Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (19 page)

“What’ve you got, Ben?”

But he could already see it over his in-head . . . misshapen blobs of light intruding within the faint bands of rainbow color ahead. As he watched, one suddenly twisted into a solid ring encircling space ahead.

“Proximity alert astern,”
Concord
’s AI warned. “Proximity alert astern . . .”

Whatever those things were, they were bearing down on
Concord
from behind, though the ship’s velocity shifted their light forward. The optical illusion was bizarre . . . and terrifying.

“Unidentified target now thirty meters astern and closing.”

Thirty meters! How’d anything get that close?
“Aft batteries!” Dahlquist yelled. “Lock on and fire!”

Aiming a weapon at this insane velocity was problematical, but the ship’s AI should be able to sort it out. Dahlquist could feel the network considering the problem, but it felt sluggish . . .
sluggish . . .

And then time stopped.

VFA-31, The Impactors

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1826 hours, TFT

“Jesus!” one of the other pilots exclaimed. “Look at the Big-F!”

Magnified images transmitted from hundreds of battlespace drones gave St. Clair an up-to-date panorama of the entire battle: dozens of ships continuing to pound away at one another with volleyed missiles and beams. Alerted by Blue Two, he saw the
Farragut
hit, saw nuclear detonations pulsing and flashing along her spine, engulfing her drive projectors, her bridge tower, her hab modules.

“There she goes,” Jess Atkinson, Blue Nine, called. “
God . . .”

St. Clair had noticed that the North American fighter pilots tended to give voice to some extremely improper sentiments during combat, specifically religious sentiments that violated the decrees of the White Covenant. The ancient adage was true, he decided; there
were
no atheists in foxholes . . . or in fighter cockpits either.

Lieutenant St. Clair wasn’t sure what he believed in, personally . . . if anything at all. He’d found himself attracted to the new religion that was exploding through Pan-Europe and the Confederation—Starlight—but had been keeping his feelings very much to himself. Starlight was still considered to be a European spiritual movement, and North Americans didn’t trust Europeans yet . . . not even expatriate Scots who happened to be flying with them. It was better by far to maintain a low profile and stay off potentially hostile lidar.

Religious sentiments or no, the squadron’s pilots were stunned by the image of the
Farragut
as she died. Half-molten fragments tumbled out from the blossoming fireball, as missiles continued to plunge into the maelstrom and add their destructive quanta to the holocaust.

“She was doing too good a job on the Tushies,” Lieutenant Ramirez said. “They had to take her out.”

“Yeah,” another pilot put in, “but where does that leave us?”

“It leaves us taking the Tushies out,” St. Clair said. “Let’s get our arses back in there!”

“What the fuck are
arses
?” Cambridge demanded, also pronouncing the normally-silent
r
.

“It’s what Scotty keeps covered up with his kilt,” Lieutenant Randles said.

St. Clair ignored the banter. He was already swinging his fighter back into line with the Turusch heavies in front of the TRGA and accelerating. Ramirez was right. The Turusch had concentrated their fire on the
Farragut
, which, so far as they were concerned, had been the most effective USNA ship in the task force. With the
Farragut
destroyed, the core of the Turusch war fleet was moving, now, trying to force itself through the encircling shield of USNA heavies. The focus of their fire had shifted now to the damaged
New York
. . . .

But St. Clair had already seen a tactical opportunity—a long shot, but a damned good one if it worked. . . .

Englobement
.

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1827 hours, TFT

“Fighters are moving back onto the attack, Admiral,” Fletcher reported.

“Good. Mallory! Order the task force to spread out farther . . . disperse and englobe.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

“Tell
Valparaiso, Hessen, Mobile,
Honshu
, and
Cincinnati
to try to get in behind them, cut them off from the Triggah. Order
Chicago
and
Boston
to begin dropping back and the destroyers with them. Let ’em think we’re on the run . . . but make it a
slow
run. Captain Gutierrez?”

“Sir!”

“Us too. Fall back!”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

While elegantly compelling in the planning tank, englobement was one of those tactical maneuvers that was almost impossible to implement in the real universe. More than many other fleet maneuvers, it demanded that the enemy do
exactly
what was expected of him. Any deviation from the script at all by either side could easily lead to disaster for the USNA fleet.

But Gray had seen his opportunity as the Turusch fleet began moving toward the center of the USNA task force, entering the space just vacated so spectacularly by the
Farragut
. The center of the USNA force was retreating in front of the enemy’s advance . . . but the flanks were stretching out and reaching around. In another minute, the Turusch fleet would be completely surrounded.

Something like this, Gray thought, had happened twenty-six hundred years ago at the Battle of Cannae, though in a mere two dimensions rather than three. There, on a hot day in early August, the center of a heavily outnumbered Carthaginian army under the command of Hannibal Barca had retreated before a superior Roman force while the flanks held firm. The Roman formation had become tangled and disorganized as it advanced deeper and yet deeper into the semicircle of Carthaginian forces, until at the critical moment Hannibal had ordered his wings to sweep around behind the Romans, enclosing them, trapping them . . . and destroying them.

Much the same was happening now to the Turusch fleet.
Surely they could see what was happening?
he wondered. But they were committed, now, unable to maneuver freely, many of them unable even to fire without hitting their own ships. The USNA heavies hammered at the Turusch vessels, hurling missiles in to detonate among the alien ships in a steady, pulsing fireworks display of silent light.

Gray watched the maneuver unfolding in a 3-D projection tank called into being on the flag bridge. The battle was too large and spread across too vast and sprawling a volume of space to be easily comprehended by any human mind, even by a human mind linked in with
America
’s powerful AI. Gray’s mind was working faster now as it melded with
America
’s tactical network, with instant recall and a perfect understanding of what was unfolding before him, but it was almost impossible to hold
all
of what was happening clearly in his mind. He was also struggling with incidentals—a common problem for people linked into a complex network. That bit of historical trivia on Cannae, for instance: he recognized it now as a kind of accidental sidebar that had slipped into the datastream, possibly in direct response to a stray thought he’d had about historical precedents.

History was great in its place, but right now he needed to stay
focused
.

It was also tough to know just how much to insert himself in the battle tactics. There was a nearly overwhelming urge now to micromanage, to reach out and direct each ship in the task force, each fighter, each man or woman and order them onto precise courses, with precise timetables, a glorious and powerful master plan . . .

He rejected the megalomania as another distraction, as insidious as the historical data. Right now, his proper role was to follow the battle at as high a strategic level as possible, allowing his subordinates, the individual ship captains, to handle the details. His people, he knew, were well trained, and most of them were experienced and battle tested. They knew what they were doing. It was up to Gray to deal
only
with the big picture, not the details.

“Order the center to hold, Commander Mallory,” he said. “Hold . . . and kick the bastards where it hurts.”

“Another hit on the
Clinton
, Admiral. And
another
. We’re losing her.”

On one of the drone transmissions, the heavy cruiser
Clinton
was rolling gently as nuclear fireballs engulfed her. Much of her aft half was gone now, vaporized, and Gray could see sections of her inner framework twisting and deforming as they were relentlessly drawn into the maw of out-of-control gravitational singularities, once part of the cruiser’s power generation plants, now agents of her final destruction.

The heavy cruiser
Valparaiso
vanished in a savage flash of hard radiation.
Clinton
followed a moment later . . . as well as the Japanese battlecruiser
Honshu
.

The epic slug-fest continued, with small and quite temporary suns illuminating the extragalactic deep.

VFA-31, The Impactors

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1828 hours, TFT

St. Clair fell through the heart of the Turusch fleet, jinking port and starboard, up and down, to avoid short-ranged defensive fire and anti-missile salvos. He glanced at his in-head display and bit off a curse. He was down to two remaining Krait missiles, plus just one of the larger VG-44c Fer-de-lances. Once those were gone, he would be limited to beam weapons and his kinetic-kill Gatling rounds . . . and those were damned near useless against these thick-hided flying mountains deployed by the Turusch.

Directly ahead, a kilometer-long Turusch monster forged its lumbering way toward the USNA fleet, its red-and-black paint scheme brilliant against the empty sky.

“Seven . . . target lock!” he called. “Fox One!”

His last remaining Fer-de-Lance dropped from his fighter’s belly, lit, and streaked into darkness. A Turusch fighter rolled out of the sky, trying to block the shot or kill the missile—St. Clair wasn’t certain which—but the missile, directed by its own on-board AI, swung wide, changed vector, and accelerated, flashing out of night and slamming into the Turusch capital ship with a brilliant flash of vaporizing hull and leaking atmosphere.

“Hit!” St. Clair called, exultant. “
Nailed
the wee bastard Sassenach!”

“Great shooting, Scotty!”

And this time he didn’t even mind the hated nickname.

The stricken Turusch capital ship was in a slow tumble, now, a crater in its starboard side glowing yellow-hot. As St. Clair streaked over the alien’s hull, he probed with his sensors. The ship wasn’t dead, not yet, but most of its power systems were down. It was out of the fight.

He looked about for another target.
Two missiles left
 . . .

Before he found one, though, a pair of Turusch fighters dropped onto his six, coming in astern behind a salvo of fast-accelerating missiles. Spinning his fighter end for end, he triggered his pee-beep, targeting the enemy missiles, then loosed both of his own remaining Kraits at the pursuing fighters. One missile detonated early, hit by the enemy’s anti-missile defenses. The other looped clear of the fireball and struck home, detonating with a brilliant flash less than three hundred kilometers away.

Close . . .

Out of missiles, now, St. Clair locked on to the remaining fighter and triggered his Gatling, spraying a stream of depleted uranium rounds at the enemy fighter. More missiles were closing, however, and one detonated close alongside.

St. Clair never learned whether he’d hit the remaining enemy fighter. A nuclear fireball expanded in a dazzling pulse of raw energy just a hundred meters away, and St. Clair was slammed into black unconsciousness. . . .

Chapter Seventeen

7 August, 2425

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

0135 hours, TFT

“Fighters incoming!” Fletcher called. “Two of them . . . VFA-96! Lieutenants Connor and Gregory.”

Gray surveyed the tactical situation in the 3-D tank. A pair of new stars had just winked on in the direction of Invictus. “Any comm from them yet?”

“Yes sir, and it’s trouble. Range now . . . four light-minutes.”

Half an AU. And by now, those Starblades would be decelerating in order to match vectors with the task force. It would take a while to get them aboard.

Gray bit off a curse.
Another
delay . . . but maybe it was a delay that was just in time. “What trouble?”

“Sir, Rand and his people appear to have been taken prisoner by the Glothr,” Mallory told him. “And a large number of Glothr ships were seen boosting clear of the Invictus ring system in pursuit of the High Guard ships.”

“How large a number?”

“They didn’t say. We’ll query.”

“Do it.” They had to know what they were up against. “Any word from
Pax
or
Concord
?”

“Only that they were last seen accelerating at maximum boost back to the Triggah.”

Which meant that they’d be coming in about twenty minutes behind the fighters.
If
they’d managed to get clear. Odd. There should be some sign of them by now on the long-range scans. So far, however, nothing.

His best guess, then, was that the Glothr had captured the High Guard ships, then turned back with their prizes to Invictus.

“One of the fighters reports picking up a fragmentary message,” Fletcher said. “It was unintelligible.”

“Comm loss at relativistic speed,” Gray said. Nothing they could do about that now. “Commander Talbot! Give me a fleet status update.”

Lieutenant Commander Henry Talbot was on Gray’s command staff, assigned to FC
3
as the fleet’s status officer. Task Force One had been badly bloodied in the exchange with the Turusch hours before, with so many ships badly damaged that Gray had cancelled the planned deployment across fifty AUs to Invictus. The fleet repair vessel
Vulcan
—named for the smith of the gods, not the planet—had been turning out tons of repair nano and sending it out in streams to those vessels that had been shot up the worst. Her raw material storage bays were already nearly empty.

“Repairs are . . . proceeding, Admiral,” Talbot replied. “But the
Vulcan
is running out of rock. We
really
need some A-ram if we want to get anywhere.”

A-ram—slang for “asteroidal raw material”—was in distressingly short supply out here. Typical solar systems always had plenty of rock and ice floating around: asteroids and comets and even dwarf planets left over from the earliest days of system formation. A ship like
Vulcan
could send out clouds of nano programmed to harvest the raw material and turn it into useful things, like food, air, water, and weapons.

But things were different out here. Invictus had been ejected from the Milky Way alone—no sun, no other worlds, no moons . . .

. . . and none of the asteroidal clutter and debris that filled proper solar systems.

For a long moment, Gray stared into the vast, pale sweep of the galaxy, thinking. He then swung the view almost one hundred eighty degrees, centering on the minute patch of golden haze cloaking the TRGA, now about half an AU distant—seventy-five million kilometers—the cylinder itself made invisible by distance.

Almost half of the surviving ships of Task Force One—eight ships total—needed further repairs.
America
had come through that desperate fight in front of the TRGA unscathed, but
New York
,
Ontario
,
Northern California
, the Pan-European
Victoire,
and
Churchill
—plus three destroyers—all had been badly damaged, so much so that they weren’t able to put on any acceleration at all—drifting and all-but-helpless hulks.

And the ships lost—the battlecruisers
Sonora
and
Honshu
, the heavy cruisers
Clinton
and
Valparaiso,
the medium cruiser
Hessen,
the light cruiser
Mobile
, and five of the smaller destroyers and frigates. Eleven ships destroyed out of the original thirty-two . . . and two of those were still unaccounted for.

Fighter losses had been heavy, too. SAR tugs were out now, catching up to disabled fighters tumbling into the Void, grappling them, and hauling them back. Five pilots had been rescued already, but eleven had been killed or were still missing.

They were still tallying up the casualties. The best guess at the moment was that the fleet had suffered some eight thousand men and women killed, another thousand injured.

All of that was stacked up against Turusch losses of an estimated nine capital ships. Exact numbers were hard to come by, though the AIs were going through the after-action data now to try to form a clearer picture of what had just happened. Some of the alien vessels—possibly as many as ten—had turned around and escaped back through the TRGA before USNA forces had completed the englobement maneuver and cut them off.

The attempt at englobement, Gray ruefully decided, had been only partially successful. Cut off an enemy’s one hope of retreat, and he likely will fight harder than ever, his back to the figurative wall, with no hope of survival at all save to attack and keep attacking until one side or the other is destroyed. The surviving Turusch heavies, when they’d realized what was happening, had turned back toward the mouth of the TRGA and smashed right through the USNA ships standing in their way. Three of the six USNA heavies lost in the battle had been destroyed in that rush, and Gray was still struggling with the knowledge that his orders had put them there in harm’s way.

Of course, that was what navies did and had done since humans first had sent warships to enforce government policy at sea, and it was no different now in interstellar space:
go in harm’s way
. And admirals had been putting their people there, and agonizing about their decisions, for very nearly that long. It was something Gray had already had to come to grips with.

But he still hated the fact of it.

Right now, however, he had a new set of decisions to make. His fleet had been reduced to seventeen capital ships, and eight of those were so badly damaged they couldn’t move. He’d just received word that the
Pax
and the
Concord
were in trouble, and there was an excellent chance that the Glothr were now on the way. They could not take on an entire planet with just nine intact warships, nor would it do to hare off to Invictus and leave the damaged ships helpless and vulnerable to a Glothr attack.

But the surviving Turusch were also an unknown, and a deadly one. At least ten Turusch vessels had vanished back into the TRGA. Some of those might have been too badly shot up to re-engage, but others could easily regroup on the other side of the cylinder, then come back through again, quite possibly bringing with them reinforcements. The nature of TRGA physics suggested that the Turusch fleet had not come from the same area of spacetime as the USNA fleet. They
might
be from twelve million years ago, but a different part of space entirely from the Beehive cluster—a different TRGA altogether, or they could be from somewhere and somewhen quite different. Speculation at this point was meaningless, but Gray knew he had to at least allow for the
possibility
that Turusch ships might come pouring in through this TRGA at any moment.

And if they did, what was left of Task Force One would be trapped, caught between them and the oncoming Glothr ships from Invictus.

So what options did he have? The first was that he could protect the helpless ships until they managed to cobble together enough repairs that the whole task force could limp back to the Beehive TRGA. They would return to Earth, having suffered a clear defeat.

And . . . that was okay. Not palatable, perhaps, not pleasant, but . . . okay. When fleets engaged with one another, generally one was the winner, one the loser, and there’d certainly been no shame in
this
loss. He would return to the Beehive, then to Earth, and offer Koenig his resignation because clearly he wasn’t suited for fleet command. That much, at least, was abundantly clear.

But it would mean that more than ten thousand humans had died . . . for nothing.

A part of Gray’s mind simply refused to accept that. In terms of material loss, the Battle of the Invictus TRGA—as Fleet Intelligence was now calling it—had been a draw. But if the USNA task force abandoned the tiny volume of space it had carved out for itself on this side of the TRGA, then the battle, and all of those losses, would be a resounding defeat—meaningless.

And he would not accept that. He
couldn’t
. Even though not dismissing that option increased the very real and serious risk that his remaining ships and crews would be sacrificed as well, he wasn’t able to choose that path. The question was
Do I have that right?

But there was more to the equation. To repair the most badly damaged of the task force vessels, they needed to find a source of raw materials, this in a volume of space completely empty of such. And making those repairs—including finding the necessary materials—required time.

Time, though, was the resource now in shortest supply. Either or both the Glothr and the Turusch might be here literally at almost any moment.

The key, then, was finding a source of raw materials. A single hundred-meter asteroid was all they would need, especially if it was a type S, containing both metals and lighter elements, as well as water.

He could send out scouts to look for asteroids adrift out here. That, Gray knew, was the longest of long shots. Unless there were a few rocks being dragged along in Invictus’s gravitational train, such bodies would be
very
few and far between.

Or he could send the
Vulcan
back through the TRGA. The Beehive cluster was young, 600 million years, or so, and filled with gas and dust, and rich in the debris associated with building stars and worlds. It wouldn’t take long to find the necessary asteroids back there, disassemble them, and reload
Vulcan
’s empty storage bays.

Could they afford to temporarily lose the
Vulcan
, however, while she went back to mine A-ram? She was also engaged in manufacturing complex circuits and repair modules, as well as maintaining life support and rebuilding shattered interior structure. That work would stop if she returned to the Beehive.

Damn . . .

The answer, of course, had been staring Gray squarely in the face the whole time. There
was
a source of raw material here, and quite a large one. He realized it was the only possible option.

“Commander Mallory . . . Mr. Talbot . . . pass the word to
Vulcan
, and to the rest of the fleet. We will cannibalize the wrecked ships in order to repair the damaged vessels.”

“Cannibalize, sir?” Talbot said. He sounded shocked.

“Exactly. The Turusch ships are like mini-asteroids to begin with. And our own ships already have supplies of nicely differentiated elements, plus large supplies of water . . . those that haven’t leaked it out already.”

“We may not get much out of our ships, Admiral,” Mallory said. “Most of them were vaporized. There’re just small globs of resolidified metal spinning off through space now.”

“We’ll use what we can.”

“What about radiation?”

A good point. Most of the wrecks, both human and Turusch, had been made that way by repeated thermonuclear explosions. Much of the wreckage—especially the metal—would be heavily contaminated.

“The recovery process will mostly be handled by robots and nano clouds,” Gray said, thinking hard. “
Vulcan
can build enough nanodecon chambers to take care of the rads as the raw material comes through. We should have had enough practice with that sort of thing by now.”

Which was true. Handling intense radiation fields had been a necessity since the first Mars and Lunar colonies in the twenty-first century, and building the first space elevator had required some efficient decon techniques just to build habs in and above the Van Allen Belts.

“Do Turusch ships have onboard water reservoirs?” Talbot wanted to know.

“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We do have one other issue here, Admiral,” Mallory said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s . . . kind of a religious issue. What do we know about Turusch customs and beliefs about their dead?”

“Ah. As in, what do we do with their bodies?”

“That . . . and just taking apart their ships. We don’t want to be accused of war crimes here.”

“So far as I know, Mr. Mallory, the Turusch are not signatory to any instrument concerning treatment of the dead or salvaging their ships.”

In a war involving just humans, certain actions could be considered grounds for war crimes trials . . . and that included mistreatment of enemy dead. Laws with roots in treaties going back to the twentieth century required combatants to respect enemy dead, as well as the enemy’s taboos and rituals concerning them. There were even provisions in certain circumstances prohibiting the salvage of warships, lest the dead be disturbed. The wet-navy battleship USS
Arizona
still rested at the bottom of Pearl Harbor as tomb and memorial to more than 1,100 sailors and Marines who’d died aboard her almost five centuries earlier.

But Gray had already decided that such niceties didn’t apply here. They
couldn’t
. Earth had no treaties with the Turusch; Gray didn’t even know what their death rituals, customs, or taboos might be like. Using the wreckage of Turusch ships was the only real option open to the USNA fleet . . . even if, as was likely, Turusch bodies were going to end up in the mix of raw materials going into the
Vulcan
storage bays.