Читать книгу The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 55

Skybase drifted in empty space, alone and unattended, now, as the last of the supply and shuttle vessels pulled back to a safe distance. Most ships, and most especially the cis-Lunar tugs and more massive cargo vessels that had been servicing Skybase, used gravitic engineering both for their drives and to maintain artificial gravity on board. Such units warped and wrinkled the fabric of space, rendering useless the Skybase’s mathematical understanding of the local metric. From a distance of 10 kilometers, though, with drives switched off, the minor warping from the argrav generators was trivial enough to ignore.

General Alexander was in his office on board Skybase, awaiting the translation to Puller 659, but he was linked in to the scene transmitted from the transport Aldebaran, the image electronically unfolded in his mind. From this vantage point, some 10 kilometers off, Skybase looked like a huge pair of dark gray dishes fastened face to face, rim to rim, with one side flattened, the other deeper and capped by a truncated dome. The structure’s surface looked smooth from this distance, but Alexander knew that up close its skin was a maze of towers, weapons mounts, sponsons, surface buildings, and trenches laid out in geometric patterns that gave it a rough and heavily textured look.

The perimeter of the double saucer was broken in one place as though a squared-off bite had been taken from its rim, at the broad opening leading into Skybase’s hangar deck, a deep and gantry-lined entryway nearly 100 meters wide jokingly referred to as the garage door. Harsh light spilled from that opening, illuminating the gantry cranes and the massive shapes of the starships nestled inside.

“Ten minutes,” an AI’s voice announced in his head. It wasn’t Cara, this time, but one of the battalion of artificial intelligences resident within the MIEF net, tasked with coordinating the entire operation.

Was there anything else that needed to be done, anything forgotten? God help them all if there was. Alexander expected no serious trouble with the PanEuropeans at Puller, but after that, when they jumped through to Nova Aquila. …

Three days earlier, a fleet of gravitic tugs had gentled the behemoth clear of Dock 27 and into open space well beyond the outer ramparts of the outermost Earthring. Hours later, Skybase had translated to the fleet rendezvous area to begin the final loading. The gravimetric picture was complicated close to Earth and to the artificial gravity-twisting engineering of the Rings themselves, but the translation was a tiny one, only about a quarter of a million miles, from geosynch out to the Moon’s orbit. There’d been the faintest of shudders, and Skybase had quietly vanished from Earth synchorbit, to reappear a heartbeat later at L-3.

L-3, the third of the five Earth-system LaGrange points, was located at the Moon’s orbit, but on the far side of Earth from the Moon’s current position, so that Luna was perpetually masked from view by the larger disk of Terra. The point was gravitationally metastable; the gravitational metric was relatively flat, here, with Earth and Moon always positioned in a straight and unchanging line, but ships or structures parked at L-3 still tended to drift away after a few-score days due to perturbations by the Sun and by other planets, especially Jupiter.

However, that metastability would not affect Skybase, which wouldn’t be there long enough to be perturbed by much. The important thing was that local space was flat enough in terms of gravitational balances, providing a good starting point for the coordinate calculations that would allow Skybase to transit through a much, much longer jump, not through but past the Void.

A jump of some 283 light-years, all the way out to Puller 659.

For that transition, local space had to be as flat as could be managed, with a metric far less complex than the scramble of interpenetrating gravity fields found in geosynch. There could be no drift of Moon relative to the Earth, no hum of nearby artificial agrav fields, no space-bending pulse of a passing ship under Alcubierre Drive. L-3 was ideal as a jump-off point, as ideal as could be found, at any rate, this deep inside the Solar System.

“There is something I do not understand,” Cara said as he watched the view of Skybase from the transport.

“What’s that?”

“The QST appears to be a highly efficient means of crossing interstellar distances,” the AI said. “I’m curious why more mobile habitats like Skybase have not been built.”

Alexander let the comment about being curious pass. From his first introduction to the EA years ago, Cara had continued to surprise him with what seemed to be a genuinely human range of behaviors. AIs weren’t supposed to exhibit curiosity, but the more powerful ones did, indisputably.

“Well, there are plans on the drawing boards,” Alexander said, “for true starships using Quantum Space Translation … but I don’t think any of them are funded for development yet. At least, not beyond the wouldn’t-it-be-nice stage.”

“I have seen some of those plans on the Net,” Cara told him. “But you’re right. None has been funded past the initial research stage.”

“The Arean Advanced Physics Institute has been using Skybase as a testbed to study paraspace,” Alexander said, “both to improve energy tap technology and to investigate the possibility of very long-range transport. But ships built around translation technology … they’d be damned expensive. They’d also have to be huge, to accommodate the necessary power taps and the translation drive itself. A lot of military decision-makers don’t think it’s feasible.”

“Skybase is still considerably smaller than a typical Xul huntership,” the AI pointed out. “And it would be simple enough to mount gravitic drives to provide the necessary maneuverability for combat and in-system travel. A fleet of such vessels equipped as warships would be most formidable.”

“And you want to know why we’re not developing such ships more … aggressively?”

“Exactly. It is as though human governments, the people who make such decisions, do not realize the gravity of the Xul threat.”

Alexander sighed. It was almost embarrassing admitting to the non-human artificial intelligence in his head what most senior military officers had lived with for their entire careers, worse, what humankind had lived with for centuries.

“That’s a complicated question, Cara. I guess the short answer is … they know the Xul are a threat, sure, but after five centuries, they don’t seem to be an urgent threat. There are always more important things to attend to closer at hand.”

“Even after the Xul incursion of 2314, when humankind was nearly annihilated?”

Alexander shrugged. “But we weren’t, were we? Humans have a lot of trouble connecting with something that happened centuries ago … or that might not happen until centuries in the future. Download the history. Remember global warming? The fossil fuel crisis? The e-trans crisis? The genetic prosthesis crisis? The chaos of the nanotechnic revolution? If it doesn’t threaten us, immediately and personally, it’s someone else’s problem—especially if it’s government that has to take action to fix it. Hell, politicians have trouble keeping their focus on problems just from one election to the next. The Roman Senate probably had the same problem with the barbarian crisis three thousand years ago.”

“But it is the politicians—specifically the Senate Military Appropriations Committee—that would be responsible for funding a fleet capable of fighting the Xul, is it not?”

Cara sounded genuinely confused, and Alexander wondered how much of that was personality software miming human patterns, how much was genuine perplexity. There was no way to tell.

“That’s right,” he said. “And they’re not eager to increase taxes just so the military can have some expensive new toys.” He hesitated. While Cara was his electronic assistant alone, she did share data with many other people, both civilian and military, and with innumerable other AIs. How well could he trust her not to share with the wrong people?

The hell with it. They would be gone, soon, gone and far beyond the reach of anyone—officious bureaucrat, ass-covering general, or self-serving politician—who might object to him giving voice to his opinions. “The truth is, Cara, it’s not just the civilians who are a little slow on the uptake, sometimes. In fact, if the military really pushed for it, we would probably get those fancy new ships. The allocations for the designing, for the building … hell, the shipyards at Earthring, at the Arean Rings, at Luna, at L-5, they’d all be falling all over themselves to win those contracts. And the civilian sector would profit with a whole new means of traveling between star systems.”

“You’re saying the work would stimulate the economy.”

“Definitely. Military contracts have always been a big factor in keeping the economy going. That’s one reason war was so hard to get rid of over the centuries.”

“Why, then, would the military sector not wish to see these ships developed?”

“Because the military sector has always been extremely conservative. They don’t trust new technology.”

“But advanced technology has always won wars. The development of nuclear weapons to end World War II, for instance, would be a case in point.”

“Which actually began as a civilian initiative, instigated by the U.S. President at the time when he learned that the enemy had a chance of developing those weapons first. But check your historical files. Naval vessels continued to have masts for decades after the steam engine made sails obsolete. When General Custer’s command was wiped out at the Little Bighorn, the native forces attacking him were armed with repeating rifles; most of Custer’s men were not, because the military bureaucracy of the time was convinced that repeaters wasted ammunition. Custer also left behind a couple of Gatling guns—primitive machine guns—because they slowed up his column. In other words … he refused to change his tactics to take advantage of new technological developments.

“Later, navies continued to cling to the battleship even after repeated demonstrations that they didn’t stand a chance against carrier-based aircraft. Then they clung to carriers after orbital railguns and microcruise missiles made those monsters into fat, wallowing targets. Two centuries after that, Marines were still being issued slug-throwers as standard weapons because of concerns about the reliability of lasers and man-portable batteries under combat conditions. As a rule, military leaders don’t like anything new or different.”

“But why would that be, given that change is the essence of history?”

“Major changes in how we do things usually means waiting around until the last generation dies off. It’s a basic truism of military history: we’re always ready to fight the last war, and the methods and tactics of the next war always catch us by surprise.”

“That would seem to be a depressing philosophy for someone in your line of work, General,” Cara told him. “Or do you embrace such conservative viewpoints as well?”

He thought about that one for a moment. “There are never any absolutes in this business,” he told the AI. “No blacks or whites. In point of fact, space-combat doctrine right now favors lights over heavies.”

“You refer to the tactical doctrine of using many small, cheap, and expendable spacecraft, rather than a few large and expensive ones.”

“Exactly. A Skydragon masses less than a hundred tons, and can still carry a dozen long-range missiles with thermonuclear warheads. One such warhead can cripple or even destroy a hundred-thousand-ton battlecruiser, if it gets through the point defense field. The powers-that-be are perfectly happy to sacrifice a few Skydragon squadrons in exchange for a high-value heavy, no problem.” He felt his own bitterness rising as he said that. “It remains to be seen if being able to translate ships as big as Skybase makes it worthwhile changing tactical doctrines.”

“It seems that there is a certain inertia resident within any given approach to warfare,” Cara observed. “Once a government is committed to a given way of doing things, it is difficult to change.”

“You could say that.” He sighed. “In fact, the conservative factions are usually right in holding on to the tried and true … up to a point. We know what works, so we stick to that. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, don’t risk creating a real mess.

“But … and this may be the single most important ‘but’ in any military leader’s lexicon, we must be aware that change—technological change, social and cultural change, demographic change, religious change, political change—all of them are going on around us all the time, even when we don’t actually see it happening. If we get so mired in the past that we don’t see the next new wave coming, if we can’t recognize it in time to adapt, then we’re doomed to go the way of the dodo, the elephant, and the blue whale, a dead-end trap and ultimate extinction.”

“It still seems short-sighted to ignore the potential for this type of interstellar transport,” Cara observed.

“Cara, I couldn’t agree more. Maybe, if Operation Lafayette and Operation Gorgon are both successful, if Skybase really shows her stuff out there, that by itself will nudge things along in a positive direction. At least we can hope.”

“Hope is one aspect of humanity I’ve never been able to fully understand,” Cara told him.

“Three minutes,” another AI’s voice announced. Pure imagination, really, but to Alexander it seemed that he could sense the gathering of energy within the bulk of Skybase. Windows open to one side in his mind showed that all of the base systems were standing ready, all personnel at battle stations, the antimatter reactors at the station’s core already pouring terawatts of energy into the slender channel now opening into the Quantum Sea.

“Cara,” he said in his mind, “has there been any word from the Puller listening post?”

“Not for eight days, five hours, twenty-seven minutes,” the AI told him. “Lieutenant Fitzpatrick’s last report indicated a possibility of failing power systems, however. He may not be able to communicate.”

“QCC units don’t need much power,” Alexander said. “And they can’t be tapped or intercepted. If he’s not able to communicate, it’s because the PEs found him … or his life-support systems failed.” He watched the inner panorama, of Skybase adrift against a star-scattered emptiness, for another moment. “I don’t like jumping into an unknown tacsit,” he said at last.

“We’ve known there would be considerable risk, General. The connection with Lieutenant Fitzpatrick has been tenuous and intermittent ever since the PanEuropean fleet entered the Puller system.”

“I know.” He was thinking about the ancient military maxim: no plan of battle survives contact with the enemy.

During ops planning, they’d considered putting a hold on the actual translation to Puller 659 until they actually received an all-clear from Fitzpatrick and the listening post. That idea had been dropped, however. There were reasons, psychological as well as engineering, that Skybase could not be kept on perpetual alert waiting for the next contact from the distant Marine listening post.

So they would make the jump, and simply try to be ready for whatever they found at the other end.

“Two minutes.”

He opened another window, sending out a connect call. “Tabbie?”

There was a brief pause.

“Hi, hon,” was her reply. “Almost up to the big jump-off?”

The link was via conventional lasercom relays, so there was a speed-of-light time lag of about three seconds between the moment he spoke, and the moment he heard her reply.

“Yeah. But I do hate leaving you behind.”

“I hate it, too. But … you’ll be back. And I’ll be here waiting for you.”

They’d talked about that aspect of things a lot during the weeks before this. Normally, Skybase was home not only to nearly eight hundred Marines and naval personnel, but also to some five hundred civilians. Most of them were ex-military, or the children of military families, or the spouses of military personnel serving on Skybase. Most worked a variety of jobs on the base, ranging from administration and clerical duties to specialized technical services to drivers and equipment operators in the docking bay.

In fact, they represented the way the Marine Corps, in particular, had over the centuries evolved its own microculture. The retired Marine staff sergeant or colonel, the spouse of a Marine pilot, the child of Marine parents both stationed at Skybase, all shared the same cultural background, language, and worldview that made them a single, very large and extended family.

But Skybase was about to take part in an operation utterly unlike anything tried in the past. This time, the MIEF’s headquarters would be traveling with the expeditionary force. It would be the target of enemy assaults, and it would likely be gone for many years.

Active duty Marines at Skybase had been given their orders. The civilians, however, had been given a choice—a choice to be worked out by both civilian and military members of each family. Many civilians had preferred to stay behind at Earthring, though the decisions of many had been swayed by the military members of those families, who’d wanted loved ones to be safe.

According to the final muster roster, two hundred five civilians were accompanying the Marines and naval personnel to the stars on board Skybase. Among them were the research team from the Arean Advanced Physics Institute, crucial members of the technician cadre, and a number of civilian family members who’d refused to be separated from loved ones.

Tabbie, though, was staying at Earthring. She had family there … and though she’d not wanted to stay at first, Alexander had finally convinced her that she would be better off making a home for herself there, rather than enduring the hardships—and the danger—of life aboard the base during this new deployment.

“I still don’t entirely agree with your reasoning,” she told him after a moment.

“You mean about Earth not being safe?”

“You’ve said it often enough yourself,” she replied after the three-second delay. “If the Xul come to Earth again, when they come, there won’t be any behind-the-lines. Everybody will be taking the same risks.”

In fact, the original rationale behind giving Skybase its paraspace capability was to ensure that the MIEF headquarters would survive if the Xul did manage to find and slag the Earth. It would be a terrible irony, Alexander thought, if Skybase survived the coming campaign … and Tabbie and the other civilians left at Earthring were killed.

“Yeah, well, there’s a big difference between the Xul coming to Earth again, and us going out hunting for the bastards,” he told her. “We’ll be out there looking for trouble, and we’re going to find it. And if we’re successful, we’ll shake the Xulies up enough that they won’t come to Earth.”

“I know, I know. But I don’t have to like it.”

“One minute,” a voice said in his head.

“Okay, Kitten,” he told her. “I just got the one-minute alert. If everything goes as planned, I’ll be back in a few hours for the next set of ships.”

“I love you, Marty.”

“I love you.” He hesitated, then added, “I’ll be back before you know it.”

He could feel the hard and familiar knot of anticipation tightening in his gut. He wished this next translation was the one taking them to the Xul. He wanted to get it over with … but unfortunately Operation Lafayette had to come first. Secure the jump-off system—and get those captured Marines back—and then it would be time to deal with the much vaster threat of the Xul.

“Thirty seconds.”

What perverse insanity emanating from the gods of battle demanded that humans first tear and kill one another, when the Xul were the real threat, the most terrible and terrifying threat the human species had ever encountered?

“Ten seconds.”

“Five … four … three … two … one … systems engaged. …”

The mental window through which Alexander was watching the scene suddenly turned to white snow and crashing static. Damn! He hadn’t even considered the self-evident fact that once Skybase translated, the camera on board the Aldebaran would suddenly be left far behind, and the abrupt loss of signal had jarred him. He switched to a different input channel, one connected to a camera feed from Skybase’s outer hull.

For just an instant, Skybase would have dropped through the blue-lit haze of paraspace, but Alexander had missed it. What he saw now was a view of deep space, star-strewn and empty, the constellations unrecognizable. Two hundred eighty-three light-years was far enough to distort the familiar patterns of stars in the sky into strangeness.

In fact, there was nothing much to see. Other downloads from Skybase’s command center, however, began providing a more complete picture of their surroundings as the base’s sensitive scanners began sampling the background of ambient electromagnetic and neutrino radiation. The star gate, as expected, was about 10 light-seconds in one direction, the tiny red spark of the local sun in another, the star marking Puller 659’s solitary gas giant just to one side of the star, and thirty light-minutes away.

Seconds after translation, Skybase began releasing her first riders—sixteen F/A-4140 Stardragons of VMA-980, the Sharpshooters, one of three fighter squadrons in 1MIEF’s aerospace wing. Sleek, black-hulled, and deadly, the fighters dispersed around Skybase in a globular formation, the base protectively at its center. They continued to move outward at a steady drift of nearly 4 kilometers per second relative to the Skybase, flight and combat systems shut down, drawing energy solely from their on-board batteries, watching for a sign, any sign, that the enemy knew they were there.

Skybase, too, continued sampling ambient space, building up a detailed picture of its new surroundings. One by one, PanEuropean ships were picked up by their electromagnetic signatures despite their being submerged within the hash of charged particles enveloping the Puller gas giant. In all, seven enemy vessels were picked up and identified, just over half of the expected twelve. Those five missing PE ships were a minor worry; most likely, they were simply too well masked by the gas giant’s radiation belts, or they might be hidden by the bulk of the planet itself, on the far sides of their orbits. They might even have departed the system … but it was also possible that they were closer at hand, well-shielded and effectively invisible.

If so, the fighter screen would sniff them out soon enough. Skybase’s sensors, meanwhile, scoured the surrounding sky, searching.

There were no ships close by the stargate. The tiny planetoid housing the Marine listening post, however, was spotted and identified after a few moments. A small shuttle slid from a secondary docking bay in Skybase’s hull, accelerating toward the stargate.

The first flight of starships was already being off-loaded as the shuttle departed. First to emerge from Skybase’s maw was the destroyer Morrigan, 24,800 tons and 220 meters in length overall, and with a crew of 112. Her antimatter reactors were already powering up; she would be ready to engage her primary drive within another fifteen minutes.

Alexander, meanwhile, switched to the downloaded view being recorded from the Morrigan, and was able to watch the second starship slip her magnetic moorings and exit Skybase’s hangar bay, edging gently into hard vacuum, guided by a quartet of AI-directed tugs.

She was the Thor, and she was sister to Morrigan, her masculine name notwithstanding. Both Cybele-class destroyers were fast and maneuverable, designed originally to serve with the Solar High Guard fleet, protecting worlds and habitats from incoming asteroids or cometary debris. Each possessed a powerful spinal-mount plasma gun as primary weapon, but their hull superstructures bristled with secondary laser turrets, missile batteries, and railgun accelerators, as well as automated point-defense mounts.

With the two destroyers launched and positioned a few thousand kilometers to either side of Skybase, Alexander let himself begin to breath more easily. The most dangerous part of Operation Lafayette was the possibility that PanEuropean warships would be close enough to pick up Skybase’s transition into normal space. While Skybase did possess defensive weapons, the structure was still not primarily intended for combat. The two destroyers would provide the fledgling insystem beachhead with some decent fire-support.

Third out of Skybase’s cargo deck was the Marine assault transport Samar, huge, blunt-prowed, and massive. Measuring 310 meters long, and with a beam of 85 meters, Samar massed nearly 35,000 tons. She carried a crew of 79, as well as her cargo—four companies of the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce, a total of nearly 600 Marines. Half of those Marines would already be loaded into their ship assault pods, or SAPs, ready to engage in ship-to-ship boarding actions.

The final ship nestled within Skybase’s hold was the largest, the Fleet Marine Carrier John A. Lejeune, massing 87,400 tons, and measuring 324 meters, stem to stern. Cocooned within Lejeune’s hangar deck were two more squadrons of F/A-4140s, as well as a squadron of A-90 ground-support strike craft and a number of support and auxiliary vessels—ninety-eight aerospace craft in all.

The Lejeune was a tight fit inside Skybase’s hangar bay; in fact, several outriggers and deep-space communications and tracking masts had been removed in order to let her slip through Skybase’s garage door at all. Getting her out was a tediously exacting exercise in geometry and tug-facilitated maneuvering that would take nearly an hour if all went well. It was for that reason that the Lejeune had been the first ship loaded on board the Skybase, and the last out; Alexander had wanted the fleet carrier to be with the first translated load, however. Her three Stardragon squadrons—forty-eight aerospace fighters in all—would be invaluable in achieving and maintaining battlespace superiority, and greatly expanded the fleet’s reach and sensitivity.

An eighth PanEuropean ship was picked out of the radiation fields around the gas giant. By now, neutrino and electromagnetic energy emitted by the newly emergent Commonwealth vessels would have reached the vicinity of the PE fleet. The question now was how good the enemy was at picking those radiations out of the storm of particulate radiation surrounding them at the moment. The Commonwealth squadron might be detected at any moment; Alexander was gambling on the enemy—even his AIs—being less than perfectly vigilant.

Even so, every passing minute increased the chances of discovery.

And so Thor and Morrigan stood guard as Skybase slowly, even grudgingly gave birth to the John A. Lejeune, while the Samar drifted nearby, her waiting Marines encased in their SAP pods, unable to do anything but watch, fret, pray, or sleep, according to individual habit and preference.

And once Lejeune drifted free in open space, the tugs dragged her clear and, after a brief gathering of inner power, the Skybase winked out of existence once again, returned to distant Earth.

The four capital ships, a small cloud of fighters and auxiliaries, and some twelve hundred men and women remained behind, alone, outnumbered, and expendable almost three hundred light-years from home.

And everything was riding on a single unknown: was the enemy aware of their arrival?

The question would be settled, one way or the other, within the next few hours.