Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5)

by Ian Douglas

  Nearby, the scarlet, misshapen egg of the alien transport or whatever it was began picking up speed, looping low over the icy limb of the frozen moon, fleeing for the safety of deep space.

  “The bastard’s running!” Taggart yelled.

  “Stop the alien!” Gray snapped. “Hit him! Hard!”

  America shifted her orientation slightly, tracking the enemy, and Taggart yelled, “Fire!” Two more KK projectiles hurtled after the receding ship.

  The destroyer John Young broke off from the battlegroup formation, pursuing the alien. Beams were all but useless, but the destroyer was loosing clouds of nuke-tipped missiles, including a couple of VG-44c Fer-de-lance shipkillers and one VG-120 Boomslang, a missile usually reserved for space-to-ground bombardment, with heavy shielding and a superb onboard AI.

  Gray watched as the alien’s X-ray laser snapped across the two KK warheads and vaporized them. One of the Fer-de-lances went next, flashed into hot plasma by the searing breath of that beam.

  But the second Fer-de-lance detonated an instant later, well short of the fleeing alien vessel, but close enough, perhaps, to scramble its shields and electronic sensors.

  When the Boomslang exploded, it lit up the entire sky close to the curve of Enceladus . . . and then the alien ship was tumbling . . . tumbling . . . falling out of Saturn space and into the blackness beyond.

  “Target appears neutralized, Admiral,” Taggart told him.

  “Send Ramirez and Young to secure that hulk,” Gray said.

  He wanted to know who—what—was on board that alien vessel.

  And what they were doing working with the Confederation.

  Emergency Presidential Command Post

  Toronto

  United States of North America

  1140 hours, EST

  “It appears, Mr. President, that we’re winning.”

  Koenig looked up at his aide and acknowledged the news with a curt nod. “That’s good, Marcus,” he said. He felt no elation . . . not even an expected sense of relief. Instead, he felt . . . drained. “Do we have any word yet on losses?”

  “The Spruance has been destroyed, sir,” Whitney replied. “And the Edmonton is badly damaged. They may lose her. The Shenandoah and America both took damage as well, but nothing their onboard damage repair systems can’t handle.”

  Again, Koenig nodded. He knew too well the terror, the uncertainty, the sheer determination that would be unfolding out there now. A billion kilometers away, a ship was dying, her crew struggling to save her.

  “There have also been heavy fighter losses, Mr. President,” Whitney told him. “Perhaps as high as fifty percent. We’ll know better once they’ve rounded up the streakers.”

  “What about the aliens?”

  “They did fire on our ships, and America shot back. Their fighters are scattering, but the large ship has been disabled. America is going to try to intercept it and board.”

  “And the enemy? The human enemy?”

  “In full retreat, sir. Our relief force is deploying to intercept them. We don’t yet know if they’ll succeed.”

  It hardly mattered. So long as USNA bases and personnel out in Saturn space were safe.

  The larger question remained, though. Why had the Confederation been trying to seize those bases? They were too far from Earth to be useful as strike or logistical positions.

  And perhaps even more pressing were two other, related questions.

  Who were the aliens who’d allied with the Confederation?

  And why had they done so?

  Virtual Combat Center

  Colorado Springs, USNA

  1155 hours, CST

  “Sorry, people,” Major Corbett’s voice said above the murmur and tumble of incoming data. “We have to interrupt your DL.”

  Shay Ashton blinked as the immense viewall within her head winked out, taking with it the cascade of raw data that had been flooding into her brain. God . . . how long had she been under? She checked her internal clock and was surprised to see that less than four hours had passed.

  Around her, her classmates were looking up and looking around, some stretching, others blinking or rubbing their eyes. All looked exhausted and drawn.

  “Hey, it’s time for lunch anyway,” one of the students said, raising his voice above the growing murmur from the class. “Man, I’m starved!”

  “We’ll go to chow in a moment, Akerly,” Corbett said. “Right now, I need to give you all an update . . . and we’re going to ask for volunteers.”

  That got their attention. The room went death silent.

  “A few hours ago,” Corbett told them, “CBG-40, a star carrier task force, entered Saturn space and engaged Confederation forces at Titan and at Enceladus. At last report, our people had the upper hand. The Confeds appear to have broken, and are either surrendering or in retreat.”

  Ashton felt a shiver of excitement at that. CBG-40 was America and her escorts . . . her old ship.

  Corbett continued with the briefing. “This presents us with a unique and singular strategic opportunity. Konstantin, our super-AI at Tsiolkovsky, has been closely monitoring computer and communications traffic within the Confederation. It reports that the Confederation government is, for the moment at least, completely preoccupied with events out at Saturn.”

  A virtual screen opened behind Corbett, stretching almost deck to overhead and spanning the room. On it, the camera perspective drew back from Sol to show the orbits of, first, the inner planets, then, as the distance increased, of Jupiter and then Saturn. Numerous curving paths were picked out in either red or green, showing the movements of the space fleets well over a billion kilometers out in space.

  “The current time lag between Saturn and Earth is just over seventy-six minutes,” Corbett went on. “The Confeds appear to be scrambling to pull together additional ships in order to counterattack our forces. And Konstantin has suggested that this represents an ideal moment for an RM insertion.”

  The murmurs picked up again, a low-voiced buzz of conversation. “Sir,” one woman said, raising her hand. “Are you talking about us?”

  “We just started dee-elling this shit this morning, Major!” another student said. “We don’t know what the hell we’re doing yet!”

  Corbett pursed his lips, then nodded, reluctantly it seemed to Ashton. “If we wait, we’ll lose the opportunity to take the Confeds by surprise. It’s not as bad as you might be thinking right now.”

  Ashton wasn’t sure she saw how it could be worse. The schedule called for two weeks of training before going out virtual-hot. She and the other students all knew how to pilot fighters . . . but from everything she’d heard, virtual incursions were an entirely different breed of cat.

  “The usual rule of thumb,” Corbett told them, “is twelve hours of download to twelve days of practice. You’ve all taken about thirty percent of the program . . . the nuts-and-bolts hard data you’ll need to operate in vir-sim. We can give you the rest this afternoon. What you’ll be lacking is experience—actually being able to practice the skills you’re learning. And”—he hesitated, looking unhappy—“we won’t have time to inoculate you against ICEscream.”

  Again, the room was silent. They’d all heard of ICEscream, of course . . . a black-humor, even laughable term referring to the darker side of virtual combat.

  Intrusion countermeasures electronics generally did their work in a purely defensive posture, detecting outside attempts to break into a network and blocking or isolating the threat. The nature of countermeasures, however, suggested something more direct, something stronger— the ability to strike back at an intruder to cause serious injury, insanity, or even death.

  ICEscream indeed . . .

  Virtual simulations were generally regarded as being completely safe. After all, they were the most popular form of public entertainment by far, an i
ndustry worth hundreds of billions. Vir-sim recreation ranged from exploring dangerous environments to experiencing mind-bending hallucinations or dreams to having virtual orgies with sex-play stars . . . and just about everything else imaginable. Docuinteractives allowed a person to be an active part of a lecture, meeting with simulated historical personalities, asking questions, and experiencing a full spectrum of sensation in computer-generated environments as diverse as the bottom of the Jovian atmosphere or the Battle of Hastings or the surface of the sun. Draminteractives let people become a part of a fictional story, anything from role-playing in the distant past to science-fiction tales set in the remote future. Teleoperation let workers operate equipment in deadly environments—like the heart of a fusion reactor or the event horizon of a microsingularity—as if they were physically present. A person linked in to the computer network and experienced in-head the simulated or the remotely transmitted realms of other worlds, separated from the action by multiple buffering layers of electronics and the superhuman speed and watchfulness of the moderating AI software.

  The important thing to remember with the technology, though, was that a vir-sim operator’s mind—his awareness—might be hurtling through artificially created electronic vistas, but his body and—most important—his brain were safely back in the virtual combat center.

  At least, that was supposed to be the idea.

  In practice, however, it wasn’t smart to put too much reliance on this promise of invulnerability. Commercial in-head dramas had built-in safeguards and generally were not trying to kill you. But most military networks and many government systems were protected by ICE software, usually through AI guardians watching for deliberate incursion attempts.

  And some were quite heavily armed.

  It took some seriously fussy programming, but it was possible to open a communications channel from the guardian to the intruder’s system and have it look like a normal data channel from the target computer. Rather than data, that channel could guide the equivalent of a small lightning bolt back to the intruder. Normally, this would result in the meltdown of the intruder’s system if his AI couldn’t disconnect in time, but it wouldn’t reach the system’s organic components.

  But a truly sophisticated ICEscream AI could overwhelm and subvert the intruder’s software, hijack his hardware, and deliver a few million volts directly to his cerebral cortex. Such systems were illegal under international law, of course, but the simple threat that they might be out there—a threat encouraged by rumor and deliberately planted misinformation—was enough to forestall most attempts by organic hackers to penetrate secure systems.

  But there was another threat flesh-and-blood hackers faced that was, if not as violent, more common . . . and ultimately nearly as dangerous, and that was the threat of PNS.

  Perceptual neural shock was an effect experienced by people immersed in a virtual world who faced something sudden and life-threatening while in simulation. Their bodies might be quite safe and well protected, but in their minds they died. The shock could trigger a massive heart attack, stroke, traumatic apnea, or even a general shutdown of the conscious mind that left the person in a coma.

  Perhaps even worse, at least to Shay’s way of thinking, was the danger of being left insane. The brain could do some astonishing things to protect itself, and by far the most extreme was to withdraw from reality entirely.

  And yet modern virtual simulation was an extremely popular recreation, as well as a vital tool for dangerous or unpleasant work requiring a human presence . . . or telepresence. People linked in to NTEs—non-terrestrial environmental robots, or “Noters”—exploring the hellish surfaces of Venus or Triton or Pluto, or enduring the crushing depths of the ocean abysses of Earth or Europa, experienced sim-death all the time. Too, there were entertainment centers that offered customers the thrill of virtually falling to Earth from orbit or engaging in combat with other gamers, and they were at risk as well.

  The best way to protect such explorers—or paying customers looking for a thrill, for that matter—was to inoculate them, a process that let them face life-threatening situations in progressively stronger and stronger doses over a period of time. That allowed their brains to cope, to adjust and come to terms with the realization that they were safe and that they weren’t going to die when they smacked into the pavement at hundreds of kilometers per hour.

  Most of what a virtual combat warrior needed to know in terms of mere data could be downloaded in a day or two. But working with that data, both integrating raw information and learning how to control your fight-or-flight reflexes when confronted with what looked and felt like certain death, took longer—generally a couple of weeks at least.

  But now it looked like the class wasn’t going to get any practice time at all.

  “How many here,” Major Corbett went on, speaking into the shocked silence, “have experience with Class One virtual threats?”

  Class Ones were the most dangerous type of simulation, the sort of perceived threat that could kill a person, or leave her comatose or insane. Two hands went up, and Ashton heard their voices over her in-head, “Yo!” and “Here.” Senior Chief Raymond Blaine had been a deep-sea construction worker on Atlantica before his enlistment in the Navy. And Major John Aldridge was a Marine officer, a fact that all by itself said a lot about his experience.

  “Okay,” Corbett said. “Major Aldridge, you’ll be team leader. Blaine, you’re his Number One. You two will help coordinate this afternoon’s training . . . and you’ll be leading the team in when we attack Geneva.

  “The assault will be initiated tomorrow morning, at 0900 hours.”

  Ashton felt a whisper of dread at that.

  She knew she wasn’t ready. . . .

  Chapter Ten

  6 March 2425

  USNA CVS America

  Enceladus orbit

  Saturn space

  0810 hours, TFT

  In Admiral Gray’s mind, he was drifting down a broad internal passageway with a low overhead, a Marine in full combat armor to either side. Ahead, two more Marines stood guard at a closed doorway of squat design. Light panels suffused the corridor with bloody glow. The door dilated open, and Gray moved through.

  He was floating a meter and a half off the deck on a pair of grav-impellers, drifting along at a man’s pace with a tiny hum in his ears. Gray’s telepresence was being conveyed by an ATD-90 robot drone, a sophisticated device that was feeding everything he was seeing, hearing, and feeling back to his organic brain, which was still back on board America. Both Colonel Harold Martin, his security officer, and Captain Gutierrez had strongly recommended that he not go on board the captured alien vessel or meet with the nonhuman prisoners in person. The admiral commanding CBG-40 was too valuable an asset to risk, Martin had told him, while Sara Gutierrez had simply looked him up and down and said, “Admiral, with respect, are you fucking crazy?”

  And so Gray had allowed them to convince him to use a telepresence robot to make the crossing from America to the captured alien vessel. In fact, the technology was good enough that it was tough to tell that he wasn’t actually on board the captured vessel. It felt as though he was right there, in the hovering robot’s metal and plastic shell. After all, in the human body, the optic nerves are several inches long, extending from the eyes to the visual cortex at the back of the brain, and sensations of hot, cold, touch, pressure, and pain travel as much as a meter or two, but the mind is blissfully unaware of the distance. With the signals relayed back to America’s primary AI, and with the two ships close enough to each other that there was no noticeable time lag, the incoming sensory data bypassed Gray’s normal sensory processes and fed directly into his brain. His body was lying comatose, strapped to a couch in sick bay; his mind, as near as he could tell, was in the small, grav-floating robot navigating the bowels of an alien starship.

  Every now and then, someone in the government back h
ome would submit a scheme to have all naval warships—especially the fighters—be teleoperated in order to preserve the lives of their crews. What those schemes couldn’t address, however, what they didn’t seem to understand, was the fact that space combat tended to sprawl across a very large volume of space. The speed-of-light delay between America’s sick bay and the captured alien ship was, at the moment, something on the order of 3 × 10-5, or .00003, of a second—the time it took for any speed-of-light signal to cross one kilometer. There was a slight additional delay as the signal was processed by America’s comm suite and vetted by her AI, but the actual time delay was far shorter than any human mind could perceive. A typical distance for combat between starships was on the order of three to four hundred thousand kilometers—about the distance between Earth and Earth’s moon—which meant a time lag of over a second. That was noticeable to the human mind—and insurmountable if you were trying to pilot a fighter across that distance in combat.

  “You ready for this, Admiral?” one of the Marines asked him. He was Captain James Kornbluth, from America’s detachment of Marines. “These things are pretty ugly!”

  “Let’s have a look, Captain.”

  “Doc Hallowell is already inside, sir.” He touched the center of the door, which dilated open, and for the first time Gray saw one of the aliens.

  There were two more armored Marines inside the compartment, plus another human in a standard environmental suit. The blond head inside the fishbowl helmet turned as he drifted in, and Gray felt her ping his ID.

  “Oh, good morning, Admiral! I wasn’t expecting you. . . .”

  Gray checked her ID. Tara Hallowell was a civilian, one of the scientists with America’s xenosophontology department. He wondered why she was here, and not the head of xenosoph, George Truitt.