Singularity, p.36
Singularity, page 36
“Thanks for the assist, CAG,” Allyn called. She flipped her fighter again and began clawing for more altitude. Detonations across the surface of AIS-1 were beginning to trail off; the Marine assault craft were on their way in. Enemy fighters continued to rise from the clouds, however. Not all of the bases and facilities on the dwarf planet’s frigid surface had been hit in the scant minutes that had passed in the battle so far.
“I’ve got a possible target at coordinates plus seven-five by minus one-one-niner,” Donovan called. “Multiple bogies emerging from an ice mountain!”
A computer-drawn graphic, a sphere marked out in lines of latitude and longitude, rotated in a window in Allyn’s head. “I’ve got it,” she called. She was closest, had the best shot. The target was high in the planet’s northern latitudes, just beyond the suns-set terminator and uncomfortably close to the spot where Lieutenant Gray’s transponder signal was winking. The first Marine Crocodiles were already cutting into the tenuous newborn atmosphere over the nightside.
Her targeting cursor isolated the target area. Radar returns showed a surface facility at the base of a mountain of solid water ice less than a hundred kilometers from the planet’s north pole. Though it was still growing warmer, the surface of AIS-1 was still at around minus 155 Celsius. At those temperatures, water ice was literally as hard and as solid as rock. Target lock . . .
“Pass a heads-up to the jarheads,” Allyn told her AI. Then, “Fox One!”
She thoughtclicked an in-head icon, and a Krait missile tuned for a detonation of one hundred megatons dropped from her Starhawk’s belly and streaked toward the planetary horizon. . . .
Colonel John Murcheson
AIS-1
Omega Centauri
1609 hours, TFT
“Missile incoming, Colonel!” the Crocodile’s pilot called over the in-head comm link. “Brace yourselves back there!”
“You heard him!” Murcheson bellowed. Strapped into the narrow seats to either side of the assault transport’s payload bay, twenty to a side, the Marines of First Platoon, Alfa Company could only brace themselves against one another. The ride down had already been plenty rough. They’d launched three minutes ago, taking advantage of Nassau’s remaining velocity to swiftly close the remaining few thousands of kilometers between assault carrier and planet, planning on using the tenuous atmosphere for aerobraking. The local atmosphere was still vanishingly thin, so the shrieking winds outside, high-pitched and shrill, carried little force, but the Crocs had hit it at high speed and the shock had been a savage jolt transmitted through deck and hull, followed by an ongoing buffeting that had grown steadily more savage as they dumped excess velocity.
The slit, armored ports down the starboard side of the compartment lit suddenly with a ferocious radiance that grew swiftly brighter, then began to fade. Thirty seconds passed . . . and then the shock wave struck.
The Crocodile rolled and yawed wildly, the concussion ringing through the cabin with a deafening crash.
“Everyone okay?” Murcheson demanded as the thunder died.
A chorus of “okay,” “ooh-rah,” and “no problem” crackled back.
“Two more minutes, Marines!” Murcheson told them.
He wondered if that nuke had been a near-miss by an enemy warhead, or if one of the Navy zorchies had gotten a little too enthusiastic. No matter. They were still flying, and the bad guys hadn’t been able to knock them down yet.
He opened a window in his head, giving a view of the command deck forward and above, looking over the pilot’s shoulder. They were over the dark side of the planet, but rapidly approaching the dawn terminator. Visibility outside was almost nil as they descended through the cloud deck, but the computer painted a graphic outline of the objective ahead.
And then the clouds parted, and Murcheson saw the objective for the first time, a kind of castle with slanted walls and domed turrets, with slender spires and Gothic arches, a mix of architecture at once familiar and utterly alien.
He disconnected from the data feed as the Croc gave a short, sharp burst of deceleration. “Marines!” he shouted. “Go! Go!”
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
1610 hours, TFT
“The first Marines have reached objective Gold,” Commander Sinclair told Koenig. “Nassau has entered orbit and the Choctaws have been released.”
“Good.” The Choctaw Type UC-154 shuttle was a monster orbit-to-surface transport. Far larger than the little Crocodiles, it carried nearly two hundred Marines and their equipment. In this case, four Choctaws off the Nassau were ferrying down the Marines’ heavy artillery—massive proton cannons that would turn their perimeters on the dwarf planet into fortresses.
They would have to hurry. The battle was slowly beginning to turn against the Confederation battlegroup.
It was a simple matter of numbers. Thirty-three capital ships and perhaps ninety-five fighters, all told, with no hope of reinforcements, were squared off against an unknown but very large force of alien warships. Sooner or later, most likely sooner, they would be overwhelmed.
An alien warship half a kilometer long, the mass of a heavy cruiser, was closing on America as the carrier drifted past AIS-1. Energy beams clawed at the carrier’s shields, burning through at three key points. America returned fire with her midships particle-beam turrets, exchanging fire in deadly, silent, and invisible salvos. Fitzgerald and Adams began to maneuver in an attempt to place themselves between the enemy cruiser and the America. Bright flashes sparkled along Fitzgerald’s flank as screen projectors overloaded and burned out, but the enemy vessel had been hit as well, its blunt, massive prow cratering, then crumpling and peeling back under the concentrated combined fire from all three Confederation ships.
“The United States is coming in astern, Admiral. Range two thousand kilometers.”
“I see her.” With the damaged Abraham Lincoln remaining at the TRGA leading back to Texaghu Resch, the United States of North America was the only other large star carrier in the assault group, very nearly as massive as America herself. Normally, tactical doctrine demanded that carriers be held back out of the thick of ship-to-ship combat, that they be protected behind screens of frigates, destroyers, and cruisers. Their strike fighters were their primary weapons, and those fighters needed someplace to trap and recover at the end of the fight.
Conventional tactical doctrine had gone out the hi-vel launch tube, however, with Koenig’s decision to enter the habitable zone of the Six Suns. They would all stand together, and if they couldn’t force the Sh’daar to negotiate, they would all die together.
Silver-gray leaf ships were streaming out of one of the tunnels, from TRGA-2.
He could see them on a battlespace drone image being transmitted by Badger, which was now a hundred thousand kilometers from the tunnel mouth. The enemy had reacted to the battlegroup’s arrival too quickly, pushing the cloud of small fighters through before Badger and the Frederick der Grosse could close with TRGA-2 and get into a bottleneck position. The aliens were coming through in a seemingly unending stream, swirling together into a cloud that flashed and flared with reflected light from the Six Suns.
“Pass to Badger and Frederick,” Koenig told his AI. “Saturate that cloud with hundred-megaton bursts and sand clouds. Use indirect vectoring.”
“Yes, Admiral.”
Young Gray had shown how to fight that particular type of alien at Texaghu Resch. Indirect vectoring meant sending your missiles out in broad, hi-vel accelerating loops so as to come in on the target from as many different directions as possible. Nukes would thin that alien swarm and overload individual shields; sand clouds traveling at thousands of kilometers per second would sweep through the rest like hurricane winds.
The image from the Badger suddenly flared into static. The flashing swarm of alien vessels appeared to have turned their mass-compression beam on the Confederation frigate. Transmissions from the Frederick der Grosse showed the escort crumpling like an aluminum can in a strong man’s fist.
Meson beams.
The techs in America’s physics department had worked out that much, at least, though the weapon represented a technology the Confederation could not yet match. Mesons are extremely short-lived subatomic particles—hadrons. In nature, they transmit the strong nuclear force that joins quarks together to form nucleons—protons and neutrons—which in turn generates the residual strong interaction that glues nucleons together within atomic nuclei.
By accelerating mesons to near-c, the leaf ships could use relativistic effects to stretch the mesons’ normal life spans of a few hundred millionths of a second. By flooding a target with high-energy mesons, the enemy caused the atomic nuclei of the target to collapse into micro-singularities, minute black holes that in turn merged with other micro-singularities nearby. Since mesons decayed into electrons and neutrinos, the beam also acted like a high-energy electron beam which could overload and overwhelm defensive screens.
Apparently, a certain large, critical number of the leaf ships were necessary to produce the beam in unison. Knocking down that number as quickly as possible gave the Confederation fleet its best chance of survival.
The Badger was completely out of action now, her port side crumpled from her shield-cap bow almost to her stern. Water sprayed in a silvery cloud into vacuum; X-rays flooded nearby space, the death shrieks of matter falling into the seething swarm of black holes now devouring her interior.
The enemy ship-cloud turned its weapon on the Frederick der Grosse next, but by this time the nuclear-tipped missiles launched moments earlier were beginning to flare around and within the leaf-ship school. Instantly, the school began scattering, dispersing into individual ships. Apparently, they could learn quickly as well.
At 1614 hours, the KK projectiles launched minutes before from America’s railguns began slamming into the large structure in the near distance. The facility, apparently some sort of deep-space dock or supply depot, was shredded by the massive incoming rounds, and the ships still moored there were smashed by the hi-vel projectiles coming in at better than fourteen kilometers per second.
Secondary explosions detonated within the disintegrating docking facility.
The cruiser attacking America and her escorts was in trouble as well, as internal gases erupted into empty space through house-sized breaches in her pressure hulls. The Fitzgerald was badly hurt, now, tumbling slowly, wreckage trailing from her spine. America’s particle-beam turrets continued to track and fire at the Sh’daar cruiser, slamming bolt after searing bolt past her failing shields and into her internal works. A savage, brilliant explosion finished the job, tearing the stricken vessel into hurtling half-molten fragments.
At this point, there was little for Koenig to do but watch the battle continue to play itself out. The United States was coming under heavy fire now, as was America herself. As the two largest and most massive vessels in the Confederation fleet, they were obvious high-priority targets for the enemy. The Kinkaid was taking heavy fire as well, both from enemy warships and from the remaining surface defense structures on AIS-1.
“How are the Marines doing?” Koenig asked his AI.
“All Crocodiles are down,” the AI replied. “Murcheson reports that Objective Gold has been breached, and the Marines are entering the facility. It appears to be defended by armored combatants in large numbers—possibly combat robots. Casualties are high.”
How long, Koenig wondered, should he press the attack? The tactical teams had discussed the possibility of having to break off and retreat. The problem was that at this point, retreat meant abandoning the Marines now on the dwarf planet’s surface. That was not an option, so far as Koenig was concerned, unless the alternative was complete annihilation for the entire naval assault group.
The scattered swarm of leaf ships, working with an astonishing degree of coherence and coordination, had come back together, and had turned its meson beam against the United States of North America. The carrier’s shield cap appeared to pucker near one rim, and a moment later a torrent of water, stored reaction mass and shielding, gushed into space in sparkling droplets that simultaneously boiled in hard vacuum and froze in the carrier’s shadow.
“Make to Adams and Trumbull!” Koenig called. “See if they can help the United States!”
A second burst of coherent meson radiation slashed through the United States, crumpling the center of her shield cap, striking through and beyond to rip through her spine near her stores decks and power plants.
Nuclear detonations again tore through the leaf-ship cloud, its numbers dissolving in thermonuclear blasts of heat, light, and hard radiation.
But the damage had been done. As the United States’ quantum-tap power plants failed and her shields collapsed, other Sh’daar warships closed on her like hungry pack predators, firing into her unprotected hull. Her hab modules broke off, ejecting, with their crews, clear of the wreckage.
But her almost one-kilometer length was being consumed in the raging inferno of megaton detonations. . . .
Chapter Twenty-Six
1 July 2405
Colonel John Murcheson
Objective Gold, AIS-1
Omega Centauri
1616 hours, TFT
The enemy troops in this dark and cavernous place seemed to move and respond like machines rather than organic beings, machines with lightning-fast reactions. Each was huge, standing ten meters tall when they stood on two legs, half that on four or six. The uppermost pair of limbs appeared to double as legs or as arms. Weapons, however, were built into the smooth surface of that massive armor; electron beams snapped from outstretched gauntlets like lightning, eerily silent in the hard vacuum, devastating when they struck Marine armor.
The Crocodile was no use in here. Guided by the flash of a Navy emergency transponder, the Marines had homed in on something like an immense dome of red metal eight kilometers across, a thick-walled fortress topped by spires and blisters and towers rising from the ice in a bristling forest. Radar and X-ray scatter mapping during their approach had revealed far more of the structure buried beneath the ice. The structure, evidently, was an enormous ship of some sort, a design utterly unknown to the Confederation grounded on the surface of the dwarf planet.
Weapons turrets on the surface had obliterated one of the four incoming Crocodiles with a bolt of artificial lightning, but the other Marine assault craft, coming in at extremely low, ice-skimming altitude and weaving back and forth, had managed to close with the grounded ship, been able to slip in so close that the enemy’s weapons could not be brought to bear.
Under the cover of a barrage of particle-beam fire, the three surviving Crocodiles had slammed into the main body of the alien ship close together, their docking collars swiftly melting through a meter of solid metal and ceramic alloy to breach the hull and gain access to the interior. The breaching tunnel at the Crocodiles’ bows had dilated open, and Murcheson and his Marines rushed through. They’d emerged inside an immense cavern, its overhead some twenty meters high, the far walls over a quarter of a kilometer distant.
The armored alien forms had attacked moments after the Marines gained entry.
“Spread out! Spread out!” Gunnery Sergeant Charlie McKean yelled. “Plasma gunners! Put fire on those black hats at two-one-one!”
Murcheson let the gunny do his job, using his M-64 laser carbine to snap off a quick quartet of shots at one of the armored giants. So far as he could tell, the weapon had no effect whatsoever.
There weren’t many of the giants, thank the gods, but that armor, gleaming silver and highly reflective, was tough. It was just possible that the enemy troops carried some sort of screen generator as well; they certainly were big enough to do so. The assault team carried a mix of armaments—M-446 laser rifles and the heavier M-18 squad plasma weapons, for the most part, backed up by hand torches and pulse grenades.
The enemy troops were something like the Nungiirtok, another Sh’daar client species the Marines had clashed with more than once, but these were obviously of a different species and were carrying higher-tech gear. They moved with a smooth, flowing grace that seemed impossible for beings their size, and with a glittering precision that suggested highly sophisticated machines.
The Marines were at a considerable disadvantage here. The surface gravity of AIS-1 was only four tenths of a meter per second—about .04G. A Marine who together with her combat armor weighed 180 kilos on Earth weighed only 7 kilos here, but she still possessed 180 kilos of mass. Worse, things fell here with agonizing slowness, and when a Marine tried to dart for cover, he tended to launch himself into empty space and take a couple of seconds to drift back down.
And as they drifted, they were easy targets.
Within a moment or two, the Marines were scattering, taking shelter behind various odd-looking pieces of machinery or conduits growing between deck and overhead. Under the concentrated fire of a plasma gunner and three Marines with laser rifles, one of the giants was burned down, but the others were advancing steadily, laying down a heavy and relentless fire. Five Marines were down . . . six . . . and then it began to look as though the Marines had run up against more than they could handle.
Colonel Murcheson wondered if it would even be possible to pull back to the Crocodiles and break off the attack.
Trevor Gray
Omega Centauri
1617 hours, TFT
“That wormhole tunnel,” Gray yelled into the darkness, “it’s a kind of inside-out Tipler machine! It’s a shortcut through space . . . but it’s also a shortcut through time, isn’t it? It brought us back in time! Maybe a long, long way into our past! And now that we’re here, we could really screw your future! Isn’t that right? . . .”
