Andromedan Dark

by Ian Douglas

  At the highest level of the swarm—this one—those beams could be gathered by accumulators positioned at the center of each sail, fed to a laser weapon mounted on the upper surface, and aimed and triggered from a command center somewhere below. For just an instant, all supporting power to the upper shell was cut off, and that titanic excess of energy was channeled into a single laser that must have carried trillions upon trillions of megawatts. When that brief beam struck a number of Dark Raider slivers, it burned through them like a blowtorch through butter; the visible light flare was momentarily brighter at close range than a dozen suns.

  Ramirez made a mental note to stay well clear of the central structure atop each of the statite sails. There’d been no warning at all when the thing fired. But what the aliens had done also gave him an idea.

  There might be a way.

  “Quincy! Evers! Slave your fire control to my computer!”

  Two green reticules immediately appeared within Ramirez’s visual field, along with his red one.

  “There’s a slivership at one-one-eight, plus twenty . . . see it?”

  “Yes, Sergeant!”

  “Got it, Staff Sergeant!”

  Ramirez gave a quick set of instructions to his computer. Then, together, the three Marines took aim, bringing the three reticules together, centered on a dark-red portion of the nearest alien’s prow; when Ramirez’s in-head secretary saw that all three reticules were perfectly aligned, in that microsecond it triggered the three rifles together.

  That kind of targeting was far too precise for an unaugmented human’s coordination, reaction time, and control. Under the computer’s direction, however, three laser pulses struck the alien vessel together, triggering a far brighter and more destructive flash, a single bolt liberating the equivalent of twelve kilos of high explosive.

  Still no meaningful effect . . . though it looked like the surface of the alien hull had been scorched. Ramirez pulled up a company map showing him the relative positions of the 120 men and women of Alfa Company, scattered across a few dozen square kilometers of floating statite sail.

  “Randal! Wu! Alvarez! Neiman! Chung!” he recited, calling the Marines spread out along the edge of the sail closest to his own position. “Slave your lasers to mine! We need to gang up on these people!”

  Eight targeting reticules wavered and drifted across Ramirez’s field of view. With a moving target, there was no way to hold all eight targeting lines of sight stationary, but Ramirez’s computer was watching the display, waiting for the precise instant when . . .

  Eight lasers fired as one, slamming the equivalent of thirty-two kilos of high explosives into the same small portion of the alien’s hull.

  It wasn’t simply an explosion like the detonating warhead of a missile. The laser energy was being absorbed by the target, causing extremely rapid heating of the armor. Thermal shock did the rest, as large portions of the material superheated and vaporized. Ramirez could see the scar as the glare faded away—torn and partially melted metal, and a blackened patch that would absorb light even better than dark red.

  “Again!” he called. He pulled his targeting reticule over the dark smudge as the alien vessel began rolling away. The other seven reticules joined his . . . and then five more reticules switched on as other Marines in the area saw what he was doing and slaved in.

  Thirteen laser pulses struck with near-perfect coordination, the equivalent in raw energy of more than fifty kilograms of high explosives concentrated in an area a few centimeters across. A brilliant flash ripped through the leading edge of the slivership, scattering a cloud of hot debris and expanding metallic vapor. The target continued to roll . . . but now it was tumbling slowly as well, its attitude control system disabled. Seconds later it struck a statite sail five kilometers away, punching through the dark fabric and vanishing.

  “Captain Lytton!” Ramirez called. “This is Ramirez! We have a way of popping these things!”

  “What is it, Staff Sergeant?”

  Ramirez uploaded his in-head record of the past few moments to the company network. “If we get the whole company firing in synch, sir,” he added, “we can start knocking these things out of our sky.”

  There was a pause. “Okay, I’ve got three other Marines calling in with the same idea,” Lytton said. “Let’s see if we can organize this. . . .”

  “GOD, LOOK at that!” Excomm Symm said. “The matbrain is under attack!”

  “I see it,” St. Clair replied. Data flowed through him, a rushing stream. As Ad Astra encountered the light traveling out from the Kroajid node, Newton extracted visual information and compressed it; St. Clair in effect was witnessing the last hour of time speeded up as the ship plunged in through the light waves at 0.5c. He saw the enormous Dark Raider ship cluster materialize, saw it shift to within a few hundred million kilometers of the Kroajid star, saw the beginnings of the attack on the Dyson swarm.

  “Are they attacking the Tellus?” Subcommander Holt asked.

  “Can’t tell, yet,” St. Clair said. “We’ll know in a few moments. Mr. Martinez? Kick the power taps up a few notches. I want to be nudging c all the way in!”

  “Aye, aye, my lord.”

  Ad Astra accelerated. Using the gravitic drive, every atom of the ship’s structure moved uniformly, so there was no sense of acceleration, no crushing pressure or feeling of weight. The sky ahead turned strange as incoming light was compressed into a hazy disk directly ahead, centered by a black void. The stars astern grew red, then began crawling forward past and around the ship to merge with the disk—an optical illusion generated by the ship’s extreme velocity.

  “What’s our ETA, Helm?”

  “Six minutes, Lord Commander.”

  “Go to battle stations, please.”

  “Battle stations, aye, aye, sir.”

  The alarm klaxon sounded in each crewmember’s head, sending them racing for their assigned positions. Ad Astra’s weapons turrets came alive, fully charged and tracking.

  “CAS?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have the fighters ready to launch, but hold them in the tubes until I give the word.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  St. Clair spent the next agonizing minutes staring at the highly magnified images Newton was plucking out of the hash of compressed light ahead. The Dark Raiders were bunched together in one area, and seemed to be dropping into the Dyson swarm now. Searingly bright explosions flared and blossomed; although it was almost impossible to see what was happening in any detail, it looked like both sides were taking a lot of damage.

  “Commencing deceleration,” Newton announced. For this type of maneuver, an AI offered much better precision than any human brain. The blur of starlight forward evaporated, returning to the normal panorama of colliding galaxies in the far distance, the thin scattering of nearer stars, and the continuing silent twinkle of massive detonations.

  “I’m picking up the transponder signal for Tellus,” Subcommander Hargrove said. “They appear to be okay so far.”

  A blue icon popped up within St. Clair’s awareness. The twin O’Neil cylinders were right where Ad Astra had parked them, in orbit around the star a few thousand kilometers above the outermost matbrain layer. They were well clear of the fighting, thank God, but if the Dark Raiders noticed them, that was bound to change.

  Three more icons appeared, closer to the swarm: Inchon, Vera Cruz, and Saipan, the three Marine transports.

  “Take us in close, Helm,” he said. “Let’s see what we can do in there.”

  GENERAL FRAZIER watched the Dark Raiders penetrate the outer layers of the matbrain. The unintentional sexual imagery—of millions of sperm accosting a single titanic egg—was so strong he let out a short bark of a laugh. Of course, only one sperm made it through the egg’s defenses, usually, not a vast cloud of them. For a moment, Frazier wondered if he actually was witnessing some sort of bizarre alien sex act . . . then dismissed the idea. The Galaxy had some strange things in it, but there wer
e limits.

  Frazier shifted through several visual data channels. His Marines had launched a large number of battlespace drones down there, and Newton could sort through the incoming signals to find the best views for him. A number of Kroajid sails had already been shredded, and others were dying now as well. The Dark Raiders, once inside the outermost layer of the swarm, appeared to be firing almost randomly into the matbrain’s depths.

  Some, though, were operating independently of the others. He watched as one red-and-white needle broke off from the rest and approached a Kroajid habistat that had broken free of its sail and begun to fall. The slivership swung around to approach the habistat from below, gentled in close, then appeared to merge with the much larger structure, melting its way into the structure until it had vanished completely.

  The habistat continued to fall for several moments, a slow drift into the depths under the influence of the distant sun. Then, the habistat began to change shape, a subtle shift, at first, but then more and more obvious. Its fall was arrested too; considerable energy was being spent to stop its fall, then accelerate it up and clear of the matbrain cloud.

  Not sperm, Frazier thought. A virus.

  “Mr. Montano, you may launch fighters.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Pass the word to the Vera Cruz and the Saipan. Launch all fighters.”

  Each LPS carried a wing of ten squadrons—120 Marine fighters, ASF-99 Wasps and the older ASF-72 Mantises—a total of 360 single-seat fighters. Three squadrons would be held back for close patrol around the LPS transports, but the rest began maneuvering into arrowhead formations as soon as they dropped from the transports’ launch tubes, then accelerated toward the Dark Raider breakthrough.

  Frazier had been waiting for the right tactical moment to commit his fighters, which is why he’d ignored Adler’s desperate pleas before. Out in open space, they wouldn’t have stood a chance against the antimatter weaponry employed by the Dark Raiders, but in here, between the two upper layers, things were more enclosed, more sheltered. The environment was a tricky one, certainly, with so many Kroajid cylinders dangling from their parasols like so many seed pods hanging from forest canopy, and there were other objects down here, Frazier noted—small structures or ships that might be part of a vast transport web between the matbrain layers. The volume of space wasn’t crowded, by any means—it was almost three light-seconds deep—but with so many small and artificial objects suspended or adrift, a few hundred Marine fighters might not be easily noticed.

  The single pressing question, though, was how to employ those fighters. Tellus’s leaders had been put up to this by the spiders, but what did the spiders expect the human forces to do? Should he launch an all-out attack on the captured Kroajid habistats? Or just try to prevent others from being taken? What did Gus, the buzzing spokes-spider for the aliens, expect them to do?

  Briefly, he considered opening the channel back to Adler and getting instructions, but immediately dropped the idea. He much preferred the lack of micromanagement.

  Best, he thought, would be to try to prevent further captures. If Gus had any other ideas, Frazier was sure he would figure out a way to let his wishes be known.

  The red-and-white sliverships were dispersing more quickly now. Damn it, they were like a virus, letting themselves into a cell through the cell’s outer defenses, then hijacking the inner workings for their own purposes.

  Just what those purposes might be was still the big unknown, but the Marines would do their best to block it.

  He connected again with Lieutenant Colonel Angel Montano, Inchon’s Marine CAS. “Mr. Montano!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have all attack squadrons focus on the sliverships that are trying to work in close to the spider habs,” he ordered. “Protect the habistats!”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  The next few minutes would tell whether it was the right strategy or not.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  “You may launch fighters now, CAS.”

  “Yes, Lord Commander.”

  Ad Astra was decelerating hard, now, with the Dyson swarm ahead growing to fill the forward displays—and growing. And growing—blotting out the sky with a pattern of three-thousand-kilometer dark gray circles. Fighters streamed from the ship’s launch bay, angling toward the swarm’s interior.

  “Fighters are away, Lord Commander.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Rand. Pass the word, please: squadron skippers, use your discretion. Try to stop the sliverships, but don’t get suckered into extended engagements.”

  “I’ll let them know, my lord.”

  “Weapons Officer.”

  “Yes, my lord?”

  “Ship’s weapons at the ready, but don’t engage unless the bad guys come for us. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Most of the slivership horde had already penetrated the outer layers of the matbrain, but a few hundred remained in open space. St. Clair would engage them if he had to, but he didn’t want to attract unwanted attention. He remembered how the slivers had holed the Tellus port cylinder with a single shot.

  The ones visible above the outer layer of the swarm were continuing with their attack against the Kroajid parasols and didn’t seem even to be aware of Ad Astra or Tellus. As St. Clair watched, another needle ship accelerated slightly, plunging through an already riddled sail off in the distance. The sail, already rippling with the multiple assaults, began to fold up on itself, beginning, slowly and majestically, to sink under the slight gravitational pull from the local sun. Antimatter weapons burned the sail fabric in searing swaths.

  Another slivership was maneuvering beneath the slow-falling cylinder, nudging upward, melting into the Kroajid structure.

  “What the hell are they doing?” Christine Nolan asked.

  “Sir,” Senior Lieutenant Cameron called. “It looks like the raiders are hijacking some of the spider cylinders.”

  “That’s what it looks like to me.” St. Clair considered linking through to Adler, then thought better of it. “Mr. Hargrove.”

  “Sir!”

  “See if you can raise Gus . . . or any of the other spiders.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Some of the battlespace drones beneath the upper sail layer were showing human fighters—Marine Wasps and Mantises. Long-range telemetry showed a large number of Marines clinging to the rim of several of the intact sails, engaging the Dark Raiders.

  Damn!

  Adler, St. Clair thought, must be pleased with this turn of events—it was an obvious way to engage human forces in exchange for help from the Kroajid. St. Clair still didn’t like the idea of getting caught up in a war about which he and the other humans of the expedition knew next to nothing. In his experience, it tended to be fanatical civilians who pushed the idea of going to war . . . and military personnel, the ones who’d been there, who argued for peace.

  That picture, of course, was not universally true. There were times when war was the necessary evil, and compromise was misplaced. Hell, if the politicians who’d argued for compromise with the Nazis before World War II or the Muslim extremists seventy years later had actually grown the backbones to let them stand against barbaric evil, perhaps the wholesale genocides that followed could have been prevented.

  In any case, St. Clair had already decided that he needed to have words with Adler.

  A lot of words.

  LIEUTENANT CHRISTOPHER Merrick used his in-head control links to push his Wasp to full acceleration, flashing in toward the dark and rippling wall of sail material. The sail had been holed a number of times by Dark Raider sliverships, and was ragged and badly mauled. Rather than maneuvering laterally to pass between separate sails, he twisted his Wasp into a port roll and plunged straight through one of the tears, emerging in the eerily twilit gulf between the two uppermost layers. Vast explosions strobed silently in the depths, where Kroajid sails were being shredded by massive positron bombardment. Rents in the sail
layers went in tens of millions of kilometers, thinning the shells in spots to the point where more and more sunlight was filtering up from the matbrain’s core. Merrick was forcibly reminded of sunbeams scattering through massive banks of dark clouds.

  There was no time, however, for sightseeing. The torn sail’s habistat module dangled from a thread just ahead, and Merrick twisted his fighter to starboard with a burst from his gravitic thrusters, then slowed sharply. Below, in the weirdly lit depths, a maroon and white needle was rising toward the bottom of the habistat, obviously bent on attacking it. The needle ship fired and the central portion of the sail, the part supporting the habistat, evaporated in a flare of white-hot plasma. Loosed from its perch, the habistat began to fall . . . until the needle ship accelerated and rammed into the falling structure’s base.

  It was tough to see exactly what was happening—a form of nanotechnology, perhaps, where the atoms of the slivership were merging with and through the Kroajid structure’s hull material. The needle appeared to sink into the dark gray spider facility, moving up and up until only a small bit of the rounded white stern of the raider ship remained visible.

  And the entire structure was rising now, accelerating past the shredded ruin of the starsail and into open space.

  Merrick realigned his Wasp and boosted at high-G, closing with the hijacked structure. “Weapons going hot,” he called, and a targeting reticule appeared over the stern of the fleeing structure ahead. “Engaging . . .”

  Wasp fighters didn’t carry gamma-ray lasers; ultra-high-energy weapons like that required too much heavy shielding to protect the pilot, and, in any case, a fighter’s power taps simply weren’t large enough to drag that much energy out of the vacuum. The Wasp mounted a pair of K-190 UV HELs, or high-energy lasers, instead, weapons with an output of around a hundred gigawatts each. Merrick wasn’t entirely sure his HELs would have any effect on the alien materials or technology, but as the range closed to less than three hundred kilometers he triggered both weapons.