B009NFP2OW EBOK

by Douglas, Ian

“Everything is now riding on the USNA contingent. We are outnumbered, but the fighter wave will be arriving at Arianrhod soon, and we can be confident that they will be softening up the enemy defenses.

  “I know that every member of this battlegroup will do your duty. Thank you.”

  And subjective seconds later, at precisely 1239 hours, fiercely focused singularities winked on astern of each of the USNA ships, and the America battlegroup began to slow.

  Lieutenant Ronald Dorshner

  VFA-112, Death Eagles

  36 Ophiuchi System

  1318 hours, TFT

  “Coming up on the objective,” Lieutenant Commander Meise, the squadron CO, announced. “Keep it tight. Weapons and attitude control to your AIs.”

  Lieutenant Dorshner checked to make certain that his Velociraptor was now solely under the control of his AI. VFA-112 was one of the strike squadrons off the America. From his perspective, just 30 minutes had passed since he’d accelerated clear of the carrier. In the non-accelerated universe outside, 349 minutes and 40 astronomical units had slipped past. He was still moving at near-light velocity, and the sky around him was sharply compressed into the familiar colored bands of light ahead.

  With everything in the electronic hands of the fighter AI, there wasn’t much left for Dorshner to do but sit and wait. Humans had their place in space fighter combat at slower speeds, carrying out maneuvers that required human creativity.

  At over 99 percent of the speed of light, human reflexes simply weren’t fast enough to provide useful input.

  His weapons triggered, missiles and sandcasters first. The missiles had to be released well before the closest point of passage, since they shared the fighter’s velocity, and needed to be put on a vector that would swing them into the targets at that speed. At near-c, a few hundred kilos—the mass of the missiles themselves—carried enough kinetic energy to overwhelm the detonations of their nuclear warheads.

  The salvo included his entire warload of AMSOs, twelve AS-78 anti-missile-shield-ordnance-containing warheads of tightly packed, sand-grain-sized spherules of matter-compressed lead. When the warheads detonated an instant later, clouds of sand hurtled across emptiness toward the Slan targets, again at close to the speed of light. Where the enemy’s anti-missile defenses might wipe incoming missiles out of the sky, it was virtually impossible to do the same to hurtling clouds of dispersing sand. At the speed of light, even something with the mass of a BB carried tremendous explosive power.

  An instant after his missiles and sandcaster rounds were away, Dorshner’s beam weapons fired—lasers, particle-cannon bursts, and fusion beams—and the weapons continued to fire as the fighter swept past the target zone, the fighter pivoting on its axis to keep the beams on target.

  And then he was past. He gave a thoughtclicked order, and his fighter began decelerating, braking at fifty thousand gravities.

  He still couldn’t see the Slan targets or the planet, now light seconds behind him, didn’t know how much damage, if any, he and the other members of the fighter swarm had caused.

  But they were about to find out.

  Slan warship

  Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

  1319 hours, TFT

  She sat in pitch darkness, her skin suit’s light off to conserve the small power cells.

  The Slan, Lieutenant Megan Connor had decided, must “see” by sonar, sending out pulses of sound and forming an image of their surroundings by listening to the returning echoes. She remembered that certain sea mammals back on Earth—dolphins and the now extinct whales—had used sonar to image their murky undersea universe. The fatty masses in the heads of dolphins that focused the sound waves, she recalled, were called melons. The mobile cones above the Slans’ bodies, she was pretty sure, must be their sonar-imaging melons. The large, somewhat translucent flaps to either side of the upper body might be external ears, focusing returning sound waves.

  The information did her no good at the moment, but she was determined now to make her escape. If she could somehow get away, somehow return to a human ship, what she’d seen and heard here might be of use.

  The ship’s artificial gravity dragged at her. Her suit could compensate, somewhat, when she was walking, but when she was just lying on her back she felt heavy—twice, nearly, her usual sixty-five kilos. For hours—her internal clock had logged seventeen since her capture—she’d been here, locked inside the small and lightless cabin to which her captors had led her earlier, after her interview with Old Captain Two-Heads, as she thought of the creature, and after the terrifying nightmare in the alien lab. She shuddered again at the memory, though they’d only hurt her once—by inserting a heavy-gauge needle into her arm right through her skin suit.

  The suit had sealed off the resulting leak almost immediately, but the stab had left her terrified. The worst part had been the not knowing, as six aliens had surrounded her in the darkness, manipulating arms and legs, touching her, scanning her with unidentifiable devices, seeming to peer at her and into her with those blunt, featureless organs on the ends of those writhing necks. . . .

  She’d tried to talk to them, by voice, by radio, by flashing her suit light . . . but she couldn’t even tell if the beings were aware of her attempts.

  And then, anticlimactically, they’d brought her to the cell and locked her in. For the hours since, all she’d been able to do was sit in the darkness, listening . . . and wondering if the Slan were going to try to feed her, take care of her environmental needs . . . or if the interrogation was to resume.

  Now, though, something was happening.

  She could hear some sort of excitement outside the locked cabin door—rapid movement through the passageways outside, and the rattling clicks and buzzes that she’d begin to think must be Slan speech. It was difficult in the extreme to attribute anything like human emotions to beings so alien, but she had the impression that they were excited.

  And then, out of nowhere, something struck the ship’s hull with a terrific bang, and she was thrown from the low pad that served her as a bed in her cell. A thin, shrill whistle told her that the atmosphere was shrieking out into vacuum. Her captors’ ship had been damaged . . . possibly critically.

  She switched on her suit’s light, and immediately saw four shafts of condensing vapor in the wet, hot air. Looking more closely, she was able to see tiny holes, each the size of a small pea, in bulkhead and deck, and she felt a cold prickle of dread moving up her spine. AMSO rounds—tiny spherules of compressed lead moving at extremely high velocities. One had missed her by less than 2 meters.

  But that also meant that the Slan fleet was being attacked. Her heart beat faster as she stood up and made her way to the door.

  She had a virtual tool in a hip pouch, overlooked by the Slan, who apparently hadn’t recognized it for what it was. All fighter pilots carried one, a programmable utility multipurpose tool that could melt through tungsten steel, punch holes or seal them, glue together broken pieces . . . or unlock doors. She’d not used it earlier, reasoning that if it did get her out of her cell, there still had been no way to get off the Slan warship. Better to stay put for the time being, perhaps with the possibility of learning more about her captors.

  Now, though, with the ship under attack and clearly damaged, there might be some way for her to take advantage of the situation . . . and the alternative was to wait here in the dark until the ship was either destroyed or its automatic repair systems kicked in, closing this window of opportunity.

  If she could find her way, somehow, back to her damaged fighter . . .

  The virtual tool was the size of her thumb, flat, and metallic green. When she held it in the palm of her hand, in contact with the maze of gold, red, and silver threads marking her glove’s contact area, it linked with her in-head systems and announced that it was ready to work . . . and what job did she want done?

  “Open the door,” she thoug
ht, pressing the tool’s business end against the seal of her cabin door, a low, broad oval shape a meter and a half high and perhaps three wide, a silhouette in keeping with the low-riding bodily structure of the Slan. There was nothing like a doorknob or activation switch, but the tool was smart enough to trace the electronic circuitry, find locks, override power supplies, even melt through mechanical tumblers or locking bolts, if necessary. Programmed by her in-head circuitry, the tool emitted a thin stream of nano agents that flowed along the seal, looking for a viable approach.

  “Please stand clear,” the tool told her, and she took a step back. The door gave a faint, high-pitched click, then dropped on hidden rails into the deck.

  Pocketing the tool, she stepped out into the passageway.

  The passageway outside was no higher than the door, and she had to stoop to move. There was no light, of course, but her suit light illuminated her way. She relied on her in-head navigational system, which now projected a small map in a mental window. She didn’t want to go back to the control center where Old Captain Two-Heads had buzzed and clicked at her, and she especially didn’t want to return to what she’d thought was likely a lab. Her arm still hurt from that needle, and for hours since then, Connor had been shaking with the dread that they would take her back there and try to remove her suit.

  Ah. By cutting through this way, she should avoid both lab and control room, and just might be able to go straight to the hangar bay where they’d brought her fighter on board. The fighter was an inert hulk, but there might be one trick left in it, if she could get on board.

  Abruptly, there was a wet, squelching sound ahead, and one of the Slan emerged from a side passageway, directly in front of her.

  The sound, she realized, was very faint now. Her suit showed her that the atmosphere was rapidly thinning—down to half a standard atmosphere now, and still falling. Didn’t these monsters have automatically sealing hulls, in case of a hull breach?

  The Slan crossed the passageway in front of her . . . and collided with the bulkhead. For a moment, it lashed about with its tentacles, feeling along the wet bulkheads, its sonar organs questing in all directions, its side flaps extended wide open . . . and Connor realized that the Slan was the equivalent of blind.

  They relied on their atmosphere to transmit sonar pulses, and as the air thinned toward hard vacuum, they were going deaf. She stepped aside, letting the bulky creature blunder past her and down the corridor in the direction from which she’d just come.

  With hardening resolve, she began hurrying ahead, following the map displayed for her in her mind.

  As she moved, though, she wondered how a being that imaged its surroundings with sound could possibly see the stars. . . .

  TC/USNA CVS America

  In transit

  Approaching Arianrhod

  1409 hours, TFT

  The sky surrounding the USNA battlegroup had slowly expanded back to its original, undistorted form, and the two suns of 36 Ophiuchi and the tiny crescent of Arianrhod were clearly visible to unaided eyes and scanners.

  They were beginning to pick up signs of the battle that had swept through the region over the past hour. At 1319 hours, the fighters launched that morning had reached Arianrhod, their AIs firing at targets within range as they passed. After one pass, they would have slowed to planetary speeds and begun engaging targets of opportunity.

  At 1407 hours, the rest of the Confederation fleet, still travelling at 0.997 c, had passed through the same volume of space. Gray didn’t know if they had engaged the enemy or not. By now, though, they were twenty-two light minutes ahead, still receding at near-c.

  Assuming, of course, that they’d survived the passage, and assuming that Delattre hadn’t changed his mind at the last moment and decelerated. There were no signs of the Confederation ships, however, so presumably they were farther up ahead, moving unreachably fast.

  Myriad colored shapes—squares, triangles, circles—drifted against the backdrop of suns and planet, marking targets—red for Slan, green for human, yellow for unidentified, while squares were vessels under acceleration, triangles were drifting free, circles were dead. Blocks of text scrolled through the projection, giving vector information, mass, and status.

  It took Gray several moments to sort out what he was seeing, even with the ship AI’s help. Local battlespace was filled with red triangles and circles; the fighter swarm had managed to hit the Slan, and hit them hard. But there were still plenty of red squares, and the vector data displayed by each showed that they were closing on the incoming human warships.

  “A lot of those Slan ships are leaking atmosphere,” Commander Laurie Taggart observed. “Looks like they’re drifting free, out of commission.”

  “So I see,” Gray replied. “A lot of them . . . a lot of them don’t look too badly hit. But they appear to be out of commission.”

  As they drew closer, and America’s scanners began showing close-ups of the drifting, brightly colored hulks, he saw the telltale damage from AMSO rounds—hull sections scoured away as if sandblasted, atmosphere leaking from hundreds of minute punctures and freezing as it hit vacuum, random and isolated patches of damage scattered across large areas of armor.

  Twenty years before, Gray had acquired the nickname “Sandy” for his innovative use of AMSO rounds, throwing sand at Sh’daar warships at close to the speed of light and letting physics do the rest. The technique was a standard maneuver now, though it was only effective if the launching ships were moving at near-c when they released the sand clouds, imparting their velocity to the individual grains of matter-compressed lead.

  But the fighter swarm had used it to good effect here as they’d swept past the enemy ships. The fighters had come through and pulverized them, and Gray allowed the tiniest bit of relief to seep through into his consciousness.

  They had a chance, a small one. . . .

  “Enemy coming into range, Captain.”

  “Commence firing.”

  America and her consorts began slamming round after round into the approaching Slan ships. Again, the enemy’s point defenses proved superb as they wiped missiles and kinetic-kill rounds from the sky, but some of those rounds were getting through. An alien Ballista staggered as rounds shredded the forward portion of its hull; a pair of Sabers vanished in a nuclear fireball as a salvo of shipkillers from the Henderson detonated between them.

  But the incoming fire from the Slan warships was devastatingly accurate. The destroyer Bradley and the heavy cruiser Alvarez both took direct hits that left them broken and helpless, and a second destroyer, the Cumberland, was crippled. America staggered as three rounds slammed into and through her forward shield cap. Ice vapor sprayed into space, mingled with fragments of hull metal.

  In-head, Gray scanned the lengthening list of damage reports from within the ship, then shifted his full concentration back to the battle. The shield cap’s interior was sectioned off by pie-wedge barriers that prevented all the ship’s water stores from venting into space. The automatic damage-control systems were staying ahead of the smaller-scale problems so far, though the damage inflicted earlier on the carrier was not yet fully repaired. America was hurt, but still in the fight.

  They were moving fast enough that the crescent of Arianrhod visibly swelled second by second until it swept past the carrier to port, filling that half of the sky as America pounded at Slan targets in all directions. America was still decelerating, dropping into a long, shallow curve around to the planet’s day-lit side, but was still traveling at twenty-five kilometers per second, considerably faster than Arianrhod’s escape velocity. The undamaged Slan vessels matched course and speed effortlessly, merging with the USNA battlegroup and closing to point-blank range.

  The six surviving CAP fighters of VFA-96, however, had matched the battlegroup’s deceleration, and were still moving in formation, positioning themselves to intercept Slan warships threatening t
he carrier. They were out of expendable munitions, according to the feed from their tactical net, but could still firefight with beam weapons and lasers. They were also attempting to use the new tactic, one evolved as a desperation measure by Lieutenant Gregory . . . getting in close enough to use their drive singularities as knife-fight weapons.

  As he watched, one fighter slipped in close to a looming Slan Ballista by mimicking a tumbling scrap of wreckage, then straightened suddenly, its singularity flickering to life. . . .

  But the Slan were learning as well. The fighter was struck point-blank by an anti-proton beam and vaporized before it was closer than 20 kilometers from its target.

  “CAG?” Gray said over the CIC link. “Pass the word to the Demons. No more knife-fighting. I don’t want them playing kamikaze out there.”

  “Right, Captain,” Captain Fletcher replied. “I concur. Interesting improvised weapon, though.”

  “We’ll have the Engineering Department take a look at it,” he replied. “After the battle . . .”

  Assuming, he thought with grim determination, we survive it. . . .

  Lieutenant Donald Gregory

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  Arianrhod Space

  1410 hours, TFT

  Gregory guided his Starhawk toward the Slan ship . . . a different design from anything he’d seen so far. It was big, nearly 300 meters long—bigger than a Ballista, bigger even than a Trebuchet, and it was in close orbit around Arianrhod. It appeared to have been damaged earlier, probably during the fighter swarm’s close passage. Vapor froze as it emerged from the dozens of tiny holes that riddled the massive hull, and one entire side had been ripped open, exposing interior struts, beams, and bulkheads. The color scheme, Gregory thought, once had been black and green, in broad, jagged stripes, but much of the ship’s outer surface had been sandblasted down to bare armor. The ship’s unique size alone suggested that it might be something special in the Slan fleet—a command ship, perhaps.