by Douglas, Ian
“Good question,” Kline said. “X-Dep has recommended maintaining a cautious approach. Don’t turn your back, don’t take any chances with them until we understand them better.”
“Unfortunately,” Gray added, “we’re going to have to take a chance . . . several of them, in fact. It is my intention to take this squadron to 70 Ophiuchi and stage a high-velocity raid. A fly-by stage spoiler.”
The statement triggered a storm of voices, both out loud around the conference table and over the virtual network. “But sir, we can’t take on a fleet that big!” Captain Geary of the Henderson exclaimed.
“Sir! Estimates based on the Slan computer records say the Sh’daar have between fifty and sixty capital ships at Osiris,” Lieutenant Commander Villanova added. “We just don’t have the ships to face off with that kind of force!”
“We can disrupt the enemy’s plans,” Gray said simply. “And that may be enough.”
It would have to be enough.
The tactic called fly-by spoiling was a direct outgrowth of modern space-military operations. A fleet would emerge from Alcubierre metaspace, accelerate to near the speed of light, then hurtle past the target planet deep in-system, precisely as had Lavallée’s fleet the day before. If the enemy force was in preparation for a deployment somewhere else, it might well be scattered and disorganized, taking on munitions, fuel, and supplies. The problem was the weakened state of the USNA squadron. Twenty ships were left, and 20 percent of those were so badly damaged they might not survive another fight . . . or even the maneuvers necessary to get them to 70 Ophiuchi. And judging by the image translations gleaned from the Slan ship, the Earth squadron would be heavily outnumbered when it got there.
“If I may say so, sir, that’s damned . . . risky,” Captain Garrison of the Inchon said. It sounded as though he’d almost said something else other than “risky.”
Like “stupid” or “lame-brained” or perhaps “fucking idiotic.” And Gray would have been forced to agree.
“Yes it is,” he replied. “You and Inchon will be facing a different kind of danger, however.”
“Sir?”
“Inchon won’t add that much firepower to a near-c fly-by of Osiris, and we won’t be hanging around long enough for us to deploy your Marines. You’ll be better employed staying here, and encouraging the Slan to get the hell off Arianrhod.”
“Here.” Again, Gray heard what might have been a bitten-off protest, but Garrison merely said, “Aye, aye, sir.”
“We will also leave the most badly damaged ships here, and the Shenandoah, of course. With luck, the Slan will think we’re leaving behind a major fraction of our fleet.”
Gray would have liked to take Osiris back from the Sh’daar. Their forces had been holding the place for fifteen years, now, and as a staging area it was perfect for future strikes against the Sol System and Earth.
Someday . . .
If there were humans still alive at Osiris, the brutal truth was that they’d survived this long, and they would survive a bit longer. Arianrhod, however, was a different matter. Silverwheel, the main research base on the surface, had been home to twenty thousand people, with hundreds more in orbit at Caer Gwydion. Their fate was unknown, though Lieutenant Connor had reported that the Slan had been firing into both indiscriminately several days before. The Marines off the Inchon could secure Silverwheel, and the ship’s Marine fighters would be useful in finding other survivors scattered across the Caer Arianrhod Archipelago.
If the Slan let them.
“The main issues,” Gray continued, “are getting America fit for transition again, and replenishing the squadron’s expendables.”
“America?” Gutierrez said. “Wouldn’t we do better shifting your flag and leaving the old girl here?”
“No,” Gray replied. “We’re going to need fighter support at Osiris, and we’re leaving the Inchon here. If Lavallée hadn’t taken the other star carriers with him, it might be different.”
“Bastards . . .” someone at the table muttered.
By now, it was clear that all of the Confederation ships under Lavallée’s command had transited into Alcubierre Drive and, presumably, were on their way back to Earth. Apparently, they hadn’t even engaged the Slan fleet as they’d whipped past Arianrhod. Most of their fighters launched earlier had managed to catch up with the Illustrious, the Bolivar, and the Kali by pegging a few more decimal places onto their percentage of c figures, but five hours and twenty minutes after they’d passed through the Slan fleet, the Confederation contingent had reached the 40-AU limit from 36 Ophiuchi A and winked out into metaspace.
The Pan-European fighters off the disabled Klemens von Metternich had stayed behind, of course, along with about a dozen fighters from the other carriers that had gone streaker in the battle, falling helplessly away into the night. America’s SAR tugs were still working at rescuing as many of those fighters as possible and hauling them back to Arianrhod orbit.
“That’s okay,” Gray said. “They’re headed back to Sol. If the Sh’daar do launch a strike at Earth, Lavallée’s ships will be needed there.”
Hours before, Gray had dispatched a message drone with a coded message intended for USNA Military Command on Mars, and for President Koenig. The message included details of the battle . . . and the all-important information that both Steiger and Delattre were dead, that the non-USNA contingent had broken off under Lavallée’s command, and that Gray had assumed overall command of the American ships.
They would know the situation back on Earth within twenty-five hours.
And Gray expected to be on his way to 70 Ophiuchi well before that time.
“Maybe we should high-tail it back to Earth too,” Gutierrez suggested.
“If we can manage to pull off a good spoiler, Commander,” Gray replied, “they might not need to make a last-ditch stand in Earth’s own backyard. The farther away we can stop them, the better, right?”
“Yes, sir. But if they’re waiting for us . . . if the Slan tell them we’re coming . . . we could lose the whole squadron.”
“Then we’ll just have to make sure they don’t know we’re coming.”
Much later, far into the night watch, Gray lay in bed with Laurie Taggart, holding her close. The gentle pattern of her breathing told him she was asleep. Good. He’d needed some time to think. . . .
He’d switched the bulkheads of his quarters to show the view outside America’s hull, partly so that he could keep tabs on the repair efforts outside, but also for the sheer, icy, spectacular beauty of the scene. Though his quarters were in a rotating hab module, providing a steady half-G of spin gravity, the image had been stitched together by computer from various cameras mounted on the non-rotating portions of the hull.
Hours before, America had been judged fit to make the short boost to the fourth planet of the 36 Ophiuchi A system, a hazy blue-green sphere two astronomical units out, an ice giant named Goewin by the original research station colonists. Like the larger Saturn back in the Sol System, Goewin possessed a spectacular ring system, multiple bands of white-silver light composed of uncounted trillions of bits of water ice, ranging in size from grains of sand to a fair-sized house. Swarms of shepherd moons tugged and nudged the rings into distinct bands separated one from another by narrow grooves of emptiness. Gray couldn’t see those grooves from here, though they’d been clear enough during the orbital approach to Goewin. America now orbited within the outer fringes of the outermost ring, and the ring system as a whole was visible only as a ruler-straight white line slashing through the center of the planet’s disk.
Scattered across the sky were moons showing various phases, the hazy glow of multiple comets, the shrunken orange face of 36 Oph A. A few kilometers away, the massive provisioning ship Shenandoah had docked in the shadow of a moon too small to have a name. The moonlet’s icy surface had been melted away, revealing the coal-black carbon
aceous interior, and swarms of unmanned picker ships were busily ferrying raw material up to Shenandoah’s capacious storage bunkers in steady streams. The moon, a potato-shaped mass perhaps three kilometers long, had a CH-core beneath its icy crust, the letters standing for carbon and high metal. Carbonaceous chondrite bodies contained large amounts of organic compounds, as well as significant amounts of silicates, oxides, and sulfides, plus, in this case, over 5 percent water by mass. The metallic component was mostly nickel-iron, but there were traces of other elements as well.
And there were other mining targets within nearby space. Hours before, one of Shenandoah’s robot miners had been dispatched to rendezvous with a 1.5-kilometer asteroid half an AU sunward, together with the squadron’s ore hauler, the aging T-AK cargo ship Altair. Though it was not widely known even yet, all of the metals accessible on and within Earth’s crust had come from the rain of meteors and asteroids that had pummeled Earth’s surface after the planet had formed and cooled. All of the nickel and iron, all of the cobalt, gold, platinum, manganese and all of the other metals that had been part of the original accretion of the planet had sunk down into the unreachable core during Earth’s molten youth. The metals available to human industry, from the copper and bronze ages on, all had arrived much later. Human civilization had, in a sense, been mining the asteroids since the very beginning.
Mining asteroids off the Earth had been a large part of what had propelled humankind off its homeworld. In the mid twenty-first century, dwindling reserves of silver, copper, gold, lead and other common elements had been nearly exhausted. A single 1-kilometer type-M asteroid, however, contained over 12 trillion dollars’ worth of industrial and precious metals; a 30-meter high-metal asteroid might hold 50 billion dollars’ worth of platinum alone. Quite early on in the migration of Humankind into the Sol System, then, technologies for extracting and refining both metals and volatiles from barren rocks had become the principal drivers of space-born industry and colonization, as well as robotics, spacecraft propulsion, and space-based nanotechnics.
Those technologies were especially important for interstellar naval vessels now. The pure elements being separated and stored in Shenandoah’s bunkers would go into her nanufactories to create everything from air and food to missiles with fusion warheads, microcircuits for regrowing damaged electronics, raw materials for the repair robots now clustered around America’s shield cap, and even fresh uniforms for the crew. The robotic assembly lines on board Shenandoah were already cranking out new SG-101 and SG-112 fighters at the rate of one per three and a half hours.
The only question was how long the fleet could afford to wait before shutting down the repair and resupply operation and boosting out-system. At the current rate of nanufacture, the squadron’s reserves would be completely replenished within fifty hours, but Gray wanted to be long gone by that time. The longer they delayed boosting for 70 Oph, the greater the chance that they would arrive there after the Sh’daar had already departed for Sol.
Laurie stirred in his arms, nestling closer. “Mmm. You still awake?”
“Watching the repair,” he replied, absently stroking the hair at the back of her head. “Wondering when to boost for Osiris.”
Wondering if they should boost for Osiris . . . or make for Earth instead. Geary, Villanova, and America’s Exec all had raised some good points.
In particular, he wondered about the Slan. Throughout the day, and as America and her consorts had shifted out-system to Goewin, more and more of the Slan ships had been pulling back from Arianrhod and accelerating off into deep space. Analyses of their outbound paths suggested that some were heading for 70 Ophiuchi, that others were on their way to other, unknown places deeper into the heart of the galaxy.
He had to assume that the Slan would communicate with the other Sh’daar clients at Osiris, telling them human forces were at 36 Oph, that they’d beaten the Slan there and forced the Slan to pull out. Inevitably, that would mean the Sh’daar themselves would know. What would their response be?
And that, more than anything, was what decided him, in that moment, on carrying out the spoiling raid at Osiris. They would go, and they would depart as soon as the basic repairs on America were complete. The Sh’daar were—they must be—as much in the dark about human intentions and capabilities and the way they saw the universe as humans were about the Slan or Turusch or the Sh’daar themselves.
“You’ve already given all the necessary orders, haven’t you?” Laurie said.
“I suppose so.”
“Then c’mere, Sandy Gray. Spend some time with me.”
He snuggled closer, kissed her, letting his hand wander. But as he looked up at the bulkhead projections again, he saw the stream of picker ships flowing up from the crater already eaten into the shepherd moon’s surface and vanishing into the gaping maw of Shenandoah’s receiving bay, Gray had a new idea.
Or, rather, a new iteration of an idea he’d had once before, twenty years earlier, when he’d acquired the nickname “Sandy” in the first place.
He kissed Laurie Taggart again, but as he did so he was linking through to the bridge, and issuing a string of new orders.
Only after those orders had been transmitted to the Shenandoah and the Altair would he be able to turn his full attention on the woman in his arms.
He just wished he knew what Clear Chiming Bell was thinking right now. . . .
Slan Protector Vigilant
Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII
2330 hours, TFT
Clear Chiming Bell studied the aural representation of nearby space displayed above its console, and—not for the first time—wondered what the aliens were thinking.
Within Slan culture, community was everything, and what counted most in any conflict was that the community be protected. Part of what that meant was using the minimum of force necessary in an engagement . . . and that depended on the loser of the engagement accepting defeat when the victor showed the greater strength.
Simple enough . . . but for the system to work, both sides in an engagement had to be working by the same set of rules. And the more that Clear Chiming Bell learned about the humans, the more it was becoming convinced that they did not—could not—understand the rules of civilized behavior.
That prospect, the Slan leader thought, was the single most terrifying aspect of the human monsters. Clear Chiming Bell had become aware of this in the behavior of the prisoner they’d picked up in space after the battle for the planet. The strange being had been captured, had clearly been helpless . . . and yet somehow it had escaped from its quarters when the humans invaded the Vigilant when by all logic it should have stayed put. Apparently it had communicated somehow with the invading forces and joined them, managing to escape when they withdrew.
The fact that those forces had attacked at all, attempting to rescue the prisoner against overwhelming odds, was . . . unsettling, as was the audio of the prisoner attacking an entire t’k’tch of Slan soldiers from the rear with a low-powered weapon that appeared to fire bursts of tightly focused electromagnetic radiation. Soldiers scattered, startled by this unexpected assault, giving the main body of humans an opening to attack from the front.
The human should have stayed in its fighter . . . no, should have stayed in its quarters. Worse by far, the alien soldiers shouldn’t have sacrificed so many of themselves to save one captured individual. Risking so many members of the community for one life? The action was inexplicable . . . and completely un-Slanlike.
But Clear Chiming Bell had a terrible feeling that he was seeing a measure of the humans’ true strength, here, and it was a strength the Slan could not hope to match.
The Slan fleet commander was well aware that the humans had used the opportunity presented by breaching the Vigilant’s hull to implant devices that allowed them to penetrate the Slan computer network. Slan soldiers would have done precisely the same if they’d boarded a human warshi
p. But the details of that desperate firefight within Vigilant’s docking bay were devastatingly incomprehensible.
It opened a channel to the ship’s navigational officer. “Cool Tunnel Deeps,” it said. “Program for transition to the main fleet.”
“We work together,” the officer replied, giving a formal reply. “What of the rest of our group?”
“We move together,” the commander said. “We will abandon this place.”
“Does such a decision align with the Community good?”
“It does,” Clear Chiming Bell replied. “Until we better understand these humans, it most assuredly does.”
Clear Chiming Bell found itself disturbed by the human view of the universe. Rather than thinking of places, like distinct tunnel complexes more or less side-by-side, they saw this place and that one as unbearably tiny and lonely motes lost in an immense vacuum, separated by unimaginably vast gulfs of emptiness.
The thought was terrifying, and bespoke a terrible, terrible loneliness.
The Slan commander yearned for the embrace of Community, the bigger, the busier, the better.
The Fleet Community would rejoin, and perhaps hold the emptiness at bay.
Chapter Twenty-One
15 November 2424
TC/USNA CVS America
In transit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII
1130 hours, TFT
America accelerated outbound, racing for the 40-AU limit, where the gravitationally warped topography of space was flat enough to allow her transition over to Alcubierre Drive. Sixteen ships flew in formation with her, including the provisioning vessel Shenandoah, which now had a vital role to play at 70 Ophiuchi.
Gray studied the readouts for the system. Little was known about the strength or deportment of Sh’daar ships around Osiris. The translations of Slan audio data suggested fifty to sixty ships, as the intelligence officer on board Inchon had pointed out, but it was unknown how many of those might be warships, and how many were transports. Dating the information was problematical as well; the Slan means of determining date and time were still a mystery, and the Osiris imagery might well be out of date.