by Ian Douglas
“Launch fighters,” Gray replied. “And go to battle stations.”
He was already on his way up to America’s bridge as the battle-station alarms sounded.
Lieutenant Donald Gregory
VFA-96, Black Demons
0440 hours, TFT
“It’s too fucking early . . .” Don Gregory complained.
“There ain’t no day or night in space, youngster,” squadron commander Luther Mackey replied. “So no early or late. Deal with it.”
“It’s zero-dark thirty, Skipper,” Gregory replied, “and I haven’t had my damned coffee yet.”
“My . . . grouchy first thing, aren’t we?” Lieutenant Gerald Ruxton said over the tactical channel, laughing. He sounded . . . awake, Gregory thought. Disgustingly so. Bright, cheerful, and—considering the fact that he’d been in the ship’s bar drinking with him about five hours ago and was, therefore, just as short on sleep as he—
“Ice it down, people,” Mackey said. “Bearing one-seven-five by minus three-one. We’re clear for launch. America has cut thrust and is drifting. Fifteen hundred kps . . .”
Gregory’s SG-420 Starblade fighter absorbed the incoming data even as the skipper relayed it in staccato fashion. He could feel the flick and trickle of numbers downloading through his skull.
“Launch in three . . .” Mackey said, “. . . and two . . . and one . . . release!”
Mounted in the outer deck of the second rotating hab module, the fighters of Black Demon squadron, VFA-96, began sliding down their launch tubes, impelled by a half G’s worth of centrifugal force. Gregory was third in the queue; together with Lieutenant Bruce Caswell’s Starblade, he dropped into blackness, slowly drifting clear of the shadow of America’s massive forward shield cap, then rotated to align his craft parallel to the far larger star carrier. The ship was an immense mushroom shape nearly a kilometer long, its shield cap a hemispherical water reservoir four hundred meters across. Ahead, partially obscured by the shield cap, the perfect circle of the TRGA—blurred by rotation and by a fiercely twisted spacetime—hung suspended in the distance.
The remaining VFA-96 fighters dropped from the hab-module flight decks and took up station with the others, a flight of twelve Starblades already morphing into high-velocity teardrop shapes. Even in the vacuum of space, streamline counted for ships moving at close to c.
“America CIC, this is Point One,” Commander Mackey said. “Handing off from PriFly. All Demons clear of the ship and formed up.”
“Copy, Point One,” a voice replied from America’s Combat Information Center. “Primary Flight Control confirms handoff to CIC. You are clear for maneuver. You may proceed.”
“Okay, boys and girls,” Commander Mackey said, addressing the squadron. “Time to thread the needle. Initiate program.”
Tightly knotted gravitational singularities winked on just ahead of each fighter, dragging it forward as it flickered in and out of existence at thousands of times per second, accelerations building rapidly as America slid past the fighters, then began dwindling astern.
VFA-96 had drawn the short straw on this mission . . . flying point, leading America and her battle group into and through the huge, fast-spinning cylinder ahead. Gregory wasn’t entirely sure he was ready for this. Three months ago—or 12 million years in the future, depending on how one counted things—his fighter had been damaged, and he’d briefly been marooned on the surface of Invictus, a frigid rogue planet wandering the darkness beyond the galaxy’s rim. He’d lost his legs . . . and he’d lost Meg Connor, a woman he’d loved very much. The legs had grown back and he’d learned how to walk again.
But other wounds were a hell of a lot harder to heal.
He had to force his mind away from thoughts of Meg. The Black Demons had lost a lot of pilots at Invictus, and very, very nearly lost him as well.
Maybe, he thought, it would have been better if he had died.
TC/USNA CVS America
Flag Bridge
0451 hours, TFT
“Admiral on the bridge!”
“As you were.” The call and the response were largely for tradition’s sake, since coming to attention in zero-gravity was more or less pointless. In any case, it would have been bad form to interrupt personnel working their consoles and links.
Gray entered the flag bridge, giving a gentle tug to pull himself along one of the tethers that roped different parts of the double bridge complex together. Parts of America, those within the rotating hab module section—mostly personnel quarters and the fighter launch and recovery decks—were under spin gravity, but the flag bridge and the adjacent ship’s bridge were located in a tower rising from the star carrier’s spine forward of the hab sections, and therefore in zero-gravity.
He positioned himself in the command chair and let it tighten around his hips. He placed the palms of his hands on the seat’s contact plates, letting them connect with his neural interfaces. Datastreams began flowing through his brain, opening in-head windows and connecting him with the AIs running both the ship and the fleet.
There was no up or down in zero-gravity, of course, but from the vantage point of his command chair, he was looking down onto the ship’s bridge forward. The flag bridge formed a kind of gallery overlooking the ship’s command center, where he could see about a dozen officers and enlisted personnel working at their consoles under the watchful electronic gaze of Captain Sara Gutierrez. On the large curving bulkhead above the bridge entrance glowed a projection of surrounding space, with the blurred and perfectly circular ring of the TRGA centered dead ahead. Dwindling numbers to the side gave range and closing velocity.
“The Demons are going in,” the voice of Captain Connie Fletcher reported, whispering in his mind. She was America’s CAG, the officer commanding the various fighter and auxiliary squadrons.
“Tell them—” Gray stopped. He’d been about to wish them “Godspeed,” but that would have been less than appropriate. There were those who thought the TRGAs had indeed been constructed, eons in the past, by godlike aliens, and the White Covenant discouraged statements that might be interpreted as religious sentiment by others. “Tell them good luck,” he said. It might be a bit lame, but it shouldn’t offend anyone.
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
Icons marking the twelve fighters of the Black Demon squadron appeared ahead, superimposed against the TRGA’s maw. And then . . .
They were gone.
Let me see the fleet disposition, Gray thought. The viewpoint pulled back from America, so that the star carrier could be seen from the side, in the distance. Other icons appeared strung out behind her. America was followed in line-ahead by the railgun cruiser Leland . . . and behind her came the alien Nameless. The Glothr, it seemed, didn’t name their ships, so the humans on the expedition had given the vessel a name of their own.
Not quite the most clever name, but there you go.
The fighters were through. Data began pulsing back . . . but broken and static-blasted. Communication across a TRGA gateway tended to be intermittent and unsatisfactory, requiring precisely positioned transmitters and receivers, as well as a great deal of power. There was enough to tell the battle group that the fighters had emerged, however, and apparently in the right epoch.
Fighter pilots called it threading a needle . . . a reasonable analogy. The interior opening of a TRGA was only slightly wider than America was long. Still, within the TRGA’s lumen, minute variations in position and velocity created wildly different pathways through space and time. The ships of the America battlegroup were following a carefully programmed and precise series of maneuvers as they entered the spinning maw.
“Okay, people,” Gray said softly. “All nav systems to automatic. Let the AIs take us through.”
The warning was unnecessary—more nervous reassurance than anything else. All twelve ships of Battlegroup America were being guided now by powerful artificial intelligences. Presumably, the additional ship, the Glothr Nameless, was guided by non-organic system
s as well. Jellyware brains—even enhanced by AI implants—simply weren’t precise enough or fast enough to handle the variables successfully.
For a breathless moment, the star carrier America hung on the verge between one space and another . . .
And then unimaginable energies seized the vessel and dragged her in.
Lieutenant Donald Gregory
VFA-96, Black Demons
0458 hours, TFT
Something strange was happening to time.
The TRGA was just twelve kilometers long. Traveling at some twenty kilometers per second relative to the alien portal, Gregory should have been through and out the other side in six tenths of a second. It felt, however, like ten or fifteen seconds, an impossibly long time as the blurred gray walls of the tube swept past his ship, terrifyingly close. The slightest miscalculation, and his fighter would be shredded by contact with a wall moving at very close to c. Even if he didn’t hit that motion-smeared surface, a ten-meter drift in any direction would put him on a different spacetime trajectory . . . and the gods alone knew where he would emerge . . . or when.
Then the TRGA’s walls vanished, whisked away at twenty kps as Gregory’s fighter emerged into open space once more.
And this new space was extraordinarily crowded with stars.
“My God . . .” he breathed, awed. The White Covenant be damned—the phrase spoke to how he felt.
The Black Demons were moving through the central core of the N’gai star cluster . . . a dwarf galaxy just above the plane of the vast spiral of the Milky Way. The TRGA had brought them back through time as well—some 876 million years into their remote past. In this epoch, life on Earth was still confined to the planet’s seas and was only just then discovering that sex and genetic diversity were useful evolutionary ideas.
“Commsat away,” Mackey reported. The satellite would drift in front of the TRGA, recording all transmissions from the squadron. If anything happened to the fighters . . .
Gregory didn’t allow himself to think about that.
“We have company, Skipper,” he reported. “Bearing zero-zero-five, minus two-one, range three-zero-thousand.”
“Got it, Greg. All Demons, shift vector to zero-zero-five, minus two-one. Do not, repeat do not initiate hostilities. . . .”
“Not unless they freakin’ initiate first,” Kemper added.
Gregory could see the oncoming alien spacecraft in an in-head display, picked up by his fighter’s long-range optics, magnified, and streamed through the craft’s AI into his brain. They were small, each only a meter or two across. They were oddly shaped, too, no two precisely alike. Perhaps more important, there were thousands of them in an onrushing cloud.
It did not look like a friendly reception.
And something was happening within that cloud of oncoming craft. Individual ships were shifting position, orienting themselves as though seeking to form some larger structure. Within his in-head, Gregory could see a series of rings, perfectly aligned, each a hundred meters across.
What the hell?
“Thirty thousand kilometers,” Mackey said. “We need to get . . .”
“Hostile incoming!” Lieutenant Cynthia DeHaviland yelled over the tactical link. “The bastards are firing!”
A tightly coherent bolt of energy struck Demon Six—Lieutenant Voight’s ship. The Starblade vanished in a cloud of white-hot vapor.
“Spread out and accelerate!” Mackey ordered. “Boost to five hundred Gs! Let’s close the gap!”
The eleven surviving Starblades hurtled forward, their velocity increasing by five kilometers per second each second. Ahead, the cloud of silvery objects continued to maneuver to organize themselves into a huge, indistinct structure. The energy bolt had come through those closely aligned rings, and Gregory’s long-range scanners were picking up evidence of a fast-building magnetic charge. . . .
“It’s a particle cannon!” Gregory called as understanding gelled. “It’s a fucking particle cannon five kilometers long!”
Gregory wondered how they’d managed that trick . . . positioning individual spacecraft like pieces in a titanic puzzle, not touching physically, but apparently locked together by magnetic fields. He didn’t ponder it long, as another pulse of energy surged up through the floating rings and very nearly caught Lieutenant Caswell, who rolled clear just as the particle beam passed him.
“Spread out, damn it, spread out!” Mackey yelled. “Arm Kraits! Target the dense parts of that cloud!”
Each Starblade carried a full complement of thirty-two VG-92 Krait space-to-space missiles, plus six of the massive and more powerful VG-120 Boomslangs. Still, a total of 418 missiles of varying megatonnage, Gregory reflected, was not going to go very far against that vast and sprawling cloud of diminutive alien vessels.
They would have to make each shot count, taking great care in the placement of every one. By targeting the thickest regions of the alien spacecraft cloud, they would do the greatest damage with what they had available.
I hope.
“Fire!”
Gregory had already brought up the control icons for the first two Kraits in his magazine, arming both and setting their yields to a hundred megatons each. The alien swarm dominated an in-head window; he zoomed in on a dense knot of alien vessels—a part of the open architecture of the enemy’s immense particle cannon.
“Demon Four, Fox One!” he yelled over the tactical channel. “Times two!”
Centuries before, the “Fox One” radio call had meant the launch of a heat-seeking missile. Now it meant a smart missile like the VG-92 Krait shipkiller, the Boomslang, or Fer-de-lance . . . or even the old-style Kraits, the VG-10s, now obsolete and considerably less competent in the AI department.
With his first two shots away, Gregory shifted targets, brought two more Kraits on-line, and loosed them. His primary tactical display was fast becoming an indecipherable mass of fighters, targets, and the slow-crawling contrails of missiles in flight. All of those contrails swung wide before angling in toward their targets, and their onboard AIs had them dodging and twisting to avoid enemy defensive fire, turning the display into a classic dogfighting furball. His AI could read the mess though, even if he could not. This allowed Gregory to focus his attention on maneuvering the Starblade, trying to make sure that it was not where the enemy was aiming and firing that colossal particle gun—
—which fired again, an instant before the first Kraits detonated in silent blossoms of white light . . . one blast after another, each equivalent to 100 million tons of high explosive.
Alien ships evaporated by the hundreds, caught between multiple expanding plasma shock waves and by intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. Nuclear explosions were not nearly as effective in the vacuum of space as they were in an atmosphere, but the temperature at the heart of each blast still measured well over 100 million degrees. As the fireballs faded, large bubbles of emptiness were stitched through the mass of silvery spacecraft. The precise organization of the particle gun appeared to have been disrupted, and the remaining fragments of the structure dissolved as alien spacecraft abandoned it.
And then the Black Demon squadron was plunging into and through the cloud of alien ships. Bright red icons representing hostile targets filled his mental view of the surrounding starscape. Gregory lined up on one of the enemy vessels and triggered his own particle weapon, sending a beam lancing into the target with savage precision.
“Watch it, Demon Four!” Caswell called to him. “You’ve got two coming in fast behind you!”
“I see ’em.”
The two aliens dropped onto his six and he flipped his Starblade end-for-end, hurtling backward as he snapped off one burst of electric flame . . . then a second . . . and a third when one target evaded his attack and kept coming.
The Sh’daar fighters had teeth. A beam caught Demon Eight, a newbie named Romero, and ripped her Starblade in half. Gregory eased his fighter around and teamed with DeHaviland. Together, they vaporized another Sh’daar fig
hter.
“How long before the fleet comes through?” DeHaviland called.
“Don’t know, Cyn,” Gregory replied. “Should be any sec now!”
That wasn’t just wishful thinking. Fighter point missions weren’t intended to engage in long-term combat. The point element was intended to go ahead of the battlegroup, find out if there were hostiles ahead, and engage them until the capitals could come up.
At least, that was the idea. If the battlegroup didn’t come through the TRGA for some reason, there were ten Starblade fighters on this side that would be in a hell of a lonely situation.
Worse would be what might happen if the local hostiles proved too much for the entire battlegroup. America and her escorts might die here, on this side of the TRGA.
Which would mean that the Black Demons would have already been wiped out.
An enemy particle beam grazed his fighter, jolting him hard. He bit off a curse and tumbled to the left, targeting an alien that was close—too close—and firing. The plasma shock wave jolted him a second time.
Damn it, don’t think so much. Angry, now, at allowing himself to be distracted, he focused all of his attention on the data cascading through his link with his fighter.
Where was Cyn? He’d lost her in that last exchange. An icon flashed against the dazzling backdrop of thickly crowded stars. There . . .
The red icons were drawing together, bunching up.
What the hell are they up to?
TC/USNA CVS America
Flag Bridge
N’gai Cluster, T-0.876gy
0503 hours, TFT
Emergence. . . .
Gray leaned forward in his seat, staring out into the throng of crowded suns, the central heart of a pocket-sized galaxy almost 900 million years lost in the remote past. At least, that was the idea. . . .
“America,” he said, addressing the ship’s primary AI. “Do you have the temp-nav data yet?”
“Affirmative, Admiral,” the ship’s mind replied, more as a mental impression than as distinct words. “Downloading to Navigation now.”