Star Carrier 6: Deep Time

by Ian Douglas

  “I’m getting a strong signal from Drone 327, people,” Commander Mackey told them. “Lock on and let’s follow it in.”

  Gregory locked on to the indicated drone signal. Red brackets appeared overlaying his visual field, indicating a portion of the outermost rim of the alien ring. There were two strong heat sources there . . . and radiofrequency leakage that looked like it was spilling from a human source.

  “Looks like our ships are inside the structure,” he told Mackey. “Think Ambassador Rand and his people are there, too?”

  “I don’t know, Gregory. But we’re going to find out! All Demons, break low and starboard on my mark! Three . . . two . . . one . . . mark!”

  One by one, the Starblades rolled right and hurtled toward the ring.

  Chapter Twenty

  7 August, 2425

  USNA Star Carrier America

  Invictus Space, T+12 MY

  1654 hours, TFT

  “We are within maximum firing range of the near edge of the ring, Admiral,” Laurie Taggart reported.

  Captain Gutierrez glanced back at Gray as if for confirmation. He nodded. “You may commence firing,” he said. “Target Glothr weapons positions as they reveal themselves. Stay clear of the red zones.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Gutierrez said. “Commander? Let ’em have it!”

  Beams and missiles launched from America. Most of her weapons turrets couldn’t bear, yet, blocked by the half-kilometer wide disk of her shield cap, but her twin spinal launch tubes began hurtling multi-ton kinetic-kill projectiles toward the target. Salvos of missiles launched in all directions out from the spine, curving around to pass the shield cap and converge on points identified by America’s AI as probable communications nodes and command-control centers.

  Taking their cue from the flag, the other heavies of the task force opened fire as well, the destroyers and frigates moving in close to take on the Glothr defenses at point-blank range, accompanied by flights of sleek fighters. The battleships Illinois, Northern California, and New York—all of them seriously damaged but very much still in the fight—held back, pounding at the alien structure. It was an awesome spectacle, and a terrifying one. If the tech discrepancy was too great, the America task force might find itself cut to pieces, the survivors alone and helpless and very far from home.

  Unable to simply sit and watch, Gray had stood up . . . which in the zero-gravity of the flag bridge meant sending a thought into the deck matrix to turn a meter-square nano patch into a stick-tight, anchoring him in place. The forward end of the flag bridge opened onto the ship’s bridge, a half deck down, while above the step, the bulkhead curved up and over into the flag bridge dome, which currently was displaying the battle as computer-generated icons and graphics.

  In fact, of course, there was no up or down in zero-G . . . but Gray could snug his shipboard utility-clad feet onto the restraining nano patch, clasp his hands behind his back, and wonder if the fleet admirals of long-ago surface navies had felt the same sense of a headlong plummet as a carefully crafted battle plan unfolded around their vessel.

  High-energy lasers reached out from the parapets of the ring fortress ahead, scoring hits. The broad shield caps on Illinois and Northern California both were punctured multiple times, spilling cascades of water that instantly froze into clouds of ice crystals as they hit hard vacuum.

  He hoped they had enough water left for maneuvering during the battle.

  “All units,” Gray said. “Move your fire in closer to the red zones. Isolate them.”

  The red zones were the spots identified as possible locations of the two captured High Guard ships, as well as Ambassador Rand and his party. All the task force really had to go on was sources of heat. Glothr physiology appeared to function at right around the freezing point of water. Their insulation was very good, but on infrared, the ring was ablaze with myriad stars—points of energy, of which the vast majority were likely power plants of some sort. Even creatures with near-frozen ammonia-water for blood needed heat in the black Void, which hovered at close to three degrees Kelvin.

  But the AIs had identified one cluster of infrared radiation—three points close to the ring’s outer rim—that looked like the heat signatures of human-habitable compartments or ship habs. The fire control computers on each ship in the task force had flagged that zone, along with several other less likely targets, in red. The idea was to pound the structure of the ring as close as possible to those areas without hitting them.

  The ring, Gray thought, was an astounding artifact, a titanic mass of material orbiting a dark and icy world five times the size of Earth. It appeared to be circling the planet in a synchronous orbit, matching the planet’s forty-four-hour rotation, and with the slender columns of space elevators connecting the ring to the surface below. The ring itself was nearly twelve thousand kilometers wide and hundreds thick; its total mass must have run into the trillions of tons, and hundreds of billions of Glothr could have lived comfortably within the structure’s interior.

  Which pointed up one of the basic problems of space warfare: a fleet could carry, at most, a few tens of thousands of naval and Marine personnel; the light carrier transport Marne carried a regimental assault group of about five thousand Marines packed into her ranked hab modules. A planet, though, might have billions of inhabitants; unless an attacker was willing to destroy the entire world from space, committing genocide on a planetary scale, he would be at an insurmountable numerical disadvantage. Gray had no idea at all how many Glothr might live now beneath the icy crust of Invictus. That artificial ring system, however, was large enough to carry the planet’s entire population and then some.

  And that led to another conceptual problem. Titan, back in Earth’s solar system, had a rocky core—specifically a hydrous silicate core capped over by a deep layer of Ice VI (frozen water under such incredible pressures that it formed tetragonal crystals and possessed unusual electrical properties). Over that inner ocean, which was many hundreds of kilometers deep and held more water within its depths than did the entire Earth, was a shell of normal ice decoupled from the interior by the ocean, and covered by rocks made of very cold ice and hydrocarbon “dirt.” Invictus appeared to be a larger, more massive version of Titan, but if that was so, where the hell had the Glothr gotten the raw material for trillions of tons of artificial ring? Never mind how they’d gotten it up into orbit; where the hell had all that stuff come from?

  The pressure at the bottom of the Invictan ocean must be so high that mining the core would present incredible technical problems, starting with the difficulty of tunneling down through hundreds of kilometers of Ice VI. Even if that were somehow possible, once the miners got through to the core itself, they would find it composed of silicates—no iron, no titanium, no copper, no aluminum, none of the metals required for an advanced technology.

  “Sensor suite,” Gray said.

  “Yes, Admiral!” a woman’s voice replied. According to the duty roster, Lieutenant Evans had the sensor watch.

  “Give me a readout on the composition of that ring material.” Lasers and particle beams were slashing into the ring structure, vaporizing starship-sized chunks of the surface material. America’s spectrometers would be peering into those expanding clouds of gas and debris and comparing them with the spectra of known materials.

  “Yes, sir. We’re reading a variety of long-chain carbon molecules . . . including acrylate polymers, polyvinyl chloride, and polyetheretherketones—”

  “In English, please, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir. It’s plastic.”

  “Plastic?”

  “There are traces of various metals—boron nitride, para-aramids, and a suggestion of tetragonal ice crystals—but it’s mostly plastic, yes, sir.”

  Well, Gray thought . . . what was a budding young technic civilization to do if copper, iron, and steel weren’t on the table? One thing worlds like Ti
tan were abundantly stocked with was hydrocarbons: substances such as petroleum, propane, ethane, and methane . . . the stuff from which plastics were made.

  Glothr history, Gray thought, must be a long and fascinating story as they moved up the technical ladder. He turned his attention back to the fight at hand—the mystery would have to be solved another time.

  The human fleet continued hammering away at the near edge of the ring. Return fire was slowly but steadily growing weaker as more and more Glothr batteries in the ring were identified and destroyed. Gray shifted his bridge display to a feed from a battlespace drone drifting low above the ring’s surface, studying the data being relayed back to America.

  The ring here, close to the edge, was between twenty and fifty kilometers thick—looking paper-thin from out in space, but remarkably bulky and substantial up close. As the drone skimmed across the dark surface, the artificial terrain took on the appearance of a kind of cityscape, with towers, blocks, and domes of unknown purpose separated from one another by deep canyons and plunging valleys. The surface, those parts that hadn’t been hit by the task force’s bombardment, appeared pristine—no meteor craters or scars or weathering from eons of dust impacts—which suggested either remarkably good defenses or that the surface was periodically renewed. True, asteroids, meteoric debris, and interstellar dust were scarce out here beyond the galaxy’s rim . . . but that ring might be as old as 12 million years, and much of that time had been spent within more crowded vistas.

  Ahead, a brilliant flare of light marked the impact of a heavy KK projectile from one of the ships. A geyser of water exploded into vacuum from the strike. An instant later, the probe flashed low above the resulting crater, glimpsing tangled depths of darkness and ragged structures below, rimmed by a thick layer of ice.

  “Pull back,” Gray told the AI controlling his image feed. “Let me see the OA.”

  The objective area was still highlighted by red brackets, the location of the Pax, the Concord, and—with luck—of Rand and his staff.

  He felt the AI’s response . . . a wordless realization that there were no human assets close enough for the view he required.

  “CAG,” he said. “I need some fighters in close to the OA.”

  “Right away, Admiral.”

  Several fighters arced in above the ring, vectoring in on the target. Zooming in close, using the fighters’ telemetry, he studied the artificial terrain closely. America’s AI had suggested a possible approach . . . and it looked like it might be feasible.

  But God, the risks . . .

  Place of Cold Dreaming

  Invictus Ring

  1702 hours, TFT

  “Seven-one-cee-eight!” the communicative electro-sense pulse cried as it rippled through its body. “The enemy appears to be attempting to isolate the Place of Cold Dreaming.”

  But Seven-one-cee-eight had already noted the human attack pattern and come to that same conclusion. They should have taken the human prisoners deeper into the ring, but there’d simply been no time. Enemy fire had wrecked major transport passageways and corridors, smashed manufacturing and power supply centers, and breached hundreds of major habitation modules, spilling their water into space. Casualties already numbered in the tens of thousands.

  But most of those casualties had been polyps, untrained and non-sapient—animals easily replaced. Only a tiny fraction of the ring’s total volume had been compromised. There was no danger as yet.

  And perhaps they could use the prisoner area as bait to lure the human fleet in closer for a crushing blow.

  “Release another swarm,” it ordered.

  “We swarm together,” was the reply.

  Enormous sections of ring surface began flaking off into space, scattering, dividing into smaller units that swirled out toward the human fleet. Several flared and vanished almost at once as enemy missiles snapped in and detonated . . . but the defender swarms were entirely robotic. The Kin’s defenses were much like the automated immune-response defenses of the body, reacting to perceived threats with little in the way of anticipation or originality of thought.

  But there were a very great many of them, enough, perhaps, to utterly overwhelm the humans’ handful of ships.

  VFA-96, The Black Demons

  Invictus Space, T+12 MY

  1703 hours, TFT

  Gregory steered his Starblade low across the surface of the ring, letting his fighter’s AI maneuver the craft to avoid the irregularities of the landscape. It was, he thought, like flying through a city on Earth . . . not that he’d ever done such a thing, of course. The closest had been full-sim downloads of fighter passes over the ruins of Columbus, D.C., shortly after the Confederation had nano-nuked the place. Passing over a recent crater punched into the ring’s surface by a five-ton high-velocity kinetic-kill projectile reminded him forcibly of the gaping crater where downtown Columbus once had been.

  Ahead, a number of the frigate-sized ring pieces tumbled into the empty sky. The enemy had an apparently inexhaustible supply of those things, and sooner or later they were going to get through the task force’s perimeter defenses and in among the heavies.

  “Okay, Demons!” Mackey yelled. “Let’s get ’em! We’ll take ’em from their six!”

  As the Glothr ships rose above the ring surface, the line of VFA-96 Starblades was in the perfect position to move into the widening gap between ring and ships, coming at the enemy from behind. It was a dangerous maneuver, for the task force was already hammering at the Glothr vessels, and the kill zone was going to be deadly, with crisscrossing beams, missiles, and fast-hurtling chunks of lead and depleted uranium.

  “Target lock!” Collins called. “Arming ferdies . . . and . . . Fox one!”

  A pair of Fer-de-lance missiles streaked from her ship, weaving low above the ring surface and then turning sharply out toward the Glothr ships. VG-44c antiship missiles were considerably more powerful than the smaller VG-10 Kraits. The twin nuclear detonations lit up the ring’s surface like a pair of novae—death-silent, casting long, sharp-edged, paired shadows back across the dark gray surface.

  Gregory brought his fighter around behind his point-singularity flickering ahead, rising now from the ring and accelerating hard. Projected from the prow of his fighter several thousand times each second, the artificial singularity puckered space ahead, drawing the Starblade along as it attempted to slide down the constantly moving slope of the gravity well.

  In an instant, he was in among the Glothr ships, so close that he could maneuver in until he was skimming meters above the speed-blurred surface of one, slicing it almost end to end with the fast-pulsing micro-black hole forward. Gregory accelerated his mental processes, trying to keep pace. Knife fighting . . .

  Turn . . . lock . . . fire . . . then accelerate, streaking back across the ring, the black disk of Invictus ahead of him as he lined up on another Glothr ship. This time he thought-triggered his KK cannon, sending a stream of depleted uranium into the alien’s hull at very nearly point-blank range . . . fifty kilmeters . . . twenty . . . five . . .

  Gas gushed into space as he passed the shredding alien, freezing. More gas erupted in front of him as a pressure containment vessel exploded; his Starblade shuddered as it passed through a glittering explosion of ice crystals. For an instant, a shape registered in Gregory’s awareness as it tumbled in front of him and then slammed against his fighter, rocking him hard to the side. For just a moment, a part of his brain thought that he’d just hit one of the Glothr flung from a hab area, but as it fragmented against his ship, he corrected that first impression. He’d just hit one of the cigar-shaped Glothr robots; its pieces were collapsing now into the haze of his fighter’s drive singularity, causing the singularity to burn with an intense blue-violet glare.

  He was in a slow tumble now, and it took him and his AI together to pull the fighter back onto an even keel.

  He executed a
thought command, trying to bring his fighter around so that he could align himself with another Glothr vessel . . . but with a cold and icy shock he realized that his fighter was not responding.

  “Turn! Turn, damn you!” he yelled. “Ship! What’s wrong?”

  The fighter’s AI replied with impressions and data rather than the clumsiness of words. His power systems had failed . . . drive system down . . . communications down . . .

  Gregory was alone and helpless as he slid past the dark surface of the embattled Glothr ring, falling toward a black-frozen alien world.

  USNA Star Carrier America

  Invictus Space, T+12 MY

  1704 hours, TFT

  “Northern California reports that they have a major breach in the ring, Admiral,” Mallory reported. “And enemy fire in that sector has fallen off to almost nothing.”

  “Very well,” Gray replied. “Get some battlespace drones in there.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  “I want you to thread them into the structure through the breach. See if you can find the Concord and the Pax.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gray watched for a moment as a dozen remote drones closed with the ring, slipping one by one into the gaping hole blown open by the bombardment mements before. Clear telemetry streamed back to America, bringing shadowy images of the ring’s interior, a vast and cavernous expanse surrounded by torn and twisted structure, girders, and hundreds of entryways to side passages and corridors.

  He shifted mental channels. “Colonel Jamison!”

  “Sir!”

  “We’re putting some drones into the AO, Colonel, inside the structure, as close to our people as we can manage. Do you have the feed?”

  “We do, Admiral.”

  “Very well. You may deploy your force.”

  “Ooh-rah! On our way, Sir!”

  “I don’t want your people trapped inside,” Gray added. “Keep them on the ring’s surface until the fighters have cleared out the interior.”