Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (12 page)

Gray had been trained twenty-four years ago with what had then been the relatively new SG-92 Starhawk. He’d heard about the bells and whistles on the SG-101s and knew he wouldn’t care to try strapping one on himself.
That
was something for a younger, newer generation of pilots.

And so, USNA carriers continued to fly squadrons of both. The SG-92s tended to be deployed against capital ships and planetary targets but
not
against top-of-the-line fighters like the Franco-German Todtadlers . . . not unless there was a way to win a
very
clear numerical advantage in a dogfight.

Going up against a Todtadler in a Starhawk one-to-one was a perfect recipe for suicide.

And the USNA Navy, conservative to begin with, tended to resist efforts to dump the old tech in favor of the new. That, Gray thought, might be a form of suicide as well—national suicide—but so far the powers that be had not been able to bring themselves to the point where they could sign off on a massive restructuring of USNA military training programs.

It
should
have been as simple, Gray thought, as not training any more Starhawk pilots, while accelerating the training programs for Velociraptors and some of the newer, still as yet unnamed fighters that would be coming on-line over the course of the next year or so—the XSG-420 or the absolutely astonishing XSG-500.

But, no, HQMILCOM Mars would rather keep cranking out obsolete pilots than spending the money on a complete retooling of the military’s spaceflight training centers, and that meant that logistics vessels like the
Shenandoah
had to keep growing obsolete fighters as well.

Gray watched the Confederation Death Eagles spreading out across his tactical in-head, and prayed that obsolete fighters—and pilots—would be enough.

Chapter Eight

5 March 2425

VFA-96, Black Demons

Saturn Space

0918 hours, CST

Three hours after launch, the Demons were plunging deep into Saturn space. Ahead, Connor could see the golden arc of Saturn stretched across half the sky, the thread-slender slash of the gas giant’s rings, and the small but brilliant glare of Sol off to the side, a dazzling burst of light.

The approach had been a torturous one, an insertion dictated by the opplan downloaded from
America
’s tactical department, which was bringing them in toward Enceladus from the dark side of Saturn. By skimming just beneath the plane of Saturn’s rings and coming in from the planet’s day side, they might be able to delay the moment when the enemy spotted them.

That part of the plan, however, hadn’t worked out . . . not at all. Nearly ten minutes ago, flights of Confederation Todtadlers had boosted from both Enceladus and Titan and deployed toward Saturn’s night side, spreading out to block the American fighters’ approach. According to the opplan, VFA-215’s ’Raptors would engage any European fighters trying to block the Enceladean approach, allowing the Starhawks to pass through to the objective.

“Okay, Demons,” Mackey’s voice said. “We’ll go in through a barrage of nukes and AMSOs. Weapons free!”

By laying down a wall of exploding nukes, the American fighters would momentarily scramble the enemy’s sensors, and clouds of high-velocity antimissile sand would both detonate incoming enemy warheads and might do significant damage to the Confederation fighters.

The problem was that while Enceladus was directly ahead, on the far side of Saturn, there were also enemy fighters deploying from Titan, off to the right, and from the orbital base within Saturn’s rings, to the left and currently masked by the vast loom of the planet itself. No doubt the base orbiting Titan had been responsible for spotting the incoming USNA fighters and for giving the alarm. Other squadrons off the
America
were angling toward those other fighter groups. First contact would be within another few seconds.

The slash of the rings expanded . . . expanded . . . and then Connor’s fighter was skimming a sea of gold and opalescent light, seemingly so close she could imagine reaching out and touching it.

“Demon Three,” Gregory called, “
Fox One!
Missiles away!”

Connor had already thoughtclicked a target lock, a region of empty space that would shield her approach beneath the rings when it became filled with an opening blossom of white-hot plasma. “Demon Six! Fox One!”

The other Black Demon fighters loosed their missiles. Nuclear detonations strobed and pulsed against black space ahead. Connor glanced up at the smear of ringlight a scant few kilometers above her fighter’s dorsal hull.

The particles in the main rings, she knew, were myriad fragments ranging in size from around a centimeter up to perhaps ten meters and almost entirely composed of water ice. Backlit by the sun, the rings were spectacularly gorgeous, giving the impression of millions of individual rings as slender and as delicate as the threads of a spider’s web, each nestled close between its neighbors, but the impression of narrow ringlets separated by even narrower gaps was an illusion. True gaps in the rings were relatively rare—circles of black emptiness swept clean by tiny “shepherd moons,” or by gravitational interactions with somewhat larger moons, the way Mimas cleared the broad gap between the A and B rings known as the Cassini Division. In fact, the rings were more like a single, annular disk etched by countless grooves where the ring particles were of low density, alternating with bumps of high density and brightness.
Like the grooves in an old-fashioned phonograph record
was the comparison Connor had heard . . . though she had no idea what a “phonograph record” might be.

Whatever the simile, the scene was unimaginably beautiful, serenely spectacular, eerily surreal. Even the Cassini Division glowed slightly with scattered sunlight when backlit this way.

She was hurtling past Saturn now at 8,000 kilometers per second; at that speed, she cut a chord across the arc of the immense B Ring in less than seven seconds. Silent explosions flared ahead and to either side. The blasts seemed . . . unimpressive, unremarkable when staged against the backdrop of Saturn’s luminous rings.

Connor felt a bump as her AI corrected the fighter’s course. The rings in this portion of circum-Saturn space were thin—only about ten kilometers thick, but there were numerous ice chunks above or below the ring planes, put there by collisions or gravitational jostlings, and her Starhawk had to constantly shift her course to avoid collisions.

And then it was a wild and swirling free-for-all as fighter swarm penetrated fighter swarm . . . and the carefully crafted opplan went to hell.

USNA CVS
America

Saturn Space

0925 hours, TFT

“Trouble, Admiral.”

“I see them, Mr. Mallory.”

Gray sat on
America
’s flag bridge, perched on the edge of his seat and staring down into the tactical tank. Red icons marking enemy ships streamed out from Enceladus, a cloud of fighters moving to block, then to engulf the fighters off of
America
. There were hundreds of them.

“The enemy fighters are of an unknown design, Admiral. I think they may be from Gallagher’s bogie.”

“If they are, the Confeds have just escalated to the next level,” Gray said. “Where are those High Guard ships?”

“Still three AUs out, and decelerating, sir,” Gutierrez told him. “ETA thirty-five minutes.”

Gray scowled at that piece of unwelcome news. Half an hour was an agony of time in combat . . . long enough for the battle to unfold, come to a climax, and be lost long before the reinforcements could join the fight.

But the implacable laws of physics dictated that there could be no turning back.
America
’s fighter squadrons were already engaging the enemy, and the ships of the carrier battlegroup were hurtling into the heart of the battle, decelerating to combat velocities—and with no time left for acceleration enough for escape.

What, he wondered, were the capabilities of those alien fighters? What surprises might they be able to inflict on the incoming USNA ships?

Gray selected one of the red fighter cons and opened up a detailed image within his in-head, the data relayed back from the star carrier’s fighters ahead, and from an expanding cloud of robotic battlespace drones spreading now through the Saturn system. The enemy fighter had an organic feel to it, lumpy and uneven, with no attempt at symmetry or streamlining. Streamlining, of course, was not normally required for operations in the vacuum of space . . . but could be important for fighters accelerating to a high fraction of the speed of light. At even 10 percent of
c
, the density of dust motes and stray atoms of hydrogen within solar space could acquire the character of a thin atmosphere. Either those alien fighters didn’t maneuver at high speeds . . . or they had power to spare, power enough not to be concerned with such mundane considerations as friction or high-energy particulate radiation.

With alien technology it was always best to expect the unexpected . . . and in combat it helped to expect the worst.

“All ships,” he said, using the battlegroup’s tactical link. “Stay tight, stick together. CAG, have the fighter screen expand to cover everyone. Captain Richards . . . you tuck the
Shenny
in close on
America
’s ass. Don’t let them separate you from the herd.”

Gray was concerned about the provisioning ship
Shenandoah
—Captain Jennine Richards commanding. When they’d begun this run, the mission specs had called for a reconnaissance of possible enemy positions in Saturn space, and it wasn’t until they’d picked up Lieutenant Gallagher that they’d realized that a formidable threat faced them up ahead. By then, it was too late to detach the
Shenandoah
and pack her off to someplace safe. The bulky logistics vessel
did
have weapons—mostly laser batteries for close-in missile and fighter defense—but she would add little to CBG-40’s overall massing of firepower.
America
did have some major firepower, however, and might be able to cover the
Shenandoah
if things got tight.

Might
. . . .

There were no guarantees in combat, none at all, and if the star carrier became too hard-pressed in the coming battle, she would have to focus on defending herself, leaving the
Shenandoah
on her own. Gray hated that kind of decision, about who lived, who died . . . but it came down to the necessities of command.

Sometimes there simply
were
no good choices. . . .

VFA-96, Black Demons

Saturn Space

0926 hours, CST

Megan Connor twisted in her seat, trying to see behind her . . . then spun her Starhawk end for end to get a better view. Her in-head showed her detailed imagery across the entire sphere of view as if her fighter were invisible, but it was still possible to forget about your six, the area of space directly astern, where you generally weren’t looking. Her AI would give her alerts to approaching threats, but she liked to be able to try thinking ahead of the enemy before that threat unfolded. That, after all, was why space fighters still had
human
pilots, and were not crewed solely by electronics.

A number of the unknowns had spread out as the Black Demons approached, and were now boosting to move around behind the USNA fighters, to cut them off from the lumbering capital ships coming up astern. The alien ships’ capabilities—both those of the alien fighters ahead and of the 700-meter thing Lieutenant Gallagher had glimpsed weeks ago—were still very much large and troubling unknowns. The human pilots were going to have to treat them with extreme caution until they showed their hand . . . or whatever other manipulatory organ they might possess.

There was no time to do anything about the alien fighters surrounding them . . . not when Confed Death Eagles were whipping in from ahead and from the right, plasma beams snapping out to spear USNA ships. Spinning again, Connor loosed a spread of VG-10s, rapidly targeting as many of the nearer Confed fighters as she could.

Blinding detonations pulsed and strobed across the sky, nuclear warheads deployed to carve a path through the enemy fighter wall. One of the Demon newbies, Groeller, tried to change course to avoid a suddenly erupting cloud of plasma in his path, but in the next instant a beam of star-hot energy nicked his fighter and sent it into a death spin, blurring as it whipped around its own drive singularity so close and tight and hard that the fighter literally disintegrated, coming apart in a cloud of glittering debris.

“Jink, Demons!” Mackey called. “Don’t let the bastards get a fucking lock!”

If singularity fighters had one special strength, it was their maneuverability. With the onboard AI juggling the wildly shifting forces and accelerations, a fighter could decelerate at tens of thousands of gravities, change direction at right angles or even through a full one-eighty, accelerate again on a new vector, all within a fraction of a second. Such maneuvers, if carried out both at high velocity and with a high degree of randomness, could prevent the enemy from getting a solid target lock—and that meant precious extra seconds of survival in the hellstorm of close fighter combat.

“Podeski!” Mackey’s voice yelled over the tactical link. “Watch the ring plane!”

“I’ve got it, Skipper!” Lieutenant (j.g.) Podeski called back. “I’ve got it!”

Podeski, another of the newbs, in trying to lose an enemy fighter that had dropped onto his tail, was attempting the spectacularly dangerous tactic of scraping his pursuer off by skimming close past the rings. The Death Eagle fired and Podeski swerved sharply . . .

. . . and then his ship plunged into the gauzy veil of Saturn’s B Ring and instantly exploded, torn to white-hot shreds as it slammed into a blizzard of ice particles and shards just 15 meters thick at a thousand kilometers per hour. A ripple of disturbance spread out through the ring material from the impact—spread, faded, and vanished.

Connor was already jinking wildly, maintaining a forward velocity of at least a thousand kilometers per second, but throwing in new vectors side to side or up and down, and varying her forward velocity from between 1,000 to 10,000 kph. She was feeling hemmed in, now, unable to jink toward the hazy gleam of Saturn’s rings without risking Podeski’s fate at these speeds. Depending on the attitude of her fighter, the rings appeared now as a ceiling overhead . . . now as a solid floor of glittering ice . . . now as a deadly, speed-blurred wall to left or right. A missile detonated within the rings just a hundred kilometers to port, and she had an instant glimpse of ripples spreading out through the plane. The rings looked solid at a distance; up close they had a gauzy translucence through which stars and the minute orbs of distant moons were visible . . . but to enter that thin layer of ice particles would be to enter a maelstrom of debris, from dust to pebbles to randomly scattered house-sized boulders, and not even her Starhawk’s AI would be able to dodge them all.

A Confed Death Eagle dropped in out of nowhere directly ahead, firing its primary beam weapon. Connor jinked to starboard and loosed a VG-10 Krait . . . a mistake, because the enemy fighter was gone by the time the Krait had accelerated across the intervening 2,000 kilometers and detonated in a white-hot blossom of light and hot plasma.
God
, those things were fast!

She allowed her fighter’s AI to guide her. . . .

She became a part of her fighter, her mind so tightly interwoven with the craft’s intelligent software that distinguishing one from the other was impossible.

Centuries before, psychologists and neural physiologists had discovered that decision making happens consciously as much as several seconds
after
the decision is made
unconsciously
. Those experiments had actually threatened to undermine the whole concept of free will; did humans make choices through conscious reasoning . . . or were they rubber-stamping decisions already made by the subconscious, which, in effect, was reducing them to puppets on strings?