Authors: Ian Douglas
Was there any chance, any chance at all that she'd been alive in alien captivity for the past twenty years?
It wasn't likely, and, in fact, he very much hoped she'd died, clean and fast, before having to endure something like that.
“All right, belay the chatter!” Gunnery Sergeant Dunne ordered. “As you were!”
Silence returned.
Then, “Garroway?” It was Dunne. “You okay, son?”
“Yeah, Gunnery Sergeant. I'm okay.”
“Good. Stay focused on now, right?”
“Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant.”
Dunne, of course, knew about Lynnley. Garroway had talked about the woman often enough over the past few subjective months. He was impressed that the platoon sergeant was concerned about the emotional state of individual men and women in his unit.
But it only made sense. Dunne was responsible for the combat performance of First Platoon, Alpha Company. He was probably on another private channel right now, checking to make sure that the FNGs hadn't been scared out of their FNG minds.
Garroway felt a sharp
bump
and a surge of acceleration. “Uh-oh,” Houston said. “This may be it!”
But zero-G returned after only a moment. The
Chapultepec
must have been performing some minor course correction, and was not entering battle.
Garroway wished he knew what was going on outside.
SF/A-2 Starhawk
Cassius
Approaching Stargate Sirius
2155 hours, Shipboard time
Cassius continued to receive, record, and retransmit the data from the far-flung network of BMS devices as he piloted the Starhawk slowly above the surface of the huge structure. “Infrared and magnetic scans suggest some type of hatch or entryway bearing one-one-seven, range fifty-five meters, and there are suggestions of a network of passageways beneath the outer hull structure,” he reported. “There may be enough vibrational data to construct a crude seismological map of the objective's interior structure.”
There was no reply to any of this from the fleet, of course. After a moment more, however, an order came through on a needle-thin beam, orders from Cassius Prime. “We require a sample of the structure's surface.”
“Very well. There has been no obvious response to my presence. However, the sampling may be construed as an attack.”
“Affirmative. The fleet is repositioning itself against that possibility.”
Cassius I-2 could sense the movement of the distant fleet,
the vessels drawing farther apart from one another, the smaller warships gently moving closer, a screen between the objective and the
Ranger
,
Chapultepec
, and the two transports.
“Stand by,” he said. “I am about to perform a spectroscopic analyses of the surface material.”
The surface looked like dark, slightly pitted metal of some sort, but the only way to tell was to zap it with a laser and take a spectroscopic reading as it flashed into vapor. The danger, of course, was that boiling even a centimeter or so of hull metal could easily be interpreted as an attack.
“Firing now.”
The Starhawk's chin laser pulsedâeight hundred megawatts. A puff of metallic vapor expanded into space and Cassius began transmitting the analyses. He'd expected the surface to be some exotic, possibly unknown material, simply because the fast-circling singularities inside the enormous hoop of the gate must create incredible stresses throughout the structure.
Nickel iron. There were other materials present as well in an unusual amalgam that included traces of manganese, titanium, carbon, and cobalt, but the surface of the object was ninety-seven percent nickel-iron, identical to that found in a typical iron asteroid.
Cassius's motion sensors caught the opening hatch seventy meters away and his EM monitors sensed a growing, prickling sensation of fast-building magnetic fields. He fired the Starhawk's port maneuvering thrusters a tenth of a second before giving full power to the main drive. The radio spectrum howled in an explosion of static, and a powerful magnetic pulse rippled through the Starhawk's hull.
He was
almost
fast enough. The antimatter beam caught the Starhawk's port wing, melting through it in nanoseconds. Secondary radiation backscattered from the blast cascaded through the Starhawk's hull. Stars alternated with the black
mass of the stargate in a frenzied whirl as the fighter tumbled through space. Cassius tried firing the maneuvering thrusters, calculating each burst to bring the tumble back under control.
He almost had itâ¦.
Combat Command Center
UFR/USS
Chapultepec
2156 hours, Shipboard time
“The Starhawk is gone, General,” Anderson reported, her voice level.
“My iteration appears to have gone through the stargate,” Cassius added. “I am no longer receiving data from him.”
Ramsey blinked, startled. Cassius sounded almost
sad
â¦though AIs could not feel emotion. Was that a programming effect, he wonderedâ¦something added by the original programmer to make Cassius seem more human?
“We've got vehicles emerging from the structure,” Admiral Harris said, his voice sharp.
“Goddess!” Ramsey breathed. On the screens and in his mind, it looked as though the stargate was dribbling away pieces of itselfâ¦each piece a ship of decidedly alien design.
“I think,” Harris added, “we can assume the fleet is under attack.”
30
MARCH
2170
Combat Command Center
UFR/USS
Chapultepec
2157 hours, Shipboard time
“Admiral Harris,” Dominick said, “I suggest we deploy for combat.”
“We're as deployed as we can be, Generalâ¦all except the fighters.”
Hours ago, Harris had ordered the two frigates
Daring
and
Courageous
to move out ahead of the main battle group. They were in the van, now, creating an outer defensive line in front of the battle group.
“General Ramsey? What about your fighters?”
Ramsey thought-clicked to the Marine aerospace channel. “Colonel Nolan? Status, please.”
Charles Nolan was the CAGâCommander Aerospace Groupâfor the two squadrons of Marine fighters stationed onboard the carrier
Ranger
, 5-and 7-MAS.
“Five-MAS is on ready five, General,” Nolan voice replied over the command network. Five-MAS was the sixteen Marine Starhawk fighters of the Fifth Marine Aerospace Squadron, a space-based fighter group informally known as the Redtails. Ready five meant they were ready for launch on five minutes' notice. The pilots had clambered into their craft
and plugged themselves in when the fleet went to battle stations, some three hours ago.
“We can launch one squadron in five minutes, General Dominick,” Ramsey told him. “The other I'd like to keep in reserve for close-fleet support.”
“I have completed a full analyses of the objects launched toward us from the stargate,” Cassius said. “Two hundred seven objects mass less than fifty kilograms and do not appear to be capable of independent acceleration. They may be automated probes or battlespace sensors, similar to our Argus probes. Twelve are significantly larger and appear to be independently maneuverable. They are probably spacecraft, possibly manned, and may represent a significant threat to this battlegroup.”
“Thank you, Cassius,” Dominick said. “Gentlemenâ¦ladiesâ¦I think it's time to launch the fighters. General Ramsey?”
“Agreed, General. The farther off we stop them, the better.”
“I concur. Tell your Colonel Nolan he may launch.”
“Aye aye, General. The countdown is beginning, t-minus five minutes.”
“The military mind,” Dr. Franz said with a growl after a moment, “will never cease to amaze me. You don't understand somethingâ¦so you kill it.”
“I might point out, Dr. Franz,” Ramsey replied, “that
they
started it. Destroying several probes and our Starhawk were not exactly acts of friendly diplomacy.”
“But we don't know how
they
are perceiving
us
,” Franz insisted. “They could simply be reacting to the Starhawk's sampling of the stargate's surface!”
“Maybe so,” Dominick put in. “For right now, though, we have a number ofâ¦objects heading our way at a relative velocity of almost six kilometers per second. They may be missiles. They may be fighters. Hell, they could be peace en
voys, for all I know, but until we have more information, our first priority is to safeguard the battle group.”
If we can
was Ramsey's unvoiced addition to Dominick's words.
SF/A-2 Starhawk
Talon Three
Launch Bay 1, CVS
Ranger
2158 hours, Shipboard time
Captain Greg Alexander, call sign Pooner, ran through the prelaunch one final time, letting the checklist scroll up through his consciousness.
Talon Three
was hot, taut, and ready.
He was sitting in a near-darkness relieved only by the green glow of his instrument panel. The fighter didn't have a canopy with a physical view of the surroundings; the pilot relied on a direct data feed through his interface to see what was going on around him. At the moment, however, there was nothing to see in any case.
Talon Three
was resting inside its launch tube, its flight surfaces folded tight about the fuselage like a black shroud.
“Okay, chicks,” a voice said over the squadron command channel. He was Major Lucas Gauthier and he was the commanding officer of the Fifth Marine Aerospace Squadron. “We're up. Launch in five mikes.”
“About freakin' time,
Talon Nine
,” Lieutenant Maria Oliviero grumbled. “I think my ass just welded itself to the seat.”
“Hey, skipper?” Alexander said. “Just what are we up against?”
“PriFly is opening the tactical feed now. Take a look.”
PriFly
was Primary Flight Control, the command group for all aerospace operations off the carrier.
And access to the tactical feed meant they now could see outside of their pitch-black launch tubes. Alexander thought-clicked a command and opaque walls faded into invisibility. It was as though he were adrift, suspended in the depths of space.
What he was seeing was, in fact, more simulation than reality. Several Argus probes and a large number of BMS devices were still functioning in the immediate vicinity of the stargate. With the loss of Cassius I-2, those devices had lost their link with the fleet, but the Argus probes were smart enough to create a new data network, select one of their own as a relay, and continue transmission. The MIEU's tactical computers onboard the
Chapultepec
analyzed the data and created a picture of what was
probably
out there, together with a percentage of confidence in the result.
Alexander scowled as he watched the oddly shaped spacecraft suddenly disperse from the stargate. It appeared as though they'd been hidden there, disguised as part of the ring structure. Flying free, they appeared in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes, from angular fragments smaller than a Starhawk, smaller even than a Marine Wasp, to things the size of a fair-sized building, as massive, roughly, as one of the fleet's frigate gunships. The hulls were black,
very
black. The smooth, seemingly organic curves and the way those hulls drank light suggested an advanced stealth technology and even the technically augmented human eye had difficulty tracking them.
The image was less than perfect, with digital dropout noise and a grainy look that contrasted sharply with the crystal-clear sharpness of the stars and illuminated dust fields beyond.
“Sixty-five percent confidence?” Alexander said over the squadron channel. “Why not just say they don't know what the hell those things are and be done with it?”
“Stow it, Pooner,” Gauthier replied. “Stand by for acceleration.”
They were in zero-gravity at the moment. Like the
Cha-
pultepec
,
Ranger
possessed rotating hab modules to provide out-is-down spin-gravity for crew and passengers, but the launch bays were located along the long spine aft, two blocks mounted like outriggers, with the launch tubes parallel to the carrier's backbone and aimed aft, past the drive venturi. Earlier space carriers had been designed with rotating launch bays designed to “drop” fighters using spin gravity, but improvements in plasma propulsion technology allowed a slicker and more efficient meansâmomentarily channeling the plasma drive's magnetic impulse into the launch tubes. Some hours earlier,
Ranger
had maneuvered so that she was pointed stern-first at the stargate, now a hundred thousand kilometers distant, her two fighter squadrons aimed at the structure like waiting bullets in a giant gun.
Minutes crawled, as
Ranger
's fusion reactor built up the power necessary for launch. There were two moments in every space carrier aerospace op that every aviator hated and feared, and this was one of them.
One minute.
You are the ship. The ship is you
â¦.
He tried to relax to his old mantra.
In the old days of Marine and naval aviation, pilots had talked about “strapping on” their fighter and flying as though their aircraft were an extension of their body. That was more true than ever with modern Wasps and Starhawks. His cerebralink, an IBM-Toshiba Starbright 8780 Aviator-mod A-12K, with specialized hypermatrixing and cyberavionic direct control interfacing, was far larger and more complex than the standard military-issue implants nanochelated within most Marines' cerebral cortices. With direct socket inputs at each wrist, each ankle, behind his ears and in a double row up his spine, he was physically jacked into his fighter by his crew chief so that its neural analog really
was
an extension of his nervous system.
The arrangement was absolutely vital for modern fighter combat. The Starbright 8700, when kicked into flight per
formance mode, increased the parallel processing capabilities of the human brain and slashed biological reaction time. That, frankly, was the only reason why organic pilots still flew combat aircraft at all; robots were far faster, lighter, were more maneuverable, required no life support, could take a much higher G-load, and were not distracted by such minor factors as fear, pain, unconsciousness, boredom, or full bladders. The only advantage human pilots brought to fighter combat was their judgmentâ¦and even that was criticized by proponents of AI-operated combat systems.
Greg Alexander had always wanted to go into space. A great-grandfather had been an archeologist with the Marines on Mars during the U.N. War a century ago, and his mother had been a xenobiologist at Europa's Cadmus Base before she'd joined his father's line marriage. He'd joined the Marines straight out of college and gone on to Annapolis. When he learned he could combine space deployments to exotic locals like Mars, the Jovian satellites, or even the worlds of other stars with his other great loveâflyingâhe'd immediately applied for aerospace pilot training, and then applied to the Marine Space Fighter Training Command at Point Arguello, California.
He'd jumped at the opportunity to volunteer for exosolar duty. Of course, the fact that his parents were dead, their line marriage dissolved, and that his engagement to Lena had just been rather abruptly broken off helped with that decision. He was Famsit Oneâno husband, no wife, no parents, not even any close friends other than the other Redtails of 5-MAS.
Ten seconds.
His attempt to relax, as always, failed.
“Five-MAS, all systems appear nominal,” the voice of PriFly announced. “And you are go in fiveâ¦fourâ¦threeâ¦twoâ¦one⦔
He never heard the word “launch,” for at that instant, a gi
ant's hand slammed down over his chest, pressing him back into the liquid-filled cells of his acceleration couch at just over fourteen G's. Seven to ten G's was the normal limit a human could endure without blacking out, but the combination of implant technology, the design of the seat, and the design of the flight suit he was wearing, which helped keep blood flowing to his brain, kept him consciousâjust barely. For a long moment, he felt as though he were looking down a long black tube with a tiny far-off opening. Breathing was flat-out impossible. An unbearable weight was crushing his ribs, a pressure that went on and on and onâ¦.
Two seconds later his Starhawk emerged from its launch tube at almost three hundred meters per second, propelled by the powerful magnetic impulse that normally was used to hurl white-hot plasma out the aft drive venturis at a speed approaching that of light. The magnetic field extended well beyond the end of the tube, however, and continued to accelerate him for another 1.7 seconds.
And then he was embraced by the blissful silence of free fall, traveling now at over half a kilometer per secondâ¦but then his fighter's AI kicked in the main drive and he was slammed into his seat back once more, this time at an almost benign five gravities.
Controlled by their onboard computers, the sixteen Starhawks maintained five gravities for ten seconds, adding another five hundred meters per second to their velocity.
And then the Starhawk's plasma jet cut off and the hand of acceleration vanished. He was in zero-G once more.
“Whee-oo!” he cried over the squadron channel. He always felt exultant after surviving another high-G launch. “What a rush!”
“Roger that, Poonman!” ZipperâLieutenant Andrea Thiery in
Talon Four
âreplied. “I think my stomach's still back in the launch tube!”
“Heads up, people,” Gauthier, in
Talon Six
, said. “Stay
alert! We're tracking incoming. Release your launch tanks.”
Each Starhawk had launched with a tank of reaction massâwaterâthat it used to fuel its initial acceleration out of the tubs. Those tanks were empty now after the five-G burn, and would get in the way of combat maneuvers. Alexander thought-clicked an icon. His fuel tank tumbled clear, blasted aside by a small explosive charge. With luck, the enemy's long-range sensors might mistake it for another fighter. The tank was large enough.
It was still difficult to sort out the tactical picture ahead. It looked as though a small cloud of debris was hurtling toward themâand the fleet behind themâfrom the stargate. However, Constance, Alexander's onboard AI, was showing that several of those chunks were accelerating on their own. Whatever they were facing, it was
not
debris.
“Connie?” he asked his Starhawk. “What the hell are those things?”
“Initial analyses suggests twelve spacecraft,” the female voice of his fighter's AI replied in even and unhurried tones. “Two hundred seven are remote probes or, possibly, decoys or weapons platforms.”
“Spacecraft? What're their drive systems like?”
“Unknown. They appear to be accelerating under some form of powerful magnetic induction field, but one sustained by the craft themselves rather than along a launch rail such as we use. Their propulsion system does not appear to employ a traditional reaction-type drive.”
“Great!” he said over the squadron channel. “The bad guys are using some kind of magic drive. They really are freaking supertechs.”
The nature of possible alien military technologyâmore, the likelihood that it would be
superior
technology to that employed by the Marinesâhad been the topic for discussion at the mess tables onboard the
Ranger
ever since the Redtails had been brought up out of cybehibe.