by Douglas, Ian
It was unlikely that even the Sh’daar themselves, whatever they really were, fully understood their subject races, that they understood them well enough to truly communicate with them. They nudged, they urged, they suggested . . . but they couldn’t lead.
Nor could they explain. Clear Chiming Bell knew from its few times of direct linkings with the Sh’daar that something about the humans terrified them. Something had happened that had led to a truce, of sorts, with the humans . . . but then something else had happened, forcing the Sh’daar to, once again, attempt to destroy them.
The nature of the threat, however, appeared incommunicable. For a species that used sound both to communicate and to reveal its surroundings in precise detail, that failure of clarity was bewildering, a failure verging on . . . sin.
The Masters had shown the Slan the stars. They’d helped the Slan leave the world, the caverns of their birth, and cross the aching emptiness to other worlds. They’d shown the Slan worlds similar enough to their birthworld—like the humans’ Arianrhod—that they’d become a truly Galactic species, potentially immortal, spreading across hundreds of Slan-friendly worlds.
Were they also capable of k’!k’t!’cht’!k’!kt’!!!k?
Were they in fact withholding or distorting information in an immoral way?
Or were the Sh’daar literally incapable of communicating clear and precise meaning about the humans?
Either possibility was . . . disturbing.
The enemy vessels appeared to be decelerating. They would be returning to the death-blasted gulf around the planet to complete what they’d begun.
Clear Chiming Bell gave the orders for the Slan contingent to meet them.
Lieutenant Donald Gregory
VFA-96, Black Demons
Osiris Space, 70 Ophiuchi AII
0725 hours, TFT
The orders had just come through: they were re-uniting with the battlegroup, then returning together to Osiris! Gregory’s deepest longing, a need that had been driving him, gnawing at him since the age of eight had just been handed to him by an arbitrary decision made out of the blue by the brass back on board the America, and the realization left him weak, almost paralyzed.
The fact that it had been handed to him hard on the heels of Jodi’s death had plunged him into a swirling emotional black hole from which there seemed to be no escape whatsoever.
Home.
The word scarcely carried meaning for Gregory any longer.
Somehow, he’d managed to wall off the shock of Jodi’s sudden death, but he still felt an all-embracing numbness that left him moving along on auto-pilot. As he’d continued hurtling out-system, away from the fire-blasted horrors of Osiris, he’d stopped thinking about home and family. Right now, he didn’t want to think about anything. . . .
Gradually, as minute followed relativistically compressed minute, the numbness receded, replaced by a fierce and unrelenting fury.
Was home something he could fight for if Jodi’s death had been the price?
And would it be home any longer? It would be, he realized with a sick twisting in his gut, a home that had been occupied by enemy aliens for twenty years, a world where home and loved ones might well have been incinerated two aching decades before.
Despite this, he found that he welcomed the decision by America’s command staff. Apparently the destruction wrought by Altair’s sacrifice, by the high-velocity passage of four fighter squadrons, and by the fly-by of the battlegroup itself had, all together, hurt the enemy enough that Captain Gray had decided to stay and fight.
“So, Nungie,” Kemper said over the tactical channel. “You get to go home after all, huh? Heh. I wouldn’t count on your relatives waiting at the spaceport for ya, though!”
“Leave him alone, Happy,” Nichols snapped. “Stop riding him.”
Ted Nichols and Gregory hadn’t been particularly close. He was a quiet and somewhat reserved pilot from Ottawa and a member of the Navy’s aristocratic elite, and that alone always had put up a barrier between him and the colonial from Osiris.
But he had known that Gregory and Jodi were . . . involved.
“Fuck, I ain’t riding the poor bastard, Teddy. The fact is, colonials are as bad as Prims. They shouldn’t be wearing fighters in the first place!”
And that, Gregory thought, was the overwhelming weakness of the Confederation space-fighter arm, that twisted sense of better-than-thou privilege, of elitism that separated pilots into “us” and the have-not “thems.” The sheer, fucking aristocratic arrogance of most of the pilots infuriated Gregory, left him shaking inside . . . and, very slowly, it helped him focus.
He wouldn’t let them win, wouldn’t let them put him down or Prims like Jodi. He was as good as any of them, and by God he would prove it.
He was going home, and whether home and family were still there or not, he would help kick the aliens off Osiris and make the place his home once more.
“Eat my fucking wake, Kemper,” he growled. “I’ll see you at Osiris.”
TC/USNA CVS America
Osiris space, 70 Ophiuchi AII
0729 hours, TFT
It would take almost fifty minutes for the America battlegroup to kill its forward velocity, by which time it would have traveled almost 450 million kilometers . . . or three more AUs. Call it three more hours before they would be able to re-engage the enemy. The fighter squadrons, well out ahead of the fleet, nonetheless would be able to cancel their forward velocity in about five minutes and, boosting at fifty thousand gravities, would be able to make it back to the planet and match local vectors in something less than another eight minutes.
But the fighters would be low on expendables—missiles, AMSO rounds, and KK projectiles—having dumped as much in the way of munitions as possible during the brief moments of their Osirian fly-by. They would still be able to generate laser and particle beams, of course, so long as their quantum power plants were still functioning, but they would be at a serious disadvantage with an enemy that could magnetically shield against incoming charged particles.
And so Gray had directed Connie Fletcher to bring the squadrons back on board America. There would be some tricky maneuvering involved; the fighters would have to pass America on the outbound leg of her flight path, turn around, accelerate to catch up, then dock while America killed her own acceleration in order to accommodate the trapping squadrons. They would lose some time, too, since the carrier could not be under acceleration while fighters were landing. There were just too many vector variables involved in an operation where a mistake of a tenth of a percent would still result in a difference in relative velocities of hundreds of kilometers per second and a staggering release of kinetic energy that would vaporize the fighter and cripple the star carrier. Safer by far to have America cut her acceleration for the time necessary to bring her chicks back on board.
The squadrons would re-arm, then launch again during the return flight.
And this time they would stay within the battlespace until the big boys joined them.
For Gray, the real agony lay in the big unknown. Would enough of the battle-damaged Sh’daar warships be able to repair themselves during those intervening three hours to put the human battlegroup at an impossible disadvantage when the fight was rejoined? There was no clear answer to that. The enemy had nanomatrix hull construction—or its alien equivalent—allowing them to repair damage in fairly short order. The Slan HQ ship had suffered serious pressure loss in the fight at Arianrhod, but had repaired the damage, at least to an extent, by the time the Marines boarded her.
The problem was that comparing technologies between mutually alien cultures was not a comparison of apples and oranges, which at least were both related as fruit. Human technology was different from Turusch technology which was different from Slan technology not only because the latter two were more advanced, but because the thinking, the ways of lookin
g at the universe, and the histories of the steps leading to the present in each culture were different as well. A being’s language, sophontologists argued, helped shape how it perceived the universe and how its brain worked at a basic, quantum level. Mutually alien technologies, it seemed, could be compared only in certain gross and relatively inefficient ways—by measuring the relative energy outputs of starship drive arrays, for example. The Slan could do that trick of accelerating at high-G inside the 40-AU limit of a star’s gravitational matrix, a clear advantage over human vessels, but, if anything, their beam energy outputs in combat were a bit less than the human equivalents. They also seemed to have a different philosophy about warfare—for them, it was more of a test of strength and will between two able parties than it was one of enforcing one’s political will over another—and that appeared to have a bearing on their technology as well.
No, not apples and oranges. Stars and sea cucumbers, maybe.
And that left Gray wondering how good the enemy force would be three hours hence, when battle was rejoined. Damn it, the human force needed an advantage, something to help tip the scales in their favor.
He had one hidden ace, in the Shenandoah, and the wrinkle he’d explored already with Linda Alvarez, her skipper.
And just maybe he had another one as well.
Emergency Presidential Command Post
Toronto, Ontario
United States of North America
1005 hours, EST
“My God, they made a job of it, didn’t they?”
President Koenig sat before the monitor, watching the scenes being transmitted from a cloud of news-camera drones swarming over the former capital of the United States of North America. What had been the center of the city of Columbus was now pocked by a gigantic bowl-shaped crater nearly three kilometers across and almost half a kilometer deep. A ring around the crater reaching another five kilometers had been burned out by the fireball. There was no radioactivity as there would have been in a nuclear strike, but the damage nevertheless was appalling.
The Scioto River tumbled now over the smooth curve of the crater’s northwestern edge, a waterfall vanishing into steam clouds deep inside the crater’s depths. Other rivers on the east side of the city were vainly attempting to fill the hole as well. It would be a while before the crater’s depths cooled enough that the infalling water no longer flashed into steam on the way down. When that happened, the crater would slowly become an almost perfectly circular lake.
Geneva’s strategy, Koenig’s advisors thought, had been to fire a succession of nano-D warheads into the crater, creating a cascade of destruction that would have eaten all the way down to the Executive Towers’ deepest, most heavily armored basement and devoured it. Fortunately, only one warhead had struck, and the trillions of nano-disassemblers it had unleashed had run through their limited lifetime before they’d gotten beneath the half-kilometer mark.
In any case, the president, his cabinet, and much of the USNA Congress was no longer in the underground bunker. Shortly after the destruction of the city above, they’d been hustled onto a special maglev train that had zipped them silently away through an evacuation tunnel running deep and straight through the Earth’s crust, traveling the 500 kilometers northeast to the city of Toronto in less than ten minutes. Still the capital of Ontario and the largest city of the Canadian provinces, Toronto’s downtown York Civic Complex had office space enough to accommodate the USNA government, at least for the time being. It would be crowded—Koenig’s own staff was packed into small offices three and four to a room, and his own office was smaller than Marcus Whitney’s office back in D.C.
No matter. They would manage. By God they would manage!
Communications relays, throughout the USNA and in space, were being set up to allow Koenig and his people to communicate with the outside world—including with Geneva—without giving away their actual physical location.
There would be no repeat of Columbus. Koenig had vowed this.
That the damage to Columbus had been only a crater a half kilometer deep—well, thank the Pittsburgh, the Amazon and the Missouri for that blessing! Their last-ditch stand out in trans-lunar space had kept the rest of the warheads from reaching the ground, and had likely saved the USNA government from the Confederation’s attempt at political decapitation.
Whitney knocked on his open door, and Koenig looked up. “Ah, Marcus. Do we have a channel open to Roettgen yet?”
“No, sir. Not a word out of them. Intelligence thinks that maybe she was caught by surprise, that a rogue element fired that nano-D. If so, they must be scrambling like demons to cover their asses now.”
“We may be able to use that,” Koenig said. “We can believe them if they claim it was a rogue admiral launching that attack.” Just like with the Chinese Hegemony almost three centuries ago, he added, keeping the depressing thought to himself. We give them a way to save face, to back away from their mistake . . . and maybe the human species survives for just a bit longer. At least until the next crisis.
But damn it, just once it would be nice if a government could be held accountable for its actions.
“Yes, sir,” Whitney said. “But there’s other news.”
“Eh? What?” Until the command center’s communications network was fully up and working, Koenig couldn’t have automatic data feeds coming through to his in-head. It was frustrating how slow information could travel.
“A message drone came through from CBG-Forty a few hours ago. The signal just now reached Synchorbit, and was relayed non-Net to General Mancuso.”
And that gave a good indication of how screwed up communications could be, vital information coming in through private calls to his generals. The Hexagon had been damaged by the Confederation attack on Columbus, but not destroyed. Mancuso had most of his staff hidden away now down in the Hexagon’s labyrinthine subsurface warrens.
“Tell me.”
“Carrier Battlegroup Forty had a break with the rest of the task force at Thirty-six Ophiuchi. The Confederation elements are probably returning to the Sol System under the command of Captain Lavallée. Admiral Steiger is dead. So is Admiral Delattre. Captain Gray has taken command of the USNA ships and is en route to Seventy Ophiuchi.”
“Seventy fucking Ophiuchi!” Koenig yelled, his voice ringing from the walls of the narrow room. “Why in God’s name is he going there?”
“We don’t have a lot of details, sir,” Whitney said. He sounded nervous in the face of Koenig’s fury. “But Gray reports that the Sh’daar appear to be massing at Osiris for a strike at Earth. He intends to launch a spoiling raid . . . maybe delay them, maybe make them think twice about even trying it.”
Koenig sank back in his chair, relief warring with rage. Damn it, he needed Gray and his ships here, not sixteen light years away at 70 Oph.
And yet, if he’d managed to block a Sh’daar strike at Earth . . .
He sighed. Even with ultra high-velocity message drones, it was impossible to manage a battlegroup light years away. When he’d commanded CBG-18 twenty years before, Koenig had often made use of that simple fact—the commanding officer on the scene knew the situation better, and had more up-to-the-second information, than the people watching from Earth and Mars. And now Gray was doing the same thing.
Koenig had to assume that Gray knew the situation better than even the president, his commander in chief . . . and that he would be making the best decisions possible, as determined by his unique experience and viewpoint.
And Gray’s call had probably been a good one. Earth’s military, certainly, had been watching the situation at 70 Ophiuchi since the system had fallen twenty years ago. That Sh’daar bastion thrust deep into the sphere of Terran space had been a constant threat, a possible staging area for a new strike at Earth. The Confederation had frequently reviewed plans for a counterattack, but somehow those plans always had been shelved. Other crises
—not least of which were the political divisions and sparring within the Confederation itself—had always intervened.
Koenig remembered all too well the earlier Sh’daar raids two decades earlier—a Turusch raid that had resulted in tidal waves buffeting Earth’s Atlantic coastlines. And there’d been a later scouting expedition by a H’rulka vessel that could have turned out much more badly than it had.
Gray would remember those threats as well. He’d been there too, as had Koenig. But none of that helped Koenig here and now, with the Confederation suddenly at the USNA’s throat.
What was that old saying? It doesn’t rain but it pours. . . .
Of one thing he was sure. The USNA could not defeat both the Sh’daar and the Confederation, not alone. At best, Gray would delay the enemy at Osiris . . . and it would be up to Koenig to somehow make the Confederation see reason and unite once again.
Because Earth would have to stand united against the Sh’daar, or what had happened to Columbus would be nothing. The Sh’daar would return to the Sol System sooner or later, they would annihilate Mars and Luna and the Synchorbital, and they would turn the surface of Earth herself into a molten sea of glass.
Somehow, Koenig had to bring together a divided Earth . . . or Humankind might well face extinction.
Lieutenant Donald Gregory
VFA-96, Black Demons