by Ian Douglas
“I would not do that, Admiral, as you well know.”
He knew. “What do you have?”
“Our reconnaissance probe sent an emergency transmission at 1540 hours. Something has emerged from the wormhole.”
“On my way.”
Technically, he could view the data here, but he preferred to be in CIC, the fleet’s nerve center. He had more options there.
He’d already decided to skip dinner until after he’d grabbed some tubetime, or at least defer it until later. But now, even sleep would have to wait.
VFA-44
En route to TRGA
Texaghu Resch System
1704 hours, TFT
The worst part about fighter combat at near-c was the fact that you were experiencing events so slowly. Traveling at 99.7 percent of c, the passing of one second for Gray was almost thirteen seconds for the universe outside, the time dilation predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity and calculated by the equation known as the Lorentz-FitzGerald transformation. The problem was one of reaction time. At those speeds it took Gray thirteen times longer to notice a threat, thirteen times longer to react . . . and if those drive signatures he’d detected were of ships or missiles themselves traveling at close to the speed of light, they would be zorching in just behind the wavefront that had alerted him to their presence.
It might already be too late.
He told his AI to begin jinking.
He couldn’t use laser com to warn the others, of course, not at that speed. At near-c velocities, communication within the squadron—or with other squadrons or with the America—was tenuous at best. All incoming signals, even from other ships with perfectly matched vectors, were smeared by relativistic spacetime distortion into that circle of light ahead. The individual fighter AIs could tease some low-level bandwidth data out of that hash, but not enough for voice or implant communications. His Starhawk could sense the other spacecraft in the formation by the dimples their power-tap singularities left on the fabric of space, but little else.
Since his instrumentation could only approximate the positions of the other fighters in the squadron by their mass effects, any change in vector at this velocity was potentially deadly. By having his AI calculate those positions, however, using fuzzy logic to calculate probable locations, he minimized the chances of a collision. The rapid, jittery movements as his fighter threw out gravitational singularities, first in one direction, then another, then a third, did two things. They reduced the chances that an aimed projectile coming in from dead ahead would strike him, and they guaranteed that the AIs of the other Dragonfires would notice his fighter’s erratic behavior. That by itself would alert the rest of the squadron that something was wrong, that they were being tracked . . . and that they had to start jinking themselves to avoid disaster.
Side-to-side jinking could be carried out within a relatively narrow area—Gray was changing lateral vectors within a cross-section a hundred meters or so across—and Gray was trusting his AI to keep from colliding with the nearest other Dragonfire Starhawks. A tactical display window opened in his mind, showing the probable relative locations of the other eleven fighters. As he watched, four of the other Starhawks began moving back and forth in erratic and random patterns as well. Then a fifth joined in . . . a sixth, and within a few seconds all of them were moving unpredictably within the display. Gray’s AI was estimating the nearest fighter to be five kilometers away. Plenty of space . . . assuming that all twelve AIs were guessing accurately.
The question was, what was it that was hurtling toward the fighters head-on, and how much time did they have?
As the seconds crawled past, the Dragonfires’ formation began to spread out slightly. The AIs at the outer edge of the flight tended to move out more than in, which left more space in the middle for the interior Starhawks to begin dispersing. If they were being targeted, the dispersal should help by making individual ships harder to hit, and a high-speed impact would be less likely to destroy more than one or two fighters at a time.
Gray extended his tactical display’s field of view to take in the other two squadrons, the Hellstreaks and the Meteors. One by one, the individual Starhawks in those formations began jinking back and forth as well. Good. Someone in those squadrons had been paying attention, and had either spotted the oncoming threat or noticed when the Dragonfires began carrying out evasive maneuvers.
Then the starbow ahead of Gray’s fighter turned as bright as the face of the sun, and the shock wave of hot plasma struck him an instant later, sending him into a wild and catastrophic tumble.
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Inbound, Texaghu Resch System
1707 hours, TFT
Koenig watched the view unfolding on the CIC’s display screens, and realized that the fleet was now in serious trouble. The three tightly interwoven questions facing him now were, what could be done to retrieve the tactical situation, what could be salvaged, what would be lost?
The scenes showed the recon mission’s point of view, and so was now more than eighty minutes out of date thanks to the slow-crawling speed of light. According to the time line imbedded in the data stream, something—correction, a lot of somethings—had emerged from the artificial wormhole at 1540 hours.
Were they missiles or small spacecraft? Koenig couldn’t tell at first, though as minutes passed, be began to get the distinct impression that they were crewed—spacecraft slightly smaller than a Starhawk, and apparently far more maneuverable. Each was different in detail, lozenge shaped, flattened side to side like leaves or the scales of a fish, with whorls and blisters and smoothly curving lines etched into mirror-bright surfaces. Their hulls were decorated in sinuous swirls of dark blue and gray-silver, but gleamed brilliantly, reflecting the glare of the nearby sun.
They were coming through in hundreds, a cloud of the things. One, Koenig saw, was larger than the others, a fat cigar shape with five knobs like thick antennae projecting from its leading end, its hull hidden beneath clusters of slender objects like black, double-pointed pencils. Lightning flared between the antennae, encircling the craft, and the pencils began coming off in unraveling sheets and accelerating.
“What are those?” Sinclair said in Koenig’s head. “Missiles?”
“Crowbars,” Koenig replied.
And an instant later the feed from Recon One went dead.
VFA-44
En route to TRGA
Texaghu Resch System
1715 hours, TFT
Gray tumbled through the Void at the speed of light.
G-forces tore at him. Where his gravitic drive acted on every atom of his body uniformly, allowing him to fall toward the singularity in zero-G, his Starhawk’s spin exerted centrifugal force that simulated gravity—about eight Gs, he estimated. He was perilously close to blacking out.
He was able to thoughtclick on icons showing in his in-head display, however, directing his AI to use the gravitic drive to slow the spin. The G-force lessened . . . then, in a series of fits and starts, dropped gradually away to nothing. He was in free fall once more.
As soon as he could bring up his tactical display, he checked to see what had happened. Two fighters from the formation were missing—Preisler and Natham, both hit, evidently, by high-grav impactors passing through the formation. Though hard vacuum could not transmit a shock wave, the shattering collision of two bodies each moving at close to c had released a great deal of kinetic energy, and that energy had driven an expanding shell of plasma—the vaporized mass of both fighter and projectile—outward with force enough to tip Gray into an end-for-end tumble.
He was under control, now, however—shaken, but still on course. That was a given; an expanding bubble of plasma with energy enough to deflect him onto a new vector at this speed would have reduced him and his Starhawk to individual free-flying atoms.
His AI completed a full systems check. There was minor damage, both in attitude control and in life support, but the fighter was alre
ady repairing itself. The nanomatrix of the hull could reconfigure itself, filling in gaps, bypassing burned-out zones, and even literally rewiring itself. The one system that could not be repaired under way, the oscillating micro-singularities at the heart of the Starhawk’s quantum power tap, were still in place and functioning at optimum, and the energy flow was steady.
He checked the stats on the other pilots. Gray couldn’t tell from the tactical display if any of the other Dragonfire pilots had been affected by impact with the fast-expanding plasma shells. His equipment could detect a nearby mass by the impression it made in spacetime, but not whether that mass was spinning or even fragmented. Preisler and Natham, though, were definitely gone, their fighters’ mass smeared outward into low-density clouds of star-hot plasma. There was some possibility of losses within the Meteors and the Hellstreaks as well, though the data was fuzzy and would remain so until they decelerated to saner velocities.
What the hell had happened? Clearly, something up ahead had detected the incoming squadrons of fighters and launched a cloud of near-c kinetic-kill impactors, a type of weapon generically known as crowbars. They had no guidance, no onboard AI; they were simply slivers of ultra-dense metal launched in clouds against incoming targets.
The slivers that had missed the individual fighters would be traveling on, now, headed out-system toward the far fatter and slower targets of the carrier battlegroup.
And Gray had no way of warning them that the impactors were on the way.
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Inbound, Texaghu Resch System
1720 hours, TFT
It was sheer luck that Koenig and his combat team in CIC had seen the crowbar launch . . . luck, and the fact that they did have intelligence resources watching the TRGA tube. That single bit of advance planning might have just saved the fleet in the relatively short term.
In the long-term, they were still in deep trouble.
According to the time stamp on Recon One’s data, those high-velocity projectiles had been launched at 1540 . . . more than forty minutes before the fighter squadrons had been deployed. That meant they were targeting the fleet, which they would have been able to pick up on long-range gravitational mass sensors, and not the fighters, which should by now be two thirds of the way to their objective.
Kinetic-kill projectiles could not be precisely aimed across more than 9 AUs. They would be coming in blind, a cloud of the things dispersing in such a way that something might be hit simply by chance. Their actual speed was unknown; they would arrive at relativistic speeds, but anything above, say, 70 percent of the speed of light was possible. The battlegroup’s only possible defense was to disperse even more to reduce the chance of a lucky hit.
Koenig thought the matter through further. It might also help to put out some additional fighters .5 AU or so ahead of the fleet. They might detect the incoming projectile cloud, and be able to give the fleet some advance warning, anything from seconds to a few minutes, depending on the velocities involved.
He began giving the necessary orders.
More serious was the long-term problem. The fleet was scheduled to arrive at the TRGA at around one in the morning. They would arrive to find several hundred hostile spacecraft, however—spacecraft of unknown design but obviously hostile.
No fleet commander cares to take his ships into a fight with a totally unknown but numerically superior enemy. The odds are too long, the threat unguessable, the potential consequences terrifying . . . and it was a hell of a long way home.
But Koenig now had an unsavory choice to make. He could stick with the original plan and engage the unknown foe, or he could order the fleet to begin immediate deceleration with an eye to changing course and re-entering Alcubierre space. The fleet could escape, and that was almost certainly the safest and sanest call right now.
But if he did that, the thirty-six fighters of three Starhawk squadrons already en route to the TRGA would be abandoned and lost.
The math was simple enough; he could save fifty-eight ships and nearly fifty thousand men and women by sacrificing the lives of thirty-six pilots.
The math was always simple. It was living with the results that was a problem.
Chapter Nine
29 June 2405
VFA-44
En route to TRGA
Texaghu Resch System
1745 hours, TFT
The fighters had hit their decell points and were slowing now at fifty thousand gravities. As their velocity dropped, the rings of colored light representing the entire outside universe smeared and expanded, breaking up into discrete stars as it stretched out to once more envelope the fighters. Radio and laser communications signals once again emerged from the background hash of relativistically distorted spacetime, and Gray again could talk to the other pilots.
The first thing he did was check the status of each ship. Each Starhawk constantly transmitted a data stream giving its condition and flight status, the health of its pilot, and other critical data, but at near-c, his navigational AI could pick up the presence of nearby mass and little else; it could not read whether the mass of another fighter was traveling normally or in a headlong tumble.
Two fighters had been vaporized. Priesler and Natham were gone, their Starhawks’ masses spread out across such a large volume of space that they could no longer be detected, and the paired, microscopic singularities of their power plants had radiated away into nothingness.
Gray could now see that three other fighters besides his own—Donovan’s, Zapeta’s, and Kuhn’s—had been put into tumbles by the blasts. All three had recovered, their pilots uninjured, thank God, and all were coming back fully on-line as their systems repaired themselves.
“Everyone okay?” Gray asked, more for the reassurance of human contact than anything else. The readouts had already answered the question.
“Okay now,” came Donovan’s voice, faint and static-blasted despite AI enhancement. They were still moving quickly enough that the transmissions between ships were almost lost in the relativistic distortions of space.
“That was quite a ride,” Lawrence Kuhn added. “I hit five Gs.”
“What the hell happened?” Shay Ryan asked.
“A spread of crowbars passed through the formation,” Gray told them. “My AI is guessing that they came through at about ninety percent of light speed.”
“What the hell is a crowbar?” Rostenkowski asked.
“Kinetic-kill projectiles, null brain,” Calli Loman replied. “Bullets, very heavy bullets, traveling very fast. It’s in your training downloads.”
“Oh, yeah . . .”
“Jesus, the bastards are shooting at us!” Zapeta’s voice called.
“Not necessarily,” Gray replied. He was studying the available data, letting it scroll through his in-head display as he absorbed it. After the enforced isolation of the near-c leg of the flight, he was starving for data. “We’re on a direct line between the fleet and the Triggah. It’s possible that they were shooting at the big boys, and we just happened to be caught in the line of fire.”
Aiming anything across more than 9 AUs, whether solid projectile or a beam of coherent light, was a complex task, one dependent on luck as much as upon precise measurements of the target’s course and speed. The enemy was very rarely where you expected him to be.
It was impossible to know just yet exactly when those deadly slivers of ultra-dense metal had been launched, or at what range they’d been fired from. Gray’s AI was picking targets up now in the vicinity of the alien artifact ahead, lots of targets. They’d emerged from the spinning, high-mass cylinder sometime within the past couple of hours, and loosed that cloud of projectiles either at the fleet or directly at the fighters.
Probably the fleet, Gray decided, examining the AI’s vector analysis. The cloud of KK projectiles had been widely dispersed; if the bad guys had been shooting at the fighters, they would have kept the cloud tighter, more compact, in order to hit more than just two.
Correction, five. The Meteors had lost two fighters as well . . . and the Hellstreaks one, and that suggested the cloud of high-velocity slivers had been huge, spread throughout a volume of space fifty thousand kilometers across or more.
Okay, the bad guys were taking potshots at the fleet. Gray’s AI had automatically transmitted an update that should arrive at America a few moments before the cloud did, and there was nothing more he could do in that department. The CBG would have to deal with the attack on its own.
“Hellstreak One, this is Dragonfire One,” Gray called. “Do you copy?”
“Copy, Dragon One,” the voice of Commander Gregory Claiborne answered. “Go ahead.”
Claiborne was the skipper of the Hellstreaks off the Abraham Lincoln, and the senior-ranked officer among the three squadrons. As such, he was in command of the overall mission, though, in fact, the Hellstreaks, the Meteors, and the Dragonfires were flying independently on this op. Except for a few short training flights back at Alphekka, the three squadrons had had little practice working together. Hell, most of the newbies in the Dragon fighter pilots were so raw, Gray wasn’t sure they would be able to stay in single-squadron formation, much less mesh with all three.
“Five minutes to intercept, sir,” Gray said. “What kind of closing velocity did you have in mind?”
If they continued pulling fifty-K Gs, they would arrive at the objective motionless relative to the TRGA. But in grav-fighter combat, as with the atmo-fighters of four centuries before, speed was life. By tweaking their decelerations, the fighters could arrive at the objective with a left-over velocity of anything from a few meters per second to thousands of kps.
But choosing the closing velocity was a juggling act of tactics and guesswork. Too slow, and the bad guys up ahead would eat the incoming fighters for breakfast. Too fast, and the fighters’ on-board AIs would not be able to track or lock on to the enemy.