Ian Douglas - Dark Mind

And then the Black Demon squadron was plunging into and through the cloud of alien ships. Bright red icons representing hostile targets filled his mental view of the surrounding starscape. Gregory lined up on one of the enemy vessels and triggered his own particle weapon, sending a beam lancing into the target with savage precision.

“Watch it, Demon Four!” Caswell called to him. “You’ve got two coming in fast behind you!”

“I see ’em.”

The two aliens dropped onto his six and he flipped his Starblade end-for-end, hurtling backward as he snapped off one burst of electric flame … then a second … and a third when one target evaded his attack and kept coming.

The Sh’daar fighters had teeth. A beam caught Demon Eight, a newbie named Romero, and ripped her Starblade in half. Gregory eased his fighter around and teamed with DeHaviland. Together, they vaporized another Sh’daar fighter.

“How long before the fleet comes through?” DeHaviland called.

“Don’t know, Cyn,” Gregory replied. “Should be any sec now!”

That wasn’t just wishful thinking. Fighter point missions weren’t intended to engage in long-term combat. The point element was intended to go ahead of the battlegroup, find out if there were hostiles ahead, and engage them until the capitals could come up.

At least, that was the idea. If the battlegroup didn’t come through the TRGA for some reason, there were ten Starblade fighters on this side that would be in a hell of a lonely situation.

Worse would be what might happen if the local hostiles proved too much for the entire battlegroup. America and her escorts might die here, on this side of the TRGA.

Which would mean that the Black Demons would have already been wiped out.

An enemy particle beam grazed his fighter, jolting him hard. He bit off a curse and tumbled to the left, targeting an alien that was close— too close—and firing. The plasma shock wave jolted him a second time.

Damn it, don’t think so much . Angry, now, at allowing himself to be distracted, he focused all of his attention on the data cascading through his link with his fighter.

Where was Cyn? He’d lost her in that last exchange. An icon flashed against the dazzling backdrop of thickly crowded stars. There …

The red icons were drawing together, bunching up.

What the hell are they up to?

TC/USNA CVS America

Flag Bridge

N’gai Cluster, T -0.876gy

0503 hours, TFT

Emergence …

Gray leaned forward in his seat, staring out into the throng of crowded suns, the central heart of a pocket-sized galaxy almost 900 million years lost in the remote past. At least, that was the idea …

“ America ,” he said, addressing the ship’s primary AI. “Do you have the temp-nav data yet?”

“Affirmative, Admiral,” the ship’s mind replied, more as a mental impression than as distinct words. “Downloading to Navigation now.”

“Got it, Admiral,” Commander Victor Blakeslee reported. “Looks like we’re spot-on. According to the positions of three hundred key stars, we’re at the same spot as the Koenig Expedition, plus twenty years.”

“Looks like we arrived after the armistice,” Commander Dean Mallory, the chief tactical officer, observed. “ That’s good news.”

Gray nodded. “Time seems to pass at the same rate on both sides of a triggah,” he said. “Good to know. I wasn’t looking forward to fighting the sons of bitches again.”

“No, sir .”

Around America , other ships of Task Force 1 were gathering as, in ones and twos and threes, they slipped through from their present to their remote past.

“Tactical! Do we have a fix on Point One?”

“We have them!” Mallory replied. “Bearing zero-zero-five, minus two-one, range two-six-thousand. We have multiple nuke detonations and particle beam discharges.”

“Captain Gutierrez …”

“Coming to new heading, Admiral,” Gutierrez said. “Zero-zero-five, minus two-one.”

“Punch it.”

America glided forward, accelerating behind the thousand-times-per-second flicker of her gravitational singularity projected out ahead of her shield cap. The other eleven human ships of the battlegroup, plus the alien Nameless , edged into the new vector and accelerated in the star carrier’s wake. Ideally, the destroyers Diaz or Mattson would have been in the battlegroup’s van, along with a couple of frigates, clearing the way, but Gray didn’t want to spend the extra time organizing his tiny fleet while one of the carrier’s fighter squadrons was heavily engaged just 26,000 kilometers ahead. Judging from the swarm of alien fighters in the distance, by-the-book tactics weren’t going to afford the carrier much protection in any case … if at all.

“CAG,” Gray said, “you may loose the rest of the hounds.”

Captain Connie Fletcher was America ’s CAG, the commander of the star carrier’s fighter group. “Launching fighters, aye, aye, sir.”

“All ships,” Gray continued. “Fire when you have a clear shot …”

29 October 2425

TC/USNA CVS America

Flag Bridge/CIC

0507 hours, TFT

Admiral Gray dropped into America ’s Combat Information Center, the CIC, located in the carrier’s command tower just below the flag and ship bridge compartments. His physical body was still in the gentle grip of his command seat on the flag bridge, but the datastream feeding through his cerebral implants created the illusion—the perfect illusion—of standing one deck below, in CIC. Holographic projectors within the bulkheads gave him a realistic if insubstantial body.

Mallory looked up from the tank, a 3-D display area at the center of the compartment. “Virtual admiral on deck,” he intoned.

Gray nodded to Mallory as he approached. “What do we have, Dean?”

“A very large number of Sh’daar fighters, Admiral. They were waiting when our fighters came through, and jumped them.”

“Sh’daar fighters?”

“We assume so, sir. They’re small—a couple of meters at the most. We’re not sure, but we think they may not be piloted by organic intelligence.”

“AIs, then.”

“Or remotely controlled from a command ship we haven’t spotted yet.”

“That wouldn’t be likely. Knock out the command ship and we’d take out all of the fighters.”

“Yes, sir. Exactly. More likely they’re acting as part of a massively parallel network.”

“Meaning the whole swarm might be a single intelligence.”

“Possibly, Admiral. Yes.”

“Is there any chance that the swarm is part of some kind of sentry system?” Gray asked. “An automated defense network protecting this side of the triggah?”

“We’re considering that possibility, Admiral,” a woman floating upside down from Gray’s perspective said. When he glanced at her, her ping data identified her as Lieutenant Commander Tonia Evans, and she was new to America ’s personnel roster. “They act like an automated defense system.”

He grinned. “And how would an alien defense net act?” he wondered. “What I want to know is why didn’t they challenge us, why didn’t they challenge the Demons when they first came through?”

She looked unhappy. “Unknown, sir.”

“One way or another, the Sh’daar have some explaining to do,” he said. “Attacking us for no reason at all was not in the armistice treaty.”

Not that the Sh’daar necessarily understood that treaty, at least in the way humans did. Any agreement with such fundamentally different minds was going to be open to misunderstandings, misinterpretation, and outright confusion.