Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three

Chapter Ten

29 June 2405

VFA-44

En route to TRGA

Texaghu Resch System

1755 hours, TFT

“All Dragonfires! Arm AMSOs and orient your vectors toward the enemy!”

AMSO, or anti-missile shield ordnance, was the Confederation Navy’s catchall acronym for a family of weapons popularly known as sandcasters. Each Dragonfire Starhawk was carrying a warload of eighteen AS-78 missiles, each mounting a warhead loaded with several kilograms of tightly packed lead spherules the size of grains of sand.

Kraits were smart missiles, guided by miniature AIs programmed to evade enemy defenses and strike with maximum effect. Sandcasters, on the other hand, were decidedly dumb weapons, accelerating in a straight line and releasing their warloads in clouds that continued traveling in a straight line, combining their acceleration velocity with whatever residual velocity the fighter had imparted to them upon launch plus whatever velocity component the target possessed at impact. No evasive maneuvers, nothing fancy—just fire the thing and forget about it. Generally, sandcasters were used as missile defense systems. The enemy equivalent of a Krait encountering a cloud of sand grains at several thousand kilometers per second simply ceased to exist, save as a smear of hot, expanding plasma.

But eight months ago, at the Defense of Earth, Gray had written a footnote in the Naval Academy downloads for space fighter tactics by turning AMSO sandcasters against enemy warships. The idea, in retrospect, was perhaps an obvious one . . . but the obvious was not always clear to hidebound risty chair pilots unable to think outside the closely set parameters of classical military training. In the Confederation Navy, you got ahead by following the rules, doing what you were told, and going by the book. In the Periphery, though, survival often required original thought, not to mention a carefree willingness to break the rules when necessary.

Gray had received a commendation for his original thinking, which had been an important factor in disrupting an incoming Turusch strike fleet out at the orbit of Uranus. Using sandcaster warheads to clear a path through enemy fighters had allowed the Terran defenders to concentrate on the bad-guy heavies.

It was not a tactic easily adapted to the realities of modern space warfare, however, and some of his squadron mates still kidded him about throwing handfuls of sand at the enemy. “Sandy Gray,” they called him.

At least it was better than “Prim.”

But this situation looked like it was made for the same tactic. The enemy, while in motion, was staying relatively put in front of the TRGA. More, the fact that thermonuclear warheads had taken them out suggested that, if they possessed defensive shielding at all, it was fairly low grade and easily overwhelmed. In space combat, screen referred to the electromagnetic sheathing that turned aside radiation or charged particle beams, while shields were grav-induced distortions of the space immediately around a ship that could turn aside incoming matter, whether KK projectiles, missile warheads, or the star-hot plasma released by the nearby detonation of a nuke.

Or a cloud of high-velocity sand.

“Set for release at thirty thousand kilometers from the target!” Gray continued. “Fire when ready!”

“Fox Two!” Ben Donovan called a moment later, as the AS-78s began emerging from the keel of his fighter two by two. Fox two was the call sign for a dumb-weapon release, and a warning to all fighters in the vicinity that they might have to take evasive action.

Gray released his own sandcaster warheads, giving the obligatory “Fox two!”

In rapid succession, the other Dragonfires launched their anti-missile defenses as well. According to his tactical scans, more KK slivers were on the way from the enemy ship-wall, but those could be avoided at this range easily enough by jinking, a problem that could be left to his AI.

“Shouldn’t we be holding some of these things in reserve?” Ryan asked him. Half of her missiles were already accelerating toward the enemy.

“Negative! Give ’em all you’ve got! The idea is to overwhelm their defenses!”

And there was another reason as well, one he didn’t mention. Hold on to a reserve of missiles for later, and you ran the risk of not being able to fire them at all if your number came up on an enemy crowbar or beam.

Don’t think about that! Just dump your missiles and stay alive! . . .

Traveling at a thousnad kilometers per second, the first PC-S 78s reached the thirty-thousand-kilometer mark and detonated, releasing their deadly clouds of sand. Enemy beams were finding many of the incoming sandcaster rounds, causing them to wink silently off the tactical display, but once a round reached that 30K line and released its load of sand grains, the enemy’s defensive fire could have little effect. Thirty seconds later, the first clouds began reaching their targets.

Gray had an excellent close-in view transmitted from one of the battlespace drones near the TRGA—a single enemy ship, silver and gray and shaped like a flat leaf. The sand cloud, widely dispersed now, was still thick enough to cause the enemy vessel’s prow to flare bright red, then orange. The glow faded swiftly, however, and the vessel did not seem otherwise affected. An energy beam—invisible at optical wavelengths but picked out by the AI graphics program as a dazzling streak of emerald green—snapped out from the vessel. Clearly it was still in the fight, and Gray sagged inwardly.

It didn’t work. . . .

And then the smart missiles, sent on roundabout courses and coming in from behind, many seemingly straight out of the glare of that nearby sun, began to strike.

The entire wall of enemy ships, stretched across hundreds of kilometers, was engulfed by dazzlingly brilliant fireballs, expanding spheres of hot gas rapidly merging with other spheres close by, growing, swelling, coalescing, forming a sheet of radiance too brilliant to look at with unshielded optics.

The plasma clouds thinned and faded rapidly, and enemy fighters began emerging from the glare . . . but not in the thousands, not in the thousands, thank God!

The space-warping shields that protected starships were created by gravitic projectors extending out from a vessel’s hull just a few centimeters. They could be melted away by a nearby thermonuclear blast—or by the sandblasting from a high-velocity AMSO round—and when that happened, that section of shield would fail, exposing the ship’s hull to incoming missiles or energy. The double volley launched by the Dragonfires—Kraits and AS-78 AMSO rounds—had wreaked a terrible destruction across that gleaming wall of alien warships.

“I have counted eight hundred forty-six vessels emerging from the fireballs,” Gray’s AI told him, its voice as complacent as though it were discussing the weather. “Others have survived, but are not moving and appear to be damaged. They may be undergoing auto-repair.”

Ships with active-nanomatrix hulls, like Starhawks, could grow new parts to replace pieces burned or blasted away if the damage wasn’t too extensive. How quickly those damaged alien vessels came back on-line would tell Gray a lot about their level of technology.

More than eight hundred of the alien ships remained, however, and the Dragonfires, plus the survivors of the other two squadrons, remained badly outnumbered.

“Okay, Dragonfires,” Gray told the others. He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. “That cut them up pretty good. Let’s finish them. Independent vectors . . . break!”

The Starhawks, already widely dispersed, began shifting both courses and velocities, passing the thirty-thousand-kilometer mark as separately vectored fighters instead of as a formation.

That gave them their best chance of survival, at this point, and a chance to mix it up ship to ship with the enemy fighters.

The Dragonfires were still badly outnumbered, but there did appear to be a chance, now. The surviving aliens appeared to be trying to regroup their formation, but they seemed hesitant, even awkward in their maneuvers. The remaining Meteors and Hellstreaks were merging now with the enemy ship-cloud, and sharp, strobing flashes were punctuating the darkness as ships on both sides died.

With both his Krait and AMSO missile lockers empty, Gray now had only two weapons remaining in his arsenal, the Starhawk’s StellarDyne PBP-2 particle beam projector, affectionately known as a “pee-beep” by gravfighter pilots, and a Gatling RFK-90 KK cannon. Both weapons were for short-range work—a few thousand kilometers for the particle gun, closer still for the kinetic-kill rounds. To use them he would have to close to knife-fighting range, and that meant getting well inside the 30K boundary of the enemy’s primary weapon.

That weapon, though, was not much in evidence now, possibly because the enemy’s formation had been disrupted, possibly because they’d lost their inter-ship tactical web, the electronic link that let them work together in close formation. That was the hell of being the first to come up against an unknown technology; you didn’t know the enemy’s strengths or his weaknesses, and had to find successful ship-to-ship tactics essentially by trial and error.

And in this game, error generally meant you ended up dead.

Accelerating hard, he arrowed into the melee now twisting about in front of the alien cylinder, lining up on a lone hostile and triggering a tenth-second burst of artificial lightning, a tightly focused beam of protons powerful enough to overwhelm enemy radiation screens and boil off armor.

A hit! The enemy vessel flared in a dazzlingly brilliant flash and began tumbling, half of its length, visible in the high-mag imagery downloading into Gray’s in-head display, charred and curdled.

Another enemy ship flashed across his vector, right to left, and he pivoted his Starhawk to track it. The turn brought the sun directly into his field of view. His fighter’s optics adjusted to protect his vision, but for a terrifying moment he couldn’t see anything, and he was flying blind.

The AI picked out the nearest enemy ships, however, and he locked on to one, firing his PBP twice, two brief bursts. The first missed; the second burned off the trailing couple of meters of the alien in a white flash, putting it into a slow tumble.

The Dragonfires twisted and turned, maneuvers possible only for light ships possessing high-performance gravitic drives. The tangle of battling ships was known as a furball, a term left over from the era of atmo-fighters and classic dogfights.

It was also what fighter pilots were pleased to call a “target-rich environment,” with hundreds of the brightly reflecting silver and gray ships swarming like angry and somewhat confused hornets throughout the volume of battlespace. Gray lined up one ship and blasted it, then moved on to another, and then to a third, knocking them out of action with rapid-fire pulses from his PBP. Comm chatter sounded in his ears, pilots calling back and forth as they coordinated their maneuvers.

“Dragon Three! Dragon Three! You’ve got one on your tail!”

“Copy! I see him! Pulling a one-eighty . . . got the bastard!”

“Dragon Eight! This is Five! Break left high!”

“Five, Eight! Rog!”

“Watch it, Two! There’s one close on your six! One on your six!”

A Starhawk a thousand kilometers away twisted suddenly, nicked by an enemy’s deadly beam. The aft portion of the grav-fighter snapped off, then vanished, leaving the rest of the ship to tumble helplessly amid an expanding cloud of glittering fragments.

“This is Dragon Two! I’m hit! I’m hit!”

“Copy Two,” Gray replied.

“Shit! Drive’s out! I’m streaking!”

Dragon Two was Shay Ryan’s ship, and streaking was grav-fighter slang for hurtling out of battlespace without power, without drives, unable to slow or maneuver.

And there wasn’t a damned thing Gray could do about it, except . . .

“Two, this is Dragon One!” Gray added, thoughtclicking on the icon marking Ryan’s crippled fighter. “I’ve got you logged! Sit tight. The SAR tugs will be after you in a few hours!”

Data on Ryan’s vector, her course and speed, had just been logged by Gray’s AI, and would be transmitted over the local tactical net. When the fleet arrived, the Search and Rescue vessels would have a good idea of where to look for her.

If the fleet arrived. Gray was realist enough to know that there were no promises there. By now the battlegroup’s tactical planners had some idea of what was waiting for them here at the TRGA cylinder. Admiral Koenig might well have decided to turn the fleet around and head back for Earth.

But . . . no. Koenig wouldn’t do that. There were plenty of Confederation naval officers who would cut and run, Gray knew, but not Koenig. The man, in Gray’s estimation, was not your typical risty. He cared about his people, and he wouldn’t abandon any of them if there was any way in heaven or earth to avoid it. At the very least, he would wait to see the outcome of this furball, and he would save the fighters if he could.

Assuming there were any fighters left to save when the fleet got here in another seven hours or so. Nineteen grav-fighters were left in the fight, now, out of the original thirty-six, and while they were doing better now that they were actually in close among the enemy ships, they were still outnumbered by fifty to one. How long could they keep this up before the bad guys wiped them from the sky, one by one?

Ten thousand kilometers away, a group of enemy ships was trying to re-form. Gray’s AI counted sixty-four of them—there was that power of two again—and they were drifting into a formation like a broad, circular wall of ships, a dish shape like the one the Dragonfires had already broken up.

This time, there were no more Kraits and no more AMSO rounds.

“All ships!” Gray broadcast. “Listen up! We’ve got an enemy formation grouping up near the cylinder’s mouth! Let’s move in close and burn them!”

Gray had no idea, at this point, if he had overall command of all three squadrons—what was left of them—or not. The skippers of the Meteors and the Hellstreaks both were dead, though, so it was a fair assumption. There was no time to check on commission dates or find out if anyone else with a higher rank was still in the fight. Leadership, at this point in the dogfight, was a matter of pointing, waving, and shouting “Follow me!”

He brought his Starhawk into a fast, broad turn, throwing his projected singularity out to port and letting the flickering gravity field draw him around, his straight path becoming a curve as it passed through gravitationally bent space. Maneuvering a fighter in space wasn’t at all like flying an atmo-fighter; with no atmosphere to provide lift or drag, the only way to change vector was to project singularities nearby, submicroscopic black holes that curved space just enough to redirect the ship’s course.

He was now hurtling toward the TRGA cylinder at five kilometers per second.

The more he watched them, the more convinced Gray was that the enemy, in fact, was some sort of machine intelligence, operating by programmed rote and without the guidance of an organic brain. The line between the two, organic and machine, could be blurred to the point of invisibility sometimes; a good AI could be quite creative, at least within its programmed area of expertise. The enemy ships were clearly trying to work together; Gray could almost imagine tightly focused beams of data interconnecting them all like the strands of a spider’s web.

Are these the Sh’daar? Gray wondered. Or were they merely more of the Sh’daar’s servants, like the Turusch or the Nungiirtok or the gas-bag H’rulka? So long as the Sh’daar remained in the shadows, fighting the Confederation through their proxies, there was no way to bring the war into their front yard, no way to force them to negotiate or back off.

He lined up on another of the silver-gray craft, blasting it with a triplet of tenth-second bolts from his PBP.

The enemy beam hit him, grazing his port side, and he felt his Starhawk partially crumple, then drop into a dizzying tumble.

“Damage report!” he shouted out at his AI. “What the hell happened? . . .”

“We received a grazing hit by an energy beam that appears to have momentarily increased the strong force at nuclear levels in an isolated area. A portion of our outer hull has undergone nuclear collapse.”

So that was the secret of the enemy beam, and why the Starhawks hit earlier had vanished. They hadn’t disappeared literally. With an increase in the strong force binding their atoms together, those atoms had collapsed as completely as the atoms of a neutron star, becoming neutronium—an ultra-dense exotic form of matter—and crunching down to occupy an invisibly small volume of space. Confederation singularity drives used a similar process to jump-start the artificial black holes that dragged free energy from hard vacuum, but so far as Gray knew, they’d never figured out how to project it as a weapon.

The brush of that deadly weapon had devoured perhaps 10 percent of Gray’s fighter. His nanomatrix hull was struggling now to repair the damage, but in the meantime, his drives were out. Using maneuvering thrusters—those remaining on-line—he managed to stop his disorienting tumble . . . but his main drives remained out. He was falling at five kilometers per second toward the TRGA cylinder.

Correction. Eight kilometers per second . . . and his velocity was increasing. He appeared to be sliding down a gravity well, as though he were being funneled straight toward the maw of that wildly rotating cylinder ahead.

With a calm that he didn’t know he possessed, Gray thoughtclicked his way through a list of icons, transmitting a running log to the local battlenet and to the ships of the distant fleet. He would continue transmitting for as long as he could.

He also began analyzing both the damage to his grav-fighter and the gravity well itself. As nearly as he could determine, the local gravitational field had been sharply bent by the one-solar mass of the spinning artifact ahead. Somehow, the builders of the TRGA had compressed a medium-sized star into a hollow cylinder a kilometer across and twenty long. That implied the density of a star-sized black hole, yet somehow it was holding its unnatural shape.

The technology to create such a thing was nothing short of miraculous. What was that ancient adage about advanced technology and magic? He couldn’t remember.

If the Sh’daar possessed such knowledge, however . . .

Something didn’t add up. Beings that could create the TRGA weren’t merely good magicians. They were gods, or the closest things to gods mere humans could imagine. If the Sh’daar possessed such power, they didn’t need to rely on the Turusch or their other subject species, and they would have been able to win the war moments after delivering their ultimatum.

Why fight this protracted war for almost forty years, when such technology could wipe Humankind out of existence with scarcely a thought?

There was something important here, but Gray couldn’t place his finger on it. His fighter, falling free, was accelerating, moving faster and faster as the maw of the TRGA cylinder yawned ahead, the opening empty and utterly lightless.

Fifty more seconds, at this rate, and he would be drawn inside.

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Inbound, Texaghu Resch System

1758 hours, TFT

“It’s time,” Koenig said with careful deliberation, “that you . . . you people level with us. I want to know about the Sh’daar.”

Though he was still in America’s CIC, Koenig had linked through to the quarters maintained for the two Agletsch. They shared a virtual reality now that, to Koenig’s senses, appeared to be a city on their home planet, a forest of loaf-shaped towers stretching as far as the eye could see, with swarming thousands of their kind in the distance. Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde stood before him, their bodies half-immersed in a sunken pool filled with a glistening black liquid.

“We have told you, Admiral, what we can,” Dra’ethde said, “as we agreed with your government on Earth.”

“Little is known about the Sh’daar masters,” Gru’mulkisch added, “yes-no?”

“Have a look at this, then,” Koenig replied, and he channeled a portion of the transmission from the recon flight in close to the TRGA artifact—of a wall of silver-gray shapes flashing in the light of the nearby sun, moving in perfect formation. “They came out of that cylinder, and they probably destroyed a reconnaissance probe we had in there, studying the thing.

“Right now, I have thirty-six of my fighters in there facing that mass of hostiles. We won’t know what the outcome will be for hours, yet, and this fleet is headed straight into that swarm. I want to know if those ships are Sh’daar, I want to know if you’ve seen this sort of vessel before, and I want to know how to defeat them.”

“Defeating them . . . this is the true problem you face, yes-no?” Gru’mulkisch’s electronically translated voice could not carry emotion—and reading the emotions of such an alien being was impossible in any case. But the brightly patterned beings both seemed to sag, somewhat, and the colors of their velvety integument seemed to fade. Gru’mulkisch actually began to hunker down deeper in the pool, letting the liquid cover all but part of her carapace and her four weaving, stalked eyes.

“The Sh’daar have dominated much of the galaxy for tens of thousands of your years,” Dra’ethde added. “If there is a way to defeat them, someone would have found it by now.”

Koenig considered the two Agletsch. What the hell were they soaking in, anyway, and why? His request to link with them in virtual reality had not been refused . . . as it would have been had they been eating. Agletsch mores prohibited them from feeding in public—all in all a good thing so far as humans were concerned, because reportedly they ate by extruding a portion of one of their stomachs through an opening in their abdomen. At the moment, they appeared to be bathing—or at least soaking in some sort of liquid, though whether that was for hygiene, relaxation, or something else entirely was impossible to judge. Not only that, but this evidently was a simulation for them as well, since the background showed an Agletsch city. There was no way of knowing what they might actually be doing, locked away in their quarters.

Self-evidently, nonhumans did not think the same as did humans. Their mores—what they considered right or wrong, proper or improper, normal or scandalous—all were shaped by wildly different biologies and psychologies. They were, in short, alien . . . and the human who tried to understand them from a strictly human perspective was going to get it wrong.

They appeared genuinely to believe that fighting against the Sh’daar was a hopeless pursuit. But was that a core belief, a superficial assumption . . . or possibly a means of hiding the truth?

Or might it be something even more profound, a completely different way, an alien way, of looking at the universe?

And perhaps the Agletsch version of truth was something humans would not even recognize.

“Do you recognize these ships?” Koenig demanded.

“They are . . . of Sh’daar origin,” Dra’ethde said.

An odd way to phrase it. “Our AIs have analyzed their movement, and suggest that they are being run by a sophisticated artificial intelligence. Is that true?”

“Those ships are not ‘manned,’ as you would use the term.” Gru’mulkisch sounded uncomfortable, hesitant. Her translated voice was still clear, however, although her translator was completely submerged.

“Robots? Or are they teleoperated?”

“ ‘Teleoperated’ is what, please?”

“Operated from a distance. Remote control.”

“Ah. We would say . . . they are piloted by ghosts.”

Koenig gave a sharp snort, an explosive sound of surprise mingled with disbelief. “Whose ghosts? Sh’daar?”

“Exactly. You comprehend.”

“No. I do not comprehend. Either those ships have flesh-and-blood pilots in them, they’re being piloted by AIs, or they’re being remote-controlled. Which the hell is it?”

“ ‘The hell’ is what, please?”

Koenig hesitated. Within the mix of cultures that made up the Terran Confederation, trying to convert someone to your religious beliefs was illegal, and simply talking about religion with someone who didn’t share your views was considered to be extremely ill-mannered. The Agletsch wouldn’t have the same taboos, of course . . . likely they didn’t have religion as humans understood the term. But for humans the word ghost carried a lot of baggage, with distinctly religious implications suggesting the survival of some noncorporeal aspect of a being after death, the soul or spirit or life force, whatever you cared to call it.

“A human expression,” he said. “One of exasperation . . . and anger if you don’t give me the information I require. Those are Sh’daar ships?”

“They are of Sh’daar origin.”

“Meaning what? The Sh’daar built them?”

“We are traders in information,” Dra’ethde said, “as you are aware. We do not deal in . . . stories. You would say . . . fiction? Fantasies?”

“Right now,” Koenig said, “neither do I. I want the truth.”

“The truth,” Gru’mulkisch pointed out, “is often of uncertain form, and may vary depending on who is speaking it. Yes-no?”

“Yes,” Koenig said. “On that point we agree.”

“We know little about the Sh’daar that can be confirmed,” Dra’ethde said. “We’ve told you and your fellows this on many occasions. Most of what we know about the Sh’daar is . . . supposition? Assumption?”

“It is difficult to separate the truth from wild speculation,” Gru’mulkisch added.

“Then tell me the speculation,” Koenig told them.

“This would not be what you term ‘hard data,’ you understand. We cannot judge its truthfulness.”

“Tell me.”

“It is possible,” Dra’ethde said, “that the Sh’daar are extinct, have been extinct for far longer than the Chelk.

“But what was left behind—their ghost, if you will—continues to govern the galaxy.”