B009NFP2OW EBOK (28 page)

No matter. They would manage. By
God
they would manage!

Communications relays, throughout the USNA and in space, were being set up to allow Koenig and his people to communicate with the outside world—including with Geneva—without giving away their actual physical location.

There would be no repeat of Columbus. Koenig had vowed this.

That the damage to Columbus had been only a crater a half kilometer deep—well, thank the
Pittsburgh
, the
Amazon
and the
Missouri
for that blessing! Their last-ditch stand out in trans-lunar space had kept the rest of the warheads from reaching the ground, and had likely saved the USNA government from the Confederation’s attempt at political decapitation.

Whitney knocked on his open door, and Koenig looked up. “Ah, Marcus. Do we have a channel open to Roettgen yet?”

“No, sir. Not a word out of them. Intelligence thinks that maybe she was caught by surprise, that a rogue element fired that nano-D. If so, they must be scrambling like demons to cover their asses now.”

“We may be able to use that,” Koenig said. “We can believe them if they claim it was a rogue admiral launching that attack.”
Just like with the Chinese Hegemony almost three centuries ago
, he added, keeping the depressing thought to himself.
We give them a way to save face, to back away from their mistake . . . and maybe the human species survives for just a bit longer
.
At least until the
next
crisis
.

But damn it, just once it would be nice if a government could be held accountable for its actions.

“Yes, sir,” Whitney said. “But there’s other news.”

“Eh? What?” Until the command center’s communications network was fully up and working, Koenig couldn’t have automatic data feeds coming through to his in-head. It was frustrating how
slow
information could travel.

“A message drone came through from CBG-Forty a few hours ago. The signal just now reached Synchorbit, and was relayed non-Net to General Mancuso.”

And
that
gave a good indication of how screwed up communications could be, vital information coming in through private calls to his generals. The Hexagon had been damaged by the Confederation attack on Columbus, but not destroyed. Mancuso had most of his staff hidden away now down in the Hexagon’s labyrinthine subsurface warrens.

“Tell me.”

“Carrier Battlegroup Forty had a break with the rest of the task force at Thirty-six Ophiuchi. The Confederation elements are probably returning to the Sol System under the command of Captain Lavallée. Admiral Steiger is dead. So is Admiral Delattre. Captain Gray has taken command of the USNA ships and is en route to Seventy Ophiuchi.”

“Seventy fucking Ophiuchi!”
Koenig yelled, his voice ringing from the walls of the narrow room. “Why in God’s name is he going
there
?”

“We don’t have a lot of details, sir,” Whitney said. He sounded nervous in the face of Koenig’s fury. “But Gray reports that the Sh’daar appear to be massing at Osiris for a strike at Earth. He intends to launch a spoiling raid . . . maybe delay them, maybe make them think twice about even trying it.”

Koenig sank back in his chair, relief warring with rage. Damn it, he needed Gray and his ships
here
, not sixteen light years away at 70 Oph.

And yet, if he’d managed to block a Sh’daar strike at Earth . . .

He sighed. Even with ultra high-velocity message drones, it was impossible to manage a battlegroup light years away. When he’d commanded CBG-18 twenty years before, Koenig had often made use of that simple fact—the commanding officer on the scene knew the situation better, and had more up-to-the-second information, than the people watching from Earth and Mars. And now Gray was doing the same thing.

Koenig had to assume that Gray knew the situation better than even the president, his commander in chief . . . and that he would be making the best decisions possible, as determined by his unique experience and viewpoint.

And Gray’s call had probably been a good one. Earth’s military, certainly, had been watching the situation at 70 Ophiuchi since the system had fallen twenty years ago. That Sh’daar bastion thrust deep into the sphere of Terran space had been a constant threat, a possible staging area for a new strike at Earth. The Confederation had frequently reviewed plans for a counterattack, but somehow those plans always had been shelved. Other crises—not least of which were the political divisions and sparring within the Confederation itself—had always intervened.

Koenig remembered all too well the earlier Sh’daar raids two decades earlier—a Turusch raid that had resulted in tidal waves buffeting Earth’s Atlantic coastlines. And there’d been a later scouting expedition by a H’rulka vessel that
could
have turned out much more badly than it had.

Gray would remember those threats as well. He’d been there too, as had Koenig. But none of that helped Koenig here and now, with the Confederation suddenly at the USNA’s throat.

What was that old saying?
It doesn’t rain but it pours
. . . .

Of one thing he was sure. The USNA could not defeat both the Sh’daar
and
the Confederation, not alone. At best, Gray would delay the enemy at Osiris . . . and it would be up to Koenig to somehow make the Confederation see reason and unite once again.

Because Earth would have to stand united against the Sh’daar, or what had happened to Columbus would be
nothing
. The Sh’daar would return to the Sol System sooner or later, they would annihilate Mars and Luna and the Synchorbital, and they would turn the surface of Earth herself into a molten sea of glass.

Somehow, Koenig had to bring together a divided Earth . . . or Humankind might well face extinction.

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

Osiris Space, 70 Ophiuchi AII

1002 hours, TFT

“Thuh-ree . . . two . . . one . . .
launch
!”

Gravity vanished. Gregory’s Starhawk, suspended over the open mouth of the launch bay, released its magnetic hold and fell toward the starscape sweeping past below. In free fall, pushed by a half G of spin-grav acceleration, he fell into the shadow aft of the curve of
America
’s huge shield cap. A nudge from his thrusters and he edged into formation with the rest of the squadron.

“
America
CIC, this is Blue One,” Commander Mackey said. “Handing off from PriFly. All Demons clear of the ship and formed up.”

“Copy, Blue One,” a voice replied from
America
’s Combat Information Center. “Primary Flight Control confirms handoff to CIC. You are clear for maneuver.”

“Thank you,
America
. Boosting at one thousand gees on my mark, in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .
punch it
!”

The five surviving fighters of VFA-96 accelerated, the bulk of the star carrier
America
swiftly dwindling astern. Two other tattered squadrons, VFA-112 and VFA-218, had already vanished into a star-clotted night ahead; another would be assembling behind the Demons and trailing in their wake. VFA-90, the Fire Hawks, and VFA-215, the Black Knights, both were flying CAP with the fleet.

So many empty slots, now.

Gregory had . . . taken care of the emotions surrounding Jodi’s death just a few hours before. Minutes after docking with America, he’d paid a visit to Sick Bay and had a Corpsman there inject him with CRF nanoblockers.

CRF—Corticotrophin Releasing Factor—was a stress-related neurotransmitter that became sharply elevated in people who’d lost a close partner. It was especially significant in people who’d lost a spouse, but it could cause trouble as well for pilots with close friends killed in combat. The nanoblockers sealed off neuron receptor sites from CRFs and helped the pilot get past the potentially deadly depression that could follow. The treatment was temporary—sooner or later Gregory would have to deal with Jodi’s death—but at least now he could function.

He’d not told the Corpsman that he’d lost his lover. The deaths of so many fellow members of his squadron at once—Benning, Mason, Del Rey . . . and, yes, Jodi Vaughn—would have been enough in itself to put his CRF levels through the overhead.

There was no time for the luxury of mourning the dead now, not with the final struggle about to unfold squarely in his face. His thoughts nudged his Starhawk into the vector designated by his op-order downloads, and he concentrated on the ship and the orders and the operation, and not on . . . anything else.

With the fleet traveling at a little less than half the speed of light, the surrounding sky didn’t show the weird distortions of relativistic velocities. Osiris shone dead ahead as a brilliant white star with two tiny attendants—its moons Ptah and Amun.

Five fighters
.

The
Shenandoah
possessed nanufactories that could turn asteroidal rock into new Starhawks and Velociraptors in less than a day. What could not be quickly replicated were new pilots . . . and all of
America
’s fighter squadrons had suffered serious losses during the past few days. After the fight at Arianrhod and, now, Osiris, the Black Demons were down to five—Gregory and Mackey, Kemper and Nichols, and the woman they’d rescued at Arianrhod, Connor.

Lieutenant Megan Connor had volunteered to go back on flight status. According to the scuttlebutt, she had been offered the chance to opt out of squadron operations entirely, to transfer to a desk. Apparently, she’d been through a pretty rough time while she’d been a prisoner of the Slan on board their flagship, and CAG had told her she could stand down. She’d refused.

Some of the other Starhawk pilots had been ragging her about being a dragon—she’d flown an SG-101 Stardragon with VFA-140 at Arianrhod—but she’d accepted the jibes with good humor and a few wisecracks about the flying antiques of VFA-96, giving as good as she received. Gregory liked her, and hoped he’d get the chance to know her better. He felt a strange kind of kinship with her; if he’d lost his home to the Sh’daar, well, then, so had she.

So she would be flying as a replacement pilot with the Demons.
America
’s fighter wing had been scrambling to come up with reserve pilots. The word was that even Captain Connie Fletcher,
America
’s CAG, had strapped on a Velociraptor and was flying with VFA-112.

With only five Black Demons left, CAG had decided to send them ahead of the battlegroup as part of the assault wave, instead of putting them—as was more usual for the older Starhawks—on CAP. It didn’t much matter one way or the other. All six of
America
’s squadrons would be in the thick of it in just a few more minutes, now. Accelerations were being set so that the wave of strike fighters would enter battlespace just ten minutes ahead of the main fleet.

Ten minutes was an eternity in space combat . . . but the thinned-out Demons would go into the fray knowing some high-power help was barreling in right behind them.

Chapter Twenty-Four

16 November 2424

TC/USNA CVS
America

Osiris space, 70 Ophiuchi AII

1058 hours, TFT

Gray watched the half-disk of Osiris swiftly growing larger.
America
was still decelerating, but would enter the Osirian battlespace traveling at better than 20,000 kilometers per second, far too fast to be captured gravitationally by the looming planet, but slow enough to target the enemy warships still clustered near the planet.

To target . . . and to be targeted as well. Slan positron beams were deadly. Switching the hull magnetic shielding of the battlegroup to “plus” would repel those particles . . . but attract the electron beams favored by the Turusch. Cycling between plus and minus would help—that was the defensive strategy when attacked by enemy vessels with both electron and proton weaponry—but antimatter positron beams did a
lot
more damage than ordinary positively charged proton beams.

But Gregory hoped they might have a partial answer to that. He opened the tactical channel. “Captain Alvarez?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“You can release your toys, now.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

On the graphic imagery running ion his head, Gray could see the
Shenandoah
—huge, massive, nearly two thirds as long as
America
herself, running parallel to America’s course, her bunker doors opening wide. Three T-AK freighters identical to the sacrificed
Altair
detached themselves from scooped-out hollows in the provisioning ship’s flanks and began accelerating clear of her, becoming, in effect, enormous missiles guided by the AIs on board.

At the same time, a cloud of robots emerged from the big ship’s bunkers and began dispersing ahead of the battlegroup.

GKM-1100 mining robots were smaller than a Fer-de-lance shipkiller, each a complex assembly of gripper arms, tools, and nano-D applicators mounted atop a one-meter drive assembly. They weren’t fast—each could boost with only a few hundred Gs of acceleration—but there were thousands of them spilling into hard vacuum and zeroing in on the enemy ships.

The enemy, of course, had no way of knowing exactly what they were. If they scanned for radioactives they would come up empty, but those motes could be kinetic-kill warheads, high explosive, mobile O-mines, singularity-triggered fusion warheads, or almost anything else. Thousands of robots closed on the nearest enemy ships, and those ships had to assume that they were the greater threat, and turn their weapons on them.

Slan positron beams slashed and stabbed, vaporizing hundreds of the robots.

The survivors kept coming, accelerating all-out now. Some slammed into enemy hulls at tens of thousands of kilometers per second, hard enough to blast gaping craters in hull metal. Others decelerated abruptly and, reverting to their primary programming, began taking the enemy ships apart literally molecule by molecule.

GKM-1100s were designed to reduce asteroids to their most basic elements—iron, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on, sequestering the free atoms and either storing them or sending them along in a stream back toward the
Shenandoah
. Normally, their programming blocked any attempt to disassemble a ship or orbital station, but Alvarez’s programmers had killed that part of the instructions, installing instead a friend-foe interrogation routine that should keep them from eating friendly vessels.

Those robots that survived the barrage of Sh’daar particle beams and point-defense lasers slammed into hull metal, burrowed in and anchored themselves with nano-D claws, and began to feed. . . .

The three robot freighters entered the battlespace next, accelerating more quickly than the other ships of the fleet, jinking hard as they came, to make themselves difficult targets. Again, the Sh’daar defenses had to assume that they were a threat—they certainly did not appear in the equivalent of a Sh’daar warbook and so were completely unknown. The lead ship,
Alcyone
, was nudged by a detonating warhead and went into an uncontrolled tumble. The
Vega
and the
Deneb
were hit almost in the same instant,
Deneb
vaporizing under direct hits by multiple Slan positron beams, while
Vega
lost her drive complex, drifted out of control at 50,000 kps, then exploded in a dazzling starburst of molten fragments.
Alcyone
hit the Osirian atmosphere a few seconds later, traveling swiftly enough that a large part of its mass probably made it all the way down to the surface as it burned.

Gray watched the procession of robotic attacks. The battlegroup was entering Osirian space now, spreading out to avoid grouping targets, jinking to throw off enemy targeting routines. The robot miners had distracted the Sh’daar fleet, which had been forced to deal with thousands of individual threats, many of which now were attached to their hulls and chewing their way inside. The three freighters had pulled many of the enemy ships off station toward the planet, leaving them vulnerable as the battlegroup arrived.

“Comm, make to all ships,” Gray said quietly. “Fire.”

Following a meticulously detailed fire plan worked out in conjunction with the battlegroup’s AIs, the human ships concentrated their fire on the larger Sh’daar vessels closest to the planet. A pair of Slan Ballistas and a Turusch Romeo-class cruiser flared nova-bright under that tightly focused fire: lasers and particle beams.

But the enemy defenses were already rallying, adapting to the attack and replying in kind. The railgun cruiser
Turner
, rotating to slam kinetic-kill projectiles into a massive Turusch warship of an unknown class, took three direct hits in as many seconds. Slan Stilletos were swarming close, overwhelming the huge cruiser’s point defense system . . . and then the ship’s midsection exploded, ripping in two.

The destroyer
Atkinson
was vaporized in a focused concentration of positron beams.

America
’s AI identified one of the targets with a winking red circle in Gray’s mind. “The Slan Onager-class command vessel,” the AI told him. “You wanted us to ID it in particular.”

“Thank you. Transmit the canned message.”

“Transmitting.”

“And continue pressing the attack. It may take them a while to chew on that. . . .”

Slan Protector
Vigilant

Low Orbit, 70 Ophiuchi AII

1104 hours, TFT

“A message from one of the human ships!”

“Let me hear.” Clear Chiming Bell listened to the signal coming through its console. While
Vigilant
’s computer network had been purged of the alien spy software, the translation programs created during that brief exchange of communications existed still.

Clear Chiming Bell was startled to learn that the incoming message was in the Slan language. The humans had kept their translation sequences as well.

What was startling was not the fact that they knew how to convert to Slan speech, but that they were, in a cultural sense, approaching the Slan on their own figurative ground. To a Slan, it was a way of saying “I am part of your community,” and that implied statement shocked Clear Chiming Bell to its core.

For a long moment, it listened to the clicks and chirps and cluckings of the message. When the message ended, it listened to them again.

The shock now was much, much worse. . . .

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

Osiris Space, 70 Ophiuchi AII

1105 hours, TFT

Gregory twisted his Starhawk around in a heart-stopping turn, whipping around the tight knot of collapsing space and onto a new vector. Because it was space itself that was bending around the projected drive singularity, and his fighter was simply following a straight line, he felt none of the fierce changes in acceleration such a turn might be expected to generate. To his point of view, the surrounding starscape suddenly shifted and spun, and then a Slan Trebuchet appeared directly ahead, a brilliant icon at a range of less than 10,000 kilometers. He bumped the acceleration up and flashed across that intervening distance in an instant.

Slowing sharply, he pivoted his fighter nose-on to the Slan giant and triggered his gravitic singularity. He felt the shock as the micro-black hole chewed through the alien hull . . . and then he released it, his Starhawk continuing to fall past the alien vessel as the singularity ripped the enemy open, gutting it, spilling internal debris into vacuum in a sudden gush of escaping atmosphere.

“This is Demon Four!” he called. “I nailed a Treb pretty good! Copy position and sic the dogs on it!”

“Copy, Demon Four,” a voice replied. “On the way.”

A number of GKM-1100 robot miners had been held in reserve, but those were being released from the
Shenandoah
now, clouds of hungry machines descending on crippled Slan and Turusch vessels, seeking out gashes and holes in enemy hulls and vanishing inside.

Several alien ships were being devoured now from the inside.

Ahead, closer to the planet, an icon marking the Slan Onager was accelerating. Gray shifted vector to intercept.

Slan Protector
Vigilant

Low Orbit, 70 Ophiuchi AII

1104 hours, TFT

Clear Chiming Bell played the human message a final time.

“These worlds (places) are parts of the human community.

You have attacked our community.

Now you will be sent to the light. . . .”

Where the aliens before had been bundles of contradictions, the concise phrasing of the incoming message suddenly made the humans seem . . . reasonable. Even sane.

Slan did not think in terms of
territory
. Instead, they recognized community, and the relationship between individual members of the hive. To capture an enemy’s world was . . . all but meaningless. A world was just a place, and there were many, many places.

But the humans were speaking now as a Slan might speak,
thinking
like Slan, and the realization was unsettling. It was like attacking other Slan, a part of the Community, and that was . . .
sin
.

“All ships!” Clear Chiming Bell chirped and clicked to the rest of its fleet. “Retreat . . . now! Break off and retreat! Recall the fighters, take them back on board.”

Long moments passed, as the Slan commander braced itself for the order it knew would come. The fighters were streaming back into the Slan vessels, now, as the capital ships continued to put distance between themselves and the contested world.

Within its mantle, the Sh’daar Seed spoke. “You break formation!”

“We will not fight with Community, self against self. The humans are Slan!”

“The Sh’daar Collective is Community. We are Slan. We are you.”

Clear Chiming Bell considered this. It had heard the argument before, but right now it seemed weak. The Sh’daar “community” was scarcely worthy of the name, a haphazard collection of mutually alien cultures and worldviews loosely guided by virtual beings governing through their computer networks from a distance. The Sh’daar themselves were disembodied voices, without form, without tangible reality. Compared to the human message, the Sh’daar response felt like a distortion of Clear Chiming Bell’s sonic surroundings.

Sin
 . . .

What, the Slan wondered, was “sin” to the humans? Or to the Sh’daar?

Where did the Slan Community’s best interests lie?

Clear Chiming Bell was under the command of the Community Conclave, deep within the home tunnels of Thadek’ha. The Conclave had agreed to help the Sh’daar as payment for space travel . . . but they’d described the humans as lacking any sense of proper community—as
animals
.

That, clearly, had been a lie. The humans were terrifying in their understanding of warfare, but they
could
think like Slan. The Community Conclave needed to be informed of that fact.

Slan did not lie; to do so would be to distort reality. The Sh’daar, however,
had
lied, and in so doing had committed a type of
k’!k’t!’cht’!k’!kt’!!!
, obscuring the truth and replacing it with illusion.

“Return to the battle!” the Sh’daar Seed commanded.

Clear Chiming Bell’s ear flaps snapped shut, a gesture meaning both “no” and “I am not listening.”

The silent reply was lost on the Seed.

“Return to the battle!”

“No,” Clear Chiming Bell replied at last. “The humans are monsters, but I suspect the Slan have more in common with them than with you. We must discuss this in Conclave.”

Shifting to nearly the speed of light, the Slan vessels began to make the transition into metaspace and disappear.

TC/USNA CVS
America

Osiris space, 70 Ophiuchi AII

1110 hours, TFT

The Slan ships were blurring, then vanishing, pulling their disappearance trick into faster-than-light drive despite the nearness of the local star. Two Ballistas remained in sight for several minutes more, as Stiletto fighters streamed on board.

Then those ships, too, winked out, transitting to metaspace nearly instantaneously.

Six Turusch cruisers remained apparently intact, along with some dozens of damaged ships, both Slan and Turusch. The single H’rulka giant spotted earlier had been destroyed.

“Target the Turusch ships,” Gray ordered, but even as the battlegroup began closing on them, they, too, began winking out.

Interesting
, Gray thought.
They can make the transition inside the 40-AU limit too.

Had that technological twist come courtesy of the Sh’daar, or a Sh’daar client species? From what they’d learned of Slan history during the download from the Onager, the Slan barely understood the concept of space travel, and probably didn’t know how their own drives worked. That close-in transition trick must have come from the Sh’daar.