by Ian Douglas
Ahead, and just to starboard, the sun grew visibly larger moment by moment.
“Hey, Skipper?” Connor called. “I don’t think we’re going to catch them.”
“We follow orders, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah . . . but they’re going to be pushing c in one more minute. And we won’t be there for another six.”
“Just follow your orders, Lieutenant. There’s nothing else we can do.”
Charlie One was boosting at fifty thousand gravities, about the same as a Krait ship-to-ship missile. Quite possibly, it was limiting its boost to accommodate its Todtadler escorts, which had an upper limit of fifty thousand Gs.
Regardless, the problem was one of straightforward TDA mathematics—time, distance, and acceleration. When Charlie One and its Confederation escorts reached about 99.7 percent of the speed of light in another sixty seconds, they would be 63.9 million kilometers from Earth. When the Black Demons reached that same speed in another six minutes, they would be 89.4 million kilometers from Earth—six-tenths the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
But by that point, Charlie One would have been traveling at near-c for five full minutes, covering an additional 90 million kilometers, for a total of nearly 154 million kilometers.
In other words, both hunter and prey would be traveling at the same speed, but the hunters would still be almost 65 million kilometers behind Charlie One.
An ancient sailing aphorism held that a stern chase was a long chase, but it was worse than that—a lot worse. There simply was no way to close that gap. No matter how high the acceleration, the dead hand of Einstein had long ago decreed that there was no way for material objects to pass—or even reach—the speed of light. According to the math governing relativistic calculations, the faster a ship went, the more massive it became, the shorter it became along its line of travel, and the more energy was required to accelerate it, a kind of feedback effect that led to the ship acquiring infinite mass and zero length at the speed of light, thus requiring infinite energy to move it faster.
The way the universe had been put together, it simply couldn’t be done. Even with all the energy available from the vacuum, the fighters might shave a few more decimals from that 99.7 percent of c, but they could never reach c, never mind surpass it.
But there was a loophole. Interstellar travel in anything less than decades would not have been possible without it. The Alcubierre Drive had been developed 284 years earlier, a realization of principles first described by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. Using the same projected singularity technology, an Alcubierre Drive ship pulled itself into an enclosed bubble of spacetime. There was nothing in physics that said that such a bubble couldn’t travel faster than light; indeed, in the earliest instants after the big bang, during the inflationary epoch, space itself had increased in volume by an estimated 1078 times in 10-30 seconds—which meant that points within that expanding volume would be moving away from one another at many, many times the speed of light. A starship imbedded inside that spacetime bubble would be motionless relative to the space immediately around it, and therefore would not violate the ultimate-speed law of the cosmos.
Alcubierre Drive had several key limitations, though. For one, a ship was effectively “alongside space,” and therefore unable to communicate or interact with anyone in “real space” until it emerged. Another—and the one Connor was focusing on at the moment—was that a ship needed a fairly flat gravitational metric when the drive was engaged. Shipbuilders had been working on that problem for centuries, with no discernable results. So a ship still couldn’t go into faster-than-light drive until it was eight to ten AUs out from a star of Sol’s mass—the distance, roughly, of Saturn at its farthest from Earth.
No, the real problem was that none of this necessarily applied to Charlie One. It was an alien ship, of unknown potential and technologies. For all any human knew, it might pop into Alcubierre Drive in the next few seconds, or within a couple of million kilometers of the sun. Connor decided, however, that that was extremely unlikely. If they could have done it inside of one astronomical unit, they would have done it by now. The fact that they hadn’t led Connor to speculate that they were aiming for a particular patch of sky, that they would continue accelerating past Sol and out into the outer system before engaging their FTL drive.
So the million-dollar question is, just what part of the sky might that be?
It was simple enough to superimpose a star chart over her fighter’s navigational data.
And the answer to her question was . . . surprising.
Chapter Four
29 June, 2425
Emergency Presidential Command Post
Toronto
United States of North America
0044 hours, EST
“The fighters are in pursuit, sir,” Admiral Armitage told Koenig. “They won’t catch the damned thing, though. Not unless either Charlie starts decelerating or they can shave another tenth of a percent off their velocity.”
“How good are the new designs at that sort of thing?”
“Mostly depends on the pilot,” Armitage said. “Things are happening awfully fast at those velocities, remember.”
Koenig nodded. He’d been a fighter pilot once, a very long time ago. “I do.”
As a fighter moved faster and faster, relativistic phenomena not only increased the vehicle’s mass, pushing it toward an impossible-to-reach infinity, but it also shortened the rate at which time—as measured by an outside observer—passed for the pilot, an effect called time dilation. The pilot experienced everything—the increase in mass, the compression of time—as perfectly normal; it was outside observers that saw basic constants of the universe shift and flow like water.
For fighters traveling at 99.7 percent of the speed of light, one minute objective—a minute as perceived by slowpoke left-behinds—was only 4.64 seconds. To observers back on board the carrier, the pilot would seem to be moving and speaking and living with extreme slowness.
The difference could be significant—and a real problem, especially in combat. Where a relatively stationary target had a minute to react to oncoming fighters, those fighters had only a few seconds. The best cybernetically augmented reaction times in the world couldn’t handle differences at such scales.
In fact, getting anything done when you were up against an unaccelerated opponent was dangerous when a decision or an action taking a handful of seconds was in fact a whole minute long outside of the pilot’s frame of reference. At least, Koenig thought, in this case both the fighters and their quarry were pushing c, and the time difference between their relative frames of reference was trivial.
That was one reason that fighters sent at relativistic speeds toward an enemy target generally decelerated before reaching their objective. Speed was life, as the old fighter-pilot aphorism had it. But in modern space-fighter combat, too much speed could put you at a serious disadvantage.
With all that in his mind, Koenig pulled down an in-head schematic from the America showing the relative positions and speeds of the alien vessel and the pursuing fighters. He began pumping through some simulations. If the fighters could increase their velocity by an additional tenth of a percent of c, their speed, relative to their quarry, would be 30,000 kilometers per second and closing.
At this point, the fighters would be trailing the enemy by . . .
He let the calculations run themselves through: 65 million kilometers. With a closing velocity of 30,000 kps, that meant an intercept in another thirty-six minutes.
Like a dog chasing a hovercraft, though, what they would be able to do with the alien once they actually caught it was still unknown.
And it was still all based on the “if ” of moving closer to the speed of light.
USNS/HGF Concord
4-Vesta
0056 hours, TFT
Commander Terrance Dahlquist
read the message as it came through, direct from Admiral Gray and the star carrier America. He wasn’t quite sure how he should feel about this . . . or what he was going to do about it.
Originally a branch of the North American military, the High Guard had been established in the wake of the Wormwood Incident in 2132, when a rogue Chinese squadron had dropped a small asteroid into the Atlantic Ocean. Later, official control had been handed over to the Earth Confederation, since it was operating in the defense of the entire planet. Concord’s mission was to monitor operations near asteroids, and to stop unauthorized attempts to manipulate their trajectories. In those cases where either asteroids or ore samples were legally being injected into Earth-approach orbits, the Guard tracked them, double-checked the calculations, and tried to make certain that Earth or other population centers across the solar system weren’t endangered.
Further, the High Guard made sure Vesta was always closely watched. The site of a large, mostly automated mining facility, the asteroid possessed a set of ten-kilometer-long magnetic launch rails designed to fire canisters of nano-extracted and -processed ore from the jumbled, frozen crust into low-energy transit loops that would bring them within capture range of Earth-based capture vessels within three to five years, depending on the constantly changing angles and distances between worlds. Fearing that terrorists or other rogue forces might easily change the launch parameters and turn the launch rails into titanic long-range weapons ideal for planetary bombardment, the High Guard was stationed there as protection against that scenario. In truth, it was not very likely to happen. For one thing, it would be a high-risk, low-reward endeavor, since incoming canisters were closely followed by radar and lidar, and intercept missions could easily nudge them into harmless orbits. But Earth’s governments remained nervous about falling rocks, especially deliberately chucked falling rocks, almost three centuries after Wormwood Fall, and High Guard frigates like the Concord were there to provide some measure of reassurance.
They were not designed to engage alien starships of unknown potential.
Dahlquist wanted to shoot a message back to Gray. The problem was that the High Guard, though technically a part of the USNA Navy during the current hostilities with the Confederation, was not under Navy jurisdiction, and a line officer like Gray did not have the authority to order High Guard assets off station.
Of course, the real reason he was hesitating had more to do with Gray’s background.
Like most USNA Guard and Naval officers, Dahlquist was a Ristie. The United States of North America was supposed to be a classless society, but that was fiction and always had been. Always there were “haves” as distinguished from “have-nots.” Money was not as big a factor in modern society as it once had been; the nanotech revolution had long ago made wealth-based distinctions largely irrelevant. But power, especially the power available to those with better technology and better access to information, was another matter altogether. Nowadays, those who had more advanced electronic implant technology, those who had life extension and better nanomed support, those who had connections in the larger “have” networks of government and the military—those were the new social elite. Risties was the slang term for the cultural aristocrats who called the shots in modern civilization.
Of course, they would never use the term themselves.
They did, however, use the term Prim, and the fact was that Gray was a well-known Primitive. Sure, Gray had acquired that technology when he left the Manhat Ruins decades ago, but Dahlquist couldn’t shake the subtle prejudice against him and people like him. They hadn’t grown up with the tech, had never been completely comfortable with it . . . and that, in the minds of most Risties, was telling.
Dahlquist would never have admitted to technocybernetic prejudice, of course, but he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that “Sandy” Gray didn’t really know what he was doing, that he tended to overlook some of the information available to him over the various data networks because he hadn’t grown up with the technology.
That in certain subtle ways, he wasn’t fully human.
And that, when all was said and done, was what it was all about. Humans were defined by their technology. That was one reason the USNA had been fighting the Sh’daar and, more recently, the Confederation: humans were what they were because of their tools, from fire to starships to neurocybernetic implants.
And yet, what it all came down to was that what Gray was ordering Dahlquist to do was technologically challenging, dangerous, and a long shot at best. He was to accelerate toward this oncoming alien vessel and lay down a spread of missiles and kinetic-kill projectiles in the hopes of disabling it. There was no question of matching course and speed with the thing, not when it was burning its way across the system at a hair under c. But Concord would still have to get uncomfortably close, and loosing that much kinetic energy and flying debris when you just might fly into the high-velocity cloud yourself was not Dahlquist’s idea of a reasonable request.
There was the political angle to consider, too.
If the Concord openly helped the America—and from the data feed Dahlquist was getting, these orders were part of a USNA operation against unknown aliens working with the Confederation—he could technically be committing treason.
Damn it, that Prim was putting Dahlquist in an impossible situation!
“Comm,” he said. “Send a reply. Ask for . . . clarification.”
“Sir, they won’t get the reply for—”
“I know. Send it.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Dahlquist had better things to do than jump through hoops held by that perverted little Prim. . . .
USNA Star Carrier America
In pursuit
0105 hours, TFT
“Looks like the pursuing fighters were able to close with the target, Admiral,” Commander Dean Mallory told him. “I wish there’d been more than four of them, though.”
“All they need to do is slow that damned alien down a bit,” Gray replied. “That, and keep him from transiting over to metaspace.”
“We don’t know how far up the side of the sun’s gravity well they need to be in order to jump,” Mallory said, thoughtful. “Would the idea be to just try to damage him?”
“It’s a long shot, I know,” Gray replied. “If you or your team have any ideas, tell me now.”
“Your old sand trick occurs to me, Admiral,” Mallory said, grinning. “ ‘The Gray Maneuver,’ they called it in Tac-Combat download training.”
Gray snorted. “It’s a dangerous option here,” he said. “We’d risk vaporizing those four fighters we have on the alien’s tail.”
“Sandy” Gray had gotten his nickname two decades earlier, when he’d released clouds of sand—the warheads of AMSO anti-missile weapons—at close to the speed of light. Even a single grain of sand traveling at that speed was deadly, and a cloud of them could disintegrate a ship, wipe out a fleet . . . or even scour the hemisphere of a world with flame. Under certain circumstances, it could be a highly effective weapon, but targeting something as small as a ship was chancy at best, and the danger of scoring an “own goal” in the rough-and-tumble of space combat made the tactic one of desperation.
“True. Of course, only the Concord would be positioned to deliver the shot, anyway.”
“I know—and risk or not, it’s what I asked them to do. Those fighters aren’t going to be able to do much, so it’s probably our only chance.”
AMSO rounds fired by those USNA ships chasing Charlie One and its fighter escorts would be completely ineffective, because both they and the targets were traveling at close to c. But sand released by the High Guard ship, approaching from slightly off the alien’s bow, would impact Charlie with its velocity plus that of the target, which was very close indeed to the speed of light.
“My concern, then,” Gray continued, “is that he might hold off for fear of hitting th
e USNA fighters behind it.” Something dawned on Gray then, and he scowled, calling up a data feed from America’s AI, looking for biographical information on Concord’s captain. He’d pulled down a bare minimum of biographical data on the man before, just enough to verify that he was North American. Right now, Gray needed more.
There it was: Commander Terrance Dahlquist. Born in Windsor, Ontario, but with most of his life spent in New New York, up the swollen Hudson from Gray’s old stomping grounds. Well-to-do family. He had an uncle who’d been governor of Manitoba . . . and a cousin who’d been a USNA representative to the Confederation Senate. Joined the Navy in 2016. Naval Academy at Oceana. Commended for valor at Freya in 2020—He’d been skipper of a gunboat, the Ajax, during an operation against renegade H’rulka fleet elements there. Transferred to the High Guard in 2022.
Why? To leave a career with the Navy proper could be seen as a less-than-positive career move. Ah . . . there it was. He’d been passed over for promotion to full commander while skippering the Ajax. By taking the High Guard posting, he got an immediate promotion.
Gray shook his head. Nothing in the data raised any flags; nothing particularly unusual or of concern.
It was frustrating, though. The nature of modern space warfare meant that individual ship captains and flotilla commanders often had to fight alongside fellow officers whom they’d never met and didn’t know. With typical operations encompassing volumes of space many astronomical units in diameter, often there was no way to coordinate with them during the battle. Speed-of-light time lags could mean the passage of hours before a reply to a message could be received. Was a given officer aggressive? Cautious? Slow off the mark? Meticulous? Hotheaded? Incompetent? Daring? It made a hell of a big difference, and not knowing could royally screw combat strategy.
He took a big mental breath. Worry about it later, he thought. There was nothing he could do about it until America and Concord were closer.
On the flag bridge tactical display, the four pursuing fighters were drawing gradually closer to the fleeing Charlie One and its Confed escorts.