Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (20 page)

To be fair, he did pause for a moment.
Was there any way to program the disassembly nano so that it would take apart the alien ships, but ignore the alien bodies?

In a coldly realistic way, he supposed, it didn’t matter. A carbon atom was a carbon atom, whether it came from a wooden desk or a lump of artificially cultured meat or a piece of what once had been a living body. There could be no thought of contamination, not when Turusch bacteria or anything else that might conceivably taint the raw material was itself nothing but atoms—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen . . .
CHON
, the basic building blocks of organic chemistry.

Even so, he thought it would be a good idea not to let humans in the fleet know where the atoms that would be showing up in the ship’s food-replicator system over the next few weeks had actually come from.

In any case, the range of acceptable behaviors among sapient species was . . . enormous. He thought, momentarily, about the alien Grdoch: highly intelligent beings, fellow star-farers, who kept their immense food beasts alive so that they could be eaten—alive—a little at a time. The sight of one of those helpless, blind titans being torn open by gleefully ravenous Grdoch still gave him nightmares. . . .

So . . . what was a little technocannibalism among interstellar enemies?

“Be very careful,” Gray said, “to check those hulks for any Turusch that might still be alive.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“But tell
Vulcan
to get on this fast. I want the fleet put back together again before the Turusch come back . . . or the Glothr show up from Invictus.”

Gray stared for a while longer at the galaxy and the emptiness beyond. That emptiness, that sense of loneliness, was preying on him,
gnawing
at him. He felt trapped.

He wanted to get this mission the hell over with, and return to the light of Sol.

VFA-96, The Black Demons

Docking approach

USNA Star Carrier
America

0142 hours, TFT

Don Gregory guided his Starblade, decelerated now to less insane velocities, toward the star carrier
America
. From out here, she was an umbrella shape, shield cap and spine, tiny and dark gray against the velvet emptiness of intergalactic space. Winking navigational lights, red and green and white, helped him pick her out against the blackness.

“It’s good to be home, Don,” Connor said.

“Damned straight, Meg. I’ll be happy to peel off this stinking fighter.”

In fact, the seven-hour voyage out from Invictus had been only a bit less than forty minutes subjective, thanks to relativistic time dilation, but it still
felt
much longer.

“Do you think the Guarders made it?”

“Dunno. We kind of had a head start on them. I hope so, though.” Gregory hesitated, then double-checked to make sure they were on a private channel. “Meg? I’d like to . . . uh . . . to see you again. Soon.” Even on a private channel he was a bit circumspect. The rest of the squadron didn’t need to know about him and Meg.

“A shower and some dinner first?”

“Of course.” He checked the fleet time. “Geez . . . it’s almost oh-two hundred. Didn’t know it was that late . . . or early.”

“It’s the damned time dilation,” Connor replied. “Still feels like eighteen hundred or so to me.”

“Roger that.”

“They’ll probably put us on evening duty tonight, so we can sleep through the day. But maybe my quarters before that?”

“I was thinking more of the Observation Deck.”

“That sounds inspired. You’re on!”

“Good.”

“Black Demon Flight, this is
America
Pryfly,” a new voice said, and Gregory jumped. Had they been listening in? “You are clear for approach and trap, Bay Two.”

Good. Primary Flight Control was just establishing the link for the landing back on board
America
.

“Copy that,
America
. Uh . . . is there any sign of pursuit?”
America
’s sensors and her far-flung network of battlespace drones could detect an approaching enemy at a much greater range than a couple of lone fighters.

“Negative on that, Demon Flight. Thank you for not leading them back home.”

“Pryfly, they may still be on the way,” Connor announced. “Keep your long range peeled.”

“Copy that.”

Still slowing, Gregory’s Starblade was perfectly aligned now with the carrier’s rotating hab modules, and the stern-facing openings, popularly known as the “barn doors,” in each. His AI took over the final approach, nudging the Starblade’s velocity just enough that Bay Two’s barn door would be sweeping across his line of approach when he got there.
America
’s power modules and aft sponsons blurred beneath his keel, there was a last-instant bump to starboard as the ASI made a final course correction . . .

. . . and then he flashed across the threshold into Bay Two, coming to a smooth but definite halt a second later. Robotic handlers maneuvered his Starblade onto the black surface of a nano pressure seal. With a lurch, his fighter began sinking into the deck, which closed around him to prevent the atmosphere on the flight deck from leaking out into the hard vacuum of the landing bay. To his left, Connor’s Starblade hurtled into the bay thirty seconds behind him, eased to a halt, and began sinking into the black rectangle on the deck as well.

They were home.

Sick Bay

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

0250 hours, TFT

“He should be awake now,” the sick bay’s AI voice announced. “Go ahead, Captain.”

“How are you feeling, Scotty?”

Lieutenant Commander Edmond St. Clair opened his eyes . . . then widened them. Captain Connie Fletcher was leaning over his bed. “CAG!” he said, and tried to sit up.

“At ease, Commander,” she said, laughing. “Take it easy.”

“What . . . happened?”

“You kind of got shot up fighting the Tushies. A SAR tug snagged you and dragged you home.”

“We’ve had you in an artificially induced coma for several hours, Commander,” the AI told him. “We’ve checked you out, and you appear undamaged.”

“God . . .”

He bit off the word. As a Pan-European, he knew how sensitive the North Americans were to religious comments. He amended the thought:
former
Pan-European.

“Don’t worry,” Fletcher said. “You’re not offending anyone.”

“I was feeling . . . pretty lost, out away from the ship.”

“I can imagine. It’s damned empty out there. You feeling up to going back to duty status?”

“I . . . think so.”

“We’re growing new fighters but we’re damned short of pilots right now, and the Admiral is taking us into hell. How’s
that
for a religious statement?”

“I’ll promise not to report you, CAG.” He swung his legs out of the sick bay rack. He felt weak, and a bit woozy . . . the effects of whatever nanodrugs they’d pumped into him.

“Proceed carefully, Commander,” the AI told him. “You should be feeling fully recovered within ten minutes.”

“How’s my squadron, CAG?” he asked.

“Four dead. One more streaker we haven’t recovered yet.”

“Who?”

“Blue Nine. Atkinson.”

He closed his eyes, and almost sagged back on the rack. Jess Atkinson—sweet and fun and a great romp in bed . . . and a hell of a fighter pilot in combat. Jess Atkinson, who had a tendency to let slip religious exclamations herself.
Shit . . .

“We’re still looking for her, Commander,” Fletcher told him. “We’ll find her if we can.”

If we can.

But the Void was so very empty and deep.

St. Clair could feel it closing on him, like a black and smothering shroud.

Observation Deck

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

0225 hours, TFT

“So . . . beautiful . . .”

“Yes. You are.”

Connor gave Gregory a playful punch against his bare chest, and the two of them drifted slightly apart. That was the trouble with zero-G lovemaking; the dead hand of Isaac Newton still reached in from the remote past: every action has an equal but opposite reaction. A thrust resulted in a backward push. A caress responded with a nudge.

“Idiot!” Connor said, laughing. “I meant the
view
.”

He looked her up and down. “So did I.”

They both were naked, adrift in the observation dome, located high atop
America
’s bridge tower. Once, the compartment had been a duty station linked in with Primary Flight Control, a place where human eyes could watch incoming fighters lining up for traps in the rotating hab modules aft, but machine eyes did the job faster, and with far greater accuracy. The dome now served as recreational space, its instrumentation and consoles stripped out, its deck given nanoreactive furniture that could be summoned with a thought . . . a place for crew members to come and watch the surrounding depths of space with their own eyes, instead of through scanners and cerebral feeds.

And also, quite often, it was a place where lovers met. The zero-gravity added a certain spice to such encounters, even if the participants needed to use elastic ties to hold themselves together, or anchor their bare feet to the nanomatrix of the deck.

With practice, it could be done—
the docking maneuver
, to use the old and popular space-faring term. And Gregory and Connor had been getting a lot of practice here of late.

The galaxy hung huge and gorgeous beyond the dome, and Gregory was forced to admit that, yes, it
was
beautiful. Its glow, the accumulated illumination from 400 billion stars, was a lot softer and more delicate than he’d imagined it would be. Visual feeds, including those in his Starblade, tended to intensify the light a bit. Here, with the naked eye, that vast spiral seemed to blend in with the blackness of intergalactic space beyond, in places becoming nearly invisible. You had to really
look
to see the detail.

But the more you looked, the more you saw.

“I wonder if what we’re seeing,” Connor said, “is any different than it was back in our day?”

They were still getting used to the revelation, passed through the fleet hours before, that the task force had emerged from the TRGA roughly 12 million years in the future.

“Not that much,” Gregory told her. “It takes two hundred fifty million years for our sun to go around the galactic center once. Twelve million years is . . . nothing.”

“It’s still deep time.”

“I usually think of that term associated with the past.”

“Depends on how you use it,” Connor said with a shrug that did delightful things to her upper torso. “Twelve million years . . . you know, we’re probably post-human out here. The average life span for a species is . . . what? A million years?”

“For mammals, yes,” Gregory said. “For intelligent species, it could be shorter . . . a hundred thousand years or so.”

“Or it could be much longer,” Connor countered. “A truly advanced galactic species might be immortal. And they would break all the rules about species life spans.”

“Well, we won’t know unless we make contact with our remote descendents in there, now, will we? I doubt the admiral’s going to be up for any long-range sightseeing.”

“Probably not. Maybe the aliens here can fill us in.”

“Maybe.” He frowned. “And maybe . . .”

“What?”

“I’m just wondering about the Tushies coming through the Triggah here . . . working with the Glothr, but twelve million years after our time. It . . . paints a kind of a strange picture, y’know?”

“Strange how?”

“A Sh’daar empire, or whatever you want to call it—a polity, an associative—that’s spread across an entire galaxy,
and also across millions of years of time
. I’m trying to imagine—I don’t know—an intragalactic
and
intertemporal network . . . trade, military assistance . . . trillions of sapient beings, millions of worlds, across millions of different times . . .”

“God. Talk about thinking big . . .”

“It just makes me wonder what we’re really up against here,” he told her.

She reached for him . . . carefully to avoid the hand of Newton. “I want to be up against
you
. C’mere.”

And they clung to each other once more, adrift in beauty. . . .

Admiral’s Quarters

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

0320 hours, TFT

“Bridge, this is Gray. I’m turning in, now.”

“Go ahead, Admiral,” Gutierrez replied. “We’ve got it covered here.”

“Quarters,” he added. “Call me at oh-seven hundred, please.”

“Acknowledged,” the room replied in his head. “Zero-seven hundred wake-up call.”

Normally he had the room wake him at 0600 or even earlier, but he’d just put in a very long day. Even with electronic sleep-aug he was going to be bumping into bulkheads when he regained consciousness. Three and a half hours just weren’t enough.

“When’s reveille?” Taggart asked him from the bed. She was gloriously naked, her brown hair spilling across the pillow in an unkempt riot. He told her, and she groaned. “Too
early
. . .”

“Yeah, but the Glothr may not feel that way,” he said. “I don’t know. Do jellyfish sleep?”

“I don’t know, but
I
sleep!”

“Well, that’s because you’re a mammal.” He gave her a deliberately salacious grin. “
Obviously
so.”

He padded across the deck and climbed in beside her.

“Obviously. But maybe we shouldn’t do anything about it,” she said. “Not if we’re on duty again in less than four hours.”

“Don’t be mad at
me
. Yell at the Glothr. Or the Tushies.”

“Who’s on the flag bridge?”

“Captain Gutierrez. She came on second watch, and she’s going to keep an eye on things until oh-eight hundred. She’s going to need sleep-aug at that point, too.” Hell, they all would. There was no day or night in space, and though
America
and the rest of Task Force One operated on Terran Fleet Time—which at the moment was reading almost four in the morning—in fact ships’ crews were scheduled to man all stations at all times. The awkward part of that was that the ship’s captain and the fleet’s admiral both were on duty 24/7, and that meant they caught sleep when they could.