by Ian Douglas
“Sir?”
“They have an astonishing ability to use backups, parallel systems, and massive redundancy, and they’re at least as good at nanotechnics as we are, and very probably better.”
“I’ve tagged six drones, sir. They’re entering the cloud now.”
Gray had been caught by surprise by what had appeared to be a dead Grdoch ship already. He didn’t intend to be caught out again.
“Order Ramirez, Maine, and Young to move in closer to the wreckage. Use extreme caution . . . and burn anything that even smells like trouble.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The rest of the task force had been returning to Vulcan over the past few minutes, slipping into orbit as they took up skywatch stations. The last of the enemy fighters, Gray saw, had scattered into the outer system . . . most headed in the general direction of 40 Eridani B and C, the pair of close, bright stars, one red, one diamond-white, some 400 AUs off. They would track them down in due time. Right now, the priority was to clear Vulcan’s orbital lanes . . . and seize control of the planet.
Several minutes dragged past.
“Sir!” Dean’s mental voice was shrill. “We’ve got a power buildup inside the debris field!”
“Take it out.”
But in the next instant, a tightly focused X-ray laser seared through America’s aft hull, vaporizing the containment array for her power taps and plunging the vessel into darkness.
Gray felt the shudder, then a sudden tug of centrifugal acceleration as the star carrier went into a wild and uncontrolled tumble.
He felt the harsh, sunburn tingle of hard radiation searing his skin, his body, and knew that America was dying. . . .
VFA-96, Black Demons
Vulcan Orbit
1554 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Don Gregory was less than 10 kilometers away from America and directly off her stern when she was hit. He’d been on final approach for a trap—a recovery in one of the carrier’s rotating hangar bays—when the X-ray beam had snapped out from what appeared to be dead and drifting wreckage nearly 2,000 kilometers away. A dazzling flash had engulfed the aft portion of the carrier, throwing off spinning chunks of debris. Worse, his sensors picked up a surge of gamma radiation from the stricken vessel—a sure sign that her power taps had been compromised, and the microsingularities encased within her power plant had just gone rogue.
Star carriers, like most interstellar vessels, consisted of a forward shield cap, like the canopy of an umbrella, with a long and slender spine stretching aft. The shield’s toroidal rim mounted the grav projectors for the ship’s Alcubierre Drive, while in the spine, forward, tucked within the shadow of the shield cap, were the rotating hab modules and hangar decks and crew areas, as well as the zero-gravity sections like the bridge and stores modules. Aft were the primary grav and power field generators and, at the extreme aft end, the containment modules for the quantum power tap.
Starships required a staggering amount of energy to create the Alcubierre warp bubble that let them—or, more precisely, let the metaspace within which they were imbedded—slide through normal space at faster-than-light speeds. The original computations had suggested that the total annihilation of a mass equivalent to the planet Jupiter would be necessary for that kind of warp. Later refinements had reduced this mass significantly . . . but travel between the stars still required enormous energies, energies summoned from the mystery of empty space itself.
America, like most starships, used helium-3 fusion plants to generate enough power to create paired microsingularities: two black holes, each the size of a proton, orbiting each other within a Higgs containment field at close to the speed of light. Those singularities served to extract vacuum energy—the unimaginably vast amounts of virtual energy resident within so-called empty space. One early set of calculations back in the twentieth century had suggested that a volume of space the size of an old-fashioned incandescent lightbulb contained energy enough to instantly vaporize all of the oceans of Earth. Later calculations had proven that this was wrong . . . that the actual energies were greater.
Much, much greater . . .
Great enough, perhaps, to annihilate not only the planet’s oceans, but the rest of the entire galaxy as well.
Current quantum power tap technology could not summon that kind of energy out of hard vacuum, but it did allow a starship to turn local space into a pretzel, to manipulate gravity, and to rewrite the laws of physics, at least on a temporary and strictly local level.
It also meant that several microsingularities purred away inside each starship’s power tap module. When America was hit by the X-ray laser, the Higgs containment fields went down, and several proton-sized black holes began eating their way through the ship.
In fact, a microsingularity was so tiny that it couldn’t eat very fast and so posed little immediate danger to the ship. But as the containment fields went down, paired singularities began merging, a star’s worth of vacuum energy poured in out of emptiness to feed them, and they began growing rapidly in a runaway cascade. Devouring more and more matter and energy as they swiftly ballooned larger, they continued to merge. America had two hundred singularity pairs in phased array—and as each black hole tried to gulp down more matter than it could absorb at once, excess matter became superheated, releasing a storm of X-ray and hard gamma radiation.
All of this Gregory was aware of in the first second or two as the flare of star-hot light and radiation engulfed the aft third of the stricken kilometer-long star carrier. He felt a surge of raw horror; that was his ship and his shipmates . . . and they were dying, had, perhaps, only seconds more to live.
Less . . . if the Grdoch wreck managed to get off another shot. . . .
USNA CA Maine
Vulcan Orbit
1554 hours, TFT
“America’s been hit!”
Captain Catharine Francesconi had been totally focused on the fragments of the Grdoch ship, and the sudden flare of raw energy across the opposite hemisphere of her bridge’s tactical display jolted her.
“My God,” her tactical officer, continued, “she’s burning! . . .”
Well . . . not burning, exactly, not in the vacuum of space . . . but America’s aft quarter was so hot that it was engulfed in an expanding sphere of radiant, white-hot plasma, with pieces of her spinal column breaking away, falling away, dissolving in the radiant heat.
“Sensors indicate the ’Doch is prepping for another shot! . . .”
“Helm! Acceleration! Put us between the Grdoch and the America! . . .”
The heavy cruiser slid forward, interposing herself. The Grdoch fragments were less than a hundred kilometers away, now, the broken America a thousand kilometers in the other direction.
Captain Francesconi was a career naval officer from a long and aristocratic line of naval officers. Like many such, she was a USNA Globalist, personally convinced that the war with the Confederation was a dangerous waste of lives and resources when aliens like the Sh’daar and, now, the Grdoch posed far, far deadlier threats to the survival of all humans. She didn’t like Koenig and his Freedomist policies . . . and she didn’t like Admiral Gray, a man she felt had been promoted beyond his abilities. Scuttlebutt held that the man was a Prim, for God’s sake, straight out of the Manhat Ruins. Only the fact that he’d won some spectacular victories let her—grudgingly—accept him as her commanding officer.
Not that she’d really had any choice, of course. Her clear duty was to obey the lawful orders of the Task Force CO. Those orders did not require her to do what she was doing now . . . but it was vital to save the America and her command constellation, the men and women directing this operation.
The Grdoch fired again . . . targeting the carrier . . . but this time the Maine was in the way.
At the equivalent of point-blank range, the X-ray laser struck with the raw force of a burgeoning super
nova. . . .
VFA-96, Black Demons
Vulcan Orbit
1554 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Gregory didn’t notice the flare a thousand kilometers up-orbit as Maine intercepted another X-ray bolt, so focused was he on the badly damaged star carrier ahead. His Starhawk was down to an approach speed of under a kilometer per second. Moving toward the carrier’s stern, he slowed further; as America’s singularity masses had shifted inside her spine and large chunks of her hull had been thrown into space, the entire ship had been kicked over into a slow tumble and Gregory no longer was aligned with the docking bay. That was just as well; America’s stern was engulfed in plasma, leaving a hot and glowing trail as it rotated. Gregory felt the shock as his fighter hit the cooling plasma then passed through it, the worst of the heat and radiation absorbed by his gravitic shielding. Had he hit that mess full on, though, he knew his fighter would not have survived.
He pivoted, pointing his bow at the ship and adjusting his vector to let him pass alongside. Matching speeds, he was close enough now that he could see the power tap module crumpling just a hundred meters in front of him under the savage, internal stresses of the rogue singularities.
Inside the carrier’s crumpling spine, merging black holes had opened a floodgate of energy from the Void, a torrent that was feeding the singularities, making them grow, turning them into ravenous monsters intent on devouring the entire ship.
Damn it, he had to do something.
But at the moment he didn’t have the slightest idea what that something might be.
Himmel-Paradisio Camp
Vulcan
40 Eridani A System
1554 hours, TFT
Connor brought her hand laser up and tried to fire it again. The weapon gave a weak flicker of energy—not enough, she thought—to light a candle—and then went inert. The three Grdoch, wounded and cautious, kept coming, rolling toward her slowly, spreading out across her line of sight, but closing on her position with a grim relentlessness.
She considered her options. She could run, which might buy her some time . . . but which might also result in some of the prisoners being hurt or killed if these monsters began firing indiscriminately. Or she could stand her ground . . . maybe try to wrestle one of those odd-looking weapons away from one of them and use that.
Or she could surrender.
None of those options particularly appealed to her. The horror of her experience with the Slan four months earlier had her thinking she would rather die than submit to another alien interrogation. It was also possible, if Delgado and Commander Fuentes were to be believed, that they would simply devour her alive. It depended on whether the Grdoch thought she had useful information, most likely, and from the descriptions she had heard, it didn’t sound like the Grdoch were interested in anything concerning humans, save dinner.
She pulled her survival knife from her sheath. It was a pathetic weapon against three of those rolling horrors—especially when they were carrying ranged weapons of some sort . . . but at least it was something. The question was how to use it effectively. She would have to get in close—so close that two of the Grdoch wouldn’t fire their weapons for fear of hitting the third.
And that made her hesitate. Did the Grdoch even have that kind of sentiment among themselves? Obviously, they worked together . . . but they might be more than willing to sacrifice one of their number if it meant frying one rebellious prisoner.
Running might be the best choice after all.
Her decision was taken out of her hands.
She’d been so fixed on the approaching Grdoch that she hadn’t noticed a group of human POWs off to her left, men and women clutching a variety of stakes, spears, and clubs, crouched low to the ground and advancing on the aliens from the flank. She saw them when they rose as a single body and charged, screaming something that might have been a battle cry, might have been nothing but mindless shrieks of rage.
How, Connor wondered, did you sneak up on a creature with eyes positioned all the way around its rotund body? The Grdoch to Connor’s left saw the rush, and rolled to bring its weapon into line with this sudden, new threat. The mob of humans scattered from their tight cluster but kept charging; the Grdoch weapon fired and several of the attackers shriveled, blackened, and smoked.
Connor couldn’t stay there behind her fighter and watch the slaughter. Screaming a mindless shriek of her own, she vaulted the downed Starhawk and rushed at the oncoming Grdoch, brandishing her knife.
She went a little mad.
The Grdoch on the right saw her coming and fired its weapon. She felt the snap of superheated air as the beam seared past her . . . and then she launched herself in a headlong dive, arms outstretched, knife seeking scarlet flesh.
The crowd of humans hit the left-side Grdoch in the same instant, using six-foot poles sharpened at the tips, hardened in fire, as spears, thrusting them at the rubbery body. Now it was the alien’s turn to shriek, a shrill, high-pitch chittering as one spear entered through a mouth-snout and penetrated deep inside.
Connor hit the Grdoch in the middle, which appeared to be unsure which threat was deadlier, which target to shoot. It was twisting back to bring its weapon to bear on Connor when she hit it full force, the knife in her right hand puncturing tough hide and sliding in, wet and hot. The hide, she found, was like leather or heavy rubber and the knife had nearly rebounded . . . but the survival blade carried a hardened, monoatomic nanocarb edge that could carve through steel and with Connor’s full, airborn mass behind it, it punctured the hide and her arm slid into the thing’s body up past her elbow.
For a horrid, queasy moment, Connor was pressed up against the thing full length, could feel its lashing, questing, biting snouts, each like the toothy business end of a terrestrial lamprey. Gripping the knife unseen, now, she twisted and slashed, trying to do as much internal damage as she could. She understood that the alien thing could take a hell of a lot of damage . . . but she had to be doing it serious harm.
One of the crooked, clawed legs descended on her, grasping her from behind, yanking her back, shaking her as a man might grab and shake a small and angry dog. Her arm slid from the gaping wound, bright orange-red and slippery now with blood.
A naked man rammed a spear against the creature, but the fire-hardened point failed to penetrate. A woman at his side tried the same, and this time the spear found a weak spot, one of the repulsive, writhing mouth-trunks, pushing past teeth and mouth cavity and plunging a meter into the thing’s body.
It screamed, shuddered, and dropped Connor. The Grdoch hand weapon—no, mouth weapon—clattered onto the ground nearby. Hitting the ground hard, Connor dropped her knife, but managed to roll to her right and scoop up the alien weapon.
It was heavy, and not at all designed for a human hand. She hoped to hell there wasn’t much of a learning curve with the thing. It was shaped something like an egg carton, with a fist-sized knob that the Grdoch held inside one of its mouths, a black orifice on the other end with something like an antenna emerging from within. Okay . . . easy enough to tell which end was which, and that was the most important thing to know about a strange weapon . . . that and how to actually fire the damned thing. Raising it, she pointed the antenna end at the Grdoch looming above her. The trigger . . . damn it, where was the trigger?
They fired the things with a mouth, so they must just bite down, must apply force to the knob somehow, must squeeze . . .
The alien had just grabbed the woman with the spear in one crooked arm and was lifting her high overhead.
She squeezed the smooth and rounded grip as hard as she could with both hands, aiming up at the Grdoch looming above her.
A portion of that thick hide directly in front of her blackened, curdled, then peeled itself open in a bloody crater. Softer tissue inside exploded in a wet, scarlet spray. The Grdoch dropped the woman it was holding and rolled backward,
comical in its attempt to get clear. Maria Fuentes was there, standing on the heaving thing, plunging a spear into an eye. It bucked, throwing her aside.
“Watch out!”
The Grdoch snapped out one leg, its claws raking down across Maria Fuentes’s torso. Fuentes screamed and Connor fired again into the writhing Grdoch, watched it shrivel . . . then shifted aim. The third Grdoch, apparently wanting no part of this mob assault from its dinner, was in full, rolling retreat.
Connor didn’t want any of the things to get away. . . .
VFA-96, Black Demons
Vulcan Orbit
1555 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Gregory knew he was out of time. America’s stern was a crumbling, white-hot mass of dissolving hull structure and plasma, and the fast-rising radiation levels showed that the merging black holes inside were gulping down energy and matter alike and working their way forward, following the ship’s internal mass.
He saw only one way to stop the disaster, and it was definitely a kill-or-cure treatment. Linking in with his AI, he armed his Starhawk’s last remaining VG-10 Krait missile, locked on to America’s spinal column just forward of the dissolving power tap module, and thought-clicked the firing icon.
“Target lock-on failed,” his AI told him. “The selected target is too—”
“Override! Lock on!”
His AI balked. “I require confirmation,” its voice said in his mind. “The selected target is—”
“Confirmed! Override safeties! Fire!”
The missile slid clear of its launch bay, accelerating, ignoring the host of safeguards and cut-outs that prevented the VG-10 smart missile from targeting a friendly vessel . . . or detonating inside the kill zone of its warhead. At a range of just under 100 meters, the missile detonated almost immediately, a deadly blossoming of hot plasma and twisted, molten fragments of starship.
The VG-10 carried a simple fission warhead of about ten kilotons’ yield . . . smaller than the devices that had annihilated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost five centuries before. While it was true that the effects of a nuclear explosion were significantly reduced in vacuum, an explosion equivalent to the detonation of ten thousand tons of high explosive was still deadly at close range. While there was no way for a shock wave to be transmitted through hard vacuum, the expanding plasma fireball itself provided a shock-wave medium, a shell of hot, subatomic particles rushing out at high speed, swatting Gregory’s fighter like a circling insect and sending it tumbling away.