Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three

Chapter Three

10 April 2405

VFA-44

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1715 hours, TFT

“Things are about to go supercritical,” Gray said over the squadron tac channel. “Reconfigure to sperm mode.”

The SG-92 Starhawk’s outer hull consisted of a matrix of conventional metals and ceramics blended with nano-molecules controlled by an electrical field projected by his ship’s AI. Launch configuration was a slender needle with a swollen central area housing the cockpit, designed for magnetic acceleration down the launch tube. Combat configuration looked a bit like a headless bird with down-canted wings, providing widely separated weapons and sensor platforms useful in a fight.

Sperm mode was fighter-slang for high-velocity configuration—a blunt-nosed egg shape with a long, tapering tail. The old, conventional wisdom that said that spacecraft didn’t need to be streamlined in the vacuum of space broke down when the vessel could approach the speed of light. At those speeds every little bit helped.

Gray didn’t know what was going to happen in the next few moments, but he did know that their survival would depend upon their speed and their maneuverability.

The twelve Starhawks had been patrolling in combat mode, but now their wings began folding in toward their bodies, their black surfaces turning cold-molten and flowing like thick water. They were drifting along the no-cross line, an empty region of space defined by its distance, 100,000 kilometers, from the America.

The heavy cruiser Valley Forge was only five kilometers off his starboard side at the moment, three quarters of a kilometer long, a slender stem behind an outsized forward cap shaped like a flattened dome. To the naked eye, she appeared slightly blurred and indistinct. Shield technology involved bending space sharply above and around a ship’s hull, and that bending caused light to twist. When an incoming projectile or thermonuclear detonation struck the field projected across a warship’s outer hull, that spatial warping momentarily became much stronger, deflecting the threat. Gravitic shielding was costly in terms of energy, however, and was generally switched on only when combat was imminent. Koenig, clearly, was taking no chances; high-velocity kinetic rounds could come slamming out of the darkness with little to no warning at all, and all ships in the battlegroup were at the highest possible alert status.

According to the tactical display, Jeanne d’Arc and the eleven other capital ships of the Pan-European contingent were a scant half million kilometers away, drawing ever closer.

“Hey . . . Skipper?” It was Shay Ryan, on a private channel.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t like the idea of shooting at our own guys, y’know?”

“Neither do I, Lieutenant.”

“If we get shot up way out here, it’s going to make fighting the Sh’daar, or getting home, a hell of a lot harder.”

“The brass’ll figure something out,” he told her. “They know a lot more about what’s happening than we do.”

He wished he felt that confident, though. Koenig was a good officer and a brilliant strategist, Gray thought, but he shared with most fighter pilots a measure of distrust for the men and women who made the tough choices in the relative safety of the CIC. Sure, their lives were on the line if the capital ships came under attack, but they weren’t out here, crammed inside a gravfighter with nothing but speed, maneuverability, and skill between you and the enemy’s incoming rounds.

He found himself wondering just what the battlegroup could do if Giraurd tried to push things. A traditional shot across their bows? And what if they called the bluff and kept coming? He called up a battlespace view, imagery transmitted from one of the thousands of robotic drones now dispersed throughout this region of space, for a closer look at the enemy.

There she was . . . the Jeanne d’Arc, a light star carrier, perhaps three quarters of the mass of America. Like all Alcubierre Drive ships, she had the same general design—slender spine aft, large, flattened dome forward. The shield cap had been painted blue and white, a sharp contrast with the sandblasted gray-black of America’s prow. Her name and number appeared pristine, newly painted. According to the warbook, the Jeanne d’Arc didn’t have America’s twin launch tubes running through the center of the shield cap. Instead, she possessed a single high-energy particle cannon, which gave her a formidable long-range bombardment capability above and beyond the punch carried by her fighters.

A whale swimming with minnows, the Jeanne d’Arc was accompanied by a cloud of fighters, tiny blue motes moving in her shadow.

Gray didn’t immediately recognize the Pan-European fighters, and had to pull an ID up on his warbook: Franco-German KRG-17 Raschadler fighters. He felt himself relax slightly. The Raschadler was roughly equivalent to the USNA SG-55 War Eagle, a design about twenty years old. They didn’t have the delta-V of Starhawks, the endurance, or the warload capability, and they didn’t possess the Starhawk’s high-tech ability to change its configuration for launch, for high-velocity travel, or for combat. In head-to-head knife fights with the Pan-Europeans, the Dragonfire Starhawks would come out on top every time. The problem was that no one wanted such a confrontation in the first place, least of all, Gray was certain, Koenig.

How could CBG-18 stop the Pan-Europeans without destroying their ships or risking the destruction of their own?

He zoomed in closer, magnifying the image. The Raschadler fighters were obviously positioned to prevent CBG-18’s fighters from getting close to the carrier’s central spine—the weapons sponsons and rotating hab modules and drop bays tucked away just aft of the shield cap.

Just ahead of the Jeanne d’Arc was a tiny, blurred tumble of distortion—the projected drive singularity that was pulling the giant through space.

The ship’s gravitic shields would be down on the forward cap, to enable the field projectors to create the singularity, a tightly knotted distortion of space.

And Gray thought he saw a way. . . .

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1732 hours, TFT

“Admiral?”

“Yes, CAG?”

“One of our people came up with something. Thought you should see it.”

Koenig read the downloaded text, transcribed from a pilot’s laser-com transmission. “Lieutenant Gray?” Koenig asked.

“Yes, sir. Acting CO of VFA-44.”

“I remember. Hero at the Defense of Earth . . . and again at Alphekka. He knows his shit.”

“Yes, sir. And his idea might work. Gives us something to go on, anyway.”

“We’ve got nothing better,” Koenig said. “Okay. Mr. Sinclair? Pass the word to all ships, tight beam and quantum encoded. Jeanne d’Arc will be the first target. We won’t hit the others unless this doesn’t work and they keep coming.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

Koenig, an avid military historian, smiled. Lieutenant Gray, he thought, knew a secret first uncovered by an aviator back in the days of fabric-winged biplanes and oceangoing navies, a man named General Billy Mitchell.

“It appears,” Koenig said, “that our fighters are going to earn their pay today, David-and-Goliath style.”

“David and who, sir?” Sinclair sounded puzzled.

“Never mind.”

Since the passage of the White Covenant, in the late twenty-first century, the religious beliefs or training of others—or the lack of such—was no one’s business. Technically, it was only against the law to try to convert someone else, but in practice it was considered bad manners even to make a casual religious comment, or to make a reference to religious mythology.

“Our boys and girls out there are going to need something more than a sling,” Wizewski said quietly. The CAG, Koenig recalled, was religious, a member of some small and semi-fundamentalist Christian sect. There were so many nowadays it was impossible to keep track.

“Amen to that, CAG,” Koenig said quietly, so no one else would hear. “Amen to that. . . .”

CIC

TC/PE CVS Jeanne d’Arc

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1739 hours, TFT

Grand Admiral Francois Giraurd studied the pattern of colored icons unfolding in the tactical display tank. Koenig would have to capitulate. He had no other sane option.

“Sir,” his tactical officer said. “We cross their line in twelve minutes.”

“Very well.”

“Sir . . . do you intend to attack?”

“It won’t come to that, Lieutenant. We will cross their line, they will scatter and refuse to confront us, and we will put our boarding party across. And then . . .”

“Sir?”

“And then we go home.”

They were ninety-eight light years from Earth, farther than any human had ever before voyaged. The emptiness, the darkness scattered with myriad unknown suns and civilizations, filled him with foreboding and a brooding sense of agitation, even fear. Humans didn’t belong out here, not in a galaxy already staked out and claimed by millions of other technic cultures.

He magnified the image in the tank. “What ship is that?”

“The Valley Forge,” the tactical officer told him. “One hundred fifty thousand tons.”

“Target to disable her,” Giraurd said. “Power systems and weapons. We will push past her, then, and engage the America.”

“The cruiser is accompanied by a number of fighters.”

“Those are of no consequence. If they get too close, destroy them.”

“Our orders, sir, are to effect Koenig’s surrender without causing damage to their ships, or causing casualties.”

“We will damage them as little as possible, cause as few casualties as possible. But I see no other way of reaching the America, do you?”

“No, Grand Admiral.”

“Direct our fighter escort to move out ahead of us,” Giraurd said. “They will be our wedge to sweep the enemy aside. Order them to fire only if they are fired upon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And accelerate to combat speed.”

“Yes, Grand Admiral.”

Giraurd smiled. They would end this standoff soon enough. Koenig was a fool if he thought he could make military policy for the Confederation. The Jeanne d’Arc would push through Koenig’s outer screen, close with America, and put boarding parties across to capture Koenig and take command of his fleet.

And then they could all go home.

VFA-44

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1748 hours, TFT

“Here they come!” Gray called. “Their fighters are deploying ahead of the carrier, and they’re accelerating!”

“Hold position, Dragonfires,” Wizewski’s voice said in his head. “We’re doing it by the book.”

“Holding, aye, sir. . . .”

By the book meant a warning shot, a formal nicety in which modern naval vessels rarely engaged. Generally, the idea was to launch an attack, all-out, complete and devastating, zorching in before the enemy was even aware that your forces were in the area, with missiles and kinetic kill impactors coming in just behind the light announcing their arrival.

He switched to the tactical channel. “All ships! Engage squadron taclink.”

Gray and the other pilots each focused their thoughts, connecting with their fighters’ artificial intelligences. The twelve fighter craft were interconnected now by laser-optic feeds linking their onboard computers into a single electronic organism.

The Valley Forge was pivoting slightly now, bringing her main battery, a spinal-mount CPG, to bear. A moment later, she fired—a burst of tightly focused high-energy-charged particles invisible to the unaided eye but showing clearly on Gray’s instruments and on his visual display. The beam burned past the shield cap of the Jeanne d’Arc, missing the carrier by less than a hundred meters.

“Jeanne d’Arc,” Koenig’s voice said over the fleet channel. “That was a warning. Change course immediately, or we will take you under fire.”

“You’re not going to fire on Confederation vessels,” Giraurd’s voice came back. “Surrender and save your people, and your reputation.”

“Dragonfires!” Wizewski’s voice snapped. “You are weapons free. Go!”

“That’s it, Dragons!” Gray called. “Maximum acceleration in three . . . two . . . one . . . now!”

Twelve Starhawk fighters leaped past the challenge line, hurtling toward the oncoming Pan-European warships. The range was just under 480,000 kilometers. At fifty thousand gravities they closed the gap in just forty seconds.

A typical strike fighter mission had the fighters zorching through an enemy formation at high velocity after a long period of acceleration. This was different, however, with only a relatively short distance for acceleration before the fighters reached the target. The squadron’s newbies hadn’t practiced this sort of tight, close-quarters maneuvering in training sims, and they were going to be making mistakes.

Gray just hoped none of those mistakes would be fatal.

“Jink!” he yelled over the tactical channel. “All Dragonfires, jink!”

By throwing drive singularities to left, right, above, and below at random, they could jerk their fighters around enough to fox enemy targeting AIs as they continued to close the range.

On the tactical display, the Pan-European fighters had leaped forward, seeking to head the Starhawks off.

“Ignore the fighters,” Gray told the squadron. “Stay on the carrier!”

“They’re firing! Missiles incoming!”

Missiles streaked out from the incoming fighters, curving to meet the fast-moving Starhawks.

“Don’t let it rattle you,” Gray said, suppressing the trembling surge of fear he was feeling. “Stay on course. Stay on the carrier. . . .”

White light flared, dazzling and silent in the darkness. The Dragonfires flashed through expanding clouds of plasma, emerging . . . and then the two clouds of fighters interpenetrated, passing through each other in an instant.

The Jeanne d’Arc and her consorts lay just ahead. . . .

CIC

TC/PE CVS Jeanne d’Arc

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1748 hours, TFT

“Harrison has betrayed us,” Hans Westerwelle said, bitterly. “He warned Koenig, somehow.”

“We don’t know that,” Giraurd replied. “I . . . agree that he was less than eager to open the dialogue with Koenig.”

“ ‘Less than eager’? The Englander swine fought the idea tooth and nail. Koenig was his friend. We should investigate Harrison when this is over, and see where his true loyalties lie.”

The plan to have the three British ships pretend to join Koenig’s squadron had been Westerwelle’s. He was the European fleet’s political officer, a civilian appointed by Geneva to maintain loyalty and an acceptable level of enthusiasm within the Federation’s ranks.

The first nuclear-tipped missiles were detonating in brilliant, savage silence across the CIC’s forward view screens. They were unlikely to cause more than superficial damage to the incoming fighters, but they might deter, might force the enemy squadron commander to break off.

“Enemy fighters are still approaching from dead ahead!” the tactical officer called. “They’re at seventy percent of c and accelerating!”

“Engage point defense!” the Jeanne d’Arc’s captain ordered. “Fight them off!”

Giraurd sat back in his command chair, watching the CIC and bridge crews carry out their routines. It had been months since the Jeanne d’Arc had been in combat, and many in her crew were new to the ship, having come aboard just before the flotilla had left for Alphekka. It would be interesting to see how well they did in this, their first exercise that was not a drill. Her captain, Charles Michel, had seen action during the Defense of Earth, but he was Belgian rather than French, and Giraurd wasn’t sure he trusted the man.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of officers on board he didn’t entirely trust. Sawicki, the tactical officer, was a Pole. Mytnyk, the fighter wing commander, was Ukrainian, while the political officer, Westerwelle, was a German. And then there were the British, always a problem in European Federation politics.

The Pan-European Federation had been a superb idea on paper, but even now, more than 270 years after the Pax Confeoderata and more than 400 years after the Treaty of Maastricht, the idea of a union of European states sounded better than it worked. The Terran Confederation, it was said, was only as strong as its weakest members, and for all their public bravado, the Pan-Europeans rarely were able to show a solid or united front.

Of course, the North Americans had the same trouble—descendents of the old United States trying to show a common front with Canadians, Mexicans, and a clutter of tiny Central American states. Political unions simply didn’t work when the member states had more differences than similarities.

The odd thing about the situation was that threats from outside generally forced such unions to put aside internal differences and pull together; but if anything, the war with the Sh’daar had reawakened old animosities, infighting, and name-calling. The ancient cracks in the painted façade were showing, not only within the European Federation, but all throughout the realm of Humankind.

What was needed was a stronger government, a government with the resolve to force the disparate fragments of humanity into line. Politically, Giraurd was a Federationialist, a neosocialist political party calling for the final abolition of the old nationalist states and the creation of a genuine United Terra.

And that day was coming. Humankind had no choice but to unite in the face of the threat from outside. The first step was to crush the so-called independence movements in the USNA, and that meant bringing mavericks like Alexander Koenig into line. A united Humankind couldn’t afford individualists like Koenig or the right-wing political reactionaries remaining within the USNA’s government.

And so, in a way, the unification of mankind began here. “Hit them with everything we have, Mr. Sawicki,” he said.

Nuclear fire continued blossoming in stark and dazzling silence against the forward view screens.

VFA-44

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1749 hours, TFT

A European Federation Raschadler flashed past on Gray’s port side, a thousand kilometers distant, practically at point-blank range, though too distant and far too fast relative to him for him to pick it up optically. Their name meant “Swift Eagle,” but in space combat, it was how many gravities a drive could pull that counted, not the actual velocity. Where the USNA Starhawks could pull up to fifty thousand gravities—an incredible performance—the Raschadlers could manage only about two thousand Gs. Where Starhawks could be pushing the speed of light after ten minutes of acceleration, it took the older Swift Eagles over four hours to reach near-c.

Gray needed to use that superior acceleration now to outperform the European fighters.

Twenty seconds passed swiftly, and Gray gave the order to decelerate. The Starhawks, still in their acceleration configurations—teardrop-shaped with slender spikes astern to bleed off excess gravitic energy—began slowing at fifty thousand Gs.

Another twenty seconds passed, with the SG-92s jinking wildly to throw off the European anti-fighter defenses. In such a tight formation, there would have been a danger of some nasty high-velocity collisions if the twelve fighters hadn’t been electronically tied together.

The enemy fighters were trying to slow and reverse course, but it would take them a long time to come around. Too long . . .

“Let your AIs handle the rendezvous,” Gray told the others. “Going on automatic for final deceleration and maneuvering. . . .”

At ten thousand kilometers per second, there’d been no evidence to human eyes that the fighters had been moving at all. The stars hung motionless in space, a cold testament to their distance and the gulfs between them. But under that searing, AI-controlled deceleration, the Jeanne d’Arc, suddenly, magically, was there, hanging in the black sky directly ahead, and Gray could see with his own eyes the gleaming blue-and-white curve of her shield cap, the neat letters and numerals picking out her name and registry number.

She was five kilometers away, and the linked fighters were closing now at a relative velocity of a half a kilometer per second.

“Combat mode!” Gray called. “Target the shield cap!”

The Jeanne d’Arc was still accelerating, so her forward shields were down. Gray thoughtclicked an icon within his virtual in-head display, and opened up with a long burst from his Gatling RFK-90 kinetic-kill cannon. Firing with a cyclic rate of twelve per second, the Gatling loosed a stream of magnetic-ceramic jacketed slugs, each with a depleted uranium core massing half a kilo and traveling at 175 meters per second plus the 500 meters per second of the fighter’s relative closing velocity. That much mass traveling that fast possessed a kinetic-energy punch powerful enough to shred hardened steel and ceramic laminate; bright flashes of light walked across the shield, and almost instantly a dense, white mist appeared above the impacts—water gushing out into vacuum and freezing almost instantly, creating a glittering cloud of ice particles.

“Watch his drag!” Gray shouted over the squadron link. “Stay clear of his drive field!”

Gravitic drive ships moved by projecting an artificial gravitational singularity ahead of their bows, creating an intense and tightly focused black hole that flickered on and off thousands of times per second, allowing the ship to fall forward into an ever-receding gravitational well. A fighter getting too close to the singularity would be drawn in and crushed out of existence in an instant, a process called “spaghettification” because of the effect on ships and personnel as they were torn by close-in tidal effects. The Dragonfires whipped past the projected drive field, feeling the hard tug but applying acceleration of their own to counter it. The other fighters were firing their Gatlings now as well, ripping the Jeanne d’Arc’s shield cap into ragged fragments and geysering sprays of fast-freezing water.

Like the America, the Jeanne d’Arc carried some billions of liters of liquid water inside its shield cap, water that served both as radiation shielding when the carrier was moving close to c, and as a reserve of reaction mass for the ship’s maneuvering thrusters. As the shield cap’s double hull was shredded, that water poured into space. Within seconds, most of it was falling in gleaming streamers into a tight spiral around the flickering drive singularity.

Gray’s fighter fell past the shield cap now, and he could see the turning hab modules in the cap’s shadow; where America had three hab modules mounted on the end of rotating spokes, the smaller European carrier had two. He also spotted the bridge tower, a building-sized structure rising from the ship’s spine between the shield cap and the hab module collar.

Laser and particle-beam fire snapped out toward his fighter, invisible to the eye but painted on Gray’s tactical display by his AI. He jinked, then pressed in closer, matching the carrier’s acceleration so that he seemed to be hanging just above her spine.

“Jeanne d’Arc!” he called using the general fleet frequency. “This is Dragon One, off the USNA America! Unless you want to lose your bridge and CIC, I suggest that you break off your attack run.”

There was silence for a long handful of seconds. The carrier’s hab modules and bridge tower were shielded, of course; he could see the faint blurring of edges where the gravitic shielding twisted light. But a nuke or a determined particle-beam attack could overload those shields or destroy their projection wave guides, and then the carrier’s vital nerve centers would be defenseless.

On the other hand, the Jeanne d’Arc had point-defense turrets that were doing their best to hit him. This close to the carrier’s spine, they were having trouble reaching him, but they were trying to hit the other fighters in the squadron as they moved in closer. A stream of KK rounds reached out and caught Dragon Eight—Lieutenant Will Rostenkowski’s ship—sending it into a helpless tumble.

“Jeanne d’Arc!” Gray barked again. “Cease fire and cease acceleration or I’m going to put a hundred megatons right on your bridge tower!”

“Don’t shoot, Dragon One,” a voice said over the fleet channel. “We will comply.”

He had to back out of his safe pocket, then, or risk hurtling into the underside of the carrier’s shield cap when the Jeanne d’Arc cut her acceleration. It could have been a trick, a ruse designed to pull him out of his pocket . . . but the other Dragonfires were in close now, and the Pan-Europeans evidently had no desire for a stand-up fight.

Gray’s threat to use nukes had been pure bluff, of course. A Krait missile going off at such close range would probably have burned through the carrier’s bridge shielding, but definitely would have vaporized Gray’s fighter.

“America CIC,” he called, “Dragon One. Hostile carrier has ceased acceleration.”

“Well done, Dragonfires,” Wizewski’s voice called back. “Keep them in your sights. California and Saskatchewan are on the way to take over.”

“Copy that. He hesitated. “We also need a rescue SAR. One casualty.”

Rostenkowski was no longer transmitting. His ship had been smashed; he might have survived the impact, but a search-and-rescue tug would have to match courses with him and drag him back to be sure.

He watched as Jeanne d’Arc continued to bleed water into space.

How, he wondered, was Koenig going to handle this one? . . .