Ian Douglas - Bright Light

“As you were,” Leystrom said. He gestured at the new pilots as the others resumed their seats. “I want you to meet three Pan-Euro fighter pilots. Leutnants Ulrike Hultqvist, Karl Maas, and Jean Araud. They were among the people off the Wotan we recovered after their carrier was destroyed. They’ve been assigned to VFA-211 to … ah … make up for our losses.”

Meier felt a sharp slap of anger. Damn it, you couldn’t just shoehorn new people into a combat squadron like that, not and expect them to fit in smoothly from the get-go. What the hell was America ’s CAG thinking?

Leystrom continued, “I know I speak for the whole squadron when I say, ‘Welcome aboard.’”

The three gave a mumble of assent as they took seats.

“Normally, of course,” the commander went on, “we’d all want a period of joint training to integrate new personnel into the unit. We do not, however, have the luxury of time. The Rosetter is out there just a couple of AUs distant, and we are the only thing standing between them and Earth.”

A holographic field switched on at Leystrom’s thought, showing CGI graphics of America and the handful of ships with her, drifting opposite the enigmatic and highly protean alien vessel. Other ship icons were moving up in support … but then Meier remembered that the Rosetter was bigger, more massive than the planet Jupiter. How were they supposed to face a thing like that? It was insane.

The representation shifted to a real-time image from a battlespace drone just a few tens of thousands of kilometers from the monster. The alien device seemed to fill the entire front of the ready room. No longer spherical, it had unfolded somehow into a much larger series of nested shapes, more like a geometric form sculpted from a cloud of dark gas than anything solid. The central core of the thing was illuminated, but the shapes around that glowing core were so complex and so ordered that Meier was having trouble understanding what he was seeing. The patterns looked fractal in nature, with each set of curves and angles and projections repeated again and again at smaller and smaller levels. A tiny speck of gleaming silver debris tumbled past, hinting at the vast scale of the monster beyond.

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