by Ian Douglas
More of the gossamer machine-things flashed past, their initial vectors given to them by beams of laser or microwave energy from the larger Web craft. They seemed to be without other means of propulsion, for the majority sailed harmlessly past the human vessels and into the interstellar deep. Those that struck, however, rapidly became motile on their own, scrunching along like handkerchief-sized amoebas, finding others of their own kind, merging into larger shapes . . . and larger . . . and larger.
Clearly, they were some type of nanotechnic weapon, similar in principle to human nanodisassembler gases, for where they gathered, pits and craters began opening up in duralloy armor plate as, literally a molecule at a time, the attackers began taking the tough artificial substance apart.
That was why the larger ships in the Combined Fleet all carried squadrons of warflyers or were covered by squadrons off the ryu carriers. Kara slowed above a particularly large mass of crawling, oozing gray eating its way into the Gauss and opened fire with her laser. She experimented with the beam intensity as she swept it over the ship’s hull; she needed to find a setting that would cook the Web units without punching a hole through the science ship’s hull. One hundred to one hundred fifty megawatts seemed to be about right. Each burst seared the duralloy armor, scorching paint and peeling off external nano layers, but so long as she kept the beam moving it could not heat any one point enough to burn through.
The Web nano-D, however, designed to receive power from lower-powered lasers, could only handle that influx of energy for a few seconds before it began to curdle and boil. A few seconds more, and the stuff exploded into vapor, all cohesion between its molecule-sized working parts lost.
It was like bailing an ocean with a teacup, however. As fast as Kara burned the snowdrifts into vapor, more of the infalling nanotechnic weapons landed. Some were collecting on her warflyer as she worked, and twice she had to call for help from someone else in the squadron to burn them off before they ate through to some vital piece of Kara’s Matic’s internal structure.
At least they were slowing the destruction of the Gauss.
A little. She hoped. . . .
Dev rode the Net, watching the battle with a curiously detached, almost casual lack of emotion. The Web vehicles appeared to be concentrating their heaviest firepower on the largest Combined Fleet ships. Hiryu, slightly ahead of the dome-shaped formation of Imperial carriers, had almost immediately become the focus for a barrage of dozens of energy beams.
One of the big Web Alphas had maneuvered to within a scant thousand kilometers of the Hiryu. Something like an enormous circular hatchway irised open on the hemisphere facing the Imperial carrier, revealing a blue-glowing cavern within. A moment later, and the cavern lit up with a dazzling blue-white glare, the energy spilling over into the ultraviolet wavelengths.
Dev recognized the energy signature of a positron beam, similar, if vastly smaller in scale, to the antimatter electron beam he’d seen jetting from the Great Annihilator at the Galactic Core. Flaring brilliantly as it plowed through the mist of particles and debris adrift in its path, it slashed like a sun-bright razor through the Hiryu’s heavily armored flank. The beam burned for only a second or so before snapping off; Hiryu staggered under the searing caress, slewing to port as a hundred-meter gash in her side spewed dense clouds of atmosphere and liquid, freezing into a silver mist as it hit the vacuum of space.
Donryu took the next burst, the blue-white beam of annihilation sweeping across the kilometer-long vessel’s upper works, detonating weapons turrets and shearing off antenna arrays in a cascade of golden explosions. The heavy cruiser Ashigara changed course, accelerating hard on flaring plasma drives, sliding between the stricken Donryu and the relentless fire of the Web moonlet. Blue fire raked the Ashigara from stem to stern, ripping open hull plates and slicing through her slush hydrogen tanks. Liquid hydrogen sprayed into space, glittering like a cloud of ice crystals as the cloud expanded. Ashigara shuddered, then exploded amidships as her fusion plant’s magnetics failed and the temperatures and pressures of a star’s core were vented against the relatively frail and unresisting latticework of duralloy plate, diacarb weave, and nan-aluminum surrounding it. A nova’s light briefly glared alongside the crippled Donryu, reflecting from the larger vessel’s hull like a sunset shimmering off the surface of an iced-over lake. Part of the Ashigara‘s bridge structure, half molten and tumbling end over end, slammed into the Donryu’s forward quarter to starboard, plunging through decks and compartments like a hurled rock slamming through meticulously stacked and ordered crockery.
The Combined Fleet was striking back with every weapon at its command. Three of the Confederation maguns advanced through the storm of machines, slamming round after high-speed round into the Alphas. Each projectile struck home with a release of kinetic energy equivalent to megatons of TNT, and in a few moments, the sides of the Web Alphas facing the Combined Fleet were beginning to glow in a patchwork of orange and yellow craters, half of their surface turned molten by the barrage. So effective was the attack that the Web faltered in the steady concentration of fire against the ryu carriers, scattering, then shifting, coming to bear on the three magnetic gun vessels. The Naga Reliant was their first target, and after only a few moments of high-energy barrage, the gun vessel began to dissolve as the Naga enfolding the asteroid that was the vessel’s heart fragmented and died. The gun vessels carried only a relatively small human crew; the Naga Reliant‘s bridge superstructure was burned away by an antimatter beam in the first second or two of the exchange. With no human controlling it, giving it orders, the vessel’s Naga continued trying to fulfill the last instructions it had been given, moving closer and yet closer to its tormentor, hurling swarms of rocks at relativistic speeds, smashing at the Alpha, smashing and smashing until its own cohesion gave way first and the magun gun vessel exploded in a thin haze of white-hot debris.
Naga Repulse died next, valiantly attempting to protect the Imperial heavy cruiser Chikuma. The antimatter particle beam sliced through the Naga and the asteroid within like a white-hot wire through plastic, emitting a vast, obscuring cloud of vaporized nickle iron and hurtling droplets of molten rock. Seconds after the magun’s destruction, the Chikuma exploded with the force of many thermonuclear warheads, the detonation briefly outshining the two dwarf suns nearby.
The battle had been under way for an eternity—all of six or seven seconds. Though Dev was not actively counting, a part of his mind was aware of the fact that twenty-three DalRiss cityships had been savaged already by the Web, and as the surviving cityships scattered under the onslaught, the fire swung to concentrate on the human vessels.
The volume of human fire returned against the Web was stupendous, devastating in its sheer volume and fire.
But it wasn’t enough, not by many orders of magnitude. No one could have predicted such a large number of enemy machines and craft in this one volume of space. All of the human warships in creation could not hope to stand for long against that horde.
The human-DalRiss fleet was losing the battle as Dev watched.
Before long, Kara found herself maneuvering through a literal storm of bits and pieces of debris that clinked and banged and thumped along her Cutlass’s hull, a clattering hail sweeping across a metal roof. The space junk ranged in size from grains of sand and dust motes to larger, mostly unidentifiable fragments. Lasers and particle beams, normally invisible in the vacuum of space, were becoming visible as ghostly flickers and pulses of translucent light as they shone through the thickening cloud of debris.
“Phantom One-one! Phantom One-one!” she heard over the tactical channel. “This is One-five! I’m in trouble!”
“One-five, this is One!” she called back. “Where are you?”
Coordinates giving her the other Cutlass’s position relative to her own flickered across her visual display. “I got hit by something,” the voice said. “My drive’s out!”
“Looks like I’m closest,” she said. “Hold tight. I’m coming!�
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One-five was Phil Dolan, one of the men who’d accompanied her to Kasei. Her warflyer’s AI had the other Cutlass centered now between flashing green brackets. He was only a hundred meters away, drifting across the blasted and surreal landscape of the Gauss‘s upper deck. Calculating burn times and vectors with practiced ease, Kara boosted across the intervening space, flipping over halfway there and decelerating in toward the helplessly drifting flyer. Righting herself, she deployed her primary arm, a telescoping, jointed branch of duralloy that unfolded from a recess in Kara’s Matic’s hull and opened into a clawed, grasping metal hand.
She was almost there. . . .
Something struck Dolan’s Cutlass; she didn’t see what it was, but it was large, larger than the warflyer. It might have been a fragment of one of the human ships hurtling through space at high speed, but judging by its vector, she thought it more likely that it was one of the Web constructs. Whatever its origin, it hurtled in from Kara’s right, sheared into Dolan’s flyer, and the two exploded in a blinding flash of unbottled fusion energy. At virtually the same instant, something—a fragment of wreckage propelled by the blast—struck Kara’s Matic like a sledgehammer blow, shredding her drive module in a spray of glittering fragments and sparkling droplets of slush hydrogen reaction mass.
The long, dark, and convoluted mass of the Carl Friedrich Gauss swept past her blurred vision . . . and again . . . and again . . .
And still again, growing visibly smaller now. Stunned by the impact, Kara was unable for a moment to realize that her Cutlass, what was left of it, was tumbling end over end, falling away from the Gauss at a considerable velocity imparted by the hurtling debris.
And with her plasma drive and reaction mass stores both gone, she wouldn’t have a chance in hell of ever arresting her spin and making it back again.
Chapter 26
North American or Ukrainian or Chinese from New America. Europeans from Loki. Japanese from Earth. Juanyekundan. Shivan. Cuchulainnan. What does anything having to do with language or religion or skin color or eye shape have to do with humanity? We have more in common with each other than we do with anything from Out There.
—Remembrance
TRAVIS EWELL SINCLAIR
C.E. 2561
Dev watched with a feeling of icy detachment, less aware of the countless thousands of personal and individual tragedies occurring second by second throughout the Combined Fleet than he was of the single, monolithic reality that the human-DalRiss fleet was being crushed, wiped from the sky like a cloud of dancing gnats caught in the flame of a blowtorch. They had already destroyed tens of thousands of Web combat machines—hundreds of thousands if the tiny light-sail craft scorched by lasers or vaporized in sweeps of laser light or particle beams were counted—yet they’d scarcely touched the body of the enemy force.
Despair.
He could sense it through the Net, rising from the minds of every human jacked into the Fleet’s communications net, then picked up and echoed across the I2C linkage to the Shichiju and back.
How many minds were jacked in at that moment? Dev didn’t know, and there was no software available on-line to give him an answer. But he could feel the building emotion, a black cloud dragging at his thoughts.
He could also feel the Net’s strength, an expression of its will, its scope, the depth of its analytical and computational power gathering, building, reaching up and out across the I2C. . . .
Vic was linked into the command center aboard the Confederation carrier Karyu. Reports continued to flood though his consciousness, reports of ships lost, of men and women lost, of incalculable numbers of enemy craft descending on his dwindling command like a whirling, deadly blizzard.
He felt close to crying with frustration. The carefully ordered plans, the meticulously reasoned logic, the convincing rationalization that with faster-than-light communications and the almost-certain guess that the Alphas were a vulnerable command target, all were coming crashing down in ruin after only a few seconds of the most bloody and savage combat that he had ever witnessed.
But ships, his ships, his people were dying at a terrifying and relentless pace. Such slaughter served no purpose; as far as he could tell from his vantage point aboard the Karyu, the Web horde was relatively untouched. It was like trying to kill a DalRiss cityship creature by slicing off a few cells from the tip of one arm at a time.
“Resistance is heavier than expected,” he said, speaking to Admiral Tanaka over the command link. “The enemy’s numbers are far greater than expected. The Confederation contingent has already taken heavy casualties. I suggest that we break off the action if we can, and regroup at Rally One.”
“You are right about the resistance, Shoshosan” Tanaka replied. “But breaking off may be difficult at this point, and rendezvous and recovery with the DalRiss will not be possible.”
“We’ll have to E and E then in K-T space. The DalRiss will have to jump out on their own and wait for us.”
“Affirmative. I will pass the order.”
“Give us time to recover the warflyers.”
“Order their recovery at once. I want to begin boosting clear of this slaughterhouse as soon as possible!”
That wouldn’t be time enough, not to get them all. Vic was achingly aware that Kara was out there somewhere. If the Carl Friedrich Gauss dropped into K-T space before she was able to recover the squadrons of flyers covering her, Kara and the other Phantoms would never make it out. They were strictly short-range fighters, incapable of entering K-T space.
But if they had to straggle behind to get the last few flyers aboard, so be it. “We’ll do our best.”
Swiftly, he broke the connection, then began rattling off new orders to the ships in the Confederation contingent.
Taki saw the warflyer tumbling clear of the Gauss, pinwheeling into darkness, strewing an expanding spiral of glittering wreckage as it fell. Instantly, she oriented her metal and plastic body, targeted the tumbling object with her probe’s sensors and locked on. Exercising her will, she fired the probe’s aft thrusters.
She’d been floating there, keeping pace with the slow-moving Gauss, throughout the long moments of the battle. Hearing one warflyer call for help, she’d started maneuvering her remote closer. Then she’d heard Kara’s voice responding, saw the second flyer approach, saw the first warflyer explode and the second go spinning into space after a desk-sized chunk of metal hit it.
She couldn’t be sure, but she thought that must be Daren’s sister aboard that damaged flyer since it was Kara’s voice she’d heard responding to the call for help. Not that that mattered, one way or another. The pilot might be dead, was probably dead after the impact Taki had just witnessed, but if there was even a chance that he or she was still alive . . .
Accelerating, she moved toward the quickly retreating flyer. She’d not been able to practice with the remote nearly as much as she would have liked, and her only experience before today had been in simulation.
Still, it was impossible to tell that this was not a simulation as she moved faster and faster through space, the only indication of her swiftly mounting speed the rising flicker of numbers at the lower right edge of her vision that read off her speed relative to the Gauss. After a few moments, however, the tumbling warflyer, centered now in flashing green brackets squarely in the center of Taki’s field of view, had stopped dwindling, was even growing larger, from a winking pinpoint of light to a tiny, crumpled toy shape in the distance.
“All flyers,” a voice said over the tactical link. “All flyers, return to your ships at once!”
She ignored the voice. It didn’t apply to her. She was still safely inside the Gauss, while the probe hurtled into the wreckage-strewn night.
It was difficult to keep track of the damaged Cutlass, though. Space was filled with sparkling, glittering, hurtling things, and only the flashing brackets assured her that she was still on target. Every few seconds, something clanged against her outer hull. Inwardly, she cringed wi
th each impact, but after a while she began ignoring them. She couldn’t read her instruments well enough to know which of those graphic symbols drifting across her field of view represented dangers and which were simply in the way.
Control of the probe, fortunately, was very nearly as simple as looking at something and thinking hard go there. The AI running her interface with the equipment handled the problems of calculation, maneuver, and control, and warned her with a flashing string of characters—or a voice speaking in her ear—when something she was trying to do was not possible.
It was a surprise, then, when the probe spun end over end with disconcerting suddenness, and she found herself staring back toward the Gauss as her drive kicked in, decelerating her with savage thrust. The probe, lacking weapons, life support, and control equipment, with more room for reaction mass and less structure to move, was far more maneuverable than a Cutlass. Manned warflyers, in fact, were limited to short periods of twenty or thirty Gs of acceleration, and that was possible only because their pilots were packed into nano jelly like babies in the womb. The probe, with no physical pilot aboard to damage, could deliver a brutal eighty to ninety Gs of acceleration.
It was the only factor that made catching and matching vectors with the runaway Cutlass possible.
She was dismayed when she saw how much the Carl Friedrich Gauss had dwindled in apparent size. It looked like scarcely more than a toy now, its spine long and in places made bulky by towers and superstructure, with the blocks of her hab mods showing alternating patches of sunlit gray and black shadow as they turned. A pinpoint of dazzling light erupted on one of her superstructures, flaring larger, then fading away. The ship was taking a battering as the battle continued.
In the distance, other Confederation ships glowed from the effects of multiple impacts; she recognized the angular lines of Karyu—but only barely. The ryu carrier’s silhouette had been horribly transformed by the bombardment, and as she watched, a dazzling blue beam swept across the Confederation flagship’s side, slicing deeply into her hull.