Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (23 page)

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The alien cloud was swiftly getting closer.

Place of Cold Dreaming

Invictus Ring

1644 hours, TFT

“Seven-one-cee-eight! We are getting another message from the primitives. They want us to halt the combat. They want to
communicate
.”

What . . . negotiate? Now?
That made no sense. The humans must believe that they held the combat advantage now, but if that was so, the proper course was to strike and continue striking, not bluster and make threats. Perhaps they were sending threats because they were weaker than they seemed, and knew it.

Or was there something else behind the impenetrable alien psychology?

“Ignore them,” Seven-one-cee-eight ordered. “We will see if they still wish to communicate once their warships have been crippled or destroyed.”

VFA-31, The Impactors

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1648 hours, TFT

St. Clair sat encased within the womblike embrace of his new-grown Starblade, watching the unfolding battle outside and awaiting the order to launch. His fighter was tucked into one of the launch-bay tubes in the rotating hab modules, but in his mind’s eye he was hurtling toward the enemy, watching as the Black Demons, the Nighthawks, and the Dragonfires took on the alien swarm.

The Earth fighters were badly outnumbered.

“C’mon, CAG!” he called over the command channel. “When are you gonna let us get in on that furball?”

“Keep it iced, Blue Seven,” Fletcher replied from Pryfly. “We’re sending you out after bigger prey.”

“Our people are getting chopped to bits out there!”

“Yeah, CAG,” Blue Two, Lieutenant Thom Vandermeyer, added. “We could catch ’em by surprise.”

“Belay the chatter, Impactors,” Fletcher said, her voice cold. “The Admiral has a plan. . . .”

It had better
, St. Clair thought,
be one hell of a plan
. The fighters deployed ahead of the task force were outnumbered four or five to one right now. The alien ships were . . . something new.
Strange
. Each was different; each looked like a small building or a collection of angled blocks and rectilinear shapes, and each was about ten times the size of a Starblade, so it was tough to decide whether they were very large fighters or small capital ships, similar in scale to human frigates. They were clumsy and slow—the fighters could literally flit rings around them—but they were powerful, possessing particle beams that were devastating when they struck.

And St. Clair noticed something else about them as well: they tended to move in units—tight-knit groups of two or three—and they seemed to move according to programmed responses, with a given type of attack generating a specific response. St. Clair couldn’t be certain, but it
felt
like he was looking at robots . . . and not particularly bright ones, either.

They were suckers, he noted, for close-inside knife work—the so-called Nungie maneuver. That was a somewhat new fighter tactic, one invented by a Black Demon pilot in a close fight with the Slan last year at 70 Ophiuchi. A fighter would pivot to face the alien ship as it swung by and actually chew up the enemy’s hull with its forward-projected singularity. The tight-knit point of intense gravitational energy—flickering on and off at thousands of times a second—ate its way through anything, releasing a blaze of X- and gamma rays. The maneuver was dangerous in the extreme, requiring absolute precision between the human pilot and the fighter’s linked AI, but that was what the Starblades were specifically designed to do, and, more and more, they were laying the alien building blocks open, spilling their contents in glittering cascades into space.

Perhaps just as important, the aliens had trouble hitting fighters that were moving that close and that fast to both them and other Glothr ships.

But when they did manage to connect, the fighter would flare like a moth caught in a blow torch.

And there were so hellishly many of the aliens.

They were leaking through, shoving their way past the human fighters and engaging the larger vessels of the task force.

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1649 hours, TFT

“Eight minutes to contact with the ring, Admiral,” Gutierrez told him.

“Thank you, Captain. Deploy long-range drones now, if you please. They’re to scan for any sign of the
Concord
and the
Pax
.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral. Drones away.”

“Admiral!” Mallory called. “The alien ships are beginning to hit the main fleet.”

“I see it. CAG, order the fighters to break off.” He didn’t want to hit any of his own people in that confused tangle ahead.

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

“Commander Taggart, you may fire when the opportunity presents itself.”

“Yes,
sir
!”

The task force’s vanguard was a rough cone of frigates and destroyers, moving just ahead of the three battleships,
Illinois
,
Northern California,
and
New York
. A Glothr phalanx of at least thirty alien ships slammed through the cone, taking terrible damage, yet not returning fire. They seemed determined to break through and get at the big boys clustered a few thousand kilometers beyond the fleet’s sharp leading point.

In modern space combat, frigates are light combatants designed for an anti-fighter role, with a special emphasis on missile weaponry as opposed to beams. Destroyers are larger and slower than the nimble frigates, but with more firepower, usually built around a spinal-mount particle gun, together with plenty of turret-mounted kinetic-kill accelerators.

As the angular Glothr craft poured into the task force’s van, they were hit by defensive salvos from the frigates and destroyers. Nuclear fireballs flared and pulsed; lasers and particle beams were invisible to the naked eye, but painted in by AI graphics on the flag bridge, showing the defenders coordinating their fire. The destroyers
Hobart
and
Lackland
caught a large Glothr ship in a deadly crossfire, pinning it with ultraviolet HEL beams—high-energy lasers—that peeled back its outer layers of hull before it erupted in a plasma blaze of blue-white light.

Then a Glothr vessel, tumbling and out of control, slammed into the
Lackland
’s port side. Huge fragments of twisted metal snapped off, and the
Lackland
heeled over to starboard, gently rolling with the impact.

But most of the incoming Glothrs were already through the shell of frigates and destroyers, and were closing now on the battleships.

Battleships were bigger, more heavily armored, and carried more heavy weapons than the smaller escorts. Numerous modern strategists were convinced that the battleship was obsolete now when it came to fleet actions, since it was less maneuverable than the sleeker battlecruiser. This battle, however, was fast turning into a slug-fest like the earlier engagement with the Turusch, with two fleets pounding at each other with every weapon that could be brought to bear. And here, the heavies—the old-fashioned battleships—were in their natural element. Generally relegated nowadays to a bombardment role for planetary assault, battleships could still bring hundreds of weapons to bear in space combat, from kinetic-kill magnetic railguns to heavy particle accelerators to HEL-guns, while their point defense system used smaller versions of those weapons to lay down a devastating field of fire designed to take out any enemy vessel that managed to make it in to the ship’s innermost killing field.

The remaining Glothr warships hit the battleship fire zone and began dying.

“CAG,” Gray said quietly, watching the pulse and throb of nuclear fire ahead. “Have the fighters in the vanguard continue sweeping in toward the planet. Let them know we’ll be coming in hard on their six.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

Gray was not dismissing the oddly shaped Glothr craft, but he had scaled back the threat in his mind. There were lots of them, yes . . . but they were not showing much of a
tactical
sense: no trying to englobe USNA ships, no attempts to gang up on a lone warship and overwhelm it with firepower. They were moving in more or less straight lines and engaging any ship that happened to be within range, and to Gray’s mind that suggested an AI, and not a very smart one at that. There was no passion in this attack, and so long as the task force could maintain superior firepower locally, it looked like they would be able to fend off the attack without too much of a problem.

This, actually, was something of a surprise. The Glothr were clearly superior to humans in terms of technology, especially with that time-bending trick of theirs, but all things considered, they weren’t
that
much better.

As he had always thought: passion could count for a hell of a lot in a firefight.

“Five minutes to contact with the ring.”

“Thank you, Captain Gutierrez.”

“Admiral?”

“Yes, CAG?”

“The squadrons in reserve are asking when they can get into the thick of things.”

“Let them know they’ll have their chance very soon now.”

VFA-96, The Black Demons

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1652 hours, TFT

Gregory watched another of the frigate-sized aliens explode, its angular hull crumpling and distorting at the touch of the nuclear fireball. While there were a few stragglers ahead, most of them were already behind the fighters, and the way in to Invictus was wide open.

The planet itself was hard to see unless it was silhouetted against the sweep and swirl of the galaxy beyond. As Gregory’s Starblade drew closer, his angle of view shifted, and the night-black world slid off the dusting of blue-white starlight across the distant galactic backdrop and faded against darkness.

The rings, though, were still crisply visible, pale gray and gray-brown, made of flat, sharp-angled blocks of various odd shapes. Gregory was reminded of massed office complexes on Earth, except that these didn’t have windows and weren’t brightly lit.

Of course, many human buildings didn’t have windows either. Wallscreens were more efficient and could be programmed for other views than the building’s immediate surroundings, or double as vidscreens or news feeds or even internal lighting. But Gregory had the feeling that the Glothr ring’s lack of windows had more to do with alien psychology than it did with esthetics. If sight wasn’t the Glothr’s primary sense, as he’d heard, they might not have the human need to see outside . . . even when the view was as spectacular as this one.

“I’m getting a strong signal from Drone 327, people,” Commander Mackey told them. “Lock on and let’s follow it in.”

Gregory locked on to the indicated drone signal. Red brackets appeared overlaying his visual field, indicating a portion of the outermost rim of the alien ring. There were two strong heat sources there . . . and radiofrequency leakage that looked like it was spilling from a human source.

“Looks like our ships are inside the structure,” he told Mackey. “Think Ambassador Rand and his people are there, too?”

“I don’t know, Gregory. But we’re going to find out! All Demons, break low and starboard on my mark! Three . . . two . . . one . . .
mark
!”

One by one, the Starblades rolled right and hurtled toward the ring.

Chapter Twenty

7 August, 2425

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1654 hours, TFT

“We are within maximum firing range of the near edge of the ring, Admiral,” Laurie Taggart reported.

Captain Gutierrez glanced back at Gray as if for confirmation. He nodded. “You may commence firing,” he said. “Target Glothr weapons positions as they reveal themselves. Stay clear of the red zones.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Gutierrez said. “Commander? Let ’em have it!”

Beams and missiles launched from
America
. Most of her weapons turrets couldn’t bear, yet, blocked by the half-kilometer wide disk of her shield cap, but her twin spinal launch tubes began hurtling multi-ton kinetic-kill projectiles toward the target. Salvos of missiles launched in all directions out from the spine, curving around to pass the shield cap and converge on points identified by
America
’s AI as probable communications nodes and command-control centers.

Taking their cue from the flag, the other heavies of the task force opened fire as well, the destroyers and frigates moving in close to take on the Glothr defenses at point-blank range, accompanied by flights of sleek fighters. The battleships
Illinois
,
Northern California
, and
New York
—all of them seriously damaged but very much still in the fight—held back, pounding at the alien structure. It was an awesome spectacle, and a terrifying one. If the tech discrepancy was too great, the
America
task force might find itself cut to pieces, the survivors alone and helpless and very far from home.

Unable to simply sit and watch, Gray had stood up . . . which in the zero-gravity of the flag bridge meant sending a thought into the deck matrix to turn a meter-square nano patch into a stick-tight, anchoring him in place. The forward end of the flag bridge opened onto the ship’s bridge, a half deck down, while above the step, the bulkhead curved up and over into the flag bridge dome, which currently was displaying the battle as computer-generated icons and graphics.

In fact, of course, there
was
no up or down in zero-G . . . but Gray could snug his shipboard utility-clad feet onto the restraining nano patch, clasp his hands behind his back, and wonder if the fleet admirals of long-ago surface navies had felt the same sense of a headlong plummet as a carefully crafted battle plan unfolded around their vessel.

High-energy lasers reached out from the parapets of the ring fortress ahead, scoring hits. The broad shield caps on
Illinois
and
Northern California
both were punctured multiple times, spilling cascades of water that instantly froze into clouds of ice crystals as they hit hard vacuum.

He hoped they had enough water left for maneuvering during the battle.

“All units,” Gray said. “Move your fire in closer to the red zones. Isolate them.”

The red zones were the spots identified as possible locations of the two captured High Guard ships, as well as Ambassador Rand and his party. All the task force really had to go on was sources of heat. Glothr physiology appeared to function at right around the freezing point of water. Their insulation was very good, but on infrared, the ring was ablaze with myriad stars—points of energy, of which the vast majority were likely power plants of some sort. Even creatures with near-frozen ammonia-water for blood needed heat in the black Void, which hovered at close to three degrees Kelvin.

But the AIs had identified one cluster of infrared radiation—three points close to the ring’s outer rim—that looked like the heat signatures of human-habitable compartments or ship habs. The fire control computers on each ship in the task force had flagged that zone, along with several other less likely targets, in red. The idea was to pound the structure of the ring as close as possible to those areas
without
hitting them.

The ring, Gray thought, was an astounding artifact, a titanic mass of material orbiting a dark and icy world five times the size of Earth. It appeared to be circling the planet in a synchronous orbit, matching the planet’s forty-four-hour rotation, and with the slender columns of space elevators connecting the ring to the surface below. The ring itself was nearly twelve thousand kilometers wide and hundreds thick; its total mass must have run into the trillions of tons, and hundreds of billions of Glothr could have lived comfortably within the structure’s interior.

Which pointed up one of the basic problems of space warfare: a fleet could carry, at most, a few tens of thousands of naval and Marine personnel; the light carrier transport
Marne
carried a regimental assault group of about five thousand Marines packed into her ranked hab modules. A planet, though, might have billions of inhabitants; unless an attacker was willing to destroy the entire world from space, committing genocide on a planetary scale, he would be at an insurmountable numerical disadvantage. Gray had no idea at all how many Glothr might live now beneath the icy crust of Invictus. That artificial ring system, however, was large enough to carry the planet’s entire population and then some.

And that led to another conceptual problem. Titan, back in Earth’s solar system, had a rocky core—specifically a hydrous silicate core capped over by a deep layer of Ice VI (frozen water under such incredible pressures that it formed tetragonal crystals and possessed unusual electrical properties). Over that inner ocean, which was many hundreds of kilometers deep and held more water within its depths than did the entire Earth, was a shell of normal ice decoupled from the interior by the ocean, and covered by rocks made of
very
cold ice and hydrocarbon “dirt.” Invictus appeared to be a larger, more massive version of Titan, but if that was so, where the hell had the Glothr gotten the raw material for trillions of tons of artificial ring? Never mind how they’d gotten it up into orbit;
where the hell had all that stuff come from
?

The pressure at the bottom of the Invictan ocean must be so high that mining the core would present incredible technical problems, starting with the difficulty of tunneling down through hundreds of kilometers of Ice VI. Even if that were somehow possible, once the miners got through to the core itself, they would find it composed of silicates—no iron, no titanium, no copper, no aluminum, none of the metals required for an advanced technology.

“Sensor suite,” Gray said.

“Yes, Admiral!” a woman’s voice replied. According to the duty roster, Lieutenant Evans had the sensor watch.

“Give me a readout on the composition of that ring material.” Lasers and particle beams were slashing into the ring structure, vaporizing starship-sized chunks of the surface material.
America
’s spectrometers would be peering into those expanding clouds of gas and debris and comparing them with the spectra of known materials.

“Yes, sir. We’re reading a variety of long-chain carbon molecules . . . including acrylate polymers, polyvinyl chloride, and polyetheretherketones—”

“In English, please, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir. It’s plastic.”

“
Plastic?
”

“There are traces of various metals—boron nitride, para-aramids, and a suggestion of tetragonal ice crystals—but it’s mostly plastic, yes, sir.”

Well, Gray thought . . . what was a budding young technic civilization to do if copper, iron, and steel weren’t on the table? One thing worlds like Titan were abundantly stocked with was hydrocarbons: substances such as petroleum, propane, ethane, and methane . . . the stuff from which plastics were made.

Glothr history, Gray thought, must be a long and fascinating story as they moved up the technical ladder. He turned his attention back to the fight at hand—the mystery would have to be solved another time.

The human fleet continued hammering away at the near edge of the ring. Return fire was slowly but steadily growing weaker as more and more Glothr batteries in the ring were identified and destroyed. Gray shifted his bridge display to a feed from a battlespace drone drifting low above the ring’s surface, studying the data being relayed back to
America
.

The ring here, close to the edge, was between twenty and fifty kilometers thick—looking paper-thin from out in space, but remarkably bulky and substantial up close. As the drone skimmed across the dark surface, the artificial terrain took on the appearance of a kind of cityscape, with towers, blocks, and domes of unknown purpose separated from one another by deep canyons and plunging valleys. The surface, those parts that hadn’t been hit by the task force’s bombardment, appeared pristine—no meteor craters or scars or weathering from eons of dust impacts—which suggested either remarkably good defenses or that the surface was periodically renewed. True, asteroids, meteoric debris, and interstellar dust were scarce out here beyond the galaxy’s rim . . . but that ring
might
be as old as 12 million years, and much of that time had been spent within more crowded vistas.

Ahead, a brilliant flare of light marked the impact of a heavy KK projectile from one of the ships. A geyser of water exploded into vacuum from the strike. An instant later, the probe flashed low above the resulting crater, glimpsing tangled depths of darkness and ragged structures below, rimmed by a thick layer of ice.

“Pull back,” Gray told the AI controlling his image feed. “Let me see the OA.”

The objective area was still highlighted by red brackets, the location of the
Pax
, the
Concord
, and—with luck—of Rand and his staff.

He felt the AI’s response . . . a wordless realization that there were no human assets close enough for the view he required.

“CAG,” he said. “I need some fighters in close to the OA.”

“Right away, Admiral.”

Several fighters arced in above the ring, vectoring in on the target. Zooming in close, using the fighters’ telemetry, he studied the artificial terrain closely.
America
’s AI had suggested a possible approach . . . and it looked like it might be feasible.

But God, the
risks
 . . .

Place of Cold Dreaming

Invictus Ring

1702 hours, TFT

“Seven-one-cee-eight!” the communicative electro-sense pulse cried as it rippled through its body. “The enemy appears to be attempting to isolate the Place of Cold Dreaming.”

But Seven-one-cee-eight had already noted the human attack pattern and come to that same conclusion. They should have taken the human prisoners deeper into the ring, but there’d simply been no time. Enemy fire had wrecked major transport passageways and corridors, smashed manufacturing and power supply centers, and breached hundreds of major habitation modules, spilling their water into space. Casualties already numbered in the tens of thousands.

But most of those casualties had been polyps, untrained and non-sapient—animals easily replaced. Only a tiny fraction of the ring’s total volume had been compromised. There was no danger as yet.

And perhaps they could use the prisoner area as bait to lure the human fleet in closer for a crushing blow.

“Release another swarm,” it ordered.

“We swarm together,” was the reply.

Enormous sections of ring surface began flaking off into space, scattering, dividing into smaller units that swirled out toward the human fleet. Several flared and vanished almost at once as enemy missiles snapped in and detonated . . . but the defender swarms were entirely robotic. The Kin’s defenses were much like the automated immune-response defenses of the body, reacting to perceived threats with little in the way of anticipation or originality of thought.

But there were a
very
great many of them, enough, perhaps, to utterly overwhelm the humans’ handful of ships.

VFA-96, The Black Demons

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1703 hours, TFT

Gregory steered his Starblade low across the surface of the ring, letting his fighter’s AI maneuver the craft to avoid the irregularities of the landscape. It was, he thought, like flying through a city on Earth . . . not that he’d ever done such a thing, of course. The closest had been full-sim downloads of fighter passes over the ruins of Columbus, D.C., shortly after the Confederation had nano-nuked the place. Passing over a recent crater punched into the ring’s surface by a five-ton high-velocity kinetic-kill projectile reminded him forcibly of the gaping crater where downtown Columbus once had been.

Ahead, a number of the frigate-sized ring pieces tumbled into the empty sky. The enemy had an apparently inexhaustible supply of those things, and sooner or later they were going to get through the task force’s perimeter defenses and in among the heavies.

“Okay, Demons!” Mackey yelled. “Let’s get ’em! We’ll take ’em from their six!”

As the Glothr ships rose above the ring surface, the line of VFA-96 Starblades was in the perfect position to move into the widening gap between ring and ships, coming at the enemy from behind. It was a dangerous maneuver, for the task force was already hammering at the Glothr vessels, and the kill zone was going to be deadly, with crisscrossing beams, missiles, and fast-hurtling chunks of lead and depleted uranium.

“Target lock!” Collins called. “Arming ferdies . . . and . . .
Fox one
!”

A pair of Fer-de-lance missiles streaked from her ship, weaving low above the ring surface and then turning sharply out toward the Glothr ships. VG-44c antiship missiles were considerably more powerful than the smaller VG-10 Kraits. The twin nuclear detonations lit up the ring’s surface like a pair of novae—death-silent, casting long, sharp-edged, paired shadows back across the dark gray surface.

Gregory brought his fighter around behind his point-singularity flickering ahead, rising now from the ring and accelerating hard. Projected from the prow of his fighter several thousand times each second, the artificial singularity puckered space ahead, drawing the Starblade along as it attempted to slide down the constantly moving slope of the gravity well.