and defenders were so high that merely human reaction times were far too slow to manage events. The artificial intelligences on board the human ships, however, perceived, recorded, and reasoned many thousands of times faster than organic systems, even than electronically enhanced organic systems, and that fact alone made such combat possible.

  Of course, the enemy must have AIs as well—or an alien equivalent. Slan technology was not at all well understood. The way the hostiles were maneuvering, snapping back and forth far too quickly for human perceptions to record or react to them, they must have some pretty good computer tech over there, either as independent AIs or as cybernetic blends of organic and machine intelligence.

  On the other hand, Gregory thought, the Slan AIs couldn’t be that far ahead of human systems. The Sh’daar control of the technologies developed by their client systems meant that they couldn’t have much of an edge there.

  And that meant that they could be beaten.

  The question was how?

  A chain of nuclear blasts strobed in a nearly straight line across the sky 20,000 kilometers distant, one VG-10 Krait after the next detonating in open space. The cascade maneuver had been designed to penetrate tough enemy defenses. The lead Krait would detonate well short of the target, and the expanding plasma fireball provided cover for the next Krait in line, which would fly through the expanding gas cloud to detonate closer to the target . . . followed by the next . . . and the next. . . .

  The last two Krait missiles either struck the Stiletto or came quite close to it; the Slan fighter vanished in the double fireball, emerging as a spray of half-molten debris.

  “Kill!” Gregory shouted, exultant. “Scratch one Stiletto!”

  “Thanks, Nungie!” Esperanza called. “Arming Krait cascade and a Fer-de-Lance . . . target lock . . . Fox One!”

  Esperanza released a cluster of Kraits followed by the bigger Fer-de-Lance . . . but the Kraits were swept from the sky by a fusion beam from the clumsy-looking target. The Fer-de-Lance, with a more powerful onboard AI, survived a few seconds longer, jinking and weaving back and forth as it bore in on its target . . . and then an electron beam fried its circuits and reduced it to a lump of dead metal and plastic. Esperanza’s Starhawk rolled left and accelerated, falling out of its path toward the Slan warship . . . and then a fusion beam from the target caught the fighter and vaporized it in a searing flash of light.

  Shit . . .

  Gregory programmed a flight of Kraits to take independent and divergent paths to the target, then broke off, the sky tumbling wildly about him. Maybe with a dozen missiles all coming in from different directions at once, he would have a chance in hell of getting at least one twenty-megaton blast on-target. His Stiletto kill of a moment ago might have happened only because the pilot was focusing too hard on Esperanza’s Starhawk, and not enough on what was going on in other parts of the sky.

  Something struck his fighter, a savage shock, and then he was tumbling helplessly through strangeness. For several horrifying seconds, Gregory l
ost all input from his AI. That meant that his corrected visual systems were down, and he was looking at the sky as it really was . . . everywhere a black and impenetrable emptiness, with a tightly smudged glow of colored light squeezed into a 60-degree cone forward. The Starhawk’s AI took incoming light and used mathematics to reverse-engineer the panorama, showing what the surrounding sky would look like without the relativistic distortion, and drew in such finicky details as the locations of both friendly and enemy ships, exploding missiles, and energy beams that otherwise would be invisible to the human eye.

  He also couldn’t tell how badly damaged his ship was. Life support appeared to still be functioning, along with emergency power and the basic visual feeds from scanners on the fighter’s outer hull, but he was tumbling, clearly, and his primary power plant and singularity drive both were down. If he couldn’t fix them, he would continue drifting at a hair beneath the speed of light, unable to decelerate and re-enter the nonaccelerated universe. Commo was down, so he couldn’t call for help.

  A few terrifying seconds later, though, the AI came back on-line, initiating a damage-control reset, and the cosmos around him became again understandable. His singularity power plant came back on-line, and an instant later his drive indicators winked green, showing them powered down but ready for operation. His communications feeds came back as well, and he no longer felt quite so lonely.

  He was drifting through the center of the Slan squadron, apparently unseen or at least unrecognized. His Starhawk was still tumbling, so possibly it was giving a good imitation of a derelict hulk or a lifeless piece of debris. One massive green, black, and red craft was closing with him at a few hundred kilometers per hour, would pass him by at a range of only a few kilometers.

  Gregory realized that chance had presented him with an invaluable opportunity. The question was how best to make use of it.