B009NFP2OW EBOK (8 page)

“Yeah. But can we win?”

“Maybe the best we can hope for is a standoff. Hold them at bay until . . .”

“Until what?”

“I don’t know. Until we become stargods? After that, all bets are off.”

For a time, they ate in silence, finishing their meals and dropping the plates and utensils into a recycler in the wall.

“That was good,” Vaughn said. “I’m glad they allowed liberty again.”

“Sandy Gray might have had a mutiny on his hands if he didn’t,” Gregory laughed. “With the Marines, especially, it being their birthday and everything. What I’m wondering, though, is if those Confed warships that pulled in this afternoon are the reason our departure was delayed.”

“Scuttlebutt says that Geneva scrubbed the mission to Omega Cent.” Playfully, she punched his shoulder. “Hey! Maybe you’re headed for Osiris after all.”

“About freakin’ time if we are.”

It was, Gregory thought, the uncertainty that was the worst part of military service. You were always waiting, it seemed. Someone higher up in the hierarchy was always making the decisions, calling the shots . . . and more often than not the decisions were changed at the last moment, with the result that flight officers and enlisted personnel never knew where or when they were deploying next.

A return to Osiris. An
invasion
of Osiris, to liberate his homeworld.

He scarcely dared hope . . .

A familiar tone sounded inside his head. “Aw, shit . . .”

“Not
now
!” Vaughn cried. “
Damn
them!”

“Attention, all
America
personnel,” he heard. “Liberty is cancelled. Repeat, liberty is cancelled. Return to the ship immediately. I say again . . .”

The two of them had had plans for a long and lingering evening at the pleasure club, but, once again, the Navy had intervened.

“Speaking of all BETS being off,” he said with a wry smile. He rummaged inside the small hip bag he’d brought on liberty, pulled out a uniform pellet and slapped it against his chest. The contents spread out from under his hand, activated by the pressure, spreading swiftly to cover him head to toe in skin-tight Navy black, complete with rank tabs and a gold sunburst on his left chest. He picked up another pellet and tossed it to Vaughn. “Get dressed, love,” he told her. “Duty calls.”

It would take them perhaps fifteen minutes to get back on board the
America
.

Bridge

TC/USNA CVS
America

USNA Naval Base

Quito Synchorbital

2028 hours, TFT

America
was coming alive.

Sandy Gray relaxed into the virtual reality projected into his mind by the ship’s AI network. He’d put in a request to link with President Koenig, and at the moment he was within the Executive Office waiting area, a virtual room equipped with chairs, a table, and floor-to-ceiling viewall imagery of space and distant worlds. One wall was particularly spectacular, showing a view taken from one of
America
’s high-velocity mail packets twenty years ago from a vantage point just outside of the dwarf galaxy that was home to the ancient Sh’daar. Visible was the sweeping expanse of the Milky Way galaxy imaged from about ten thousand light years above one outer spiral arm, looking in toward the red-orange beehive swarm of the galactic core.

America
’s packet was, so far, the only vessel of humanity that had looked back at the home galaxy from the outside. The vista was spectacular—billions of stars swept up together in the curves of spiral arms, interlaced with the sinuous twists of dark nebulae and the scattered blue-white gleam of rarer, brighter suns.

Gray wondered if Koenig had posted that image here to overawe visitors, to remind them of the America battlegroup’s visit to the remote past . . . or simply because he loved the panorama’s beauty and wanted to share.

An adjoining wall displayed a live view of
America
, still tethered to her docking gantry. Another reminder, perhaps . . .

What Gray was doing—trying to get a direct mind-to-mind link with the president of the United States of North America, was technically illegal, a blatant and straightforward attempt to bypass the usual chain of command entirely. Admiral Steiger was his commanding officer . . . and normally the hierarchy went up through CO to USNA Naval Command, to the Joint Chiefs, and finally to the USNA secretary of Space Defense. The arrival of Admiral Delattre at Quito Synchorbital had dropped even more buffering layers between him and the president, including the Confederation Bureau of Extraplanetary Affairs in Geneva, but Gray was ignoring all of that and going straight to the top.

He had the
right
. Not one recognized by Geneva or USNANC, perhaps, but the right of warrior to commanding officer. They’d both been at Arcturus and Eta Boötis, at Alphekka and Texaghu Resch . . . both had been through the TRGA to another galaxy 900 million years in the past to face the Sh’daar in their home space and time. Both of them had commanded the CVS
America
, and that alone counted for a hell of a lot.

Even so, his decision had surprised him a little. Gray was still a Prim, an outsider from the Manhat Ruins, even if his decision to join the USNA Navy twenty-three years ago had conferred upon him full citizenship. And with the universal access afforded by modern neural-link communications, the barriers afforded both by differences in rank and by social status simply no longer existed. The president could refuse his link request, of course . . . but Gray didn’t think that was going to happen.

They’d both been in the figurative trenches all those years ago. He looked again at the view of Earth’s galaxy seen from outside and almost a billion years ago. They’d both been out
there
, so distant in time and space that you were to all intents and purposes alone, beyond the reach of orders from Earth, beyond anything save your own personal concept of duty.

“Captain Gray!” a remembered voice said, as the electronic avatar of President Koenig snapped into view. “It’s good to see you again!”

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. President.”

“Not a problem. You’re here because of the Confederation orders, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir. Admiral Steiger appears . . . committed to following those orders. The
new
orders. But I’m not convinced that those orders are in the best interest of the United States.”

“Obviously.” Koenig gave a wry grin. “You’re stepping way outside of the proper chain of command here. You must think it’s pretty serious.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Serious enough to commit an act of mutiny?”

“I . . . no, sir.” Gray felt . . . flustered. Off balance. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected Koenig to say, but he hadn’t expected
that
. “Not mutiny. Sir, I’m here to ask your advice, not go against my oath.”

“What do you think we need to do?”

“Well, for a start, something damned big and scary came out of the Black Rosette. We need to know what it is.”

“Right now, I think Geneva doesn’t
want
to know,” Koenig said. “And whatever it is, it’s a long way away.”

“If our drive technology can ’cube a capital ship cross sixteen thousand light years in less than six months, I expect that Sh’daar technology can as well. Whatever destroyed the
Endeavor
could be here sometime in March. Maybe sooner.
We don’t know
.”

“
If
it’s the Sh’daar who destroyed the
Endeavor
,” Koenig reminded him. “And if it
wasn’t
the Sh’daar . . . and there are reasons for doubting that it is . . . then it’s somebody else, and we have no reason to assume they know where Sol is.”

“What reasons, sir?”

“That we doubt the Sh’daar came out of the Black Rosette?” Koenig shrugged. “Mostly the fact that we haven’t been able to ID the ships.”

One of the viewalls cut to a recorded image, one taken, the block of text in one corner reported, from one of the scout vessels off of the destroyer
Herrera
and transmitted to the HVK-724 high-velocity courier that had returned to Sol with the news of the attack.

Blue-white beams snapped out from the center of the Rosette, riddling the
Endeavor
, the
Herrera
, and the
Miller
, shredding their forward water-storage tanks in expanding clouds of ice crystals, puncturing sponsons and hab modules and drive blisters. An instant later, all three vessels were enveloped in expanding plumes of plasma as hot as the core of a star. The plumes grew and merged, forming what looked like a miniature and grossly misshapen sun surrounded by minute and outward-tumbling bits of debris.

And then the ships began emerging from the soft-glowing orifice of the Black Rosette . . . tens of them—no,
hundreds
—a cloud of highly polished ovoid shapes visible only because they were reflecting the glare from the destroyed ships in their mirror-perfect reflective hulls.

And the silver objects continued to swarm as something larger, something
much
larger, slowly emerged from the Rosette. The shape looked organic—egg shapes partially overlapping one another or partially merged together—its hull mirror-smooth like the tiny spheres traveling in its shadow.

And then the vid broke off as the ship recording and transmitting the images went off-line, presumably destroyed.

“Those ships,” Gray said, “what were they? I’ve never seen anything like them.”

“Exactly. They’re not Turusch, H’rulka, or any other technology with which we’re familiar. And the weapon they used . . .”

“Yeah, what
was
that?”

“Antiprotons accelerated to near-light speed. They do damage by both kinetic impact and by matter-antimatter reaction.”

“An AM explosion would also cause damage from the X-ray and gamma radiation it released,” Gray said, thoughtful.

“Exactly. We’ve not run into this kind of weapons technology before. If the Sh’daar had it, they never used it on us.”

“Maybe the Sh’daar have been busy inventing stuff for the last twenty years.”

“Maybe . . . but not likely. Remember, the Sh’daar are
extremely
conservative, not given to tinkering with established designs or technologies. Intelligence thinks these . . . these mirror ships are something new. A new species . . . a new civilization we haven’t encountered before.”

“All the more reason to find out who they are, what they want . . . and why the hell they destroyed three of our ships without warning.”

“I agree with you.”

“Okay . . . so what would you advise, Mr. President?”

“Are you asking because I am president of the USNA?”

“No, sir. I’m asking because you were once CO CBG-18. And before that, you were Captain of the
America
. You made command decisions that were not exactly approved by Geneva.”

Koenig seemed thoughtful for a moment. Was he thinking? Or remembering? “I am not going to undercut the authority of Admiral Steiger, son.”

“I would not expect you to, sir.”

“All I will say . . . all I
can
say, is that you will need to use your best judgment. You’re going out where Geneva can’t keep a tight leash on Admiral Steiger or you . . . and neither can Columbus. You’ll have to use your discretion, do what
you
think is right. That’s what I did.”

Twenty years before, Koenig had been declared a rogue by the Confederation government when he’d violated operational orders and taken the carrier battlegroup off to face the Sh’daar on his own. They’d sent a pan-European squadron out to bring him home. Had his gamble not worked, he would likely still be in a Confederation correctional institution on Mars or Triton.

Assuming, of course, that Earth and the human species still survived.

“Admiral Steiger is a good man,” Koenig added after a moment. “He knows what he’s doing. Follow his lead, support his decisions, and watch his back. That’s what a good flag captain does.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Beyond that, all I will tell you is that when you get out there, your duty is to your conscience . . . and to the human species. Not to Geneva, not to Columbus, and not to me . . . because you’re going to be well beyond the reach of any human government.”

“Yes, sir.” Gray hesitated. “It occurred to me, though . . .”

“What?”

“These new orders put over a quarter of the USNA fleet under the direct command of the Confederation, and most of the rest of our ships are scattered the hell and gone across seven star systems. If Geneva was going to try some sort of a power grab, the time to do it would be when CBG-40 is nineteen light years away. At 36 Ophiuchi.”

“Believe me, Captain, that’s occurred to us as well.” He didn’t add
but that is
my
responsibility
. He didn’t need to.

The unspoken words hung within the virtual meeting room as President Koenig’s image began to fade out.

“Good luck, Sandy,” Koenig said.

The use of his nickname startled him. “Thank you, sir.”

And then he was back on the bridge of the star carrier
America
.

Chapter Seven

11 November 2424

TC/USNA CVS
America

USNA Naval Base

Quito Synchorbital

0715 hours, TFT

America
was leaving port.

Grav tugs with magnetic grapples extended gently eased the huge ship clear of the docking gantries, working her well clear of the delicate traceries of the synchorbital port facilities. Her own maneuvering drives were powerful enough that a careless drift left or right, high or low, could collapse beams or support structures and cause as much damage as a kinetic-kill warhead.

Gray, immersed in the navigational virtual feed, noted four of the largest Confederation ships standing off a few thousand kilometers in the distance—an unspoken threat, perhaps. If
America
made some untoward or unexpected move, she might well find herself under the guns and missiles of her nominal allies.

“Tugs releasing,” helm officer Alicia Byrnes reported. “We are drifting free at twenty-eight meters per second and clear of the gantry.”

“Very well,” Gray replied. “Bring us about to the proper heading.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

As
America
pivoted slowly in space, swinging about to face just to one side of Earth’s sun, Gray opened another feed, downloading the available data on their destination.

Planetary Data Download

Arianrhod

P
LANET:
36 Ophiuchi AIII

N
AME:
Arianrhod, Silverwheel

C
OORDINATES:
RA 17h 15m 21.7s, Dec -26° 34’ 16.32”, distance 19.5 ly

T
YPE:
Terrestrial/rocky superEarth; reducing atmosphere

M
EAN ORBITAL RADIUS:
0.766 AU; Orbital period: 265d 9h 40m

I
NCLINATION:
15.1° 23’ 12.2”;
R
OTATIONAL PERIOD:
12h 28m 08s

M
ASS:
5.084 Earth
;
E
QUATORIAL DIAMETER:
21448.4 km = 1.7 Earth

M
EAN PLANETARY DENSITY:
5.62 g/cc = 1.02 Earth

S
URFACE GRAVITY:
1.8 G;
E
SCAPE VELOCITY:
19.4 km/sec

H
YDROSPHERE PERCENTAGE:
95.7%;
C
LOUD COVER:
50%;
A
LBEDO:
0.35

S
URFACE TEMPERATURE RANGE:
~-15°C – 45°C.

S
URFACE ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE:
~5095 millibars = 5.028 atmospheres

P
ERCENTAGE COMPOSITION:
CO
2
48.1; O
2
14.1; SO
2
9.6; NH
4
8.63; H2S 7.1; N
2
5.95; SO
3
4.15; CH3 2.1; Ar 0.2; others <700 ppm

A
GE:
0.9 billion years

B
IOLOGY:
C
,
N
,
H
,
S
8
,
O
,
Se
,
H
2
O
,
CS
2
; Free-floating and motile photoautotrophs, chemoautotrophs, and chemoorganoheterotrophs in liquid water. Anomalous biology may be due either to periodic flares from parent star drastically accelerating the local biosphere’s evolution, or to biological contamination by unknown alien visitation within the past few million years. . . .

C
OLONIAL HISTORY:
Silverwheel research colony established in 2278 under auspices of the Confederation Xenoplanetological Directorate to study local biology and causes of anomalously rapid evolution . . .

The reasoning behind changing the mission objective to Arianrhod was, frankly, bewildering as far as Gray was concerned. The colony of Osiris—70 Ophiuchi—was closer to Earth and, therefore, more of a threat. Presumably, the invaders at 36 Oph wouldn’t have had time to fortify their conquest—they’d had twenty years to do so at Osiris—but in terms of the system’s usefulness it didn’t make sense. Osiris was a
far
more habitable world than Arianrhod and, twenty years ago, had had a much larger population. Arianrhod’s surface gravity of 1.8 Gs was no joke unless you were a genaltered transhuman, and even then the problems of creating an enhanced subspecies able to endure that environment for more than a very short time were daunting enough that there had to be a
significant
reason to make the effort . . . something more than research that could have been conducted from orbit.

And there was still the matter of the arrival of unknowns at the Black Rosette.

But all of that, Gray knew, was now decidedly SEP—someone else’s problem. The USNA military had a long, long tradition, one going all the way back to the original United States, of encouraging independent thought up and down within the hierarchy of the command structure. Both enlisted personnel and junior officers were actually encouraged to ask questions . . . and to question orders.
Why
must we take that hill?
Why
are we retreating?
Why
are we fighting this war?
Why?

That kind of democratization of the battle force could cause a hell of a lot of headaches for the high command and the nation’s political leadership, but it made for a stronger, healthier, and more self-reliant war-fighting force. It was also an approach almost unknown in the military traditions of other Confederation member-states—the European Unions, the Brazilian Empire, the various squabbling republics of los Estados de las Americas del Sur, the North India Federation. And with the Confeds preempting the USNA battle group and strong-arming it into their operation, questions by mere ship commanders would no longer be tolerated. Gray had been taking a rather large risk by going to Koenig, but if Confederation Security had been tracking his link communications, there’d been no sign. He was still the captain of the
America
.

“Captain,” Steiger’s voice said in his command link, “Admiral Delattre has given the command. We are clear to accelerate.”

“Very well, Admiral. Helm initiate Acceleration Program One.”

“Initiating Program One, aye, aye, Captain.”

America
began to move forward, falling toward the stuttering, on-again, off-again knot of intense gravitational warping projected ahead of her titanic mass.
Bootstrapping
, the technique was called, a seeming violation of the common-sense of basic physics, but the ship’s velocity continued to increase as an intense singularity was repeatedly projected and switched off just beyond the vast, round shield of her forward cap at a rate of some hundreds of times per second. The fabric of spacetime around the ship began to reshape itself as
America
slid forward, leaving a fast dwindling Earth astern.

Gray decided that what he most objected to was Delattre’s high-handed commandeering of the
America
as his flagship. Yes,
America
was a Confederation warship first, a USNA vessel second but that had always been little more than a technicality of intraconfederation law. Twenty years ago, Admiral Koenig had had Confed political officers looking over his shoulder on the flag bridge but when he’d sent one packing nothing had been done about it, nothing overt, at any rate.

Geneva might have decided that Steiger wouldn’t dare do the same to a Confederation naval service
admiral
. . . .

But the system was clumsy and inefficient, adding another layer to the battlegroup’s chain of command. It was also humiliating, as if Geneva’s military hierarchy just didn’t trust the Americans.

Gray was forced to admit, though, that they might have just cause on that point. Anti-Confederation sentiment was at a fever’s pitch back home; he remembered the crowds celebrating Koenig’s re-election.

But in Gray’s book Jason Steiger was
not
Alexander Koenig. He was a good officer, a good CO, but Gray couldn’t see him kicking against the command structure. He would follow orders, so long as they were legal.

Following the software instructions of Program One,
America
’s acceleration gradually but steadily increased. Earth all but vanished astern, a tiny blue star, now, with the moon a minute attendant. The sun appeared at first to lie almost directly ahead, but as minute followed minute it began drifting off to the right, swelled huge for an instant, and then flashed past on
America
’s starboard beam.

At this time of the year, Sol appeared to be in the constellation Scorpio, right next door to the constellation Ophiuchus; in another two weeks it would actually track through Ophiuchus—the so-called thirteenth constellation of the Zodiac—much to the embarrassment of traditional astrologers, and in the first week of December would pass quite close to 36 Ophiuchi, at least as viewed from Earth.

The Earth was now drowned out by the sun’s glare astern, and the familiar stars of Scorpius, Ophiuchus, and the teapot of Sagittarius now hung directly ahead. Giant Antares hung a little to starboard, its ruby hue now beginning to blue-shift toward orange as
America
’s velocity began creeping up on
c
. The navigational tank showed the rest of the battlegroup—the entire Confederation battlegroup of sixty-nine other warships spread out in a rough cone formation around, behind, and ahead of the
America
.

Hours later, they reached the orbit of Neptune and the so-called “flat metric,” where the gravitational effects of the sun were slight enough that the fleet could switch over to Alcubierre Drive. The gravitational drive projectors extended their effect, curving local space around each individual ship until it existed within a tiny, walled-off bubble of space apart from normal spacetime. Within metaspace, as the bubbles’ interiors were called, each ship remained at legal, sublight velocities relative to the space within which they were embedded . . . but there were no such restrictions on bubbles of space. Indeed, during the first instants of the big bang, space itself had expanded at what amounted to many,
many
trillions of times the speed of light, carrying matter and energy along with it.

America
and the other ships of the battlegroup couldn’t manage velocities like that, not with the vacuum energy available to them. Drive technology had improved considerably in the past twenty years, however, and they could now manage the equivalent of about four hundred light years per day. At that rate, they would have been able to reach 36 Ophiuchi in about an hour and ten minutes.

The energy requirements for that fast of a metaspace transition, however, were literally astronomical. Battlegroup
America
would make the passage in twenty-five hours, a pseudovelocity of “only” about 18.7 light years per day.

It wouldn’t be long enough. Gray had been going over the Confederation plan for entering the 36 Ophiuchi system, and he didn’t like what he saw one bit.

Slan Protector
Vigilant

Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

1535 hours, TFT

Its name was a high-pitched chatter of clicks and chirps, but an Agletsch translation of the sound-symbol would have been something close to “Clear Chiming Bell.” The Slan—that name, too, was the product of Agletsch translation, a shortened version of the phrase “Dwellers in Night”—could see visible light after a fashion, but poorly, in infrared frequencies only, and without depth or detail. They relied instead on high-frequency sound to image their surroundings clearly. Clear Chiming Bell was listening to the view of the alien planet below.

Vigilant
had been orbiting the ocean world since their arrival nearly sixty
ch’k’!tt’cht
earlier. Clear Chiming Bell spread its heads farther apart to better appreciate the globe’s delicate, cloud-wreathed beauty.

The Slan had been a long time in reaching space . . . sixties upon sixties upon sixties upon slow-marching sixties of
!cht’k’k’k’!cht
, their homeworld’s years. It had been sixties of thirty-six hundreds of their years more before they were even
aware
of the stars in their endless night skies, and sixties of sixties years beyond that before they learned what stars were. The single light-sensing organ each Slan possessed high on its torso between the rubbery stalks that held its
!k’ch’t’t
organs could sense differences in light intensity, could tell the difference between light and dark, but could make out only the very brightest of stars in their night skies.

Fortunately, their home sun was located close to an open cluster, some hundreds of stars in a loose grouping the Slan had called The Mystery. Those vague and blurred blobs of light had drawn them on, leading them to develop technologies that could convert even weak electromagnetic wavelengths to clearly visible patterns of sound.

The discovery of the galaxy, of the far vaster universe around them, had transformed the species forever.

“Lord!” Clear Chiming Bell’s second-in-command, Sighing Wind, called over the bridge comm. “We have found a living alien and captured it!”

“Indeed?” Clear Chiming Bell replied. This was excellent news. “On the planet’s surface?”

“No, Lord. It appears to be a pilot of one of their fighters, damaged during the battle. One of our scouts discovered it on an outbound trajectory, and took it under tow. It is being brought on board now.”

Numerous members of the alien species—designated as
Nah-voh-grah-nu-greh Trafhyedrefschladreh
by the Sh’daar—had been recovered, both in past engagements and on the poisonous surface of the world below, but always they’d been torn and lifeless. Clear Chiming Bell wanted a living specimen.

Knowing one’s enemy always was the key to victory. There were puzzling aspects of these creatures. For one thing, they did not appear to have
!k’ch’t’t
organs for beaming sound at objects in their vicinity. This would represent a serious handicap for the creatures, not being able to form detailed sonic images of their surroundings.