Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (26 page)

“Demon One, Demon Six,” Connor called. “Time to ’fess up, Mac. What’s the straight shit? Are these guys hostiles or not?”

“You were there and downloaded the briefing with the rest of us, Meg,” Mackey replied. “CIC says to treat ’em as hostile . . . but let them make the first move.”

“Shit, Skipper!” Lieutenant Carlson, Demon Three, said. “No IB?”

“Yeah,” Lieutenant Gregory added. “That’s the perfect recipe for getting ourselves seriously dead!”

“I know,” Mackey replied. “But we need to give ’em time to be friends if the bastards want, right? This is just show of force . . . until they decide otherwise.”

“So what better way to make them be friends than a little IB diplomacy?” Gregory wanted to know.

IB stood for initial bombardment, and it was the central pillar of all modern space combat. Battles rarely occurred in open space; a typical star system was so large, encompassing such a vast volume of space, that, unless both sides sought it, a meeting of fleets in all that emptiness was unlikely in the extreme.

And of course the whole point of using a fleet to dominate a star system was to control those pieces of orbiting real estate that made the system strategically important in the first place—the planets, moons, and major asteroids, the free-orbiting bases and colonies, the deep-space nanufactories, antimatter plants, and power stations that were the signature of modern, space-faring technic civilization.

So space tactics had evolved around defending forces that protected key planets, and attacking forces that emerged from Alcubierre Drive far out in the relatively empty reaches of the outer system, accelerated in-system, and engaged the defenders for control of whatever it was they were protecting.

The initial bombardment was quite literally the opening volley in such an engagement. Long-range missiles and kinetic-kill projectiles launched from far out-system could smash through a defending fleet; more devastating by far were
relativistic
bombardments, where the incoming projectiles were traveling at a hefty percentage of the speed of light. The kinetic energy contained in even a grain of sand traveling at such a velocity was starkly unimaginable. The man commanding the task force, “Sandy” Gray, had gotten his nickname years before when he’d released clouds of sand at near-
c
, annihilating much of an enemy fleet and scouring one hemisphere of a planet with fire in the process. The tactic was extremely effective if you didn’t care what got broken going in. This time, though, the word was no initial bombardments; there might be USNA prisoners on Vulcan or on board one or more of the ships near the objective planet.

Besides, scuttlebutt held that the task force was here to make
friends
with the hostiles. A show of force . . . followed by a goddamned treaty . . .

So the fighter wave launched from the task force would be first to make contact with the enemy, and would do so without the usual softening-up of a preliminary bombardment. The main fleet, twenty-two capital ships, was on the way. With less acceleration, they would be arriving later—another two hours.

Until then, the fighters would be on their own . . . and they would be calling the shots insofar as diplomatic decisions were concerned.

It was not, Connor thought, a good utilization of assets. Politicians talked, signed treaties, and decided when it was time to go to war. Fighter pilots handled the rough stuff after the political possibilities had been exhausted.

“Arm weapons,” Mackey told them. “But don’t fire until I give you clearance.”

Still decelerating, the fighters of the Black Demon Squadron continued to fall toward the planet.

Grdoch Huntership
Swift Slayer

Vulcan Space

1423 hours, TFT

Alarmed, now, the Swarmguide Tch’gok turned three more of its eyestalks to watch the control-room screen. The prey was hurtling ever closer, their ships decelerating but still moving quite fast.

“Weapons!” it said, speaking its tightly focused thoughts through fiber-optic cables wired directly into its nervous system. “Target the nearest of those small ships and . . . fire!”

X-ray lasers snapped out from the hull of the Grdoch huntership
Swift Slayer
, and the oncoming motes of enemy fighters flared and vanished like night flyers caught by flame. Those fighters did not pose a significant threat to the Grdoch hunterships . . . but the major warships coming in behind them might.

Tch’gok was balancing.

The concept was basic to Grdoch psychology, the result of tens of millions of years of evolution as hunters in a violently dangerous ecosystem. Grdoch hunters tended to advance as a swarm when prey—helpless and vulnerable—was in sight. They tended to scatter and retreat when confronted by strength, or the risk of personal injury.

That had been the evolutionary imperative, at least, for millions of years before the Grdoch left the swamps and estuaries of their watery homeworld and developed civilization. They’d evolved as both predator and prey, and their modern psychology reflected that fact.

As did their physiology. Where predators tended to have forward-facing eyes with good depth perception in contrast to browsers, which had eyes mounted to let them see in all directions, the Grdoch had both . . . with a dozen eyes in telescoping snouts that gave them both superb binocular
and
360-degree vision. Though they were large and ungainly organisms, their spherical symmetry let them move rapidly in any direction, and their feeding snouts doubled as graspers and manipulators of surprising sensitivity.

Evolution had molded the Grdoch into perfect middle-tier predators within their homeworld’s ecosystem. Eons ago, the top predator on the Grdoch homeworld had been a nightmare horror, all teeth and slasher claws and spiky armor and ravenous appetite, a monster called the
tch’tch’tch
, which had imprinted its terror deep within the modern Grdoch psyche. Those large and hungry top-tier predators that had helped that evolutionary process along were extinct now . . . but the Grdoch remained as natural selection had made them—both in their physiology and in their psychology—fierce predator, terrified prey.

Balancing
 . . .

Tch’gok could feel the familiar inner pull in two directions . . . toward feeding frenzy and toward rout. The trick was to override the blind emotions with mind and will . . . by encouraging the thoughts of steaming bodily fluids and oozing flesh.
Feed! Feed! Feed!

Digestive enzymes flowed in questing, hungry mouths. Terror receded, replaced by a deep and nearly overwhelming hunger.

“Swarmreleaser!” it commanded. “Release your swarm! Shipguide! Take us closer.”

And
Swift Slayer
accelerated toward the oncoming fighters.

VFA-96, Black Demons

Vulcan Space

1424 hours, TFT

Two Black Demon fighters were caught in that invisible blowtorch flame—Teller and de la Cruz. Several fighters from other squadrons were hit as well.

“Weapons free!” Mackey told the group. “Weapons free!”

“Shit, what
was
that?” a shrill voice called.

Lieutenant Del Rey was one of the squadron’s replacement pilots, after the losses at Enceladus, and she didn’t sound as though she quite believed what she was seeing.

Connor shook her head, disgusted.
Idiot
. She’d seen the after-action reports, and downloaded the engagement records.

“X-ray laser, Lieutenant,” Mackey told her. “Don’t let it hit you with the thing. It’ll ruin your whole day.”

“Here they come!” Kemper called. Connor could hear the stress in his mental voice. “They’re engaging!”

“Hold formation!” Mackey replied. “All fighters,
hold formation
!”

Swarms of fighters—squat and egg shaped—were emerging from the far larger alien vessel behind them and moving to attack the oncoming USNA fighters head-on.

“There are too many of them!” Daimler, another newbie, said.

“Definitely a target-rich environment,” Connor put in. She didn’t like the thread of nervousness running through the mental voices of her squadron mates.

“Remember,” Mackey warned. “These things drink high-energy beams. No lasers or pee-beeps! Stick with missiles.”

“Locking on,” Kemper reported. “And
. . . Fox One
!”

Other fighters in the squadron began loosing missiles—VG-10 Kraits for the most part, but several of the Black Knight and Grim Reaper Velociraptor pilots had just released the much larger and more powerful Fer-de-lance shipkillers. The enemy fighters replied with volleys of high-energy X-ray beams, silently erasing both accelerating missiles and human fighters from the sky in rapid-fire bursts of light . . . but then the surviving nuclear warheads began detonating among the alien ships, in dazzling pulses of light and hard radiation.

“Get past the fighters if you can,” Mackey ordered. “We want the mother ships!”

Connor loosed a pair of Kraits, then punched her Starhawk into high-G acceleration, angling for an opening in the enemy fighter swarm that might let her slip through. Her AI alerted her to vector changes among some of the nearer enemy ships; they were moving to cut her off. She rolled to starboard, jinking now to throw off the Grdoch targeting systems. Her Starhawk, she knew, would never survive even a touch of one of those 80-teraJoule X-ray energy bolts. Each shot delivered the punch of a pocket nuke, as much as a VG-10 Krait but focused down to a beam the thickness of a man’s forearm. When one touched a Starhawk’s hull matrix, that hull material simply vaporized, and the heat of the disintegration—temperatures equivalent to the core of a star—simply engulfed the fighter and reduced it to an expanding plasma of charged particles.

“Watch out!” Lieutenant Carlson yelled. “The bastards are—”

Carlson’s ship vanished, wiped from the sky.
Damn
 . . .

Connor had a lock on the Grdoch mothership, now looming less than a thousand kilometers ahead. “Target lock,” she called. “Going to Lance! Fox One!”

Her fighter’s warload included four of the VG-44c Fer-de-lance missiles, each about a megaton’s worth of destructive energy packaged in the tip of a three-meter shipkiller. She felt the jolt as one of the heavy missiles slid clear of her fighter’s belly, followed by a second, and then she rolled sharply to port, pumping out a stream of AMSO rounds. She wasn’t certain that the flying sand clouds would scatter those X-ray bolts as they did lower-energy laser beams, but it was certainly worth a try. She laid down a pattern of sandcaster rounds designed to protect both her own fighter and the fast-moving Fer-de-lance as well.

Her AI’s wordless alarm sounded in her head. A Grdoch fighter had just dropped onto her tail, and the energies within its weapons bays were building to a peak. Flipping end-for-end, she fired a pair of AMSO sandcaster rounds, then jinked toward the nadir; white light blinded her for an instant as X-rays scattered through the expanding cloud of sand. She targeted the opposition with a Krait . . . no,
two
. . . and fired.

The enemy fighter was closing fast . . . too fast, and the proximity fuses on the pair of nuclear warheads she’d just launched detonated less than 15 kilometers away. Almost in the same instant, a more distant but much larger nuclear detonation filled the universe with light. The radiation storms swept across her ship. . . .

And Meg Connor’s fighter went dead, tumbling stem over stern as she fell toward Vulcan.

Chapter Eighteen

13 March 2425

USNA CVS
America

40 Eridani A System

1430 hours, TFT

“Give me a magnified image,” Gray ordered. “Let’s see what the drones have to say.”

Battlespace drones had been launched ahead of the fighter squadrons, creating an interlocking network of video and electronic images that the task force’s AIs could use to pierce the classic fog of war and assemble a useful picture of what was going on. Though
America
was still nearly 15 million kilometers out, her flag-bridge display now zoomed in on the fighter battle ahead. Vulcan was a vast silver-limned crescent close against the intolerably brilliant orange glare of 40 Eridani. Green and red icons drifted against the light; by selecting one and giving a thoughtclick command, Gray could focus on individual actions, could watch the exchange of missiles and X-rays lighting up the sky.

Gray was less interested in individual fighter-against-fighter exchanges, however, than he was in the evolution of the entire engagement. Task Force Eridani would be entering that fiercely contested volume of space in another few moments, and it was imperative that the fighters clear out some of the Grdoch opposition.

That, of course, was the point of sending in fighters ahead of the main body of the fleet.
America
and the capital ships with her were not as vulnerable to Grdoch X-ray beams as were fighters; they mounted gravitic screens designed to intercept incoming energies in tightly curved regions of spacetime and scatter them back into space. But an analysis of the Grdoch weapons collected at Enceladus had proved that human warships would not be able to divert those tightly packaged energies for long. If the fleet were to survive the next thirty minutes, the fighter squadrons had to eliminate some, at least, of the defenders . . . or at least sharply reduce their ability to fight.

But there was paradox there as well. Such vital fleet assets were at the same time the most vulnerable . . . delicate motes lost in emptiness, and buffeted by nuclear storms.

Gray watched the pulse and flash of myriad nuclear warheads, and wondered how the struggle was going—who was winning. He could hear the chatter of pilots calling to pilots over the comm channels in the background, but each individual was so focused on his or her one tiny slice of the firefight that they had no understanding of the larger picture.

“Knight Six! Watch it! Watch it! You have one on your tail!”

“Target lock! Fox One! Fox One!”

“Donny! Break left!”

“I’ve got him! Lock! Fire!”

“My God . . . he’s coming apart!”

“Watch the debris, Reaper Seven! You’re too close!”

“Shit! Reap-Seven is gone! . . .”

Gray kept listening to those disembodied voices coming over the tactical links, and knew that too many had died already.

Nuclear detonations didn’t behave the same in space as they did on a planetary surface. There was no stereotypical mushroom cloud, for a start, just an expanding sphere of white-hot plasma. With no atmosphere, both heat effects and shock waves were enormously attenuated. The radiation released by a nuclear warhead, however, with no air molecules to absorb it, could reach levels 5,000 times higher than the same detonation inside a planetary atmosphere, and it was this radiation that caused the majority of damage in space combat. Even the most hardened electronic systems were vulnerable to pulses of high-level radiation when it was that strong.

Unfortunately, the pilots of those fighters were even more vulnerable. Their cockpits were heavily shielded, of course. They
had
to be, since a fighter traveling at near-
c
encountered stray hydrogen atoms or subatomic particles at relative velocities that turned them into deadly ionizing radiation. But a nuke going off close enough could dump enough hard rads into a fighter’s systems to cripple the ship and literally fry the pilot.
America
’s sick bays had the technology to repair all but the most serious radiation-induced injuries . . . but the pilot had to live long enough to reach one.

And if enough radiation leaked through a fighter’s gravitic and electromagnetic shielding all at once, the pilot would be dead within seconds, and there was no medical technology good enough to fix
that
.

The Chinese fighters off the
Shi Lang
—three squadrons of new
Kaifeng
fighters—were engaging the enemy now, sweeping in on the more distant of the two Grdoch capital ships. The Grdoch warships had split up, one—identified by
America
’s AI as Alfa—advancing to meet the incoming Allied fleet, the other, Bravo, remaining in orbit over Vulcan.

There was another element as well . . . a contingent of ten Confederation capital ships, still half an hour out, but accelerating in toward Vulcan. Were they working with the Grdoch? Or were they potential allies?

Gray studied the shifting tactical situation for a moment, looking for an advantage and how best to capitalize on it.
Divide and conquer
was an age-old military dictum, one that applied as much to modern starships as it had to the hoplites of ancient Greece. By splitting up, the Grdoch ships might be committing one of the deadliest sins of combat—dividing their forces in the face of an enemy.

On the other hand, military history was full of examples of commanders who’d done just that . . . and won.

Gray was also uncomfortably aware that the Chinese were doing the same thing—splitting the Allied forces by moving independently on Bravo, the more distant of the Grdoch ships. The operational orders had stated that the task force should stay together—but Admiral Guo evidently had chosen to test those orders. Why? To demonstrate that the Chinese contingent was independent of Gray’s command? He would have to have a word with Guo later.

If there
was
a later. . . .

Still, the situation could work to the Allies’ advantage, he thought. If the Chinese kept that second Grdoch warship distracted, the rest of the Allies could gang up on the Alfa.

He studied the unfolding situation a moment more, and then began issuing orders.

“Dean! We’re going to maintain line ahead. Let the other ships know.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

On the flag-bridge overhead screen, lines drew themselves across the firmament, showing the projected paths of each of the ships.

“We’ll do a close pass on target Alfa . . . then make straight for Bravo.”

“Yessir.”

“Line ahead” was a term from the ancient days of wet navies, with all of the vessels of a fleet or squadron strung out in a line. It had the questionable advantage of offering only the first few ships in the line to enemy fire and sparing the rest. One alternative was a wall approach, with the ships spread out in a more-or-less two-dimensional sheet that gave all of them a shot at the enemy, but also exposed all to incoming defensive fire. Another possibility was the “melee,” or general chase, where individual ships or small squadrons chose their own approach, and their own targets.

Because of the deadliness of the Grdoch X-ray weapons, Gray had decided on the first set of tactics. He expected to lose some of the ships in the van; the chances were good that the Grdoch would concentrate on the lead ships, the ones more easily targeted and not so heavily masked by Allied electronic countermeasures. In a wall attack, more of the task group’s heavies might be crippled going in—specially the larger ones, while a general chase invited destruction in detail.

“Destroyers and frigates in the van,” he ordered. “And frigates on the flanks. Cruisers next, then carriers, battleships, and gunships.”

“Relaying the orders now, Admiral.”

Gray sat back in his seat, trying to ignore the icy fist gripping his stomach.
This
was the worst part of command . . . giving the orders that determined who might live, who was likely to die. Putting the more expendable destroyers and frigates forward in the van—small ships of a few thousand tons and with crews numbering a few hundred—might mean fewer volleys directed against the larger ships—the carriers massing some millions of tons, or the heavy railgun cruisers—each of them a small city, with a population numbered in the thousands.

Had he guessed right? Depending on the effectiveness of the Grdoch heavy weaponry, splitting their fire among all twenty-two capital ships might turn out to be a better approach than concentrating that same fire on a few ships. Gray was gambling on the fact that modern space combat was unthinkably fast. The task force would be past Target Alfa in a fraction of a second; its disposition—he hoped—would let the heavies get in and past without taking major damage.

There was also the fact of the fighter squadrons that had preceded the task force into the battlespace. They were scoring hits on the Grdoch warships. The question was whether they had been able to degrade the enemy’s defensive capabilities at all. If they hadn’t, Task Force Eridani’s attack formation wouldn’t matter much at all.

“Seventy-five seconds to closest passage, Admiral,” Captain Gutierrez told him. “This doesn’t look like it’ll be as easy as Enceladus, though.”

“No,” Gray replied. “It doesn’t. But let’s see how they react to a direct threat.”

The Grdoch ship at Enceladus had offered something of a puzzle, and USNA strategists and xeno specialists had been working on the contradiction since, trying to find a key to the aliens’ behavior. The alien had opened fire on the USNA squadron . . . but had fled rather than face a protracted fight. And when he’d virtually gone on board the captured vessel in the guise of a robotic drone and encountered one of the Grdoch crew, it had behaved . . . oddly inconsistent, at least by human standards. First it had seemed afraid, even cowardly . . . but they’d turned aggressive when the Marines had opened fire on their food creature.

Of course, the key issue lay in the phrase
by human standards
. What seemed like inconsistent behavior for humans was not necessarily so in aliens. But if humans were going to fight these things, they had to understand them.

Know your enemy
, a basic precept of the ancient strategic philosopher Sun Tzu. It wasn’t easy, though, with a culture evolved on a world light years from Earth and Humankind.

Gray had downloaded a lot of initial reports and speculation by the XS people analyzing the alien prisoners, and seen nothing definitive as yet. Based on what he’d seen at Enceladus, however, he was willing to bet that the Grdoch possessed a more pronounced fight-or-flight response than did humans. That begged the question as to why they’d even come here in the first place, or allied with the Confderation . . . but it suggested that there might be ways of making them back down. Naked force appeared to make them aggressive . . . but the ship at Enceladus
had
fled when
America
had opened fire on it. Perhaps they had a kind of bully mentality—one that led them to attack when they felt they had a strong advantage, but sent them scurrying when they were given a hard punch in the nose.

Well . . . assuming they
had
noses.

In any case, that was what he was counting on here.

The ships of TF Eridani had dropped into line . . . led by the frigates
Wyatt
,
McDonnell
, and
Brewster
, and followed by the destroyers
Semmes
,
Young
, and
Ramirez,
and the cruiser
Milwaukee
.
America
had fallen into line astern of the battleship
Long Island
, with the
Maine
flanking them to port and the Russian
Slava
just astern. As one, they switched off their gravitic drives, traveling now at a residual velocity of just under 8,000 kilometers per second.

“All ships,” Gray said quietly, “stand by. Tacnet link, AI control . . .”

One disadvantage of the line ahead formation was the fact that most of the ships couldn’t fire at the enemy without risking a hit on friendlies in the van. The most devastating fire, however, would be delivered during that split second as the task force swept past the enemy at several thousand kps and at a range of just 10,000 kilometers in this case. Human reflexes simply weren’t fast enough to direct such fire, so the actual targeting and release would be handled by ship AIs. The computer tactical links connecting the ships of the task force would control the fleet as a unit, concentrating fire and making sure that no ship blocked another as it passed the target.

“The van is taking fire, Admiral,” Dean reported.

Gray saw the volley on his tactical screen, computer-controlled graphics filling in the otherwise invisible bolts of coherent X-ray energy as they snapped out from Target Alfa, aiming at the lead human warships. The
McDonnell
took a direct hit that vaporized a large central portion of her shield cap. Wreckage and glittering ice spilled into space, still traveling toward the objective at nearly 8,000 kilometers per second.

Fifty kilometers ahead of the
McDonnell
and just a bit to one side, the
Wyatt
took a near miss, losing a pie-wedge chunk of shield cap. Both stricken frigates were tumbling, now, their control systems fried. And the alien’s deadly weapons were questing deeper up the human van, now, ignoring the damaged ships, searching for new targets. The frigate
Brewster
vanished in a vast, eye-wrenching flare of white light as several X-ray beams converged on her, burning through her shield cap and vaporizing her power plants.

But a new danger threatened. Another ancient dictum of war held that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy . . . and that was abundantly demonstrated now as Grdoch fighters began piercing the human task force’s line. Many had been destroyed by the human fighter wave, of course, but not
all
by any means. Dozens of Grdoch fighters converged now on the larger human ships—in particular the carriers. Their X-ray beam weapons weren’t nearly as powerful as those on the mother ships, but there were so many of them, a swarm of scarlet attackers seeking to overwhelm the human defenses.