toward the ship’s spine again, gliding past the blurred hull metal of the bridge tower. His AI signaled a target lock on the alien, which was melting now into America’s hull, sinking through the low-level bending of space, just above the ship’s outer hull, which deflected incoming energies. In another moment it would detonate, and the carrier might lose its bridge and combat information center all at once.
Gregory triggered his KK Gatling, sending a stream of high-velocity rounds slamming into and through the enemy craft. A particle-beam shot might do too much damage, though in fact he didn’t have the time to give the decision any conscious thought. He aligned with the target and fired, watching white flares of heat and light and splashes of molten metal erupt from the partially sunken alien hull.
At the last instant, he pulled out, whipping around his drive singularity and using a tremendous burst of acceleration to shove his ship sideways to avoid becoming a kinetic-kill projectile himself.
He held his breath, waiting for the alien to explode.
It didn’t.
“America CIC,” he called, “this is Demon Four! You have an enemy bogie buried in the bridge tower!”
“We copy that, Demon Four. Acknowledged.”
“Better send some Marines in case they’re still alive.” And in case there’s a loose black hole inside the wreckage, he added to himself … but he didn’t say so aloud. The shipboard response teams knew their business.
“Copy that, Four. Thanks for the assist.”
“All part of our friendly Black Demon service,” he replied, with a nonchalance that he definitely did not feel. That had been too damned close for sanity!
And they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So here I go again …
A group of eight alien fighters were inbound, a thousand kilometers out. He locked on and fired one of his dwindling number of Kraits. The detonation moments later took out seven of the eight; he nailed the survivor with another burst from his Gatling, watching the wreckage collapse in upon itself, folding up tighter and tighter until it vanished in a surprised pop of hard X-rays.
That was proof that the Sh’daar fighters had power taps similar to what the human ships were using—tiny black holes that skimmed energy from the frothing virtual energy at the base of reality and made it real. When a ship was destroyed, the black hole inside often ate much of the wreckage, then evaporated. Sometimes the singularity hung around long enough to become a menace to navigation, but luckily that wasn’t the case this time.
Unluckily, there were more opportunities, because beyond those eight Sh’daar ships another ten were approaching at high speed.
“Damn it,” Gregory snapped. “How many of these things are there?”
His Starblade’s AI gave him an answer, though as an impression, an unspoken realization, rather than in words. More than six thousand, out of an original estimated nine thousand …
Too fucking many. They’d destroyed thousands of the things already … but thousands more remained.
“All ships, this is America CIC,” a voice announced. “Be aware … we have more Sh’daar vessels inbound, repeat, more Sh’daars inbound. Capital ships, this time …”
Great! he thought. Just fucking great!
TC/USNA CVS America
Flag Bridge/CIC
0535 hours, TFT
Admiral Gray stared into the mass of alien vessels headed for the battlegroup from dead ahead. America’s tactical AIs had counted over three hundred so far, including a couple of monsters that must have started out as planetoids, kilometers across and massing billions of tons.
There would be no escape from so powerful an alien force …
He saw exactly three different tactical options—surrender, fight to the death, or order the fleet to scatter in the hope that a few of the battlegroup’s ships, at least, might make it back through the TRGA and reach home. None of those choices was particularly appealing … and a fourth option emerged.
“Open a channel to that fleet,” he told the communication officer on America’s bridge. “Use the Agletsch protocols. See if they’re willing to talk.”
“They are already willing to talk, Admiral.” The voice was that of Konstantin—or, rather, of a clone of that powerful AI. “I am now in communication with them.”
The Konstantin clone was resident within the TOAF module, a cylinder strapped to America’s spine aft of the rotating hab section, but was linked in through the carrier’s electronic network to America’s resident AIs. It hadn’t spoken before, and Gray had more or less forgotten that it was there, but he welcomed its input now.
“What do they say, Konstantin?”
There was a brief but agonizing pause.
“The force ahead is siding with us,” the AI told him. “The small Sh’daar fighters appear to be … they are calling them counter-Refusers, which is confusing, but the word rebels may approximate the meaning.”
“Counterrevolutionaries?” Gray suggested. He’d encountered the term once in a downloaded history of twentieth-century global politics.
“Indeed. The Sh’daar, remember, began as what they termed Refusers, rejecting the ur-Sh’daar Schjaa Hok.”
“‘The Transcending,’” Gray said, giving the alien term its closest English translation. “I remember.”
They’d learned that bit of history twenty years ago, during the Koenig Expedition to this spacetime. Originally, the N’gai dwarf galaxy had been occupied by hundreds of mutually alien civilizations that humans now knew as the ur-Sh’daar … the original or primal Sh’daar. When that galactic culture had entered its own version of the technological singularity almost a billion years in Humankind’s past, some, for various reasons, had rejected or somehow avoided the transformation, becoming known as “Refusers.”
“Are you telling me that these fighter swarms are Sh’daar who embrace the ur-Sh’daar Transcending?”
“I do not yet have enough data on Sh’daar ideologies or political interactions to say with certainty,” Konstantin replied. “However, that is certainly a valid possibility.”
“So why the hell were they attacking us?”
“I do not have enough information as of yet to give you a meaningful reply,” Konstantin told him. “But this rebel subgroup must feel threatened by our arrival in some way. Perhaps they wish to join the original ur-Sh’daar, and fear that we would threaten or delay their plans.”
“Hell, if they want to go, let them,” Gray said. “Attacking us without provocation isn’t a rational act.”
“Again, Admiral, I would caution you that we lack hard data as to their motives, needs, and aspirations.
