Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (8 page)

But there were missiles incoming now, answering Blue Flight’s volley. Gallagher’s AI pegged the designation as AM/AS-9, which carried the USNA code name Black Mamba. The AM/AS designation stood for antimatter/antiship; rather than a nuclear warhead, it packed several grams of antimatter in a magnetic containment capsule, enough to generate a multi-megaton blast laced with deadly X-ray and gamma radiation. There were eight of them, pushing a 100,000 Gs. The Pan-Europeans, it appeared, were out for blood.

“Blue Four!” Gallagher called. “Try to block those Mambas!”

“Copy, Blue Leader! Fox One . . .”

For several endless seconds, two sets of artificial intelligences vied with each other tactically, each trying to outguess the other, feinting, dodging, putting on sudden bursts of acceleration, or decelerating sharply to spoof its opposite numbers. Then nuclear flashes erupted against the black of space, deathly silent, and half of the Mambas vanished in the blasts.

Four kept coming, their AIs seeking out the formation of USNA Starhawks for the kill.

“Blue Flight, go to E-and-E!” Gallagher yelled, breaking hard high and to port. E and E—Evasion and Escape. It was time to get the hell out of Dodge.

Sharp turns with a singularity fighter were always dicey, requiring the drive to anchor the gravity ball and allow the fighter to whip around it into the new desired course. The tricky part was keeping the fighter smoothly riding the gravity well’s sides without slipping in close enough to be caught in the microsingularity’s tidal effects. Maneuvering in a singularity fighter was completely unlike flying an atmospheric wing. Rather than banking and turning on air, it was space itself that was being twisted, allowing one vector to be shifted to another in a 90-degree turn, or even through a full one-eighty. Do it right and you slid around the artificial black hole smoothly, the sky wheeling past your head and you didn’t even feel the turn because you were still in free fall. Do it wrong and in an instant your fighter would be shredded into metallic confetti . . . a process technically known as spaghettification.

Jinking in three dimensions, Gallagher worked to keep the enemy warheads guessing, letting his ship’s AI handle the math, but guiding the process with his organic brain to keep the maneuverings as random and as unpredictable as possible. One of the antimatter warheads detonated several thousand kilometers to starboard, the flash wiping out the sky for a light-dazzled couple of seconds. A blue icon winked out of existence with the flash. Blue Four, Dwayne Tanner . . . and the end had come so quickly he’d not even realized he was dying.

“Blue Leader, Blue Two!” Joyce screamed. “I’ve got two on my tail! Can’t shake them!”

On the in-head, Gallagher could see Blue Two twisting hard to escape a pair of Todtadlers closing on her six, but he was too far . . .
too far
. . . .

“I’m on it, Karyl,” Truini called back. “Going to guns. Target lock . . . and
fire
!”

Blue Three swung into perfect line with the two Death Eagles at close range, spraying kinetic-kill Gatling rounds into their path. First one, then the other of the KRG-60s flared into savage smears of white-and-orange light, the wreckage twisting wildly into the fighter’s own drive singularity and vanishing in an instant.

“Good shot!” Gallagher told Truini, but then he had some serious problems of his own: a Black Mamba settling in on his own six and accelerating fast.

Cutting acceleration, Gallagher spun his Starhawk end for end, so that he now was facing the oncoming Mamba, traveling stern-first. He selected two AS-78 AMSO rounds. The acronymn stood for anti-missile shield ordnance, but they were better known as sandcasters—unguided warheads packed with several kilos of lead spherules, each as small as a grain of sand.

“Fox Two!” he called—the launch alert for unguided munitions, and he sent the AMSO warheads hurtling toward the Mamba. They detonated an instant later, firing sand clouds like shotgun bursts directly in the Mamba’s path. Before the Black Mamba’s AI could correct or dodge, the missile had hit the sand cloud at a velocity so high that the missile flared and disintegrated . . . then erupted in a savage burst of matter-antimatter annihilation.

The blast was close . . . very nearly
too
close. The expanding plasma wall nudged Gallagher’s Starhawk as it unfolded at close to the speed of light, putting him into a rough, tumbling spin. For the next several seconds he was extremely busy, trying to balance his Starhawk’s attitude controls to bring him out of the tumble.

Then he had the nimble little ship back under control, with tiny Enceladus and, beyond, the looming bulk of Saturn filling the forward sky. Red icons were scattering rapidly past and around him, he saw; those were the enemy fighters. Farther off, still a million kilometers away, a small knot of red icons marked an incoming continent of Confederation capital ships. The big boys were decelerating now, closing on Enceladus and leaving the mop-up of the defending USNA squadron to their own fighters.

And Gallagher didn’t see any way he could stop them, or even to get close. The last of Red Flight was gone, now, and the three remaining fighters of Blue Flight weren’t going to be able to do a damned thing about those heavies. His AI’s warbook was busily cataloguing the enemy fleet . . . two heavy cruisers, a light carrier, half a dozen destroyers, a couple of monitor gun platforms, a heavy transport . . .

Jesus!
What did they think the USNA had deployed out here on this damned little iceball? Salad Bowl was a civilian research station, nothing more, an exobiology outpost hunting for alien life in the salty deep-ocean pockets beneath the Enceladean ice. The Starhawk squadron had been placed here to protect against minor Pan-European raids . . . but what he was seeing here was a large-scale invasion. That transport was almost certainly a troop ship.

They might yet manage to do some damage. “Listen up, team,” he called. “We’re on a vector that will take us within ten thousand kilometers of that transport. I think it’s probably a troop ship, okay? Hit that baby, and we might be able to throw a major wrench into the Pannies’ plans.”

A troop ship meant troops, which meant the Pan-Europeans were here to occupy Enceladus or some other body in the Saturn subsystem . . . Titan, possibly, or the Huygens ERRF observatory in Saturn orbit. Destroy or damage it badly enough, and those invasion plans would have to be scrubbed. Gallagher had two Kraits left in his armament bays; he would shoot one and save the other as a just-in-case.

“That’s gonna really stir up a hornet’s nest,” Joyce said.

“Yeah, boss,” Truini added. “And what’s the point, anyway? We have to surrender. We’ve freakin’
lost
!”

Gallagher considered the question. Out here on the cold, empty ass-edge of the system, concepts like duty and honor just didn’t count for as much as they might back in more civilized areas. Here, you fought for your buddies.

Or, in this case, the other members of the squadron back in the Salad Bowl, the loaders, manglers, technicians, and all of the other support and logistics personnel that made a squadron work. Not to mention some six hundred scientists, technicians, and support personnel stationed at the Bowl.

“Yeah, and how are we supposed to do that, True?” Gallagher replied. Another antimatter warhead detonated in the distance, flooding the area with a harsh and deadly light. Surrender was not a matter of simply contacting the enemy . . . not when their electronic defenses were up to prevent attempts to hack into fighter control systems or AIs. “If the Bowl tells us to stand down, we stand down. Until then, we fight, damn it!”

There was no response . . . and Gallagher realized with a sudden cold impact that Truini’s fighter had vanished from the display with that last detonation. It was down to Gallagher and Joyce.

“Blue Two calling Fox One!” Joyce announced. “Missiles away!”

Gallagher programmed the shot and triggered it. “Fox One!”

“Their fighters are trying to cut us off!

“I see them.” He considered their options . . . which were few and not good. He considered ducking in Saturn’s rings and immediately discarded the idea. The thicker portions of the rings were too distant—the outer reaches of the massive and brilliant B Ring orbited over 120,000 kilometers farther in from Enceladus, more than a third the distance between Earth and Luna.

But damn it, they needed
cover
.

Nuclear fireballs flared and blossomed in the distance. The enemy transport was still there . . . but it was no longer decelerating. Maybe they’d done some damage.
Maybe
 . . .

Something about the data coming up on the alien transport didn’t add up. The ship was longer than a French Orcelle-class transport—nearly 700 meters—and its power curve was closer to that of a battle cruiser than a troop ship. Gallagher called up a magnified image . . . and he stifled a sharp, bitter exclamation.

He didn’t know what that . . . that
thing
was, but it wasn’t a troop ship.

No time for analyses now. He would store the data and hope he lived to transmit it.

“Okay! Make a run for Enceladus, Karyl. Close pass . . . crater hop if you have to. We’ll see if we can lose ’em in the ice!”

“Right behind you, Frank.”

The problem with being so badly outnumbered was the openness out here, with enemy fighters and capital ships now moving in from all sides. If they could get down on the deck of Enceladus, half the encircling sky would be blocked, and the radar and laser signatures of the fighters themselves might be masked by the ice skimming beneath their keels.

“Enceladus Base, this is Blue Leader!” he called over the tactical channel. “We’re down to two fighters! I think we managed to ding their troop ship, but they’re trying to swarm us! What are your instructions?”

“Blue Flight, Enceladus Base. You’ve done what you can, Frank. Get the hell clear of battlespace. RTB when you can.”

“Copy.” RTB—Return to base—when they could,
if
they could. More Black Mambas were streaking toward them, now. If things had been bad before, they were worse now. The enemy fighters were furious at the attack on the Confederation capital ship. Gallagher launched several more sandcaster rounds, then put on a burst of raw, hard acceleration that sent him hurtling toward the fast-swelling white disk of the moon. He was aware of the crater-pocked surface growing swiftly larger, of the dazzle from a distance-weakened sun glinting from the ice plains below . . . and then he was twisting around his drive singularity, fighting to shift his vector to one a little closer to parallel to the moon’s surface. Enceladus was so near now that its bulk blocked out the far vaster loom of giant Saturn.

Three enemy fighters were following him down. Where were the rest?

Where was Karyl?

He didn’t know. The three bandits on his six were closing fast, though. It looked like they were lining up for a gun attack rather than another volley of antimatter warheads. Maybe their missile rails had gone empty. Maybe . . . maybe . . .

A nuclear fireball blossomed to port, the detonation rapidly lost astern. They were popping nukes at him then . . . and one had just impacted the surface. He swerved to starboard, angling toward the tiny moon’s south polar region, still accelerating.

His fighter shuddered, and he heard the rapid-fire banging of small high-velocity pellets against his hull. He cut back on his speed . . . then cut back again as the shuddering increased in strength and decibel level.

A shimmering, hazy wall rose against the black of space from the horizon ahead.

Shit!
In the excitement, Gallagher had forgotten about the moon’s south pole . . . and the tiger stripes.

Cassini, an early robotic probe exploring the Saturn system, had discovered the mysterious jets streaming out from the moon’s south polar region in 2005. The constant tug-of war between Saturn and Enceladus created tidal heating and heavy tectonic activity, generating titanic cryovolcanoes erupting from four parallel fractures—deep cracks in the icy crust popularly known as “tiger stripes” for their dark color. Geysers of water emerged at high pressures from the vents and froze almost instantly, creating plumes extending as far as 500 kilometers up and out into space.

Much of this ice drifted back to the surface of Enceladus as snow, carpeting the moon’s southern regions to create a brighter, whiter surface much younger than existed in the north. The rest drifted clear of the satellite and formed the broad, highly diffuse E ring of Saturn, a 2,000-kilometer-thick belt circling the planet all the way from the orbit of Mimas, an inner moon of the planet, out to Rhea.

Those cryovolcanic plumes had been the first evidence that Enceladus might harbor a liquid-water ocean beneath the ice . . . and possibly life as well. Enceladus base had been established a century and a half earlier to search for that life—a far more difficult task than on Jupiter’s Europa. While the subsurface ocean had a temperature close to 0˚ centigrade, the surface of the ice was a numbing 240 degrees colder, just 33 degrees above absolute zero. And unlike Europa, the internal ocean seemed to exist in pockets, limiting the areas where the xenobiology people could drill.

The effort had been worth it, however. Life had been discovered beneath the Enceladean ice . . . very, very
strange
life, life based on hydrogen-germanium chemistry—on organometallic semiconductors rather than on carbon chains.

Exactly how an ice ball like Enceladus had acquired enough germanium—a relatively rare element on Earth—to evolve life based on the stuff was a mystery; how it
worked
was a bigger mystery still. Simply identifying the flecks of organometallics exchanging photons with one another in the Enceladean oceans as being
alive
had taken the better part of a century . . . and a near-total rewrite of the definition of the word
life
.

Enceladus Station, located in the permanent blizzard 100 kilometers from the terminus of one of the tiger stripes, was a xenobiological outpost maintained as a joint venture by Phoenix University of Arizona and the Universidade de Brasília. With Brazil siding with the Confederation against the North American rebels, there’d been some understandable political stresses at Enceladus. VF-910 had been dispatched to the moon to keep the peace . . . and the scientific neutrality of the base.