Ian Douglas - Bright Light

“CIC, Headhunters, we copy. Boosting in three … two … one … kick it!”

The flight of Starblades hurtled outward, their view of space ahead turned strange as their velocity inexorably crowded that of light. For Meier, it was as though he was suspended somehow in time, with all of the visible stars crowded into a ring of light forward, with everything else enveloped in total black emptiness, and with no feeling of movement at all.

Moments later, the fighter AIs linked and in synch gave rapid-fire commands that flipped the Starblades end for end and began deceleration.

“Headhunters!” Leystrom snapped. “Arm Kraits and Boomslangs!”

Meier thoughtclicked an in-head icon, arming his fighter’s complement of missiles—thirty-two VG-92 Krait space-to-space shipkiller missiles, plus six of the far more powerful VG-120 Boomslangs.

Light exploded around him.

The Consciousness

Outer Sol System

1932 hours, TFT

In much the same way as the human mind emerged from tightly interlinking networks of individual neurons, the Consciousness was an emergent phenomenon arising from some hundreds of billions of lesser units. That subset of itself that had just entered the Sol System was only a tiny fraction of the Whole. Other iterations of the Consciousness were back within the depths of the Omega Centauri cluster, at Kapteyn’s Star, and scattered throughout the galaxy, some in communication with one another via microscopic wormholes, some operating completely independently.

This Consciousness had made the jump from Kapteyn’s Star some twelve light years away, using data lifted from various human-ship AIs to find the human home system. As it closed on Earth, it sensed the approaching objects, but only as material abstractions bearing low-level minds of questionable sentience. For the Rosette Consciousness, aware of individual hydrogen atoms singing within the Deep, enmeshed within the etheric beauty of intertwining magnetic fields and a complex sea of electromagnetic radiation, the merely material was of little importance. Sensate to the warp and woof of spacetime itself and the interplay of gravitational ripples across the underlying fabric of myriad dimensions, the Rosette had little interest in solid objects, however swiftly they might be hurtling across the Void.

Those minds it sensed ahead promised larger, more powerful mentalities within this system, however. Reaching out with its senses, the Consciousness recognized aggregates of mass as planets, all orbiting a single star. One rocky planet in particular, directly ahead, was the focus of an extremely complex concentration of electromagnetic frequencies, gravitic anomalies, and encrypted transmissions that could not possibly be natural. If there were higher minds in this star system, they would be physically present there, on the world the human systems had identified as Earth.

Destruction of Earth, the Consciousness estimated, and the assimilation of all minds of worthwhile caliber, should require only a few minutes …

Three of the entity’s components, traveling well out in advance of the main cloud, struck material objects with combined velocities approaching that of light, kinetic energy flaring into miniature suns of appalling destructive power …

VFA-211, Headhunters

Outer Sol System

1921 hours, TFT

Meier and the other Headhunters didn’t see the oncoming projectiles. They couldn’t , not with combined velocities approaching that of light itself. Not even the fighter AIs could react in time.

Porter’s Starblade flashed into star-hot plasma an instant before the ships piloted by Malone and Judith Kelly blossomed into light and hard radiation. “ Christ! ” Lakeland exclaimed; his fighter brushed the expanding wavefront of what had been Porter’s fighter and went into a savage tumble.

For a stunned instant, Meier stared into the triplet of rapidly fading stars displayed in-head. No …

“CIC, Hunter One!” Leystrom yelled. “Headhunters are under attack! Request permission to fire!”

“Permission to fire granted, Hunter One.”

“Hunters! Let ’em have it with everything we’ve got! Wide dispersion, proximity detonation! Put up a fucking wall!”

Meier thoughtclicked a blinking icon, loosing a pair of VG-92 pulse-focused variable-yield Krait shipkillers. “Fox One away!” Meier yelled over the tactical channel, the battle code for a smart-AI missile launch.

“And Fox One!” Lieutenant Pamela Schaeffer called out. Other Headhunter pilots chimed in as the sky ahead filled with fast-moving proximity-fused warheads.

White flashes silently strobed against the darkness. Even one-hundred-megaton detonations were not particularly vivid in space; the flash was bright, but unless the warhead vaporized part of a ship or other large target, there was little plasma to balloon outward in a fireball, and no atmosphere to transmit a shock wave. By using proximity fusing, though, the warheads turned thousands of the incoming firefly microships into expanding clouds of hot gas, and those clouds caught more and more of the tiny craft as they swept in. At relativistic speeds, even a few stray atoms of gas could superheat the alien microships and flare them into hot plasma. In moments, there were enough expanding gas clouds that they acted like solid walls as additional fireflies slammed into them.

The human fighters continued their deceleration, avoiding the white-hot volume of destruction spreading across open space. The cloud of alien fireflies kept coming, seemingly oblivious … and in moments half of the sky was lighting up in rapid-fire pulses of heat and radiation as they slammed into hot gas and debris.

Meier fought as though he was in a trance, pulling up in-head icons and thoughtclicking them, sending missile after missile into the growing wall of white flame. He was vaguely aware of the other fighters in his squadron, vaguely aware of three other squadrons off the America adding their firepower to the melee. He couldn’t think … didn’t want to think; not about the three deaths he’d just witnessed.

And then the thoughts began flowing and he couldn’t turn them off. Malone had been a buddy, a drinking partner on liberty and an interesting guy in late-night bull sessions on board ship. As for Kelly and Porter … they were all wingmates. And that’s a bond that forms tightly, no matter if he had known them for years, like Kelly, or had only recently met them, like Porter.

Every military pilot knew this was a dangerous job, one of the most hazardous assignments on the board for naval personnel. They knew the risks and they knew the odds, and sudden death by fireball—or worse, by frozen suffocation—were constant specters tucked into the cockpit each and every time a pilot launched.

But it still was a shock each time you encountered it.

“Meier!” Leystrom’s voice called. “Watch your vector! Break right!”

He’d let his attention wander for just a moment and had been falling toward a fading blossom of plasma. “Copy,” he called back. His fighter’s AI had been nudging at him, he saw, trying to get his attention. He let the fighter’s electronic mind flip the flickering drive singularity around and sharply change his course.

The fighters continued firing Krait missiles, hurling warhead after nuclear warhead into the oncoming swarm of glowing microvessels. At the same time, the thickest part of the alien firefly swarm slammed into the wall of glowing plasma, adding fresh and rapidly moving debris to the deadly cloud.

Abruptly, however, the aliens shifted their tactics as the swarming vessels, most only a centimeter or two long, altered course to move around the wall of detonations and expanding gas clouds rather than through. In a matter of seconds, the human fighters went from holding the line to being in imminent danger of being bypassed or surrounded.