Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three

Chapter Sixteen

30 June 2405

Lieutenant Shay Ryan

VFA-44

TRGA, Texaghu Resch System

1348 hours, TFT

It was too late now for doubts or self-searching. The fighter swarm accelerated.

Shay Ryan had little to do but watch. Her fighter’s AI was controlling her approach to the tunnel’s opening, keeping her rigidly locked in tight formation with the other Dragonfires.

“Stick to the oplan,” Donovan said over the squadron tactical channel. “Let your AIs thread the way through. Be prepared for a blackout. Your screens will switch to maximum, all wavelengths, three seconds before you emerge. Once your screens drop, keep your eyes open and be careful of your targets. No own goals.”

Shay worked to calm herself, to steady the trembling inside. It was going to be confusing as hell when they broke through, and no amount of training, no number of sims, no number of hours in the cockpit could possibly prepare you for the reality. Every fighter engagement she’d been in over the past months had been terrifying . . . and she knew that this one would be worse by far.

“Hey, Prim!” Lieutenant Kuhn called. “You should have stayed in sick bay!”

“Silence on-channel!” Donovan snapped.

Shay ignored the attempt at banter. Prim had been Trevor’s hated nickname. The bastards couldn’t even wait until he was officially declared KIA before handing out his squadron handle to someone else. . . .

No . . . focus on the mission. Kuhn and the others were her squadron mates. In a few more moments they’d be fighting the Sh’daar together . . . maybe dying together. . . .

The opening of the tunnel expanded rapidly . . . and then Shay was hurtling down a long tube with dark gray walls blurred by their rotation into a haze that hurt the eye. Time seemed . . . wrong. At her velocity, she should have traversed the tunnel in less than a second, but the seconds dragged on and on as the distant patch of shining stars very slowly grew larger.

She waited for her screens to switch to full. . . .

Bridge

TC/USNA CA(M) Ma’at Mons

TRGA, Texaghu Resch System

1348 hours, TFT

Captain John Grunmeyer sat on the Ma’at’s bridge, his acceleration chair overlooking the navigational systems station, the helm, and the weapons stations, as the hazy dark blur of the tunnel’s interior wrapped itself around them. Deck, bulkheads, and overhead currently all projected imagery gathered from the shield cap forward, creating the illusion that the bridge was open and exposed to empty space. “Release Volley One,” he said.

This was the tricky part . . . well, the first of several tricky parts, the biggest of which would be simply surviving the next few minutes. But it was the first step.

The Ma’at Mons possessed four rotating modules evenly spaced about her spine. Two were hab modules for the ship’s crew of eighty-four. The other two were missile stores and launch bays. Like the fighters dropped from America’s rotating bays, missiles could be released gently from the cruiser, set free into open space with an outward velocity of about five meters per second—the impulse derived from a rotational acceleration of half a gravity. With one complete rotation, a string of Boomslang missiles was put into place, a necklace encircling the bombardment vessel like a ring.

Data sent back from the hapless America fighter pilot who’d already fallen through the tunnel and reported back by message drone had told the mission planners what to expect—the strange apparent elongation of the tunnel as the Ma’at accelerated down its length, approaching at last the speed of light. The tightly clustered stars ahead had gradually smeared out into a high-velocity starbow, and still the tunnel seemed to go on and on and on. The boomslangs reached optimum separation from the ship, and their onboard AIs took control of their flight programs, arresting their outward drift, then beginning to move them forward, sliding past Ma’at Mons’ forward shield and into the space ahead. According to the data from Lieutenant Gray, they still had another ten subjective seconds.

At seven seconds, the missiles’ AIs punched it, accelerating at fifty thousand gravities, which, since they were already moving at near-c, meant they slowly dragged their way forward one kilometer . . . ten kilometers . . . fifty kilometers ahead of the bombardment vessel.

Then they hit the programmed screen engagement point, with five seconds to go, and the ship’s screens slammed to full.

Despite the fact that all incoming electromagnetic radiation was now being blocked by the vessel’s electromagnetic screens, the image of the tunnel’s weirdly distorted interior remained. Telescoping antennae mounted around the shield cap’s rim and extended above the hull-hugging flow of the ship’s defensive screens continued to send in visual images from outside, distorted by the high velocity.

Grunmeyer didn’t expect that to last for much longer, however. In another few seconds . . .

Four VG-120 Boomslang missiles approached the far end of the tunnel and detonated in perfect unison, mutiple fireballs erupting within the kilometer-wide confines of the TRGA opening while they were still traveling at within a percent or so of the speed of light. The blast—radiant heat and hard radiation, together with the plasma that originally had been the eight-meter-long hulls of the missiles themselves—emerged from the tunnel in a star-hot eruption of apocalyptic white fury. The detonation was like a shotgun blast, and any Sh’daar ships or facilities in front of the TRGA opening would have been vaporized in an instant.

Those first four warheads had been precisely timed to explode just inside the TRGA cylinder’s entrance, before they could be crumpled by the enemy’s matter-compression weapons. The next twelve missiles emerged in a ring just less than a kilometer across, entering a searing storm of high-energy plasma that in effect masked them from the enemy’s momentarily blinded sensors. Much of a Boomslang’s mass was in its shielding, which was designed to let it penetrate planetary atmospheres from orbit at high velocity without burning up and disintegrating. That shielding, along with their electromagnetic screening, protected their internal circuitry and the resident AIs from the surrounding firestorm for the precious second or two necessary for each missile to swing onto a new course, swinging around through 90 degrees and traveling out at right angles from the length of the rotating cylinder.

Koenig and his tactical staff had decided that the likeliest location of any Sh’daar warships, fortresses, or guardian monitors protecting the Omega Centauri end of the TRGA would be beyond and even behind the opening. As each missile emerged from the expanding cloud of radiation, their sensors picked up the nearest potential military targets and accelerated, hard. They’d lost much of their velocity as they emerged from the tunnel into normal space, a phenomenon similar to the velocity bleed-off of ships emerging from the bubbles of the Alcubierre Drive. The course change and high-grav boost sent them streaking into the clouds of waiting alien starships faster than organic senses could have recorded it.

The missile AIs, operating far more swiftly than organic nervous systems, located and identified the enemy targets, homed in on them, and detonated. Fresh nuclear firestorms erupted in empty space, blotting out the star-packed sky and etching in the TRGA cylinder in harsh, actinic radiance.

And alien warships began dying in the thousands, the tens of thousands, before they could react and trigger their own weapons.

Grunmeyer and his officers could only wait and watch from the bridge of their missile cruiser, able only to glimpse what was happening through the signals relayed back from the Boomslangs ahead. They saw the flashes, glimpsed massed hosts of enemy vessels . . . and then Ma’at Mons had passed through the tunnel opening and plunged into the expanding nuclear fireball engulfing a fifty-kilometer sphere of space beyond.

“Multiple targets!” Commander Hugh Conrad called. But the imagery surrounding the ship’s bridge was already failing, flickering out in large sections, as the antennae mounted on the ship’s shield cap burned away in the fireball.

“Volley fire!” Grunmeyer yelled in response, and missiles, dozens of them, spilled from rotating weapons bays, or lanced into darkness from launch tubes mounted beneath the shield cap and radiating from the vessel’s spine. The bridge projection screens were completely dark, now, the ship in effect cut off from the universe outside.

Seconds trickled past, and then the bombardment vessel’s EM screens went partially transparent again. The bridge team looked back into unimaginable nuclear chaos. As expected, there were vast numbers of alien ships—most of them the silver-gray leaf shapes moving in enormous, twisting sphere formations . . . but other vessels were visible as well, alien designs never yet seen and catalogued by humans.

Visible too was a trio of massive structures fifty kilometers from the tunnel and spaced about it equidistantly, armored planetoids positioned as semi-mobile space fortresses to cover the tunnel mouth. But Ma’at Mons’ missiles were striking home, blast upon blast upon utterly silent and fiercely radiating blast, consuming ships and structures in a rippling wave of devastation. One of the fortresses had been badly hit already, and white flashes were hammering at the others.

And even as they watched, more missiles emerged from the tunnel opening, curving around to home in on the surrounding enemy fleet.

“Independent fire,” Grunmeyer called. “Pour it on the bastards!”

The enemy, clearly, had been caught by surprise, but they were recovering now. A second missile cruiser, the Gurrierre, emerged from the tunnel, her velocity damping down to almost nothing in a flash of light momentarily brighter and more dazzling than the fireball of nuclear plasma around her, her hull obscured by the white radiance sleeting off of her screens and shields. As Grunmeyer and the other bridge officers watched, half of the Pan-European ship’s shield cap vanished, crumpled by Sh’daar matter-compression beams. Water exploded from the sheared-off wreckage as the Gurrierre, its gravitic drive disabled, began to tumble, trailing streams of broken wreckage.

“We’re under attack, Captain,” Conrad reported. “Multiple targets, incoming.”

“Keep firing! Everything we have!”

The Ma’at Mons shuddered, the bridge lights dimming for a moment before coming back on-line.

“Hit to our main drive complex,” Lieutenant Anders, at the damage control station reported. Her voice was steady and calm. “Main singularity inducers off-line.”

“Point defenses operational and on automatic,” Conrad added.

At this point, there was painfully little for Grunmeyer or his staff to do, save monitor the battle’s progress. The Ma’at herself was fighting the engagement now, her AI controlling the ship’s defensive fire suites while continuing to release and direct her fast-dwindling store of nuclear-tipped missiles. The last of her Boomslang warload was gone; now she was firing the smaller VG-92 Kraits, the same anti-ship missiles that were carried by fighters. Massed banks of hull turrets loosed invisible laser and charged particle beams and clouds of anti-missile sand at the oncoming alien fighters.

The Ma’at Mons shuddered violently as she took another hit. In the distance, other ships were emerging from the tunnel. The Cheng Hua emerged close on the heels of the Gurrierre and immediately began taking heavy fire from the circling cloud of enemy ships. Behind the Chinese bombardment vessel, the destroyers Trumbull and Ishigara dropped into normal space, dumping energy in a blaze of light, and two more destroyers, the Santiago and the Fletcher, emerged close behind them.

The three bombardment vessels were loosing volley upon volley of nuclear-tipped missiles; the destroyers mounted heavy missiles as well, but were targeting the three fortresses with particle beams and laser fire. The fireball by the mouth of the tunnel by now had dissipated, expanding rapidly into ragged invisibility, but fresh nuclear detonations flashed and strobed in an expanding ring encircling the TRGA opening. It was imperative that the enemy fighters closest to the tunnel be destroyed before the big carriers started coming through. The fighters should emerge first. . . .

And there they were! Flying in close-knit formation, Starhawk fighters whipped around their singularities to fall into new vectors, hurtling into the densest clouds of alien vessels. Both sides, Grunmeyer could see, were taking heavy casualties.

And then the Ma’at Mons came under direct attack from a squadron of four alien vessels. Grunmeyer didn’t recognize them; they weren’t listed in the Ma’at’s warbook, though their mass and overall length—one to two hundred meters—suggested that they were similar to Confederation frigates or destroyers. A savage explosion vaporized a portion of the Ma’at’s shield cap as she turned to face the new threat, and alarms shrilled throughout the vessel.

This would not, could not go on for very much longer.

Lieutenant Shay Ryan

VFA-44

TRGA, Texaghu Resch System

1349 hours, TFT

“Here we go!” Donovan’s voice called over the tactical net, the words slightly garbled by the relativistic distortions within the wormhole’s shaft. “Lights out!”

Ahead was a glaring ring of blue light, the radiance from the far end of the tunnel focused into a ring by her speed. And then her screens came up to full and the glare winked out, leaving her alone within a darkness relieved only by the gleam of her cockpit lights and instrumentation.

Shay found herself wondering about the workings of the tunnel. It was definitely a two-way transport device. What would happen if she met someone coming through from the other side, from the opposite direction?

Then she decided that she didn’t want to know. There was fear enough attached to the thought of what was waiting for them at the other end of this impossible tunnel. She was gripping both arms of her seat with a fierce determination laced with terror. By now, the Confederation missile ships and destroyers up ahead should have engaged the enemy, should have blanketed the tunnel exit with nuclear flame, but there was no way to know. She continued to hurtle through empty darkness, dreading the touch of a Sh’daar beam. If one hit her, if it even grazed her ship, she would never feel it, she knew, but the agony of waiting dragged on through the slow-passing seconds.

She must be out of the tunnel by now. Her screens were drawing energy from her power tap, drawing at a torrential rate. She must be passing through the expected fireball, shedding the ambient radiation and star-hot plasma as she slowed.

And then the universe outside winked on once more.

She plowed through a sea of radiant plasma. Around her, above, below, and to every side, ships crumpled and burned, shields and screens failing, wreckage tumbling, new detonations flaring against a night packed solid with a background of tightly massed stars. Directly ahead, the destroyer Santiago, half of her length sheered away, tumbled helplessly as swarms of alien fighters descended on her helpless corpse.

In past battles, the capital ships of CBG-18 had survived by making high-velocity passes of enemy fleets or armored facilities, turning the target acquisition, tracking, and firing of the weapons over to AIs with far swifter reflexes than humans. At high speed, ships were hard to track, harder to hit, and even a badly damaged ship would be carried by its residual velocity clear of the battlespace.

This time, however, that particular defensive charm was not available. Ships emerging from the tunnel wormhole lost most of their transit velocity as they emerged into normal space, shedding excess energy in dazzling eruptions of light, which suggested that, as with the Alcubierre Drive, it was the space within the tunnel that was moving at near-c, not the ships themselves. When they emerged, they dropped back to velocities of a few hundred meters per second, a relative snail’s pace that left them slow and vulnerable targets. The enemy’s defensive fire was concentrating on the larger vessels—particularly on the three bombardment ships.

The fighters, however, could accelerate at fifty thousand gravities, which meant that in one second they could cover five hundred kilometers. They actually had to rein themselves in, or they would have been well outside of the battle zone in an instant; their acceleration did, however, give them tremendous maneuverability within the close confines of this battlespace, and made them extremely difficult to hit.

Shay brought her Starhawk in to within a few kilometers of an alien vessel—what amounted to point-blank range—and triggered two quick bursts. The target, a flattened silvery egg fifty meters long, deflected the first shot with its shields, but seemed to be jolted by the second. Debris hurtled away from a crater gouged into its surface.

Nearby enemy ships opened fire, but Shay’s fighter was already in motion once more, ducking back, twisting, returning, darting, taking advantage of her ship’s maneuverability. Again and again, she zorched through enemy formations, savaging them, tearing them apart, scattering them as she hammered at them with particle beams and close-range Gatling rounds. Targets at longer ranges were prey for her Krait missiles. Again and again she thoughtclicked distant targets, then released salvos of the nuclear-tipped smart hunter-killers. Light flooded the surrounding cosmos.

Her AI monitored her commands closely. Twice, it blocked her attempt to fire an instant before a friendly fighter moved into her line of fire. And once it refused an order to change course because the maneuver would have resulted in her fighter slamming into the hull of an alien vessel as big as a Confederation battleship.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she yelled as her Starhawk hurtled clear of the battle, missing the intended target.

“The requested maneuver would have resulted in this fighter’s destruction,” her AI replied, its voice infuriatingly calm and precise in her head.

“Well then you fly the thing!” she demanded. She didn’t know now whether she was feeling rage or terror. Maybe it was both . . . but she felt as though she was at the breaking point.

“Human pilots,” the AI replied, still with that maddening calm, “are more flexible, more creative, and better able to choose surprising tactics than artificially intelligent systems. The ideal is for human and machine to work together in close symbiosis. . . .”

But Shay wasn’t listening. She’d spotted three leaf-fighters that were themselves pursuing a Starhawk from the Impactors, twisted her fighter around, and dropped into a trailing intercept vector. Voices called and crackled through the flame-seared void.

“Impact Seven! This is Impact Seven! I have three fish on my tail!”

“Hang on, Seven!” Shay called. “I’m on ’em!”

“Get them off!”

Too far for Gatlings, too close for missiles. As she focused on the lead enemy fighter, she thoughtclicked a command to engage her PBP, and saw the fighter explode on her high-mag imaging. She shifted targets, locked . . . fired. At the same instant, Impactor Seven flipped end for end, flying backward as he opened up with his Gatling on the remaining alien fighter, ripping it apart with a high-velocity stream of kinetic-kill rounds.

She shifted vectors yet again, letting her attention sweep throughout the entire volume of space surrounding her. Combat required a constant balance of the pilot’s attention between the tightly focused and the broad and panoramic sweep. Without complete situational awareness, you could get into serious trouble very swiftly indeed.

She loosed another salvo of missiles, scoring a direct hit on an enemy warship the size of a large cruiser. Ahead, both the Gurrierre and the Cheng Hua appeared to be dead in space, surrounded by expanding bubbles of debris, glittering specks of ice from their onboard water supplies gushing into hard vacuum and freezing.

The glow from the initial nuclear bombardment was almost completely dissipated now, the stars in the surrounding background hard and brilliant. Some streamers, however, arced through the sky, following, perhaps, lines of magnetic force centered on the TRGA wormhole mouth.

Her AI directed her attention to another alien vessel of unknown design—similar to a Turusch Alpha-class battleship, but squatter and chunkier, and it was closing on the Cheng Hua.

Standard combat communications protocol required her to identify a target as she locked on . . . but this was, as fighter pilots liked to put it, a target-rich environment, so much so that the Confederation fire-control network was unable to label the enemy ships with identifying codes. The battle had very swiftly degenerated into an all-out melee, a furball beyond the ability of even the best and fastest AIs to direct.

Locking on to the massive alien, she triggered a Krait launch, shouting, “Fox One!” Lock, fire. “Fox One!”

The enemy battleship’s main batteries were firing into the Cheng Hua barely three hundred kilometers distant, now, ripping into the Hegemony missile cruiser’s flanks, knocking out her gravitic shields.

Then Shay’s missiles struck the alien from astern, the nuclear fireballs hammering down the big ship’s shields, penetrating her hull, then lighting her up from within. The aft quarter of the big vessel simply disintegrated, and the forward section began crumpling and twisting as the singularities of the vessel’s power plant chewed along the stricken warship’s spine. Pieces the size of skyscrapers tumbled away from the collapsing shell.

“Great shot, Shay!” someone yelled over the squadron net. She was startled to realize that it had been Lawrence Kuhn.

“This is Lightning Five! Santiago’s in trouble!”

“Five, One! See if you can brush those fish off her hull!”

Fish. Those swarming leaf-shaped fighters did look like schooling fish. And there were so many of them, too many, descending upon the crippled North American destroyer in gleaming, massed thousands. Shay threw her drive singularity to port and whipped around it in a tight vector change. Technically in free fall, she didn’t feel the crushing force of acceleration, but she skimmed close enough to the microsingularity that the fighter shrieked protest, and she felt the ominous, sickening pull of unbalanced tidal forces. Too close!

And too late! Santiago exploded, her remaining weapons load detonating in a silent, savage flash that took out thousands of enemy fighters.

Shay swore bitterly, then boosted her acceleration, slashing through the cloud of surviving enemy fighters, ripping at them with her Gatling cannon, screaming aloud as she plunged through the swirling silver-gray cloud.

More ships of the fleet were arriving, heavy cruisers, like the Russian Groznyy and the Brazilian Defensora. The railgun cruiser Kinkaid followed, closely shadowed by the frigates Brown, Vreeland, and Badger. One of the asteroid fortresses now was glowing white hot, its surface molten with the incessant nuclear bombardment from the incoming warships. The Sh’daar fleet appeared to be wavering, then breaking, with many of the smaller ships streaming off into the depths of the star cluster.

The door-kickers had delivered the kick . . . and now they had their foot through the door and solidly planted on the other side.

The big vessels, though, appeared to be hunkering down for a determined defense. An immense vessel, a reshaped planetoid two kilometers long, fell across her path, apparently trying to maneuver for a shot at the Ma’at Mons. Shay nudged her fighter into an intercept vector, targeting the flying mountain with her last five Krait missiles.

God! Had she run through her warload already? She’d started the fight with thirty-two missiles n her internal bays. She didn’t remember firing that many, didn’t remember engaging that many enemy ships. Those last VG-92s slipped from her bay, however, as she shouted a triumphant final “Fox One!”

The enemy’s gravitic shielding wasn’t quite as good as Confederation technology, one of the few areas in which the human forces had an advantage. Late-hour bull sessions in the squadron rec bay speculated endlessly about this, and on how outnumbered human pilots could best take advantage of it. Where screens used intense electromagnetic radiation to deflect incoming charged particle beams or radiation, shields used microsingularities to warp space immediately around a ship’s hull, a distortion that could deflect or scatter incoming beams, and rip warheads to shreds. The two worked together. An overloaded screen could leak enough joules from a PBP to vaporize exposed shield projectors, causing a partial failure. Space combat tactics emphasized hitting a shielded target with everything available to overwhelm its shields and cause significant damage.

Detonating a string of one-megaton nukes in close proximity to the target was an excellent way to achieve this.

The alien planetoid-ship was large enough, massive enough, and heavily shielded enough to shrug off three of Shay’s Krait missiles, but the fourth punched through and vaporized an immense white-glowing gouge into the mountain’s flank. The fifth, her last missile, exploded silently within the hot crater, punching through to a warren of chambers and passageways deep inside.

Atmosphere jetted into space, a powerful lateral rocket that put the damaged planetoid in an awkward tumble. Donovan’s Starhawk put two more Kraits into the wreck ten seconds later, and the blasts reduced the planetoid to a half dozen broken fragments falling outward from a blossoming flower of hot plasma.

The Sh’daar fighters, lightly shielded, many badly damaged, were in full retreat, now. Shay ignored them, concentrating instead on the enemy’s capital ships. There were at least a hundred of these, some of them enormous, and the human fleet was still seriously outnumbered.

And with no more nuclear weapons in her personal arsenal, Shay was limited in what she could do.

But more fighters were coming through the tunnel, now, squadrons from the United States of North America and the Lincoln and Illustrious. Her CPGs could still knock out enemy screens and render their shield projectors vulnerable . . . and if even one Sh’daar point-defense turret was tracking her, it wouldn’t be tracking one of the fresh and fully armed fighters.

She selected yet another target and vectored in. . . .