Dark Mind

“Okay, people,” Gray said softly. “All nav systems to automatic. Let the AIs take us through.”

The warning was unnecessary—more nervous reassurance than anything else. All twelve ships of Battlegroup America were being guided now by powerful artificial intelligences. Presumably, the additional ship, the Glothr Nameless, was guided by non-organic systems as well. Jellyware brains—even enhanced by AI implants—simply weren’t precise enough or fast enough to handle the variables successfully.

For a breathless moment, the star carrier America hung on the verge between one space and another …

And then unimaginable energies seized the vessel and dragged her in.

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

0458 hours, TFT

Something strange was happening to time.

The TRGA was just twelve kilometers long. Traveling at some twenty kilometers per second relative to the alien portal, Gregory should have been through and out the other side in six tenths of a second. It felt, however, like ten or fifteen seconds, an impossibly long time as the blurred gray walls of the tube swept past his ship, terrifyingly close. The slightest miscalculation, and his fighter would be shredded by contact with a wall moving at very close to c. Even if he didn’t hit that motion-smeared surface, a tenmeter drift in any direction would put him on a different spacetime trajectory … and the gods alone knew where he would emerge … or when.

Then the TRGA’s walls vanished, whisked away at twenty kps as Gregory’s fighter emerged into open space once more.

And this new space was extraordinarily crowded with stars.

“My God …” he breathed, awed. The White Covenant be damned—the phrase spoke to how he felt.

The Black Demons were moving through the central core of the N’gai star cluster … a dwarf galaxy just above the plane of the vast spiral of the Milky Way. The TRGA had brought them back through time as well—some 876 million years into their remote past. In this epoch, life on Earth was still confined to the planet’s seas and was only just then discovering that sex and genetic diversity were useful evolutionary ideas.

“Commsat away,” Mackey reported. The satellite would drift in front of the TRGA, recording all transmissions from the squadron. If anything happened to the fighters …

Gregory didn’t allow himself to think about that.

“We have company, Skipper,” he reported. “Bearing zero-zero-five, minus two-one, range three-zero-thousand.”

“Got it, Greg. All Demons, shift vector to zero-zero-five, minus two-one. Do not, repeat do not initiate hostilities …”

“Not unless they freakin’ initiate first,” Kemper added.

Gregory could see the oncoming alien spacecraft in an in-head display, picked up by his fighter’s long-range optics, magnified, and streamed through the craft’s AI into his brain. They were small, each only a meter or two across. They were oddly shaped, too, no two precisely alike. Perhaps more important, there were thousands of them in an onrushing cloud.

It did not look like a friendly reception.

And something was happening within that cloud of oncoming craft. Individual ships were shifting position, orienting themselves as though seeking to form some larger structure. Within his in-head, Gregory could see a series of rings, perfectly aligned, each a hundred meters across.

What the hell?

“Thirty thousand kilometers,” Mackey said. “We need to get …”

“Hostile incoming!” Lieutenant Cynthia DeHaviland yelled over the tactical link. “The bastards are firing!”

A tightly coherent bolt of energy struck Demon Six—Lieutenant Voight’s ship. The Starblade vanished in a cloud of white-hot vapor.

“Spread out and accelerate!” Mackey ordered. “Boost to five hundred Gs! Let’s close the gap!”

The eleven surviving Starblades hurtled forward, their velocity increasing by five kilometers per second each second. Ahead, the cloud of silvery objects continued to maneuver to organize themselves into a huge, indistinct structure. The energy bolt had come through those closely aligned rings, and Gregory’s long-range scanners were picking up evidence of a fast-building magnetic charge …

“It’s a particle cannon!” Gregory called as understanding gelled. “It’s a fucking particle cannon five kilometers long!”

Gregory wondered how they’d managed that trick … positioning individual spacecraft like pieces in a titanic puzzle, not touching physically, but apparently locked together by magnetic fields. He didn’t ponder it long, as another pulse of energy surged up through the floating rings and very nearly caught Lieutenant Caswell, who rolled clear just as the particle beam passed him.

“Spread out, damn it, spread out!” Mackey yelled. “Arm Kraits! Target the dense parts of that cloud!”

Each Starblade carried a full complement of thirty-two VG-92 Krait space-to-space missiles, plus six of the massive and more powerful VG-120 Boomslangs. Still, a total of 418 missiles of varying megatonnage, Gregory reflected, was not going to go very far against that vast and sprawling cloud of diminutive alien vessels.

They would have to make each shot count, taking great care in the placement of every one. By targeting the thickest regions of the alien spacecraft cloud, they would do the greatest damage with what they had available.

I hope.

“Fire!”

Gregory had already brought up the control icons for the first two Kraits in his magazine, arming both and setting their yields to a hundred megatons each. The alien swarm dominated an in-head window; he zoomed in on a dense knot of alien vessels—a part of the open architecture of the enemy’s immense particle cannon.

“Demon Four, Fox One!” he yelled over the tactical channel. “Times two!”

Centuries before, the “Fox One” radio call had meant the launch of a heat-seeking missile. Now it meant a smart missile like the VG-92 Krait shipkiller, the Boomslang, or Fer-de-lance … or even the old-style Kraits, the VG-10s, now obsolete and considerably less competent in the AI department.

With his first two shots away, Gregory shifted targets, brought two more Kraits on-line, and loosed them. His primary tactical display was fast becoming an indecipherable mass of fighters, targets, and the slow-crawling contrails of missiles in flight. All of those contrails swung wide before angling in toward their targets, and their onboard AIs had them dodging and twisting to avoid enemy defensive fire, turning the display into a classic dogfighting furball. His AI could read the mess though, even if he could not. This allowed Gregory to focus his attention on maneuvering the Starblade, trying to make sure that it was not where the enemy was aiming and firing that colossal particle gun—

—which fired again, an instant before the first Kraits detonated in silent blossoms of white light … one blast after another, each equivalent to 100 million tons of high explosive.

Alien ships evaporated by the hundreds, caught between multiple expanding plasma shock waves and by intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. Nuclear explosions were not nearly as effective in the vacuum of space as they were in an atmosphere, but the temperature at the heart of each blast still measured well over 100 million degrees. As the fireballs faded, large bubbles of emptiness were stitched through the mass of silvery spacecraft. The precise organization of the particle gun appeared to have been disrupted, and the remaining fragments of the structure dissolved as alien spacecraft abandoned it.

And then the Black Demon squadron was plunging into and through the cloud of alien ships. Bright red icons representing hostile targets filled his mental view of the surrounding starscape. Gregory lined up on one of the enemy vessels and triggered his own particle weapon, sending a beam lancing into the target with savage precision.

“Watch it, Demon Four!” Caswell called to him. “You’ve got two coming in fast behind you!”

“I see ’em.”

The two aliens dropped onto his six and he flipped his Starblade end-for-end, hurtling backward as he snapped off one burst of electric flame … then a second … and a third when one target evaded his attack and kept coming.

The Sh’daar fighters had teeth. A beam caught Demon Eight, a newbie named Romero, and ripped her Starblade in half. Gregory eased his fighter around and teamed with DeHaviland. Together, they vaporized another Sh’daar fighter.

“How long before the fleet comes through?” DeHaviland called.

“Don’t know, Cyn,” Gregory replied. “Should be any sec now!”

That wasn’t just wishful thinking. Fighter point missions weren’t intended to engage in long-term combat. The point element was intended to go ahead of the battlegroup, find out if there were hostiles ahead, and engage them until the capitals could come up.

At least, that was the idea. If the battlegroup didn’t come through the TRGA for some reason, there were ten Starblade fighters on this side that would be in a hell of a lonely situation.

Worse would be what might happen if the local hostiles proved too much for the entire battlegroup. America and her escorts might die here, on this side of the TRGA.

Which would mean that the Black Demons would have already been wiped out.

An enemy particle beam grazed his fighter, jolting him hard. He bit off a curse and tumbled to the left, targeting an alien that was close—too close—and firing. The plasma shock wave jolted him a second time.

Damn it, don’t think so much. Angry, now, at allowing himself to be distracted, he focused all of his attention on the data cascading through his link with his fighter.

Where was Cyn? He’d lost her in that last exchange. An icon flashed against the dazzling backdrop of thickly crowded stars. There …

The red icons were drawing together, bunching up.

What the hell are they up to?

TC/USNA CVS America

Flag Bridge

N’gai Cluster, T-0.876gy

0503 hours, TFT

Emergence …

Gray leaned forward in his seat, staring out into the throng of crowded suns, the central heart of a pocket-sized galaxy almost 900 million years lost in the remote past. At least, that was the idea …

“America,” he said, addressing the ship’s primary AI. “Do you have the temp-nav data yet?”

“Affirmative, Admiral,” the ship’s mind replied, more as a mental impression than as distinct words. “Downloading to Navigation now.”

“Got it, Admiral,” Commander Victor Blakeslee reported. “Looks like we’re spot-on. According to the positions of three hundred key stars, we’re at the same spot as the Koenig Expedition, plus twenty years.”

“Looks like we arrived after the armistice,” Commander Dean Mallory, the chief tactical officer, observed. “That’s good news.”

Gray nodded. “Time seems to pass at the same rate on both sides of a triggah,” he said. “Good to know. I wasn’t looking forward to fighting the sons of bitches again.”

“No, sir.”

Around America, other ships of Task Force 1 were gathering as, in ones and twos and threes, they slipped through from their present to their remote past.

“Tactical! Do we have a fix on Point One?”

“We have them!” Mallory replied. “Bearing zero-zero-five, minus two-one, range two-six-thousand. We have multiple nuke detonations and particle beam discharges.”

“Captain Gutierrez …”

“Coming to new heading, Admiral,” Gutierrez said. “Zero-zero-five, minus two-one.”

“Punch it.”

America glided forward, accelerating behind the thousand-times-per-second flicker of her gravitational singularity projected out ahead of her shield cap. The other eleven human ships of the battlegroup, plus the alien Nameless, edged into the new vector and accelerated in the star carrier’s wake. Ideally, the destroyers Diaz or Mattson would have been in the battlegroup’s van, along with a couple of frigates, clearing the way, but Gray didn’t want to spend the extra time organizing his tiny fleet while one of the carrier’s fighter squadrons was heavily engaged just 26,000 kilometers ahead. Judging from the swarm of alien fighters in the distance, by-the-book tactics weren’t going to afford the carrier much protection in any case … if at all.

“CAG,” Gray said, “you may loose the rest of the hounds.”

Captain Connie Fletcher was America’s CAG, the commander of the star carrier’s fighter group. “Launching fighters, aye, aye, sir.”

“All ships,” Gray continued. “Fire when you have a clear shot …”

Chapter Three

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.