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“So it’s hiding from the Rosetters, you think, sir?”
“Almost certainly. Let’s just hope they can’t find that hiding place either.”
Bridge
TC/USNA CVS America
Outer Asteroid Belt
2053 hours, TFT
Captain Gutierrez studied the inflow of data with grim determination. “How much longer before Task Force Ritter gets here?”
“They’re within extended launch range now, Captain,” Commander Mallory told her. She could see the computer graphics unfolding within an in-head window—the advancing wall of red light marking the Consciousness microcraft, the tiny knot of oncoming human ships, the retreating clusters of fighters. “Twelve minutes …”
“Sensors!”
“Yes, Captain!”
“How big is that thing? How massive?”
“The cloud is roughly half an astronomical unit across, Captain,” Lieutenant Scahill replied. “Mass … it’s tough to tell when it’s that diffuse, but I’m guessing something on the order of two times ten to the thirty grams.”
“That’s as big as Jupiter!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
And how the hell did you fight something as massive as the gas giant Jupiter?
Gutierrez shifted her attention back to the fighter screen, and to the teeming swarm of microcraft beyond. She was juggling a number of variables—maintaining distance from the leading edge of the cloud but moving slowly enough away from that cloud that the fighters could catch up. The fighters, too, were engaged in a kind of complex three-dimensional dance, continuing to fire nuclear warheads in front of the cloud, causing it to slow, to spread out, to break into separate masses, while staying ahead of the swarm and closing with the carrier. One squadron, VFA-190, the Ghost Riders, had already caught up with America and was currently recovering back aboard.
Despite her message to Earth, Gutierrez had not yet loosed the one ace she had hidden up her sleeve. Once she began firing nano-D at the approaching alien cloud, that region of space would become deadly for America’s fighters, and she wanted to get her people back on board before initiating the new tactics.
It seemed more and more likely, however, that she was not going to have the chance. America’s sensors were already picking up incoming fireflies slipping past the carrier’s outer hull. They didn’t appear to be doing any damage; they weren’t disassembling America’s hull or otherwise posing an immediate threat to the ship.
But they were proof that the human defensive force was losing the race.
Another fighter, a Black Knight with VFA-215, flared into an incandescent blossom.
“Weapons officer!” Gutierrez ordered. “Ready two disassembler rounds for immediate railgun launch!”
“First two rounds are loaded and ready,” Commander Kevin Daly, America’s new weapons officer, replied. “At your command …”
“Target inside that cloud. Have them detonate at least half a million kilometers beyond the farthest Starblade.”
“Aye, aye, Captain. We’re locked and loaded.”
“Fire!”
The star carrier mounted two magnetic-launch railguns running most of the length of the kilometer-long vessel’s slender spine, emerging in side-by-side ports at the center of the broad, massive shield cap forming the vessel’s prow. The ports opened … and two one-ton projectiles hurtled into space, accelerated in an instant to nearly 1 percent of the speed of light.
Recoil nudged the immense carrier … hard. Gutierrez’s seat jerked back, yanking her along. “Helm! Compensate!”
“Got it, ma’am …”
“Reload!”
“Reloading!”
“CAG! Pass the word to our fighters to lay down everything they have left around the periphery of that cloud.”
“Captain? …”
“I want to force it to move through the center.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
“Weapons!”
“Weapons, aye.”
“Mr. Daly! Hold your fire. In a few minutes I expect that cloud to begin contracting toward its center. When it does, I want you to slam as many nano-D warheads into that center as you can!”
“Aye, aye, Captain!”
She leaned forward, staring into the CGI panorama ahead. She could see white points of light moving swiftly out from the fighters, warheads swinging out and to the sides. Blinding flashes marked the detonations, and, sure enough, the cloud began to contract. Thermonuclear blasts were ravaging the outer edges of the alien swarm, and the individual microcraft responded by moving toward the center.
“Very well, Mr. Daly. Fire! And continue firing!”
“Firing …”
Two more warheads packed with nanotech disassemblers slammed out of America’s bow. And two more … and two more …
VFA-211, Headhunters
Outer Asteroid Belt
2059 hours, TFT
Meier and the rest of the Headhunters—those who were left, at any rate—continued to fall back toward the America, now just ten thousand kilometers distant. The Ghost Riders had already been taken aboard. The Black Knights were retreating alongside the Headhunters, all semblance of an ordered flight formation lost in the melee in front of the alien cloud.
He triggered his last pair of Kraits, sending them streaking into darkness. The order had come through from CIC moments before to fire all remaining missiles at the cloud’s perimeter, and Meier was doing so, though so far he’d seen little sign that the target was even aware of the barrage.
All he had left were his six Boomslangs.
He thoughtclicked a mental icon, triggering the release of his last missiles, sending them well out to one side of the cloud before looping them in for the kill. Kraits could be dialed up to a hundred megatons or so. VG-120 Boomslangs used focused bursts of vacuum energy to amplify the detonation to the equivalent of as much as a thousand megatons of high explosives. Generally, they were reserved for planetary or asteroid fortifications or extremely large and hardened military emplacements. The fireball flash of a VG-120 was eight kilometers across.
That, he thought with a grim finality, ought to get that swarm’s attention!
And that was it. His missile magazines were dry. He still had particle beams and a high-speed Gatling that fired depleted uranium, but those were popguns in the face of that incoming swarm.
It was definitely time to head back to the barn.
The Consciousness
Outer Sol System
2059 hours, TFT
In a sense, the Consciousness was carefully feeling its way into this star system, unsure of what was here. It was awash in data. Literally billions of sensations flooded through its laser-sharp awareness second by second, sensory input carrying gigabits of information about the density of the local interplanetary medium, about temperature, about the local gravitational matrix, about radiation, light, and magnetic moment. It sensed the eternal dance of vibrating hydrogen atoms and the wrack of lifeless, drifting dust charged with searing radiation; the sharp pulse of thermonuclear detonations; the shrill keening of hundreds of millions of radio frequencies, some heterodyned with encoded meaning, most of it empty noise.
It sensed spacecraft, it sensed the minute and insignificant flickers of warmth and electrical activity that were organic beings, it sensed the far faster and more information-rich pulses of electronic intelligences.
Local space was, for the Rosette Consciousness, a kind of maze, with flares of hard radiation appearing and dissipating in seemingly random patterns ahead of it. Each flash of heat and light annihilated some hundreds of millions of the microcraft making up the entity’s physical form, but there were tens of trillions of the craft linked into its network, and the loss of a thousandth of 1 percent of the machines was trivial, a minor ablation to be expected as it moved through the relatively dense space of a typical star system such as this. The Consciousness allowed itself to flow in those directions that offered the least resistance. An opening appeared in the radiation storms … there …
It sensed two spacecrafts, guided by simple-minded electronics, piercing the outer reaches of its diffuse body.
Then, shockingly … horrifically … the Consciousness sensed something, a dizzying sense of loss and diminution, something that just possibly might be described as pain.
TC/USNA CVS America
Outer Asteroid Belt
2059 hours, TFT
“Captain!” the weapons officer called from his station in CIC. “The swarm is reacting!”
“I see it, Commander.”
Gutierrez watched, fascinated, as the swarm, painted in red both on her main screen and in the open window within her mind, sharply contracted and began folding back within itself. There could be little doubt that it was reacting to the nanotechnic disassemblers fired into its heart. The only question was … would they be enough?
The cloud’s forward advance had stopped, at least for the moment. “CAG!” she called. “Now’s our chance. Bring our people back on board.”
“The Headhunters are recovering now, Captain. We’ll have everyone back on board in … call it ten minutes.”
Gutierrez checked other data feeds and noted that Task Force Ritter was now just six minutes away. They had fighters out, now, coming in well in advance of the light carrier Wotan. Missile trails reached out from the Pan-Euro fighters, probing the alien cloud.
The cloud seemed to be reacting less to the fresh barrage of missiles than it was to the steady drumbeat of nano-D searing into its central core. It was flowing backward now, as though trying to escape the burning touch of the nanodisassemblers, and seemed to be compacting itself.
A sphere. It was collapsing down into a smooth, black sphere …
“What the hell is happening to that thing?” Gutierrez asked.
“We’ve seen this sort of technology before, Captain,” Lydia Powell said. Powell was the new head of America’s xenosophontology department, replacing Dr. Truitt. “At the Rosette, in Omega Centauri … at Kapteyn’s Star. Those micromachines can join together in millions of different ways.”
“Right now,” Gutierrez said, “they appear to be making a planet the size of Jupiter.”
“A J-brain, Captain …”
“What’s that?”
“A jovian world made of solid computronium. It would possess an artificial mentality of staggering power.”
“What would such a thing be for?”
“I doubt humans would be able to grasp the reasoning of minds that powerful, Captain,” Powell told her.
“I just want to know why it’s quietly turning itself into a planet,” Gutierrez said. “We already know it was intelligent, a super-AI of some sort. Why change from a cloud half an AU across to that?”
“Power, Captain,” Mallory said from CIC. “As a diffuse cloud, each distinct unit was producing its own power … probably from the local magnetic field. As a single sphere one hundred forty thousand kilometers across, it could assemble internal structures to draw vacuum energy.”
“It could build some pretty hellacious weapons, too,” Gutierrez said. As she watched the forming sphere ahead, she felt a deep stirring of fear mingled with awe. “Helm … let’s increase our separation from that thing.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“Message coming through from the Pan-Euros,” the bridge communications officer reported. “Admiral Ritter … for you.”
“What’s our c-lag?”
“Five seconds, Captain. Two-way.”
“Put him on.”
She counted down the time lapse as a laser-com beam raced out from America … with another delay as the reply lanced back.
“Captain Gutierrez,” a voice said in her head at last, cultured and slightly accented. “I’m Admiral Jan Ritter, on board the carrier Wotan. What is the tactical situation?”
“Hello, Admiral. Captain Gutierrez of the star carrier America. Here’s an update.” Gutierrez transmitted the bridge log recordings for the previous forty minutes. “We have not been able to more than distract that thing,” she added. “Our fighters have expended their weapons and are now recovering back on board. We are continuing to fire high-velocity nano-D canisters into the object. We are not yet sure if this is having any direct effect.”
Another five seconds dragged past.
“Cease fire, America! Cease fire! Do not, repeat, do not continue to fire disassemblers at the target!”
Gutierrez hesitated. Technically, Ritter outranked her. If America had been assigned to Task Force Ritter she would have been legally able to give her orders. On the other hand, America had not received orders to join with Task Force Ritter, which meant that she could do as she damn well pleased. An interesting political and diplomatic situation …
But Wotan’s fighters were entering the combat zone, which meant they would be at risk from America’s nano-D fire. “Mr. Daly!” she called. “Cease fire.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
“Com. Message headquarters. Update them … and request clarification of our command chain out here.”
“Right away, Captain.”
This far from Earth, it would be forty minutes for her request to reach HQ, and forty minutes more for their reply to get back to the America. Damn, she should have requested that clarification as soon as she knew Wotan’s battle group was going to join her.
It didn’t help, too, that she didn’t like the Euros … or trust them. Memories of the Confederation Civil War were still too damned fresh. She’d lost family in Columbus—her brother Steve, both of his wives, and her two young nephews. She wasn’t about to turn her ship over to the Pan-Euros without some very explicit orders indeed.
“Have your fighters reloaded,” Ritter told her, “and launch them in support of my battle group.”
