Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

Shifting her projected drive singularity to starboard, she put her fighter into a sharp turn.

Turning a ship at high-G was always a risky proposition. Space fighters, especially, couldn’t swoop or turn the way their atmospheric counterparts did, not without an atmosphere in which to bank, turn, and bleed off excess speed.

But they could come close. By projecting the singularity to the side or above or below, rather than straight ahead or astern, the fighter could travel along what technically was a straight line passing through gravitationally curved space…and the end result was a curved path. If the maneuver was performed correctly, the fighter could make the turn without acceleration effects-just as a spacecraft or hab module orbiting the Earth was following the curvature of space around the planet without feeling the effects of centripetal force.

But make the turn too tight, and the fighter could get caught by the singularity’s tidal effects. Its nose could be whipped around, throwing the ship into a nightmare spin; closer still, and the fighter would be ripped to shreds…or devoured in a flash of fragments and hard radiation by its own artificial singularity.

She kept her turn on the gentle side, giving the focus of her turn a generous berth. As her prow fell into line with the distant, fleeing fighter, she kicked in the forward drive once more, accelerating now at 48,000 gravities.

“AI targeting!” she called. “Beams!”

At these velocities, human reflexes simply weren’t fast enough-by several orders of magnitude-to track the target, lock on, and destroy it.

The Toad was also accelerating hard and fast, but the Starhawk was faster. The AI signaled target lock, a red cursor on the combat display capturing the target icon in its embrace and flashing quickly.

Before she could fire, the target vanished.

No matter. Her ship’s sensors couldn’t detect the Toad when it was completely shielded; it had been detected only because of its drive field. By shutting off its drive, the enemy fighter effectively became invisible…but it also could not change course or speed. Allyn’s AI could easily calculate where the Toad would be when the PBP-2 beam caught it.

Allyn’s AI triggered her Blue Lightning projector, three quick pulses invisible in the emptiness of space, but shown on her display as a bright, blue thread of light reaching toward the fleeing, invisible target, touching it….

Friedman had fired almost at the same instant. Two charged-particle beams caught the Toad from behind, slashing at its shields. One of the impacts caused substantial damage to the Toad’s aft shield projectors and part of the shield went down. The Toad was now nakedly exposed, fully visible, and still in her sights.

“Again!” she yelled, the adrenaline of the chase pounding through her system. “Fire!”

Her AI fired again, and the Toad vanished in a tiny nova of light.

“Good shot, Skipper!” Friedman called.

“Thank the wonders of technology,” she replied. But she was pleased. That had been a shot at extremely long-range for a fighter, and her AI had performed flawlessly. “All ships! Go to CTT.”

CCT-constant tactical transmission-meant that their AIs were beaming out steady reports on everything that was happening. Four hours from now, those transmissions would reach Earth, and headquarters would know that the enemy was, indeed, here as well as at Triton. Normally, CCT was left off during deep recon flights; there was no sense in letting the enemy know you were there. But Allyn had to assume that the Toad had flashed a warning to other Turusch ships out here as soon as it had detected the Confederation Starhawks. The enemy knew that four Starhawks were out here, and they would be reacting soon.

The CCT was beaming out in all directions, too, so the rest of the Black Lightnings would know, sooner or later, that Red Bravo One had run into bad guys, and they would be coming to help.

The question was whether they would be here in time.

There would be other cloaked Toads out here, probably a lot of them. Allyn guessed that the enemy had penetrated the High Guard warning net by slipping fighters through to the repeater station and destroying it… possibly by destroying a number of repeater stations. Those automated stations pinged their locations back to Earth and Mars, usually, twice a day, and it was possible that in all the excitement back there no one had yet noticed that one of the relays was off-line. A number of enemy fighters, brought in, perhaps, by a carrier that had deliberately emerged far out in Sol’s Kuiper Belt, had cloaked themselves and slipped in to the thirty-AU shell unobserved, slipping close enough that they could destroy the repeater station without being spotted.

It was a necessary and obvious prelude to an all-out Inner System assault-punching a hole through the enemy’s early-warning net to admit the attacking force unobserved.

And it was proof, positive, that the Turusch were sending a Force Bravo through the hole they’d opened. That was why no hasty, snap-launched impactor bombardment, or waves of high-velocity incoming fighters. The Turusch had had this operation planned down to the last detail, and would be descending on Earth with their full fleet, en masse.

Unless the Black Lightnings could launch a spoiler attack.

Unless the fleet back in the Inner System could be warned in time.

Unless America’s battlegroup could delay the enemy’s assault.

There were so many variables. So little chance of complete success….

“Target acquired ahead,” her AI announced. “Range approximately two tenths of an AU, closing at point six c.”

At that range, the target must be enormous…and it was traveling inbound at a tenth of the speed of light if the total rate of closure was sixth-tenths light. She studied the icon that had just winked on against her combat display.

Gods of the cosmos…what was that thing?

“Close in tight, people!” she ordered. “I think we have problems!..”

Chapter Twenty-Two

18 October 2404

Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn

Annihilator Regrets of Parting

30-AU Shell, Sol System

0713 hours, TFT

“Deep Tactician!” a communicator throbbed from the console-shelf overhead. “Four enemy fighters, range ninety lurm’m and closing quickly!”

Emphatic Blossom’s forward tendrils curled with a distinctly Turusch emotion, part frustration, part surprise, part rigidly unyielding determination. The Turusch did not believe in luck, as such, since theirs was a harshly deterministic and mechanistic view of the universe, but the universe was known to be unpleasantly perverse at times. Everything had been riding on the premise that the Fleet of Raucous Driving would fully engage the enemy’s attention, permitting the much larger and more powerful Fleet of Objective Silence to move, cloaked behind their shields, deep into their star system.

How had the enemy discovered the ruse? How, in all of the near-infinite possibilities of a probabilistically determined cosmos, had the enemy been able to divine precisely where the main fleet had emerged?

“Have they detected us yet?” its bonded other asked.

The Turusch tactician speaking to Emphatic Blossom was Blossom’s twin, the other half of its life-pair, and it was, technically speaking, the combination of the two that was named Radiant Blossom. Others addressed it as a single unit, and Radiant Blossom itself always knew which of its halves was speaking, so there was no confusion…at least for those familiar with Turusch psychology; in a very real sense, Radiant Blossom was always in two places at once.

It watched the icon representing the approaching enemy ships for a moment. “That seems almost certain,” it replied. “Their course is directly toward us…an unlikely eventuality if this were random chance.”