Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5)

by Ian Douglas

  Whatever the simile, the scene was unimaginably beautiful, serenely spectacular, eerily surreal. Even the Cassini Division glowed slightly with scattered sunlight when backlit this way.

  She was hurtling past Saturn now at 8,000 kilometers per second; at that speed, she cut a chord across the arc of the immense B Ring in less than seven seconds. Silent explosions flared ahead and to either side. The blasts seemed . . . unimpressive, unremarkable when staged against the backdrop of Saturn’s luminous rings.

  Connor felt a bump as her AI corrected the fighter’s course. The rings in this portion of circum-Saturn space were thin—only about ten kilometers thick, but there were numerous ice chunks above or below the ring planes, put there by collisions or gravitational jostlings, and her Starhawk had to constantly shift her course to avoid collisions.

  And then it was a wild and swirling free-for-all as fighter swarm penetrated fighter swarm . . . and the carefully crafted opplan went to hell.

  USNA CVS America

  Saturn Space

  0925 hours, TFT

  “Trouble, Admiral.”

  “I see them, Mr. Mallory.”

  Gray sat on America’s flag bridge, perched on the edge of his seat and staring down into the tactical tank. Red icons marking enemy ships streamed out from Enceladus, a cloud of fighters moving to block, then to engulf the fighters off of America. There were hundreds of them.

  “The enemy fighters are of an unknown design, Admiral. I think they may be from Gallagher’s bogie.”

  “If they are, the Confeds have just escalated to the next level,” Gray said. “Where are those High Guard ships?”

  “Still three AUs out, and decelerating, sir,” Gutierrez told him. “ETA thirty-five minutes.”

  Gray scowled at that piece of unwelcome news. Half an hour was an agony of time in combat . . . long enough for the battle to unfold, come to a climax, and be lost long before the reinforcements could join the fight.

  But the implacable laws of physics dictated that there could be no turning back. America’s fighter squadrons were already engaging the enemy, and the ships of the carrier battlegroup were hurtling into the heart of the battle, decelerating to combat velocities—and with no time left for acceleration enough for escape.

  What, he wondered, were the capabilities of those alien fighters? What surprises might they be able to inflict on the incoming USNA ships?

  Gray selected one of the red fighter cons and opened up a detailed image within his in-head, the data relayed back from the star carrier’s fighters ahead, and from an expanding cloud of robotic battlespace drones spreading now through the Saturn system. The enemy fighter had an organic feel to it, lumpy and uneven, with no attempt at symmetry or streamlining. Streamlining, of course, was not normally required for operations in the vacuum of space . . . but could be important for fighters accelerating to a high fraction of the speed of light. At even 10 percent of c, the density of dust motes and stray atoms of hydrogen within solar space could acquire the character of a thin atmosphere. Either those alien fighters didn’t maneuver at high speeds . . . or they had power to spare, power enough not to be concerned with such mundane considerations as friction or high-energy particulate radiation.

  With alien technology it was always best to expect the unexpected . . . and in combat it helped to expect the worst.

  “All ships,” he said, using the battlegroup’s tactical link. “Stay tight, stick together. CAG, have the fighter screen expand to cover everyone. Captain Richards . . . you tuck the Shenny in close on America’s ass. Don’t let them separate you from the herd.”

  Gray was concerned about the provisioning ship Shenandoah—Captain Jennine Richards commanding. When they’d begun this run, the mission specs had called for a reconnaissance of possible enemy positions in Saturn space, and it wasn’t until they’d picked up Lieutenant Gallagher that they’d realized that a formidable threat faced them up ahead. By then, it was too late to detach the Shenandoah and pack her off to someplace safe. The bulky logistics vessel did have weapons—mostly laser batteries for close-in missile and fighter defense—but she would add little to CBG-40’s overall massing of firepower. America did have some major firepower, however, and might be able to cover the Shenandoah if things got tight.

  Might. . . .

  There were no guarantees in combat, none at all, and if the star carrier became too hard-pressed in the coming battle, she would have to focus on defending herself, leaving the Shenandoah on her own. Gray hated that kind of decision, about who lived, who died . . . but it came down to the necessities of command.

  Sometimes there simply were no good choices. . . .

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  Saturn Space

  0926 hours, CST

  Megan Connor twisted in her seat, trying to see behind her . . . then spun her Starhawk end for end to get a better view. Her in-head showed her detailed imagery across the entire sphere of view as if her fighter were invisible, but it was still possible to forget about your six, the area of space directly astern, where you generally weren’t looking. Her AI would give her alerts to approaching threats, but she liked to be able to try thinking ahead of the enemy before that threat unfolded. That, after all, was why space fighters still had human pilots, and were not crewed solely by electronics.

  A number of the unknowns had spread out as the Black Demons approached, and were now boosting to move around behind the USNA fighters, to cut them off from the lumbering capital ships coming up astern. The alien ships’ capabilities—both those of the alien fighters ahead and of the 700-meter thing Lieutenant Gallagher had glimpsed weeks ago—were still very much large and troubling unknowns. The human pilots were going to have to treat them with extreme caution until they showed their hand . . . or whatever other manipulatory organ they might possess.

  There was no time to do anything about the alien fighters surrounding them . . . not when Confed Death Eagles were whipping in from ahead and from the right, plasma beams snapping out to spear USNA ships. Spinning again, Connor loosed a spread of VG-10s, rapidly targeting as many of the nearer Confed fighters as she could.

  Blinding detonations pulsed and strobed across the sky, nuclear warheads deployed to carve a path through the enemy fighter wall. One of the Demon newbies, Groeller, tried to change course to avoid a suddenly erupting cloud of plasma in his path, but in the next instant a beam of star-hot energy nicked his fighter and sent it into a death spin, blurring as it whipped around its own drive singularity so close and tight and hard that the fighter literally disintegrated, coming apart in a cloud of glittering debris.

  “Jink, Demons!” Mackey called. “Don’t let the bastards get a fucking lock!”

  If singularity fighters had one special strength, it was their maneuverability. With the onboard AI juggling the wildly shifting forces and accelerations, a fighter could decelerate at tens of thousands of gravities, change direction at right angles or even through a full one-eighty, accelerate again on a new vector, all within a fraction of a second. Such maneuvers, if carried out both at high velocity and with a high degree of randomness, could prevent the enemy from getting a solid target lock—and that meant precious extra seconds of survival in the hellstorm of close fighter combat.

  “Podeski!” Mackey’s voice yelled over the tactical link. “Watch the ring plane!”

  “I’ve got it, Skipper!” Lieutenant (j.g.) Podeski called back. “I’ve got it!”

  Podeski, another of the newbs, in trying to lose an enemy fighter that had dropped onto his tail, was attempting the spectacularly dangerous tactic of scraping his pursuer off by skimming close past the rings. The Death Eagle fired and Podeski swerved sharply . . .

  . . . and then his ship plunged into the gauzy veil of Saturn’s B Ring and instantly exploded, torn to white-hot shreds as it slammed into a blizzard of ice particles and shards just 15 meters thick at a thousand kil
ometers per hour. A ripple of disturbance spread out through the ring material from the impact—spread, faded, and vanished.

  Connor was already jinking wildly, maintaining a forward velocity of at least a thousand kilometers per second, but throwing in new vectors side to side or up and down, and varying her forward velocity from between 1,000 to 10,000 kph. She was feeling hemmed in, now, unable to jink toward the hazy gleam of Saturn’s rings without risking Podeski’s fate at these speeds. Depending on the attitude of her fighter, the rings appeared now as a ceiling overhead . . . now as a solid floor of glittering ice . . . now as a deadly, speed-blurred wall to left or right. A missile detonated within the rings just a hundred kilometers to port, and she had an instant glimpse of ripples spreading out through the plane. The rings looked solid at a distance; up close they had a gauzy translucence through which stars and the minute orbs of distant moons were visible . . . but to enter that thin layer of ice particles would be to enter a maelstrom of debris, from dust to pebbles to randomly scattered house-sized boulders, and not even her Starhawk’s AI would be able to dodge them all.

  A Confed Death Eagle dropped in out of nowhere directly ahead, firing its primary beam weapon. Connor jinked to starboard and loosed a VG-10 Krait . . . a mistake, because the enemy fighter was gone by the time the Krait had accelerated across the intervening 2,000 kilometers and detonated in a white-hot blossom of light and hot plasma. God, those things were fast!

  She allowed her fighter’s AI to guide her. . . .

  She became a part of her fighter, her mind so tightly interwoven with the craft’s intelligent software that distinguishing one from the other was impossible.

  Centuries before, psychologists and neural physiologists had discovered that decision making happens consciously as much as several seconds after the decision is made unconsciously. Those experiments had actually threatened to undermine the whole concept of free will; did humans make choices through conscious reasoning . . . or were they rubber-stamping decisions already made by the subconscious, which, in effect, was reducing them to puppets on strings?

  The debate still raged in academic neuroscience circles four hundred years later, though the default position held that it was a constantly shifting gestalt of conscious and unconscious thought that let humans decide everything from the color and pattern of today’s skin suit to whether or not to join the military, to get married, or to deliberately put their lives in terrible danger. At the moment, her decision making—augmented in both speed and scope by AI software—was focused on choosing targets, locking on, and firing, a complex dance of maneuver, fire, and maneuver again, unfolding at superhuman speed.

  Her AI, with senses far quicker and more penetrating than hers, could spot and identify incoming threats. Her mind, however—her thoughts—meshed closely with the software, selecting specific threats, often relying more on instinct than on reason or calculation. A thought, a mental nudge, would send her Starhawk whipping around its flickering drive singularity and onto a new course.

  The idea at any given instant was to be where the enemy or his weapons were not.

  Reacting to a warning from her AI, she spun fast and fired her primary weapon just as a Todtadler flashed in close—less than 300 kilometers. Her Starhawk’s Blue Lightning PBP-2 particle beam projector, a “pee-beep” in the lexicon of fighter pilots, loosed a tightly focused stream of high-energy protons, which erupted in a coruscating flare of blue-white light across the enemy fighter’s hull and chewed deep into its inner structure.

  That’s one . . .

  She spun again, locked onto a second Death Eagle at 500 kilometers, and burned off a chunk of the enemy fighter’s port side. Pieces spun off into space . . . and then suddenly the imbalance in the distribution of the Death Eagle’s mass nudged the craft into a tight spin around its own drive singularity, shredding it into a wildly expanding spray of sparkling debris.

  Two . . .

  Then there was no time for counting, no time for thought as she whirled, shifted, and dodged through the enemy formations. Move and fire . . . move and fire . . . and all the while she was aware that there were fewer and fewer fighters remaining in her own squadron, which was scattering across the whole sky. Chuck Taylor’s Starhawk exploded, vaporized in a direct hit. Jayli Adrian’s fighter crumpled a moment later, its atoms smashed down into a sub-microscopic point as she lost control of her drive.

  VFA-96 was down to seven fighters, now, and though they were scoring victories, the enemy fighters kept coming and coming, waves of them sweeping in from two different directions. One of the egg-shaped alien fighters slipped onto Connor’s six, 800 kilometers astern. She spun end over end, hurtling tail-first now across the shimmering, translucent blur of Saturn’s rings as she locked and fired her primary weapon.

  The enemy fired as well, an eye-searing bolt of violet-blue energy that crisped some of her external hull’s nanomatrix as she rolled away from it. Connor’s AI identified the radiation as an X-ray laser: coherent radiation at a wavelength of 1.8 exahertz and with energies approaching 80 terajoules—as much energy as the detonation of a 20-kiloton nuke. The visible light wasn’t x-rays, of course, which were invisible . . . but appeared to be part of the excitation process that generated the alien weapon’s charge.

  Connor’s plasma bolt struck the enemy fighter full on . . . but that lumpy, scarlet hull appeared to drink in the energy, with no damage that the sensors could detect. That just wasn’t possible.

  She was expecting a second bolt from the alien, but her AI whispered in her thoughts that it appeared to be recharging. Power levels were at 40 percent . . . at 60 . . .

  She locked on with a VG-10 and let the shipkiller drop from her Starhawk’s weapons bay. Its drive triggered as soon as it was clear and the missile streaked aft toward the alien. Seconds later, the Krait’s warhead detonated in a searing, silent flash, and as the sphere of expanding plasma cleared, the enemy fighter drifted slowly to one side, a charred and burned-out husk. Whatever those things were made of, they were not invulnerable.

  “Skipper!” Connor called. “Demon Six! Those new alien fighters slurp down pee-beeps like soda! But I killed one with a Krait. . . .”

  “Copy that, Six. Good work! I’ll pass that along.”

  VFA-215 was heavily involved in a dogfight up ahead, drawing enemy fighters away from the Black Demons, at least for the moment. The Velociraptors had taken heavy casualties, Connor saw . . . but as word of her kill began rippling through the various USNA squadrons, more and more nuclear detonations pulsed and flashed against the night.

  And the USNA fighters began breaking through.

  Her discovery put some sharp constraints on the fighters. They would have to save their PBP-2 primary weapons for the human-piloted ships, and use nuke-tipped Kraits on the scarlet aliens. In the heat of combat, it was easy to lose track of who was who, even with AI help in sorting out the targets and IDing them.

  The worst problem was that there were a lot of the aliens—her AI was currently counting over two hundred sixty of them—and the USNA fighters were limited in how many VG-10s they could carry in a warload. Depending on how many larger projectile weapons they carried—missiles like VG-44c Fer-de-lance ship-killers—Starhawks could mount between twelve and forty-eight VG-10s, enough to use cascade volleys to tear through enemy defenses and fire patterns. She’d expended half of her load of thirty-six already . . . and it griped her to use her precious Kraits against fighters instead of the far more valuable capital ships.

  But there appeared to be no other way to tag the scarlet-painted alien fighters. Beam weapons were useless, or nearly so. Kemper announced that he’d killed one with combined pee-beep and laser fire—his store of VG-10s was exhausted—but only by hammering the enemy with six or eight shots in rapid succession. Apparently, the aliens had a limit on how much plasma energy they could absorb . . . but that limit was still uncomfortably high.

 
Connor hurtled clear of the main rings and into open space, with Saturn an immense, gold-ocher globe astern, bisected perfectly by the paper-thin, knife-edge slash of the rings.

  In fact, she was still well within the planet’s ring system. Beyond the edge of bright, well-defined A Ring lay a broad gap known as the Roche Limit, extending all the way out to the F Ring . . . but in fact, this gap was occupied by a tenuous sheet of debris. Three thousand kilometers beyond the A Ring lay the F Ring, the outermost discrete ring in the system, narrow, twisted, knotted in places, teased by passing moonlets until it formed a central core ring with a more slender spiral of material encircling it.

  Beyond that, 180,000 kilometers from Saturn’s cloud tops, was the orbit of Enceladus, and that tiny moon was imbedded in the E Ring, which it had created and continually renewed with cryovolcanic material spewed from its south polar vents. Unlike the inner rings, the E Ring was more of a debris cloud than a plane, its individual ice particles microscopic in size. Ring particles out here were more dispersed, too; there was less of a chance of a direct collision with a rock big enough to inflict serous damage.

  But at the same time, flying through this zone was like pushing through a blizzard. Connor could hear the steady hiss and crackle of particles sleeting across her Starhawk’s outer hull, and her in-head instrument feeds showed her that she was losing nanomatrix to a steady, high-velocity sandblasting effect that would strip her hull down to the support struts in minutes if she kept up this speed.