Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three

Chapter Eight

29 June 2405

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Outer System, Texaghu Resch System

1645 hours, TFT

“The fighters are away, Admiral,” Wizewski told him. “The Dragonfires just handed off to CIC.”

“I heard them, CAG. Thank you.”

He looked into the tactical tank. Over the past hours, the battlegroup had formed up for its passage to the TRGA, adopting one of several standard fleet formations—carriers grouped together in an elongated cluster behind the battleships and railgun cruisers. The destroyers out in front and in a protective cloud around the big boys, and with the support and logistical vessels to the rear. The frigates and gunships, the smallest of the capital ships, held the outermost perimeter, ahead, on all flanks, and astern. The idea was to focus firepower forward, while providing detection and defense in-depth in all directions.

Of course, no fleet formation could adequately protect against enemy vessels or kinetic-kill projectiles zorching in at near-c velocities, but this one, dubbed “spearhead,” provided a fair balance between focused offense and general defense.

And there was still no sign of enemy forces within the Texagu Resch system. Unmanned recon drones were on the way to each of the planets for a close look, but so far, nothing had turned up, not even the power signatures of zero-point energy emissions. The system appeared to be undefended.

And why not? Even the Sh’daar couldn’t be everywhere, covering every system with defensive fleets or bases, not in a galaxy of 400 billion suns.

It couldn’t be that easy, could it?

In Koenig’s estimation, it never was.

If it was impossible to base crewed naval forces in every system, it was possible to leave behind detector satellites and drones. They could be powered by batteries or local sunlight, and didn’t need quantum power taps, at least not until they had to accelerate to high velocity. They could be completely static, orbiting the local star and transmitting a signal when anything unusual—like the arrival of a carrier battlegroup—took place. Like the low-power signals used by the Sh’daar Seeds implanted in the Agletsch, the signals might not be detectable at all if you didn’t know where to listen, or what to look for.

Koenig had to assume that the enemy knew they were coming.

Assuming, of course, that the TRGA artifact was indeed a part of some sort of interstellar Sh’daar transport system—the likeliest explanation for the thing, he thought. It could belong to someone else, of course . . . and might even be left over from some other star-faring civilization now long extinct.

But according to the Agletsch, this region of space was known to and traversed by the Sh’daar. The vanished Chelk had been here twelve thousand years ago, defied the Sh’daar ban on advanced GRIN technologies, and been exterminated.

Koenig had questioned Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde closely about the Chelk, wondering if perhaps they had created the TRGA object. According to them, the Chelk homeworld was somewhere close by, but not here. “The Eye of Resch”—evidently, their name for this star—was visible in their night sky, a part of one of their constellations. The star was similar in most respects to Sol . . . and to human eyes a G2 star was only visible for a distance of about ten parsecs—roughly 32 light years. The Chelk might have had more efficient light-gathering organs than did humans, true, but the likelihood was that the Chelk homeworld had been relatively close by—say within ten or fifteen light years.

It would be interesting to survey the nearby star systems in an attempt to find the Chelk homeworld. It should be easy enough to locate. Gru’mulkisch had told him that the planet had been glassed over by the Sh’daar. That meant most of the evidence of their technology had been erased, but surely something had survived, on a moon or another planet, if not on the homeworld itself.

He suppressed a shudder. The Chelk and their fate had been preying on his mind now for some days, ever since he’d learned about them from the Agletsch.

What, Koenig wondered, had been the sin of the Chelk, a sin so grievous that billions of living souls had been extinguished?

And was that what the Sh’daar had planned for Humankind?

In any case, the two Agletsch had been certain that the Chelk had not been responsible for the Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly. The physics boys had gone over the data transmitted back from America’s recon probe and suggested that the object, obviously artificial, had been created by taking a star of the same mass as Earth’s sun—Texaghu Resch must once have been a double star—and somehow crushing it down into a rotating, hollow cylinder.

Worse, a star was composed mostly of hydrogen. The TRGA appeared to be . . . well, not solid, but not a gas, either. A black hole wasn’t comprised of anything recognizable as one of the traditional states of matter, since, technically, the mass had collapsed into a singularity. Was the TRGA a singularity—by definition a dimensionless point—somehow unfolded, stretched into a hollow needle twelve kilometers long?

That was advanced technology, a technology so advanced as to seem literally godlike.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” ran the old aphorism.

Was that what the Sh’daar feared?

Was that why the Chelk had been exterminated . . . because they had been exercising such magic? Or perhaps they’d simply been about to reach this system and perhaps the Sh’daar had feared they would learn something they weren’t supposed to know?

Surely, if the Chelk had possessed such technology, the Sh’daar would not have been able to wipe them out.

“Karyn?” he said.

“Yes, Admiral?” The voice was that of his electronic personal assistant, a simulation of his dead lover. God, I miss her. . . .

“Take over for me here. I need to grab something to eat, then crash for a couple of hours.”

He’d skipped lunch, as he often did, and was just realizing that he was hungry. And the battlegroup would be arriving at the gravitational anomaly at around 0100 hours, ship’s time, so he wasn’t going to be getting a full night’s sleep. He’d already told Commander Jones, America’s exec, to pass the word to all hands on the day watch to get their sleep ahead of time. He needed to do likewise.

“Very good, Admiral. I’ll alert you if anything comes up.”

Karyn’s simulation would keep a practiced electronic eye on things in CIC. Koenig released himself from his seat and floated toward the hatchway leading to hab module access and his quarters.

VFA-44

En route to TRGA

Texaghu Resch System

1650 hours, TFT

For Gray, only seconds had passed since the fighters had stopped their high-G boost. For just less than ten minutes, the Dragonfires had boosted at fifty thousand gravities. Coasting, now, at 99.7 percent of the speed of light, they hurtled in-system as subjective time, squeezed down to nearly nothing by the effects of relativistic time dilation, flashed past. For them, the coast phase of their flight would last just less than six minutes instead of more than seventy-one.

With acceleration, the universe around them had grown strange, with all incoming light compressed into a glowing band encircling the heavens forward, the light itself sorted by wavelength from blue on the band’s leading edge to red on the trailing, the gorgeous starbow that traditional physics said should not be, but was.

But they were just beginning their c run. In another five minutes and some seconds, as the fighters were measuring the quickly passing time, they would flip end for end and throw out the drive singularities in their wakes for the ten-minute deceleration in to the objective.

“Lieutenant?” his fighter said to him. “I’m parsing out some anomalous signals from directly ahead.”

Gray felt a cold chill prickle at the back of his neck. “What kind of signals?”

“They appear to be drive signatures. I am also detecting what may be power-plant signatures.”

The starbow was an artifact of Gray’s near-c velocity. Just as a flier moving through a rainstorm on Earth creates the illusion that the raindrops are coming from ahead, not above, incoming electromagnetic radiation—light, among others—appeared to be compressed forward until even light from directly astern seemed to be coming from ahead, although even visible wavelengths were stretched into the radio portion of the spectrum, just as visible light from dead ahead was compressed into ultraviolet and X-ray frequencies.

Because of this distortion, it was extremely difficult to pick out individual signals and make sense of them. The AI running Gray’s Starhawk, however, was tasked with doing just that, sampling thousands of discrete frequencies, teasing them out of the compressed mash of stretched and squeezed wavelengths, and converting them back to their originals. The distortion was too severe for ships traveling at near-c to pick up radio or laser-com transmissions and make sense of them—fighters traveling at a hairsbreadth beneath c were all but cut off from the rest of the universe—but some data could be discerned.

Drive signatures were ripples in space caused by relativistic moving objects—like high-velocity fighters or kinetic-kill rounds moving at a fair percentage of c.

Power-plant signatures were different. Mere fusion or antimatter power was insignificant when it came to the energy needed to boost a spacecraft to near-c velocities. That sort of speed required vacuum energy, the all-but-infinite energy fluctuations occurring in the quantum foam of what was laughingly known as “empty space.” Quantum power taps—and the enemy appeared to use an identical technology here—used paired artificial microsingularities to pull a fraction of this energy out of hard vacuum. Inevitably, there was some leakage—and distinct ripples in spacetime created by the fast-orbiting black-hole pairs that could be detected across vast distances.

Despite his fighter’s velocity, Gray’s AI was picking up those ripples from directly ahead, and reading them as evidence of ships using quantum power taps and traveling at high speeds.

The only things Gray could think of that would explain those signals were either ships or, more likely, KK warheads coming straight for the fighters head-on, and doing so at close to light speed. Two objects, each traveling at near-c and hitting each other did not do so at twice the speed of light; c was always c, no matter what the circumstances.

What they did do was release one hell of a lot of energy.

As squadron commander, Gray had to make sure the other Dragonfires had picked up on this. Possibly, their AIs had detected the same signatures—not at all a sure bet—but the squadron would have to react as a unit, damned tough when no one could talk to anyone else.

But there was one thing he could do.

“Okay,” he told his AI. “Stand by for near-c maneuvering. . . .

Admiral’s Quarters

TC/USNA CVS America

Inbound, Texaghu Resch System

1659 hours, TFT

“Admiral!” Karyn’s voice called suddenly. “We have an emergency incoming transmission!”

Koenig had only just reached his quarters, had not even opened his occutube yet. He stood in the middle of the spacious compartment, looking up at the softly lit overhead with an expression mingling exasperation and wry amusement. “You’re kidding me.”

“I would not do that, Admiral, as you well know.”

He knew. “What do you have?”

“Our reconnaissance probe sent an emergency transmission at 1540 hours. Something has emerged from the wormhole.”

“On my way.”

Technically, he could view the data here, but he preferred to be in CIC, the fleet’s nerve center. He had more options there.

He’d already decided to skip dinner until after he’d grabbed some tubetime, or at least defer it until later. But now, even sleep would have to wait.

VFA-44

En route to TRGA

Texaghu Resch System

1704 hours, TFT

The worst part about fighter combat at near-c was the fact that you were experiencing events so slowly. Traveling at 99.7 percent of c, the passing of one second for Gray was almost thirteen seconds for the universe outside, the time dilation predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity and calculated by the equation known as the Lorentz-FitzGerald transformation. The problem was one of reaction time. At those speeds it took Gray thirteen times longer to notice a threat, thirteen times longer to react . . . and if those drive signatures he’d detected were of ships or missiles themselves traveling at close to the speed of light, they would be zorching in just behind the wavefront that had alerted him to their presence.

It might already be too late.

He told his AI to begin jinking.

He couldn’t use laser com to warn the others, of course, not at that speed. At near-c velocities, communication within the squadron—or with other squadrons or with the America—was tenuous at best. All incoming signals, even from other ships with perfectly matched vectors, were smeared by relativistic spacetime distortion into that circle of light ahead. The individual fighter AIs could tease some low-level bandwidth data out of that hash, but not enough for voice or implant communications. His Starhawk could sense the other spacecraft in the formation by the dimples their power-tap singularities left on the fabric of space, but little else.

Since his instrumentation could only approximate the positions of the other fighters in the squadron by their mass effects, any change in vector at this velocity was potentially deadly. By having his AI calculate those positions, however, using fuzzy logic to calculate probable locations, he minimized the chances of a collision. The rapid, jittery movements as his fighter threw out gravitational singularities, first in one direction, then another, then a third, did two things. They reduced the chances that an aimed projectile coming in from dead ahead would strike him, and they guaranteed that the AIs of the other Dragonfires would notice his fighter’s erratic behavior. That by itself would alert the rest of the squadron that something was wrong, that they were being tracked . . . and that they had to start jinking themselves to avoid disaster.

Side-to-side jinking could be carried out within a relatively narrow area—Gray was changing lateral vectors within a cross-section a hundred meters or so across—and Gray was trusting his AI to keep from colliding with the nearest other Dragonfire Starhawks. A tactical display window opened in his mind, showing the probable relative locations of the other eleven fighters. As he watched, four of the other Starhawks began moving back and forth in erratic and random patterns as well. Then a fifth joined in . . . a sixth, and within a few seconds all of them were moving unpredictably within the display. Gray’s AI was estimating the nearest fighter to be five kilometers away. Plenty of space . . . assuming that all twelve AIs were guessing accurately.

The question was, what was it that was hurtling toward the fighters head-on, and how much time did they have?

As the seconds crawled past, the Dragonfires’ formation began to spread out slightly. The AIs at the outer edge of the flight tended to move out more than in, which left more space in the middle for the interior Starhawks to begin dispersing. If they were being targeted, the dispersal should help by making individual ships harder to hit, and a high-speed impact would be less likely to destroy more than one or two fighters at a time.

Gray extended his tactical display’s field of view to take in the other two squadrons, the Hellstreaks and the Meteors. One by one, the individual Starhawks in those formations began jinking back and forth as well. Good. Someone in those squadrons had been paying attention, and had either spotted the oncoming threat or noticed when the Dragonfires began carrying out evasive maneuvers.

Then the starbow ahead of Gray’s fighter turned as bright as the face of the sun, and the shock wave of hot plasma struck him an instant later, sending him into a wild and catastrophic tumble.

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Inbound, Texaghu Resch System

1707 hours, TFT

Koenig watched the view unfolding on the CIC’s display screens, and realized that the fleet was now in serious trouble. The three tightly interwoven questions facing him now were, what could be done to retrieve the tactical situation, what could be salvaged, what would be lost?

The scenes showed the recon mission’s point of view, and so was now more than eighty minutes out of date thanks to the slow-crawling speed of light. According to the time line imbedded in the data stream, something—correction, a lot of somethings—had emerged from the artificial wormhole at 1540 hours.

Were they missiles or small spacecraft? Koenig couldn’t tell at first, though as minutes passed, be began to get the distinct impression that they were crewed—spacecraft slightly smaller than a Starhawk, and apparently far more maneuverable. Each was different in detail, lozenge shaped, flattened side to side like leaves or the scales of a fish, with whorls and blisters and smoothly curving lines etched into mirror-bright surfaces. Their hulls were decorated in sinuous swirls of dark blue and gray-silver, but gleamed brilliantly, reflecting the glare of the nearby sun.

They were coming through in hundreds, a cloud of the things. One, Koenig saw, was larger than the others, a fat cigar shape with five knobs like thick antennae projecting from its leading end, its hull hidden beneath clusters of slender objects like black, double-pointed pencils. Lightning flared between the antennae, encircling the craft, and the pencils began coming off in unraveling sheets and accelerating.

“What are those?” Sinclair said in Koenig’s head. “Missiles?”

“Crowbars,” Koenig replied.

And an instant later the feed from Recon One went dead.

VFA-44

En route to TRGA

Texaghu Resch System

1715 hours, TFT

Gray tumbled through the Void at the speed of light.

G-forces tore at him. Where his gravitic drive acted on every atom of his body uniformly, allowing him to fall toward the singularity in zero-G, his Starhawk’s spin exerted centrifugal force that simulated gravity—about eight Gs, he estimated. He was perilously close to blacking out.

He was able to thoughtclick on icons showing in his in-head display, however, directing his AI to use the gravitic drive to slow the spin. The G-force lessened . . . then, in a series of fits and starts, dropped gradually away to nothing. He was in free fall once more.

As soon as he could bring up his tactical display, he checked to see what had happened. Two fighters from the formation were missing—Preisler and Natham, both hit, evidently, by high-grav impactors passing through the formation. Though hard vacuum could not transmit a shock wave, the shattering collision of two bodies each moving at close to c had released a great deal of kinetic energy, and that energy had driven an expanding shell of plasma—the vaporized mass of both fighter and projectile—outward with force enough to tip Gray into an end-for-end tumble.

He was under control, now, however—shaken, but still on course. That was a given; an expanding bubble of plasma with energy enough to deflect him onto a new vector at this speed would have reduced him and his Starhawk to individual free-flying atoms.

His AI completed a full systems check. There was minor damage, both in attitude control and in life support, but the fighter was already repairing itself. The nanomatrix of the hull could reconfigure itself, filling in gaps, bypassing burned-out zones, and even literally rewiring itself. The one system that could not be repaired under way, the oscillating micro-singularities at the heart of the Starhawk’s quantum power tap, were still in place and functioning at optimum, and the energy flow was steady.

He checked the stats on the other pilots. Gray couldn’t tell from the tactical display if any of the other Dragonfire pilots had been affected by impact with the fast-expanding plasma shells. His equipment could detect a nearby mass by the impression it made in spacetime, but not whether that mass was spinning or even fragmented. Preisler and Natham, though, were definitely gone, their fighters’ mass smeared outward into low-density clouds of star-hot plasma. There was some possibility of losses within the Meteors and the Hellstreaks as well, though the data was fuzzy and would remain so until they decelerated to saner velocities.

What the hell had happened? Clearly, something up ahead had detected the incoming squadrons of fighters and launched a cloud of near-c kinetic-kill impactors, a type of weapon generically known as crowbars. They had no guidance, no onboard AI; they were simply slivers of ultra-dense metal launched in clouds against incoming targets.

The slivers that had missed the individual fighters would be traveling on, now, headed out-system toward the far fatter and slower targets of the carrier battlegroup.

And Gray had no way of warning them that the impactors were on the way.

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Inbound, Texaghu Resch System

1720 hours, TFT

It was sheer luck that Koenig and his combat team in CIC had seen the crowbar launch . . . luck, and the fact that they did have intelligence resources watching the TRGA tube. That single bit of advance planning might have just saved the fleet in the relatively short term.

In the long-term, they were still in deep trouble.

According to the time stamp on Recon One’s data, those high-velocity projectiles had been launched at 1540 . . . more than forty minutes before the fighter squadrons had been deployed. That meant they were targeting the fleet, which they would have been able to pick up on long-range gravitational mass sensors, and not the fighters, which should by now be two thirds of the way to their objective.

Kinetic-kill projectiles could not be precisely aimed across more than 9 AUs. They would be coming in blind, a cloud of the things dispersing in such a way that something might be hit simply by chance. Their actual speed was unknown; they would arrive at relativistic speeds, but anything above, say, 70 percent of the speed of light was possible. The battlegroup’s only possible defense was to disperse even more to reduce the chance of a lucky hit.

Koenig thought the matter through further. It might also help to put out some additional fighters .5 AU or so ahead of the fleet. They might detect the incoming projectile cloud, and be able to give the fleet some advance warning, anything from seconds to a few minutes, depending on the velocities involved.

He began giving the necessary orders.

More serious was the long-term problem. The fleet was scheduled to arrive at the TRGA at around one in the morning. They would arrive to find several hundred hostile spacecraft, however—spacecraft of unknown design but obviously hostile.

No fleet commander cares to take his ships into a fight with a totally unknown but numerically superior enemy. The odds are too long, the threat unguessable, the potential consequences terrifying . . . and it was a hell of a long way home.

But Koenig now had an unsavory choice to make. He could stick with the original plan and engage the unknown foe, or he could order the fleet to begin immediate deceleration with an eye to changing course and re-entering Alcubierre space. The fleet could escape, and that was almost certainly the safest and sanest call right now.

But if he did that, the thirty-six fighters of three Starhawk squadrons already en route to the TRGA would be abandoned and lost.

The math was simple enough; he could save fifty-eight ships and nearly fifty thousand men and women by sacrificing the lives of thirty-six pilots.

The math was always simple. It was living with the results that was a problem.