Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (6 page)

“
Jeanne d’Arc
,” Koenig’s voice said over the fleet channel. “That was a warning. Change course immediately, or we will take you under fire.”

“You’re not going to fire on Confederation vessels,” Giraurd’s voice came back. “Surrender and save your people, and your reputation.”

“Dragonfires!” Wizewski’s voice snapped. “You are weapons free.
Go!
”

“That’s it, Dragons!” Gray called. “Maximum acceleration in three . . . two . . . one . . .
now
!”

Twelve Starhawk fighters leaped past the challenge line, hurtling toward the oncoming Pan-European warships. The range was just under 480,000 kilometers. At fifty thousand gravities they closed the gap in just forty seconds.

A typical strike fighter mission had the fighters zorching through an enemy formation at high velocity after a long period of acceleration. This was different, however, with only a relatively short distance for acceleration before the fighters reached the target. The squadron’s newbies hadn’t practiced this sort of tight, close-quarters maneuvering in training sims, and they were going to be making mistakes.

Gray just hoped none of those mistakes would be fatal.

“Jink!” he yelled over the tactical channel. “All Dragonfires,
jink
!”

By throwing drive singularities to left, right, above, and below at random, they could jerk their fighters around enough to fox enemy targeting AIs as they continued to close the range.

On the tactical display, the Pan-European fighters had leaped forward, seeking to head the Starhawks off.

“Ignore the fighters,” Gray told the squadron. “Stay on the carrier!”

“They’re firing! Missiles incoming!”

Missiles streaked out from the incoming fighters, curving to meet the fast-moving Starhawks.

“Don’t let it rattle you,” Gray said, suppressing the trembling surge of fear he was feeling. “Stay on course. Stay on the carrier. . . .”

White light flared, dazzling and silent in the darkness. The Dragonfires flashed through expanding clouds of plasma, emerging . . . and then the two clouds of fighters interpenetrated, passing through each other in an instant.

The
Jeanne d’Arc
and her consorts lay just ahead. . . .

CIC

TC/PE CVS
Jeanne d’Arc

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1748 hours, TFT

“Harrison has betrayed us,” Hans Westerwelle said, bitterly. “He warned Koenig, somehow.”

“We don’t know that,” Giraurd replied. “I . . . agree that he was less than eager to open the dialogue with Koenig.”

“ ‘Less than eager’? The Englander swine fought the idea tooth and nail. Koenig was his friend. We should investigate Harrison when this is over, and see where his
true
loyalties lie.”

The plan to have the three British ships pretend to join Koenig’s squadron had been Westerwelle’s. He was the European fleet’s political officer, a civilian appointed by Geneva to maintain loyalty and an acceptable level of enthusiasm within the Federation’s ranks.

The first nuclear-tipped missiles were detonating in brilliant, savage silence across the CIC’s forward view screens. They were unlikely to cause more than superficial damage to the incoming fighters, but they might deter, might force the enemy squadron commander to break off.

“Enemy fighters are still approaching from dead ahead!” the tactical officer called. “They’re at seventy percent of
c
and accelerating!”

“Engage point defense!” the
Jeanne d’Arc
’s captain ordered. “Fight them off!”

Giraurd sat back in his command chair, watching the CIC and bridge crews carry out their routines. It had been months since the
Jeanne d’Arc
had been in combat, and many in her crew were new to the ship, having come aboard just before the flotilla had left for Alphekka. It would be interesting to see how well they did in this, their first exercise that was
not
a drill. Her captain, Charles Michel, had seen action during the Defense of Earth, but he was Belgian rather than French, and Giraurd wasn’t sure he trusted the man.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of officers on board he didn’t entirely trust. Sawicki, the tactical officer, was a Pole. Mytnyk, the fighter wing commander, was Ukrainian, while the political officer, Westerwelle, was a German. And then there were the British,
always
a problem in European Federation politics.

The Pan-European Federation had been a superb idea on paper, but even now, more than 270 years after the
Pax Confeoderata
and more than 400 years after the Treaty of Maastricht, the idea of a union of European states sounded better than it worked. The Terran Confederation, it was said, was only as strong as its weakest members, and for all their public bravado, the Pan-Europeans rarely were able to show a solid or united front.

Of course, the North Americans had the same trouble—descendents of the old United States trying to show a common front with Canadians, Mexicans, and a clutter of tiny Central American states. Political unions simply didn’t work when the member states had more differences than similarities.

The odd thing about the situation was that threats from outside generally forced such unions to put aside internal differences and pull together; but if anything, the war with the Sh’daar had reawakened old animosities, infighting, and name-calling. The ancient cracks in the painted façade were showing, not only within the European Federation, but all throughout the realm of Humankind.

What was needed was a stronger government, a government with the resolve to
force
the disparate fragments of humanity into line. Politically, Giraurd was a Federationialist, a neosocialist political party calling for the final abolition of the old nationalist states and the creation of a genuine United Terra.

And that day
was
coming. Humankind had no choice but to unite in the face of the threat from outside. The first step was to crush the so-called independence movements in the USNA, and that meant bringing mavericks like Alexander Koenig into line. A united Humankind couldn’t afford individualists like Koenig or the right-wing political reactionaries remaining within the USNA’s government.

And so, in a way, the unification of mankind began here. “Hit them with everything we have, Mr. Sawicki,” he said.

Nuclear fire continued blossoming in stark and dazzling silence against the forward view screens.

VFA-44

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1749 hours, TFT

A European Federation Raschadler flashed past on Gray’s port side, a thousand kilometers distant, practically at point-blank range, though too distant and far too fast relative to him for him to pick it up optically. Their name meant “Swift Eagle,” but in space combat, it was how many gravities a drive could pull that counted, not the actual velocity. Where the USNA Starhawks could pull up to fifty thousand gravities—an incredible performance—the Raschadlers could manage only about two thousand Gs. Where Starhawks could be pushing the speed of light after ten minutes of acceleration, it took the older Swift Eagles over four hours to reach near-
c
.

Gray needed to use that superior acceleration now to outperform the European fighters.

Twenty seconds passed swiftly, and Gray gave the order to decelerate. The Starhawks, still in their acceleration configurations—teardrop-shaped with slender spikes astern to bleed off excess gravitic energy—began slowing at fifty thousand Gs.

Another twenty seconds passed, with the SG-92s jinking wildly to throw off the European anti-fighter defenses. In such a tight formation, there would have been a danger of some nasty high-velocity collisions if the twelve fighters hadn’t been electronically tied together.

The enemy fighters were trying to slow and reverse course, but it would take them a long time to come around.
Too
long . . .

“Let your AIs handle the rendezvous,” Gray told the others. “Going on automatic for final deceleration and maneuvering. . . .”

At ten thousand kilometers per second, there’d been no evidence to human eyes that the fighters had been moving at all. The stars hung motionless in space, a cold testament to their distance and the gulfs between them. But under that searing, AI-controlled deceleration, the
Jeanne d’Arc
, suddenly, magically, was
there
, hanging in the black sky directly ahead, and Gray could see with his own eyes the gleaming blue-and-white curve of her shield cap, the neat letters and numerals picking out her name and registry number.

She was five kilometers away, and the linked fighters were closing now at a relative velocity of a half a kilometer per second.

“Combat mode!” Gray called. “Target the shield cap!”

The
Jeanne d’Arc
was still accelerating, so her forward shields were down. Gray thoughtclicked an icon within his virtual in-head display, and opened up with a long burst from his Gatling RFK-90 kinetic-kill cannon. Firing with a cyclic rate of twelve per second, the Gatling loosed a stream of magnetic-ceramic jacketed slugs, each with a depleted uranium core massing half a kilo and traveling at 175 meters per second
plus
the 500 meters per second of the fighter’s relative closing velocity. That much mass traveling that fast possessed a kinetic-energy punch powerful enough to shred hardened steel and ceramic laminate; bright flashes of light walked across the shield, and almost instantly a dense, white mist appeared above the impacts—water gushing out into vacuum and freezing almost instantly, creating a glittering cloud of ice particles.

“Watch his drag!” Gray shouted over the squadron link. “Stay clear of his drive field!”

Gravitic drive ships moved by projecting an artificial gravitational singularity ahead of their bows, creating an intense and tightly focused black hole that flickered on and off thousands of times per second, allowing the ship to fall forward into an ever-receding gravitational well. A fighter getting too close to the singularity would be drawn in and crushed out of existence in an instant, a process called “spaghettification” because of the effect on ships and personnel as they were torn by close-in tidal effects. The Dragonfires whipped past the projected drive field, feeling the hard tug but applying acceleration of their own to counter it. The other fighters were firing their Gatlings now as well, ripping the
Jeanne d’Arc
’s shield cap into ragged fragments and geysering sprays of fast-freezing water.

Like the
America
, the
Jeanne d’Arc
carried some billions of liters of liquid water inside its shield cap, water that served both as radiation shielding when the carrier was moving close to
c
, and as a reserve of reaction mass for the ship’s maneuvering thrusters. As the shield cap’s double hull was shredded, that water poured into space. Within seconds, most of it was falling in gleaming streamers into a tight spiral around the flickering drive singularity.

Gray’s fighter fell past the shield cap now, and he could see the turning hab modules in the cap’s shadow; where
America
had three hab modules mounted on the end of rotating spokes, the smaller European carrier had two. He also spotted the bridge tower, a building-sized structure rising from the ship’s spine between the shield cap and the hab module collar.

Laser and particle-beam fire snapped out toward his fighter, invisible to the eye but painted on Gray’s tactical display by his AI. He jinked, then pressed in closer, matching the carrier’s acceleration so that he seemed to be hanging just above her spine.

“
Jeanne d’Arc
!” he called using the general fleet frequency. “This is Dragon One, off the USNA
America
! Unless you want to lose your bridge and CIC, I suggest that you break off your attack run.”

There was silence for a long handful of seconds. The carrier’s hab modules and bridge tower were shielded, of course; he could see the faint blurring of edges where the gravitic shielding twisted light. But a nuke or a determined particle-beam attack could overload those shields or destroy their projection wave guides, and then the carrier’s vital nerve centers would be defenseless.

On the other hand, the
Jeanne d’Arc
had point-defense turrets that were doing their best to hit him. This close to the carrier’s spine, they were having trouble reaching him, but they were trying to hit the other fighters in the squadron as they moved in closer. A stream of KK rounds reached out and caught Dragon Eight—Lieutenant Will Rostenkowski’s ship—sending it into a helpless tumble.