Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (24 page)

In an instant, he was in among the Glothr ships, so close that he could maneuver in until he was skimming meters above the speed-blurred surface of one, slicing it almost end to end with the fast-pulsing micro-black hole forward. Gregory accelerated his mental processes, trying to keep pace.
Knife fighting
 . . .

Turn . . . lock . . . fire . . . then accelerate, streaking back across the ring, the black disk of Invictus ahead of him as he lined up on another Glothr ship. This time he thought-triggered his KK cannon, sending a stream of depleted uranium into the alien’s hull at very nearly point-blank range . . . fifty kilmeters . . . twenty . . . five . . .

Gas gushed into space as he passed the shredding alien, freezing. More gas erupted in front of him as a pressure containment vessel exploded; his Starblade shuddered as it passed through a glittering explosion of ice crystals. For an instant, a shape registered in Gregory’s awareness as it tumbled in front of him and then slammed against his fighter, rocking him hard to the side. For just a moment, a part of his brain thought that he’d just hit one of the Glothr flung from a hab area, but as it fragmented against his ship, he corrected that first impression. He’d just hit one of the cigar-shaped Glothr robots; its pieces were collapsing now into the haze of his fighter’s drive singularity, causing the singularity to burn with an intense blue-violet glare.

He was in a slow tumble now, and it took him and his AI together to pull the fighter back onto an even keel.

He executed a thought command, trying to bring his fighter around so that he could align himself with another Glothr vessel . . . but with a cold and icy shock he realized that his fighter was not responding.

“Turn! Turn, damn you!” he yelled. “Ship! What’s wrong?”

The fighter’s AI replied with impressions and data rather than the clumsiness of words. His power systems had failed . . . drive system down . . . communications down . . .

Gregory was alone and helpless as he slid past the dark surface of the embattled Glothr ring, falling toward a black-frozen alien world.

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1704 hours, TFT

“
Northern California
reports that they have a major breach in the ring, Admiral,” Mallory reported. “And enemy fire in that sector has fallen off to almost nothing.”

“Very well,” Gray replied. “Get some battlespace drones in there.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“I want you to thread them into the structure through the breach. See if you can find the
Concord
and the
Pax
.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gray watched for a moment as a dozen remote drones closed with the ring, slipping one by one into the gaping hole blown open by the bombardment mements before. Clear telemetry streamed back to
America
, bringing shadowy images of the ring’s interior, a vast and cavernous expanse surrounded by torn and twisted structure, girders, and hundreds of entryways to side passages and corridors.

He shifted mental channels. “Colonel Jamison!”

“Sir!”

“We’re putting some drones into the AO, Colonel,
inside
the structure, as close to our people as we can manage. Do you have the feed?”

“We do, Admiral.”

“Very well. You may deploy your force.”

“
Ooh-rah!
On our way, Sir!”

“I don’t want your people trapped inside,” Gray added. “Keep them on the ring’s surface until the fighters have cleared out the interior.”

There was a hesitation on the other end. “Sir, that will restrict our ability to respond to the enemy a bit.”

“Just do it, Colonel! I don’t want that battalion becoming another bunch of POWs!”

“Yes, sir.”

The Marine transport
Marne
was already edging closer toward the ragged edge of the ring, the fighters of both of her strike squadrons spilling from her launch tubes.

And behind the fighters came a cloud of MAPP-2 Assault Pods—Apache Tears, as they were called—light-drinking black teardrops of nanomatrix, each holding a fully armed and armored USNA Marine. There were more than a thousand of them in the cloud, moving together in concert as they edged their way up to the ragged crater that was their entrance into the ring.

“CAG,” Gray said. “You still have the rest of
America
’s fighters on standby?”

“Yes, Admiral. The Dragonfires, the Lightnings, and the Impactors.”

“Deploy them in support of the Marines, if you please.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Launching fighters . . .”

Gray was extremely glad that
America
had been able to upgrade all of her fighters to the new SG-420 Starblades. When he’d been a fighter driver, about 12 million years ago, he’d flown the old SG-92 Starhawk . . . and he knew he’d not have wanted to try flying one of those inside an enclosed, debris-strewn compartment within an alien structure.

Fleet repair vessels like the
Vulcan
, and even
America
herself, could grow new fighters almost indefinitely, so long as they had sources of raw material available, and there was no good logistical reason to continue using outdated designs. The problem came with headware and with wetware—the training of human organic brains. There simply weren’t enough pilots who’d grown up with the newest fighter systems as yet, and that might limit what they would be able to do in there.

Well, they would find out soon enough.

VFA-31, The Impactors

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1705 hours, TFT

“Three . . . two . . . one . . .
drop
!”

Lieutenant Commander Edmond St. Clair felt the sensation of weight vanish as his Starblade fell down its launch tube and out into the starless void.
America
’s three flight decks, the outermost portions of the hab modules rotating around the carrier’s spine about twice a minute, received the benefit of a half G of spin gravity. Releasing the fighters under that acceleration dropped them into open space behind
America
’s shield cap with an outward velocity of five meters per second, plus whatever forward momentum the carrier possessed at the moment of drop.

In open space, now, St. Clair accelerated slightly, moving clear of the huge curve of the carrier’s shield cap, then nudged his Starblade forward.

St. Clair was still getting used to the new fighter. When he’d been with the British contingent of the Confederation military, he’d been trained and cybernetically equipped to fly the Franco-German KRG-60 Todtadler fighters . . . the “Death Eagles” that were roughly the equivalent of the USNA SG-101 Velociraptor. He’d received a nanobiological upgrade when he’d joined the USNA Navy, of course, including both chelated cybermemory upgrades and a genetic prosthesis to his organic brain designed to enhance his mental performance. He understood, however, that he was only able to control the Starblade at all because the Starblade’s AI was able to emulate more primitive control systems like the Velociraptor and the Todtadler. It turned out that it was far easier to boost an AI’s performance than to radically change the efficiency of the human brain.

“Form up on me,” he told his squadron, and he kicked his Starblade into a gentle drift forward, past the immense curve of
America
’s shield cap, past the handful of task-force ships ahead, and in toward the tattered outer edge of the Invictus ring. White pulses of light strobed and flashed in all directions as nuclear detonations blossomed in silent display.

One of the USNA ships, the battleship
Illinois
, was badly damaged. Her shield cap had already been holed, but now it was shredded, an expanding cloud of jagged debris, and many of her weapons were out of action. The destroyer
Lackland
had been hit numerous times as well, and looked like she was out of the fight.

The fighters of St. Clair’s squadron angled in toward the opening in the alien ring. Enemy fire from the ring structure had fallen off considerably in the past few minutes, but there were still a large number of the blocky, angular Glothr ships, and they were moving to try to intercept both the fighters and the Marine MAPP-2 pods. The Impactors, along with one of the marine squadrons, were deploying to cut them off.

A nuclear explosion flared off the ring’s surface immediately in front of St. Clair, and his Starblade went into a savage tumble.

For a terrifying moment, St. Clair fell into black emptiness. . . .

Marine Transport
Marne

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1707 hours, TFT

The initial attack was being made by a single battalion off the
Marne
’s regimental assault group, supported by both of her Marine air-space squadrons, the Death Dealers and the Devil Dogs. Linked in within his high-tech cocoon on board the
Marne
, Colonel Joseph Jamison watched the deployment and directed the assault.

Jamison would have liked to stay linked with all twelve hundred of his troops, but not even the
Marne
’s formidable AI could have accomplished that. Instead, he was receiving steady data feeds from both of his squadron commanders and from nearly sixty regimental, company, and platoon commanders; intelligence and tactical officers; battlespace drones; and artificial intelligences within the assault force. “Hold the entryway,” he was telling Major Harrison Smith, his first batt commander. “Let the zoomies clear out the interior.”

“But we’re picking up transmissions from the
Pax
, Colonel,” Smith told him. “She’s only about ten kilometers in!”

“I don’t care, Major. Hold that perimeter. I’ll tell you when to move.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Smith didn’t sound pleased, but he was a good officer, and Jamison knew he could count on the man not to jump the gun. Jamison had served with Smith before, on Luna and in Earth orbit, and he knew he was a solid, reliable battalion CO. This was going to be a rough op—extracting hostages or POWs from enemy control always was—and Jamison wanted the CO at the sharp, pointy end to be one he could trust to follow orders.

Not that the other battalion COs weren’t good. They were
Marines
, which made them by definition the very best. But he’d not been in combat with them, as he had with Smith . . . and that made a difference.

Data was pouring in from the fighter squadrons now, and Jamison opened his mind wider to receive it.

VFA-96, The Black Demons

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1703 hours, TFT

Gregory knew he was in serious trouble. Nothing in his Starblade was responding. The best nanotechnology in Earth’s entire military arsenal . . . and nothing was working. His fighter was past the ring, now, and falling steadily toward the vast, black globe of Invictus.

He
did
have power . . . a little. His auxiliary power tap was drawing a steady feed from the onboard singularity, a trickle of vacuum energy that was enough to keep his life support going, and to provide—if he was
very
lucky—enough maneuvering power to keep from slamming into the dark planet’s surface at better than fifty kilometers per second. He would have to nurse that power, however, if he intended to survive the impact. His AI, thank the gods, was back on-line now, and had assumed piloting duties. Gregory felt a small bump as the AI applied a few seconds of deceleration to the fighter’s internal grav-impeller blocks. You couldn’t get much thrust from the things, but if they lasted long enough, if they survived the stress of a high-velocity planetary approach, he might still live through this.

At least for a while. How long he would survive on the bleak surface of Invictus was still anyone’s guess.

Chapter Twenty-one

7 August, 2425

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1710 hours, TFT

“All ships!” Gray snapped. “Cease fire! Cease fire!”

The task force had been drifting closer and closer to the edge of the alien ring, but as USNA fighters and MAPPed Marines entered the structure, the likelihood of scoring an own goal grew more and more certain. The attack now was in the hands of the Marine assault force and the supporting fighters; all the capital ships could do from here on out was provide covering fire on the flanks . . . and protect the assault force from an attack from space.

The Marines had seized the rim of the crater punched into the edge of the ring and were holding it against Glothr robots making their way along the external surface. A Marine assault personnel pod was very much like a Starblade fighter, but with a far more flexible and adaptable nanomatrix form: essentially a tarlike semisolid surrounding an inner capsule holding one Marine; the power, drive, and control systems; and a particle cannon. A MAPP-2 Apache Tear could extend parts of itself to grab hold of the bulkhead of an alien ship or fortress; could dissolve its way through to the interior; could even walk, after a clumsy fashion, though it generally hovered on gravitic impellers. The light-absorbing outer surface made it all but invisible against the blackness of space, and the particle cannon let it serve as a fighter if necessary, albeit slow and awkward.

Right now, nearly twelve hundred Marines in MAPP-2 assault pods were clinging to the ragged edge of the cavern opened in the ring surface, using their particle beams to fend off the gathering swarms of Glothr robots. Gray recognized a serious tactical danger in the situation. He’d ordered Jamison’s Marines to stay put at the entrance until the way inside had been cleared out by the USNA fighters . . . but the longer they waited there, holding their perimeter, the more time the Glothr had to gather their forces. Through his data feed, Gray was aware of some thousands of Glothr robots out beyond the Marine perimeter, taking advantage of every bit of cover provided by the blasted and twisted architecture of the ring surface as they steadily moved closer. So far as Gray knew, the Marines of the
Marne
’s regimental assault group were up against an entire planet’s worth of defenders and defending technologies, and it wouldn’t pay at all to hang around longer than was absolutely necessary.

With a sudden shock, Gray realized that he was playing the role of MMREMF.

REMFs—the acronym’s
polite
translation was “rear-echelon mothers”—had been the bane of frontline troops for centuries . . . the gold-braid-heavy bastards who drew their plans in the comfort and safety of headquarters and gave the orders that sent men out to die.
Micro-managing
REMFs were infinitely worse.

Starting in the late twentieth century, military operations had been dominated more and more by advancing communications technologies designed to eliminate the ancient fog of war. It had become possible for generals—even government leaders—to watch a battle unfold in real time
and to give orders to the officers on the ground from thousands of kilometers away
.

Unfortunately, being able to see and hear all that was happening from the other side of the planet didn’t necessarily convey the battlefield reality. The commander of the forces on the ground knew things the political and military leaders in the rear could never possibly know—the temper and morale of the troops, for instance, how tired they were, how scared, how exposed, or how close they were to breaking. The fact that the people in the rear had not gone through the same training as the troops on the ground, or in the band-of-brothers camaraderie they shared, meant that those leaders would always be out of touch, to some degree, with the men and women on the ground.

Military history included more than one account of field commanders who had suddenly and mysteriously suffered “communications difficulties” that had allowed them to ignore orders from the rear.

Over the next few centuries, the technology had only improved, making convenient comm difficulties harder and harder to explain . . . or invoke.

Earth and the USNA military leadership was 12 million years in the past, and tens of thousands of light years distant, but Gray himself now constituted a local REMF, watching the Marine deployment from his seat on the flag bridge and giving orders to the Marine commanders. A micromanaging REMF, no less.

“Colonel Jamison.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

“It occurs to me that you and I are . . . removed a bit from the engagement. Perhaps we should give Major Smith his head.”

“I concur, Admiral.” There was a long hesitation. “Thank you.”

“Give ’em hell, Colonel.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

1/4 Marines

4
th
Regimental Assault Group, 1
st
MARDIV

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1710 hours, TFT

The First Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment of the First Marine Division clung to the ragged edge of a black and bottomless hell, fighting for its life. Major Harrison Smith edged his MAPP along a half-melted fold of ring material, trying to get a better look at the enemy advance along this sector of the perimeter.

Two of his Marines were crouched just ahead, looking like jet-black three-meter-wide amoebae clinging to the twisted and ice-covered surface. One of them edged above the lip of the crater, the muzzle of his pee-beep protruding from the rippling black nanomatrix of his pod. Alphanumerics scrolling past Smith’s vision identified the Marines—PFC Gene Sanders and Lance Corporal Ed Moultrie.

Moultrie’s weapon fired, eliciting a brief hiss of static over Smith’s comm unit. A hundred meters away, a silvery, cigar-shaped object flared in a brilliant light, fragmenting.

“
Got
the bastard!”

“Good shot, Moultrie,” Smith said.

The man almost jumped off his perch. “Oh! Uh . . . thank you, sir!”

“Don’t mind me,” Smith said. “Keep after ’em!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Smith moved away. “Shit!” the voice of PFC Sanders said in something like awe. “Was that the
skipper
?”

“One of ’em, Sanders,” Moultrie replied. “Forget about it. Keep firing!”

Smith chuckled to himself. Rank-and-file Marines tended not to expect the brass to come poking around their fighting positions, not in the middle of a hot firefight. He liked to keep them on their toes.

Or, in this case, on their pseudopods. MAPP-2 units were slow and clumsy as fighters in open space, but they served well as highly specialized combat armor on the surface, especially when that surface was uneven and possessed an uncertain gravity.

There
was
gravity here on the outer edge of the Invictus ring—the total mass of the ring was that of a small planet, added to the more powerful pull of Invictus itself; the ring was rotating slowly, however, keeping match with the planet’s leisurely forty-four-hour rotation, and the outward centrifugal force generated by that rotation cancelled a great deal of that attraction. There was, in fact, just enough gravity that the immense hole in the edge of the ring—a good eight kilometers across—felt like down, but a misstep could send you flying here, and without grav impellers you might find yourself in orbit. MAPP-2 units had originally been designed for operations on the surfaces of asteroids, or on the outside hulls of orbital structures like planetary fortresses or orbital manufactories, places where Marines needed something that could serve as both spaceship and personal armor, depending on the situation.

Extending another pseudopod, Smith reached for a fold in the ring structure’s surface, let the nanomatrix on his gauntlet’s palm adhere to it, and then pulled himself across. Light flared above him—another particle burst, though he didn’t know if it had been fired by Marine or Glothr.

Another blast—silent, but sending a rippling shock wave through the surface strong enough to break his hold. Smith latched on with three more pseudopods, then directed his attention up and out. Sure enough, one of the frigate-sized Glothr ships was there, five kilometers overhead and dropping toward the surface, firing as it came. Smith extended his particle-beam weapon, locked on, and triggered it, sending a stream of protons slashing into the target. Other Marines opened fire on the intruder as well, but not before the Glothr ship fired again, sending several Apache Tears tumbling off into space.

Damn it . . . how long are we going to be kept here in this exposed position?

“Castle Rock, Castle Rock!” he called. “This is One-Four! We need some cover down here!”

“One-Four, Castle Rock,” the voice of the assault group’s command/control center replied. “On the way!”

The concentrated fire from the Marines on the perimeter seemed to be having an effect. The frigate was pulling back, now, as bright flashes and sparkles across its surface showed dozens of hits. An instant later, the Glothr ship crumpled as gravitic rounds from the battleship
New York
slashed into the boxy structure and began devouring it from the inside out.

Gravitic guns in the human arsenal were relatively recent developments of one of the enemy’s weapons—weapons developed originally by the Turusch for planetary bombardment and used in their attacks on Haris and Osiris. They were difficult and dangerous weapons—they tended to sear nearby space with intense bursts of gamma and X-rays as they ate their way through solid matter—and were rarely used in fleet actions, but the big battleships each mounted a couple of grav cannon turrets and, sometimes, they could be used against capital ships with considerable effectiveness.

Crippled, the Glothr ship drifted toward the horizon. A flight of four Navy fighters pursued it.

Most of the zoomies—the fighter pilots—had already descended into the hole and were supposed to be clearing the way for the main body of Marines, but if they had to sit perched up here for much longer, those Glothr monsters were going to sweep them right off into space.

Smith was getting a steady feed of data, both from assault-team drones already inside the ring structure and from the command-control center on the
Marne
. The two captured High Guard ships, he noted, had been identified already, their locations marked on his in-head maps.

Another explosion, this one quite close. Smith hugged the smoothly rippled surface, then looked up. Moultrie and Sanders had taken a direct hit; what was left of their MAPPs was drifting off into space, an expanding cloud of hot gas.

Shit!

He looked for another Glothr ship . . . but then a group of the cigar-shaped robots appeared above the lip of the crater, just thirty meters from Smith’s position. He swung his weapon about, his MAPP-2 unit flowing like water to both track the targets and to keep him snugged down against the surface. He fired . . . and a half dozen other Marines opened up as well. The Glothr robots, thank the gods of battle, tended to be a bit on the sluggish side, as though they were being controlled under a time lag. In seconds, the entire group, four or five of the machines, had been shot to bits.

But there were so many, many more—all of them, it seemed, headed this way.

“One-Four, this is Castle Rock.” The voice and ID were those of Colonel Jamison.

“This is One-Four. Go ahead!”

“You’re clear to move into the interior, Harry,” Jamison told him. “At your discretion, advance on the
Pax
and the
Concord
.”

“It’s about fucking time! Heads up, Marines! We’re going spaceborne!”

The order was answered by a chorus of shouts from Marine throats, a roar of battle cries as twelve hundred Marines rose from cover and dropped into hell. . . .

VFA-96, The Black Demons

Invictus Ring, T+12 MY

1712 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Fred Dahlquist wrestled his Starblade onto the correct vector and punched it, dropping through the gaping crater on the outer rim of the massive alien ring. This, he reflected, was something new, something never covered in the training simulations: piloting a high-performance nanomatrix fighter
inside
an alien structure.

He had to cut way, way back on his forward velocity as soon as he entered the crater. The normal velocities associated with deep-space combat would have slammed him into the far wall of the interior space in less time than an eye’s blink. Dropping now at a few hundred meters per second, he scanned the surrounding space, a cavern with black walls, unlit and made complicated by structural components—stalactites and stalagmites stretching out into the gulf as if to claw the invading fighters from the sky.

The Black Demons had taken some heavy losses in the past few moments. Dobbs and Martinez were dead, fried by those Glothr flying buildings. Hathaway was dead, caught in a nuclear fireball, the wreckage smeared across the outer surface of the ring. Gregory was missing . . . gone streaker and last seen dropping out of control toward the planet. And Schmitt had been killed earlier, in the tangle with the Tushies in front of the TRGA.

Over a third of the squadron, wiped out just like that.

All around him, Marines were entering the cavern, almost invisible in their light-drinking nanomatrix assault pods . . . not that there was much in the way of visible light in here. His visual feeds were mostly infrared. The six other Black Demons were scattered across the enclosed space, mixed in with the older Velociraptors of the Marines. High-energy proton beams swept up and out from the depths of the pit; Marine MAPPs flared like moths in a flame . . . and died.

“I’ve got a gun position locked!” Connor said. “Zero-one-niner . . . firing!”

Connor’s Starblade loosed a brief stream of high-velocity kinetic-kill rounds, dropping them with deadly accuracy into a pit housing a Glothr energy weapon. Visible light erupted from the pit, along with hurtling fragments.