“Confirm that!”
“Confirmed, Admiral! KKs on the way in! Impact in . . . I make it three minutes seventeen!”
And that was the final confirmation he needed. Up until that point, it was at least possible that the unknown ships out therewere simply trying to catch up with America. Maybe they intended to deliver an ultimatum—don’t enter the TRGA or else!
But the missiles made that unlikely. “KK” stood for kinetic kill. The missiles weren’t nukes, but they were coming straightfor the USNA squadron at better than three quarters of the speed of light. Anything they hit at that velocity would be transformedin a literal flash into hot plasma and hard radiation.
“Right, everybody,” he transmitted. “We have confirmed KK warshots inbound. Everybody who can do so, lay down a pattern ofAMSO rounds. Let’s stop those things before they get too close!”
AMSO stood for Anti-Missile Shield Ordnance and referred to AS-78 or the newer AS-90 sandcaster missiles, projectiles capableof some thousands of Gs of acceleration loaded with tiny lead spherules that could be fired into space like shotgun blasts.Gray’s successful use of sandcaster rounds in a battle a couple of decades ago had earned him the moniker “Sandy,” a handlehe was quite proud of.
The question was whether his people could lay down enough expanding cone-patterns of AMSO sand to intercept those inboundrounds. Was there anything he was missing? He thought he’d covered it all. He hadn’t wanted to fight in the first place, but the oncoming ships weren’t going to give him an option.
One minute left. Birmingham, Arlington, and Seare were loosing volley after volley of AMSO rounds, targeting the volume of space directly in front of the oncoming ships andKK missiles. The Acadia waited until the wall of shield missiles was past, then accelerated in the same direction, headed directly for the oncomingships. Gray wanted to call Ferguson again, wanted to tell him not to cut things too close, but James Ferguson was skilledand experienced. He knew what he was doing and would look after his ship.
The remaining seconds dwindled away, a relentless countdown.
An instant before zero, a bright flash strobed in the darkness, eye-searingly savage. The first flash was followed by a second . . .a third . . .
Several hundred kilometers out there in the dark, high-velocity clouds of AMSO sand were slamming into incoming KK roundsat relativistic velocities, each impact the equivalent of some hundreds or even thousands of tons of high explosives. In moments,dozens of flashes silently flared, then dimmed across the dark and empty sky.
The scattering of flashes died away. Seconds later, surviving KK rounds began arrowing past and through the USNA squadron.
Those rounds weren’t aimed, of course. There was no way to accurately aim a weapon at a pinpoint target from ten light-minutesaway. But there were so many of them, launched in a tightly packed cloud, that a few were sure to hit simply and purely bychance.
The Seare shuddered violently and slewed to port, a dazzling pulse of light erupting from her stern, and Gray’s heart sank. Damn! Ruler-straight threads of raw light streaked past the America from the detonation aft—fragments of impactors converted in an instant to lines of fast-moving plasma. Had the destroyernot intercepted that warhead, Gray knew, it would have slammed into America’s stern at eighty percent of the speed of light.
Four hundred seventy-one men and women had just died to protect the far larger carrier.
“Watch that wreckage!” Rand snapped. The mass of wreckage was tumbling now, spilling fragments in a silvery arc as it turned.Parts of her central spine were crumpling as Gray watched; Seare and the other ships of the USNA squadron were powered by tiny singularities—artificial black holes—and the destroyer’s powertap singularities didn’t simply go away when the ship was destroyed. They were moving through the wreckage’s center of massnow, feeding greedily on the debris.
“Maneuvering, Captain,” the helm officer reported. America was using some of her reaction mass to nudge the massive star carrier to the side, avoiding the spill of wreckage. America had magnetic screens in place, of course—hull-conforming shielding designed to protect her from radiation and relativisticimpacts at near-c velocities—but the largest pieces were too massive and could cause serious damage to America’s aft hull if they struck.
Some hundreds of kilometers aft, the Acadia was weathering a storm of missiles. A KK projectile grazed her forward shield cap, the flash loosing a geyser of water freezinginstantly to sparkling particles of ice. “Took a hit there, America,” Captain Ferguson said over the open channel. “Nothing major. Cargo hatches are open. Commencing roll.”
The Acadia was on a direct heading toward the oncoming attacking ships. Despite the damage she’d just taken, she began rolling aroundher long axis.
She was a bulk rawmat carrier, designed to pull up alongside an asteroid and use clouds of nanodisassemblers to devour therock and transport individual particles, most the size of grains of sand, back to her cargo holds. Ferguson had released thecontainment fields in his holds and opened the outer bay doors. As Acadia rolled, centrifugal force dropped the holds’ contents into space in several fine, spiraling plumes of dust, expanding outward from the ship. With a rotation rate generating one gravity, the dust clouds expanded a rate of ten meters per second. When her holds were empty, Acadia reversed course and moved back toward America.
“Okay, Admiral Sandy,” Ferguson said. “Hope you know what you’re doing! We’re plumb out of rawmat now.”
“Good job, James,” Gray replied. “We’ll stock up at the first supermarket we encounter. Sensors!” he then called out. “Canyou read any life signs on the Seare wreckage?”
A long and painful delay, seconds following seconds, marked Vasquez’s hesitation as he studied his readouts. He was searchingfor intact pockets of heat radiation, the expected leakage from sealed compartments still holding atmosphere at seventeento twenty degrees. “I’m sorry, Admiral. I’m not getting anything.”
Gray had not expected there to be survivors, not with a blast that savage, but you never knew. The debris field had spreadout across a huge area of the sky aft, but a substantial portion of the spine, including the hab modules, was visible
