Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5)

by Ian Douglas

  “What ships?”

  “We’re checking, sir.”

  It was one of the hazards of interstellar travel, of course. The Alcubierre Drive functioned by wrapping up a starship, already traveling at close to the speed of light, inside a tight little bubble of gravitationally distorted space. The ghost of the long-dead Einstein declared that nothing—not matter, not energy—could travel faster than light. Indeed, matter couldn’t even reach c, while energy—photons—could only travel at that magical velocity of just under 300,000 kilometers per second.

  The loophole, first pointed out by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre four centuries earlier, was that there was nothing that said that space couldn’t move faster than light. Indeed, during the first microsceonds of the big bang, space had moved considerably faster than light in the expansive outrush known to physicists as inflation. And, it turned out, a starship resting inside the bubble could travel with that bubble. So long as it was moving at less than light speed relative to the space within which it rested, there was no foul, no harm, the ghost of Einstein was appeased . . . and Humankind could travel to the stars in hours, days, or weeks instead of decades or centuries.

  While resting within its Alcubierre bubble, a starship wasn’t in normal space, but in a kind of pocket universe outside of the normal expanse of four-dimensional spacetime, a region known as metaspace. Pockets of metaspace could overlap one another, or they could overlap ships or even worlds or whole stars in complete safety . . . but should a ship emerge from metaspace within the same volume of space occupied already by another ship or a chunk of rock, the results were both energetic and catastrophic.

  Ships were so relatively tiny and the space they operated in so vast that such collisions were extraordinarily rare. Gray had heard of just one in the entire three-century history of interstellar flight, the Umberto and the New Horizon.

  Now, evidently, two more ship names were to be added to the list now, and damn the ill luck that had brought them together at the same place and the same time.

  “What ships?” he demanded.

  “Frigate Sam Morison, sir,” Commander Mallory announced. “She was already in normal space when another ship dropped on top of her. We suspect a failure in the communications pre-warp protocol. Still checking on the ID of the other vessel.”

  Two ships lost out of the task group of twenty-four, and the operation had not even properly begun. Worse, that nova-flare of raw energy, a bubble of pure light expanding at the speed of light, would reach 40 Eridani’s inner system in just four hours.

  Task Force Eridani had just announced its arrival in spectacular fashion.

  Nothing could be gained by waiting. The light emitted by the various ships as they dropped from their Alcubierre bubbles was more than enough to alert any enemy vessels in-system, and there was no point in scrubbing the mission.

  Gray opened the command channel. “You may launch fighters, CAG.”

  “Very well, Admiral,” Captain Fletcher replied. “Launching fighters.”

  America’s contingent of fighters began emerging from the far larger starship, two by two from the twin axial launch tubes through the shield cap, and six by six from the rotating hab modules in the shield cap’s shadow. The view from a nearby battlespace drone showed the launch: dozens of minute, flying insects emerging from the far larger umbrella shape of the carrier, and moving into close squadron formation 10 kilometers off America’s newly resurfaced and painted prow.

  After transferring control from Prifly to CIC, the ship’s Command Information Center, the fighters began accelerating, squadron after squadron. The Starhawks of the Dragonfires, VF-44, would stay with America, serving as her CAP—a defensive envelope still called combat air patrol even now, centuries after extending beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The other squadrons would accelerate at 50,000 gravities, coming a hairsbreadth shy of the speed of light in about ten minutes.

  It was those squadrons, together with fighters launched from the other carriers in the task group, that would make First Contact with whatever was waiting for them there at Vulcan.

  “Message coming through, sir,” Lieutenant Davidson, on the communications watch, said in Gray’s head. “Admiral Guo, on the Shi Lang.”

  “Accept.”

  Admiral Guo Hucheng’s bland, unemotional face appeared on a window opening within Gray’s mind. “Admiral Gray.”

  “Yes, Admiral Guo.”

  “It appears that one of my vessels, and one of yours, have . . . intersected.”

  His lips were moving rapidly, completely out of synch with the calm, computer-generated voice speaking English in Gray’s mind.

  “Yes, Admiral,” Gray replied, keeping his face neutral. “We appear to have lost the frigate Samuel Eliot Morison. With which of your ships did it collide?”

  “The light cruiser Li Jinping, Admiral. There appears to be some . . . conflict within the emergence protocols.”

  With large numbers of ships emerging from metaspace at about the same time during fleet ops, and within the same target volume of space, the chances of emergence overlap, while still remote, were greater than they might be otherwise. The computer AIs operating each vessel in a naval formation were linked and their clocks synchronized before each Alcubierre translation in order to allow some additional spread in the emergence pattern of the ships. USNA ships had not worked this closely with ships in the Chinese navy before, however.

  Such inexperience could lead to mistakes.

  “We’re checking on that, Admiral. In the meantime, we need to commence acceleration.”

  Guo’s eyes widened very slightly. “You intend to proceed, then?”

  “Of course. It’s not as though the enemy won’t already be aware of our arrival.”

  “True. Apparently I was mistaken in assuming you would respond like your Pan-European counterparts.”

  Gray decided to accept that as a compliment. European commanders—in particularly the French—were notorious for being extremely cautious, to the point of aborting an operation if the element of surprise was lost.

  “I intend, Admiral Guo, to take this fight to the enemy. Now.”

  “Agreed. Guo out.”

  The window closed, and Gray vented a small sigh of relief. The Chinese were still a very much unknown element. The events of the Second Sino-Western War had ended with the fall of a small asteroid into the Atlantic Ocean in 2132. Given the Biblical name Wormwood, from the Book of Revelations, the asteroid had been diverted from its normal orbit by a Chinese warship.

  Though Beijing had insisted that a rogue Chinese officer had been responsible, the Chinese Hegemony had been blamed for the resultant tidal wave and the deaths of half a billion people, declared a rogue nation by the Allies, and denied membership in the Pax Confeoderata, the new world government organization that emerged after the war.

  For years, elements within the USNA government had been seeking an alliance with the Chinese with varying degrees of success. Guo’s inclusion with Task Force Eridani was very much an experiment. Gray had already noted that Guo had not yet specifically placed himself under Gray’s command, but had so far been operating his squadron of four—now three—ships as an independent command.

  Gray had responded by carefully not giving Guo direct orders, but by simply telling him what the rest of the task force was doing and inviting him to join in. The low-key approach had worked so far, at least if you ignored the loss of two ships in what was probably a protocol error.

  Whether this informal operating procedure would work during combat was anyone’s guess. Gray was inclined to think that the system would break down under the stresses and demands of battle, and contented himself with the realization that the Hegemony’s contingent to the Vulcan operation was only four ships.

  No. Three.

  The situation was made deadly by the multiple levels of the task force
’s current orders. HQ-MILCOM’s operational directives had included the possibility of establishing relations with the Grdoch, using the new language protocols taken from the Confederation. That wasn’t going to happen now if Gray had any say in the matter. Admiral Armitage’s final word to him had been to “use his own discretion.”

  The reports from Vulcan’s Confederation governor had been brutally open about the Grdoch atrocities at 40 Eridani. They’d attacked human forces at Vulcan without provocation, accepted a treaty when one was offered by a well-armed battlefleet, then attacked again as soon as that fleet had departed.

  According to Armitage and HQ-MILCOM, the Grdoch weren’t at all fussy about their mealtimes. The aliens had been feeding on humans at Vulcan. Gray had seen them feeding on the . . . what had Truitt named them? Praedams, that was it. Genetically tailored food beasts. The thought of people being devoured alive by those things was . . . horrific.

  And it suggested a thoroughly alien mind-set for the Grdoch, a willingness to use intelligent life forms as food sources. Humans didn’t have a pristine record when it came to such niceties, of course, but in general—and for modern human cultures—eating thinking, rational beings, especially alive, was as close to unthinkable as it was possible to get. Grdoch biochemistry might be identical to that of humans, but their minds might be so alien, might work in such radically different ways, that true communication with them would forever be impossible.

  From the sound of things, the various policy-making groups back on Earth were still divided on how to relate to the Grdoch. Geneva had initiated a treaty with them after they’d attacked Vulcan the first time, though it wasn’t entirely clear that they’d known about the aliens’ dietary habits. And MILCOM, it seemed, couldn’t quite bring itself to rejecting the possibility of an alliance entirely. “Use your own discretion.”

  Well, none of them had ever seen those things eat.

  “All fighters away,” CAG Fletcher said in Gray’s mind. “They are boosting for Vulcan as dictated by the Opplan Alfa.”

  “Very well,” Gray said over the in-head command link. “Captain Gutierrez, you may commence acceleration. Alert the rest of the task force, please.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral.”

  And the remaining twenty-two ships of Task Force Eridani began to accelerate in-system.

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  Vulcan Space

  1423 hours, TFT

  “Black Demons, Demon One!” Commander Mackey’s voice rasped out. “Look sharp! We’re coming up on the objective . . . ten million kilometers.”

  Lieutenant Megan Connor was well aware of that fact. The bizarrely warped and twisted view of the surrounding universe created by near-c flight had relaxed into normalcy as her fighter’s velocity dropped, and the target planet was dead ahead, growing rapidly from a blue-hued star to a tiny crescent. Magnified, the image was cloud-wreathed over vast stretches of ocean, and achingly reminiscent of home.

  Red icons scattered across her view ahead marked potentially hostile warships. Two large ones tagged as unknowns were likely Grdoch vessels, but there were several smaller ones that her warbook was identifying as known designs—a Francesco-class light cruiser . . . several Rommel-class destroyers . . . five Rhone-class frigates. They were approaching in-system from the direction of the system’s third planet, half an AU out and well off to port.

  “Demon One, Demon Six,” Connor called. “Time to ’fess up, Mac. What’s the straight shit? Are these guys hostiles or not?”

  “You were there and downloaded the briefing with the rest of us, Meg,” Mackey replied. “CIC says to treat ’em as hostile . . . but let them make the first move.”

  “Shit, Skipper!” Lieutenant Carlson, Demon Three, said. “No IB?”

  “Yeah,” Lieutenant Gregory added. “That’s the perfect recipe for getting ourselves seriously dead!”

  “I know,” Mackey replied. “But we need to give ’em time to be friends if the bastards want, right? This is just show of force . . . until they decide otherwise.”

  “So what better way to make them be friends than a little IB diplomacy?” Gregory wanted to know.

  IB stood for initial bombardment, and it was the central pillar of all modern space combat. Battles rarely occurred in open space; a typical star system was so large, encompassing such a vast volume of space, that, unless both sides sought it, a meeting of fleets in all that emptiness was unlikely in the extreme.

  And of course the whole point of using a fleet to dominate a star system was to control those pieces of orbiting real estate that made the system strategically important in the first place—the planets, moons, and major asteroids, the free-orbiting bases and colonies, the deep-space nanufactories, antimatter plants, and power stations that were the signature of modern, space-faring technic civilization.

  So space tactics had evolved around defending forces that protected key planets, and attacking forces that emerged from Alcubierre Drive far out in the relatively empty reaches of the outer system, accelerated in-system, and engaged the defenders for control of whatever it was they were protecting.

  The initial bombardment was quite literally the opening volley in such an engagement. Long-range missiles and kinetic-kill projectiles launched from far out-system could smash through a defending fleet; more devastating by far were relativistic bombardments, where the incoming projectiles were traveling at a hefty percentage of the speed of light. The kinetic energy contained in even a grain of sand traveling at such a velocity was starkly unimaginable. The man commanding the task force, “Sandy” Gray, had gotten his nickname years before when he’d released clouds of sand at near-c, annihilating much of an enemy fleet and scouring one hemisphere of a planet with fire in the process. The tactic was extremely effective if you didn’t care what got broken going in. This time, though, the word was no initial bombardments; there might be USNA prisoners on Vulcan or on board one or more of the ships near the objective planet.

  Besides, scuttlebutt held that the task force was here to make friends with the hostiles. A show of force . . . followed by a goddamned treaty . . .

  So the fighter wave launched from the task force would be first to make contact with the enemy, and would do so without the usual softening-up of a preliminary bombardment. The main fleet, twenty-two capital ships, was on the way. With less acceleration, they would be arriving later—another two hours.

  Until then, the fighters would be on their own . . . and they would be calling the shots insofar as diplomatic decisions were concerned.

  It was not, Connor thought, a good utilization of assets. Politicians talked, signed treaties, and decided when it was time to go to war. Fighter pilots handled the rough stuff after the political possibilities had been exhausted.

  “Arm weapons,” Mackey told them. “But don’t fire until I give you clearance.”

  Still decelerating, the fighters of the Black Demon Squadron continued to fall toward the planet.

  Grdoch Huntership Swift Slayer

  Vulcan Space

  1423 hours, TFT

  Alarmed, now, the Swarmguide Tch’gok turned three more of its eyestalks to watch the control-room screen. The prey was hurtling ever closer, their ships decelerating but still moving quite fast.

  “Weapons!” it said, speaking its tightly focused thoughts through fiber-optic cables wired directly into its nervous system. “Target the nearest of those small ships and . . . fire!”

  X-ray lasers snapped out from the hull of the Grdoch huntership Swift Slayer, and the oncoming motes of enemy fighters flared and vanished like night flyers caught by flame. Those fighters did not pose a significant threat to the Grdoch hunterships . . . but the major warships coming in behind them might.

  Tch’gok was balancing.

  The concept was basic to Grdoch psychology, the result of tens of millions of years of evolution as hunters in a violently dang
erous ecosystem. Grdoch hunters tended to advance as a swarm when prey—helpless and vulnerable—was in sight. They tended to scatter and retreat when confronted by strength, or the risk of personal injury.

  That had been the evolutionary imperative, at least, for millions of years before the Grdoch left the swamps and estuaries of their watery homeworld and developed civilization. They’d evolved as both predator and prey, and their modern psychology reflected that fact.

  As did their physiology. Where predators tended to have forward-facing eyes with good depth perception in contrast to browsers, which had eyes mounted to let them see in all directions, the Grdoch had both . . . with a dozen eyes in telescoping snouts that gave them both superb binocular and 360-degree vision. Though they were large and ungainly organisms, their spherical symmetry let them move rapidly in any direction, and their feeding snouts doubled as graspers and manipulators of surprising sensitivity.

  Evolution had molded the Grdoch into perfect middle-tier predators within their homeworld’s ecosystem. Eons ago, the top predator on the Grdoch homeworld had been a nightmare horror, all teeth and slasher claws and spiky armor and ravenous appetite, a monster called the tch’tch’tch, which had imprinted its terror deep within the modern Grdoch psyche. Those large and hungry top-tier predators that had helped that evolutionary process along were extinct now . . . but the Grdoch remained as natural selection had made them—both in their physiology and in their psychology—fierce predator, terrified prey.

  Balancing . . .

  Tch’gok could feel the familiar inner pull in two directions . . . toward feeding frenzy and toward rout. The trick was to override the blind emotions with mind and will . . . by encouraging the thoughts of steaming bodily fluids and oozing flesh. Feed! Feed! Feed!

  Digestive enzymes flowed in questing, hungry mouths. Terror receded, replaced by a deep and nearly overwhelming hunger.

  “Swarmreleaser!” it commanded. “Release your swarm! Shipguide! Take us closer.”