Deep time, p.32
Deep Time, page 32
“Again!” Dahlquist yelled. “Hit them again! Same spot!”
Mirror-bright hull material, made of an ultra-hard plastic coated with a highly reflective polyester film, blackened and crinkled, then puffed out into vacuum in a cloud of hot plasma.
“Hit!” Ames called. “Burn through!”
“Yeah, screw with our time now, you bastards!” Dahlquist said.
Marines in nearby space saw what was happening to the alien, and began turning their weapons on the ship’s hull as well, and a destroyer and two frigates entering the cavern several kilometers overhead added their fire to the fusillade. The Pax had joined in as well, hurling proton beams at the time bender still hovering alongside her.
But something appeared to be wrong. With a sense of growing horror, Dahlquist became aware that the distant USNA ships were . . . jittering, moving back and forth in erratic, rapid jumps, as though they were station keeping, but far, far too quickly.
The time benders were using their unique weapons again, slowing time for the Concord, and also for the nearest Marines, drawing them all into a field where the passage of time was far slower than it was for ships outside the area of effect. The frequency of energy weapons fired within that field dropped as time slowed, until even direct hits did very little damage at all.
Damn it, they wouldn’t be able to break free if they were frozen in time! And the Marines outside were obviously struggling with the area effect as well, moving back and out of range before they, too, were frozen like insects trapped in amber.
“Hit them!” he yelled. “Keep hitting them!”
But minutes had already passed, and felt like a bright-edged instant as they did.
VFA-31, The Impactors
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1733 hours, TFT
When his AI had at last reported that his fighter was again operable, St. Clair had very nearly passed out. The terror, the loneliness, the sheer nightmare fear gripping him as he streaked into emptiness had been growing steadily, threatening to overwhelm him. Then his fighter’s drive was on-line, safe, and ready to engage. His first instinct had been to switch on his gravitic drive, flip his Starblade end for end to align with the task force, and accelerate hard, heading back to the human fleet as quickly as he could.
But he kept remembering that fragment of a distress call, and wondered who it was. The signal had been too weak to carry with it an electronic ID tag.
Not that it mattered. It had been a human voice he’d heard, so it was another pilot with the task force. And he was down on the surface of Invictus, alone and likely freezing to death.
For a grim minute, St. Clair stared into the night ahead, trying not to think about it . . . and then with a savage curse he flipped the Starblade around its drive singularity once more, lining the ship up with the curve of the planet.
“AI!” he said. “Do you still have that distress signal?”
He felt the computer’s affirmative.
“Show me.”
A red cursor winked on against the planet’s disk, marking the spot where the signal had come from.
He sighed. SAR wasn’t a part of his job description, but he couldn’t leave that unknown pilot out there to freeze. He couldn’t.
He accelerated.
Chapter Twenty-three
7 August, 2425
Connor
VFA-96, The Black Demons
Invictus surface, T+12 MY
1733 hours, TFT
Connor’s Starblade began accelerating again, steadily but gradually . . . as though time was a flowing river, slow at the shorelines, faster out in the middle, and she was cutting across the current. The alien temporal technology appeared to envelope the Glothr ship or machine, but could also be projected. Evidently—and fortunately—they couldn’t project it in all directions at once, and as they redirected their attention elsewhere, Connor’s Starblade edged through molasses and out into the clear once more.
The time field was also . . . uneven. As she pulled free, she noticed a patch of severe damage amidships, right about where she’d slammed the target with a stream of KK projectiles. The temporal field hadn’t frozen that damage before it could burn through the alien’s hull, but she hadn’t seen it until she was clear.
She shook her head. That sort of crap was for the physicists to figure out, not her. All that concerned her at the moment was the fact that the Glothr temporal field was now down, and she had a clear and perfect shot.
She let loose a burst from her particle-beam projector, then twisted away as the entire length of the alien ship began opening up, coming apart as though it were being unzipped. Pieces of the craft tumbled out into the cavern, including fiercely radiating gravitic singularities, the artificial anomalies responsible for power generation, for acceleration—and for the Glothr time-bending technology.
She never felt it when the singularity from the Glothr vessel engulfed her dying Starblade in night, the fierce gravitic tides shredding her and her ship.
USNS/HGF Concord
Invictis Ring, T+12 MY
1733 hours, TFT
The Glothr time bender opened under the concentrated fire from every direction, spilling debris as it helplessly drifted toward the nearest wall of the cavern. Dahlquist watched as it collided with the outstretched arms of several gantries, snapping them off, then continued its inexorable drift. The hull struck the wall and the ship began crumpling; a trio of singularities escaped, devouring plastic hull material as they fell, tunneling inside. Human fighters crumpled, died, and vanished.
Dahlquist had never heard of a space battle being fought in such close, confined quarters as this. Concord continued firing her turret weapons, chewing up the wreckage of the drifting Glothr hulk, and taking aim, too, at the second time-bender adrift perhaps a kilometer away. Marines were swarming through local space now, some of them attaching to Concord’s outer hull.
It didn’t feel as lonely as it had for a while, there.
“Let’s get us the hell out of here, Amsie,” Dahlquist said. “I’m feeling claustrophobic.”
“Yes, sir. Imagine how they feel, though.”
She indicated movement on the display ahead—“up” within the weak gravity field of the ring. Three ships—human ships—were coming through the ten-kilometer-wide crater that had been torn into the ring edge, their running lights winking on and off brightly within the darkness. From this angle, all he could see of them were the shield caps from bow-on, all three holed and ragged from heavy fire, but telescopic optical scans could still pick out the names arced across the prow of each—New York, Northern California, and America.
“I’d say it feels,” Dahlquist said, “like the goddamned cavalry is coming to the rescue.”
Gregory
VFA-96, The Black Demons
Invictus surface, T+12 MY
1735 hours, TFT
His emergency power was very nearly gone, but Gregory had elected to keep the visual feed open. He didn’t like the idea of dying alone in the dark.
Not that the current view was a whole lot better. The surface of Invictus was relentlessly flat, covered by head-sized chunks of ice frozen to the hardness of basalt. But the galaxy towered above the horizon, casting a dim illumination across the barren landscape. The planet’s rings arched high overhead. Gregory couldn’t see any sign of the battle, however. It was either hidden below the world’s horizon, or simply too distant to be seen by the naked eye.
It was hard to get used to the absence of stars. He could have simply imagined that it was a cloudy night, except that he could see a few very faint, fuzzy stars here and there against the darkness.
Other galaxies, inexpressibly distant. Somehow, they seemed to intensify the sense of isolation and loneliness.
Movement . . .
He thought at first he was imagining it, but something as black as the stygian night around him was moving across the slightly lighter grays of the ring. A signal sounded within his head . . . and an ID tag.
“Hello!” he called. “Hello! This is Demon Five! Demon Five, calling mayday! Mayday!”
“I see you, Five,” a voice replied, static blasted and weak with the fast-fading power of Gregory’s ship. “I’m coming in for pickup!”
An in-head ID tag told him the voice belonged to Lieutenant Commander St. Clair, the squadron CO of the Impactors, VFA-31.
He could make out details of St. Clair’s Starblade now as it flattened itself across the sky, descending, unfolding, reaching for him. It rippled out suddenly like a blanket, cutting off Gregory’s vision, enfolding him in darkness. There was a long pause.
“Damn . . .” St. Clair said.
Gregory felt a sudden, panicky start. “What is it?” he asked.
“You’re frozen to the ground! I can’t break you free!”
It was, Gregory supposed, to be expected. Nanotechnology and what it could do seemed downright magical at times, so much so that it was possible to forget that there were limits to its performance. His hull’s nanomatrix had gone inert when he lost his main power, and as the heat drained from his fighter the temperature of its outermost layers had begun dropping toward twenty-five degrees above zero absolute. The interior matrix, next to his cockpit, was currently at about minus one hundred Celsius—a good one hundred fifty degrees warmer than the outside; inside his cockpit it was just now slipping past minus ten.
He didn’t feel the cold yet, not really. His suit would insulate him for a time, and it had a micro-heater system woven into the fabric that would try its best to keep him at a comfortable eighteen to twenty degrees, but that wouldn’t stave off the cold for very long.
The other fighter moved off his own, revealing again the spectacle of the galaxy, its cold and serene beauty hanging in the sky. There had to be a way around this.
He considered opening up his fighter and standing up; he might survive the cold for a critical few seconds while the other pilot scooped him up. He ran some numbers through his in-head processor, desperately hopeful.
No. At the rate heat was draining away into the surrounding surface, his suit would protect him for two seconds . . . maybe three . . . and then the heating system would fail, the environment would suck the heat from his body and he would freeze solid very nearly instantaneously.
“Maybe a SAR tug could pull you out,” the voice said.
Gregory ran some more numbers. “At the rate things are going here,” he said slowly, “I’ve got about five minutes left. Is there a SAR tug within three or four minutes of here?”
“No. They haven’t launched yet. At least, I don’t think they have. They’re still fighting inside the ring.”
SAR tugs were unarmed, and standard operating procedure kept them aboard the carriers until the battle was over.
“Not many options, then.”
“No.” The other pilot sounded frustrated. ”Damn it, there must be something.”
“Well, unless you can build me a really big fire . . .”
He’d meant it as a joke, as gallows humor, but the other Starblade pilot snapped it up. “I can use my laser! Minimum power . . . draw circles around you as close as I can without burning you. You game?”
There were no numbers to describe this. All Gregory knew was that it was getting damned cold in here.
“Yeah! Do it!”
The other fighter rose into the sky, assuming its combat configuration, an elongated black teardrop.
And Gregory switched off his exterior optic feed. He didn’t particularly want to see St. Clair’s Starblade vaporizing the frozen surface around him at close range, a supremely unsettling thought.
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1736 hours, TFT
“Target the area of the cavern wall behind the High Guard ships,” Gray ordered. “Be careful of our people.”
“Our people are swarming all over the place, Admiral,” Taggart replied. “Can we order them out of there?”
“Colonel Jamison?” Gray asked. “How about it?”
The Marine colonel was on the same link. “I’ve given orders, sir. But c-cubed is breaking down.”
C3—command, communications, and control—was the imperative of any combat situation. Incredible levels of technology had been applied to perfect it, to control an unfolding battle at all levels, but the human factor continued to swamp the purely technical. Men in combat became emotional—enraged, afraid, protective of comrades—and didn’t hear the orders . . . or chose to ignore them.
“We can’t wait any longer,” Gray said softly. “All units . . . fire!”
Electron beams snapped out from all three capital ships, focused together at a single spot behind and between the two captured High Guard vessels. The black backdrop flared . . . boiled . . . then vaporized.
And, guided by the senses and the analyses of the shipboard AIs, the beams burned through to the Glothr electrical network within.
Gray sat back in his command chair and watched the attack through his in-head with something approaching awe. Space battles generally were fought in . . . well . . . open space, with thousands, even tens of thousands of kilometers between the combatants. The commander of a ship—or a task force—could not even see other vessels in the engagement, either his own or those of the enemy, with his naked eyes, and depended on computer simulation to reveal what was going on. Here, three capital ships, each a kilometer long, had edged inside the ring structure and were carrying out what amounted to a planetary bombardment at a range of, now, less than five kilometers. America had turned slightly, to bring her single electron gun turret into action. The two battleships had narrower, deeper shield caps, their reaction-mass storage tanks looking like blunt-nosed bullets, and their turrets were designed to elevate out from their spines far enough that they could clear the forward obstruction.
In atmosphere, electron beams would have looked like straight-line lightning bolts, which, in fact, was exactly what they were. In hard vacuum, the beams were invisible, but America’s AI painted them in for clarity’s sake. Their focus became an intolerably brilliant point of light, melting into the plastic wall of the cavern and illuminating the entire vast surrounding space.
Electromagnetic pulses are transferred in four different ways—through electrical fields, through magnetic fields, through electromagnetic radiation, and by direct electrical conduction. Combining the first three of these methods, electron beams are intense streams of electron radiation constrained and directed by powerful electromagnetic fields. When they hit the Glothr electrical systems and overwhelmed their hardened defenses, they generated the fourth type as well: an induced EMP wave surging deeper into and through the alien structure at roughly two-thirds the speed of light.
The outer surfaces of the ring were hardened against this sort of attack; at the first touch of an electron beam, the charge shields would have flashed over to a negative charge, repelling the attack.
But Invictus had not been the objective of an enemy attack in many millions of years—and with no sun, its inhabitants didn’t need to worry about solar flares or natural electrical or plasma effects that might have damaged their equipment. In short, and as advanced as they were technically, they had no real defenses against an EMP generated from within.
Circuits burned out. Parallel circuits utilizing fiber optics suffered data overload and went down as well. And worst of all, individual Glothr experienced direct attacks on their primary sensory systems.
Gray could only imagine what the Glothr population was experiencing right now.
He hoped it was enough to convince them to stop fighting. That, after all, was the whole purpose of war: kick the other guy in the crotch until he decided it wasn’t worth continuing the fight.
But it was a whole lot harder when you weren’t sure if the other guy even had a crotch . . . or what you were doing to him when you kicked him there.
VFA-31, The Impactors
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1736 hours, TFT
St. Clair hovered a hundred meters above the frozen surface of Invictus, directing his fighter’s primary laser in a circle around the tattered remnants of Lieutenant Gregory’s fighter. Steam billowed up in vast clouds from below . . . and that was an unexpected problem because the steam rapidly refroze as dust-sized particles of ice, and those diffracted and scattered the laser light. Twice, he ceased fire and repositioned his Starblade on its impellers, trying to get a clear shot. His laser was carving a trench around the crashed fighter . . . and the area on either side of that trench was substantially warmer than the surrounding terrain.
But it was damned tough to tell if he was actually helping at all.
“What are your temp readings, Gregory?”
“I’m reading minus ninety now directly beneath the ship, sir . . . but I’m not sure if that’s a true reading. The matrix is pretty well frozen solid underneath, and the sensors may be giving screwy readings.”
“Okay. I’m going to—” St. Clair broke off in mid-sentence, then added, “Shit!”
“What now?” Gregory asked him.
A dozen elongated, silvery shapes had just surrounded St. Clair’s fighter, watching him with unblinking eyes.
“I’m afraid,” he said slowly, “that we have company.”
1/4 Marines
4th Regimental Assault Group, 1st MARDIV
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1737 hours, TFT
Major Harrison Smith slammed his Apache Tear into the looming black wall of the alien ring’s interior bulkhead and thoughtclicked for an entryway. The nanomatrix of the assault pod’s forward hull clung to the alien wall and released its package of nano-D: molecule-sized disassemblers that began taking the wall apart almost literally atom by atom, but very swiftly. His instruments registered a breach, then analyzed the atmosphere on the other side—nitrogen, hydrogen, methane, and traces of ammonia at three atmospheres and a temperature of minus four Celsius. That matched the data from the Glothr ship back in the Sol System, and must represent their native environment.
