objective, however, the enemy would have less time to track them, less time to lock on their weapons. Meier doubted that those tactics would be very effective in this case. Their target was—according to the best xenosophontological guess—an extremely powerful and highly developed artificial intelligence, possibly an AI that had been around for hundreds of millions or even billions of years. It could probably think rings around anything humans could bring to bear and come up with countertactics and unexpected attacks in nanoseconds.
Still, a guy with a stone knife and the element of surprise could kill a man with a high-tech handgun, if he could get in the first blow. It was that sizeable if that the squadron would be working on.
“Headhunters,” CAG called over the squadron’s tactical net. “You are clear to commence your drop in thirty seconds.”
“Okay, people,” Leystrom added. “There is a chance that the Rosies are coming in to talk. Keep your weapons offline, I repeat, off-line until either I or C3 gives you the word. Understand?”
A ragged chorus of assents came back. “What’re the chances the bastards want to talk, Skipper?” Lieutenant Greg Malone asked.
“When the Joint Chiefs see fit to tell me, I’ll let you know,” Leystrom replied. “Just stay the hell alert, and don’t Krait ’em until you get orders. Understand?”
“Copy that, Commander.”
The seconds dragged past. “VFA-211, commence drop sequence in three … and two … and one … drop!”
Centrifugal force tossed Meier’s Starblade from the carrier’s launch tube. As he dropped clear of America’s shieldcap, he could see the objective dead ahead … a small and fuzzy patch of pale light.
“CIC,” Leystrom said. “Handing off from PriFly. Headhunters are clear of the ship and formed up.”
“CIC copies that, Hunters, and thank you. Accelerate and close with the objective.”
“CIC, Headhunters, we copy. Boosting in three … two … one … kick it!”
The flight of Starblades hurtled outward, their view of space ahead turned strange as their velocity inexorably crowded that of light. For Meier, it was as though he was suspended somehow in time, with all of the visible stars crowded into a ring of light forward, with everything else enveloped in total black emptiness, and with no feeling of movement at all.
Moments later, the fighter AIs linked and in synch gave rapid-fire commands that flipped the Starblades end for end and began deceleration.
“Headhunters!” Leystrom snapped. “Arm Kraits and Boomslangs!”
Meier thoughtclicked an in-head icon, arming his fighter’s complement of missiles—thirty-two VG-92 Krait space-to-space shipkiller missiles, plus six of the far more powerful VG-120 Boomslangs.
Light exploded around him.
The Consciousness
Outer Sol System
1932 hours, TFT
In much the same way as the human mind emerged from tightly interlinking networks of individual neurons, the Consciousness was an emergent phenomenon arising from some hundreds of billions of lesser units. That subset of itself that had just entered the Sol System was only a tiny fraction of the Whole. Other iterations of the Consciousness were back within the depths of the Omega Centauri cluster, at Kapteyn’s Star, and scattered throughout the galaxy, some in communication with one another via microscopic wormholes, some operating completely independently.
This Consciousness had made the jump from Kapteyn’s Star some twelve light years away, using data lifted from various human-ship AIs to find the human home system. As it closed on Earth, it sensed the approaching objects, but only as material abstractions bearing low-level minds of questionable sentience. For the Rosette Consciousness, aware of individual hydrogen atoms singing within the Deep, enmeshed within the etheric beauty of intertwining magnetic fields and a complex sea of electromagnetic radiation, the merely material was of little importance. Sensate to the warp and woof of spacetime itself and the interplay of gravitational ripples across the underlying fabric of myriad dimensions, the Rosette had little interest in solid objects, however swiftly they might be hurtling across the Void.
Those minds it sensed ahead promised larger, more powerful mentalities within this system, however. Reaching out with its senses, the Consciousness recognized aggregates of mass as planets, all orbiting a single star. One rocky planet in particular, directly ahead, was the focus of an extremely complex concentration of electromagnetic frequencies, gravitic anomalies, and encrypted transmissions that could not possibly be natural. If there were higher minds in this star system, they would be physically present there, on the world the human systems had identified as Earth.
Destruction of Earth, the Consciousness estimated, and the assimilation of all minds of worthwhile caliber, should require only a few minutes …
Three of the entity’s components, traveling well out in advance of the main cloud, struck material objects with combined velocities approaching that of light, kinetic energy flaring into miniature suns of appalling destructive power …
VFA-211, Headhunters
Outer Sol System
1921 hours, TFT
Meier and the other Headhunters didn’t see the oncoming projectiles. They couldn’t, not with combined velocities approaching that of light itself. Not even the fighter AIs could react in time.
Porter’s Starblade flashed into star-hot plasma an instant before the ships piloted by Malone and Judith Kelly blossomed into light and hard radiation. “Christ!” Lakeland exclaimed; his fighter brushed the expanding wavefront of what had been Porter’s fighter and went into a savage tumble.
For a stunned instant, Meier stared into the triplet of rapidly fading stars displayed in-head. No …
“CIC, Hunter One!” Leystrom yelled. “Headhunters are under attack! Request permission to fire!”
“Permission to fire granted, Hunter One.”
“Hunters! Let ’em have it with everything we’ve got! Wide dispersion, proximity detonation! Put up a fucking wall!”
Meier thoughtclicked a blinking icon, loosing a pair of VG-92 pulse-focused variable-yield Krait shipkillers. “Fox One away!” Meier yelled over the tactical channel, the battle code for a smart-AI missile launch.
“And Fox One!” Lieutenant Pamela Schaeffer called out. Other Headhunter pilots chimed in as the sky ahead filled with fast-moving proximity-fused warheads.
White flashes silently strobed against the darkness. Even one-hundred-megaton detonations were not particularly vivid in space; the flash was bright, but unless the warhead vaporized part of a ship or other large target, there was little plasma to balloon outward in a fireball, and no atmosphere to transmit a shock wave. By using proximity fusing, though, the warheads turned thousands of the incoming firefly microships into expanding clouds of hot gas, and those clouds caught more and more of the tiny craft as they swept in. At relativistic speeds, even a few stray atoms of gas could superheat the alien microships and flare them into hot
