B009NFP2OW EBOK (9 page)

“Once you are certain it is not distressed by our environment, bring it to the command compartment. Protect it! We want it unharmed.”

“Yes, Lord.”

Trafhyedrefschladreh
: the Agletsch sound patterns created as a common language among those Sh’daar client species that could use them meant roughly “carbon-oxygen-water,” the basis of the alien biology. Slan, too, were carbon-based, breathed oxygen, and used water as a biological solvent and transport mechanism. The aliens might not be so different from the Dwellers in Night after all. It was odd, however. The planet below possessed far too little oxygen and far too much carbon dioxide to support oxygen breathers. The sulfur dioxide was probably a poison to this type of life as well, as it was for the Slan. What were they doing here if they could not breathe the atmosphere?

“Lord,” another subordinate said. “There is news. The enemy fleet is in motion. Its flight path suggests that it may be coming here.”

The Sh’daar masters had identified the home system of the aliens, and Clear Chiming Bell had dispatched a cloud of sensor drones to its outskirts, each smaller than one of its projection heads. The drones were programmed to listen and wait, and to dispatch one of their number back to the fleet at high velocity if any significant movement of the enemy was detected.

“As we hoped,” Clear Chiming Bell replied. “The trap is set?”

“It is, Lord. Half a sixty of ships, in five positions, powered down and silent. They will appear to be background debris.”

“Alert them all, then maintain communications silence. You expect the enemy when?”

“Within less than a
k’k’k’cht’t
, Lord.”

“Then we will be ready for their arrival.”

TC/USNA CVS
America

In transit

1725 hours, TFT

America
was ten hours out on her programmed flight, which put her just under nine light years from Earth. There was nothing to be seen by the ship’s sensors, however, no view of slow-passing stars, no impossible starbow of velocity-distorted light, as appeared ahead of ships pushing close to
c
. Wrapped tightly in its Alcubierre bubble of metaspace,
America
effectively was outside of the familiar universe of stars and matter and light. Even the other vessels of the fleet, the nearest technically only a few kilometers distant, were completely beyond the star carrier’s sensor arrays.

They might as well have been on the far side of the galaxy, impossibly distant, utterly beyond reach.

No matter. The ship’s AI was counting down the nanoseconds until emergence, the precise timing necessary to ensure that all of the vessels in the Confederation fleet came out of Alcubierre Drive within very roughly the same volume of space. There was always
some
scattering on emergence, of course, but it was important that the fleet lose as little time as possible forming up on the other side.

“What do
you
think, Dean?” Gray asked. He was staring into the tank, a 3-D holofield projection based on the ops orders transmitted by Delattre moments after he’d come on board.

Commander Dean Mallory was
America
’s chief tactical officer, the head of the Tactics Department, which planned operations with an eye to maximizing the battlegroup’s efficiency and getting the CBG’s individual ships to work together.

“Precise and by the book, Captain,” Mallory replied. “Maybe a bit
too
by the book.”

“What do you mean?”

“Emergence at forty AU,” Mallory said. “Fighter launch at E plus sixty seconds, deployment in standard wedge formation . . .”

“Like you say, by the book.”

“Yes, sir. And what if the Slan have read the book?”

“That hardly seems likely.”

“No, sir. But we don’t yet know their capabilities. And the ghost signals have me worried.”

Ghost signals
was the term used for the whispers and stray radio-frequency signals Naval Intelligence had been picking up on the outskirts of Earth’s solar system for the past few months. There’d been speculation that the Slan were deploying drones in Sol’s Kuiper Belt that would help them track ship movements in and out of the system.

“So what do you recommend?”

“I’m not sure, sir. I’d like to have some tactical flexibility worked into the deployment, though.”

“I understand.” And he did. Gray had been thinking about this problem for some time, now, ever since they’d departed Quito Synchorbital, in fact. There was only one way to address the problem that he could see, and the decision would put his head on the chopping block if anything went wrong. “If we hold back . . . say . . . two squadrons of fighters . . . would that help?”

“Maybe.” Mallory didn’t sound enthusiastic, however. “Two squadrons may not be enough to protect the ship . . . and four squadrons might not be enough for the main effort.”

CVS
America
carried six squadrons of strike fighters—three of SG-101 Velociraptors, one of SG-112 Stardragons, and two of the older SG-92 Starhawks. The battle plan, as presented by Admiral Delattre, called for sending all six of those squadrons in ahead of the main fleet, accelerating to near-
c
and flashing through the targeted battlespace around 36 Ophiuchi AIII, smashing everything possible during the brief instants of their passage. Again, this was standard tactical doctrine with star carrier strike fighters; the high-speed pass would cause enough damage and confusion that the main fleet, arriving at a somewhat more sedate velocity hours later, would be in a position to mop up a shattered enemy while taking little in the way of return fire.

That was the idea, at any rate. Generally, battlegroup commanders held back one or two fighter squadrons to provide close space support for the capital ships, just in case there was an unpleasant surprise. The limitations set by the speed of light meant that maneuvers by enemy ships at a distance wouldn’t be noticed right way. Forty astronomical units was five and a third light hours, a distance dictated by the need to enter or leave normal space in a reasonably “flat metric,” far enough from the local star that there was a minimum of gravitational interference. Any defending Slan ships close to Arianrhod wouldn’t notice that the Confederation fleet had arrived for some five hours and eighteen minutes after they’d actually emerged from metaspace. By the same token, though, there would be a speed-of-light delay before the incoming ships would be able to see what the defenders were doing in reply.

Modern naval tactics all were predicated on these elements—emergence from Alcubierre Drive at least 40 AUs from the target system’s star, a high-velocity fighter strike, and a follow-up attack by the main fleet. Gray knew that this wasn’t the
only
way to do things, but current Confederation technology sharply limited the options.

The biggest question always was about the enemy’s technological levels . . . about how far advanced the technology of any new and unknown species would be beyond that of Earth.

Perhaps, Gray thought, Humankind owed the Sh’daar a debt of gratitude. They were why the various alien civilizations Earth had been fighting since 2367 were within a century or so of human technology, and not thousands of years ahead . . . or millions. Their fear of the Technological Singularity seemed to be behind the limits they put on the technologies developed by their client species. The ultimatum they’d delivered fifty-seven years earlier had required Humankind to curtail all the so-called “GRIN” technologies—genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology. For centuries, now, these had been seen as the driving force behind the coming Singularity. Confederation Intelligence assumed that the Sh’daar were attempting to stop other technic species from entering their respective Singularities and evolving into . . . something else.

Stargods . . .

As a result, Sh’daar client species tended to be somewhat in advance of human technology—especially military technology—but not so far ahead that they possessed an impossible advantage in combat. Their weapons systems were similar to human weapons—with an emphasis on particle beams and kinetic-kill projectiles. Human forces at least had a chance against the Turusch, the Slan, and all the rest, even if they were usually badly outnumbered.

Sometimes, Gray thought, it felt like Humankind stood completely alone against a hostile galaxy.

Slan warship

Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

2015 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Megan Connor stumbled as the monster dragged her away from the broken shell of her fighter. She had a blurred impression of something large holding her, but at first her brain wasn’t able to assemble a coherent picture.
Brown
,
purple
, and
wet
were all she could see. Her surroundings were . . .
dark
. Utterly and completely dark.

She was completely disoriented, exhausted, and weak, so weak she could scarcely stand in what her suit told her was a 1.9 G gravity field. She’d been trapped inside her dead Stardragon for four days, at least according to her in-head timekeeper. Her suit’s nanorecyclers had kept her fed and hydrated, but her e-links to the ship’s sensors and onboard AI carried nothing but static. She’d been unable to move or see as hour followed empty, dragging hour.

She’d maintained a wavering grip on her sanity by running docuinteractives stored in her cerebral implant memory. There were several propaganda pieces of the “Why We Fight
”
variety; she’d saved them in her CIM because they included quite a bit of information on various Sh’daar client species, especially the Turusch, the Nungies, and the weird, drifting H’rulka. Unfortunately, there was nothing on the Slan, a species that she’d heard of, but never seen in person.

There was also a rather simplistic role-playing game, a fantasy with an epic quest to complete, hideous monsters to slay, and a kingdom’s throne to win. She hadn’t liked the hideous monster part, because there was every possibility that she was going to encounter real monsters if the Slan detected her disabled fighter.

They had. She’d felt the bumps and slight acceleration as something big had grappled with her ship. A probe with a nano-D tip had penetrated her cockpit, evidently sampling the internal atmosphere and environmental conditions. There’d been a long wait after that . . . several hours. With the ship’s nanomatrix hull no longer responding to her thoughts, she couldn’t get at the fighter’s emergency survival pack behind her seat, which included a small hand-laser weapon.

And if she had gotten her hand on the laser . . . what then? She wouldn’t be able to fight them off.

Maybe she could take her own life.

She wasn’t ready—quite—to consider that option.

And then the Dragon’s cockpit had ripped open fore and aft at the touch of a brilliant light, and she thought at first that her bubble helmet had turned opaque in response. It took a moment for her to realize that the darkness wasn’t in her helmet’s polarizing circuitry, but in the room itself. Something dragged her through the opening; her feet found the deck, but her legs gave way and she crumpled. She could feel heavy ropes encircling her arms and legs, lifting her.

Her skin suit utilities had a powerful lightpanel at her throat, just below her helmet. She triggered it with a thoughtclick.

Somehow, she managed not to scream. . . .

That was when she got her confused impression of brown and purple, and it took a moment more for the thing’s actual shape to begin making sense.
A two-headed monster
 . . .

The body was squat and round with a hump in the center, with skin like wrinkled rubber. It appeared to slide along the deck on its belly, and was surrounded by a writhing mass of tentacles ranging from hair-thin to as thick as a man’s leg. Whether it was gliding on its stomach, moving along on a layer of tentacles, or in fact had very short legs hidden by the squat body, she couldn’t tell. The heads were large, blunt, and cone-shaped, attached to the base of the central hump by a pair of 2-meter necks, rubbery and bonelessly flexible. She
assumed
they were heads and necks. She didn’t see any eyes or mouths or anything else she recognized as a sense organ. No . . . wait. On either side of the body were thin, membranous flaps of tissue that could open, twist, or lie flat. At first, she thought they might be involved in the creature’s breathing, but the more she watched them, the more she thought that they might be external ears, capturing and focusing faint sounds.

Connor tried to concentrate on her environment. She would need to know about it if she was to survive for very long. Her skin suit was feeding readouts to her in-head display. The outside temperature was hot—55 degrees Celsius—and the humidity was 100 percent. The air, in fact, appeared to be filled with a mist that captured the light from her suit and turned her surroundings into a thick, white haze. Her transparent helmet was by now covered with droplets of water, as were the glistening bodies of the massive beings around her.

The atmosphere, she noted, was high in oxygen compared to the air of Earth—28 percent—and the carbon dioxide was high—over 5 percent—with enough ammonia, methane, and hydrogen sulfide that she didn’t want to have to try the air without a respirator. The pressure was high, too, about five times that of sea level on Earth, a thick, hot, and poisonous soup.

Interesting. The pressure was close to that of Arianrhod at the surface, the gas mix was roughly similar, if different in its component percentages, the gravity felt similar, and even the temperature was only a bit higher than Arianrhod’s upper extremes at the equator. The Slan environment was a lot closer to Arianrhod’s than it was to Earth’s. Was that why they were here? A land grab?

The Slan, she thought, were likely as curious about her as she was about them.

She just hoped that they didn’t plan to peel her out of her skin suit just to see if she could breathe the air.