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TC/PE CVS Jeanne d’Arc
Kuiper Belt, HD 157950
98 light years from Earth
1748 hours, TFT
“Harrison has betrayed us,” Hans Westerwelle said, bitterly. “He warned Koenig, somehow.”
“We don’t know that,” Giraurd replied. “I … agree that he was less than eager to open the dialogue with Koenig.”
“‘Less than eager’? The Englander swine fought the idea tooth and nail. Koenig was his friend. We should investigate Harrison when this is over, and see where his true loyalties lie.”
The plan to have the three British ships pretend to join Koenig’s squadron had been Westerwelle’s. He was the European fleet’s political officer, a civilian appointed by Geneva to maintain loyalty and an acceptable level of enthusiasm within the Federation’s ranks.
The first nuclear-tipped missiles were detonating in brilliant, savage silence across the CIC’s forward view screens. They were unlikely to cause more than superficial damage to the incoming fighters, but they might deter, might force the enemy squadron commander to break off.
“Enemy fighters are still approaching from dead ahead!” the tactical officer called. “They’re at seventy percent of c and accelerating!”
“Engage point defense!” the Jeanne d’Arc’s captain ordered. “Fight them off!”
Giraurd sat back in his command chair, watching the CIC and bridge crews carry out their routines. It had been months since the Jeanne d’Arc had been in combat, and many in her crew were new to the ship, having come aboard just before the flotilla had left for Alphekka. It would be interesting to see how well they did in this, their first exercise that was not a drill. Her captain, Charles Michel, had seen action during the Defense of Earth, but he was Belgian rather than French, and Giraurd wasn’t sure he trusted the man.
Unfortunately, there were a lot of officers on board he didn’t entirely trust. Sawicki, the tactical officer, was a Pole. Mytnyk, the fighter wing commander, was Ukrainian, while the political officer, Westerwelle, was a German. And then there were the British, always a problem in European Federation politics.
The Pan-European Federation had been a superb idea on paper, but even now, more than 270 years after the Pax Confeoderata and more than 400 years after the Treaty of Maastricht, the idea of a union of European states sounded better than it worked. The Terran Confederation, it was said, was only as strong as its weakest members, and for all their public bravado, the Pan-Europeans rarely were able to show a solid or united front.
Of course, the North Americans had the same trouble—descendents of the old United States trying to show a common front with Canadians, Mexicans, and a clutter of tiny Central American states. Political unions simply didn’t work when the member states had more differences than similarities.
The odd thing about the situation was that threats from outside generally forced such unions to put aside internal differences and pull together; but if anything, the war with the Sh’daar had reawakened old animosities, infighting, and name-calling. The ancient cracks in the painted façade were showing, not only within the European Federation, but all throughout the realm of Humankind.
What was needed was a stronger government, a government with the resolve to force the disparate fragments of humanity into line. Politically, Giraurd was a Federationialist, a neosocialist political party calling for the final abolition of the old nationalist states and the creation of a genuine United Terra.
And that day was coming. Humankind had no choice but to unite in the face of the threat from outside. The first step was to crush the so-called independence movements in the USNA, and that meant bringing mavericks like Alexander Koenig into line. A united Humankind couldn’t afford individualists like Koenig or the right-wing political reactionaries remaining within the USNA’s government.
And so, in a way, the unification of mankind began here. “Hit them with everything we have, Mr. Sawicki,” he said.
Nuclear fire continued blossoming in stark and dazzling silence against the forward view screens.
VFA-44
Kuiper Belt, HD 157950
98 light years from Earth
1749 hours, TFT
A European Federation Raschadler flashed past on Gray’s port side, a thousand kilometers distant, practically at point-blank range, though too distant and far too fast relative to him for him to pick it up optically. Their name meant “Swift Eagle,” but in space combat, it was how many gravities a drive could pull that counted, not the actual velocity. Where the USNA Starhawks could pull up to fifty thousand gravities—an incredible performance—the Raschadlers could manage only about two thousand Gs. Where Starhawks could be pushing the speed of light after ten minutes of acceleration, it took the older Swift Eagles over four hours to reach near-c.
Gray needed to use that superior acceleration now to outperform the European fighters.
Twenty seconds passed swiftly, and Gray gave the order to decelerate. The Starhawks, still in their acceleration configurations—teardrop-shaped with slender spikes astern to bleed off excess gravitic energy—began slowing at fifty thousand Gs.
Another twenty seconds passed, with the SG-92s jinking wildly to throw off the European anti-fighter defenses. In such a tight formation, there would have been a danger of some nasty high-velocity collisions if the twelve fighters hadn’t been electronically tied together.
The enemy fighters were trying to slow and reverse course, but it would take them a long time to come around. Too long …
“Let your AIs handle the rendezvous,” Gray told the others. “Going on automatic for final deceleration and maneuvering. …”
At ten thousand kilometers per second, there’d been no evidence to human eyes that the fighters had been moving at all. The stars hung motionless in space, a cold testament to their distance and the gulfs between them. But under that searing, AI-controlled deceleration, the Jeanne d’Arc, suddenly, magically, was there, hanging in the black sky directly ahead, and Gray could see with his own eyes the gleaming blue-and-white curve of her shield cap, the neat letters and numerals picking out her name and registry number.
She was five kilometers away, and the linked fighters were closing now at a relative velocity of a half a kilometer per second.
“Combat mode!” Gray called. “Target the shield cap!”
The Jeanne d’Arc was still accelerating, so her forward shields were down. Gray thoughtclicked an icon within his virtual in-head display, and opened up with a long burst from his Gatling RFK-90 kinetic-kill cannon. Firing with a cyclic rate of twelve per second, the Gatling loosed a stream of magnetic-ceramic jacketed slugs, each with a depleted uranium core massing half a kilo and traveling at 175 meters per second plus the 500 meters per second of the fighter’s relative closing velocity. That much mass traveling that fast possessed a kinetic-energy punch powerful enough to shred hardened steel and ceramic laminate; bright flashes of light walked across the shield, and almost instantly a dense, white mist appeared above the impacts—water gushing out into vacuum and freezing almost instantly, creating a glittering cloud of ice particles.
“Watch his drag!” Gray shouted over the squadron link. “Stay clear of his drive field!”
Gravitic drive ships moved by projecting an artificial gravitational singularity ahead of their bows, creating an intense and tightly focused black hole that flickered on and off thousands of times per second, allowing the ship to fall forward into an ever-receding gravitational well. A fighter getting too close to the singularity would be drawn in and crushed out of existence in an instant, a process called “spaghettification” because of the effect on ships and personnel as they were torn by close-in tidal effects. The Dragonfires whipped past the projected drive field, feeling the hard tug but applying acceleration of their own to counter it. The other fighters were firing their Gatlings now as well, ripping the Jeanne d’Arc’s shield cap into ragged fragments and geysering sprays of fast-freezing water.
Like the America, the Jeanne d’Arc carried some billions of liters of liquid water inside its shield cap, water that served both as radiation shielding when the carrier was moving close to c, and as a reserve of reaction mass for the ship’s maneuvering thrusters. As the shield cap’s double hull was shredded, that water poured into space. Within seconds, most of it was falling in gleaming streamers into a tight spiral around the flickering drive singularity.
Gray’s fighter fell past the shield cap now, and he could see the turning hab modules in the cap’s shadow; where America had three hab modules mounted on the end of rotating spokes, the smaller European carrier had two. He also spotted the bridge tower, a building-sized structure rising from the ship’s spine between the shield cap and the hab module collar.
Laser and particle-beam fire snapped out toward his fighter, invisible to the eye but painted on Gray’s tactical display by his AI. He jinked, then pressed in closer, matching the carrier’s acceleration so that he seemed to be hanging just above her spine.
“Jeanne d’Arc!” he called using the general fleet frequency. “This is Dragon One, off the USNA America! Unless you want to lose your bridge and CIC, I suggest that you break off your attack run.”
There was silence for a long handful of seconds. The carrier’s hab modules and bridge tower were shielded, of course; he could see the faint blurring of edges where the gravitic shielding twisted light. But a nuke or a determined particle-beam attack could overload those shields or destroy their projection wave guides, and then the carrier’s vital nerve centers would be defenseless.
On the other hand, the Jeanne d’Arc had point-defense turrets that were doing their best to hit him. This close to the carrier’s spine, they were having trouble reaching him, but they were trying to hit the other fighters in the squadron as they moved in closer. A stream of KK rounds reached out and caught Dragon Eight—Lieutenant Will Rostenkowski’s ship—sending it into a helpless tumble.
“Jeanne d’Arc!” Gray barked again. “Cease fire and cease acceleration or I’m going to put a hundred megatons right on your bridge tower!”
“Don’t shoot, Dragon One,” a voice said over the fleet channel. “We will comply.”
He had to back out of his safe pocket, then, or risk hurtling into the underside of the carrier’s shield cap when the Jeanne d’Arc cut her acceleration. It could have been a trick, a ruse designed to pull him out of his pocket … but the other Dragonfires were in close now, and the Pan-Europeans evidently had no desire for a stand-up fight.
Gray’s threat to use nukes had been pure bluff, of course. A Krait missile going off at such close range would probably have burned through the carrier’s bridge shielding, but definitely would have vaporized Gray’s fighter.
“America CIC,” he called, “Dragon One. Hostile carrier has ceased acceleration.”
“Well done, Dragonfires,” Wizewski’s voice called back. “Keep them in your sights. California and Saskatchewan are on the way to take over.”
“Copy that. He hesitated. “We also need a rescue SAR. One casualty.”
Rostenkowski was no longer transmitting. His ship had been smashed; he might have survived the impact, but a search-and-rescue tug would have to match courses with him and drag him back to be sure.
He watched as Jeanne d’Arc continued to bleed water into space.
How, he wondered, was Koenig going to handle this one? …
Chapter Four
11 April 2405
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Kuiper Belt, HD 157950
98 light years from Earth
0940 hours, TFT
“Admiral Giraurd,” Koenig said, standing. “Welcome aboard.” He kept his voice and his expression pleasant, even mild. It was important at this point to avoid any sense of drama.
Testosterone-laced posturing would not help at all at this point.
“Koenig,” Giraurd replied with a curt nod. “You still have the option of surrendering.”
“I think, sir, that I will decline that privilege.”
They were meeting physically instead of through virtual communications, within the spacious officers lounge in America’s hab modules. Present were Captain Buchanan and most of Koenig’s command staff and, just in case, several Marine guards flanking the doors as unobtrusively as they could considering that they were in full combat armor. Koenig and the other USNA officers wore full dress; Giraurd wore his command utilities, a blue jumper with the gold emblems of his rank on the shoulders and down the left sleeve.
“You are making an enormous mistake,” Giraurd said, taking an offered seat.
“Perhaps.” Koenig sat down as well, watching Giraurd across a low table grown from the deck. “But if so, I risk losing my command and, possibly, my fleet. If you and the Conciliationists are wrong, however, we could lose all of humanity. Our species could become extinct. Can you understand my point of view?”
Giraurd hesitated, then gave another nod. “I suppose so. But it is not for the military to make political decisions of this magnitude. You, of all people, should know that.”
Giraurd, Koenig knew, was referring to the peculiar political baggage the USNA derived from two of its predecessors—Canada and the United States of America. In those nation-states, the military had been expressly forbidden to participate in political decisions. While military coups had not been unthinkable, certainly, they’d been extremely unlikely when the military’s commander-in-chief had been the civilian president.
It was a tradition not all members of the Terran Confederation shared. Giraurd was chiding him for breaking that tradition, for making what was essentially a political decision without going through a democratic process.
“Out here,” Koenig said quietly, “we have to make our own decisions. They don’t see what we see, not from a hundred light years away.”
“And suppose your little raid behind the enemy lines backfires, Koenig? Suppose it brings down upon us the full weight of the Sh’daar?”
“In other words,” Koenig replied gently, “what if we make them angry? Earth lost sixty million souls during their last foray into the Sol System. It’s hard to see how they could be any madder.”
During the Defense of Earth, in October of 2404, a twelve-kilo mass traveling at a significant fraction of c had skimmed past the sun and slammed into the Atlantic Ocean, 3,500 kilometers off the North American seaboard. The resultant tidal waves had scoured the coastlines of North and South America, Africa, and of Europe, killing an estimated 60 million people.
“Perhaps,” Giraurd said. “We might not be so lucky with another direct attack on Earth. That impactor might have simply been a demonstration of their power. We would not survive a determined attack.”
“I agree,” Koenig said. “And that’s why we’re out here. Even the Sh’daar don’t have unlimited resources. If we pose a threat to their worlds, to their star systems and the systems of their allies, we’ll draw them away from the Confederation.”
“You are a fly attacking an elephant, Koenig.”
“Perhaps. But elephants, I will remind you, are extinct. Earth still has lots of flies.”
“Listen to what I am saying! My point is that the Sh’daar and their allies, the Turusch, the H’rulka, the Nungiirtok, and others, are too big, too powerful, for Earth to face alone!”
“I hear what you’re saying, Grand Admiral. My point is that Earth needs time, and I’m attempting to buy that time. I’m not against negotiating. I’m just hoping we can negotiate with the Sh’daar when they’re not holding a gun to our head!”
“And if we give in to the Sh’daar demands … what is the worst that will happen? We give up our insane gallop into a world of ever higher and higher technology! We become content with what we have! We avoid the Vinge Singularity! And what would be so bad about that?”
Giraurd was referring to a long-expected exponentiation of human technology, sometimes called the Technological Singularity, when human life, blending with human technology, would pass out of all recognition. It was named for a late-twentieth-century math professor, computer scientist, and writer who’d pointed out that the rate of increase in human technology had fast been approaching a vertical line on the graph, and that had been in 1993. When the Sh’daar had delivered their ultimatum almost four centuries later, they’d demanded that Humankind stop all technological development and research, especially in the fields of genetics, robotics, information systems and computers, and nanotechnology. These so-called GRIN technologies were seen as the principal drivers in the coming Technological Singularity; arrest them, and human life might not evolve into something unrecognizably alien.
“I don’t know,” Koenig admitted. “But I do think we deserve to make our own mistakes.”
“The Sh’daar seem terrified of the Singularity,” Giraurd said. “Perhaps it is with good cause.”
“Terrified of the Singularity itself?” Koenig asked. “Or of what happens if another technic species like us reaches it?” He shrugged. “In any case, if it’s a mistake, it’s our mistake. We should not allow ourselves to be protected from it by the Sh’daar or anyone else. And more than that … don’t you think we should make our own decisions about our future and about who we’re going to play with as we move out into the galaxy? If the Sh’daar fold us into their little empire, they’ll use us like they use the Turusch and the others, right? As frontline warriors? Damn it, Admiral, the Confederation military will end up working for them, puttering around the galaxy putting down upstart technic species … species like we are now. That is, unless they decide to just turn us all into slaves and be done with it!”
“I hadn’t realized, Admiral Koenig, that you were a xenophobe.”
“I am not, Admiral Giraurd. But I do believe in self-determination for my species!”
The two men glared at each other for a moment across the table. Gradually, Koenig relaxed. He’d hoped to get the Pan-European admiral to see reason—as, no doubt, Giraurd had hoped for him—but the argument was going nowhere. Giraurd would not change his mind, and neither would Koenig.
“I see no reason to continue this discussion, Admiral,” he said. “How badly was the Jeanne d’Arc damaged?”
“Our water reserves are gone,” he said with a Gallic shrug. “Repair robots are working on the breached tanks now.”
“I’ve given order that the battlegroup’s repair and fabrication ships be deployed to lend you a hand. There were no casualties?”
“No. Your fighters were … surgically precise.”
In 1921, General William Lendrum “Billy” Mitchell had argued, then demonstrated, that aircraft, only recently emerged as military weapons, could sink battleships. Within another twenty years, air attacks against naval fleets at Taranto and Pearl Harbor would completely change the way wars were fought at sea, but in 1921 the idea was not merely revolutionary, but heretical.
Young Lieutenant Gray had demonstrated a similar principle, one now well known within the military and political hierarchies back home but frequently ignored: a twenty-two-ton fighter could disable a capital ship a kilometer long and massing millions of tons. The trick was in slipping it in exactly where it would be most effective, with enough firepower to overcome the target’s gravitic shielding. Surgical precision, as Giraurd had put it, made possible by advanced technology, was the only means by which a lone gravfighter could take down a far larger foe.
Something of the sort would be necessary if the Terran Confederation was going to win over the Sh’daar.
“The intent was to stop you, Admiral,” Koenig said. “Not hurt you.”
“I could wish, sir, that you had destroyed the Jeanne d’Arc … and me with her.”
Giraurd’s emotional pain showed for a moment, but Koenig ignored it. The man would have to explain his failure later, in front of the Senate Military Directorate. It might even mean the end of his career.
Welcome to the club, Koenig thought.
“Do you anticipate any problem getting the Jeanne d’Arc ready for Alcubierre Drive?”
“No. The damage is superficial. But we will need to take on water.”
