itself, now, dwindling with eerie rapidity as the black hole within swallowed it from the inside out. But AI scans of battlespace data indicated that there were as many as two thousand Xul warships in this system. Cluster Space, as was well known, was a major Xul node and operations center.
At the moment, the biggest question was whether or not the Xul would try to follow 1MIEF back through the stargate to Carson Space.
Hermes, largest of the ships of the human fleet, as well as the slowest and most clumsy, completed her reversal maneuver and began making her way back toward the gate.
About her flashed swarms of smaller craft, including the retreating Marines of the initial assault force. Alexander flashed an order to Pappy. “Make sure you track every damned one of those M-CAPs,” he said. “Coordinate the withdrawal with Smedley.”
“Affirmative, General,” Pappy’s calm voice replied. “We will leave no one behind.”
Of course, how the hell did you guarantee something like that? Battlespace was a bewildering soup, of ships large and small, of retreating M-CAPs, of aerospace fighters, Ontos transports, drones, sensor and communications probes, missiles, and drifting chunks of white-hot wreckage. Many of the fighters and Marine assault capsules were damaged, some disabled completely and adrift in emptiness.
But they had to try.
Green One,
AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,
Cluster Space
0722 hrs, GMT
“Pull out, Skipper! Pull out!”
Wayne’s voice shrieking in her mind wasn’t helping. Lee blocked it off and focused instead on urging her Wyvern to exert maximum lateral thrust, and then some, as she flashed toward the loom of the Xul monster.
It was a Behemoth, the code name for the Xul Type IV huntership. It had been noted and photographed at several Xul node-bases, but for a long time the assumption had been that it was a fortress, immobile.
In fact, Commonwealth Intelligence wasn’t sure whether the Xul themselves differentiated between fortress and warship. All that really was known about the Behemoth was that it was big and deadly—a slightly flattened spheroid five kilometers across—and that it was often posted as a sentry near Xul-controlled stargates or worlds, but that it could move under its own power when necessary. The Xul equivalent of the Alcubierre Drive gave it FTL capability, and there was evidence that it possessed a space-matrix translation capability akin to that of the MIEF’s Hermes and other extremely large Commonwealth ships.
Moments ago, this Behemoth had dropped out of FTL almost directly between the Shadow Hawks and the stargate, emerging into normal space with the signature burst of light bent and focused along its wake of warped space. Lee had ordered her surviving fighters to disperse and accelerate, getting past the Behemoth by using antimatter missiles as screens.
Major Lee’s weapons bays were empty, but she could go into an attack approach anyway, seeking to draw off some of the defensive fire from the enemy batteries.
Thank God, she thought, for the AIs. …
AI-piloted aerospace fighters never stretched the envelope. They flew conservatively … and fought conservatively as well, and here was a perfect example: the Shadow Hawks’ AI fighters still had missiles left in their weapons bays. Expending antiship missiles on distant targets with a low probability of hitting with them just so you didn’t need to take them back to the carrier was a human way of thinking and fighting, not one of intelligent software.
She was damned glad three AI-piloted Wyverns in her formation had survived, though. Their remaining missiles probably wouldn’t destroy the enemy vessel, not without some extraordinary luck, but they would give them a chance to get past the Behemoth. Antimatter explosions blossoming against the Xul hull would screen the hurtling fighters from enemy sensors. She had ordered Green Five to loose its two remaining AM-98 ship-killers going in. Seconds later, twin blue-white flares of light had erupted against the Xul huntership’s hull like a close pair of hot suns just ahead. Now, Lee’s Wyvern was hurtling toward the fast-expanding bubbles of plasma and vaporizing debris as her wingman screamed at her to pull up.
Her Wyvern hit the shell of fast-moving plasma with the shock of striking a solid wall, but her inertial dampers cushioned her through the worst of it. She could feel the burn of hard radiation, though, as it seared through her shields, and then she was in a tumble, spinning nose-for-tail a few meters above the tortured metal and ceramic landscape of the Xul Behemoth as alarms shrieked and flashed over the Wyvern’s link with her brain.
The jolt had been enough to knock her out of a trajectory that would have sent her slamming into the huntership’s hull, however. In an instant, she was past the alien vessel’s bulk, struggling with her ship’s mind-linked thrusters to bring the tumbling fighter back under control. Damage alerts shrilled at her, and with a thought-click she silenced them. She knew she was in trouble, damn it, and didn’t need the irritating reminder. …
The universe spun past her awareness. “Pappy!” she cried. “Let’s have some help, here!”
The AI was already helping, and she knew it. She considered, then rejected, the idea of having him stabilize the wildly spinning view of her surroundings being fed into her brain. Pappy2 had enough on his electronic mind at the moment. She concentrated instead on trying to slow the fighter’s spin, letting Pappy work through her to precisely balance the firing of her thrusters.
Two of her stabilizing thrusters were off-line, which made it tricky. Her comnet, her connection with the other ships in her squadron, was down as well. Other electronic systems were beginning to fail in cascade.
And then, without further warning, Pappy went off-line as well. It took her a few moments to realize that he was down, and when she did, she bit off a sharp curse. Without the AI’s help, she was going to have a hell of a time navigating to the stargate, if she could get her essential ship’s systems on-line and working again.
The damaged Wyvern continued its nose-over-tail tumble into the night. …
UCS Hermes
Stargate
Cluster Space/Carson Space
0727 hrs, GMT
The distant curve of the stargate flattened as Hermes approached the oddly distorted space at the gate’s center, until it was a golden straight line bisecting the encircling sky. An instant later, Alexander felt the faint, internal shiver and disorientation as Hermes passed through the stargate.
The flattened pinwheel of the Galaxy, the reddish beehive of the globular cluster, the advancing Xul armada all vanished, wiped from the sky.
The Marine expeditionary force was back in Carson Space.
Or most of them were, at any rate. Fighters and Marine assault pods were still coming through. Alexander opened a channel to the commanding officer of CVW-5, Samar’s fighter wing.
“How
