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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.

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.

Gray knew he would remember those human figures—so tiny against the dark!—for the rest of his life.

A number of Sh’daar fighters slammed bodily into the long, lean hull of the French cruiser Verdun. They seemed to be eating their way in through the cruiser’s hull … and then all of them detonated in a chain of white-hot flares that devoured the vessel’s central spine. More explosions followed … with the wreckage crumpling in upon itself in a seething storm of radiation, heat, and light.

We’re losing, Gray thought. We’re going under.

“All ships,” he ordered. “Come about and make for the TRGA.”

There was no choice. They’d stuck their collective nose into this time and space and gotten it bitten off.

They had to retreat. If they were going to save even a few of the battlegroup’s ships, they had to retreat now.

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

0516 hours, TFT

“Pull back and cover the America, people,” Mackey ordered. “They’re using fucking kamikaze tactics! We’ve got to stop them from getting through!”

Gregory had heard the order from the carrier’s CIC already, and had witnessed both the destruction of the Verdun and the damage done to America herself.

It was a hopeless fight. So far, he’d run through about half of the missiles in his magazine, but as the fighting enveloped the carrier more and more tightly, he was having to shift to his Gatling cannon, firing high-velocity kinetic-kill rounds of depleted uranium. Nuclear detonations were tricky things to employ close to the hulls of friendly ships, and the USNA fighter pilots were being forced to use more surgical methods in their defensive tactics.

Surgical methods took longer—you couldn’t yell “Fox One” and blow a dozen enemies away with a single highyield detonation, and you had to be frustratingly precise in the placement of your warshots.

One alien fighter, gleaming silver and irregular in shape, came in across America’s stern and raced up the length of her spine, Gregory in close pursuit. He fired a burst of KK rounds, but the angle was bad and the rounds glanced off the hurtling spacecraft with minimal damage. The rounds that missed slammed into the underside of the carrier’s shield cap forward … though with minimal damage as well, thank the gods. The carrier’s hull shields absorbed or deflected much of the impact.

For a terrifying moment, he thought the enemy craft was trying for one of America’s three landing bays in the steadily rotating hab section … but the fighter slipped between two of the moving bays and plunged toward the blunt, forwardleaning tower between hab module and the underside of the shield cap.

Damn! They were trying for the bridge and CIC!

The alien vessel struck the bridge tower at its base, just above the main hull of the carrier’s spine; Gregory’s Starblade flashed past an instant later, twisting around his grav singularity and angling out and away from the carrier. Braking hard, he reversed course and dropped toward the ship’s spine again, gliding past the blurred hull metal of the bridge tower. His AI signaled a target lock on the alien, which was melting now into America’s hull, sinking through the low-level bending of space, just above the ship’s outer hull, which deflected incoming energies. In another moment it would detonate, and the carrier might lose its bridge and combat information center all at once.

Gregory triggered his KK Gatling, sending a stream of high-velocity rounds slamming into and through the enemy craft. A particle-beam shot might do too much damage, though in fact he didn’t have the time to give the decision any conscious thought. He aligned with the target and fired, watching white flares of heat and light and splashes of molten metal erupt from the partially sunken alien hull.

At the last instant, he pulled out, whipping around his drive singularity and using a tremendous burst of acceleration to shove his ship sideways to avoid becoming a kinetic-kill projectile himself.

He held his breath, waiting for the alien to explode.

It didn’t.

“America CIC,” he called, “this is Demon Four! You have an enemy bogie buried in the bridge tower!”

“We copy that, Demon Four. Acknowledged.”

“Better send some Marines in case they’re still alive.” And in case there’s a loose black hole inside the wreckage, he added to himself … but he didn’t say so aloud. The shipboard response teams knew their business.

“Copy that, Four. Thanks for the assist.”

“All part of our friendly Black Demon service,” he replied, with a nonchalance that he definitely did not feel. That had been too damned close for sanity!

And they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So here I go again …

A group of eight alien fighters were inbound, a thousand kilometers out. He locked on and fired one of his dwindling number of Kraits. The detonation moments later took out seven of the eight; he nailed the survivor with another burst from his Gatling, watching the wreckage collapse in upon itself, folding up tighter and tighter until it vanished in a surprised pop of hard X-rays.

That was proof that the Sh’daar fighters had power taps similar to what the human ships were using—tiny black holes that skimmed energy from the frothing virtual energy at the base of reality and made it real. When a ship was destroyed, the black hole inside often ate much of the wreckage, then evaporated. Sometimes the singularity hung around long enough to become a menace to navigation, but luckily that wasn’t the case this time.

Unluckily, there were more opportunities, because beyond those eight Sh’daar ships another ten were approaching at high speed.

“Damn it,” Gregory snapped. “How many of these things are there?”

His Starblade’s AI gave him an answer, though as an impression, an unspoken realization, rather than in words. More than six thousand, out of an original estimated nine thousand …

Too fucking many. They’d destroyed thousands of the things already … but thousands more remained.

“All ships, this is America CIC,” a voice announced. “Be aware … we have more Sh’daar vessels inbound, repeat, more Sh’daars inbound. Capital ships, this time …”

Great! he thought. Just fucking great!

TC/USNA CVS America

Flag Bridge/CIC

0535 hours, TFT

Admiral Gray stared into the mass of alien vessels headed for the battlegroup from dead ahead. America’s tactical AIs had counted over three hundred so far, including a couple of monsters that must have started out as planetoids, kilometers across and massing billions of tons.

There would be no escape from so powerful an alien force …

He saw exactly three different tactical options—surrender, fight to the death, or order the fleet to scatter in the hope that a few of the battlegroup’s ships, at least, might make it back through the TRGA and reach home. None of those choices was particularly appealing … and a fourth option emerged.

“Open a channel to that fleet,” he told the communication officer on America’s bridge. “Use the Agletsch protocols. See if they’re willing to talk.”

“They are already willing to talk, Admiral.” The voice was that of Konstantin—or, rather, of a clone of that powerful AI. “I am now in communication with them.”

The Konstantin clone was resident within the TOAF module, a cylinder strapped to America’s spine aft of the rotating hab section, but was linked in through the carrier’s electronic network to America’s resident AIs. It hadn’t spoken before, and Gray had more or less forgotten that it was there, but he welcomed its input now.

“What do they say, Konstantin?”

There was a brief but agonizing pause.

“The force ahead is siding with us,” the AI told him. “The small Sh’daar fighters appear to be … they are calling them counter-Refusers, which is confusing, but the word rebels may approximate the meaning.”

“Counterrevolutionaries?” Gray suggested. He’d encountered the term once in a downloaded history of twentieth-century global politics.

“Indeed. The Sh’daar, remember, began as what they termed Refusers, rejecting the ur-Sh’daar Schjaa Hok.”

“‘The Transcending,’” Gray said, giving the alien term its closest English translation. “I remember.”

They’d learned that bit of history twenty years ago, during the Koenig Expedition to this spacetime. Originally, the N’gai dwarf galaxy had been occupied by hundreds of mutually alien civilizations that humans now knew as the ur-Sh’daar … the original or primal Sh’daar. When that galactic culture had entered its own version of the technological singularity almost a billion years in Humankind’s past, some, for various reasons, had rejected or somehow avoided the transformation, becoming known as “Refusers.”

“Are you telling me that these fighter swarms are Sh’daar who embrace the ur-Sh’daar Transcending?”

“I do not yet have enough data on Sh’daar ideologies or political interactions to say with certainty,” Konstantin replied. “However, that is certainly a valid possibility.”

“So why the hell were they attacking us?”

“I do not have enough information as of yet to give you a meaningful reply,” Konstantin told him. “But this rebel subgroup must feel threatened by our arrival in some way. Perhaps they wish to join the original ur-Sh’daar, and fear that we would threaten or delay their plans.”

“Hell, if they want to go, let them,” Gray said. “Attacking us without provocation isn’t a rational act.”

“Again, Admiral, I would caution you that we lack hard data as to their motives, needs, and aspirations. It’s too early to speculate concerning their actions.”

Damned machine. “Let me know when you have hard data.”

“Of course.”

“In the meantime, what about our new best buddies out there?”

The Sh’daar vessels ahead were spreading out. America’s long-range sensors were detecting bursts of gamma radiation—evidence of positron annihilation. The aliens were using antimatter weaponry.

“They appear to be attacking the rebels, Admiral.”

“You’re saying they’re rescuing us?”

“So it would appear, Admiral.”

“All ships,” Gray said, using the battlegroup’s tactical channel. “Disengage and pull back. The cavalry’s just galloped in to the rescue. Stay clear and let them do their thing.”

Sh’daar fighters continued to press their attack on the America battlegroup, trying to overwhelm the human defenses … but the fleet of capital ships was moving in swiftly, now, using precisely wielded bursts of antimatter particles to vaporize the minute alien ships.

And then the surviving alien fighters were breaking off and fleeing, scattering out and away and into the surrounding cloud of densely packed suns.

“Admiral, the Adjugredudhran commander of the Sh’daar flagship Ancient Hope gives you its greetings,” Konstantin reported. “It hopes our force has not suffered serious loss … and regrets the counter-Refuser attack on our vessels. It suggests that we follow the Sh’daar fleet into the Core … to the vicinity of the Six Suns.”

Gray let out a pent-up breath. He felt weak … shaky enough that he wondered if he would have been able to stand in a full gravity. So close …

“Please thank the Ad … thank the Sh’daar commander,” he replied, “and tell it that we will comply.”

“Well,” Mallory said out loud. He’d obviously been listening in on the conversation with Konstantin. “Let the diplomacy games begin.”

“Better with words than with particle cannon,” Gray said with a shrug. “I guess it’s a good thing we brought Konstantin-2 out here.”

“It would’ve been nice if the good guys had been here to meet us,” Mallory said. “I don’t trust this.”

“Neither do I, Dean. But let’s see what they have to say.”

And the battlegroup—the ten survivors, at any rate, plus the Glothr liaison ship—fell into formation with the far more numerous locals.

Admiral Gray looked at the nearest of the Sh’daar vessels—a monster wedge five kilometers long, its hull gliding past a few kilometers away like a massive black cliff dotted with city lights …

… and felt very, very small.