by Ian Douglas
And a few months ago, just before CBG-18 had left the Sol System, they’d taken the colony at Osiris, 70 Ophiuchi AII. That was just sixteen and a half light years away, practically on Earth’s doorstep, astronomically speaking.
The Sh’daar and their subject races were closing in.
Operation Crown Arrow had been devised to buy the Confederation time, a raid deep, deep into Sh’daar-controlled space, striking at fleet assembly points, manufactory centers, and staging areas. WHISPERS, the Weak Heterodyned Interstellar Signal Passband-Emission Radio Search, had detected a number of sources of faint, intelligently directed radio signals and identified them as probable sites of Sh’daar or Turusch activity. The immense manufactory at Alphekka, sucking in debris from the star’s protoplanetary disk and building Turusch warships, had been one of the loudest of these, but there was a list of more distant sites as well.
And with the capture of the Alphekkan manufactory had come the Alphekkan Directory, a Turusch list of other military bases within about five thousand light years of Sol.
That list proved one important thing. The Sh’daar and their Turusch proxies were stretched thin. It couldn’t really be otherwise, not in a galaxy of 400 billion stars. The enemy couldn’t maintain a guardian fleet within every star system. They couldn’t even put guards within every inhabited system.
Koenig was certain now that the Alphekkan base had been designed for nothing less than building a fleet intended to subjugate—possibly to destroy—Earth. A huge number of ships, empty and waiting, had been captured there. The Sh’daar might be planning on using the newly captured base at 70 Ophiuchi, but that was across 42 degrees of Earth’s sky, a straight-line distance of 62.5 light years from Alphekka. The almost overwhelming likelihood was that the enemy had hit 70 Ophiuchi as a diversion, to pull human fleet resources away from Sol. The main strike, Koenig thought, would come from the direction of the constellation of Corona Borealis, from Alphekka.
Operation Crown Arrow called for an initial strike at Alphekka in order to cripple the Sh’daar assets there . . . and that strike had been an unprecedented success. But the follow-on had called for CBG-18 to continue deeper into Sh’daar space, ideally drawing off the enemy forces now pressing so hard on Sol, getting them to follow America and her consorts.
Exhaustive analyses had gone into the planning. Step by step, Koenig, using a small army of artificial intelligences, had shown conclusively that running from point to point to meet individual Sh’daar advances—like the taking of Osiris—would inevitably leave Earth vulnerable to a final, overwhelming attack. The Confederation did not have the capacity in personnel, in equipment, or in industrial strength to meet the Sh’daar on anything like an equal basis long term.
That, Koenig, thought, should have been self-evident. According to the alien Agletsch, the Sh’daar dominated something like a third of the galaxy, which meant more than 100 billion suns, billions of habitable worlds, and an estimated 5 million technic civilizations. The Confederation had Sol and a handful of colonized star systems—twenty-five, at last count, plus a couple of hundred outposts and research stations. Twenty-five worlds against an unknown number of billions . . . a flea against some giant, enormous extinct beast, a tyrannosaur, a titanothere, or an elephant. It was impossible. . . .
But Koenig had an idea that might work. Alphekka had been a spectacular victory; now, CBG-18 needed to hit the next target, and the next one after that. The Alphekkan Directory had pointed him to a likely candidate, a star system not listed on any human catalogues, but known to the Agletsch as Texaghu Resch.
Hit that, and Koenig believed that every Sh’daar fleet within a thousand light years would be chasing him. After that . . .
“Admiral? Incoming . . . from Captain Harrison, on the Illustrious.”
Koenig checked his internal clock. What the hell? Only five minutes had passed since he’d sent the message to Harrison; he hadn’t even had time to receive it yet. This must be one of those “great minds” moments; Harrison had tried to reach him within moments of his trying to communicate with Harrison.
“Put it through. Randy? Listen in, please.”
Within his mind, a communications window opened, and Harrison’s face appeared. “Alex! This is Ron Harrison. Remember me? The academy speech, two years ago.”
Koenig remembered. The two of them had together addressed the 2403 graduating class at the Naval academy. It wasn’t the last time he’d seen the man, but it was the last time he’d had more than a few minutes to talk with him.
“What the hell is going down, Alex?” Harrison continued. “Giraurd is about to bust a gut. He’s calling you a traitor and worse, and he’s told us that he intends to attack your squadron if you don’t do exactly what he says.
“This mess is a put-up hatchet job, I’m certain of that. This isn’t the Senate speaking. It’s a small clique inside the Senate—the damned Conciliationists. They haven’t figured out yet that appeasement never works.
“Now, I notice the other USNA ships in our flotilla broke off and followed you. That was to be expected. Illustrious and two others, Warspite and Conqueror, are under my direct command . . . and I’ll be damned if I’m going to see them fire the opening shots of a civil war. Give the word, and I’ll slide the three of us over to your side of the line.
“Harrison, awaiting your reply. Out.”
“Well, well,” Buchanan said. “Division within the enemy’s ranks?”
“They’re not our enemies,” Koenig said.
He was thinking furiously. How well did he trust Harrison? Was this a genuine offer to change sides . . . or was it a covert move directed by Giraurd, an attempt to get three major warships in close to the America? Koenig hated the paranoid thought, but he had to consider every possibility.
What, he wondered, had been the speech at the academy? When the topic didn’t come immediately to mind, he downloaded it from his personal database. Koenig’s speech had been about the need to be vigilant and develop a unity of purpose and strategy in the war against the Sh’daar. Harrison’s speech had been titled “The Worm Within: Covert Penetration of the Enemy’s Infrastructure.” He’d been telling the graduating midshipmen that they needed to think outside the box, to think not only in terms of classical fleet strategies, but to use high-tech infiltration techniques to tap into alien command and control systems. Koenig had done exactly that three months before, when he’d deployed a small SEALs team to covertly breach and enter a giant H’rulka warship moving into the Sol System in order to establish contact with the beings inside.
And now, Koenig thought, Harrison was using the title as a warning. This was a covert attempt to get his forces in close to the America.
“Ramirez,” Koenig said. “Reply to Captain Harrison, personal and confidential. Message begins.
“Hey, Ron, you Limey bastard. Got your message, all of it.” He thought for a moment. Chances were good that Giraurd was tapped in to Illustrious’s comm suite and reading the mail. He decided not to mention his previous message, which Giraurd may or may not have seen.
“The thing about a civil war,” Koenig went on, “is that it is never civil. We can’t afford to bloody each other, and I refuse to become the bone of contention that splits open the Terran Confederation. The enemy is out there, not within our own ranks.
“I appreciate your offer, but for now, I’d prefer that Illustrious, Warspite, and Conqueror remain with the Pan-European fleet. We are establishing a no-cross line one hundred thousand kilometers from the America, and we ask that you respect that.
“I hope that when this is over, you and I can sit down in a wardroom, your ship or mine, and have a cold one and a good laugh about this. For now, please stay clear.
“Koenig, America, out.”
In the tactical tank, the two fleets continued to draw closer together.
Chapter Three
10 April 2405
VFA-44
Kuiper Belt, HD 157950
98 light years from
Earth
1715 hours, TFT
“Things are about to go supercritical,” Gray said over the squadron tac channel. “Reconfigure to sperm mode.”
The SG-92 Starhawk’s outer hull consisted of a matrix of conventional metals and ceramics blended with nano-molecules controlled by an electrical field projected by his ship’s AI. Launch configuration was a slender needle with a swollen central area housing the cockpit, designed for magnetic acceleration down the launch tube. Combat configuration looked a bit like a headless bird with down-canted wings, providing widely separated weapons and sensor platforms useful in a fight.
Sperm mode was fighter-slang for high-velocity configuration—a blunt-nosed egg shape with a long, tapering tail. The old, conventional wisdom that said that spacecraft didn’t need to be streamlined in the vacuum of space broke down when the vessel could approach the speed of light. At those speeds every little bit helped.
Gray didn’t know what was going to happen in the next few moments, but he did know that their survival would depend upon their speed and their maneuverability.
The twelve Starhawks had been patrolling in combat mode, but now their wings began folding in toward their bodies, their black surfaces turning cold-molten and flowing like thick water. They were drifting along the no-cross line, an empty region of space defined by its distance, 100,000 kilometers, from the America.
The heavy cruiser Valley Forge was only five kilometers off his starboard side at the moment, three quarters of a kilometer long, a slender stem behind an outsized forward cap shaped like a flattened dome. To the naked eye, she appeared slightly blurred and indistinct. Shield technology involved bending space sharply above and around a ship’s hull, and that bending caused light to twist. When an incoming projectile or thermonuclear detonation struck the field projected across a warship’s outer hull, that spatial warping momentarily became much stronger, deflecting the threat. Gravitic shielding was costly in terms of energy, however, and was generally switched on only when combat was imminent. Koenig, clearly, was taking no chances; high-velocity kinetic rounds could come slamming out of the darkness with little to no warning at all, and all ships in the battlegroup were at the highest possible alert status.
According to the tactical display, Jeanne d’Arc and the eleven other capital ships of the Pan-European contingent were a scant half million kilometers away, drawing ever closer.
“Hey . . . Skipper?” It was Shay Ryan, on a private channel.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t like the idea of shooting at our own guys, y’know?”
“Neither do I, Lieutenant.”
“If we get shot up way out here, it’s going to make fighting the Sh’daar, or getting home, a hell of a lot harder.”
“The brass’ll figure something out,” he told her. “They know a lot more about what’s happening than we do.”
He wished he felt that confident, though. Koenig was a good officer and a brilliant strategist, Gray thought, but he shared with most fighter pilots a measure of distrust for the men and women who made the tough choices in the relative safety of the CIC. Sure, their lives were on the line if the capital ships came under attack, but they weren’t out here, crammed inside a gravfighter with nothing but speed, maneuverability, and skill between you and the enemy’s incoming rounds.
He found himself wondering just what the battlegroup could do if Giraurd tried to push things. A traditional shot across their bows? And what if they called the bluff and kept coming? He called up a battlespace view, imagery transmitted from one of the thousands of robotic drones now dispersed throughout this region of space, for a closer look at the enemy.
There she was . . . the Jeanne d’Arc, a light star carrier, perhaps three quarters of the mass of America. Like all Alcubierre Drive ships, she had the same general design—slender spine aft, large, flattened dome forward. The shield cap had been painted blue and white, a sharp contrast with the sandblasted gray-black of America’s prow. Her name and number appeared pristine, newly painted. According to the warbook, the Jeanne d’Arc didn’t have America’s twin launch tubes running through the center of the shield cap. Instead, she possessed a single high-energy particle cannon, which gave her a formidable long-range bombardment capability above and beyond the punch carried by her fighters.
A whale swimming with minnows, the Jeanne d’Arc was accompanied by a cloud of fighters, tiny blue motes moving in her shadow.
Gray didn’t immediately recognize the Pan-European fighters, and had to pull an ID up on his warbook: Franco-German KRG-17 Raschadler fighters. He felt himself relax slightly. The Raschadler was roughly equivalent to the USNA SG-55 War Eagle, a design about twenty years old. They didn’t have the delta-V of Starhawks, the endurance, or the warload capability, and they didn’t possess the Starhawk’s high-tech ability to change its configuration for launch, for high-velocity travel, or for combat. In head-to-head knife fights with the Pan-Europeans, the Dragonfire Starhawks would come out on top every time. The problem was that no one wanted such a confrontation in the first place, least of all, Gray was certain, Koenig.
How could CBG-18 stop the Pan-Europeans without destroying their ships or risking the destruction of their own?
He zoomed in closer, magnifying the image. The Raschadler fighters were obviously positioned to prevent CBG-18’s fighters from getting close to the carrier’s central spine—the weapons sponsons and rotating hab modules and drop bays tucked away just aft of the shield cap.
Just ahead of the Jeanne d’Arc was a tiny, blurred tumble of distortion—the projected drive singularity that was pulling the giant through space.
The ship’s gravitic shields would be down on the forward cap, to enable the field projectors to create the singularity, a tightly knotted distortion of space.
And Gray thought he saw a way. . . .
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Kuiper Belt, HD 157950
98 light years from Earth
1732 hours, TFT
“Admiral?”
“Yes, CAG?”
“One of our people came up with something. Thought you should see it.”
Koenig read the downloaded text, transcribed from a pilot’s laser-com transmission. “Lieutenant Gray?” Koenig asked.
“Yes, sir. Acting CO of VFA-44.”
“I remember. Hero at the Defense of Earth . . . and again at Alphekka. He knows his shit.”
“Yes, sir. And his idea might work. Gives us something to go on, anyway.”
“We’ve got nothing better,” Koenig said. “Okay. Mr. Sinclair? Pass the word to all ships, tight beam and quantum encoded. Jeanne d’Arc will be the first target. We won’t hit the others unless this doesn’t work and they keep coming.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
Koenig, an avid military historian, smiled. Lieutenant Gray, he thought, knew a secret first uncovered by an aviator back in the days of fabric-winged biplanes and oceangoing navies, a man named General Billy Mitchell.
“It appears,” Koenig said, “that our fighters are going to earn their pay today, David-and-Goliath style.”
“David and who, sir?” Sinclair sounded puzzled.
“Never mind.”
Since the passage of the White Covenant, in the late twenty-first century, the religious beliefs or training of others—or the lack of such—was no one’s business. Technically, it was only against the law to try to convert someone else, but in practice it was considered bad manners even to make a casual religious comment, or to make a reference to religious mythology.
“Our boys and girls out there are going to need something more than a sling,” Wizewski said quietly. The CAG, Koenig recalled, was religious, a member of some small and semi-fundamentalist Christian sect. There were so many nowadays it was impossible to keep track.
“Amen to that, CAG,” Koenig said quietly, so no one else would hear. “Amen to that. . . .”
CIC
TC/PE CVS Jeanne d’Arc
Kuiper Belt, HD 157950
98 light years from Earth
1739 hours, TFT
Grand Admiral Francois Giraurd studied the pattern of colored icons unfolding in the tactical display tank. Koenig would have to capitulate. He had no other sane option.
“Sir,” his tactical officer said. “We cross their line in twelve minutes.”
“Very well.”
“Sir . . . do you intend to attack?”
“It won’t come to that, Lieutenant. We will cross their line, they will scatter and refuse to confront us, and we will put our boarding party across. And then . . .”
“Sir?”
“And then we go home.”
They were ninety-eight light years from Earth, farther than any human had ever before voyaged. The emptiness, the darkness scattered with myriad unknown suns and civilizations, filled him with foreboding and a brooding sense of agitation, even fear. Humans didn’t belong out here, not in a galaxy already staked out and claimed by millions of other technic cultures.
He magnified the image in the tank. “What ship is that?”
“The Valley Forge,” the tactical officer told him. “One hundred fifty thousand tons.”
“Target to disable her,” Giraurd said. “Power systems and weapons. We will push past her, then, and engage the America.”
“The cruiser is accompanied by a number of fighters.”
“Those are of no consequence. If they get too close, destroy them.”
“Our orders, sir, are to effect Koenig’s surrender without causing damage to their ships, or causing casualties.”
“We will damage them as little as possible, cause as few casualties as possible. But I see no other way of reaching the America, do you?”
“No, Grand Admiral.”
“Direct our fighter escort to move out ahead of us,” Giraurd said. “They will be our wedge to sweep the enemy aside. Order them to fire only if they are fired upon.”