by Ian Douglas
And now it seemed that the Eulers had long been overlooked by the Xul, apparently because their favored worlds were gas-giant satellites well outside the usual habitable zone of a given planetary system. Once the Xul had finally noticed the Euler worlds, the Eulers, evidently, had, like the N’mah, moved to hollowed-out asteroids.
Ramsey remembered how many RF targets had been detected in this star system alone, in the vast band of asteroids circling the local star. There might be some hundreds of inhabited planetoids lost among the hundreds of thousands of chunks of debris making up the asteroid belt.
He had so many questions. Surely the Xul could pick up radio frequency noise as readily as could human ships. Weren’t the Eulers afraid that their radio leakage would give them away?
Or were they unaware of it? They must know radio, since their virtual reality world seemed to be transmitted at radio wavelengths. Or, perhaps the Xul were oblivious to leakage at radio frequencies?
“Unknown,” Achilles2 said, reading his thoughts and stating the obvious. “There is reason to suspect that the Xul are so self-centered they don’t notice relatively subtle effects like secondary radio transmission. But, ultimately, we simply don’t know.”
Ramsey stared at the nightmarish being floating in front of him. If the scale was accurate, the thing was almost 3 meters long, with easily twice the mass of a human, at least. He felt no fear now, however. The being—had Achilles2 called it she?—appeared to be waiting.
Waiting for what?
Waiting, perhaps, for an apology.
Or, at the least, for some sign that the humans wanted an alliance. That might be self-evident, especially in the images of humans battling Xul that Achilles2 was sending them—the enemy of my enemy is my friend….
On the other hand, there was no way to guess what the Eulers were thinking, how they thought, how they connected with or even perceived aliens in the first place. These things were different….
“Achilles? Can you create an animation of humans and Eulers working together? Maybe show them fighting the Xul?”
“I will try.” A moment passed. “Done.”
There was no response from the Euler. It hovered there in the darkness of a virtual sea, its tentacles waving gently in an unfelt current.
“Achilles…bring an image of the damaged cylinder into this simulation, would you?”
“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant.”
A lone tank appeared in the shared simulation, upright, 3 meters tall, a meter thick. The 2-centimeter hole was clearly visible in the side.
At least the Euler crammed inside that thing would not have suffered. Literal explosive decompression as the contents blasted out into hard vacuum would have killed it instantly.
As instantly as it had killed Private Kenyon.
Ramsey moved forward in the simulation until he was standing directly beside the cylinder. Reaching out, he tapped it, just above the hole. Then he tapped himself on his own chest. Finally, he opened his arms wide, hands open, legs spread apart. Spread-eagle, he stood there for a long moment, hoping the symbols were clear.
He’d already pointedly divested himself of his weapons, and, in the sim he wasn’t even wearing armor. There wasn’t a lot else he could do to prove peaceful intent to these beings, except try for an empty-hand-means-no-weapon gesture. Hell, even that might not be understood by a being that had no hands.
How did one mime an empty tentacle?
If these beasties knew math, though, they must understand a one-to-one equivalence. He’d been the one in command when Kenyon had drilled into the tank. He was offering himself, one for one….
The damaged tank vanished. Slowly, when nothing further happened, he lowered his arms.
“Did you take the tank out of the sim, Achilles?”
“No, Gunnery Sergeant. She did.”
Communication.
He studied the impassive being for a moment. “Achilles? What makes you think that it’s a she?”
“They have been transmitting a great deal of data, Gunnery Sergeant, more than what you have been experiencing for the past few moments. Some of that information includes data on their biology…which appears to be based on polyaromatic sulfonyl halides, by the way.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Do you see this?” Achilles2 asked, putting a green cursor over a part of the alien’s body, just below the octopoid head and between the front two tentacled protuberances. There, buried between the outer layers of transparent skin and the uppermost of the five pulsing hearts, was a dark, knobby shadow, like a bunch of grapes the size of Ramsey’s fist.
“Yeah….”
“In the Eulers, the male is a parasite living inside the larger female. Some species on Earth show similar adaptations.”
Ramsey had heard of deep-sea angler fish that did that, and possibly for the same reason…to ensure that mates could find one another in the dark and cold of the benthic abyss.
“Gunnery Sergeant?”
“Yes?”
“I believe they are responding in the affirmative.” Achilles2 opened a new window in Ramsey’s head. “They are retransmitting the animations I just sent them, showing humans and Eulers working together to fight the Xul.”
The image was a crude animation, showing cartoon representations of a human and of an Euler on one side, a recognizable sketch of a Xul huntership on the other. Human and Euler moved up and down quickly and in unison for a moment, and the Xul ship broke into pieces and dissolved.
Thank God!…
“Gunnery Sergeant?”
“What is it, Achilles?”
“We now have a clear radio channel back to the fleet.”
Excitement thrilled, pounding at Ramsey’s awareness. “Excellent!”
“Perhaps not. According to FleetCom, the Stargate has just changed pathways…and a Xul fleet is coming through. A very large Xul fleet….”
As Ramsey accessed the newly opened command channel, he heard the alert sounding as the Fleet went to battlestations.
24
1012.1102
UCS Hermes
Stargate
Aquila Space
1157 hrs GMT
Emerging from the tube-car transport from his office, General Alexander entered the Ops Center, a large and circular room given over primarily to communications equipment and to the couches used by Ops personnel when they linked in full-sim with the Fleet Command Net. At a brisk walk, he threaded his way through the couches, most of them occupied by men and women of his command constellation, and lay down on the central couch reserved for CO-MIEF2. CO-MIEF1, Admiral Taggart, was already strapped to the couch next to his, his face white and drawn as he wrestled with the fast-deteriorating tactical situation.
As he lay down, contacts in the material connected with his implant interfaces at wrists and palms and the back of his head, snapping him instantly into a virtual world perfectly re-creating the view outside.
The eighty ships of 1MIEF hung suspended between the icon representing RFS Alpha and the wedding-band hoop of the system’s stargate.
The Xul ships were still emerging from the Gate. He counted five so far, four of the 1-to 2-kilometer-long needles commonly referred to as hunterships, Types I and II, and one of the larger, far more massive flattened spheres that Marine Intelligence called “Nightmares.” Another Type I huntership was just emerging from the Gate, the gold-hued spire of its prow protruding from the grav-twisted emptiness at the Gate’s center.
“Welcome to the show, General,” Admiral Taggart’s voice said in his mind. “Ain’t we got fun?”
“Is this real time or time-lagged?” Alexander asked. The question was vital. The Stargate was twenty-five light-minutes away. What he was seeing now might be real-time, or it could be the tactical situation of almost half an hour ago, with the light they were seeing having taken that long to crawl across space to the MIEF.
“Real time,” Taggart replied. He indicated four green icons encircling the Stargate,
but well distant from the merging enemy fleet. “We have four patrol-picket ships posted around the Stargate—Sentry, Defender, Patriot, and Watcher. They’re relaying their sensor data via QCC.”
“Good.” Patrol pickets were the smallest FTL-capable ships in the MIEF’s inventory, snug little eight-man vessels massing 500 tons, not a whole lot bigger than an Ontos, but they could be customized with swap-out sensor pods and drone controls.
As he watched, a blue-white thread of light snapped out from the largest Xul ship, the saucer, and touched one of the pickets. There was a flare of light….
“Damn,” Taggart said. “That was Watcher. The others are taking evasive action.”
The pickets, darting gnats to the ponderous Xul behemoths, jinked and shifted, making targeting them difficult. The Xul, however, after destroying Watcher, appeared to take no more notice of them. Arrogant bastards, Alexander thought. They honestly don’t care whether we see what they’re doing or not.
That, he thought, was the worst part about dealing with the Xul. The slow-paced tempo of their response to humans suggested that humans simply weren’t that significant to them, insects to be swatted at leisure.
And, watching those huge ships sliding into the hard, blue-white glare of the HD387136 system’s sun, it was easy to believe that such was exactly the case.
Admiral Taggart, he saw, was already deploying the MIEF to strike the Xul ships before they could get organized. The fleet carriers Chosin and Lejeune were lining up for FTL runs into the near-Gate battlespace, where they could release their fighters, while the heavy guns, Ishtar, Mars, and Chiron, spread out in order to catch the enemy vessels in a three-way crossfire. Cruisers, destroyers, and frigates were scattering across the sky, arcing in on the Xul flotilla from every possible direction.
“You’re trying for englobement?” he asked the admiral.
“That’s the idea,” Taggart told him. “If we can close in on them, englobe them up against the stargate before they can spread out, we might have a chance.”
The Xul ships were still very close together. Alexander saw what Taggart was suggesting. Hit them now, before they dispersed, and the massive bulks of the Xul ships themselves might block some of their own fire.
“How close are you trying to get?”
“Fifty thousand kilometers,” Taggart told him. “Any closer, and we won’t be able to stand up to the big Xul guns.”
The sixth huntership was all the way through the Gate, now. Were any more coming through? How long would they stay in place? The MIEF was accelerating now, preparatory to engaging their Alcubierre Drives for the short sprint in to the Gate.
“Cara,” Alexander asked, curious. “Do we have a fix on where they’re coming from?”
“Affirmative, General. The Gate has been retuned to the orbital resonances associated with Starwall.”
Alexander had suspected as much. Starwall was the location of a major Xul node, and that was where Lieutenant Lee had picked up the intelligence that the Xul had learned of Earth after taking the Argo.
Starwall, then, would be the MIEF’s first objective…if the enemy fleet now flowing into Aquila Space could be stopped.
As one, linked together by the FleetCom net, fifty-eight of the MIEF vessels blurred, streaking forward, leaving behind the carriers, the troop ships, and the noncombatant logistical vessels. FTL maneuvers across a scant twenty-five light-minutes, were touchy, requiring absolute precision and timing. In fact, AIs were at the helm of each of those vessels; no human touch at a control or thought-click could possibly be precise enough.
The Xul ships were beginning to accelerate, slowly, at first, but they were drawing away from the Gate. Not good. Ships in Alcubierre Drive could not see out or communicate; they might arrive to find the Xul fleet already behind them.
Minutes passed…and then the MIEF ships dropped out of FTL.
No battle plan, the ancient saying went, ever survives contact with the enemy. The englobement had almost succeeded…but the Xul ships had moved far enough in the intervening minutes that two of the hunterships were already outside the globe, and the others were much closer to the nearest MIEF ships than had been planned. The light cruiser Shiva had dropped into normal space less than 8,000 kilometers from one of the Xul needles, and came under immediate and devastating fire.
Among other high-tech magic, Xul weapons included linear accelerators that hurled microscopic black holes at the target. Shiva staggered under a barrage from the enemy warship, her structure crumpling as naked singularities the size of a human blood cell ripped through her hull and internal spaces. Such tiny black holes couldn’t eat much matter in a single pass; the excess was bled off as fiercely radiating energy, much of it in the x-ray frequencies. In seconds, Shiva had been transformed into a drifting knot of white-hot wreckage.
But one of the Xul ships, a kilometer-long Type I, was crumpling as well. Alexander saw the huge vessel slew to one side and begin drifting helplessly, the long, slender blade of its structure beginning to collapse toward the aft end. Alexander pointed this out to Cara.
“I have just analyzed the paths of each of the MIEF vessels,” Cara told him. “One, the path taken by the Valkyrie-class light cruiser Judur, intersected that Type I huntership while Judur was still under Alcubierre Drive.”
“Interesting.” He’d not thought about the possibility of what might happen if the warp bubble enclosing a ship under FTL passed through another ship. He knew there’d been some discussion of the idea among tactical planners, but that the practice was not recommended. The warp bubble tended to compress space ahead of the ship under drive, and extend space astern; he could see how that might badly chew up a ship that happened to be in the way. “Could that be adapted as a weapon?” he asked.
“Negative,” Cara told him. “There have been numerous studies since the inception of a practical Alcubierre Drive. Essentially, there is no way to aim a vessel traveling under Drive, since it cannot see past the horizon of its own warp bubble. An actual hit would occur only by sheer, random chance.”
“I see.” In simplistic terms, hitting another ship while under FTL drive would be like hitting another bullet with a bullet of your own—fired with your eyes shut.
But sheer chance did happen in combat, especially when the combatants were as relatively close-packed as these. Chance or not, the Judur had just cut down the odds against the MIEF by a substantial margin.
“The Judur doesn’t seem any the worse for wear,” he commented, checking the telemetry on the cruiser.
“A ship within the Alcubierre warp bubble is effectively cut off from the rest of the universe,” Cara reminded him.
“Damn, there’s got to be a way we could use that,” Alexander said.
The Judur was firing her main batteries now into the nearby Xul vessel, which continued to slowly crumple and deform. Xul hunterships possessed small black holes as the hearts of their power plants; serious damage to the ship could result in the black hole getting loose from its magnetic restraints and eating its way through the collapsing vessel.
Elsewhere, other MIEF warships were beginning to engage the enemy now, ganging up four and five and six to one, where possible. Chosin and Lejeune were loosing streams of Skydragon fighters. As soon as all fighters were away, they would pull back out of the engagement area. Until that happened, however, they were vulnerable. Chosin lurched sharply as a micro-black hole passed through her bow, radiating fiercely.
Xul warships possessed electromagnetic screens powerful enough to twist aside charged particle beams and any solid object with enough ferrous material to grab hold of. Lasers, however, were unaffected by magnetic screens, and could punch holes in Xul warships if they were powerful enough.
Much research had gone into this aspect of space-borne weaponry. During the battle to save Earth 563 years ago, titanic high-energy laser arrays in solar orbit had been used as very long range artillery and had managed to disable the Xul hunter, opening up a way for Marines to get on boar
d with their backpack nukes.
But Xul hulls were built up of composite adaptive materials as tough as diamond, and the ships themselves were so huge that most lasers small enough to be mounted on board a warship simply weren’t powerful enough to punch through one-on-one. The three heavy battlecruisers Ishtar, Chiron, and Mars, however, were built around spinal-mount HEL weapons—the acronym stood for High-Energy Laser—each with an output of 10 million billion watts—1,000 terawatts, or 1 petawatt.
A 5 megawatt laser delivers the energy equivalent to the detonation of a kilogram of TNT. A spinal-mount HEL, then, firing in a tenth-second pulse, released 500 terawatts of power in a pulse equivalent to a 1 megaton nuclear explosion.
Not even the thick, tough skin of a huntership’s hull could stand up to that much energy concentrated in one small spot. Xul ships repaired themselves swiftly—Marines had witnessed huge holes burned into a Xul warship’s hull literally growing shut in the course of a few moments—but tactics had evolved to circumvent, or, rather, to overwhelm Xul technology. Where possible, the AIs controlling the aiming of shipboard weapons would focus all available weapons on the same spot, the first bursts opening up a hole in the target, and subsequent laser bursts or remote-guided warheads traveling into the target’s interior, causing massive internal damage.
The other capital ships possessed lighter weapons, of course, but each still packed a significant punch. Light cruisers like the Judur and her Valkyrie sisters each possessed turret-mounted lasers with a 100TW output, roughly the energy released by a 20 kiloton nuke. Xul hunterships could generally shrug off 20KT pinpricks without much effort, but a concentration of such bursts could add up to significant damage. The main batteries of deity-class cruisers like the Diana, the Kali and the hastily repaired Morrigan could deliver pulses five times stronger, in the hundred-kiloton range.
Guided by the command net, then, the MIEF warships swarmed the far larger Xul vessels, blasting at their thick outer hulls with big-gun petawatt lasers, then following up with smaller but far more numerous laser weaponry to cause greater internal damage. When Xul magnetic shields collapsed, then, the way was open for swarms of smart missiles with megaton thermonuclear warheads, and the sharp, savage bursts of charged-particle weapons. The fighters darted in close, skimming the Xul hulls, slashing at hot craters with missiles and beams that could never have touched the carapaces of those giants, but which now wreaked searing damage within the enemy warships’ interiors.