Ian Douglas - Dark Mind

Still, “Don’t attack us,” should be pretty straightforward.

“We’re certain we’re in the right time?” Gray said.

“Navigation has double-checked the star positions, Admiral,” Mallory said. “We’re definitely in the double-T. Between eighteen and twenty-three years after we were here last.”

Good. We hit double-T—the temporal target. So what the hell is going on?

Possibly, Gray thought, the attack on the battlegroup was simply the way the Sh’daar understood the treaty provisions: if the humans poked their noses into the N’gai Cluster of 876 million years in their past, they would get punched in the face.

If that was the case—if they didn’t want humans hanging around in their epoch—they were going to love what the battlegroup had to offer them this time around.

Making this a very short-lived armistice.

“Targets within range,” Mallory announced. “Firing …”

Beams lashed out from America ’s main batteries, followed closely by beams and missiles from the battlegroup coming up astern. The enemy swarm began gathering, moving toward the fleet, even as 100-megaton blasts from Black Demon missiles continued to rip through the heaviest concentrations of Sh’daar ships. The carrier’s other fighter squadrons were just beginning to engage the enemy as well: VFA-31, the Impactors, and VFA-215, the Black Knights.

A fourth fighter squadron, one brand new to America ’s flight decks, hung back to provide close support for the battlegroup—VFA-190, the Ghost Riders.

Gray heard the chatter among pilots as the fighters attacked, in tones ranging from ice-cold professionalism to shrill excitement.

“Impactor Nine, moving in …”

“Target lock … Fox One!”

“Knight Three! Knight Three! You’ve got two on your six!”

“I can’t shake them! I can’t—”

America trembled as something struck the star carrier.

“Hit to the shield,” Mallory reported. “We’re bleeding …”

According to damage control, however, the damage was minor, a few hundred thousand liters of water spilling into hard vacuum and freezing as glittering grains of ice. Self-repair nano on the inner hull was already closing off the hole.

“This is the Mitchell !” another voice called. “We’re taking heavy fire … damage to the main drive … damage to primary power … —Damn it! Mayday! Mayday!”

A long stream of Sh’daar fighters had looped out and around, coming in on the frigate Mitchell from astern. On displays and within his own mind, Gray could see the ship, her stern crumpling as the artificially conjured black holes that plucked power from the vacuum spun out of control and began devouring the ship from within.

Gray checked the tank to see which human ships were closest.

“ Diaz! Young! ” he ordered. “Close in with the Mitchell ! See if you can hold those bogies off!”

It was too little, too late, though. The Mitchell died quickly, collapsing into her own power tap singularity …

“Too many of the bastards are getting through, Dean,” Gray said. “Pull the fighters back.”

“We can’t go on the defensive, Admiral. We need to hit them, hit them hard, away from the fleet!”

That was the conventional and established naval-fighter doctrine.

But this wasn’t a conventional fight.

“That won’t help if the fleet is wiped out of the sky, damn it. Pull in the fighters!”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

It was becoming almost impossible to pull useful data from the furball spreading out around the battlegroup. Thousands of alien craft continued to converge on the human capital ships, while a scant forty or so human fighters tried to hold them off. America ’s AIs sifted through the mess and extracted the most important info for human analysis, but increasingly the fight was in the electronic hands of the ship’s combat system.

A bright flash snapped through the CIC. “What was that ?” Gray demanded.

“Checking sir …” Mallory adjusted the display field to show the Glothr emissary ship Nameless . “It was the Glothr ship, Admiral. Looks like she has teeth.”

“What the hell did they use?”

“Not sure … but I think they might’ve just time-twisted a laser into gamma ray frequencies.”

Gray wasn’t sure he understood what that meant, but that wasn’t surprising, as Glothr technology embraced several concepts that most humans didn’t yet understand. One of the more startling involved actually bending time. How they managed that trick was a mystery, but human xenotechnologists thought they might do it by using intense but short-ranged gravitational singularities tightly focused next to their hulls. By stretching time out—making an instant last seconds or longer—they could dissipate the energy of a thermonuclear explosion—a neat trick if you wanted to avoid getting fried by an incoming nuke.

Apparently, they could use the trick offensively as well. By turning a second into an instant, they could vastly increase the electromagnetic frequency of a laser, pumping it up to far more destructive energy levels.

Gray frowned. The extra energy had to come from somewhere , but he wasn’t sure he saw how it worked. Then he gave a mental shrug. Dozens of Sh’daar fighters had just evaporated in that beam. He would accept the gift-horse advantage of Glothr tech and worry about the details later. Maybe it was just the equivalent of firing a laser continuously for an hour, but compressing all of that energy into a single pulse.

At this point all he cared about was the fact that when the Glothr vessel fired again, more enemy ships flashed into hot plasma.

But there were simply too many of them. Each ship in the battlegroup now was surrounded by its own cloud of fighters, and they were pressing in close. Individually, they weren’t that powerful, firing particle beams in the gigawatt-laser range of destructiveness. When fifty of them fired at once, however, aiming at the same target … or a hundred … or five hundred …

The railgun cruiser Leland was in trouble. The largest warship in the battlegroup after America herself—eight hundred meters long and massing a quarter of a billion tons—she was built around a magnetic accelerator tube nearly as long as she was, a mobile artillery piece designed for planetary bombardment or engaging large enemy vessels. Her primary weapon was useless against fighter swarms, however, and the elephant’s point-defense batteries were swiftly being overwhelmed by clouds of Sh’daar mosquitos.

“ Verdun! ” Gray called. “ Deutschland! Close in on the Leland and give her some support!”

The two ships were Pan-European heavy cruisers, former enemies now incorporated into the USNA battlegroup as a show of political will. Gray hoped their point defense weaponry would help keep the larger Leland from being mobbed.

But the European vessels were already fighting their own enemy swarms … and now the aliens attacking America herself were getting past the carrier’s PDBs. The ship shuddered again, a vicious jolt, rolling heavily to starboard.

“We just lost Turret Five,” Mallory reported. Damage control imagery showed that one of the big particle-beam turrets mounted on the carrier’s central axis had been ripped away. For a moment, air vented into space from pressurized areas, mingled with clouds of debris and, horribly, several flailing human figures, made minute by the scale of their surroundings.

Then the open compartment was sealed off, and the escaping air—rapidly freezing into glittering flecks—dwindled away to nothing.