human fighters continued their deceleration, avoiding the white-hot volume of destruction spreading across open space. The cloud of alien fireflies kept coming, seemingly oblivious … and in moments half of the sky was lighting up in rapid-fire pulses of heat and radiation as they slammed into hot gas and debris.
Meier fought as though he was in a trance, pulling up in-head icons and thoughtclicking them, sending missile after missile into the growing wall of white flame. He was vaguely aware of the other fighters in his squadron, vaguely aware of three other squadrons off the America adding their firepower to the melee. He couldn’t think … didn’t want to think; not about the three deaths he’d just witnessed.
And then the thoughts began flowing and he couldn’t turn them off. Malone had been a buddy, a drinking partner on liberty and an interesting guy in late-night bull sessions on board ship. As for Kelly and Porter … they were all wingmates. And that’s a bond that forms tightly, no matter if he had known them for years, like Kelly, or had only recently met them, like Porter.
Every military pilot knew this was a dangerous job, one of the most hazardous assignments on the board for naval personnel. They knew the risks and they knew the odds, and sudden death by fireball—or worse, by frozen suffocation—were constant specters tucked into the cockpit each and every time a pilot launched.
But it still was a shock each time you encountered it.
“Meier!” Leystrom’s voice called. “Watch your vector! Break right!”
He’d let his attention wander for just a moment and had been falling toward a fading blossom of plasma. “Copy,” he called back. His fighter’s AI had been nudging at him, he saw, trying to get his attention. He let the fighter’s electronic mind flip the flickering drive singularity around and sharply change his course.
The fighters continued firing Krait missiles, hurling warhead after nuclear warhead into the oncoming swarm of glowing microvessels. At the same time, the thickest part of the alien firefly swarm slammed into the wall of glowing plasma, adding fresh and rapidly moving debris to the deadly cloud.
Abruptly, however, the aliens shifted their tactics as the swarming vessels, most only a centimeter or two long, altered course to move around the wall of detonations and expanding gas clouds rather than through. In a matter of seconds, the human fighters went from holding the line to being in imminent danger of being bypassed or surrounded.
“Fall back, Hunters!” Leystrom called. “Everyone fall back!”
TC/USNA CVS America
Outer Sol System
1920 hours, TFT
Captain Sara Gutierrez sat on America’s bridge, watching the computer-generated graphics on the main screen in front of her. A similar image was showing on an in-head window, but she’d pushed that to the back of her awareness. She preferred seeing things through her own eyes rather than directly through her brain. She wasn’t certain why … though she suspected that some perverse part of her preferred to keep the data at arm’s length, in some sense, to give her brain time, distance, and a much-needed objectivity to process it. Trevor—Admiral Gray—would have called her old-fashioned … but, then, he’d had a Prim’s mistrust of implants and AI feeds, so who was he to talk?
Damn … she missed having the admiral on the flag bridge behind her. Why the hell had the top brass seen fit to yank him off the America?
The graphics in front of her were painting the Rosette swarm as a vast, angry red hand, the fingers reaching past and around the small blue cons marking the fighter squadrons. The fighters were in very real danger of being surrounded.
“CAG!” she called. “Get our people out of there!”
“Working on it, Captain! Those things are fast.”
“I would remind the Captain,” Commander Dean Mallory, the ship’s senior tactical officer aft in the CIC, said, “that what we’re seeing here is almost twenty minutes out of date.”
“I know, I know,” she grumbled. “Damn it, Keating, get us in closer!”
“Aye, aye, ma’am,” the helm officer replied. “Another few minutes subjective.”
The twists and turns of relativistic combat tended to make Gutierrez’s eyes cross, and it was a damned good thing, she thought, that the ship’s AI could handle that stuff without blinking. America had released the fighters when she was just under five astronomical units away from the objective. Those fighters would have crossed that gulf in a bit over forty minutes, reaching the target at around 1720 hours. During that forty minutes, America herself had closed the range to just under 2 AUs—say, fifteen light-minutes.
Fair enough. But that meant that America was now picking up telemetry beamed from her fighter squadrons fifteen minutes ago, letting her literally see the recent past.
But what was happening now was still hidden and would not be revealed for another fifteen minutes.
And so Captain Gutierrez and her bridge crew had seen the destruction of three fighters out of VFA-211 and were watching now as the Headhunters conducted a skillful fighting withdrawal. The outcome likely had already been decided, one way or another, but America wouldn’t see what that outcome was for another … make it another eight minutes. America was still hurtling toward the far-off firefight at a bit under seven-tenths c.
“Captain?” Mallory said, his voice steady and calm in her head. “CIC. We don’t know how our fighters will stand up against those … things. We have to be prepared to try a different set of tactics when we get there. I recommend using nano-D.”
The idea shocked … though she’d been thinking about it herself. “That’s on the proscribed list, Commander!”
“Yeah, and it may be the only damned thing we have that can touch those things!”
“Point. Do we have any?”
“Affirmative, Captain. A few thousand rounds. We were scheduled to offload it at SupraQuito, but events … ah … kind of overtook us.”
“You can say that again.” Gutierrez thought furiously. The use of nano-D was not illegal … not exactly, not yet. Use of the stuff was strongly restricted, however, bound up in red tape and prohibitions, to the point where Gutierrez would quite literally be putting her career on the line if she gave the order to use it.
Weapons-grade nanotechnic disassemblers were molecule-sized machines that attached themselves to any material substance with which they came in contact and took it apart atom by atom, releasing a very great deal of heat in the process. Just over a year earlier, in November 2424, a rogue element in the Pan-European military had launched a string of nano-D warheads at the USNA capital of Columbus, Ohio, in an attempt to decapitate the rebellious North-American government. Buildings, pavement and subsurface infrastructure, vehicles, and people all had been reduced to their component atoms in the space of seconds. The heart of the city had been cored cleanly into oblivion, replaced by a perfectly circular lake three kilometers across and half a kilometer deep. Millions had died.
After that atrocity, many had demanded a retaliatory strike against Geneva. President Koenig had managed to deflect the call for vengeance, launching instead a memetic engineering raid in cyberspace … a purely data-oriented
