7 August, 2425
Connor
VFA-96, The Black Demons
Invictus surface, T+12 MY
1733 hours, TFT
Connor’s Starblade began accelerating again, steadily but gradually . . . as though time was a flowing river, slow at the shorelines, faster out in the middle, and she was cutting across the current. The alien temporal technology appeared to envelope the Glothr ship or machine, but could also be projected. Evidently—and fortunately—they couldn’t project it in all directions at once, and as they redirected their attention elsewhere, Connor’s Starblade edged through molasses and out into the clear once more.
The time field was also . . . uneven. As she pulled free, she noticed a patch of severe damage amidships, right about where she’d slammed the target with a stream of KK projectiles. The temporal field hadn’t frozen that damage before it could burn through the alien’s hull, but she hadn’t seen it until she was clear.
She shook her head. That sort of crap was for the physicists to figure out, not her. All that concerned her at the moment was the fact that the Glothr temporal field was now down, and she had a clear and perfect shot.
She let loose a burst from her particle-beam projector, then twisted away as the entire length of the alien ship began opening up, coming apart as though it were being unzipped. Pieces of the craft tumbled out into the cavern, including fiercely radiating gravitic singularities, the artificial anomalies responsible for power generation, for acceleration—and for the Glothr time-bending technology.
She never felt it when the singularity from the Glothr vessel engulfed her dying Starblade in night, the fierce gravitic tides shredding her and her ship.
USNS/HGF Concord
Invictis Ring, T+12 MY
1733 hours, TFT
The Glothr time bender opened under the concentrated fire from every direction, spilling debris as it helplessly drifted toward the nearest wall of the cavern. Dahlquist watched as it collided with the outstretched arms of several gantries, snapping them off, then continued its inexorable drift. The hull struck the wall and the ship began crumpling; a trio of singularities escaped, devouring plastic hull material as they fell, tunneling inside. Human fighters crumpled, died, and vanished.
Dahlquist had never heard of a space battle being fought in such close, confined quarters as this. Concord continued firing her turret weapons, chewing up the wreckage of the drifting Glothr hulk, and taking aim, too, at the second time-bender adrift perhaps a kilometer away. Marines were swarming through local space now, some of them attaching to Concord’s outer hull.
It didn’t feel as lonely as it had for a while, there.
“Let’s get us the hell out of here, Amsie,” Dahlquist said. “I’m feeling claustrophobic.”
“Yes, sir. Imagine how they feel, though.”
She indicated movement on the display ahead—“up” within the weak gravity field of the ring. Three ships—human ships—were coming through the ten-kilometer-wide crater that had been torn into the ring edge, their running lights winking on and off brightly within the darkness. From this angle, all he could see of them were the shield caps from bow-on, all three holed and ragged from heavy fire, but telescopic optical scans could still pick out the names arced across the prow of each—New York, Northern California, and America.
“I’d say it feels,” Dahlquist said, “like the goddamned cavalry is coming to the rescue.”
Gregory
VFA-96, The Black Demons
Invictus surface, T+12 MY
1735 hours, TFT
His emergency power was very nearly gone, but Gregory had elected to keep the visual feed open. He didn’t like the idea of dying alone in the dark.
Not that the current view was a whole lot better. The surface of Invictus was relentlessly flat, covered by head-sized chunks of ice frozen to the hardness of basalt. But the galaxy towered above the horizon, casting a dim illumination across the barren landscape. The planet’s rings arched high overhead. Gregory couldn’t see any sign of the battle, however. It was either hidden below the world’s horizon, or simply too distant to be seen by the naked eye.
It was hard to get used to the absence of stars. He could have simply imagined that it was a cloudy night, except that he could see a few very faint, fuzzy stars here and there against the darkness.
Other galaxies, inexpressibly distant. Somehow, they seemed to intensify the sense of isolation and loneliness.
Movement . . .
He thought at first he was imagining it, but something as black as the stygian night around him was moving across the slightly lighter grays of the ring. A signal sounded within his head . . . and an ID tag.
“Hello!” he called. “Hello! This is Demon Five! Demon Five, calling mayday! Mayday!”
“I see you, Five,” a voice replied, static blasted and weak with the fast-fading power of Gregory’s ship. “I’m coming in for pickup!”
An in-head ID tag told him the voice belonged to Lieutenant Commander St. Clair, the squadron CO of the Impactors, VFA-31.
He could make out details of St. Clair’s Starblade now as it flattened itself across the sky, descending, unfolding, reaching for him. It rippled out suddenly like a blanket, cutting off Gregory’s vision, enfolding him in darkness. There was a long pause.
“Damn . . .” St. Clair said.
Gregory felt a sudden, panicky start. “What is it?” he asked.
“You’re frozen to the ground! I can’t break you free!”
It was, Gregory supposed, to be expected. Nanotechnology and what it could do seemed downright magical at times, so much so that it was possible to forget that there were limits to its performance. His hull’s nanomatrix had gone inert when he lost his main power, and as the heat drained from his fighter the temperature of its outermost layers had begun dropping toward twenty-five degrees above zero absolute. The interior matrix, next to his cockpit, was currently at about minus one hundred Celsius—a good one hundred fifty degrees warmer than the outside; inside his cockpit it was just now slipping past minus ten.
He didn’t feel the cold yet, not really. His suit would insulate him for a time, and it had a micro-heater system woven into the fabric that would try its best to keep him at a comfortable eighteen to twenty degrees, but that wouldn’t stave off the cold for very long.
The other fighter moved off his own, revealing again the spectacle of the galaxy, its cold and serene beauty hanging in the sky. There had to be a way around this.
He considered opening up his fighter and standing up; he might survive the cold for a critical few seconds while the other pilot scooped him up. He ran some numbers through his in-head processor, desperately hopeful.
No. At the rate heat was draining away into the surrounding surface, his suit would protect him for two seconds . . . maybe three . . . and then the heating system would fail, the environment would suck the heat from his body and he would freeze solid very nearly instantaneously.
“Maybe a SAR tug could pull you out,” the voice said.
Gregory ran some more numbers. “At the rate things are going here,” he said slowly, “I’ve got about five minutes left. Is there a SAR tug within three or four minutes of here?”
“No. They haven’t launched yet. At least, I don’t think they have. They’re still fighting inside the ring.”
SAR tugs were unarmed, and standard operating procedure kept them aboard the carriers until the battle was over.
“Not many options, then.”
“No.” The other pilot sounded frustrated. ”Damn it, there must be something.”
“Well, unless you can build me a really big fire . . .”
He’d meant it as a joke, as gallows humor, but the other Starblade pilot snapped it up. “I can use my laser! Minimum power . . . draw circles around you as close as I can without burning you. You game?”
There were no numbers to describe this. All Gregory knew was that it was getting damned cold in here.
“Yeah! Do it!”
The other fighter rose into the sky, assuming its combat configuration, an elongated black teardrop.
And Gregory switched off his exterior optic feed. He didn’t particularly want to see St. Clair’s Starblade vaporizing the frozen surface around him at close range, a supremely unsettling thought.
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1736 hours, TFT
“Target the area of the cavern wall behind the High Guard ships,” Gray ordered. “Be careful of our people.”
“Our people are swarming all over the place, Admiral,” Taggart replied. “Can we order them out of there?”
“Colonel Jamison?” Gray asked. “How about it?”
The Marine colonel was on the same link. “I’ve given orders, sir. But c-cubed is breaking down.”
C3—command, communications, and control—was the imperative of any combat situation. Incredible levels of technology had been applied to perfect it, to control an unfolding battle at all levels, but the human factor continued to swamp the purely technical. Men in combat became emotional—enraged, afraid, protective of comrades—and didn’t hear the orders . . . or chose to ignore them.
“We can’t wait any longer,” Gray said softly. “All units . . . fire!”
Electron beams snapped out from all three capital ships, focused together at a single spot behind and between the two captured High Guard vessels. The black backdrop flared . . . boiled . . . then vaporized.
And, guided by the senses and the analyses of the shipboard AIs, the beams burned through to the Glothr electrical network within.
Gray sat back in his command chair and watched the attack through his in-head with something approaching awe. Space battles generally were fought in . . . well . . . open space, with thousands, even tens of thousands of kilometers between the combatants. The commander of a ship—or a task force—could not even see other vessels in the engagement, either his own or those of the enemy, with his naked eyes, and depended on computer simulation to reveal what was going on. Here, three capital ships, each a kilometer long, had edged inside the ring structure and were carrying out what amounted to a planetary bombardment at a range of, now, less than five kilometers. America had turned slightly, to bring her single electron gun turret into action. The two battleships had narrower, deeper shield caps, their reaction-mass storage tanks looking like blunt-nosed bullets, and their turrets were designed to elevate out from their spines far enough that they could clear the forward obstruction.
In atmosphere, electron beams would have looked like straight-line lightning bolts, which, in fact, was exactly what they were. In hard vacuum, the beams were invisible, but America’s AI painted them in for clarity’s sake. Their focus became an intolerably brilliant point of light, melting into the plastic wall of the cavern and illuminating the entire vast surrounding space.
Electromagnetic pulses are transferred in four different ways—through electrical fields, through magnetic fields, through electromagnetic radiation, and by direct electrical conduction. Combining the first three of these methods, electron beams are intense streams of electron radiation constrained and directed by powerful electromagnetic fields. When they hit the Glothr electrical systems and overwhelmed their hardened defenses, they generated the fourth type as well: an induced EMP wave surging deeper into and through the alien structure at roughly two-thirds the speed of light.
The outer surfaces of the ring were hardened against this sort of attack; at the first touch of an electron beam, the charge shields would have flashed over to a negative charge, repelling the attack.
But Invictus had not been the objective of an enemy attack in many millions of years—and with no sun, its inhabitants didn’t need to worry about solar flares or natural electrical or plasma effects that might have damaged their equipment. In short, and as advanced as they were technically, they had no real defenses against an EMP generated from within.
Circuits burned out. Parallel circuits utilizing fiber optics suffered data overload and went down as well. And worst of all, individual Glothr experienced direct attacks on their primary sensory systems.
Gray could only imagine what the Glothr population was experiencing right now.
He hoped it was enough to convince them to stop fighting. That, after all, was the whole purpose of war: kick the other guy in the crotch until he decided it wasn’t worth continuing the fight.
But it was a whole lot harder when you weren’t sure if the other guy even had a crotch . . . or what you were doing to him when you kicked him there.
VFA-31, The Impactors
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1736 hours, TFT
St. Clair hovered a hundred meters above the frozen surface of Invictus, directing his fighter’s primary laser in a circle around the tattered remnants of Lieutenant Gregory’s fighter. Steam billowed up in vast clouds from below . . . and that was an unexpected problem because the steam rapidly refroze as dust-sized particles of ice, and those diffracted and scattered the laser light. Twice, he ceased fire and repositioned his Starblade on its impellers, trying to get a clear shot. His laser was carving a trench around the crashed fighter . . . and the area on either side of that trench was substantially warmer than the surrounding terrain.
But it was damned tough to tell if he was actually helping at all.
“What are your temp readings, Gregory?”
“I’m reading minus ninety now directly beneath the ship, sir . . . but I’m not sure if that’s a true reading. The matrix is pretty well frozen solid underneath, and the sensors may be giving screwy readings.”
“Okay. I’m going to—” St. Clair broke off in mid-sentence, then added, “Shit!”
“What now?” Gregory asked him.
A dozen elongated, silvery shapes had just surrounded St. Clair’s fighter, watching him with unblinking eyes.
“I’m afraid,” he said slowly, “that we have company.”
1/4 Marines
4th Regimental Assault Group, 1st MARDIV
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1737 hours, TFT
Major Harrison Smith slammed his Apache Tear into the looming black wall of the alien ring’s interior bulkhead and thoughtclicked for an entryway. The nanomatrix of the assault pod’s forward hull clung to the alien wall and released its package of nano-D: molecule-sized disassemblers that began taking the wall apart almost literally atom by atom, but very swiftly. His instruments registered a breach, then analyzed the atmosphere on the other side—nitrogen, hydrogen, methane, and traces of ammonia at three atmospheres and a temperature of minus four Celsius. That matched the data from the Glothr ship back in the Sol System, and must represent their native environment.
Majors aren’t normally expected to lead close assaults themselves, but this was a special case, and becoming more special second by second. Casualties had been extremely heavy, and there’d been problems maintaining communications both with the Marne and Colonel Jamison, and among the Marines in the assault group. Rather than hang around outside and pretend that he knew what was going on, Smith elected to punch through into the interior of this enormous thing, round up as many Marines as he could, and see if he could find the humans supposedly imprisoned in here.
The three-dimensional schematic glowing in his in-head showed other Marines entering the structure nearby. He pressurized the interior of his pod to three atmospheres, opened the seal separating him from the Glothr structure’s interior, switched on his command beacon, and stepped through.
Gregory
VFA-96, The Black Demons
Invictus surface, T+12 MY
1737 hours, TFT
“What are they doing?” Gregory asked. He tried switching his visual input back on, but nothing happened. Either the cold had finally gotten to it, or, more likely, the wildly shifting changes in temperature had broken something crucial.
“N-nothing,” St. Clair replied. “Not so far. They’re just . . . watching.”
“Maybe they’re not military. They’re scouts or something.”
“Maybe. The reports I saw a little while ago said they were fighting hard enough inside the ring.”
How, Gregory wondered, do you judge the intent of a completely alien being? True, these things were robots, not living creatures like the Glothr, but they must have been programmed with Glothr values and purposes. What did they want?
“They’re moving . . . well, a little,” St. Clair reported. “They just backed off maybe two . . . three meters.”
“Still just watching?”
“Yup. I think we should continue trying to get you out of there. They haven’t attacked . . . but they haven’t shown any interest in helping us, either.”
“Look . . . I have an idea.”
“What is it?”
“I’m going to open my ship and stand up. You be ready to come grab me.”
“Wait! I thought you said you’d only have a couple of seconds! I don’t think I can do it that fast . . . and we’d still be risking major hypothermia, frozen limbs—”
“I was calculating those numbers based on heat loss through the soil beneath me.”
“Yeah? So . . . ?”
“I’m going to be standing in my cockpit, which isn’t that cold yet. And I’m going to be in a vacuum.”
“Ahh . . .”
When Gregory had run the numbers earlier, he’d done so based on the heat loss of the entire crashed Starblade where it was in contact with the Invictan surface. He’d forgotten that the cockpit itself had a certain amount of insulation . . . and that the very best temperature insulation of all was provided by hard vacuum. It was tough getting hard numbers . . . but it looked like he would have longer—perhaps as much as eight or ten seconds—before he froze out there.
And he was willing to risk it.
“What are our friends doing?” he asked.
“Nothing. Just watching. It’s kind of getting on my nerves, y’know?”
“Okay. Move on down closer to the surface. Let me know if anything changes.”
“Okay. I’m ten meters above you. The aliens followed me down . . . but they’re still just floating there in a circle. Like, I don’t know. Like they’re waiting for orders.”
That was perhaps the most unnerving bit of news of all. But with only minutes left to him, Gregory decided he had to do something.
He thoughtclicked a command, opening up the cockpit inside its nanomatrix shell . . .
And the shell exploded.
1/4 Marines
4th Regimental Assault Group, 1st MARDIV
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1738 hours, TFT
According to IR scans, there were several small areas of the ring at higher temperatures than most of the structure. Most were probably involved with life support or heat exchange, but one had been picked out by America’s intelligence department and her AI as a habitat area set up for human POWs. Radiated heat readings through layers of insulation suggested that the hab area was being held at thirty-seven degrees Celsius—human body temperature.
Major Smith dropped to the deck, startled at the sudden imposition of gravity. He’d been told that Charlie One had manufactured internal gravity to order, but not experienced it directly. His suit told him the local gravity was running at 1.8 Gs; interesting that that didn’t seem to translate to the ring’s exterior. Maybe it was a short-ranged field effect, like the temporal distortion projected from their time benders.
In any case, Humankind had a lot to learn from these critters. If we can get these bastards to talk.
He engaged his armor’s exoskeletal functions, allowing him to walk normally despite the increased gravity. He also switched on his external lights. The passageways in here were pitch-black. He suspected that the EMP moments before had fried the lighting system.
Assuming the Glothr used lights. He’d been briefed on the fact that vision wasn’t their primary sense, so maybe this area was always this dark.
Several more armored Marines showed up a few seconds later, homing on the command beacon he’d switched on moments before.
“This way, Marines!” he ordered.
“Ooh-rah!”
They stormed down the indicated passageway, turned a corner . . . and came face to face with one of the ubiquitous Glothr robots. It hovered there in mid-passage, watching them with glassy eyes.
And didn’t appear to have seen them.
“Whaddaya think, Major?” Gunnery Sergeant Vince Semmler asked. He reached out and gave the floating machine a shove. It drifted slowly across the corridor. “Fried by the EMP?”
“Looks like. Or else it’s not getting orders from its controllers.”
“I dunno,” Staff Sergeant Rezewski put in. “If its circuits got fried, it shouldn’t still be floating there, should it?”
“Fuck it,” Semmler said. “Leave it and c’mon.”
They threaded their way through another fifty meters of left, right, and straight ahead, coming at last to a solid bulkhead.
“Rezewski!” Smith snapped. “Use a breacher.”
“Aye, aye, Major.”
The breacher was a rubbery disk two meters across that adhered to the bulkhead. A nano-D charge around the perimeter ate through the wall in seconds; the center of the disk remained intact, a dark, translucent sheet stretched taut, with the feel, the give, of rubber.
“We’re through, sir,” Rezewski said.
“Go!” Smith said. And the first Marine in line stepped through the breach.
Gregory
VFA-96, The Black Demons
Invictus surface, T+12 MY
1738 hours, TFT
The outer layers of the fighter’s nanomatrix hull had been super-cooled on the Invictan surface, taken down to temperatures fifty-two degrees colder than liquid nitrogen, colder even than nitrogen snow. As the cockpit pod split and opened, it struck the frozen matrix, which shattered.
Gregory had once seen a demonstration—a block of wood lowered into liquid nitrogen, then struck against a table. The cascade of glittering, frozen particles, like broken glass, was eerily similar to the fragmenting ship. Only too aware, now, of the deadliness of his deceptively quiet surroundings, Gregory stood up.
Despite being insulated by the surrounding vacuum, he could feel his shipboard utilities—which with helmet and gloves doubled as an emergency environmental suit—stiffening around him, could feel the cold as though it literally were seeping in.
Impossible, of course. Heat was escaping his body, not cold seeping in, but that was what it undeniably felt like. His feet . . . he couldn’t feel his feet anymore, and his legs were starting to burn.
He felt oddly tranquil, despite the pain, despite the sudden realization that he may have just made a serious mistake. The landscape was serene, dark, utterly silent. It would have been easy to step out of the ruin of his Starblade and onto that flat, rock-strewn plain. That step, he knew, would have been lethal.
He also felt heavy. The planet’s gravity was dragging at him with almost twice the pull of home. But he managed to stand up straight . . . and raise his arms.
Overhead, St. Clair’s fighter descended like an unfolding blanket, the alien robots encircling it at a range of thirty meters. The blackness descended on him, scooped him up, folded him in . . .
And Gregory screamed with pain.
1/4 Marines
4th Regimental Assault Group, 1st MARDIV
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1739 hours, TFT
Smith stepped through the opening in line behind the first few Marines. The breacher ring was filled with a form of nanomatrix, tightly stretched and only a molecule thick. The stuff clung to his armor as he moved through it, maintaining a perfect pressure seal, closing off behind him as he stepped through.
The chamber beyond was small, claustrophobically so, dominated by massive structural supports and deep, deep black shadows that shifted and jumped as the Marines and the lights mounted on their armor moved.
Inside were seven capsules, a human sealed inside each one.
“The power in here has failed,” Semmler reported. “The EMP took everything off-line. We need to get these people out of here now.”
“Do it.”
The atmosphere in here was poisonous, the temperature above freezing only because of the heat radiating from the seven capsules. The men and women inside those tubes appeared to be fully awake and alert as the Marines’ lights passed over them, making them squint in the glare.
Smith had been concerned about the POWs in their pods, but he was also worried about getting the POWs out of the ring. They didn’t appear to have environmental suits of their own, which would mean they would have to be taken out in emergency e-pods—essentially nanomatrix balloons that could hold one human and perhaps an hour’s worth of air inside while rescuers hauled them across space to a rescue vessel. And with the room filled with cold poison, making the transfer would be difficult in the extreme.
Fortunately, the life-support capsules appeared to have been designed for easy transfer. Pressure plates at the base of each recessed at a touch, allowing the tubes to be detached, still sealed, from their supports. They weighed a lot in 1.8 Gs—almost two hundred kilos apiece—but they could be rolled across the deck, then manhandled by two Marines through the nanoseal.
They were too large to fit inside the MAPP-2 pods, but Smith had already called for help, and a SAR tug was outside, cutting a hole through the wall big enough for the Marines to jockey each cylinder through.
Strangest of all, though . . . the Marines had help. As they began rolling the former prisoners out of the claustrophobic room—surely the most undignified rescue in Marine history—a number of the floating robots showed up and began helping to move each cylinder. They said nothing, and they ignored transmissions from the Marines.
But without their help, the evacuation would have taken a lot longer.
What was going on?
Outside, it appeared that the battle had ended.