Center of Gravity (28 page)

There were fighters out there, punching in through the gas shells—a pair of Turusch Toads.

Toads were heavy fighters, squat and ugly, thirty meters long, fifteen thick, and massing over fifty tons. They didn’t change shape like Starhawks and other more modern Confederation fighters, but they were more powerful, could accelerate more quickly, and could survive the detonation of a tactical nuke at close range. Gray flipped his fighter end for end, bringing his PBP–2 to bear on the nearest one.

The StellarDyne Blue Lightning particle beam projector mounted on his Starhawk’s spine charged, then fired. Variously called a PBP, a CPG for “charged-particle gun,” and, more commonly, a “pee-beep,” the weapon loosed a tenth-second gigajoule burst of tightly focused protons, a straight-line lightning stroke that could overpower enemy radiation screens and boil off tons of surface armor. Gray’s first shot knocked down the lead Toad’s forward screens, and he followed up with a burst from his KK Gatling, using the Turusch ship’s higher relative velocity against it. The explosion flooded nearby space with the harsh glare of evaporating grav singularities, and forced the second Toad to break off its approach.

Gray fired a second proton beam… and then his AI took momentary control of the fighter’s attitude to release both VR–5s.

“Dammit, Gray,” Collins told him. “I told you to stay clear!”

Her fighter cut sharply past his, twenty kilometers ahead.

“Plenty of sky for both of us,” he told her.

On the tac display, four VR–5s fell toward Arcturus Station. One flared and vanished as it hit a cloud of sand, fired by the point-defense system of one of the Turusch ships. A second, then a third probe struck sand clouds and vanished.

And then Gray’s fighter fell between Arcturus Station and Jasper.

The moon had swelled huge in the past few moments, a gigantic, sharp-edged crescent filling the sky ahead. Golden clouds covered much of the visible surface, reflecting the gold-red light of Arcturus. Jasper’s atmosphere was primarily nitrogen and carbon dioxide, with traces of ammonia. The Confederation colonizing team had begun terraforming the world three years earlier, raising enormous nanoconverters on the surface to break down the carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon. Presumably, the surface converters had been destroyed by the Turusch; possibly, they intended to colonize the world themselves, since they breathed an atmosphere composed primarily of CO
2
.

In any case, Jasper’s atmosphere was still a deadly poison, as Gray’s fighter skimmed through the uppermost layers in a piercing shriek of ionizing gasses. Gray’s Starhawk was traveling at over seventy thousand kilometers per hour relative to the moon, however, far too fast for gravity to more than briefly tug at him.

And then he was clear, with Alchameth and its moons dwindling behind. He’d had only a glimpse of Arcturus Station, a bright star accompanied by the constellation of the enemy fleet. Missiles arced out from one of the Beta-class battleships; the other appeared to be leaking internal atmosphere and was in trouble.

It looked like one of his VR–5s had survived the enemy’s defensive volleys and made it all the way in to the station.

Gray accelerated… .

Arcturus Station

Jasper Orbit

Arcturus System

1201 hours, TFT

When launched, a VR–5 recon probe was a mirrored-black cylinder half a meter long and three centimeters thick. In flight, its nanomatrix hull flowed together into a black egg twenty-five centimeters long. As the surviving probe approached Arcturus Station, however, it gave a single sharp, short burst of deceleration, then unfolded like a blossoming flower, with black petals expanding and reaching out as if to embrace the station’s outer hull. The orbital base possessed radiation screens, of course, but not shields. Had the station been protected by space-twisting defensive shields, the probe’s penetration attempt would have been far more difficult.

As it was, however, the probe dropped through the electromagnetic screens as four petals, longer than the others, stretched out to serve as landing legs. They touched the station’s hull, merged with it as the nano-charged tips rearranged the local metal chemistry, and drew the rest of the probe down to rest.

The probe’s artificial intelligence was far smaller, far more limited than a Gödel 2500 or similar AI, and, though classified as sentient and self-aware, it had nothing close to human flexibility or scope. It basically had a limited set of functions within its software parameters… but those functions were things it did very, very well. It detected the station’s screens and merged with them effortlessly, redirecting the energy flow so that the probe’s landing went undetected by the facility’s sophisticated sensory and monitoring equipment.

The programmed nano of the probe’s business end began melting through solid layers of metal and ceramic, and the device swiftly sank from sight, leaving behind only a hair-thin wire thread to serve as a communications antenna.

In moments, the probe’s penetrating tendrils encountered fiber-optic wiring and an access to the station’s electronic systems. Many had been taken off-line by the Turusch invaders, including the sentient component of the base’s resident AI.

But within moments the VR–5 was reading through a complete station checklist, monitoring life support settings throughout the facility and even turning on security cameras and microphones.

There was some internal damage to the station, where control panels had been melted, and power leads cut. Overall, though, the orbital base remained intact. Most of the atmosphere had higher-than-expected levels of CO
2
, but temperature and the basic gas mix were close to human-norm. Better yet, the Arcturus Station AI was still present as resident software—switched off—“sleeping” in a sense—but still residing within the base computer network.

Following its programmed instructions, the recon probe opened a relay… .

Alchameth-Jasper Space

Arcturus System

1204 hours, TFT

Gray brought his fighter onto a new heading, whipping the Starhawk around a projected singularity fast enough that the G-force nearly made him black out. Falling in a straight line through a gravitational field—even one measuring fifty thousand gravities—was felt by ship and pilot as free fall, but vector changes—whipping around a high-G singularity—still exerted an outward centrifugal force. Make too tight a turn, and the pilot could be smeared into jelly, his ship stretched and ripped into microscopic fragments.

Fighter AIs were designed to monitor turns closely and override pilot commands that might exceed safety limits. Even so, Gray experienced nine gravities as his ship made its turn. Blood drained from his head despite the tight embrace of his seat around his legs and torso, and he came perilously close to blacking out.

Ahead, one of the mystery ships was breaking free from Jasper orbit, accelerating toward open space.

“Strike One, Strike Nine,” he called. “Red-Two is on the move. In pursuit.”

“Copy, Strike Nine. Take him out.”

“Copy. Arming Kraits… target lock… and…
Fox One
!” The first nuclear-tipped Krait slid from the Starhawk’s belly into the void. “And
Fox One
!”

The enemy ship was big, as big as a Turusch Hotel-class heavy cruiser, five kilometers long and massing some millions of tons. The design was clearly different, however, suggesting that it had been built by a different, possibly unknown Sh’daar client race. It lacked the jarring hull-color schemes favored by the Turusch, and the hull itself was of an unknown design, with the look of a collision involving several dozen dark gray spheres and spheroids of different sizes, from several hundred meters across to the big leading sphere, which had a diameter of more than two kilometers. Gray’s guess was that the alien ship was built along the same general lines as
America
and other Confederation capital ships, however, with that forward sphere holding reaction mass. He’d ordered both Kraits to target the cluster of small spheres just aft of the big one, reasoning that, as with
America
, that would be where the alien’s command-control and habitable shipboard areas would be, safe in the RM tank’s shadow.

An AI alarm was shrilling in his head, seeking his full attention.

“What?”

“We have telemetry from the VR–5,” the AI told him.

“Well… shoot it on to the
America
.” There was nothing he could do about it at the moment anyway.

“I already have. Expected transmission time is 117 minutes. However, you should see the data.”

This was
not
a good time. One of the Kraits vanished, intercepted by the enemy’s point-defense. He armed two more Kraits, readying a follow-up strike.

“Go on.”

A window opened in Gray’s awareness.

“Oh, shit! . . .”

He didn’t notice when the second Krait twisted through the enemy warship’s defenses and detonated just behind its two-kilometer sphere.

“Make sure the rest of the strike group gets this too,” Gray said.

The data was precise and complete.

There were human survivors on board Arcturus Station.

Lots
of them.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America

Arcturus System

1356 hours, TFT

America
had completed just over one third of her fourteen-hour voyage from emergence to the objective. Almost five hours after beginning acceleration, she’d traveled more than 760 million kilometers, and was now hurtling inbound at over 87,000 kps, almost 30 percent of the speed of light.

Alchameth and Jasper were still more than nine hours away.

Admiral Koenig floated above the CIC’s big tactical tank, watching as the ship’s navigational and combat AIs continued, moment by moment, to update the display. They were 134 light minutes out from the battle, now, so everything they saw in circum-Alchameth space was 134 minutes out of date, but that state of affairs would change as they drew closer, over the course of the next nine hours.

Each of the fighters was sending a steady stream of data out to
America
and her consorts. Just eight minutes ago, they’d seen the fighters engage the enemy fleet elements around Jasper. Many of the men and women around the tank had broken into cheering as one of the Beta-class battleships was crippled… then again as a Turusch cruiser and two destroyers were savaged as well. The second Beta was under way, clear of Arcturus Station and moving outward, but slowly, possibly damaged. Other enemy vessels appeared to be damaged as well.

On the downside, the enemy’s defenses had knocked down five Confederation fighters. The alpha strike had suffered 13 percent casualties, and the fight was only eight minutes old.

“Sir!” the CIC communications officer called. “New message coming through. Priority urgent!”

“Put it through.”

A window opened in the minds of Koenig and the other senior CIC personnel. The message had been composed in the form of a standard naval communiqué.

F
ROM:
VR–5 R
ECONNAISSANCE
P
ROBE
6587

T
O:
America
CIC

T
IME:
1203.38.22 TFT

S
UBJ:
A
RCTURUS
S
TATION

I
N ACCORDANCE WITH PROGRAMMED INSTRUCTIONS,
VR–5 6587
HAS PENETRATED THE OUTER HULL OF
A
RCTURUS
S
TATION AND INFILTRATED BASE ELECTRONICS AND INTERNAL CONTROL SYSTEMS.

B
ASE
AI
HAS BEEN ACTIVATED, ALONG WITH LOWER-TIER SECURITY AND CONTROL SYSTEMS.

C
AMERA AND
IR
SCANS HAVE LOCATED
975
HUMANS ON BOARD
A
RCTURUS
S
TATION,
L
EVEL
5, C
OMPARTMENT
740, M
ESS AND
R
ECREATION
S
PACES.

N
O HUMANS HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED IN OTHER AREAS OF THE STATION.
H
OWEVER,
2,825
LIFE FORMS OF VARYING DESCRIPTIONS HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED IN VARIOUS STATION COMPARTMENTS, INCLUDING SHIP BAYS AND STATION CONTROL CENTER.