by Douglas, Ian
Still, even the best-planned vectors could be affected by very minor and unforeseen elements of the local gravitational matrix, and the detonation of tons of chemical high explosive might well—would almost certainly—shift a few random bits of debris into unpredictable intercept paths with the planet.
A quarter of a million kilometers ahead of Gregory’s fighter, the freighter Altair and her cargo had been transformed into a fast-spreading cloud of debris, over two thousand tons of matter ranging in size from multi-ton chunks of the disintegrated freighter down to dust- and sand-grain-sized specks, all of them traveling at 99.7 percent of the speed of light. At that velocity, even flecks of paint from Altair’s hull carried the kinetic punch of several kilograms of high explosive. The tactic was officially known as relativistic bombardment, and had been introduced by “Sandy” Gray two decades ago. Most people called it c-gunning, because it was like firing an immense shotgun at the enemy . . . but with the pellets moving at relativistic speeds.
And a large portion of the Sh’daar fleet was orbiting now in the path of that deadly cloud of projectiles.
Slan Protector Vigilant
Extended Orbit, 70 Ophiuchi AII
0716 hours, TFT
Clear Chiming Bell expanded its ear membranes around its body, the better to focus on the audio representation of Vigilant’s surroundings, a vast gulf of emptiness punctuated by pure tones representing ships, and anchored by a deep and richly textured rumble that was the planet half a million t!!t distant. The ship tones were overlaid by complex harmonics giving information on vector—direction and speed. Only moments before, a series of targets had appeared moving inbound at very nearly the speed of light itself. The Slan commander clicked out orders . . . and then the nearest of the approaching targets exploded, its pure tone replaced by a fluttering, fast-rising cacophony of harmonies and near-harmonies indicating small fragments hurtling toward the Sh’daar fleet.
Ships around the Vigilant began vaporizing as fragments plowed through them. Vigilant was hit, the deck lurching sharply as warning tones sounded. The ship’s gravity flickered a few times, then died . . . and Clear Chiming Bell drifted helplessly into the center of the compartment.
Slan were not well-adapted for zero gravity. They could thrash the fringe of tentacles around their heavy mantle, but their bodies were too massive for that to give them much momentum in any direction. Clear Chiming Bell was helpless.
The humans. The humans they’d encountered at the other planetary system—it had to be them. Clear Chiming Bell had reported the Slan defeat to the Sh’daar net when they arrived at this gathering place, of course, and warned of the possibility that they would be coming here. Clear Chiming Bell had hoped this would not be the case, however. The humans were . . . disturbing in the intensity with which they waged war.
It had seen records gleaned from the human computer networks. These creatures were capable of . . . of atrocities on a planetary scale. They seemed to care little for community as Clear Chiming Bell understood the concept, and they seemed capable of fighting to the death, literally unable to know when to quit. That alien twist made them deadly to the Sh’daar Alliance. Communicating with the strange, blind creatures was definitely preferable to fighting them, but the Sh’daar Seed within the growing fleet here at the Hu-vah-scha’n staging area had ordered them to proceed with preparations for the attack on the human homeworld.
But the humans had just fired an unknown but powerful relativistic weapon at the Sh’daar fleet. Their warships would be close behind that first strike, seeking to follow up their advantage. Clear Chiming Bell was not sure that the Sh’daar ships could mount an effective defense.
The Slan commander could still speak to its subordinates, even if it couldn’t reach the controls. “Launch all fighters!” it chattered. “Quickly! Quickly!”
Acknowledgement came back from several stations, including the auxiliary command center. The ship was damaged, but still operational.
“Get the gravity working again!” it snapped. “And ready all ship weapons for close combat!”
To fight the humans, Clear Chiming Bell thought, it would be necessary to match their warlike demeanor . . . to fight them all-out, without quarter, until their homeworld and all of their colonies had been reduced to radioactive rubble. The Slan hated that thought; it was disgusting . . . alien, and yet Clear Chiming Bell could see no alternative.
The Sh’daar Alliance would have to destroy the humans to the last blind, living creature . . . or the Alliance itself might be destroyed.
Lieutenant Donald Gregory
VFA-96, Black Demons
Osiris Space, 70 Ophiuchi AII
0716 hours, TFT
On his in-head, time adjusted so that he could see what was happening, Gregory watched the scattering of bright flares across the volume occupied by the enemy fleet, as pieces of the Altair and chunks of rock slammed into and through fragile metal and ceramic at near-c. Each impact released unimaginable torrents of raw kinetic energy as intense heat, as light and hard radiation, as savage impact. He saw half a dozen flashes across the night side of Osiris as well, and inwardly flinched.
God willing, those missiles hadn’t landed near cities occupied by humans. Six impactors out of tens of thousands wasn’t a bad percentage, but the collateral damage down there might still be unacceptably high. Even if the cities had been spared direct impacts, they might well be doomed by the water strikes.
Twenty years earlier, a Turusch kinetic-kill impactor massing less than a kilogram had struck the Atlantic Ocean at relativistic speed. The tidal wave generated by that attack had scoured the Periphery of North America, and low-lying portions of Europe, South America, and Africa as well, killing tens of millions of people. Similar tidal waves were spreading out now from dozens of impacts in Osiris’s north-hemisphere ocean. If anything was left of New Egypt or the other colony cities down there near the coast, the tsunamis might well wash them all into barren nonexistence.
Were there humans down there after twenty years?
Had the c-gun blast just killed any who might have survived?
The damned Sh’daar had owned Osiris for so long now that the chances were good there were no humans left to suffer the effects of friendly fire. There was no time to worry about it . . . or to think about lost parents and relatives.
“Ready with the sandcaster rounds!” Mackey ordered. “On my mark in three . . . two . . . one . . . fire!”
Twelve AS-78 AMSO missiles dropped from his Starhawk and accelerated. They wouldn’t be able to get that far ahead of the hurtling flight of SG-92s, but they did slip into trajectories carrying them toward the densest concentrations of Sh’daar spacecraft. In rapid, ripple-fire sequence, the AMSO rounds detonated, sending clouds of matter-compressed lead spherules toward the enemy in expanding, cone-shaped clouds, if anything, more deadly and precise than the use of the Altair as a relativistic shotgun.
Seconds later, the rounds began exploding . . . many of them in apparently empty space between the fighters and the planet. O-mines, Gregory thought. Obstacle mines orbiting through battle space to block a relativistic fly-by like this one. The sand might clear a path through the artificial debris fields.
And then enemy spacecraft were being struck as well, a devastating volley of high-energy destruction sleeting through them at the speed of light. Explosions flashed and swelled and faded, like multitudes of lightning flashes seen in thick clouds from orbit, ghostly and utterly silent.
But Gregory had no time to more than glimpse the multiple flares of raw light. In seconds, his fighter plunged into the Osirian battlespace. Human reflexes and perceptions were far too slow to handle the flood of data pouring through his data links. His AI took charge of his weapons systems, delivering missiles and particle beams at targets selected moments before, all while jinking wildly to avoid enemy missiles, mines, and other fighters. In seconds, his entire warload of missiles had b
een expended. Explosions blossomed around him, most in the distance, a few terrifyingly near. A Black Demon fighter 12 kilometers off his starboard side vanished in white-hot fury as it struck a Sh’daar obstacle-mine overlooked by the sandcaster rounds. He checked the roster: Lieutenant Caryl Mason. She could not have felt what hit her.
Another Black Demon fighter flared and vanished. Jason Del Rey . . . his fighter hit by a Slan positron beam. Those beams were everywhere now, slashing, weaving an intricate and deadly web across the path of the incoming fighters.
Other fighters in other squadrons were dying now . . . striking O-mines or taking fire from the Sh’daar warfleet surrounding them. Sh’daar ships were dying as well. Gregory was all too aware that the survival of the America battlegroup depended on how much damage the fighters did to the enemy fleet now.
And yet the actual battle now was in the metaphorical hands of the AIs, machines with far faster reflexes than mere humans.
Two kilometers off his starboard side, Jodi Vaughn’s fighter took a glancing hit from a positron beam, fragments of her Starhawk exploding into a cascade of white-hot stars . . . and then what was left of her fighter seemed to crumple in upon itself, collapsing, compressing . . . then disappearing, as the wreckage was devoured within the singularity powering her ship.
“Jodi!” he yelled, unable to silence the anguished scream.
Somehow the fears for family lost these twenty years paled at the death of someone loved here and now. Jodi . . .
She’d been friend and confidant, far more than playmate. And she was gone in a fraction of an eyeblink.
Something huge flashed across his port side, and then he was past, hurtling on into deep space. Lieutenant Andrew Bennings died on the way out.
The entire battle had lasted only for as long as it took a fighter traveling at close to the speed of light to plunge through the battlespace volume, a sphere roughly 1 million kilometers across . . . three and a third seconds.
The battle was over almost before Gregory could register the fact, and there’d been precious little he could have done to affect the outcome. His AI maintained control of the Starhawk . . . and a very good thing, too. He was numb, unable to move, unable to think.
A frequent argument heard both back at Fleet Command HQ and in the squadron recreation decks on board fleet star carriers held that crewed fighters were anachronisms, that a strike fighter could do its job purely under robotic control. Most human pilots, however, stubbornly held that there were mission elements that demanded a human brain—albeit one with cybernetic enhancement and AI links. As far as Gregory was concerned, robots were good—and vital for operations at near-c—but you still needed a human in the loop to make the decisions upon which human lives depended.
Except that, right now, Gregory wasn’t entirely human. Jodi . . .
Quite often in modern combat, the human element simply wasn’t in the equation. As feeling returned, shock and a numb emptiness replaced by anger and a searing hatred, Gregory was ready to flip end for end and re-engage the enemy. He wanted to kill them, burn them, punish them for what they’d done to Jodi . . . to Mason and Del Rey and Bennings and all the others . . . to his family . . . he wanted to kill them . . . kill them. . . .
In a standard planetary assault, the squadron’s pilots would have spun their fighters about, decelerated, then boosted back into the battlespace around the planet, re-engaging the enemy and awaiting the arrival of the fleet. The squadron’s orders this time, however, were to keep moving; they would rendezvous with America out near the 40-AU limit, assuming, of course, that the star carrier survived the next few moments.
America and the other capital ships of the fleet would be running the Sh’daar gauntlet in less than five minutes.
Gregory was left to sit within the embrace of his fighter, alone with some very dark thoughts.
TC/USNA CVS America
Osiris space, 70 Ophiuchi AII
0721 hours, TFT
At a whisper below the speed of light, America’s battlegroup dropped into the fire-wracked volume of space surrounding Osiris. Captain Gray was hyperlinked with the ship’s main AI, which allowed him to perceive events transpiring outside the ship at an accelerated rate. He would pay for the privilege later in migraines and insomnia that normal nanomeds couldn’t touch. He’d worry about that later. Right now, he needed, somehow, to penetrate the c-fog and understand what was happening.
Out of fifty-seven Sh’daar vessels that had shown up on the initial scans of the area around the planet, twelve appeared to have been destroyed, and perhaps another nineteen were disabled, an excellent outcome for the first strike. Some of the disabled ships, however, would likely be back in action soon as their damage control protocols took effect . . . and there were still at least twenty-six Sh’daar capital ships untouched and awaiting the human battlegroup’s arrival.
So the odds were down to seventeen to twenty-six. Those odds weren’t good, but they weren’t impossibly bad either. Sh’daar battle fleets, Gray knew, had trouble with efficient command control after being c-gunned, especially when they were mixed fleets. Spread out as they were, it might be possible to engage a few enemy ships at a time, overwhelming them with the massed firepower of the entire human fleet.
At least, that was the idea. America’s battlegroup flashed down through the last few tens of millions of kilometers and entered the contested battlespace, releasing clouds of AMSO rounds and long-range antiship missiles to blast out a clear path for themselves.
The railgun cruiser Turner engaged the enemy directly first, slamming high-velocity rounds into a lone H’rulka warship, a kilometer-wide sphere apparently already damaged by the fighter strike. America exchanged fire with a Turusch Romeo, then, a second later, with a Slan Ballista. The heavy cruiser Washington was struck by a barrage of KK projectiles and vanished in a searing blaze of starcore light. The accompanying fighters engaged Turusch Toads and Slan Stilettos.
Ships on both sides died, vaporizing in intense nova flares of light and hard radiation . . . or tumbling helplessly in clouds of shredding wreckage . . . or collapsing into the black holes of their own gravitic drives and power plants.
Gray’s mind, accelerated through the ship’s AI, watched, catalogued, analyzed, calculated. In modern fleet combat, often the best a fleet commander could do was set all of the pieces in motion, then just sit back and watch as the resulting battle played itself out across a handful of seconds. There simply was no time to react as the two fleets interpenetrated, no possibility of changing tactics or outmaneuvering the enemy. You lived or died, succeeded or failed based on your initial planning and the luck of the draw.
The enemy ships, Gray saw, were widely dispersed across the target battlespace, and the damaged ones were having trouble maneuvering to meet the human fleet’s onslaught. Through his AI links to the rest of the battlegroup, he directed his ships to focus on the undamaged enemy ships. The objective for the operation, after all, was to cause enough damage to the entire Sh’daar fleet that they would not launch their own assault on the Sol System and Earth. Damaged ships might be repaired and brought back on-line, but that would take time, and damaged ships would not be able to make the faster-than-light passage across sixteen light years to Earth.
The number of damaged Sh’daar ships was up to twenty-five, now, with six more destroyed. That left just fourteen untouched enemy vessels. The human battlegroup had suffered five losses so far—all of them destroyed. The odds had dropped to twelve to fourteen . . . and Gray made a command decision.
“Comm,” he snapped.
“Comm here, sir.”
“Make to all ships. Initiate deceleration and engage the enemy at non-rel velocities. Order the strike fighters to decelerate immediately and rejoin the fleet in battlespace.”
“Aye-aye, sir!”
“We are still heavily outnumbered, Captain Gray,” the AI pointed out with emot
ionless reserve. “Besides the fourteen undamaged warships, there are twenty-five damaged Sh’daar vessels. While the damaged ships are having difficulty maneuvering, most appear to have their weapons systems intact.”
“I know,” Gray replied. “But this is our chance to end this thing, once and for all! It’s why we’re here!”
“Understood. We have passed through the battlespace, and are now initiating deceleration. The other ships of the battlegroup have acknowledged the order, and are decelerating as well.”
CBG-40 began the cumbersome evolution of reversing course.
Astern, the enemy slowly and clumsily maneuvered to meet them.
Chapter Twenty-Three
16 November 2424
Slan Protector Vigilant
Extended Orbit, 70 Ophiuchi AII
0723 hours, TFT
Damage to the Vigilant, it turned out, was relatively slight. Clear Chiming Bell had at last made it to the deck by snapping its ear flaps shut, then slowly opening them, using puffs of expelled air to waft itself back to its control station. Shortly after that, the ship’s artificial gravity was restored, and the weapons came back on-line.
Vigilant was again ready for combat.
The human fleet had devastated the assembled Sh’daar forces. There was still a chance to pull things together, however, if the Sh’daar Masters could pull some organization out of the chaos of multi-specific discordance.
The Sh’daar, as the Slan experienced them, existed as a kind of electronic network nestled within the linkages between minute computers implanted within billions of individuals of a number of mutually alien species. The net at the star the humans called 36 Ophiuchi had been relatively small, non-sentient, and limited in scope to observing and recording events. The net here at the staging area was larger and better realized, with hundreds of computer nodes in the various ships and on the surface of the planet.
The problem the Sh’daar faced, however—their single, sometimes overwhelming weakness—lay in that mutual alienness of their subject species. The Slan could understand the H’rulka fairly well—titanic gasbags evolved within the atmosphere of a gas giant world who communicated using natural radio. The Turusch, dual-brained beings that thought and spoke in harmonies that gave rise to nested meanings, were far more difficult to relate to. A third Sh’daar-dominated species, the Agletsch, had developed a kind of lingua franca allowing interspecies communication with a wide variety of Galactic cultures, but in fact that worked only with beings physiologically capable of working within a certain range of sounds locked into a claustrophobically narrow band of frequencies.