Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (13 page)

The debate still raged in academic neuroscience circles four hundred years later, though the default position held that it was a constantly shifting gestalt of conscious and unconscious thought that let humans decide everything from the color and pattern of today’s skin suit to whether or not to join the military, to get married, or to deliberately put their lives in terrible danger. At the moment, her decision making—augmented in both speed and scope by AI software—was focused on choosing targets, locking on, and firing, a complex dance of maneuver, fire, and maneuver again, unfolding at superhuman speed.

Her AI, with senses far quicker and more penetrating than hers, could spot and identify incoming threats. Her mind, however—her thoughts—meshed closely with the software, selecting specific threats, often relying more on instinct than on reason or calculation. A thought, a mental nudge, would send her Starhawk whipping around its flickering drive singularity and onto a new course.

The idea at any given instant was to be where the enemy or his weapons were not.

Reacting to a warning from her AI, she spun fast and fired her primary weapon just as a Todtadler flashed in close—less than 300 kilometers. Her Starhawk’s Blue Lightning PBP-2 particle beam projector, a “pee-beep” in the lexicon of fighter pilots, loosed a tightly focused stream of high-energy protons, which erupted in a coruscating flare of blue-white light across the enemy fighter’s hull and chewed deep into its inner structure.

That’s one . . .

She spun again, locked onto a second Death Eagle at 500 kilometers, and burned off a chunk of the enemy fighter’s port side. Pieces spun off into space . . . and then suddenly the imbalance in the distribution of the Death Eagle’s mass nudged the craft into a tight spin around its own drive singularity, shredding it into a wildly expanding spray of sparkling debris.

Two
 . . .

Then there was no time for counting, no time for thought as she whirled, shifted, and dodged through the enemy formations. Move and fire . . . move and fire . . . and all the while she was aware that there were fewer and fewer fighters remaining in her own squadron, which was scattering across the whole sky. Chuck Taylor’s Starhawk exploded, vaporized in a direct hit. Jayli Adrian’s fighter crumpled a moment later, its atoms smashed down into a sub-microscopic point as she lost control of her drive.

VFA-96 was down to seven fighters, now, and though they were scoring victories, the enemy fighters kept coming and coming, waves of them sweeping in from two different directions. One of the egg-shaped alien fighters slipped onto Connor’s six, 800 kilometers astern. She spun end over end, hurtling tail-first now across the shimmering, translucent blur of Saturn’s rings as she locked and fired her primary weapon.

The enemy fired as well, an eye-searing bolt of violet-blue energy that crisped some of her external hull’s nanomatrix as she rolled away from it. Connor’s AI identified the radiation as an X-ray laser: coherent radiation at a wavelength of 1.8 exahertz and with energies approaching 80 terajoules—as much energy as the detonation of a 20-kiloton nuke. The visible light wasn’t x-rays, of course, which were invisible . . . but appeared to be part of the excitation process that generated the alien weapon’s charge.

Connor’s plasma bolt struck the enemy fighter full on . . . but that lumpy, scarlet hull appeared to drink in the energy, with no damage that the sensors could detect. That just wasn’t
possible
.

She was expecting a second bolt from the alien, but her AI whispered in her thoughts that it appeared to be recharging. Power levels were at 40 percent . . . at 60 . . .

She locked on with a VG-10 and let the shipkiller drop from her Starhawk’s weapons bay. Its drive triggered as soon as it was clear and the missile streaked aft toward the alien. Seconds later, the Krait’s warhead detonated in a searing, silent flash, and as the sphere of expanding plasma cleared, the enemy fighter drifted slowly to one side, a charred and burned-out husk. Whatever those things were made of, they were
not
invulnerable.

“Skipper!” Connor called. “Demon Six! Those new alien fighters slurp down pee-beeps like soda! But I killed one with a Krait. . . .”

“Copy that, Six. Good work! I’ll pass that along.”

VFA-215 was heavily involved in a dogfight up ahead, drawing enemy fighters away from the Black Demons, at least for the moment. The Velociraptors had taken heavy casualties, Connor saw . . . but as word of her kill began rippling through the various USNA squadrons, more and more nuclear detonations pulsed and flashed against the night.

And the USNA fighters began breaking through.

Her discovery put some sharp constraints on the fighters. They would have to save their PBP-2 primary weapons for the human-piloted ships, and use nuke-tipped Kraits on the scarlet aliens. In the heat of combat, it was easy to lose track of who was who, even with AI help in sorting out the targets and IDing them.

The worst problem was that there were a
lot
of the aliens—her AI was currently counting over two hundred sixty of them—and the USNA fighters were limited in how many VG-10s they could carry in a warload. Depending on how many larger projectile weapons they carried—missiles like VG-44c Fer-de-lance ship-killers—Starhawks could mount between twelve and forty-eight VG-10s, enough to use cascade volleys to tear through enemy defenses and fire patterns. She’d expended half of her load of thirty-six already . . . and it griped her to use her precious Kraits against fighters instead of the far more valuable capital ships.

But there appeared to be no other way to tag the scarlet-painted alien fighters. Beam weapons were useless, or nearly so. Kemper announced that he’d killed one with combined pee-beep and laser fire—his store of VG-10s was exhausted—but only by hammering the enemy with six or eight shots in rapid succession. Apparently, the aliens had a limit on how much plasma energy they could absorb . . . but that limit was still uncomfortably high.

Connor hurtled clear of the main rings and into open space, with Saturn an immense, gold-ocher globe astern, bisected perfectly by the paper-thin, knife-edge slash of the rings.

In fact, she was still well within the planet’s ring system. Beyond the edge of bright, well-defined A Ring lay a broad gap known as the Roche Limit, extending all the way out to the F Ring . . . but in fact, this gap was occupied by a tenuous sheet of debris. Three thousand kilometers beyond the A Ring lay the F Ring, the outermost discrete ring in the system, narrow, twisted, knotted in places, teased by passing moonlets until it formed a central core ring with a more slender spiral of material encircling it.

Beyond that, 180,000 kilometers from Saturn’s cloud tops, was the orbit of Enceladus, and that tiny moon was imbedded in the E Ring, which it had created and continually renewed with cryovolcanic material spewed from its south polar vents. Unlike the inner rings, the E Ring was more of a debris cloud than a plane, its individual ice particles microscopic in size. Ring particles out here were more dispersed, too; there was less of a chance of a direct collision with a rock big enough to inflict serous damage.

But at the same time, flying through this zone was like pushing through a blizzard. Connor could hear the steady hiss and crackle of particles sleeting across her Starhawk’s outer hull, and her in-head instrument feeds showed her that she was losing nanomatrix to a steady, high-velocity sandblasting effect that would strip her hull down to the support struts in minutes if she kept up this speed.

Ahead, Enceladus showed as a hard, diamond-brilliant, and tiny crescent bowed away from the shrunken sun. With much of its surface constantly being renewed by ice particles dropping back to its surface, Enceladus was the brightest reflective body in the entire solar system, its sunlit portions reflecting better than 99 percent of the light that hit it. The moon, barely 500 kilometers across at its longest, gleamed like a minute, brilliant jewel.

Closer, between Connor’s ship and Enceladus, the Black Knights of VFA-215 were engaging individual enemy fighters, both human and alien. There were six Velociraptors remaining of the Knights—half of their original contingent—and they were up against a couple of dozen enemy ships. Not good. . . .

Astern, more squadrons off the
America
were funneling through the hole the Demons and the Knights had punched through the enemy fighter defenses. Off to starboard, VFA-224 had reached Titan and was scattering a small enemy contingent there; and to port, and back closer to Saturn, inside the Cassini Division, between the A and B Rings, the Starhawks of VFA-99 were clearing out a gathering of Pan-European fighters at the Huygens Station. Pulses of brilliant light flashed and flickered, casting oddly shifting bursts of hard illumination across the vast sweep of the rings.

Silent explosions were erupting to port as well, where enemy ships were trying to flank the incoming USNA squadrons.

The greatest concentration of enemy forces, however, appeared to be up ahead, at small and brilliant Enceladus. Why that should be was unknown . . . but it certainly wasn’t up to Connor to figure out that part of the enemy’s motivations.

“Form up on me, Demons,” said Mackey. “We’re going to help out the Knights.”

“Shit,” Kemper’s sour voice put in, “when did the damned Velocicrappers ever take any help from us?”

It was an old rivalry—the gleaming new-tech of the Velociraptors versus the near obsolete Starhawks.

None of that mattered now in the least. Those were fellow pilots out there . . .
shipmates
.

And they were outnumbered and needed help.

USNA CVS
America

Saturn Space

0946 hours, TFT

“How long?” Gray demanded.

His tactical officer stared into the highly detailed, 3-D projection tank, his face eerily stage lit from below. “An hour twenty minutes before we can engage, Admiral,” Mallory told him. “We can’t push too hard or we’ll ablate ourselves in the rings.”

Gray let more data through his conscious mind, data revealing the ship’s status, the coherence of the ceramic-plastic composites covering
America
’s shield cap, of power drain, of rising temperatures on the ship’s leading surfaces as friction clawed at them.

The star carrier
America
was shaped like a colossal mushroom, a pencil-slender stalk trailing behind a 500-meter shield cap. That cap was, in fact, an enormous water storage tank holding some 27 billion liters, the water serving both as radiation shielding when the carrier was plowing through supposedly empty space at near-
c
velocities, and as a store of reaction mass for her plasma maneuvering thrusters. Of the two, the radiation shielding was actually the more important; individual hydrogen atoms or stray protons adrift in hard vacuum were perceived as hard radiation when they were encountered at relativistic speeds.

Here, just beneath the plane of Saturn’s spectacular rings, the particles
America
was encountering were considerably larger than protons. The carrier’s shield cap was slamming through a cloud of particles—mostly flecks of ice—that ranged from microscopic in size up through occasional chunks a meter or more across. The largest could be vaporized by the automated point-defense lasers mounted around the shield-cap rim, but there was simply no way to clear out all of the debris floating in
America
’s path. The carrier had been forced to slow sharply to avoid vaporizing herself in the storm of minute ice crystals and debris.

“What’s the tacsit on our fighters up ahead?” Gray demanded.

“They’ve all suffered pretty heavy casualties, Admiral. VFA-99 is down to three fighters left, plus a couple of streakers. Most of the action right now is centered around Enceladus. Mackey’s squadron reports that they’ve punched through the main enemy defenses, but they’re outnumbered and beginning to run low on expendable ordnance.”

“Meaning nukes.” Gray had received the report earlier about the alien fighters and their resistance to beam weapons. For a time, space ahead had been bright with the flaring blossoms of nuclear detonations, as
America
’s fighters had hunted down the swarming aliens, but they would be running low on missiles by now. Even their stores of small and efficiently compact Kraits wouldn’t last forever in a fight like this.

“Any sign of planetary defenses?” Gray asked.

Mallory shook his head. “No, sir. Not yet.”

“Capital ships?”

“A few, in orbit around Enceladus. A couple of monitors protecting that big alien ship, plus two cruisers, a light carrier, some destroyers. We’re reading some destroyers at Titan, too. They may be preparing to break orbit and join the main force.” Mallory hesitated. “The biggest question right now is the alien capital ship. It’s in close orbit around the moon, but has not opened fire on our fighters as yet. It may not be armed.”

“It carried those fighters,” Gray said. “That makes it a warship.”

But did it, really? The aliens were still a complete unknown . . . and that meant that their psychology, their way of looking at the universe, their motivations, their essential codes of morality or ethics were still unknown as well. The aliens might see nothing wrong at all with bringing space fighters into the system on board the equivalent of a hospital ship or a diplomatic courier. What humans considered to be violations of the rules of war might be completely unfathomable to another species.

Gray pushed the uncomfortable thought aside. The aliens obviously had had contact with Confederation representatives, and were working closely with them. They’d stepped into the middle of a major civil war . . . and Gray intended to show them exactly what that meant.

“Here’s what we’re going to do, Commander,” he told Mallory. “We’re going to start putting out AMSOs, a lot of them . . . and we’re going to sweep ourselves a tunnel from here to Enceladus.”

Mallory looked worried. “You think that will work, sir?”

“We’ll find out. I want this task force to be over Enceladus in ten minutes or less. Now
move
!”