Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (40 page)

“I’ve got a possible target at coordinates plus seven-five by minus one-one-niner,” Donovan called. “Multiple bogies emerging from an ice mountain!”

A computer-drawn graphic, a sphere marked out in lines of latitude and longitude, rotated in a window in Allyn’s head. “I’ve got it,” she called. She was closest, had the best shot. The target was high in the planet’s northern latitudes, just beyond the suns-set terminator and uncomfortably close to the spot where Lieutenant Gray’s transponder signal was winking. The first Marine Crocodiles were already cutting into the tenuous newborn atmosphere over the nightside.

Her targeting cursor isolated the target area. Radar returns showed a surface facility at the base of a mountain of solid water ice less than a hundred kilometers from the planet’s north pole. Though it was still growing warmer, the surface of AIS-1 was still at around minus 155 Celsius. At those temperatures, water ice was literally as hard and as solid as rock. Target lock . . .

“Pass a heads-up to the jarheads,” Allyn told her AI. Then,
“Fox One!”

She thoughtclicked an in-head icon, and a Krait missile tuned for a detonation of one hundred megatons dropped from her Starhawk’s belly and streaked toward the planetary horizon. . . .

Colonel John Murcheson

AIS-1

Omega Centauri

1609 hours, TFT

“Missile incoming, Colonel!” the Crocodile’s pilot called over the in-head comm link. “Brace yourselves back there!”

“You heard him!” Murcheson bellowed. Strapped into the narrow seats to either side of the assault transport’s payload bay, twenty to a side, the Marines of First Platoon, Alfa Company could only brace themselves against one another. The ride down had already been plenty rough. They’d launched three minutes ago, taking advantage of
Nassau
’s remaining velocity to swiftly close the remaining few thousands of kilometers between assault carrier and planet, planning on using the tenuous atmosphere for aerobraking. The local atmosphere was still vanishingly thin, so the shrieking winds outside, high-pitched and shrill, carried little force, but the Crocs had hit it at high speed and the shock had been a savage jolt transmitted through deck and hull, followed by an ongoing buffeting that had grown steadily more savage as they dumped excess velocity.

The slit, armored ports down the starboard side of the compartment lit suddenly with a ferocious radiance that grew swiftly brighter, then began to fade. Thirty seconds passed . . . and then the shock wave struck.

The Crocodile rolled and yawed wildly, the concussion ringing through the cabin with a deafening crash.

“Everyone okay?” Murcheson demanded as the thunder died.

A chorus of “okay,” “ooh-rah,” and “no problem” crackled back.

“Two more minutes, Marines!” Murcheson told them.

He wondered if that nuke had been a near-miss by an enemy warhead, or if one of the Navy zorchies had gotten a little too enthusiastic. No matter. They were still flying, and the bad guys hadn’t been able to knock them down yet.

He opened a window in his head, giving a view of the command deck forward and above, looking over the pilot’s shoulder. They were over the dark side of the planet, but rapidly approaching the dawn terminator. Visibility outside was almost nil as they descended through the cloud deck, but the computer painted a graphic outline of the objective ahead.

And then the clouds parted, and Murcheson saw the objective for the first time, a kind of castle with slanted walls and domed turrets, with slender spires and Gothic arches, a mix of architecture at once familiar and utterly alien.

He disconnected from the data feed as the Croc gave a short, sharp burst of deceleration. “Marines!” he shouted.
“Go! Go!”

CIC

TC/USNA CVS
America

Omega Centauri

1610 hours, TFT

“The first Marines have reached objective Gold,” Commander Sinclair told Koenig. “
Nassau
has entered orbit and the Choctaws have been released.”

“Good.” The Choctaw Type UC-154 shuttle was a monster orbit-to-surface transport. Far larger than the little Crocodiles, it carried nearly two hundred Marines and their equipment. In this case, four Choctaws off the
Nassau
were ferrying down the Marines’ heavy artillery—massive proton cannons that would turn their perimeters on the dwarf planet into fortresses.

They would have to hurry. The battle was slowly beginning to turn against the Confederation battlegroup.

It was a simple matter of numbers. Thirty-three capital ships and perhaps ninety-five fighters, all told, with no hope of reinforcements, were squared off against an unknown but
very
large force of alien warships. Sooner or later, most likely sooner, they would be overwhelmed.

An alien warship half a kilometer long, the mass of a heavy cruiser, was closing on
America
as the carrier drifted past AIS-1. Energy beams clawed at the carrier’s shields, burning through at three key points.
America
returned fire with her midships particle-beam turrets, exchanging fire in deadly, silent, and invisible salvos.
Fitzgerald
and
Adams
began to maneuver in an attempt to place themselves between the enemy cruiser and the
America
. Bright flashes sparkled along
Fitzgerald
’s flank as screen projectors overloaded and burned out, but the enemy vessel had been hit as well, its blunt, massive prow cratering, then crumpling and peeling back under the concentrated combined fire from all three Confederation ships.

“The
United States
is coming in astern, Admiral. Range two thousand kilometers.”

“I see her.” With the damaged
Abraham Lincoln
remaining at the TRGA leading back to Texaghu Resch, the
United States of North America
was the only other large star carrier in the assault group, very nearly as massive as
America
herself. Normally, tactical doctrine demanded that carriers be held back out of the thick of ship-to-ship combat, that they be protected behind screens of frigates, destroyers, and cruisers. Their strike fighters were their primary weapons, and those fighters needed someplace to trap and recover at the end of the fight.

Conventional tactical doctrine had gone out the hi-vel launch tube, however, with Koenig’s decision to enter the habitable zone of the Six Suns. They would
all
stand together, and if they couldn’t force the Sh’daar to negotiate, they would all die together.

Silver-gray leaf ships were streaming out of one of the tunnels, from TRGA-2.

He could see them on a battlespace drone image being transmitted by
Badger
, which was now a hundred thousand kilometers from the tunnel mouth. The enemy had reacted to the battlegroup’s arrival too quickly, pushing the cloud of small fighters through before
Badger
and the
Frederick der Grosse
could close with TRGA-2 and get into a bottleneck position. The aliens were coming through in a seemingly unending stream, swirling together into a cloud that flashed and flared with reflected light from the Six Suns.

“Pass to
Badger
and
Frederick
,” Koenig told his AI. “Saturate that cloud with hundred-megaton bursts and sand clouds. Use indirect vectoring.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

Young Gray had shown how to fight that particular type of alien at Texaghu Resch. Indirect vectoring meant sending your missiles out in broad, hi-vel accelerating loops so as to come in on the target from as many different directions as possible. Nukes would thin that alien swarm and overload individual shields; sand clouds traveling at thousands of kilometers per second would sweep through the rest like hurricane winds.

The image from the
Badger
suddenly flared into static. The flashing swarm of alien vessels appeared to have turned their mass-compression beam on the Confederation frigate. Transmissions from the
Frederick der Grosse
showed the escort crumpling like an aluminum can in a strong man’s fist.

Meson beams
.

The techs in
America
’s physics department had worked out that much, at least, though the weapon represented a technology the Confederation could not yet match. Mesons are extremely short-lived subatomic particles—hadrons. In nature, they transmit the strong nuclear force that joins quarks together to form nucleons—protons and neutrons—which in turn generates the residual strong interaction that glues nucleons together within atomic nuclei.

By accelerating mesons to near-
c
, the leaf ships could use relativistic effects to stretch the mesons’ normal life spans of a few hundred millionths of a second. By flooding a target with high-energy mesons, the enemy caused the atomic nuclei of the target to collapse into micro-singularities, minute black holes that in turn merged with other micro-singularities nearby. Since mesons decayed into electrons and neutrinos, the beam also acted like a high-energy electron beam which could overload and overwhelm defensive screens.

Apparently, a certain large, critical number of the leaf ships were necessary to produce the beam in unison. Knocking down that number as quickly as possible gave the Confederation fleet its best chance of survival.

The
Badger
was completely out of action now, her port side crumpled from her shield-cap bow almost to her stern. Water sprayed in a silvery cloud into vacuum; X-rays flooded nearby space, the death shrieks of matter falling into the seething swarm of black holes now devouring her interior.

The enemy ship-cloud turned its weapon on the
Frederick der Grosse
next, but by this time the nuclear-tipped missiles launched moments earlier were beginning to flare around and within the leaf-ship school. Instantly, the school began scattering, dispersing into individual ships. Apparently, they could learn quickly as well.

At 1614 hours, the KK projectiles launched minutes before from
America
’s railguns began slamming into the large structure in the near distance. The facility, apparently some sort of deep-space dock or supply depot, was shredded by the massive incoming rounds, and the ships still moored there were smashed by the hi-vel projectiles coming in at better than fourteen kilometers per second.

Secondary explosions detonated within the disintegrating docking facility.

The cruiser attacking
America
and her escorts was in trouble as well, as internal gases erupted into empty space through house-sized breaches in her pressure hulls. The
Fitzgerald
was badly hurt, now, tumbling slowly, wreckage trailing from her spine.
America
’s particle-beam turrets continued to track and fire at the Sh’daar cruiser, slamming bolt after searing bolt past her failing shields and into her internal works. A savage, brilliant explosion finished the job, tearing the stricken vessel into hurtling half-molten fragments.

At this point, there was little for Koenig to do but watch the battle continue to play itself out. The
United States
was coming under heavy fire now, as was
America
herself. As the two largest and most massive vessels in the Confederation fleet, they were obvious high-priority targets for the enemy. The
Kinkaid
was taking heavy fire as well, both from enemy warships and from the remaining surface defense structures on AIS-1.

“How are the Marines doing?” Koenig asked his AI.

“All Crocodiles are down,” the AI replied. “Murcheson reports that Objective Gold has been breached, and the Marines are entering the facility. It appears to be defended by armored combatants in large numbers—possibly combat robots. Casualties are high.”

How long, Koenig wondered, should he press the attack? The tactical teams had discussed the possibility of having to break off and retreat. The problem was that at this point, retreat meant abandoning the Marines now on the dwarf planet’s surface. That was not an option, so far as Koenig was concerned, unless the alternative was complete annihilation for the entire naval assault group.

The scattered swarm of leaf ships, working with an astonishing degree of coherence and coordination, had come back together, and had turned its meson beam against the
United States of North America
. The carrier’s shield cap appeared to pucker near one rim, and a moment later a torrent of water, stored reaction mass and shielding, gushed into space in sparkling droplets that simultaneously boiled in hard vacuum and froze in the carrier’s shadow.

“Make to
Adams
and
Trumbull
!” Koenig called. “See if they can help the
United States
!”