Center of Gravity

by Ian Douglas

  The Soru were fierce and implacable warriors, evolved from chlorine-breathing plains-runners that could bring down fast-galloping prey animals many times larger than they. Perhaps they would be able to deal the approaching enemy a crippling blow.

  Another incoming round slashed past a Turusch ship, the Abyssal Wind, but it was only a glancing blow, enough to vaporize a few m’ni of rock on the converted asteroid but not to cause any serious damage. The fleet was moving, as Diligent Effort had commanded. Other Seeds, within other vessel tacticians, had failed to block the order.

  Good. . . .

  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

  Alphekka System

  1940 hours, TFT

  America continued to slow, backing down toward the enigmatic artificial moon dubbed Al–01. They were traveling now at 40,149 kilometers per second. The actual passage would take place so quickly that merely human observers would not even be aware when it happened. There would be time for a single focused volley from every ship in the battlegroup, but both the targeting and the firing would be handled by the fleet’s AIs, with reaction times that made human reactions seem glacial by comparison.

  “Make to all ships,” Koenig ordered. “On my mark, cut drives. CAG, prepare to bring the CSP back on board.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  There would be no opportunity for dogfighting during that nearly instantaneous passage; Koenig had deployed them against the possibility of the Turusch launching a fighter assault during the long flight in . . . and the tactic had paid off when the enemy had tried to pick off the Remington.

  In another sixty-eight minutes, however, the battlegroup would sweep past A1–01; a few heartbeats later, it would pass through the debris field beyond, the vast, flat disk of protoplanetary dust, meteoric rubble, gas, and ice circling the Alphekkan suns. The fighters wouldn’t be able to engage the enemy ships, and with lighter shields than capital ships they’d be at risk trying to pass through the debris field. They would ride out the passage on board the carriers, and redeploy once the battlegroup had slowed and reversed course.

  “CSP is now forming up for trap, Admiral,” America’s CAG told him.

  “Very well.”

  The squadrons currently on patrol were the Nighthawks and the Lightnings. Two more, the Night Demons and the Dragonfires, were on ready status, meaning they were loaded up and ready for launch. As soon as America had slowed on the far side of the protoplanetary disk, those two squadrons would be launched and, in short order, so would the rest of the fighters on board the carrier. The idea was to hit the enemy as hard as possible with the capital ship volley in a few minutes, then come back with everything they had and mop up what was left.

  Of course, it wouldn’t be that simple. It never was.

  “Admiral!” Commander Craig called. “Trouble!”

  “What is it?”

  “We’re tracking three enemy warships leaving the fleet, approaching head-on at high acceleration. They’ll be here in . . . three point one minutes!”

  “What kind of warships?”

  “Undetermined, sir. They appear to be a new design . . . possibly a new species we’ve not encountered before.” As she spoke, a window opened in Koenig’s mind and a computer-generated schematic came up, showing an oddly designed ship consisting of three intersecting crescents, like claws. The image rotated, giving a sense of a third dimension. “Mass . . . about the same as one of our destroyers, sir. Power plant emissions suggest a similar energy curve.”

  Destroyers. Assuming they filled the same role as Confederation destroyers, they would be fast, and they would be armed with lethal ship-killers of some sort.

  “Shall I order the trapping squadrons to abort, sir?” the CAG asked.

  “Do it,” Koenig said after a moment’s thought. “And launch the ready squadrons.”

  He would take no chances with enemy warships of unknown capabilities.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  25 February 2405

  VFA–44, TC/USNA CVS America

  Alphekka System

  1945 hours, TFT

  “Dragonfires!” Allyn’s voice snapped across the squadron’s communications link. “New orders coming through! Stand by for drop!”

  Gray watched the tactical feed downloading into his in-head display. Three alien ships of unknown design were racing toward the carrier battlegroup almost head-on.

  America had been drifting for several long minutes, her drives switched off, but that had been to allow VFA–31 and VFA–51 to come back on board the carrier. He’d not been expecting a drop order for another seventy-five minutes, after the CBG passed Al–01 and engaged the enemy fleet. The appearance of those three ships, with their wickedly curved hulls, had changed the equation.

  “Dragonfires, PriFly. You are cleared for drop.”

  “Copy, PriFly. VFA–44 dropping in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . drop!”

  Gray’s fighter swung to face the out-is-down emptiness of the drop tube, and then he was falling, accelerated at half a gravity by the rotation of the carrier’s hab and docking bay modules. In an instant, he was out in space, drifting away from the apparently motionless America at five meters per second.

  The other Starhawks drifted with him, to either side. The squadron had lost four ships and their pilots, defending the Remington. There were only eight of them now.

  He applied a burst of acceleration with his maneuvering thrusters, increasing his velocity. Out here, everything appeared to be stationary. America was traveling at better than forty thousand kilometers per second right now . . . but so were the Starhawk fighters now drifting out from the carrier behind the massive bulk of her shield cap. At first, the fighters were in deep shadow, but then the two Alphekkan suns emerged above the shield cap’s rim in an artificial sunrise, a brilliant duo, one blindingly bright, the other much dimmer. As Gray’s Starhawk emerged from behind America’s shield cap, he could see the vast, flat, red plane of the protoplanetary disk—invisible at optical wavelengths, but given form and substance by his fighter’s sensors and AI.

  A tiny, tight trio of red stars, bracketed by his targeting display system, marked the location of the enemy ships rising toward them from the disk.

  “America CIC, Dragonfires. Handing off from PriFly.”

  “Dragonfires, CIC. Acknowledge hand-off from PriFly. Carrier will decelerate in another twenty seconds. Good hunting, people.”

  “Thank you, CIC.”

  The fighters continued to drift clear of America, the only movement against the staggeringly vast scale of that panorama. They could hear the voice of Commander Craig in CIC counting down the seconds to deceleration: “ . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . and now!”

  And the star carrier vanished, wiped from the sky as it again began decelerating at five hundred gravities, while the fighters continued hurtling forward at 40,149 kilometers per second.

  “Okay, Dragons,” Commander Allyn ordered. “Form up on me. We’re on lead. The Night Demons will follow us in. Calculate for minimum-time intercept.”

  “Where the hell are the Lightnings and the Nighthawks?” Collins, Dragon Five, called.

  “Already deploying ahead of us, Five,” Allyn replied. “You just worry about where you are. Gray, Tucker, you two take point.”

  Gray urged his Starhawk into the lead, letting his AI calculate the intercept. Paradoxically, the Dragonfires would be turning about to present their tails to the oncoming enemy ships. If they tried to meet them bow-on, they would have such an enormous relative difference in velocities there would be no time for an engagement. Instead, they would accelerate at 25,000 gravities along the same vector the enemy ships were on . . . first canceling out the 40,000 kps of residual velocity from the carrier, then boosting to match the enemy’s outbound acceleration.

  He saw the green blips representing the other two
fighter squadrons, now some five thousand kilometers distant, decelerating for intercept. And the space between the battlegroup and the enemy vessels was beginning to fill now, with initial, long-range shots.

  There was little chance of hitting anything on either side, of course. The two groups were still a light minute apart, and both the enemy and the Confederation vessels were now beginning to jink randomly, so that the other aside couldn’t predict where a given target would be when a KK round or proton beam reached its vicinity. AI-directed smart missiles were also beginning to crisscross through the void. Point defense lasers and canisters loosing high-velocity sand clouds began reaching out toward the missiles, strike and counter-strike, weapon and anti-weapon, all in absolute silence.

  The trio of enemy ships passed the fighters at a distance of some twelve thousand kilometers, racing toward the America. The Dragonfires continued accelerating, dropping now onto their wakes of rippled spacetime and closing the range rapidly.

  “It’s beginning,” Tucker told Gray.

  The Black Lightnings and the Nighthawks had reached the enemy destroyers, merging with their formation. White flares of nuclear detonations flashed and strobed against the night.

  “Hey, Skipper?” Gray called. He was studying his long-range sensor readouts.

  “What is it, Nine?”

  “I’m getting hard gamma from up ahead.”

  “Nuclear detonations, Gray. They give off gamma.”

  “No, ma’am. This is more like backscatter, and there’s too much for nukes. I think . . .”

  “The spectrum is consistent,” Gray’s AI put in, “with the discharge of grazer beams.”

  Grazers—gamma-ray lasers.

  The numbers of the Black Lightnings and the Nighthawks were dwindling fast. The enemy destroyers were picking them off almost as swiftly as they approached.

  “Shit,” Kirkpatrick said. “The squatty’s right. Those things are hot!”

  The Confederation had never deployed coherent gamma-ray weapons, though the concept had been around, certainly, for hundreds of years. The principle was simple enough, and single-shot prototypes using nuclear explosions to generate the requisite energy had been designed as far back as the twenty-first century. Theoretically extremely powerful, they would suck down enormous quantities of energy and be extremely difficult to cool or to direct. They would also be dangerous to their own crews on manned vessels, requiring massive shielding to protect the gunners. Confederation military technology hadn’t yet worked out the details of how such weapons could be deployed practically or safely on crewed warships.

  In his in-head, Gray watched battlespace close-ups of one of the craft as power levels grew within it, then were discharged in a single, fierce half-second pulse, the optically invisible bolt rendered a dazzling, electric blue by his display graphics. That beam, he noted, was being directed by the forward-sweeping points of those claw-wings; the enemy ships appeared to have a field of fire across a full one hundred degrees of sky forward.

  A good piece of intelligence, that, something good to keep in mind. A single gamma beam slashed across one of the Black Lightnings at a range of over a million kilometers. Shields and screens fell in an instant, and the Starhawk flared and vanished, a moth caught in the glare of an electric-arc torch. Three Confederation fighters had already been burned down . . . now four . . . now five. . . .

  The aliens were also burning down incoming Krait missiles. Sometimes the missiles would be triggered, detonating far short of their intended targets, but usually the missiles would simply vanish in those intense blue flashes of radiation.

  “Heads up, people,” Commander Allyn warned. “Stay clear of their bows!”

  But even as she gave the warning, one of the aliens spun swiftly to face a Nighthawk coming in low and off its stern quarter. The movement was incredibly swift, the big ship as nimble as a fighter. The incoming Starhawk never had a chance. . . .

  “Spread out, Dragonfires,” Allyn ordered. “Our missiles aren’t getting through. Use your pee-beeps at long range.”

  Gray and Tucker, ahead of the main body of the squadron, were sliding into PBP range now. “I’ve got a target lock,” Gray said, centering his cursor on the nearest of the vessels. It was, an analytical portion of his brain noted, about five hundred meters from wingtip to curving wingtip, but the central hull at the intersection of the wing-crescents was just over two hundred meters, prow to stern, close to a Confederation destroyer in length. The surface was a rippling, glossy black with scarlet markings. There was nothing in the Starhawk’s warbook about any vessel like this. It appeared to be a complete and genuine unknown.

  The three alien destroyers were working in perfect harmony with one another, spinning, flipping, and rotating to face and destroy each and every incoming threat—Krait missiles, KK rounds, and fighters—as swiftly as it approached. They continued accelerating until they’d passed the carrier battlegroup. Then they began decelerating, killing their forward momentum. In another few minutes, they would be accelerating again, coming down the battlegroup’s wake. If those monsters got in among the CBG ships with those gamma-ray weapons, the battlegroup would be obliterated.

  The eight Dragonfires swept in, closing with the three destroyers.

  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

  Alphekka System

  1949 hours, TFT

  Koenig studied the image in the tank for a moment, as it was relayed in from the fighters. He made a decision.

  “Dr. Wilkerson?” he said, opening a new channel.

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “I need a secure link with one of the Agletsch.”

  “A secure link?”

  “Yes.”

  The fact of the matter was, Koenig did not trust the bugs.

  He’d known there was a risk when he’d decided to bring the pair on board. Since most of their kind resided somewhere out in Sh’daar-controlled space, it was possible, at least, that some of the Agletsch within Confederation space were working for the enemy.

  Espionage and counter-espionage were difficult enough when you were dealing with humans. When the subject was nonhuman, when she didn’t even think like humans or have the same consideration for human values or concepts like loyalty or gratitude or reward or even sex, intelligence work became all but impossible.

  The two Agletsch, Dra’ethde and Gru’mulkisch, held Level Five-green security clearances, and had been cleared both by the ONI and by the Confederation Department of Extraterrestrial Relations. But how could you be sure of an alien being, how could you trust it when you couldn’t even read the expression on whatever passed for its face? What Koenig did know was that Alphekka had been intended as a trap.

  The clue came from the positioning of the various groups of enemy vessels around the system, small, hunter-killer groups like Fox-Sierra One, pursuing their slow orbits around the distant Alphekkan suns, spaced out to cover the likeliest approach paths from the direction of Sol and far enough out that an emerging Confederation battlegroup would have been unable to turn and flee without finding itself boxed in. The placement had been perfect . . . but it meant that the enemy had kept those hunter-killer squadrons out there for extended periods of time, replacing them occasionally perhaps, but still maintaining those formations as if waiting for the battlegroup to arrive.

  Perhaps the Turusch were simply cautious. The Confederation kept High Guard squadrons on patrol throughout Sol’s outer system, though they had other things to watch for besides emerging alien fleets. Koenig thought it possible that the defenders at Alphekka had been warned that the America battlegroup was coming, and assumed the best possible defensive stature as a result.

  Had the battlegroup’s two Agletsch guests and guides leaked word to the enemy ahead of time? They would have had the opportunity when the CBG accelerated out of Arcturian space, communicating, possibly, with the H’rulka city in the skies of A
lchameth. The various species associated with the Sh’daar all had somewhat better starflight capabilities than did humans; a warning could easily have been dispatched from Alchameth to Alphekka, arriving well before the human fleet.

  Koenig had discussed his concerns with the ONI officers on board America. They’d listened, shrugged, and pointed out that Dra’ethde and Gru’mulkisch had been cleared. Besides . . . how could they have talked with the H’rulka? Both possessed small translators of alien design cemented to their thoracic areas, but those had been carefully examined and simply did not have the power to have sent a radio signal from America to the H’rulka city, not without detection.

  By demanding a secure channel, Koenig wasn’t simply guarding against others eavesdropping on the conversation. He was also making certain that America’s two alien guests did not have access, through the ship’s Net, to other parts of the ship’s electronic anatomy. If they’d sent a covert message at Alchameth, they could do it here, with the nearest enemy ships less than a light minute distant.

  “Admiral?” Wilkerson said. “They’re here, and I have them online. Secure, as you requested.”

  “Thank you. Please stay on the link, would you? In case I need help with them.”

  “Of course, Admiral.”

  “Gru’mulkisch? Dra’ethde? This is Admiral Koenig.”

  “We greet you, Admiral,” one of them said.

  “How may we be of service?” the other added. Although the translated voices were slightly different in tone and timbre, Koenig had trouble telling the two apart.

  “We have encountered warships of an unknown design,” he told them, uplinking to the tactical tank and pulling in the telemetry images of the alien vessels. “I’d like you to look at it, and tell me what you know.”