by Ian Douglas
Gray fired a second proton beam . . . and then his AI took momentary control of the fighter’s attitude to release both VR–5s.
“Dammit, Gray,” Collins told him. “I told you to stay clear!”
Her fighter cut sharply past his, twenty kilometers ahead.
“Plenty of sky for both of us,” he told her.
On the tac display, four VR–5s fell toward Arcturus Station. One flared and vanished as it hit a cloud of sand, fired by the point-defense system of one of the Turusch ships. A second, then a third probe struck sand clouds and vanished.
And then Gray’s fighter fell between Arcturus Station and Jasper.
The moon had swelled huge in the past few moments, a gigantic, sharp-edged crescent filling the sky ahead. Golden clouds covered much of the visible surface, reflecting the gold-red light of Arcturus. Jasper’s atmosphere was primarily nitrogen and carbon dioxide, with traces of ammonia. The Confederation colonizing team had begun terraforming the world three years earlier, raising enormous nanoconverters on the surface to break down the carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon. Presumably, the surface converters had been destroyed by the Turusch; possibly, they intended to colonize the world themselves, since they breathed an atmosphere composed primarily of CO2.
In any case, Jasper’s atmosphere was still a deadly poison, as Gray’s fighter skimmed through the uppermost layers in a piercing shriek of ionizing gasses. Gray’s Starhawk was traveling at over seventy thousand kilometers per hour relative to the moon, however, far too fast for gravity to more than briefly tug at him.
And then he was clear, with Alchameth and its moons dwindling behind. He’d had only a glimpse of Arcturus Station, a bright star accompanied by the constellation of the enemy fleet. Missiles arced out from one of the Beta-class battleships; the other appeared to be leaking internal atmosphere and was in trouble.
It looked like one of his VR–5s had survived the enemy’s defensive volleys and made it all the way in to the station.
Gray accelerated. . . .
Arcturus Station
Jasper Orbit
Arcturus System
1201 hours, TFT
When launched, a VR–5 recon probe was a mirrored-black cylinder half a meter long and three centimeters thick. In flight, its nanomatrix hull flowed together into a black egg twenty-five centimeters long. As the surviving probe approached Arcturus Station, however, it gave a single sharp, short burst of deceleration, then unfolded like a blossoming flower, with black petals expanding and reaching out as if to embrace the station’s outer hull. The orbital base possessed radiation screens, of course, but not shields. Had the station been protected by space-twisting defensive shields, the probe’s penetration attempt would have been far more difficult.
As it was, however, the probe dropped through the electromagnetic screens as four petals, longer than the others, stretched out to serve as landing legs. They touched the station’s hull, merged with it as the nano-charged tips rearranged the local metal chemistry, and drew the rest of the probe down to rest.
The probe’s artificial intelligence was far smaller, far more limited than a Gödel 2500 or similar AI, and, though classified as sentient and self-aware, it had nothing close to human flexibility or scope. It basically had a limited set of functions within its software parameters . . . but those functions were things it did very, very well. It detected the station’s screens and merged with them effortlessly, redirecting the energy flow so that the probe’s landing went undetected by the facility’s sophisticated sensory and monitoring equipment.
The programmed nano of the probe’s business end began melting through solid layers of metal and ceramic, and the device swiftly sank from sight, leaving behind only a hair-thin wire thread to serve as a communications antenna.
In moments, the probe’s penetrating tendrils encountered fiber-optic wiring and an access to the station’s electronic systems. Many had been taken off-line by the Turusch invaders, including the sentient component of the base’s resident AI.
But within moments the VR–5 was reading through a complete station checklist, monitoring life support settings throughout the facility and even turning on security cameras and microphones.
There was some internal damage to the station, where control panels had been melted, and power leads cut. Overall, though, the orbital base remained intact. Most of the atmosphere had higher-than-expected levels of CO2, but temperature and the basic gas mix were close to human-norm. Better yet, the Arcturus Station AI was still present as resident software—switched off—“sleeping” in a sense—but still residing within the base computer network.
Following its programmed instructions, the recon probe opened a relay. . . .
Alchameth-Jasper Space
Arcturus System
1204 hours, TFT
Gray brought his fighter onto a new heading, whipping the Starhawk around a projected singularity fast enough that the G-force nearly made him black out. Falling in a straight line through a gravitational field—even one measuring fifty thousand gravities—was felt by ship and pilot as free fall, but vector changes—whipping around a high-G singularity—still exerted an outward centrifugal force. Make too tight a turn, and the pilot could be smeared into jelly, his ship stretched and ripped into microscopic fragments.
Fighter AIs were designed to monitor turns closely and override pilot commands that might exceed safety limits. Even so, Gray experienced nine gravities as his ship made its turn. Blood drained from his head despite the tight embrace of his seat around his legs and torso, and he came perilously close to blacking out.
Ahead, one of the mystery ships was breaking free from Jasper orbit, accelerating toward open space.
“Strike One, Strike Nine,” he called. “Red-Two is on the move. In pursuit.”
“Copy, Strike Nine. Take him out.”
“Copy. Arming Kraits . . . target lock . . . and . . . Fox One!” The first nuclear-tipped Krait slid from the Starhawk’s belly into the void. “And Fox One!”
The enemy ship was big, as big as a Turusch Hotel-class heavy cruiser, five kilometers long and massing some millions of tons. The design was clearly different, however, suggesting that it had been built by a different, possibly unknown Sh’daar client race. It lacked the jarring hull-color schemes favored by the Turusch, and the hull itself was of an unknown design, with the look of a collision involving several dozen dark gray spheres and spheroids of different sizes, from several hundred meters across to the big leading sphere, which had a diameter of more than two kilometers. Gray’s guess was that the alien ship was built along the same general lines as America and other Confederation capital ships, however, with that forward sphere holding reaction mass. He’d ordered both Kraits to target the cluster of small spheres just aft of the big one, reasoning that, as with America, that would be where the alien’s command-control and habitable shipboard areas would be, safe in the RM tank’s shadow.
An AI alarm was shrilling in his head, seeking his full attention.
“What?”
“We have telemetry from the VR–5,” the AI told him.
“Well . . . shoot it on to the America.” There was nothing he could do about it at the moment anyway.
“I already have. Expected transmission time is 117 minutes. However, you should see the data.”
This was not a good time. One of the Kraits vanished, intercepted by the enemy’s point-defense. He armed two more Kraits, readying a follow-up strike.
“Go on.”
A window opened in Gray’s awareness.
“Oh, shit! . . .”
He didn’t notice when the second Krait twisted through the enemy warship’s defenses and detonated just behind its two-kilometer sphere.
“Make sure the rest of the strike group gets this too,” Gray said.
The data was precise and complete.
; There were human survivors on board Arcturus Station.
Lots of them.
CIC, TC/USNA CVS America
Arcturus System
1356 hours, TFT
America had completed just over one third of her fourteen-hour voyage from emergence to the objective. Almost five hours after beginning acceleration, she’d traveled more than 760 million kilometers, and was now hurtling inbound at over 87,000 kps, almost 30 percent of the speed of light.
Alchameth and Jasper were still more than nine hours away.
Admiral Koenig floated above the CIC’s big tactical tank, watching as the ship’s navigational and combat AIs continued, moment by moment, to update the display. They were 134 light minutes out from the battle, now, so everything they saw in circum-Alchameth space was 134 minutes out of date, but that state of affairs would change as they drew closer, over the course of the next nine hours.
Each of the fighters was sending a steady stream of data out to America and her consorts. Just eight minutes ago, they’d seen the fighters engage the enemy fleet elements around Jasper. Many of the men and women around the tank had broken into cheering as one of the Beta-class battleships was crippled . . . then again as a Turusch cruiser and two destroyers were savaged as well. The second Beta was under way, clear of Arcturus Station and moving outward, but slowly, possibly damaged. Other enemy vessels appeared to be damaged as well.
On the downside, the enemy’s defenses had knocked down five Confederation fighters. The alpha strike had suffered 13 percent casualties, and the fight was only eight minutes old.
“Sir!” the CIC communications officer called. “New message coming through. Priority urgent!”
“Put it through.”
A window opened in the minds of Koenig and the other senior CIC personnel. The message had been composed in the form of a standard naval communiqué.
FROM: VR–5 RECONNAISSANCE PROBE 6587
TO: America CIC
TIME: 1203.38.22 TFT
SUBJ: ARCTURUS STATION
IN ACCORDANCE WITH PROGRAMMED INSTRUCTIONS, VR–5 6587 HAS PENETRATED THE OUTER HULL OF ARCTURUS STATION AND INFILTRATED BASE ELECTRONICS AND INTERNAL CONTROL SYSTEMS.
BASE AI HAS BEEN ACTIVATED, ALONG WITH LOWER-TIER SECURITY AND CONTROL SYSTEMS.
CAMERA AND IR SCANS HAVE LOCATED 975 HUMANS ON BOARD ARCTURUS STATION, LEVEL 5, COMPARTMENT 740, MESS AND RECREATION SPACES.
NO HUMANS HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED IN OTHER AREAS OF THE STATION. HOWEVER, 2,825 LIFE FORMS OF VARYING DESCRIPTIONS HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED IN VARIOUS STATION COMPARTMENTS, INCLUDING SHIP BAYS AND STATION CONTROL CENTER.
I HAVE MERGED WITH THE AI DESIGNATED “GUARDIAN” AND AWAIT FURTHER ORDERS.
“Christ,” Buchanan said. “That throws some quantum uncertainty into things.”
“It does,” Koenig agreed. “Looks like it’ll be Plan Gamma.”
Chapter Fifteen
29 January 2405
Demon Twelve
Alchameth-Jasper Space
Arcturus System
1401 hours, TFT
High-G space fighters enjoyed considerable advantages in close combat with capital ships. Their speed and maneuverability made targeting them with beam weapons extremely difficult, especially at ranges where speed-of-light time lags made predicting a target’s future position more a matter of guesswork than of mathematics. At longer ranges, smart missiles were the only reliable way to kill fighters . . . and fighters possessed sandcaster rounds and other point-defense weapons specifically designed to knock out incoming missiles.
Inevitably, though, as the space battle continued, those advantages began wearing away. The sheer size and mass of enemy capital ships, the numbers of weapons they possessed, the amount of raw power they could direct to shields, screens, and beam weapons began to tell. Fighters carried sharply limited supplies of expendable munitions—thirty-two VG–10 Kraits, generally, and forty-eight anti-missile rounds, ninety-six AM decoys, and two thousand depleted uranium slugs for the RFK–90 KK cannon. After more than two hours of steady combat, the Confederation fighters were beginning to run low on missiles.
More and more of the Confederation fighters were dying.
There were nine Night Demons left in the fight. Chalmers, Ball, and McKnight were gone, picked off one by one by the increasingly accurate and deadly fire of the Turusch heavies.
Commander McKnight had been the squadron’s skipper, blown out of the sky when a couple of Toads had dropped onto his ass ten minutes ago and hammered him with pee-beep fire. Lieutenant Commander Jonnet had taken command of the squadron . . . though at this point it was tough to tell if anyone was in control.
“Break left, Demon Twelve!” Jonnet was yelling. “Break Left!”
Lieutenant Shay Ryan rolled her Starhawk left, pulling around a projected singularity with a savage pull of G-forces as three Turusch missiles swung in from high and off her port stern quarter, then kicking in a ten-K boost. By turning in to the missiles, she had a chance of shaking them off her tail, or at least of forcing them to slow in order to match her turn.
The sky around her was filled with light—pulsing flashes of nuclear weaponry detonating silently against the night. A quarter of the sky was filled by the ringed, banded giant, Alchameth, bloated in half phase and red-gold in Arcturian light. Her new vector was carrying her toward the swollen planet at over one thousand kilometers per second. Jasper and Arcturus Station were somewhere behind her, she wasn’t sure where.
White light blossomed astern as one of the missiles detonated, a desperate attempt to disable her. She punched out two decoys—hand-sized robots that moved and reflected like a Starhawk fighter—hoping to ditch the remaining two incoming warheads. One of the Turusch missiles veered off, tracking the drone . . . but the other stubbornly completed its turn and continued homing on her ass. It was less than a hundred kilometers away now, and closing at a leisurely fifteen kilometers per second.
“Impact in six seconds,” her AI whispered in her head.
“I know, I know!” she yelled into the close embrace of the fighter’s cockpit. She was out of sand . . . and the loom of the super-Jovian gas giant ahead was rapidly cutting off her tactical options.
With the seconds to impact dwindling away, Ryan flipped her Starhawk end for end, dragging the targeting cursor floating in her in-head display onto the red icon marking the fast-approaching missile. She triggered a burst of high-velocity Gatling fire, hosing the incoming warhead. The target was tiny, less than four hundred centimeters wide, impossibly small for a targeting ship even with AI-assisted aim. The warhead was jinking as it approached, and she continued to squeeze off bursts at twelve per second.
The enemy warhead exploded just four kilometers off, the wavefront of fast-expanding debris and radiation washing across her fighter like a tidal wave, knocking out screens, killing her forward drive projector, sending her Starhawk into an uncontrollable tumble. The fireball dimmed, then faded.
Ryan was falling helplessly toward Alchameth.
“This is Demon Twelve,” she broadcast on the general tactical channel. She felt strangely relaxed, almost accepting.
I’m going to die, she thought. “I’m hit. Mayday, I’m hit. I’m falling in. . . .”
Dragonfire Nine
Alchameth-Jasper Space
Arcturus System
1406 hours, TFT
Gray saw the fifty-kiloton nuclear detonation close by the green icon marking Shay Ryan’s ship, heard her calm announcement over the taclink. He was twelve hundred kilometers behind her and closing—pure chance in the freewheeling chaos of a space-fighter furball, but fighter pilots relied on chance, on luck, as often as they relied on the predictions of cold, hard numbers.
Alchameth was just half a million kilometers ahead. At Ryan’s current speed, she would tumble into the outer layers of the giant’s atmosphere in a
nother seven or eight minutes.
“Night Demon Twelve, this is Dragonfire Nine,” he called. “I’m following you down from twelve hundred out. What’s your situation?”
“Dragon Nine, Demon Twelve,” she replied. He could hear the stress in her voice. “Main power out, primary drives out. I’m tumbling . . . about fourteen rotations per minute. I’ve got . . . shit . . . looks like seven minutes and something before I burn up.”
When Ryan’s fighter hit the gas giant’s outer atmosphere, friction would turn it incandescent, then vaporize it in the flare of a brief-lived shooting star.
He was closing with her fast. “Twelve, Nine. Can you control your tumble?”
There was a long pause. “Negative, Dragon Twelve. Maneuvering thrusters are dead.”
He accelerated harder, until the green icon drifting in his view ahead gave way to a black delta shape—an SG–92 Starhawk in combat mode, crescent-shaped, with forward-arcing wings, tumbling slowly.
Gently, Gray edged his Starhawk closer, maneuvering with brief, precisely controlled bursts from his thrusters. Using his fighter’s AI, he projected vectors in his in-head display, lines and angles of light accompanied by flickering blocks of alpha-numerics, showing direction, spin, and momentum.
Starhawks weren’t designed for this kind of work. It was going to be a bit on the hairy side.
“Hang on, Ryan,” he said. “I’m going to connect in three . . . two . . . one . . .”
In combat mode, a Starhawk’s wing-arcs curved forward and down, creating a sheltered area beneath the fighter’s belly. Gray was trying to use those wings as arms to capture Ryan’s tumbling ship, to bleed off momentum and stop its end-over-end roll.
His fighter bumped against Ryan’s ship, hard enough to jolt him and knock his fighter up and back. The transfer of momentum had robbed her tumble of some of its speed. She was still tumbling, but more slowly now.
Ahead, Alchameth filled the sky, its rings a brilliant slash across heaven. The fighters were falling toward the planet’s night side, toward a point just below the dark curve of the horizon.