Читать книгу Earth Strike - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 9

25 September 2404

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Eta Boötean Kuiper Belt

0428 hours, TFT

Admiral Koenig took a final look at the heavens revealed through the encircling viewalls of America’s CIC. Eta Boötis gleamed in amber splendor directly ahead. Off to port, red-golden Arcturus shone as well—not as brilliantly as Eta Boötis, but still with twice the brightness of Venus as seen from Earth at its closest.

Someday, we’ll make it back there, Koenig thought, gazing for a moment at Arcturus, just three light years distant. He still felt the bitterness of that last, desperate fight at Arcturus Station last year.

That was for later. Right now, it was Mufrid that required his full attention.

Two of the naval transports never had checked in … which might mean they’d suffered malfunction or disaster en route from Sol, or, more likely, that they’d emerged from Alcubierre Drive more than 1.3 light hours from the America.

It would be the transports, he thought—the entire reason for coming to Eta Boötis in the first place. Still, if they’d made it this far, they would follow the task force in. Gray couldn’t hold up the mission any longer waiting for them.

Over the course of the past eighty minutes, the task force had been pulling slowly together, until most occupied a rough sphere half a million kilometers across. All were now electronically connected through the laser-link tacnet, though the most distant vessels would lag fifteen minutes behind in receiving any message from the flagship.

“Captain Buchanan,” Koenig said, “you may inform the ship that we are about to get under way.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Buchanan’s voice replied immediately.

It was a formality. All hands had been at maneuvering stations since their arrival in-system. The announcement went out silently, spoken through each person’s in-head e-links. “Now hear this, now hear this. All hands, prepare for immediate acceleration under Alcubierre Drive.”

“Make to all vessels on the net,” Koenig told the ship’s AI. “Engage Alcubierre Drive, acceleration five hundred gravities, on my mark … and three … two … one … mark!”

That mark was variable, depending on how long it took for the lasercom command to crawl across emptiness from the America. The massive carrier began moving forward first, accompanied by the heavy cruiser Pauli and the frigates Psyché and Chengdu, close abeam. One by one the other vessels began falling into train, the sphere slowly elongating into an egg shape as more and more vessels got the word and engaged their drives.

The principles of the Alcubierre Drive had been laid down by a Mexican physicist in the last years of the twentieth century. It was old tech compared to the artificial singularities employed by modern gravfighters, but it used the same principles. Essentially, drive projectors compressed spacetime ahead of each vessel, and expanded spacetime astern, creating a bubble in the fabric of space that could move forward at any velocity, ignoring the usual constraints imposed by the speed of light because everything within the bubble, imbedded in that patch of spacetime, was motionless compared to the space around it.

Practical considerations—both size and mass—limited Alcubierre acceleration to five hundred gravities. At that rate, America would be pushing the speed of light after sixteen hours, thirty-seven minutes.

However, after that length of time they would have traveled almost sixty astronomical units, which meant they wouldn’t have time to decelerate in to the target.

Instead, they would accelerate constantly for just over nine hours, at which point they’d be moving at .54 c, then reverse their drives and decelerate for the same period.

They would arrive in the vicinity of Eta Boötis IV ten hours after fighter wing Blue Alpha had engaged the enemy.

And until that time, Blue Omega Strike Force would be fighting the enemy alone.

VFA-44 Dragonfires

Eta Boötis System

1015 hours, TFT

For Trevor Gray, half an hour passed. In the universe outside, six and a half hours slipped away, and with them another 7 billion kilometers, or forty-six more astronomical units.

He was just over three quarters of the way to the target.

He wondered how the other eleven pilots of the squadron were doing … but shrugged off the question. His AI would alert him if the tenuous data link with another fighter snapped. That hadn’t happened yet, so the chances were good that the others all were out there, as bored and, paradoxically, as nervous as he was.

In another eleven subjective minutes, he would begin the deceleration phase of the strike, but that would be handled by his AI. Coordination of the timing within the flight of twelve gravfighters had to be exact, or they would drop down to combat speed scattered all over the sky, rather than in attack formation.

He spent the time studying the world now just two and a half light hours ahead.

His AI had last updated his target data from America’s CIC just before the squadron had boosted, which meant that his information about the enemy’s strength and dispositions around Eta Boötis were now a full seventeen hours out of date. That was the tricky aspect to near-c deployment; once you boosted to relativistic speeds, you couldn’t be exactly sure of what you were getting into until you were nearly there.

His Starhawk’s forward sensors, at this speed, were all but useless. Radiation from ships around Eta Boötis IV was strongly distorted both by relativistic effects and by the “dustcatcher,” a high-gravity zone maintained ahead of the fighter at near-c even when the ship wasn’t accelerating, to trap or deflect dust and gas in the gravfighter’s path. Any information that made it to the fighter’s sensors was lost in the light-smeared ring representing the star dead ahead.

According to the most recent electronic intelligence, though, there were fifty-five ships there—almost certainly all Turusch—orbiting Eta Boötis IV or on final approach. And there was a way to slightly improve the view.

He moved his hands within the control field. On the mirrored black surface of his Starhawk, three sensor masts detached from the hull and swung out and forward, each two meters long at the start, but unfolding, stretching, and growing to reach a full ten meters from the ship. The receivers at the ends of the masts, spaced equidistant around the fighter, extended far enough out to let them look past the nebulous haze of the dustcatcher. As Gray watched, the inner circle of light on the cockpit display grew sharper and brighter. Incoming radiation was still being distorted by the Starhawk’s velocity, of course, but now he could see past the distortion of the singularity, and even take advantage of the dustcatcher’s gravitational lensing effect.

Bright flashes silently popped and flared across the display now, however. Extended, the sensor masts were striking random bits of debris—hydrogen atoms, mostly, adrift in the not-quite-perfect vacuum of space and made deadly by the gravfighter’s speed. Impact at this speed with something as massive as a meteoric grain of sand could destroy the mast; his AI had to work quickly.

The data came up less than five seconds later, and with a feeling of relief Gray retracted the sensor masts back into the hull, safe behind the blurring distortion of the dustcatcher. The fighter’s artificial intelligence had sampled the incoming radiation, sorting through high-energy photons to build a coherent picture of what lay ahead.

Resolution was poor. Only a few ship-sized targets—the most massive—could be separated from the distortion-induced static. The AI did its best to match up the handful of targets it could see now with those that had been visible to America’s sensors hours earlier. By combining the America data with this fresh, if limited, glimpse, the AI could make a close guess at the orbits of a few of the enemy vessels, and predict where they would be—assuming no changes in orbit—in another 136-plus minutes, objective.

Fifteen targets. Gray had hoped there would be more, but it was something with which to work. Fifteen large starships appeared to be in stable, predictable orbits around the target world, their orbital data precise enough to allow a clear c-shot at them. Of those fifteen, six, the data predicted, would be on the far side of the target planet 136 objective minutes from now, so they were off the targeting list. The remaining nine, however, were fair game.

The actual targeting and munitions launch were handled automatically by the AI-net, requiring only Gray’s confirmation for launch. So long as there was no override from Commander Allyn, all eleven Starhawks would be contributing to the PcB, the Pre-engagement c Bombardment.

Release would be at a precisely calculated instant just before deceleration. He checked the time readouts again. Five minutes, twelve seconds subjective to go.

He worked for a time trying to get a clearer look at the objective. The visual image was blurred, grainy, and heavily pixilated, but he could make out the planet, Eta Boötis IV, sectioned off by green lines of longitude and latitude, the shapes of continents roughed in. Fifteen red blips hung in space about the globe, most so close they appeared to be just skimming the globe’s surface, and he could see their motions, second to second, as the AI updated their locations. A white blip on the surface marked the objective—General Gorman’s slender beachhead. It was on the side of the planet facing Gray at the moment, the planet’s night side, away from the local sun, but in another two hours objective, it would be right on the planet’s limb—local dawn.

Additional red blips flicked on, a cloud of them, indistinct and uncertain, centered around and over Gorman’s position. Those marked enemy targets for which there was no orbital data and that most likely were actively attacking the Marine perimeter. Or rather, they had been 136 minutes ago, when the photons revealing their positions had left Eta Boötis IV. For all Gray knew, the perimeter had collapsed hours ago, and the squadron was about to make a useless demonstration at best, fly into a trap at worst. He shoved the thought aside. They were committed, had been committed since boosting clear of the America. They would know the worst in another few subjective minutes.

He opened his fighter’s library, calling up the ephemeris for Eta Boötis and its planets. He scrolled quickly through the star data, then slowed when he reached the entry for the fourth planet.

PLANET: Eta Boötis IV

NAME: Al Haris al Sama, (Arabic) “Guardian of Heaven”; Haris; Mufrid.

TYPE: Terrestrial/rocky; sulfur/reducing

MEAN ORBITAL RADIUS: 2.95 AU; Orbital period: 4y 2d 1h

INCLINATION: 85.3 ; ROTATIONAL PERIOD: 14h 34m 22s

MASS: 1.8 Earth; EQUATORIAL DIAMETER: 24,236 km = 1.9 Earth

MEAN PLANETARY DENSITY: 5.372 g/cc = .973 Earth

SURFACE GRAVITY: 1.85 G

SURFACE TEMPERATURE RANGE: ~30ºC – 60ºC.

SURFACE ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE: ~1300 mmHg

PERCENTAGE COMPOSITION: CO₂ 30.74; SO₂ 16.02; SO₃ 14.11; NH₄ 13.63; OCS 12.19; N₂ 5.55; O₂ 3.85; CH3 2.7; Ar 0.2; CS₂ variable; others <800 ppm

AGE: 2.7 billion years

BIOLOGY: C, N, H, S₈, O, Se, H₂O, CS₂, OCN; SESSILE PHOTOLITHOAUTOTROPHS IN REDUCING ATMOSPHERE SYMBIOTIC WITH VARIOUS MOBILE CHEMOORGANOHETEROTROPHS AND CHEMOSYNTHETIC LITHOVORES …

Gray broke off reading at that point, shaking his head. The squadron had been briefed on the native life forms on Haris, but he’d bleeped past the recorded lectures. He wouldn’t be on the planet long enough to worry about any native life forms.

Hell, from what he had picked up at the briefing, it was mildly bizarre that there was any life on the rock at all. One point seven billion years ago, the stellar companion of Eta Boötis had burned up its hydrogen fuel stores and entered a red giant phase before collapsing to its current white dwarf state. Planet IV had probably formed farther out than its current orbit within the star’s habitable zone, but migrated in closer as friction with the outer layers of the red giant’s atmosphere both baked it dry and slowed it down. The current ecosystem could not have even begun evolving until about a billion years ago … an impossibly short time by cosmological standards.

Whatever was growing on Haris’s surface wasn’t going to be very bright. In fact, the chances that it would find humans tasty, or even interesting, were vanishingly remote.

Gray shrugged the news off. He was a fighter pilot, not a ground-pounding grunt. His only view of Harisian biology would be from space, which was perfect, so far as he was concerned.

The subjective minutes ground slowly along, as objective minutes and kilometers streamed past at a breakneck gallop.

“Deceleration in one minute, subjective,” the AI’s voice announced in Gray’s head. “Confirm A-7 strike package release command at deceleration.” It was a woman’s voice, sultry, attention-commanding.

“Strike package release order confirmed,” Gray replied.

Another minute crawled past. Then, “Deceleration with strike package release in five … four … three … two … one … release. Commence deceleration.”

At the precisely calculated release point, a portion of the Starhawk’s outer hull turned liquid, flowed open, and exposed a teardrop-shaped missile nestled within. The fighter’s AI fired the missile, then triggered the spacetime-twisting immensity of the drive singularity, this time astern, off the Starhawk’s spiked tail. At fifty thousand gravities, the Starhawk began slowing; the strike package pod kept accelerating and, from the gravfighter’s perspective, flashed forward at five hundred kilometers per second squared, the dustcatcher winking out just long enough for the teardrop to flash past unimpeded, before switching on once more.

Ten seconds later, the gravfighter’s velocity had slowed by five thousand kilometers per second. After a minute, he was down to .87 of the speed of light, and his velocity continued to decrease.

Six hundred thousand kilometers ahead, the strike package, still accelerating and moving at better than .997 c, began to deploy.

At this point on the timeline, the Turusch at the planet half an AU up ahead would still be unaware that the Confederation task force had even arrived.

They were in for one hell of a surprise.

Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn

Enforcer Radiant Severing

1241 hours, TFT

Emphatic Blossom at Dawn had been named for a species of hydrogen floater on the homeworld that stunned its prey with an electric charge fired through trailing, gelatinous tentacles … emphatic indeed. It was a tactician, and a gurgled suffix on the Turusch sound-pulse translated as “tactician” carried the added meaning of a deep tactician … very roughly the equivalent of a general or an admiral in the enemy’s fleet.

The phrase Emphatic Blossom at Dawn also implied stealth, relentless determination, and a sudden strike at the end, all qualities of mind that had contributed to its being designated a deep tactician.

There was little stealth involved in this operation, however. The enemy was hemmed in on the planet’s surface, huddled beneath its enclosing force-bubble as Turusch particle beams and thermonuclear warheads flared and thundered. For nearly thirty g’nyuu’m now, the Turusch fleet had been hammering that shield, and it was showing signs of imminent failure.

Victory was simply a matter of time.

“Tactician!” a communicator throbbed from a console-shelf overhead. “Enemy ships, range twelve thousand lurm’m!”

The news chilled … and excited. Emphatic Blossom had hoped the enemy would deploy its fleet. At that range, it would have taken light nearly five g’nyuu’m to reach the fleet’s sensors. And that meant—

“All vessels!” the Tactician pulsed. “Disengage from the enemy! Power deep! Ships in orbit, change vector now!”

Everything depended now on the Turusch hunterforce having the time to change course and speed. The enemy force would have launched their fighters within moments of dropping out of superluminal drive, which meant that those fighters, and any kinetic-kill devices they’d released along the way, would be just behind the light-speed wavefront bearing the news of the enemy’s arrival.

How fast were the approaching kinetic devices traveling, how close on the heels of light? How far behind them were the enemy fighters? That depended on the enemy’s technology—how fast they could accelerate—as well as on how quickly Turusch scanners had detected the enemy fleet in the first place. Five light-g’nyuu’m were a great depth. Many, many g’nya might have passed before Turusch scanners—or even the automated systems they controlled—had noticed the enemy’s arrival. How long had they been out there?

Blossom felt the kick of acceleration as the Turusch command hunter Extirpating Enigma increased speed, breaking free of synchronous orbit, and with it an answering surge of relief. If the enemy had targeted the Extirpating Enigma several g’nyurm ago, while still en route, their missiles would miss the command ship now.

Unfortunately, Emphatic Blossom’s warning would take time to reach the other ships. Some of them might detect the threat in time and act independently, but independence of action, independence of thought were decidedly not imperatives in Turusch tactical planning.

But it was vital that the command ship survive any opening kinetic barrage by the enemy. By boosting clear of a predictable orbit, they had—

“Enemy kinetic-kill missile has just passed our tail!” the scanner throbbed. “Speed—”

And then the Languid Depths of Time exploded in a white-hot glare of vaporizing metal.

In another instant, three other Turusch hunterships exploded, and two dazzlingly brilliant stars appeared against the surface of the planet, expanded, blossoming. The claw-transport Victorious Dream of Harmony staggered as a portion of its tail vanished in a flare of silent light, the shock setting the massive vessel into an uncontrolled tumble.

Lasered messages began flashing back to the flagship, speaking of projectiles passing through the fleet at speeds just a mr’uum less than that of light itself.

The hunters had just become the prey.

VFA-44 Dragonfires

Eta Boötis System

1245 hours, TFT

Gray’s Starhawk was still slowing swiftly, still traveling at nearly eighteen thousand kilometers per second—a mere 0.06 c, a snail’s pace compared to typical high-G transit speeds.

In principle, speed in combat was as important as it had ever been in the long-gone era of aerofighters and atmospheric dogfights in the skies above Earth. However, if your closing velocity was too high relative to your opponent, there simply wasn’t time to react, even with electronic senses and AI reaction times. The target was there and gone before you could do a thing about it.

The universe had minutes earlier slipped back into its more usual, low-velocity appearance. Eta Boötis, the star, glared dead ahead, smaller than Sol seen from Earth, but a hair brighter. Other stars gleamed in constellations distorted to Earth-born eyes; Arcturus was a golden beacon high and to the left relative to Gray’s current attitude.

Haris, the target planet, was a tiny crescent close by the star, 1.8 million kilometers distant, growing larger moment by moment.

At Gray’s command, the Starfighter began rearranging itself once again, adopting standard combat configuration—a blade-lean crescent, slender black wings drooping to either side of the thicker central body, the crescent tips stretched forward as if to embrace the enemy. Sleek streamlining wasn’t as necessary at these velocities as it was when plowing through near-vacuum at near-c, but there was always the possibility in these sorts of engagements that a fight would drop into planetary atmosphere, and then streamlining was very necessary indeed.

Minutes earlier, as he dropped past .5 c, Gray had released the dustcatcher, sending a microscopic speck of collected dust and hydrogen atoms compressed into a neutron micro-body hurtling ahead at half the sped of light. If it, by sheer, random chance, hit an enemy spacecraft as it zipped through the system, so much the better, but there was no way to aim it. Like the vaporized whiffs of any A7 strike packages that had missed their targets, the dust balls released by the infalling fighters would remain interstellar navigation hazards for eons to come.

Data flooded across Gray’s navigational and combat displays. As he glanced this across the screen, his in-head display opened windows, showing magnified views.

Expanding spheres of star-hot gas marked the funereal pyres of four Turusch ships, while a fifth tumbled end for end through space, spilling a haze of vaporized armor, internal atmosphere, and sparkling debris in its wake. Patches of bright-glowing turbulence on the planet’s night side showed where two A7s had missed orbital targets and struck the planet instead.

So … five hits total. Not bad, considering the Kentucky windage involved from sixth tenths of an AU out. That left fifty enemy vessels to deal with … correction, fifty-three. Three others must have either been masked by the planet when America had first scanned the inner system, or had arrived in the objective hours since.

Enemy warships were scattering from the vicinity of the planet, a swarm of nest-kicked hornets. Turusch vessels were characteristically large, bulky, and clumsy-looking, the space-going equivalents of fortresses painted in bold swaths of either green and black or a starker red and black. Even their fighters, painted in green-and-black stripes, had the look of lumpy potatoes, each four to five times the mass of a Confederation Starhawk.

Despite appearances, they were fast and they were deadly. Gray caught one huge capital ship with his eyes and held it as he triggered a weapons lock. The Starhawk’s offensive warload consisted of thirty-two VG-10 Krait smart missiles, a StellarDyne Blue Lightning PBP-2 particle beam projector, and, for very close work, a Gatling RFK-90 KK cannon. At long range, smart missiles were always the weapon of choice.

A tone sounded in his ear, indicating that a VG had acquired lock.

“Omega Seven!” he called over the tacnet. “Target lock! Fox One!”

The missile streaked from beneath the embrace of Gray’s wings, the heat dump from its miniature gravitic drive gleaming like a tiny sun as it streaked through space.

The other Starhawks were all there, still in the circle formation they’d adopted out in the system’s Kuiper Belt. The circle was opening now as the fighters applied lateral thrust and spread themselves apart. Other pilots were calling Fox One now, the code-phrase that meant they were firing smart missiles. More missiles flashed into the gulf ahead, tracking and dogging enemy warships, each accelerating at close to one thousand gravities.

His missile and two others were closing with the big green-and-black enemy warship—a Tango-class destroyer, under the standard Confederation nomenclature for enemy ships. The enemy was dumping sand—blasting clouds of tiny, refractive particles into space both to defeat laser targeting systems and to serve as a physical barrier against incoming kinetic-kill or high-velocity warheads.

One missile hit the expanding sand cloud and exploded, a ten-kiloton blast that pulsed in the darkness, but the other two missiles plunged through the hole vaporized in the Turusch ship’s defensive barrier, striking its magnetic shielding and detonating like a close pair of bright, savage novae.

Enemy shield technology was a bit better than the Confederation could manage yet. Neither nuke penetrated the envelope of twisted spacetime sheathing the destroyer, but enough of the double blast leaked through to crumple a portion of the warship’s aft hull. Atmosphere spilled into space as the ship slewed to one side, staggered by the hit.

Gray was already tracking another Turusch warship, however, a more distant one, a Juliet-class cruiser accelerating hard toward the planet.

“Omega Seven!” he called. “Target lock! Fox One … and Fox One!” Two Kraits streaked into darkness.

“Incoming, everyone,” Allyn warned. “Jink and pull gee!”

The half of the sky in the direction of planet and sun was filled now with red blips, the icons marking incoming enemy missiles. Turusch anti-ship missile technology was better than human systems, and their warshots packed bigger warheads.

This, Gray thought, is where things get interesting.