Читать книгу Deep Time - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 11

29 June, 2425

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

0044 hours, EST

“The fighters are in pursuit, sir,” Admiral Armitage told Koenig. “They won’t catch the damned thing, though. Not unless either Charlie starts decelerating or they can shave another tenth of a percent off their velocity.”

“How good are the new designs at that sort of thing?”

“Mostly depends on the pilot,” Armitage said. “Things are happening awfully fast at those velocities, remember.”

Koenig nodded. He’d been a fighter pilot once, a very long time ago. “I do.”

As a fighter moved faster and faster, relativistic phenomena not only increased the vehicle’s mass, pushing it toward an impossible-to-reach infinity, but it also shortened the rate at which time—as measured by an outside observer—passed for the pilot, an effect called time dilation. The pilot experienced everything—the increase in mass, the compression of time—as perfectly normal; it was outside observers that saw basic constants of the universe shift and flow like water.

For fighters traveling at 99.7 percent of the speed of light, one minute objective—a minute as perceived by slowpoke left-behinds—was only 4.64 seconds. To observers back on board the carrier, the pilot would seem to be moving and speaking and living with extreme slowness.

The difference could be significant—and a real problem, especially in combat. Where a relatively stationary target had a minute to react to oncoming fighters, those fighters had only a few seconds. The best cybernetically augmented reaction times in the world couldn’t handle differences at such scales.

In fact, getting anything done when you were up against an unaccelerated opponent was dangerous when a decision or an action taking a handful of seconds was in fact a whole minute long outside of the pilot’s frame of reference. At least, Koenig thought, in this case both the fighters and their quarry were pushing c, and the time difference between their relative frames of reference was trivial.

That was one reason that fighters sent at relativistic speeds toward an enemy target generally decelerated before reaching their objective. Speed was life, as the old fighter-pilot aphorism had it. But in modern space-fighter combat, too much speed could put you at a serious disadvantage.

With all that in his mind, Koenig pulled down an in-head schematic from the America showing the relative positions and speeds of the alien vessel and the pursuing fighters. He began pumping through some simulations. If the fighters could increase their velocity by an additional tenth of a percent of c, their speed, relative to their quarry, would be 30,000 kilometers per second and closing.

At this point, the fighters would be trailing the enemy by …

He let the calculations run themselves through: 65 million kilometers. With a closing velocity of 30,000 kps, that meant an intercept in another thirty-six minutes.

Like a dog chasing a hovercraft, though, what they would be able to do with the alien once they actually caught it was still unknown.

And it was still all based on the “if” of moving closer to the speed of light.

USNS/HGF Concord

4-Vesta

0056 hours, TFT

Commander Terrance Dahlquist read the message as it came through, direct from Admiral Gray and the star carrier America. He wasn’t quite sure how he should feel about this … or what he was going to do about it.

Originally a branch of the North American military, the High Guard had been established in the wake of the Wormwood Incident in 2132, when a rogue Chinese squadron had dropped a small asteroid into the Atlantic Ocean. Later, official control had been handed over to the Earth Confederation, since it was operating in the defense of the entire planet. Concord’s mission was to monitor operations near asteroids, and to stop unauthorized attempts to manipulate their trajectories. In those cases where either asteroids or ore samples were legally being injected into Earth-approach orbits, the Guard tracked them, double-checked the calculations, and tried to make certain that Earth or other population centers across the solar system weren’t endangered.

Further, the High Guard made sure Vesta was always closely watched. The site of a large, mostly automated mining facility, the asteroid possessed a set of ten-kilometer-long magnetic launch rails designed to fire canisters of nano-extracted and -processed ore from the jumbled, frozen crust into low-energy transit loops that would bring them within capture range of Earth-based capture vessels within three to five years, depending on the constantly changing angles and distances between worlds. Fearing that terrorists or other rogue forces might easily change the launch parameters and turn the launch rails into titanic long-range weapons ideal for planetary bombardment, the High Guard was stationed there as protection against that scenario. In truth, it was not very likely to happen. For one thing, it would be a high-risk, low-reward endeavor, since incoming canisters were closely followed by radar and lidar, and intercept missions could easily nudge them into harmless orbits. But Earth’s governments remained nervous about falling rocks, especially deliberately chucked falling rocks, almost three centuries after Wormwood Fall, and High Guard frigates like the Concord were there to provide some measure of reassurance.

They were not designed to engage alien starships of unknown potential.

Dahlquist wanted to shoot a message back to Gray. The problem was that the High Guard, though technically a part of the USNA Navy during the current hostilities with the Confederation, was not under Navy jurisdiction, and a line officer like Gray did not have the authority to order High Guard assets off station.

Of course, the real reason he was hesitating had more to do with Gray’s background.

Like most USNA Guard and Naval officers, Dahlquist was a Ristie. The United States of North America was supposed to be a classless society, but that was fiction and always had been. Always there were “haves” as distinguished from “have-nots.” Money was not as big a factor in modern society as it once had been; the nanotech revolution had long ago made wealth-based distinctions largely irrelevant. But power, especially the power available to those with better technology and better access to information, was another matter altogether. Nowadays, those who had more advanced electronic implant technology, those who had life extension and better nanomed support, those who had connections in the larger “have” networks of government and the military—those were the new social elite. Risties was the slang term for the cultural aristocrats who called the shots in modern civilization.

Of course, they would never use the term themselves.

They did, however, use the term Prim, and the fact was that Gray was a well-known Primitive. Sure, Gray had acquired that technology when he left the Manhat Ruins decades ago, but Dahlquist couldn’t shake the subtle prejudice against him and people like him. They hadn’t grown up with the tech, had never been completely comfortable with it … and that, in the minds of most Risties, was telling.

Dahlquist would never have admitted to technocybernetic prejudice, of course, but he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that “Sandy” Gray didn’t really know what he was doing, that he tended to overlook some of the information available to him over the various data networks because he hadn’t grown up with the technology.

That in certain subtle ways, he wasn’t fully human.

And that, when all was said and done, was what it was all about. Humans were defined by their technology. That was one reason the USNA had been fighting the Sh’daar and, more recently, the Confederation: humans were what they were because of their tools, from fire to starships to neurocybernetic implants.

And yet, what it all came down to was that what Gray was ordering Dahlquist to do was technologically challenging, dangerous, and a long shot at best. He was to accelerate toward this oncoming alien vessel and lay down a spread of missiles and kinetic-kill projectiles in the hopes of disabling it. There was no question of matching course and speed with the thing, not when it was burning its way across the system at a hair under c. But Concord would still have to get uncomfortably close, and loosing that much kinetic energy and flying debris when you just might fly into the high-velocity cloud yourself was not Dahlquist’s idea of a reasonable request.

There was the political angle to consider, too.

If the Concord openly helped the America—and from the data feed Dahlquist was getting, these orders were part of a USNA operation against unknown aliens working with the Confederation—he could technically be committing treason.

Damn it, that Prim was putting Dahlquist in an impossible situation!

“Comm,” he said. “Send a reply. Ask for … clarification.”

“Sir, they won’t get the reply for—”

“I know. Send it.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Dahlquist had better things to do than jump through hoops held by that perverted little Prim …

USNA Star Carrier America

In pursuit

0105 hours, TFT

“Looks like the pursuing fighters were able to close with the target, Admiral,” Commander Dean Mallory told him. “I wish there’d been more than four of them, though.”

“All they need to do is slow that damned alien down a bit,” Gray replied. “That, and keep him from transiting over to metaspace.”

“We don’t know how far up the side of the sun’s gravity well they need to be in order to jump,” Mallory said, thoughtful. “Would the idea be to just try to damage him?”

“It’s a long shot, I know,” Gray replied. “If you or your team have any ideas, tell me now.”

“Your old sand trick occurs to me, Admiral,” Mallory said, grinning. “‘The Gray Maneuver,’ they called it in Tac-Combat download training.”

Gray snorted. “It’s a dangerous option here,” he said. “We’d risk vaporizing those four fighters we have on the alien’s tail.”

“Sandy” Gray had gotten his nickname two decades earlier, when he’d released clouds of sand—the warheads of AMSO anti-missile weapons—at close to the speed of light. Even a single grain of sand traveling at that speed was deadly, and a cloud of them could disintegrate a ship, wipe out a fleet … or even scour the hemisphere of a world with flame. Under certain circumstances, it could be a highly effective weapon, but targeting something as small as a ship was chancy at best, and the danger of scoring an “own goal” in the rough-and-tumble of space combat made the tactic one of desperation.

“True. Of course, only the Concord would be positioned to deliver the shot, anyway.”

“I know—and risk or not, it’s what I asked them to do. Those fighters aren’t going to be able to do much, so it’s probably our only chance.”

AMSO rounds fired by those USNA ships chasing Charlie One and its fighter escorts would be completely ineffective, because both they and the targets were traveling at close to c. But sand released by the High Guard ship, approaching from slightly off the alien’s bow, would impact Charlie with its velocity plus that of the target, which was very close indeed to the speed of light.

“My concern, then,” Gray continued, “is that he might hold off for fear of hitting the USNA fighters behind it.” Something dawned on Gray then, and he scowled, calling up a data feed from America’s AI, looking for biographical information on Concord’s captain. He’d pulled down a bare minimum of biographical data on the man before, just enough to verify that he was North American. Right now, Gray needed more.

There it was: Commander Terrance Dahlquist. Born in Windsor, Ontario, but with most of his life spent in New New York, up the swollen Hudson from Gray’s old stomping grounds. Well-to-do family. He had an uncle who’d been governor of Manitoba … and a cousin who’d been a USNA representative to the Confederation Senate. Joined the Navy in 2016. Naval Academy at Oceana. Commended for valor at Freya in 2020—He’d been skipper of a gunboat, the Ajax, during an operation against renegade H’rulka fleet elements there. Transferred to the High Guard in 2022.

Why? To leave a career with the Navy proper could be seen as a less-than-positive career move. Ah … there it was. He’d been passed over for promotion to full commander while skippering the Ajax. By taking the High Guard posting, he got an immediate promotion.

Gray shook his head. Nothing in the data raised any flags; nothing particularly unusual or of concern.

It was frustrating, though. The nature of modern space warfare meant that individual ship captains and flotilla commanders often had to fight alongside fellow officers whom they’d never met and didn’t know. With typical operations encompassing volumes of space many astronomical units in diameter, often there was no way to coordinate with them during the battle. Speed-of-light time lags could mean the passage of hours before a reply to a message could be received. Was a given officer aggressive? Cautious? Slow off the mark? Meticulous? Hotheaded? Incompetent? Daring? It made a hell of a big difference, and not knowing could royally screw combat strategy.

He took a big mental breath. Worry about it later, he thought. There was nothing he could do about it until America and Concord were closer.

On the flag bridge tactical display, the four pursuing fighters were drawing gradually closer to the fleeing Charlie One and its Confed escorts.

He checked the time. Concord should have received the message ten minutes ago and be getting into position now. The High Guard ship was just too far away for the light carrying that information to have reached America. Hawes and Elliot were still on the chase as well, but like America, were still much too far astern to take part in the coming clash.

Dahlquist better be moving …

Because without the Concord, those four Starblades were on their own. And, as always, it would be the fighters that bore the first, hardest shock of contact with the enemy.

VFA-96, Black Demons

In pursuit

0120 hours, TFT

Megan Connor thoughtclicked a mental icon and enlarged the object visible now within an in-head window. It was tough to make out details; the view of the surrounding universe outside was wildly distorted by her fighter’s speed. At relativistic velocities, incoming starlight was crowded forward until it formed a ring ahead of the ship, with chromatic aberration smearing the light into a rainbow of color: blue ahead, red behind.

Somewhere within that “starbow” was the light from the fleeing alien, also distorted by the near-c velocities of pursuer and pursued. The AI running Connor’s fighter was extracting that light and recreating what the alien would have looked like to human eyes at more sedate speeds … a beautiful assembly of fluted curves, sponsons, teardrop shapes, and streamlined protrusions that looked more grown than assembled. It was five thousand kilometers ahead, now, and seemed to be struggling to maintain that dwindling lead. The image was being transmitted by one of several battlespace drones the USNA fighters had launched moments before. Their acceleration was just good enough to let them creep up on the alien, meter by hard-fought meter.

The pursuing fighters were now within missile range … but USNA ship-to-ship missile accelerations were not much better than the fighters themselves. Piloted by small AIs, it might be hours more before they could close the remaining distance.

Drones possessed better AIs; they had to in order to maneuver for the best views of a target, to assemble the clearest picture of a contested volume of space, and to avoid enemy anti-missile defenses. They also had somewhat more powerful drives so that they could quickly fill an entire battlespace volume, and to give them long-term endurance on station.

All of which gave Connor an idea.

USNS/HGF Concord

4-Vesta

0121 hours, TFT

Commander Terrance Dahlquist studied the tactical display on Concord’s bridge. The out-system craft tagged Charlie One was just over one AU from Vesta, now, and was reaching the closest point to the asteroid on its outbound path. Four USNA fighters were in close pursuit.

The images he was seeing, thanks to the speed-of-light time delay, were about nine minutes out of date, which meant that alien craft had already passed the nearest point and was well beyond now.

And Dahlquist was worried.

“You know, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Ames told him, “you could land yourself in a world of shit.”

Ames was Concord’s executive officer, Dahlquist’s second in command. She was a GM transhuman and he respected her intelligence, a carefully crafted intellect connected to in-head systems that purportedly made her as good as that of the best AI.

“It’s a kind of a nebulous area,” he told her. “I don’t take my orders from … people like him.”

Both the line Navy and the High Guard answered to HQMILCOM, the USNA’s military command center located on and around Mars, and, after that, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Earth. Until one or the other of those command entities officially directed him to follow Gray’s orders, he was in the right if he ignored the man’s instructions. It was a technicality, but the military was built on technicalities.

“Not as nebulous as you might think, Captain,” Ames told him. “Admiral Gray is still a flag officer, and that puts you in probable violation of Article Ninety-two.”

“Article Ninety-two?” Dahlquist asked, smirking. “Not Ninety?”

“Article Ninety specifies punishment for disobeying a lawful command of your superior commissioned officer,” Ames told him. “It also covers actually striking a superior officer. So yes, it might apply. But Article Ninety-two applies to failure to obey any lawful general order or regulation. It also covers dereliction of duty. So it’s probably the charge they would use against you. Sir.”

Dahlquist sighed. He liked Ames, and she was a hell of a good ship’s first officer, but talking with her was like discussing calculus with a computer. Once, just once, he would like to hear her admit that she didn’t know something. He sighed again, as he knew that was unlikely.

Some claimed that the entire human species was headed the way of the genetically modified transhumans, but Dahlquist sincerely doubted this. GMs tended to increase mental efficiency by sacrificing passion—emotional involvement. Without said passion, they often didn’t pursue success in career or relationship as tenaciously as unmodified Mark I Mod 0 humans. As such, he couldn’t envision anyone giving up their ambition just for the sake of knowledge. Emotions were just too important to the human experience. The old idea of the emotionlessly logical genius was a myth. Fact was, there were studies linking high intelligence with emotional swings and disorders. Dahlquist couldn’t help but think about all the geniuses throughout history that had also been emotionally disturbed.

In any case, cybernetic implants were good enough now that anyone could have access to any data almost as efficiently as GMs, and without the loss of what it was that made humans human. For Dahlquist, that would always be raison d’être.

Nonetheless, Dahlquist valued Ames’s ability to pull raw data on the most obscure topics out of the seemingly endless depths of her memory. And that’s what he needed at the moment.

“So what do you recommend?” he asked.

“That we maneuver Concord to intercept Charlie One, as ordered.”

“I have a better idea.”

Ames blinked. “Sir?”

“We have available a potentially devastating weapon in the VLA. We can use that.”

Dahlquist was pleased with himself for thinking of it. The Vesta linear accelerator was the mining facility’s magnetic launcher. They could use it as a monstrous cannon to disable or destroy the alien from here, a full AU away.

“With respect, sir,” Ames said, shaking her head, “it won’t work.”

“No?”

“Not even close. Check the numbers, sir.”

He did so, pulling down stats from Concord’s AI on the mining accelerator and applying the TDA formula, then scowling as the answer came through. At its very best, the one-kilometer magnetic rail gun, accelerating a one-ton payload at twenty thousand gravities down its one-kilometer length, would boost the package to twenty kps—a respectable velocity across interplanetary distances that would cross one astronomical unit in … shit! Just over eighty-six days. It was amazing. Even with all of his training and experience, it was still so damnably possible to underestimate the sheer vastness of space.

And Ames was right. He could be making a hell of a lot of trouble for himself by disregarding those orders … and a Prim like Gray wasn’t worth landing himself a court-martial.

The realization steadied Dahlquist, and helped resolve the issue a bit in his mind. He’d not been aware of just how jealous he’d been of Gray’s advancement up the career ladder, but he recognized it now as her thought about the possibility of crashing and burning over an Article 92. He and Gray were about the same age, with roughly the same time-in-service. Yet he was just a commander, struggling to make captain, while the damned Prim had had his four admiral’s stars handed to him on a plate. There was scuttlebutt to the effect that Gray had friends in very high places; his former commanding officer was now president of the United States of North America. And those friends could cause Dahlquist a lot of trouble.

It wasn’t fucking fair.

He rather neatly disregarded the hypocrisy of a Ristie being jealous of a Prim’s “advantages.”

“Okay, Amesie,” he said. “Take us out. Rendezvous course with Charlie One.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

He heard Concord’s communications officer requesting departure clearance, heard the clearance being given by the AI that ran the mining facility. Ceres, a rugged, splotched, and cratered sphere over five huindred kilometers through, dwindled away into the distance, lost among the stars almost instantly. Contrary to popular belief—and countless docuinteractives and in-head sims with a very bad sense of scale—the asteroids were not so thickly sown through the belt that they formed any kind of obstacle. At the moment, exactly one other asteroid was naked-eye visible from Vesta—a fifth-magnitude speck of light a million kilometers away. The Asteroid Belt was very nearly as empty as the rest of interplanetary space.

Dahlquist was embarrassed by the gaffe of suggesting that they use the VLA to bombard the alien ship. Years of chasing rocks, he thought, must have contributed to acute hardening of the cerebral cortex.

He would have to find some way of recovering from the gaffe, or Ames and the members of Concord’s crew would be spreading the story on their next visit Earthside.

Besides that, though, he was also seething from being shown up, not only by Ames, but—in his head at least—by the Prim.

There had to be a way for him to prove himself, as someone brilliant instead of an idiot …

VFA-96, Black Demons

In pursuit

0120 hours, TFT

The problem—as was always the case at relativistic speeds—was one of energy. Every kilogram of mass moving at this speed carried more energy than a fifty-megaton nuclear warhead—the size of the titanic “Tsar Bomba” detonated by the then Soviet Union in the early 1960s. Firing nuclear antiship warheads at the enemy might have unpredictable effects … especially when you realized that the artificial singularities serving as gravitic drives were created and fed by extremely large amounts of energy of their own, drawn from the quantum foam. Add more energy, in an uncontrolled rush, and well …

Connor was not at all anxious to try the experiment.

Instead, she’d elected to try something more subtle: launching one of her battlespace drones as a missile.

Her consciousness was filled by the magnified image of Charlie One, an enormous, organic form of curves and flowing shapes; the twelve accompanying Todtadler fighters were dwarfed by the giant starship. How, Connor wondered, had the aliens gotten that thing past Earth’s defenses and down to the planet itself?

She’d fed specific instructions into the drone’s pocket-sized AI; the relativistic time dilation at this speed was just too sharp to allow precise control. Right now, for every four seconds that passed, over a minute slipped by in the outside universe, and the spacetime fabric around each of the fast-moving vehicles—Charlie One, her own Starblade, and the drone—was distorted enough to scramble data packets and affect fine, long-range control signals.

Closer, now. Charlie One was a few hundred kilometers ahead, though her AI had magnified the image so that it felt like she was just a few meters from the alien’s hull. The twelve fighters appeared to be drawing off now. Connor couldn’t know for sure, but she had the feeling they were getting clear in anticipation of the alien switching over into its equivalent of Alcubierre Drive.

Closer still …

The drone shuddered violently as it passed the gravitic bow wave. Ships under gravitic acceleration projected a field around themselves, a kind of bubble within which mass fell toward the on-off flickers of the projected singularity ahead of the craft’s prow. Hitting the interface between normal space and the space within that highly warped bubble could be like hitting a solid wall.

The image from her drone flickered, broke into static, and vanished.

Connor could only hope that her instructions to the device had been both complete and comprehensive.