Ian Douglas - Dark Mind

Gray knew he would remember those human figures—so tiny against the dark!—for the rest of his life.

A number of Sh’daar fighters slammed bodily into the long, lean hull of the French cruiser Verdun . They seemed to be eating their way in through the cruiser’s hull … and then all of them detonated in a chain of white-hot flares that devoured the vessel’s central spine. More explosions followed … with the wreckage crumpling in upon itself in a seething storm of radiation, heat, and light.

We’re losing , Gray thought. We’re going under .

“All ships,” he ordered. “Come about and make for the TRGA.”

There was no choice. They’d stuck their collective nose into this time and space and gotten it bitten off.

They had to retreat. If they were going to save even a few of the battlegroup’s ships, they had to retreat now .

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

0516 hours, TFT

“Pull back and cover the America , people,” Mackey ordered. “They’re using fucking kamikaze tactics! We’ve got to stop them from getting through!”

Gregory had heard the order from the carrier’s CIC already, and had witnessed both the destruction of the Verdun and the damage done to America herself.

It was a hopeless fight. So far, he’d run through about half of the missiles in his magazine, but as the fighting enveloped the carrier more and more tightly, he was having to shift to his Gatling cannon, firing high-velocity kinetic-kill rounds of depleted uranium. Nuclear detonations were tricky things to employ close to the hulls of friendly ships, and the USNA fighter pilots were being forced to use more surgical methods in their defensive tactics.

Surgical methods took longer—you couldn’t yell “Fox One” and blow a dozen enemies away with a single highyield detonation, and you had to be frustratingly precise in the placement of your warshots.

One alien fighter, gleaming silver and irregular in shape, came in across America ’s stern and raced up the length of her spine, Gregory in close pursuit. He fired a burst of KK rounds, but the angle was bad and the rounds glanced off the hurtling spacecraft with minimal damage. The rounds that missed slammed into the underside of the carrier’s shield cap forward … though with minimal damage as well, thank the gods. The carrier’s hull shields absorbed or deflected much of the impact.

For a terrifying moment, he thought the enemy craft was trying for one of America ’s three landing bays in the steadily rotating hab section … but the fighter slipped between two of the moving bays and plunged toward the blunt, forwardleaning tower between hab module and the underside of the shield cap.

Damn! They were trying for the bridge and CIC!

The alien vessel struck the bridge tower at its base, just above the main hull of the carrier’s spine; Gregory’s Starblade flashed past an instant later, twisting around his grav singularity and angling out and away from the carrier. Braking hard, he reversed course and dropped toward the ship’s spine again, gliding past the blurred hull metal of the bridge tower. His AI signaled a target lock on the alien, which was melting now into America ’s hull, sinking through the low-level bending of space, just above the ship’s outer hull, which deflected incoming energies. In another moment it would detonate, and the carrier might lose its bridge and combat information center all at once.

Gregory triggered his KK Gatling, sending a stream of high-velocity rounds slamming into and through the enemy craft. A particle-beam shot might do too much damage, though in fact he didn’t have the time to give the decision any conscious thought. He aligned with the target and fired, watching white flares of heat and light and splashes of molten metal erupt from the partially sunken alien hull.

At the last instant, he pulled out, whipping around his drive singularity and using a tremendous burst of acceleration to shove his ship sideways to avoid becoming a kinetic-kill projectile himself.

He held his breath, waiting for the alien to explode.

It didn’t.

“ America CIC,” he called, “this is Demon Four! You have an enemy bogie buried in the bridge tower!”

“We copy that, Demon Four. Acknowledged.”

“Better send some Marines in case they’re still alive.” And in case there’s a loose black hole inside the wreckage , he added to himself … but he didn’t say so aloud. The shipboard response teams knew their business.

“Copy that, Four. Thanks for the assist.”

“All part of our friendly Black Demon service,” he replied, with a nonchalance that he definitely did not feel. That had been too damned close for sanity!

And they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So here I go again …

A group of eight alien fighters were inbound, a thousand kilometers out. He locked on and fired one of his dwindling number of Kraits. The detonation moments later took out seven of the eight; he nailed the survivor with another burst from his Gatling, watching the wreckage collapse in upon itself, folding up tighter and tighter until it vanished in a surprised pop of hard X-rays.

That was proof that the Sh’daar fighters had power taps similar to what the human ships were using—tiny black holes that skimmed energy from the frothing virtual energy at the base of reality and made it real. When a ship was destroyed, the black hole inside often ate much of the wreckage, then evaporated. Sometimes the singularity hung around long enough to become a menace to navigation, but luckily that wasn’t the case this time.

Unluckily, there were more opportunities, because beyond those eight Sh’daar ships another ten were approaching at high speed.

“Damn it,” Gregory snapped. “How many of these things are there?”

His Starblade’s AI gave him an answer, though as an impression, an unspoken realization, rather than in words. More than six thousand, out of an original estimated nine thousand …

Too fucking many. They’d destroyed thousands of the things already … but thousands more remained.

“All ships, this is America CIC,” a voice announced. “Be aware … we have more Sh’daar vessels inbound, repeat, more Sh’daars inbound. Capital ships, this time …”

Great! he thought. Just fucking great!

TC/USNA CVS America

Flag Bridge/CIC

0535 hours, TFT

Admiral Gray stared into the mass of alien vessels headed for the battlegroup from dead ahead. America ’s tactical AIs had counted over three hundred so far, including a couple of monsters that must have started out as planetoids, kilometers across and massing billions of tons.

There would be no escape from so powerful an alien force …

He saw exactly three different tactical options—surrender, fight to the death, or order the fleet to scatter in the hope that a few of the battlegroup’s ships, at least, might make it back through the TRGA and reach home. None of those choices was particularly appealing … and a fourth option emerged.

“Open a channel to that fleet,” he told the communication officer on America ’s bridge. “Use the Agletsch protocols. See if they’re willing to talk.”

“They are already willing to talk, Admiral.” The voice was that of Konstantin—or, rather, of a clone of that powerful AI. “I am now in communication with them.”

The Konstantin clone was resident within the TOAF module, a cylinder strapped to America ’s spine aft of the rotating hab section, but was linked in through the carrier’s electronic network to America ’s resident AIs. It hadn’t spoken before, and Gray had more or less forgotten that it was there, but he welcomed its input now.