Dark Matter

Maybe there were advantages to having the USNA government renew its claims along the coast after all.

Angrily, she shook off the thought. The government was the proverbial camel with its nose worming in under the side of the tent. Let it in just a little, and pretty soon the whole damned camel was in there, shouldering you out into the desert cold.

No. . . .

Blue Seven, VF-­910

Saturn Space

1315 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Frank Gallagher accelerated at nearly 10,000 Gs, streaking up from the tiny white, icy moon and into open space. Above him, Saturn hung huge and vast and beautiful, filling half the sky, her rings a diamond-­hard and ruler-­straight white scratch across all of heaven.

“Enceladus Base!” he called. “Blue One clear and accelerating!”

“Copy, Blue One,” the voice of Enceladus Flight Control replied in his head.

“Joining formation.” The three other Starfighters of Blue Flight drifted in open formation a few thousand kilometers ahead and he moved to join them. “Okay, Blues,” he said. “Keep it tight.”

“Blue Two, affirmative.” That was Lieutenant Karyl Joyce.

“Blue Four, ready to boost.” Lieutenant Dwayne Tanner.

“Blue Three, ready.” Lieutenant Victor Truini.

“Blue Flight formed up and ready for formation intercept,” Gallagher announced.

“Copy, Blue Flight. Unknowns now bearing at one-­seven-­three plus twelve, range two-­niner-­five thousand. Unknowns have fired on Red Flight, and are confirmed hostile. You have weapons free, I say again, weapons free.”

“Copy weapons free. Coming to one-­seven-­three plus one-­two.”

“Go get ’em, Frank.”

“No prob, Salad Bowl. Keep the coffee warm for us back there.”

“Will do.” The voice hesitated. “We’re reading the hostiles now as twelve Krag-­sixties. Range now two-­five-­zero thousand. The big boys are moving in, range one-­point-­seven-­seven million.”

Not good. “Copy.”

The Pan-­European Krag-­sixties—­KRG-­60 Todtadlers, or Death Eagles—­were as fast, as maneuverable, and as heavily armed as modern USNA Velociraptors, which meant that they were much better than Blue Flight’s older Starhawks, especially at long range.

They would have to get in tight to make a difference.

But twelve of them! Blue Flight consisted of four Starhawks, and Red Flight of four more, assuming they were all still operational. The USNA defensive contingent at Enceladus was going to be badly outclassed in this engagement—­and there were still the “big boys,” the Confederation capital ships, to contend with.

“Blue Flight, engage sperm mode,” Gallagher ordered. The external hulls of the SG-­92 Starhawks softened and flowed, morphing into their high-­velocity configuration—­a rounded body with a long, slender spike at the tail. Streamlining wasn’t normally a factor in spaceflight—­at least, not at normal planetary velocities. But minute flecks of debris—­stray hydrogen atoms, for the most part—­were definitely a consideration at higher velocities.

And, more to the point, the region of space close to Enceladus was not hard vacuum. The dazzlingly white moon was imbedded inside the thickest part of Saturn’s E ring; in fact, specks of frozen water streaming out from Enceladus were responsible for creating the E Ring, and for keeping it in existence. Though local space was still hard vacuum by terrestrial standards, flying through that blizzard of ice particles at high-­G accelerations would be like plowing through an atmosphere of molasses.

“On my mark, boys and girl,” Gallagher told his flight. “Fifty-­kay gees in three . . . and two . . . and one . . . and boost!”

Powerful, tightly wrapped balls of warped space flickered into existence off each Starhawk’s bow. In existence for only a tiny fraction of a second, each microsingularity lasted just long enough to bend space ahead, allowing the fighter to fall forward. By continuing to flicker on and off, the drive allowed the craft to bootstrap itself to higher and higher velocities . . . and since the fighter was in freefall, following the local curvature of space itself, there were none of the unpleasant side effects of acceleration—­like having the pilot smeared across his acceleration couch in a thin, red stain. At 50,000 gravities, a Starhawk could nudge up against the speed of light in about ten minutes. They wouldn’t be boosting for that long, however. The idea was to engage the incoming enemy, not blow right past him at a high percentage of c. The fighters’ AIs cut off acceleration when the closing velocity was up to 5,000 kilometers per second, and the enemy was thirty seconds away.

“Prepare to engage,” Gallagher called. “Arm Kraits. Spread for area effect . . . but watch out for our Red Flight. Blue Four, hold yours in reserve.”

“Copy, Blue Leader.”

Kraits were nuke-­tipped VG-­10 antiship missiles. They were particularly effective against capital ships, but a near miss would fry a fighter’s circuitry and the expanding plasma sphere might shred hull matrix if the detonation was close enough. They weren’t as powerful or as long-­ranged as the newer Boomslangs or Taipans, but they could do the job well enough with good tactics.

Gallagher watched the red points of light representing the enemy fighters drift across an in-­head window, each accompanied by a small block of text describing the target’s mass, direction, speed, and acceleration. The friendlies out there were in full retreat . . . three of them dropping back toward Enceladus at high-­G. A white sphere of light blossomed . . . and then there were two friendlies left. The hostiles kept closing.

Damn it, they should have ordered Red Flight to open up on the unknowns as soon as they’d become visible. Who the hell else had the Salad Bowl—­the squadron’s pet slang name for Enceladus Station—­been expecting out here?

He selected four Kraits, marked detonation points on his in-­head to create a spread across the expected paths of the Confederation fighters, and triggered the release. “Fox One!” he announced. “Blue One, missiles away!”

“Blue Three! Fox One!”

“Blue Two! Fox One!”

Fox One was the code phrase indicating the launch of smart missiles—­fire-­and-­forget warheads equipped with AIs to guide them to their targets. Released from the fighters’ bellies, the missile drives switched on an instant after they were clear to avoid changing the fighters’ vectors, sending them streaking into darkness. One vanished two seconds later, wiped from the sky by a Todtadler’s particle beam, but the others detonated in a pulsing one-­two-­three blossoming of white light. The enemy fighters had scattered off their path as soon as they’d detected the launch . . . but the spreads launched by Truini and Joyce had been placed to box the Todtadlers in, and as additional fireballs flared in the distance, two of the enemy fighters vanished, while a third, torn by an expanding plasma fireball, tumbled helplessly out of control.

But there were missiles incoming now, answering Blue Flight’s volley. Gallagher’s AI pegged the designation as AM/AS-­9, which carried the USNA code name Black Mamba. The AM/AS designation stood for antimatter/antiship; rather than a nuclear warhead, it packed several grams of antimatter in a magnetic containment capsule, enough to generate a multi-­megaton blast laced with deadly X-­ray and gamma radiation. There were eight of them, pushing a 100,000 Gs. The Pan-­Europeans, it appeared, were out for blood.

“Blue Four!” Gallagher called. “Try to block those Mambas!”

“Copy, Blue Leader! Fox One . . .”

For several endless seconds, two sets of artificial intelligences vied with each other tactically, each trying to outguess the other, feinting, dodging, putting on sudden bursts of acceleration, or decelerating sharply to spoof its opposite numbers. Then nuclear flashes erupted against the black of space, deathly silent, and half of the Mambas vanished in the blasts.

Four kept coming, their AIs seeking out the formation of USNA Starhawks for the kill.

“Blue Flight, go to E-­and-­E!” Gallagher yelled, breaking hard high and to port. E and E—­Evasion and Escape. It was time to get the hell out of Dodge.

Sharp turns with a singularity fighter were always dicey, requiring the drive to anchor the gravity ball and allow the fighter to whip around it into the new desired course. The tricky part was keeping the fighter smoothly riding the gravity well’s sides without slipping in close enough to be caught in the microsingularity’s tidal effects. Maneuvering in a singularity fighter was completely unlike flying an atmospheric wing. Rather than banking and turning on air, it was space itself that was being twisted, allowing one vector to be shifted to another in a 90-­degree turn, or even through a full one-­eighty. Do it right and you slid around the artificial black hole smoothly, the sky wheeling past your head and you didn’t even feel the turn because you were still in free fall. Do it wrong and in an instant your fighter would be shredded into metallic confetti . . . a process technically known as spaghettification.

Jinking in three dimensions, Gallagher worked to keep the enemy warheads guessing, letting his ship’s AI handle the math, but guiding the process with his organic brain to keep the maneuverings as random and as unpredictable as possible. One of the antimatter warheads detonated several thousand kilometers to starboard, the flash wiping out the sky for a light-­dazzled ­couple of seconds. A blue icon winked out of existence with the flash. Blue Four, Dwayne Tanner . . . and the end had come so quickly he’d not even realized he was dying.

“Blue Leader, Blue Two!” Joyce screamed. “I’ve got two on my tail! Can’t shake them!”

On the in-­head, Gallagher could see Blue Two twisting hard to escape a pair of Todtadlers closing on her six, but he was too far . . . too far. . . .

“I’m on it, Karyl,” Truini called back. “Going to guns. Target lock . . . and fire!”

Blue Three swung into perfect line with the two Death Eagles at close range, spraying kinetic-­kill Gatling rounds into their path. First one, then the other of the KRG-­60s flared into savage smears of white-­and-­orange light, the wreckage twisting wildly into the fighter’s own drive singularity and vanishing in an instant.

“Good shot!” Gallagher told Truini, but then he had some serious problems of his own: a Black Mamba settling in on his own six and accelerating fast.

Cutting acceleration, Gallagher spun his Starhawk end for end, so that he now was facing the oncoming Mamba, traveling stern-­first. He selected two AS-­78 AMSO rounds. The acronymn stood for anti-­missile shield ordnance, but they were better known as sandcasters—­unguided warheads packed with several kilos of lead spherules, each as small as a grain of sand.

“Fox Two!” he called—­the launch alert for unguided munitions, and he sent the AMSO warheads hurtling toward the Mamba. They detonated an instant later, firing sand clouds like shotgun bursts directly in the Mamba’s path. Before the Black Mamba’s AI could correct or dodge, the missile had hit the sand cloud at a velocity so high that the missile flared and disintegrated . . . then erupted in a savage burst of matter-­antimatter annihilation.

The blast was close . . . very nearly too close. The expanding plasma wall nudged Gallagher’s Starhawk as it unfolded at close to the speed of light, putting him into a rough, tumbling spin. For the next several seconds he was extremely busy, trying to balance his Starhawk’s attitude controls to bring him out of the tumble.

Then he had the nimble little ship back under control, with tiny Enceladus and, beyond, the looming bulk of Saturn filling the forward sky. Red icons were scattering rapidly past and around him, he saw; those were the enemy fighters. Farther off, still a million kilometers away, a small knot of red icons marked an incoming continent of Confederation capital ships. The big boys were decelerating now, closing on Enceladus and leaving the mop-­up of the defending USNA squadron to their own fighters.

And Gallagher didn’t see any way he could stop them, or even to get close. The last of Red Flight was gone, now, and the three remaining fighters of Blue Flight weren’t going to be able to do a damned thing about those heavies. His AI’s warbook was busily cataloguing the enemy fleet . . . two heavy cruisers, a light carrier, half a dozen destroyers, a ­couple of monitor gun platforms, a heavy transport . . .

Jesus! What did they think the USNA had deployed out here on this damned little iceball? Salad Bowl was a civilian research station, nothing more, an exobiology outpost hunting for alien life in the salty deep-­ocean pockets beneath the Enceladean ice. The Starhawk squadron had been placed here to protect against minor Pan-­European raids . . . but what he was seeing here was a large-­scale invasion. That transport was almost certainly a troop ship.

They might yet manage to do some damage. “Listen up, team,” he called. “We’re on a vector that will take us within ten thousand kilometers of that transport. I think it’s probably a troop ship, okay? Hit that baby, and we might be able to throw a major wrench into the Pannies’ plans.”

A troop ship meant troops, which meant the Pan-­Europeans were here to occupy Enceladus or some other body in the Saturn subsystem . . . Titan, possibly, or the Huygens ERRF observatory in Saturn orbit. Destroy or damage it badly enough, and those invasion plans would have to be scrubbed. Gallagher had two Kraits left in his armament bays; he would shoot one and save the other as a just-­in-­case.

“That’s gonna really stir up a hornet’s nest,” Joyce said.

“Yeah, boss,” Truini added. “And what’s the point, anyway? We have to surrender. We’ve freakin’ lost!”

Gallagher considered the question. Out here on the cold, empty ass-­edge of the system, concepts like duty and honor just didn’t count for as much as they might back in more civilized areas. Here, you fought for your buddies.

Or, in this case, the other members of the squadron back in the Salad Bowl, the loaders, manglers, technicians, and all of the other support and logistics personnel that made a squadron work. Not to mention some six hundred scientists, technicians, and support personnel stationed at the Bowl.

“Yeah, and how are we supposed to do that, True?” Gallagher replied. Another antimatter warhead detonated in the distance, flooding the area with a harsh and deadly light. Surrender was not a matter of simply contacting the enemy . . . not when their electronic defenses were up to prevent attempts to hack into fighter control systems or AIs. “If the Bowl tells us to stand down, we stand down. Until then, we fight, damn it!”

There was no response . . . and Gallagher realized with a sudden cold impact that Truini’s fighter had vanished from the display with that last detonation. It was down to Gallagher and Joyce.

“Blue Two calling Fox One!” Joyce announced. “Missiles away!”

Gallagher programmed the shot and triggered it. “Fox One!”

“Their fighters are trying to cut us off!

“I see them.” He considered their options . . . which were few and not good. He considered ducking in Saturn’s rings and immediately discarded the idea. The thicker portions of the rings were too distant—­the outer reaches of the massive and brilliant B Ring orbited over 120,000 kilometers farther in from Enceladus, more than a third the distance between Earth and Luna.

But damn it, they needed cover.

Nuclear fireballs flared and blossomed in the distance. The enemy transport was still there . . . but it was no longer decelerating. Maybe they’d done some damage. Maybe . . .

Something about the data coming up on the alien transport didn’t add up. The ship was longer than a French Orcelle-­class transport—­nearly 700 meters—­and its power curve was closer to that of a battle cruiser than a troop ship. Gallagher called up a magnified image . . . and he stifled a sharp, bitter exclamation.

He didn’t know what that . . . that thing was, but it wasn’t a troop ship.

No time for analyses now. He would store the data and hope he lived to transmit it.

“Okay! Make a run for Enceladus, Karyl. Close pass . . . crater hop if you have to. We’ll see if we can lose ’em in the ice!”

“Right behind you, Frank.”

The problem with being so badly outnumbered was the openness out here, with enemy fighters and capital ships now moving in from all sides. If they could get down on the deck of Enceladus, half the encircling sky would be blocked, and the radar and laser signatures of the fighters themselves might be masked by the ice skimming beneath their keels.

“Enceladus Base, this is Blue Leader!” he called over the tactical channel. “We’re down to two fighters! I think we managed to ding their troop ship, but they’re trying to swarm us! What are your instructions?”

“Blue Flight, Enceladus Base. You’ve done what you can, Frank. Get the hell clear of battlespace. RTB when you can.”

“Copy.” RTB—­Return to base—­when they could, if they could. More Black Mambas were streaking toward them, now. If things had been bad before, they were worse now. The enemy fighters were furious at the attack on the Confederation capital ship. Gallagher launched several more sandcaster rounds, then put on a burst of raw, hard acceleration that sent him hurtling toward the fast-­swelling white disk of the moon. He was aware of the crater-­pocked surface growing swiftly larger, of the dazzle from a distance-­weakened sun glinting from the ice plains below . . . and then he was twisting around his drive singularity, fighting to shift his vector to one a little closer to parallel to the moon’s surface. Enceladus was so near now that its bulk blocked out the far vaster loom of giant Saturn.

Three enemy fighters were following him down. Where were the rest?

Where was Karyl?

He didn’t know. The three bandits on his six were closing fast, though. It looked like they were lining up for a gun attack rather than another volley of antimatter warheads. Maybe their missile rails had gone empty. Maybe . . . maybe . . .

A nuclear fireball blossomed to port, the detonation rapidly lost astern. They were popping nukes at him then . . . and one had just impacted the surface. He swerved to starboard, angling toward the tiny moon’s south polar region, still accelerating.

His fighter shuddered, and he heard the rapid-­fire banging of small high-­velocity pellets against his hull. He cut back on his speed . . . then cut back again as the shuddering increased in strength and decibel level.

A shimmering, hazy wall rose against the black of space from the horizon ahead.

Shit! In the excitement, Gallagher had forgotten about the moon’s south pole . . . and the tiger stripes.

Cassini, an early robotic probe exploring the Saturn system, had discovered the mysterious jets streaming out from the moon’s south polar region in 2005. The constant tug-­of war between Saturn and Enceladus created tidal heating and heavy tectonic activity, generating titanic cryovolcanoes erupting from four parallel fractures—­deep cracks in the icy crust popularly known as “tiger stripes” for their dark color. Geysers of water emerged at high pressures from the vents and froze almost instantly, creating plumes extending as far as 500 kilometers up and out into space.

Much of this ice drifted back to the surface of Enceladus as snow, carpeting the moon’s southern regions to create a brighter, whiter surface much younger than existed in the north. The rest drifted clear of the satellite and formed the broad, highly diffuse E ring of Saturn, a 2,000-­kilometer-­thick belt circling the planet all the way from the orbit of Mimas, an inner moon of the planet, out to Rhea.

Those cryovolcanic plumes had been the first evidence that Enceladus might harbor a liquid-­water ocean beneath the ice . . . and possibly life as well. Enceladus base had been established a century and a half earlier to search for that life—­a far more difficult task than on Jupiter’s Europa. While the subsurface ocean had a temperature close to 0˚ centigrade, the surface of the ice was a numbing 240 degrees colder, just 33 degrees above absolute zero. And unlike Europa, the internal ocean seemed to exist in pockets, limiting the areas where the xenobiology ­people could drill.

The effort had been worth it, however. Life had been discovered beneath the Enceladean ice . . . very, very strange life, life based on hydrogen-­germanium chemistry—­on organometallic semiconductors rather than on carbon chains.

Exactly how an ice ball like Enceladus had acquired enough germanium—­a relatively rare element on Earth—­to evolve life based on the stuff was a mystery; how it worked was a bigger mystery still. Simply identifying the flecks of organometallics exchanging photons with one another in the Enceladean oceans as being alive had taken the better part of a century . . . and a near-­total rewrite of the definition of the word life.

Enceladus Station, located in the permanent blizzard 100 kilometers from the terminus of one of the tiger stripes, was a xenobiological outpost maintained as a joint venture by Phoenix University of Arizona and the Universidade de Brasília. With Brazil siding with the Confederation against the North American rebels, there’d been some understandable political stresses at Enceladus. VF-­910 had been dispatched to the moon to keep the peace . . . and the scientific neutrality of the base.

Obviously, it hadn’t worked out as planned. The Confederation had dispatched a naval squadron to seize Enceladus and to isolate North America from the rest of Earth’s scientific community.

None of this was of particular interest to Gallagher at the moment, as he skimmed above the polar ice toward a misty wall, which, at his current velocity, would have nearly the same effect on his ship as a cliff of solid ice. He gave orders to his AI, nudging the fighter into a slightly different path. Those tiger stripes each were about 35 kilometers apart. It would be like threading a needle, but he might slip between the plumes if he could maintain a low-­enough altitude.

The Pan-­European fighters were still behind him, following him in.

Hurtling between two towering plumes that filled the sky with misty light, Gallagher flipped his fighter end for end again, hurtling tail-­first and head-­down, meters above the roiled and jaggedly broken icy surface. He had one Krait remaining. He rolled back to keel-­down, giving orders to his AI in brief, staccato bursts of thought.

“Fox One!”

His last Krait dropped from his keel, ignited, streaked aft . . . and detonated on the ice. The flare was blinding . . . and an instant later a fresh and violent plume of freezing water geysered into space above the hole he’d punched into the surface, directly in the path of the trailing enemy fighters.

Unfortunately, the expanding plasma shock wave from his missile caught the Starhawk and nudged it to one side, nudged it enough to send it skimming through the fringes of one of the other plumes. Gallagher felt a savage shock, saw pieces of his fighter ripping free . . .

. . . and then the jolt of deceleration slammed against him, sending him hurtling into blackness as he lost consciousness. . . .

Chapter Six

4 March 2425

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

1640 hours, EST

“The President of the Confederation Senate is on the link for you, Mr. President,” Marcus Whitney, the Chief of Staff, said. “The new President, I should say.”

President Koenig glanced at the others in the room—­Pamela Sharpe, the Secretary of State. Lawrence Vandenberg, the Secretary of Defense. Dr. Neil Eskow, the Secretary of Science. All maintained facial expressions of careful neutrality.

“You have the security issues worked out already, I presume?”

“Of course, sir.”

The security problem was far more difficult than merely one of virus control. A direct data link between Geneva and the emergency USNA capital in Toronto could easily serve as a conduit for a variety of electronic attacks—­viruses, worms, or brute-­force virtual assaults aimed at downloading confidential data or knocking out the American communications network. Powerful e-­security AIs would be monitoring the exchange on both sides of the Atlantic, making sure that only the video and sound being exchanged between the two government leaders would pass the firewalls.