by Ian Douglas
Unlike most of her classmates from the wealthier and more e-connected inland cities of North America, Shay Ashton had never played virtual war games, but she was a damned good fighter pilot, and that seemed to count for something with the brass.
She gritted her teeth and pushed ahead into the unfolding mass of technical data.
USNA CVS America
Saturn Space
0916 hours, TFT
“So, how’s our guest doing?” Gray asked. He was in America’s sick bay, in the office just outside the ward. His exec was there as well, but virtually, watching in-head from the command chair on the bridge.
“He’ll make it, Admiral,” Dr. Joseph Haynes told him. “We’re maintaining the coma while we bring his blood chemistry fully back on-line.”
“When can we talk to him?” Sara Gutierrez asked, speaking inside both Gray’s and Haynes’ heads. “It’s . . . important.”
“Give the boy some time,” Haynes told her. “We need to bring him up gradually to avoid major psychochemical trauma. I’d say . . . six hours.”
“Hell, we’ll be at Enceladus by that time,” Gutierrez grumbled.
“Let me know when he’s conscious, Doctor,” Gray said. He directed a thought at his XO. “We have the Agletsch database in our network, Number One. We should be able to identify the new bandit there.”
“If the spiders have had contact with them,” Gutierrez said. “It’s a big galaxy. Even they haven’t met everyone in it.”
Some time ago, the USNA had purchased from the Agletsch data traders a portion of an extensive database listing thirty-five sapient species currently within the Sh’daar-dominated portions of the galaxy. This Encyclopedia Galactica, as it was popularly known, was by no means complete. There might be four or five thousand technical, star-faring species within the Sh’daar Collective alone, and in the entire galaxy there were an estimated fifty million intelligent or parasapient species in all.
Those thirty-five va-Sh’daar races included all of the starfaring species Humankind had encountered and battled in the past seven decades—the Turusch; the H’rulka; the Nungiirtok and their odd little Kobold symbiotes, the Slan; and several other lesser-known races. The rest were known only by means of the data purchased from the Agletsch, and there’d as yet been no way to confirm the information.
But the AI on Gallagher’s fighter had recorded a high-mag image of an alien ship of some sort—a flattened, 800-meter egg shape, deep scarlet in color, covered with lumpy protrusions that gave it a distinctly organic look. There was nothing like it in either the USNA or Confederation warbooks . . . so what the hell was it doing with that Confed squadron Gallagher had encountered en route to Enceladus?
“Admiral Gray, Comm,” a voice said in his head. “We have a reply coming through from Earth.”
He checked the time: 1015. Damn, that was pretty fast. America and her consorts had emerged from metaspace at 0620, immediately sending an AI alert back to Earth. With the current layout of the Sol System’s planets, Earth was 15.7 astronomical units distant . . . about 126 light-minutes. Gray had dispatched a fuller, burst-encoded message ten minutes later, giving USNA Fleet HQ a brief but detailed report on what had happened out at Omega Centauri, plus a rundown on what was planned next: the rescue of a streaker 1 AU out from Saturn. Headquarters would have received that message about 126 minutes later—call it 0836, Terran Fleet time—but during that time America had accelerated toward Saturn, picked up the SAR tug and the fighter pilot, and decelerated on into Saturn space. If Earth had responded instantly, that reply would have reached America—now 10 AUs from Earth—80 minutes later . . . call it 1000 TFT, just 15 minutes ago.
Fifteen minutes’ turnaround was remarkably quick for the Naval HQ staff, which, in Gray’s experience, tended to discuss things to death rather than actually doing anything.
“Put it through,” he said. “Route it to all task-force department heads and senior staff.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
A new window opened in Gray’s mind, static-filled at first but swiftly clearing, to show the craggy face of Fleet Admiral Michael Diaz of USNA Military Command. “Admiral Gray,” he said. “Welcome home. I wish it could be under happier circumstances.”
“Your emergence so close to Saturn space is . . . fortuitous, however. We have a problem.”
America’s arrival just 6 AUs from Saturn had been purely by chance. Until relatively recently, of course, starships had not been able to emerge closer to a star of Sol’s mass than about 40 astronomical units—some 6 billion kilometers, or about the mean distance of Pluto from the sun in its long, dark orbit through the Kuiper Belt. But the powerful AIs at the Navy Bureau of Engineering were constantly working to refine the capabilities of singularity drives, as well as all of the other technologies required in modern ship design and weaponry. Capital ships could now emerge from their Alcubierre warp bubbles 12 to 15 AUs out from a sunlike star. But the fact that Saturn, 9.5 AUs out from Sol, had happened to be at that part of its orbit around the sun, had been sheerest happenstance.
“Twenty-two days ago, on February twelfth, a Confederation task force took over USNA facilities in Saturn space, including bases on Enceladus, on Titan, and in the rings. There were reports, as yet unconfirmed, that spacecraft of unknown but alien origin accompanied the enemy fleet. . . .”
“Comm,” Gray said. “Get confirmation of the alien sighting off to SpaCom. Include the vid Gallagher grabbed during the battle.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
Diaz continued talking, describing the latest Confederation offensive. Geneva appeared to have established a stronghold in Saturn space. Exactly why they’d done so was as yet unknown.
“The Confeds claim that they are allied with the Sh’daar now,” Diaz went on. “It’s possible that the alien forces with them at Saturn are Sh’daar . . . or Sh’daar clients, like the Turusch and the Slan. . . .”
Gray was willing to bet on a Sh’daar client race. So far as was known, no human had ever seen an actual Sh’daar in all the decades of war with them.
“Admiral, this is asking a lot of you and your people, I know,” Diaz went on, “but we’re badly stretched here in the Sol System. Right now, America is the only operational star carrier we have in-system, so we’re damned glad to see you. Constitution is protecting the Chiron colony at Alpha Centauri, Intrepid has deployed out to Vulcan on deep recon, and Constellation, Independence, and Saratoga are all undergoing extensive refits or repair at SupraQuito. Those are the closest other carriers in service we have.
“We want you to make a close reconnoiter of the Saturn system—especially of Enceladus, which appears to be the Confed’s main target out there. Get an idea of their strength, and, in particular, see if you can get more data on the alien bandit. We need to know where it’s from, what he hell it’s doing here, and if it’s actively helping the Confederation.
“We are deploying what we can from Earth High Guard to Saturn to support you . . . the California, the Inchon, and five destroyers. Sorry it can’t be more.
“Sorry to delay your happy homecoming, Sandy. Do a good job with this, and those admiral’s stars might become permanent. HQMILCOM, out.”
Damn the man, Gray thought, angry. He wasn’t here to earn his stars. They’d needed someone with command experience—specifically command experience at Omega Centauri, either the Tee-Prime of today or the Tee-Sub of hundreds of millions of years ago . . . and Gray had been it. He’d volunteered, and he’d taken the strictly temporary bump up in rank because it wasn’t proper, according to the hoary perspective of Navy tradition, for a mere captain to command a squadron of capital ships. Koenig had understood that when he’d offered Gray the job.
He would be happy to get back to being a captain again. But in the meantime, he would do what he had to. Duty. Honor.
There was nothing at all in that litany about rank.
He pushed the thought aside and called up an in-head tactical display. “Where are our fighters?” he wanted to know.
“Coming up on Enceladus now, Admiral,” Connie Fletcher told him. America and her consorts were 70 million kilometers out from Saturn now—just less than half an AU—and the golden planet showed as a slender sickle curving away from the shrunken sun. Its rings were a straight, needle-thin slash across the crescent, giving it the look of an arrow drawn back on a bow. The giant moon Titan was a bright orange star off to one side.
“Good. Launch the rest of the fighters in support.”
“Yes, Admiral.”
“Tactical!”
Commander Dean Mallory was in the link. “Aye, sir.”
“You heard Admiral Diaz?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We need an operations plan and we need it now. One squadron on CAP, protecting the task force. The others will swarm Enceladus—that’s the primary objective—but I also want to check out both Titan and the ring facility. It’ll be recon, but be prepared to engage the enemy if he comes out. Put an opplan together and send it out through the taclink. You have fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
Fifteen minutes, Gray reflected, was not enough time to come up with a working opplan from scratch, or to test it through AI modeling and simulation. He was counting on the Tactical department’s ROP, the Ready-Op Cascade—an ongoing series of operational plans running and evolving constantly within America’s primary AI. As America moved from objective point to objective point, thousands of plans based on the current tactical and logistical situation were created, amended, evolved, or discarded, based on the best current tactical data. Commander Mallory and his team would be pulling up a handful of the best current opplans, plugging in Gray’s tactical and strategic requirements, and making a final determination. That plan, then, could be transmitted directly to the fighters already en route to their objectives, with very little time lost.
Red geometric icons were beginning to emerge from Enceladus within Gray’s in-head view . . . Confederation fighters deploying to meet America’s approach. It’s about time, he thought. Where’ve you guys been? The enemy should have had pickets out . . . and possibly some capital ships on patrol to cut off or block a USNA attack. So far, it looked like about two squadrons’ worth of fighters . . . KRG-60 Todtadlers, it looked like. That wasn’t good. America had only two squadrons of modern SG-101 Velociraptors, which were a reasonable match in combat for the Death Eagles. America’s older Starhawks would be at a distinct disadvantage with the newer and more technologically sophisticated Pan-European fighters.
Gray had long campaigned with HQMILCOM for a high-tech upgrade for the USNA Navy’s fighters. It should have been a simple-enough program. Logistics vessels routinely grew replacement fighters using raw materials and nanoassemblers in a matter of hours, even while on deployment, after all—so why not simply grow all Velociraptors and not the older, slower Starhawks?
But even with the most advanced military technology, things are rarely that simple. . . .
While it was true that with the right programming, nanoassemblers could take masses of raw material mined from asteroids—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, iron, titanium, and dozens of other elements—and literally grow a working fighter on the spot. The same was true for the implants nanotechnically grown inside the brains of military pilots, implants that intimately connected them with the software running their fighters, merging human and machine into a single, integrated cybernetic organism.
More difficult, however—more difficult by far—were the organic components of this man-machine hybrid. Human fighter pilots were trained by downloading vast amounts of data into their implants, but to make use of this material there had to be downloads into the organic component as well. Pilots trained long and hard to learn how to use the fighter-control software, how to interface with their craft, how to exchange information with the fighter’s AI seamlessly and automatically, how literally to become a part of their fighter.
There were significant differences between the newer Velociraptors and the older Starhawks, especially in the way data were stored on the organic side of the equation. Retraining a Starhawk driver required extensive reprogramming—essentially going in and wiping old training in order to make room for new. A pilot carrying both sets of wetware programming was a disaster waiting to happen, especially considering that much of that programming would be expressed at a pre-cerebral level, meaning before the neural impulses had time to reach the brain or to be considered on a conscious level. A pilot making a tight turn, for instance, by whipping his fighter around the flickering death zone of its own drive singularity without getting spaghettified by the tidal forces, demanded absolute agreement and precision between the organic and inorganic components.
So while the inorganic mass of an advanced, high-tech singularity fighter was easy to grow, retraining the pilots was hard and it was involved. Far easier to train new pilots for the new squadrons than to try to retrain the old ones.
Gray had been trained twenty-four years ago with what had then been the relatively new SG-92 Starhawk. He’d heard about the bells and whistles on the SG-101s and knew he wouldn’t care to try strapping one on himself. That was something for a younger, newer generation of pilots.
And so, USNA carriers continued to fly squadrons of both. The SG-92s tended to be deployed against capital ships and planetary targets but not against top-of-the-line fighters like the Franco-German Todtadlers . . . not unless there was a way to win a very clear numerical advantage in a dogfight.
Going up against a Todtadler in a Starhawk one-to-one was a perfect recipe for suicide.
And the USNA Navy, conservative to begin with, tended to resist efforts to dump the old tech in favor of the new. That, Gray thought, might be a form of suicide as well—national suicide—but so far the powers that be had not been able to bring themselves to the point where they could sign off on a massive restructuring of USNA military training programs.
It should have been as simple, Gray thought, as not training any more Starhawk pilots, while accelerating the training programs for Velociraptors and some of the newer, still as yet unnamed fighters that would be coming on-line over the course of the next year or so—the XSG-420 or the absolutely astonishing XSG-500.
But, no, HQMILCOM Mars would rather keep cranking out obsolete pilots than spending the money on a complete retooling of the military’s spaceflight training centers, and that meant that logistics vessels like the Shenandoah had to keep growing obsolete fighters as well.
Gray watched the Confederation Death Eagles spreading out across his tactical in-head, and prayed that obsolete fighters—and pilots—would be enough.
Chapter Eight
5 March 2425
VFA-96, Black Demons
Saturn Space
0918 hours, CST
Three hours after launch, the Demons were plunging deep into Saturn space. Ahead, Connor could see the golden arc of Saturn stretched across half the sky, the thread-slender slash of the gas giant’s rings, and the small but brilliant glare of Sol off to the side, a dazzling burst of light.
The approach had been a torturous one, an insertion dictated by the opplan downloaded from America’s tactical department, which was bringing them in toward Enceladus from the dark side of Saturn. By skimming just beneath the plane of Saturn’s rings and coming in from the planet’s day side, they might be able to delay the moment when the enemy spotted them.
That part of the plan, however, hadn’t worked out . . . not at all. Nearly ten minutes ago, flights of Confederation Todtadlers had boosted from both Enceladus and Titan and deployed toward Saturn’s night side, spreading out to block the American fighters’ approach. According to the opplan, VFA-215’s ’Raptors would engage any European fighters trying to block the Enceladean approach, allowing the Starhawks to pass through to t
he objective.
“Okay, Demons,” Mackey’s voice said. “We’ll go in through a barrage of nukes and AMSOs. Weapons free!”
By laying down a wall of exploding nukes, the American fighters would momentarily scramble the enemy’s sensors, and clouds of high-velocity antimissile sand would both detonate incoming enemy warheads and might do significant damage to the Confederation fighters.
The problem was that while Enceladus was directly ahead, on the far side of Saturn, there were also enemy fighters deploying from Titan, off to the right, and from the orbital base within Saturn’s rings, to the left and currently masked by the vast loom of the planet itself. No doubt the base orbiting Titan had been responsible for spotting the incoming USNA fighters and for giving the alarm. Other squadrons off the America were angling toward those other fighter groups. First contact would be within another few seconds.
The slash of the rings expanded . . . expanded . . . and then Connor’s fighter was skimming a sea of gold and opalescent light, seemingly so close she could imagine reaching out and touching it.
“Demon Three,” Gregory called, “Fox One! Missiles away!”
Connor had already thoughtclicked a target lock, a region of empty space that would shield her approach beneath the rings when it became filled with an opening blossom of white-hot plasma. “Demon Six! Fox One!”
The other Black Demon fighters loosed their missiles. Nuclear detonations strobed and pulsed against black space ahead. Connor glanced up at the smear of ringlight a scant few kilometers above her fighter’s dorsal hull.
The particles in the main rings, she knew, were myriad fragments ranging in size from around a centimeter up to perhaps ten meters and almost entirely composed of water ice. Backlit by the sun, the rings were spectacularly gorgeous, giving the impression of millions of individual rings as slender and as delicate as the threads of a spider’s web, each nestled close between its neighbors, but the impression of narrow ringlets separated by even narrower gaps was an illusion. True gaps in the rings were relatively rare—circles of black emptiness swept clean by tiny “shepherd moons,” or by gravitational interactions with somewhat larger moons, the way Mimas cleared the broad gap between the A and B rings known as the Cassini Division. In fact, the rings were more like a single, annular disk etched by countless grooves where the ring particles were of low density, alternating with bumps of high density and brightness. Like the grooves in an old-fashioned phonograph record was the comparison Connor had heard . . . though she had no idea what a “phonograph record” might be.