Earth Strike (25 page)

Marissa Allyn had become her Starhawk, her senses inextricably entwined with its sensor suite, to the flow and pulse and rhythm of incoming signals. Part of the problem, of course, was that this patch of space was so damnably
empty
, a vast abyssal gulf four light hours out from a dwindled sun.

This was just one of a dozen distinct navigational waypoints determined by Combat back on board the
America
—guesses, really, as to where the enemy fleet might be.

The four-hour coast out from Mars had, for her, passed in just seventeen minutes. Five objective minutes ago, she and the other three Starhawks in her flight had begun decelerating. Now they were coasting once more, still moving at nearly half the speed of light.

That velocity was a compromise. With such a huge area within which the enemy’s Force Bravo might have emerged, it was more than likely that they would be someplace else, that Allyn and her flight would have to change course and rendezvous elsewhere, perhaps as much as two light hours away. Zorching along at half-
c
, she was moving too fast to effectively engage the enemy if she found him.

On the other hand, if the bad guys
were
here in her personal corner of the Outer System, she’d be crazy to engage them with only four fighters.

“Anyone see anything yet?” she asked over the squadron frequency.

“Nothing, Skipper,” Walsh replied. “Just a whole lot of nothing.”

Allyn felt a small, inner warming at Walsh calling her “skipper.” She was no longer the CO—the
skipper
—of a squadron, but her commander’s rank did put her in charge of the little four-ship group. The others in the Black Lightnings had been a bit standoffish when she’d first joined them in their ready room a week ago. Technically, her rank would have made her the CAG’s executive officer, the Assistant CAG, though that position was already filled by Commander Huerta.

By calling her “Skipper,” Walsh was showing that she’d been accepted by the others.

Family
….

And Walsh was right.
A whole lot of nothing…

The problem was that Force Bravo could not have emerged at a single point. Because starships under warp drive couldn’t see outside of their tightly folded little pocket universe, they were completely reliant on the accuracy of their ships’ AIs in determining when to break out of metaspace. Tiny discrepancies at the beginning of the boost translated into enormous distances at the end, with the result that ships emerged at different places and different times scattered over half of the sky. The enemy needed time to assemble his scattered forces—one very good reason for the delay, so far, in launching a strike on the Inner System.

“Hey, Skipper?” Friedman called. “Something funny here. I’m not getting Repeater Four-one.”

Friedman’s fighter was twenty thousand kilometers to high-starboard, and slightly ahead of Allyn’s ship.

Repeater Four-one was one of several hundred long-range communications repeater units set in solar orbit at the thirty-AU shell. Four-one was one of the dozen or so stations following in Neptune’s orbit, but others followed inclined orbits that let them cover the entirety of the thirty-AU shell.

“Well, well,” she said. “
That
might explain some things.”

The original warning of the enemy’s presence, of course, had been transmitted by High Guard Watch Station 8734 and several of its sisters. Lacking the power to transmit a clear signal all the way to Earth or Mars when they’d picked up the photon flash of emerging Turusch warships out at 45 AU, they’d transmitted an alert to the base at Triton. But the base on Triton was within range of only a tiny fraction of the High Guard watch stations. The repeater stations were spread out over the entire thirty-AU shell, serving as relays for transmissions from any of the tiny automated probes.

The system wasn’t perfect. There weren’t enough watch stations or repeater stations to cover the entire 450 quintillion square kilometers of the forty-AU shell, and the constantly changing orbital positions of the repeater stations at the thirty-AU shell left occasional gaps in the signal coverage. It was possible that Force Bravo had emerged somewhere where coverage was scant or nonexistent.

But if they’d emerged here, they would have been detected, and Repeater Station Four-one would have transmitted the warning to Earth.

Unless…

“I’ve got a contact!” Lieutenant Friedman yelled. “Contact at one-seven-niner plus five one!” There was a harsh pause, then, “
Toad!
I’ve got a Toad fighter, confirmed, range kay forty-three!”

Allyn saw the contact at the same moment…a single fighter, outbound, 43,000 kilometers beyond Friedman’s ship.

“Transmit log!” Allyn told her AI; the other fighters in her group would be doing the same.
Whatever
happened, Earth would have confirmation that Turusch warships were out here in another four hours. “All ships!
Get
the bastard!”

Shifting her projected drive singularity to starboard, she put her fighter into a sharp turn.

Turning a ship at high-G was always a risky proposition. Space fighters, especially, couldn’t swoop or turn the way their atmospheric counterparts did, not without an atmosphere in which to bank, turn, and bleed off excess speed.

But they could come close. By projecting the singularity to the side or above or below, rather than straight ahead or astern, the fighter could travel along what technically was a straight line passing through gravitationally curved space…and the end result was a curved path. If the maneuver was performed correctly, the fighter could make the turn without acceleration effects—just as a spacecraft or hab module orbiting the Earth was following the curvature of space around the planet without feeling the effects of centripetal force.

But make the turn too tight, and the fighter could get caught by the singularity’s tidal effects. Its nose could be whipped around, throwing the ship into a nightmare spin; closer still, and the fighter would be ripped to shreds…or devoured in a flash of fragments and hard radiation by its own artificial singularity.

She kept her turn on the gentle side, giving the focus of her turn a generous berth. As her prow fell into line with the distant, fleeing fighter, she kicked in the forward drive once more, accelerating now at 48,000 gravities.

“AI targeting!” she called. “Beams!”

At these velocities, human reflexes simply weren’t fast enough—by several orders of magnitude—to track the target, lock on, and destroy it.

The Toad was also accelerating hard and fast, but the Starhawk was faster. The AI signaled target lock, a red cursor on the combat display capturing the target icon in its embrace and flashing quickly.

Before she could fire, the target vanished.

No matter. Her ship’s sensors couldn’t detect the Toad when it was completely shielded; it had been detected only because of its drive field. By shutting off its drive, the enemy fighter effectively became invisible…but it also could not change course or speed. Allyn’s AI could easily calculate where the Toad would be when the PBP-2 beam caught it.

Allyn’s AI triggered her Blue Lightning projector, three quick pulses invisible in the emptiness of space, but shown on her display as a bright, blue thread of light reaching toward the fleeing, invisible target, touching it….

Friedman had fired almost at the same instant. Two charged-particle beams caught the Toad from behind, slashing at its shields. One of the impacts caused substantial damage to the Toad’s aft shield projectors and part of the shield went down. The Toad was now nakedly exposed, fully visible, and still in her sights.

“Again!” she yelled, the adrenaline of the chase pounding through her system. “Fire!”

Her AI fired again, and the Toad vanished in a tiny nova of light.

“Good shot, Skipper!” Friedman called.

“Thank the wonders of technology,” she replied. But she was pleased. That had been a shot at extremely long-range for a fighter, and her AI had performed flawlessly. “All ships! Go to CTT.”

CCT—constant tactical transmission—meant that their AIs were beaming out steady reports on everything that was happening. Four hours from now, those transmissions would reach Earth, and headquarters would know that the enemy was, indeed, here as well as at Triton. Normally, CCT was left off during deep recon flights; there was no sense in letting the enemy know you were there. But Allyn had to assume that the Toad had flashed a warning to other Turusch ships out here as soon as it had detected the Confederation Starhawks. The enemy knew that four Starhawks were out here, and they would be reacting soon.

The CCT was beaming out in all directions, too, so the rest of the Black Lightnings would know, sooner or later, that Red Bravo One had run into bad guys, and they would be coming to help.

The question was whether they would be here in time.

There would be other cloaked Toads out here, probably a lot of them. Allyn guessed that the enemy had penetrated the High Guard warning net by slipping fighters through to the repeater station and destroying it…possibly by destroying a number of repeater stations. Those automated stations pinged their locations back to Earth and Mars, usually, twice a day, and it was possible that in all the excitement back there no one had yet noticed that one of the relays was off-line. A number of enemy fighters, brought in, perhaps, by a carrier that had deliberately emerged far out in Sol’s Kuiper Belt, had cloaked themselves and slipped in to the thirty-AU shell unobserved, slipping close enough that they could destroy the repeater station without being spotted.

It was a necessary and obvious prelude to an all-out Inner System assault—punching a hole through the enemy’s early-warning net to admit the attacking force unobserved.

And it was proof, positive, that the Turusch were sending a Force Bravo through the hole they’d opened. That was why no hasty, snap-launched impactor bombardment, or waves of high-velocity incoming fighters. The Turusch had had this operation
planned
down to the last detail, and would be descending on Earth with their full fleet, en masse.

Unless the Black Lightnings could launch a spoiler attack.

Unless the fleet back in the Inner System could be warned in time.

Unless
America
’s battlegroup could delay the enemy’s assault.

There were so many variables. So little chance of complete success….

“Target acquired ahead,” her AI announced. “Range approximately two tenths of an AU, closing at point six
c
.”

At that range, the target must be
enormous
…and it was traveling inbound at a tenth of the speed of light if the total rate of closure was sixth-tenths light. She studied the icon that had just winked on against her combat display.

Gods of the cosmos…what
was
that thing?

“Close in tight, people!” she ordered. “I think we have problems!…”

18 October 2404

Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn
Annihilator
Regrets of Parting
30-AU Shell, Sol System
0713 hours, TFT

“Deep Tactician!” a communicator throbbed from the console-shelf overhead. “Four enemy fighters, range ninety
lurm’m
and closing quickly!”

Emphatic Blossom’s forward tendrils curled with a distinctly Turusch emotion, part frustration, part surprise, part rigidly unyielding determination. The Turusch did not believe in
luck
, as such, since theirs was a harshly deterministic and mechanistic view of the universe, but the universe was known to be unpleasantly perverse at times.
Everything
had been riding on the premise that the Fleet of Raucous Driving would fully engage the enemy’s attention, permitting the much larger and more powerful Fleet of Objective Silence to move, cloaked behind their shields, deep into their star system.

How
had the enemy discovered the ruse? How, in all of the near-infinite possibilities of a probabilistically determined cosmos, had the enemy been able to divine precisely where the main fleet had emerged?

“Have they detected us yet?” its bonded other asked.

The Turusch tactician speaking to Emphatic Blossom was Blossom’s twin, the other half of its life-pair, and it was, technically speaking, the
combination
of the two that was named Radiant Blossom. Others addressed it as a single unit, and Radiant Blossom itself always knew which of its halves was speaking, so there was no confusion…at least for those familiar with Turusch psychology; in a very real sense, Radiant Blossom was always in two places at once.

It watched the icon representing the approaching enemy ships for a moment. “That seems almost certain,” it replied. “Their course is directly toward us…an unlikely eventuality if this were random chance.”

“Agreement. Their mass sensors may have detected the curvature of local space around us.”

“Destroy them, then. Before they alert others to our presence.”

“That may already have happened. We detected radiofrequency transmission from those ships several
url’i
ago. They will have warned other vessels in the area.”

Emphatic Blossom considered this for a moment.

“Then gather what is available of the fleet so far. We will launch the attack at once.”

“We have yet to reestablish contact with two and a half twelves of our vessels.”

“They will join us eventually. As will the Fleet of Raucous Driving. When the time is right.”

“The crew is ready. Our weapons are prepared.”

“The threat is there.
Kill!
”

Red Bravo Flight
America
Deep Recon
30-AU Shell, Sol System
0713 hours, TFT

“Fire missiles!” Allyn cried. “Dump everything!”

Thirty-two Krait missiles, two of them in the one-hundred-megaton range, streaked off her Starhawk’s launch rails, accelerating at maximum. With their closing velocity, they would impact in seconds.

“Now hard one-eighty,” she commanded as the last missile pair flashed from her rails. “And
zorch
it!”

There was no sense in holding back with the Kraits. The object bearing down on the four fighters was enormous—a dwarf planet some nine hundred kilometers in diameter and massing over nine times ten to the twenty kilograms—about 900 quadrillion tonnes. That put it roughly on a par with the dwarf planet Ceres, orbiting within Sol’s Asteroid Belt.

The four fighters all were turning now as tightly as they dared, swinging around their flank-projected drive singularities. Allyn could feel the unequal tug between her head and her feet now, a sure sign that she was riding right on the deadly edge of high-G destruction.

Some thousands of kilometers away, a beam from the oncoming monster ship brushed Cutler’s Starhawk…not enough to damage his shields, but explosive ablation kicked his fighter at the critical point of his turn.

“I’m hit! I’m hit!” Cutler cried…and then his Starhawk was in a helpless tumble, whipping in close around his drive singularity. The singularity winked out as his drive projectors failed, but his ship was already fragmenting.

The icon on the combat display flared and vanished.

“Stay with the turn, people!” Allyn called. “Stay with it!…”

And then the three remaining fighters had completed the 180-degree turn and were under full acceleration, fifty thousand gravities. She tensed, waiting for the first impact from astern…

And then the first Kraits were slamming home against the super-ship, nuclear fireballs blossoming silently in the night.

“I’m picking up other ships now, Skipper,” Walsh told her. “They’re powering up, starting to move…”

“I see them.”

Her AI picked out some seventy other vessels…with more appearing all the time as they received new orders from their flagship and began to power up. Allyn felt a cold prickling at the base of her neck; there might be hundreds of vessels out there, masked by their shields or still too far out to register on her fighter’s sensors. God in heaven, how were they supposed to fight
that
?

But the large asteroid-starship they’d just slammed with their missile barrage was half-molten now, its surface glowing white-hot in places, and it was trailing a faint, hazy stream of gas and debris. They’d clobbered the thing, all right, and hurt it, bad.

She hoped they would be seeing all of this back on Earth through the CCT.

She doubted that she’d be alive long enough to deliver the recordings in person.

Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn
Annihilator
Regrets of Parting
30-AU Shell, Sol System
0715 hours, TFT

The Turusch thought in terms of pairs, and of pairings, of joining two in such a way that they became one.

It was a biological imperative, with twinned individuals working closely together under the same name and designation, but the principle could be applied to ships and tactics as well. Emphatic Blossom at Dawn’s ship, the
Radiant Severing
, had been nested inside the far larger Annihilator
Regrets of Parting
, becoming a part of the much larger vessel. Now, though, with portions of the Parting’s external crust molten,
Radiant Severing
would become a lifeboat.

Emphatic Blossom—one of them—gave an order, and the Radiant Severing blasted through weakening crust in a geyser of loose rock, nanolaminates, and hot gasses. It would have been good if others of
Parting
’s crew could have been pulled off the dying ship as well, but there was no time. Several thousand Turusch might perish with
Regrets of Parting
’s demise…but such was the harsh reality of interstellar war.

In fact, the inhabitants of
Regrets of Parting
might yet be saved. The mobile planet’s power plants were down, its weapons melted into ruin, its drives useless, but the craft’s sheer bulk was still intact. If the enemy threw nothing more at it, it would continue to hurtle through this star system at its current velocity, something more than one-twelfth of the speed of light. Once the local system had been crushed, rescue transports could rendezvous with the
Regrets of Parting
and take off its crew.

Radiant Severing
, free of the dying giant’s embrace, began accelerating starward now, taking up position with the other inbound ships. Some eight twelfths of the fleet had been gathered so far. The others, scattered across the outer reaches of this star system, would follow later as they got the orders
Severing
was broadcasting toward them now. On Blossom’s display, fed through cables implanted in its brain case, the
Parting
rapidly smaller and smaller, rapidly falling away behind until it was lost among the stars.

“We should be prepared for the possibility of further attacks,” Blossom’s twin said.

“Agreement. I do not understand how those fighters found us, lost in so vast an emptiness. They either have technological resources of which we have been unaware, or there are numerous enemy fighters in this area, operating in small groups.”

“Agreement. It seems unlikely that they could seriously hamper the Fleet of Objective Silence, however.”

“Obviously, single strikes, hit-and-run assaults like the one just past, can destroy or cripple even our largest vessels.”

“The high closing speed and short period of awareness worked against us. We could not deploy sand, or other defensive measures.”

“As has been noted before, we must not underestimate these creatures. The Sh’daar Seed has warned us that they are extraordinarily adaptable, resourceful, and tenacious, that they
will
surprise us if we do not exercise extreme care.”

“Agreement.”

Another surprise was in store for the Turusch strike force.

But it would be some minutes yet before that surprise revealed itself.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America
Outbound, Sol System
0721 hours, TFT

“Update coming through, Admiral!” the Comm Officer reported. “Sir…it’s the transmission from Triton!”

“What the hell?…”

Koenig checked the time. Of course. The transmission from the High Guard ships was due in now. The message would have reached Earth a few minutes ago, and been rebroadcast to the accelerating battlegroup. He opened a window in his mind….

He watched the five High Guard ships in their approach across the Neptunian pole. He watched the squadron of five ships, four
unarmed
ships, flash across the remaining distance to Triton, saw the enemy fleet orbiting the frigid moon.

The data acquired by the
Gallagher
, the
Hatakaze
, the
John Paul Johns
, the
Jianghua
, and the
Godavari
had been compiled, dissected, and analyzed by powerful AIs at Earth and Mars both before being redirected to the battlegroup. Koenig could look at the enemy fleet from any direction, at any level of detail, could separate out individual vessels and read pages of information concerning their mass, weaponry, maneuvering capabilities, and combat potency. There were thirty-six ships altogether, the largest a pair of small asteroids each several kilometers across, the rest designs Koenig had encountered before, or studied in training downloads.

Koenig watched the destruction of the tiny High Guard flotilla.

“Comm, this is Koenig.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

“Patch this through the fleet memories. Everyone should see this.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

There was a theory prevalent in some of the upper hierarchies of the military, a bit of nonsense to the effect that it was better not to let the rank-and-file access to the truth about the enemy—like how strong he was, how dangerous, how ruthless. Information was disseminated strictly on a need-to-know basis. After all, robots didn’t need to know the details…and the odds of not coming back.

Koenig was an officer of the old school, descended from the military traditions of the old United States. Soldiers, Marines, and sailors were not robots, and they fought better when they had a stake in the matter. Their morale was better, and they pulled together better as a unit. And sometimes bad news, even desperation, could rally them, boost them to greater levels of determination, courage, and will.

They needed to know what they were fighting for, and why.

He studied the images from Triton for several minutes more. Right now, the armchair strategists at the Directorate were going to be fixated on them. It would be up to Caruthers and a few others like him to keep them focused on the likelihood that Triton was a diversion, that a larger force would be coming in from another direction.

The prophesied message from Echeclus had come through at just past 0515 that morning, just a little more than two hours earlier. Assuming the outbound fighter squadrons off the
America
had, indeed, intercepted that message wave front, they would have continued out to the thirty-AU shell, and would be searching for the enemy there now, perhaps even engaging him.

The data stream intercepted by the communications relay was not translatable, of course. If it was possible—with less than satisfactory results—to understand Turusch speech when they were using Lingua Galactica, it was still impossible to understand their native language. Naval Intelligence hadn’t even been able to take a guess at whether the data stream captured and retransmitted by Echeclus was a language or a code.

They couldn’t even be certain if there was one message imbedded in the stream or two; information heterodyned on the carrier wave appeared to be in two separate, parallel tracks at slightly different frequencies. Whether that meant two separate messages, or was an artifact of the code, it was impossible to tell.

“Admiral Koenig?” Lieutenant Commander Cleary said, breaking into his thoughts. “Dr. Wilkerson wants to speak with you, from the lab.”

“Put him through.”

“Ah, Admiral. Thank you. I know you’re busy right now….”

“Actually no, Doctor.
Alea iacta est
. We’ve crossed the Rubicon, and there’s not a lot for us to do now until tonight.”

“Alea…what?”

“Never mind, Doctor. A minor reference from ancient military history. What’s on your mind?”

“I thought you should know, Admiral. We have the breakthrough we’ve been looking for on the Turusch language.”

The announcement sent a thrill through Koenig’s body, like an electric jolt. “The Devil, you say.”

“There’s more than one level to their speech.”