Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (5 page)

He checked the time.
Concord
should have received the message ten minutes ago and be getting into position now. The High Guard ship was just too far away for the light carrying that information to have reached
America
.
Hawes
and
Elliot
were still on the chase as well, but like
America
, were still much too far astern to take part in the coming clash.

Dahlquist better be moving . . .

Because without the
Concord
, those four Starblades were on their own. And, as always, it would be the fighters that bore the first, hardest shock of contact with the enemy.

VFA-96, Black Demons

In pursuit

0120 hours, TFT

Megan Connor thoughtclicked a mental icon and enlarged the object visible now within an in-head window. It was tough to make out details; the view of the surrounding universe outside was wildly distorted by her fighter’s speed. At relativistic velocities, incoming starlight was crowded forward until it formed a ring ahead of the ship, with chromatic aberration smearing the light into a rainbow of color: blue ahead, red behind.

Somewhere within that “starbow” was the light from the fleeing alien, also distorted by the near-
c
velocities of pursuer and pursued. The AI running Connor’s fighter was extracting that light and recreating what the alien would have looked like to human eyes at more sedate speeds . . . a beautiful assembly of fluted curves, sponsons, teardrop shapes, and streamlined protrusions that looked more grown than assembled. It was five thousand kilometers ahead, now, and seemed to be struggling to maintain that dwindling lead. The image was being transmitted by one of several battlespace drones the USNA fighters had launched moments before. Their acceleration was just good enough to let them creep up on the alien, meter by hard-fought meter.

The pursuing fighters were now within missile range . . . but USNA ship-to-ship missile accelerations were not much better than the fighters themselves. Piloted by small AIs, it might be hours more before they could close the remaining distance.

Drones possessed better AIs; they had to in order to maneuver for the best views of a target, to assemble the clearest picture of a contested volume of space, and to avoid enemy anti-missile defenses. They also had somewhat more powerful drives so that they could quickly fill an entire battlespace volume, and to give them long-term endurance on station.

All of which gave Connor an idea.

USNS/HGF
Concord

4-Vesta

0121 hours, TFT

Commander Terrance Dahlquist studied the tactical display on
Concord
’s bridge. The out-system craft tagged Charlie One was just over one AU from Vesta, now, and was reaching the closest point to the asteroid on its outbound path. Four USNA fighters were in close pursuit.

The images he was seeing, thanks to the speed-of-light time delay, were about nine minutes out of date, which meant that alien craft had already passed the nearest point and was well beyond now.

And Dahlquist was worried.

“You know, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Ames told him, “you could land yourself in a world of shit.”

Ames was
Concord
’s executive officer, Dahlquist’s second in command. She was a GM transhuman and he respected her intelligence, a carefully crafted intellect connected to in-head systems that purportedly made her as good as that of the best AI.

“It’s a kind of a nebulous area,” he told her. “I don’t take my orders from . . . people like him.”

Both the line Navy and the High Guard answered to HQMILCOM, the USNA’s military command center located on and around Mars, and, after that, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Earth. Until one or the other of those command entities officially directed him to follow Gray’s orders, he was in the right if he ignored the man’s instructions. It was a technicality, but the military was built on technicalities.

“Not as nebulous as you might think, Captain,” Ames told him. “Admiral Gray is still a flag officer, and that puts you in probable violation of Article Ninety-two.”

“Article Ninety-two?” Dahlquist asked, smirking. “Not Ninety?”

“Article Ninety specifies punishment for disobeying a lawful command of your superior commissioned officer,” Ames told him. “It also covers actually striking a superior officer. So yes, it might apply. But Article Ninety-two applies to failure to obey any lawful general order or regulation. It also covers dereliction of duty. So it’s probably the charge they would use against you. Sir.”

Dahlquist sighed. He liked Ames, and she was a hell of a good ship’s first officer, but talking with her was like discussing calculus with a computer. Once, just
once
, he would like to hear her admit that she didn’t know something. He sighed again, as he knew that was unlikely.

Some claimed that the entire human species was headed the way of the genetically modified transhumans, but Dahlquist sincerely doubted this. GMs tended to increase mental efficiency by sacrificing passion—emotional involvement. Without said passion, they often didn’t pursue success in career or relationship as tenaciously as unmodified Mark I Mod 0 humans. As such, he couldn’t envision anyone giving up their ambition just for the sake of knowledge. Emotions were just too important to the human experience. The old idea of the emotionlessly logical genius was a myth. Fact was, there were studies linking high intelligence with emotional swings and disorders. Dahlquist couldn’t help but think about all the geniuses throughout history that had also been emotionally disturbed.

In any case, cybernetic implants were good enough now that anyone could have access to any data almost as efficiently as GMs, and without the loss of what it was that made humans
human
. For Dahlquist, that would always be
raison d’être
.

Nonetheless, Dahlquist valued Ames’s ability to pull raw data on the most obscure topics out of the seemingly endless depths of her memory. And that’s what he needed at the moment.

“So what do you recommend?” he asked.

“That we maneuver
Concord
to intercept Charlie One, as ordered.”

“I have a better idea.”

Ames blinked. “Sir?”

“We have available a potentially devastating weapon in the VLA. We can use that.”

Dahlquist was pleased with himself for thinking of it. The Vesta linear accelerator was the mining facility’s magnetic launcher. They could use it as a monstrous cannon to disable or destroy the alien from here, a full AU away.

“With respect, sir,” Ames said, shaking her head, “it won’t work.”

“No?”

“Not even close. Check the numbers, sir.”

He did so, pulling down stats from
Concord
’s AI on the mining accelerator and applying the TDA formula, then scowling as the answer came through. At its very best, the one-kilometer magnetic rail gun, accelerating a one-ton payload at twenty thousand gravities down its one-kilometer length, would boost the package to twenty kps—a respectable velocity across interplanetary distances that would cross one astronomical unit in . . .
shit
! Just over eighty-six days. It was amazing. Even with all of his training and experience, it was still so damnably possible to underestimate the sheer vastness of space.

And Ames was right. He could be making a hell of a lot of trouble for himself by disregarding those orders . . . and a Prim like Gray wasn’t worth landing himself a court-martial.

The realization steadied Dahlquist, and helped resolve the issue a bit in his mind. He’d not been aware of just how jealous he’d been of Gray’s advancement up the career ladder, but he recognized it now as her thought about the possibility of crashing and burning over an Article 92. He and Gray were about the same age, with roughly the same time-in-service. Yet he was just a commander, struggling to make captain, while the damned Prim had had his four admiral’s stars handed to him on a plate. There was scuttlebutt to the effect that Gray had friends in very high places; his former commanding officer was now president of the United States of North America. And
those
friends could cause Dahlquist a lot of trouble.

It wasn’t fucking fair.

He rather neatly disregarded the hypocrisy of a Ristie being jealous of a Prim’s “advantages.”

“Okay, Amesie,” he said. “Take us out. Rendezvous course with Charlie One.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

He heard
Concord
’s communications officer requesting departure clearance, heard the clearance being given by the AI that ran the mining facility. Ceres, a rugged, splotched, and cratered sphere over five huindred kilometers through, dwindled away into the distance, lost among the stars almost instantly. Contrary to popular belief—and countless docuinteractives and in-head sims with a
very
bad sense of scale—the asteroids were not so thickly sown through the belt that they formed any kind of obstacle. At the moment, exactly one other asteroid was naked-eye visible from Vesta—a fifth-magnitude speck of light a million kilometers away. The Asteroid Belt was very nearly as empty as the rest of interplanetary space.

Dahlquist was embarrassed by the gaffe of suggesting that they use the VLA to bombard the alien ship. Years of chasing rocks, he thought, must have contributed to acute hardening of the cerebral cortex.

He would have to find some way of recovering from the gaffe, or Ames and the members of
Concord
’s crew would be spreading the story on their next visit Earthside.

Besides that, though, he was also seething from being shown up, not only by Ames, but—in his head at least—by the Prim.

There had to be a way for him to prove himself, as someone
brilliant
instead of an idiot. . . .

VFA-96, Black Demons

In pursuit

0120 hours, TFT

The problem—as was always the case at relativistic speeds—was one of energy. Every kilogram of mass moving at this speed carried more energy than a fifty-megaton nuclear warhead—the size of the titanic “Tsar Bomba” detonated by the then Soviet Union in the early 1960s. Firing nuclear antiship warheads at the enemy might have unpredictable effects . . . especially when you realized that the artificial singularities serving as gravitic drives were created and fed by
extremely
large amounts of energy of their own, drawn from the quantum foam. Add more energy, in an uncontrolled rush, and well . . .

Connor was not at all anxious to try the experiment.

Instead, she’d elected to try something more subtle: launching one of her battlespace drones
as
a missile.

Her consciousness was filled by the magnified image of Charlie One, an enormous, organic form of curves and flowing shapes; the twelve accompanying Todtadler fighters were dwarfed by the giant starship.
How
, Connor wondered,
had the aliens gotten that thing past Earth’s defenses and down to the planet itself?

She’d fed specific instructions into the drone’s pocket-sized AI; the relativistic time dilation at this speed was just too sharp to allow precise control. Right now, for every four seconds that passed, over a minute slipped by in the outside universe, and the spacetime fabric around each of the fast-moving vehicles—Charlie One, her own Starblade, and the drone—was distorted enough to scramble data packets and affect fine, long-range control signals.

Closer, now. Charlie One was a few hundred kilometers ahead, though her AI had magnified the image so that it felt like she was just a few meters from the alien’s hull. The twelve fighters appeared to be drawing off now. Connor couldn’t know for sure, but she had the feeling they were getting clear in anticipation of the alien switching over into its equivalent of Alcubierre Drive.

Closer still . . .

The drone shuddered violently as it passed the gravitic bow wave. Ships under gravitic acceleration projected a field around themselves, a kind of bubble within which mass fell toward the on-off flickers of the projected singularity ahead of the craft’s prow. Hitting the interface between normal space and the space within that highly warped bubble could be like hitting a solid wall.

The image from her drone flickered, broke into static, and vanished.

Connor could only hope that her instructions to the device had been both complete and comprehensive.

Chapter Five

29 June, 2425

USNS/HGF
Concord

4-Vesta

0128 hours, TFT

With Charlie One having already passed the closest point to Vesta on its outbound trajectory,
Concord
could no longer move to block the alien’s path. She could start chasing the other ship, however . . . or, more specifically, she could start accelerating toward the point far ahead of Charlie One where the alien should be when
Concord
intercepted it.

An intercept would be possible, of course, only if
Concord
could pile on a little more acceleration. Fortunately, while High Guard cutters weren’t armed to the teeth, they
were
designed with high-velocity intercepts in mind. An asteroid flung into a dinosaur-killer trajectory by unpleasant aliens might well have a considerable velocity once the course change had been discovered, and the sooner the ship could rendezvous with the incoming rock, the easier it would be to nudge it once more onto a safer course.
Concord
was a Lexington-class WPS-100 cutter, streamlined to reduce the drag that became significant at relativistic velocities within the dust-filled volume of the Sol System. She would be able to catch Charlie One in another hour—unless, of course, the alien flipped over into metaspace.

Regardless, she would make the rendezvous before the star carrier
America
.

Back home, in New New York, Dahlquist had a dog—a genetically modified pocket mastiff named Bumble who had a psychotic tendency to chase aircars when they passed overhead.

Like Bumble, Dahlquist wondered what he was going to do with Charlie if he actually caught the thing.

VFA-96, Black Demons

In pursuit

0131 hours, TFT

Connor was flying blind. Her scanners still showed the alien craft about five hundred kilometers up ahead with AI-resolved magnification enough to show some detail, but she wasn’t getting any signal at all from the drone, which minutes earlier had dropped into Charlie One’s pocket of intensely warped space. The device
should
be falling forward along the alien’s hull, now, in free fall toward the intense, flickering point of projected gravity out ahead of the alien’s nose . . . assuming, of course, that the alien’s flight technology worked along the same line as that of human ships. Everything she’d seen suggested that the technology was the same, right down to an apparent upper level of acceleration.

The escorting fighters had worked well clear of the alien and were decelerating now. Connor and the other three Starblades were already past them. Possibly, they were deploying to engage the
Hawes
and the
Elliot
, which still were following in the fighters’ wakes, but that wasn’t her concern.

She needed to stay focused on Charlie One.

Her Starblade shuddered, and an inner awareness—her link with the fighter’s AI—warned her of trouble: gravity waves.
Powerful
gravity waves. Her fighter literally was passing through ripples in spacetime.

And then Charlie One was tumbling, its power plant dead, its acceleration at zero.

“
Got
him!” Connor yelled over the tactical channel. Communications between squadron members were always a bit iffy at relativistic speeds, but she got an immediate acknowledgement from Commander Mackey. Still accelerating, Connor’s fighter closed with the alien very swiftly now, passing it within a hundred kilometers. There was no response from the vehicle, and no indication that she was being tracked or targeted. There was power being generated on board, she noted, but the main power plant appeared to be off-line.

Good. Flipping her fighter end for end, she began decelerating. Rendezvousing with Charlie was going to be touch and go, since the alien spacecraft was still coasting along at very close to the speed of light. But with its singularity drive switched off, it was no longer accelerating, and that made the problem a little bit simpler.

She checked her nav data and realized that she was the closest of the four fighters to the target.

“This is Demon Five,” she reported. “I’m going to try to close with Charlie One.”

“Copy that, Five,” Mackey’s voice came back. “For God’s sake watch yourself.”

Watch yourself get blown out of space
, she thought, but she said only, “Affirmative.”

She began closing with the alien.

USNA Star Carrier
America

In pursuit

0140 hours, TFT

“One of our fighters is docking with the alien,” Commander Mallory told Gray. “It’s confirmed: Charlie One has stopped accelerating.”

“About goddamned time,” Gray said. “Pass the word, though. Do
not
attempt to board the alien alone. I want them to wait until we have some capital ships there to back them up. And we’ll need SAR tugs to slow Charlie One the hell down.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

America
carried a number of search-and-rescue craft, and the UTW-90 space tugs of the carrier’s DinoSAR squadron were specifically designed to rendezvous with streakers: ships damaged in combat at relativistic speeds, hurtling off into deep space at near-
c
velocities and unable to decelerate. SAR tugs could link up with fast-moving hulks, recover their crews, and slow them down to more manageable velocities.

“They can try for an AI link,” Gray went on, “but no physical contact.”

They were going to do this
right
. There were too many unknowns floating around out here to risk some fighter pilot putting his or her foot in it.

“And what if the aliens decide not to cooperate?” Mallory asked.

“Then they’ll keep until we get there with the big guns.”

“I presume you don’t mean literal weapons.”

“No,” he said, a little exasperated by the question. “But
America
’s AI should be able to pry them open electronically.”

Combat for over half a century with half a dozen different Sh’daar species had given humans plenty of opportunity to learn about Sh’daar computer networks and protocols. In particular, contact with one alien species, the Agletsch, had introduced humans to various Agletsch artificial languages—especially their trade pidgins, which allowed various members of the Sh’daar Collective to communicate with one another. Language, it turned out, was as utterly dependent on a given species’ physical form as it was on their psychology. There were galactic species that communicated by changing color, by modulating burps of gas from their abdomens, and by the semaphore twitchings of appendages on what passed for faces. The huge, floating-gasbag H’rulka broadcast on radio wavelengths. The Turusch lived in closely bonded pairs, and the speech of one harmonized with the speech of its twin, giving rise to a
third
layer of meaning. The Slan, who “saw” in sonar, communicated in patterns of rapid-fire ultrasound clicks at wavelengths well beyond the limits of human hearing. With such a bewildering range of communication types and styles, it was amazing that anyone in the Galaxy could exchange even the simplest ideas with anyone else at all.

But that was where the super-AIs came in, the immensely powerful computer minds billions of times faster and more powerful than mere organic brains. Some were designed solely to crack alien languages; shipboard systems had language software developed by those specialized AIs.

Even so, it was never easy. There were no guarantees that an unknown language could be cracked at all. Mostly, Gray was hoping that the aliens on board Charlie One had met the Agletsch, and used one of their pidgins.

If they were actually a part of the Sh’daar Collective, though, they would have to have a way to communicate with other Collective members.

More than that, Charlie One had been on Earth, which meant its crew had been in touch with the Earth Commonwealth—and
that
meant they almost certainly spoke a language humans (or their AIs) could understand.

Gray wondered if Charlie One was carrying an ambassador of some kind. Not that the Sh’daar had ever shown any evidence of understanding the concept of ambassadors or of the niceties of diplomatic service. Agletsch traders were the closest thing humans had encountered yet to Sh’daar diplomats. For even though those damned spiders never did anything for free, their stock-in-trade was information . . . and in so far as diplomacy involved an exchange of information and of understanding, they were naturals in the role.

But, so far, at least, there were no generally accepted rules on the galactic stage as there were for human diplomats—no embassies or consulates or formal exchanges of ambassadors. It had occurred to Gray on more than one occasion that this was one reason the Sh’daar War had dragged on for so long. Even the defeat of the Sh’daar in their home time and space had led to only an informal and non-binding truce. Twenty years after Koenig had emerged victorious from the N’gai Cloud in the remote past, human space was being raided by the Slan.

And now Charlie One was in the picture. What the hell had that ship been doing in North India?

That was one reason for giving the order not to attempt contact until
America
had arrived.

He didn’t want to hear about this one secondhand.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

0725 hours, EST

“It looks like a full day for you, sir.”

President Koenig looked up at Marcus Whitney and scowled. “Where’s my coffee, damn it?”

“Right here, sir,” Lana Evans said, reaching past Whitney and placing the cup on his desk. “Anything else, Mr. President?”

“No. Thank you.” He glowered at Whitney. “What do we have?”

“Most of it is focused on what’s happening in Europe right now, sir, and throughout the Confederation. After the battle at Verdun yesterday, the entire Confederation appears to have collapsed.”

“And about damned time, too,” Koenig said. He was tired after far too little sleep, and he needed his coffee. He’d been up until nearly three that morning, following reports streaming in from the star carrier
America
. When he’d gone to bed,
America
was still maneuvering, trying to match course and speed with the alien. A fighter had already docked with Charlie One, and two SAR tugs had been launched, but it would be hours yet before there would be any solid information from out there, now out well beyond the orbit of Neptune.

He sipped his coffee, made a face, then looked up at Whitney. “Okay. What else?”

“Here you go, sir,” Whitney said, thoughtclicking on his own connection with the electronics in the presidential office. “It’s all on the Pickle.”

He was referring to the “PICKL,” a centuries-old acronym standing for “President’s Intelligence ChecK-List.” It had first appeared in the mid-twentieth century as the CIA’s daily briefing for the U.S. president on important events that had occurred throughout the world overnight. Eventually it had vanished, world events having become too complex to be so easily distilled.

Recently, though, the idea of the PICKL had been revived in electronic form. World events were more complex than ever, including as it did not only news from all over Earth, but from colonies across the entire solar system and out among the nearer stars as well. The ocean of information flooding in at every moment was too large and complex by far for any one man to follow, information of which the president of the USNA needed to be aware. The current PICKL was created by a metanetwork of super-AIs operating within the government, the military, and for the various national intelligence services—Konstantin, on the Moon, was a major participant—and in large part was the network responsible for boiling that ocean down to teacup size.

Koenig ran down the list of briefings. At the top of the list was the capture of the alien starship, code-named Charlie One. It would be hours yet before
America
’s SAR tugs would catch the vessel and begin decelerating it. Until that happened, it was still hurtling outbound, now well past the orbit of Neptune and out into the Kuiper Belt. Details were sketchy, but evidently a fast-thinking fighter pilot off the
America
had used a drone to interfere with the alien’s singularity projector. Something important had clearly burned out; if it hadn’t, Charlie One would have slipped into metaspace long ago and been gone.

I’ll have to commend that pilot later
, he thought. Another urgent point on the list caught his eye. It had to do with Charlie One’s apparent destination, in the constellation Cancer. He decided to study that later, too.

He moved to another item: closer to home there was a revolution against the Confederation government in South India, clashes between Chinese special forces and Russian troops in the Siberian maritime province, religious riots and demonstrations across the Theocracy, and massive flooding from a storm surge in the Philippines that almost certainly would foment unrest.

It went on:

A breakthrough in communicating with the Slan at Crisium . . . suspected sabotage in the Mt. Kenya space elevator . . . yet another formal protest by the Papess in Rome denouncing the White Covenant . . . government collapse in Geneva . . . possible Sh’daar activity at 70 Ophiuchi . . .

In short, very much business as usual. With the USNA walking the proverbial knife’s edge between survival and disaster on a dozen fronts.

“The big thing on the docket for today,” Whitney said, interrupting Koenig’s perusal of the list, “is the Washington dedication.”

Koenig groaned. “I don’t suppose we can put that off?”

“Not easily, sir. It’s an enormous affair, and there may be a hundred thousand people attending. It may turn out to be a lot bigger than that, as the news about Verdun moves down the Nets.”

Koenig sighed.

Washington, D.C., the former capital of the old United States, had been partially submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the twenty-first century. The capital had been moved to Columbus, Ohio, where it had remained for the next nearly three and a half centuries. Washington had slowly been claimed by swamp, mangroves, and forests of kudzu, which enveloped the exposed marble buildings and monuments. A part of the Periphery, it had been abandoned by the United States, then ignored by the new United States of North America. Tribes of Prims continued to hang on to a marginal existence there, fishing over what once had been the Mall, and fighting off periodic attacks by raiders out of the Virginia Periphery.