“Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.”
Heinrich Heine, Augsberg Gazette, 12, VII, 1842
13 July 1943
“I don’t know what you mean, Herr Reichsführer,” Orsic said. She was shaken. She’d been tending this garden most carefully . . . but now it looked as though Himmler’s patience was at an end. She had been playing him along, using his obvious infatuation with her, to get what she wanted. But that, she now knew, would no longer work.
Himmler gave her a cold glare through the pince-nez. “You people, your so-called Vril Society, they have been promising the Reich a new type of weapon, a Wunderwaffe unlike anything ever seen before, a flying disk faster and more maneuverable than anything the enemy possesses, yes? More . . . you have been promising the Führer an open alliance with the authors of these weapons, with these technological supermen since . . . when? The 1930s?”
“We offered antigravity technology from our extraterrestrial contacts in the early 1920s, Herr Reichsführer,” Orsic replied. “We were rewarded by having our Vril Society shut down, our work appropriated by the SS and taken over by General Kammler’s scientists.”
“For reasons of security for the Reich,” Himmler told her. “Madam, the Führer is becoming disillusioned with your promises!
“And now, one of our generals has been sent to verify your claims of a German colony on another planet . . . and he disappears! General Kemperer was supposed to have returned from this Paradies of yours almost a year ago! Where is he? Why haven’t we heard?”
“Herr Reichsführer . . . I don’t know what to tell you. We have not heard from our Sumi contacts either. We have been unable to reach them.”
“So very convenient.”
“It’s true!” Stark desperation clutched at her throat, her mind. “Sir, the Sumi have been assisting us! They promise that the new bomb—”
“Enough! No more promises!” He regarded her for a long moment, and Orsic had the feeling he was weighing options. Her life might well hang by the decision he was about to reach.
“I could have you taken into custody now for interrogation,” he said at last. “But if you’re telling the truth, that would not restore General Kemperer to us. I will give you . . . two weeks, let us say. You will return him here, or you will produce verifiable information concerning his whereabouts and safety. Fail in this, and the consequences shall be . . . unfortunate for you. Now go!”
Summarily dismissed, Maria Orsic was escorted from the Reichsführer’s presence.
Her mission here was in grave peril.
As was she.
The Present Day
“Where the hell did that come from?” Groton demanded.
“It just came around Charlie’s limb, sir,” the scanner tech replied. “It must have been lurking on the far side!”
“We should have picked it up, then!”
Haines shook his head. “It probably just came out of warp, Captain. Happened to emerge on the Charlie’s far side.”
“Comm! Flash a warning to our people on Daarish,” Groton said. “Admiral? I suggest we close and be prepared to engage.”
Winchester considered this. “Very well. But carefully, Captain. We don’t know what this new ship is capable of.”
“Yes, sir. But he doesn’t know what we can do, either! Helm! Set course for Daarish! Ahead slow! Mr. Haines, sound general quarters!”
“General quarters, aye, sir.”
“Comm! Alert the Carlucci and the Blake. Have them follow us in.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
And the Hillenkoetter accelerated toward the planet, now some three light minutes distant.
“Sorry, Commander,” Samford’s captain, John Holcomb, said over Alfa’s comm unit. “We’ve got a big hostile vectoring toward us. Our orders are to block it, if we can.”
“We understand, Captain,” Hunter replied. He and the other members of Alfa Platoon had been watching that monster alien ship on the command center screen. Human fighters were already boosting for space, positioning themselves to defend the ground units from a spaceborne attack. Orders had just come in from the Hillenkoetter directing the Samford, Inman, and McCone to move into a blocking position, and to try to ascertain the alien’s intentions. The shift left the ground troops dangling, dangerously exposed to an enemy counterattack.
But the real question was whether three Solar Warden battle cruisers and a handful of fighters had a hope in hell of stopping that thing.
“Commander?” Billingsly said.
“Yeah.”
“She’s awake.”
“How is she?”
“She had some trouble expelling the perfluorocarbon from her lungs, but she’s recovering fast.”
Hunter nodded. “Okay. I’ll come.”
He was curious about the young woman they’d decanted from the bottle downstairs. She was sitting on the stretcher they’d used to bring her up in one of the side rooms off the main center. Someone had found a uniform for her from one of the Germans killed in the attack. It was dusty but not bloodied, and, if it didn’t fit her very well, at least it concealed what it needed to conceal.
She looked up as he entered, and Hunter was rocked back by the intensity of that stare.
“You are Commander Hunter,” she said. “I understand I have you to thank for rescuing me from that . . . that nightmare.”
“And you speak English,” Hunter replied. “I thought you might. What’s your name?”
“Sigrun.”
“Okay, Sigrun. If you don’t mind, I have a few questions to ask of you. You’re Talis, aren’t you?”
Those incredible eyes opened much wider. “How do you know that?”
“Someone I know. Someone who hasn’t been entirely honest with us . . .”
So much for carefully laid battle plans, Lieutenant Duvall thought.
The Thunderbolts and the Firedrakes both were supposed to be flying CAP for the three cruisers, protecting them from enemy saucers as they provided ground support for the 1-JSST. However now, orders had come in from the Hillenkoetter, currently close with a large target entering orbit around Daarish, to determine whether or not it was hostile, and if it was, neutralize it. Since Inman, McCone, and Samford had the same orders, the Thunderbolts would still be providing cover for their larger charges, but the focus of the op now had shifted.
Identify and stop that incoming vessel.
Things, as they said, had just gotten real.
The squadron accelerated toward the east, climbing fast into the brilliant light of Aldebaran as it spilled over the horizon ahead, setting clouds ablaze in ruby light.
“Okay, Thunderbolts,” Jason Blakeslee called over the tactical channel. “Relay from the Big-H puts the target two thousand kilometers ahead, just over the curve of the planet. They’re transmitting orbital specs now. We are to close with the bogie and see if we can get a response. We hold our fire, unless they fire first. If they do, weapons will be free. Squadron acknowledge.”
The other spacecraft each replied in turn. “’Bolt Twelve acknowledges, Thunderbolt Leader,” Duvall said at the end of the string of acknowledgments.
“So,” Martel said from the Stingray’s back seat, “we get to play sitting duck.”
“That’s the plan,” Duvall replied. The new plan. He liked the first one better.
“Holy shit . . .”
“Talk to me, Marv.”
“Target acquired, Dee. It’s . . . big. . . .”
Targeting data appeared on Duval’s heads-up display, with red brackets embracing a bright point of light just rising above the horizon. The glare from Aldebaran was a bitch and he couldn’t make out details. He shifted to infrared but the image, if anything, was worse—washed out by the heat glare of the local star.
The range now was fourteen hundred kilometers.
“Spread out, Thunderbolts,” Blakeslee ordered. “Attack formation, Bravo.”
The fighters drifted into a spearhead formation, accelerating now to close the range. Duvall could hear Blakeslee’s voice on the hailing channel, demanding the unknown vessel to identify itself and its intentions.
But could the alien even hear them?
As they closed toward the alien, Duvall wondered what species had built the thing. It wasn’t the usual small flattened disk that seemed to be the spaceship-of-choice for the Grays. Not Nazi human, either; a Haunebu saucer would have been a toy by comparison.
Was it possible that the alien vessel belonged to some other species? An unknown alien civilization?
The vessel, he could see now, was vaguely disk shaped, but extremely thick top to bottom with a pronounced equatorial rim that gave it the look of a slightly flattened walnut half a mile across. That easily made it twice Hillenkoetter’s length, and far, far more massive with its extra bulk. Oumuamua, Duvall thought, would have made a fair-sized lifeboat for that thing.
There was something about that design that was twigging at Duvall, something familiar. Where had he . . .
A shock of recognition jolted him. He’d read once about a ship, a UFO, that looked exactly like that. All Solar Warden pilots were encouraged to immerse themselves in UFO literature to familiarize themselves with what they might encounter out among the stars.
Back in . . . what year had it been? It might have been 1986, maybe ’87, a Japanese Airlines 747 cargo plane had encountered a UFO over Alaska, and the pilot’s descriptions and drawings looked very much like this. They’d certainly had a good look at what they’d later called a “mother ship”; the flight crew had played tag with the monster along with several smaller vessels for fifty minutes before the unidentifieds disappeared over Denali, and the 747 went on to land safely at Anchorage. Duvall remembered reading that the 747’s captain, a former fighter pilot with over ten thousand hours of flight experience, had talked about the sighting to the media, and for his pains been moved to a desk job.
Duvall felt sympathy for a fellow fighter jock. The pilot, Kenju Terauchi, had described the object as “the size of two aircraft carriers,” ten times longer than Terauchi’s aircraft. To have something like that stalking your relatively slow and clumsy jumbo jet . . .
He called Martel’s attention to the ID and instructed him to pass it on to the Hillenkoetter. Solar Warden pilots had very gradually been building up a library of stats and specifications on the ships they’d encountered, which was being compiled at Lunar Operations Command.
Another tiny piece in an unimaginably huge and complicated puzzle.
And then the fighters hurtled into the alien’s black shadow . . .
“Thank you for coming down, Elanna,” Groton said. They were in Hillenkoetter’s Combat Information Center, along with Winchester, their combat staffs, and the regular CIC personnel, which made the dimly lit compartment feel distinctly more claustrophobic than usual.
“How can I be of assistance, Captain?”
By not hiding out in your cabin most of the time, Groton thought, but he didn’t say that.
“It has been important that I do so,” she said aloud, and Groton blinked. Damn her mind reading.
“That ship,” he said, pointing at a large monitor screen. “What is it? Do you Talis know about it?”
Elanna stared at the monitor for a long moment, expressionless. Groton had the feeling she was trying to decide how much she should say.
“It’s Saurian,” she said. “Malok. . . .”
“A warship?” Winchester asked. “Coming in to defend Daarish?”
“That doesn’t seem very likely, Admiral,” Commander Bernard Reid, Groton’s space naval combat officer, pointed out. “Not unless they have another base in this system and a pretty big one. We haven’t picked up heat signatures or radio emissions from anything like that.”
“Commander Wheaton is correct,” Elanna said. “We call that ship a Kalaika-class, named after a very large sea creature on one of our worlds. It is used for hauling freight, supplies, passengers . . . sometimes soldiers.”
“Ah!” Groton exclaimed. “I think we’re seeing how they planned on getting a hundred thousand soldiers from Aldebaran to Earth!”
“In one ship?” Winchester asked. “Even something that size . . .”
“How many people could that Kalaika carry, Elanna?” Groton asked.
“Several tens of thousands Captain, if they were packed into cryogenic suspension.”
“You mean in those damned transparent tubes of theirs.”
“Yes. I would estimate that a fleet of four Kalaikas could carry one hundred thousand humans, plus their equipment, to Earth. Also, a Kalaika could function like the Hillenkoetter and carry a fleet of the Haunebu flying disks.”
“So this Kalaika just happened to arrive from some other, more distant base to transport an army to Earth. How well armed is it?”
“It is armed. How well depends on its mission.”
“If I’m understanding this,” Winchester said, thoughtful, “their intent is to drop a fleet of Haunebu saucers and a hundred thousand German troops off in Europe . . . the expected Nazi return, right?”
“That is what we believe,” Elanna said.
“Then their transports probably won’t be heavily armed. No point.”
“I’m not so sure of that, Admiral,” Groton said. “The Saurians know about Solar Warden, and our space fleet near Earth. They’ll need heavy artillery to brush our ships aside.” He looked at Elanna. “Am I right?”
“Probably,” she replied. “Nor can you discount the possibility that they intend to support their ground operation with a heavy bombardment from space.”
“If Berlin disappeared,” Wheaton said, “the Germans wouldn’t be able to tell if it had been aliens who pulled the trigger or returning Nazis.”
Winchester nodded. “That makes sense, actually. Okay . . . we proceed on the assumption that this Kalaika is a battleship as well as an aircraft carrier. We just might have three more of those monsters on the way. That makes our response . . . problematic.”
“Not at all, Admiral,” Groton said, grinning. “We know exactly what we have to do! But we’ll need to hurry. . . .”
Duvall cut his forward velocity to a slow drift, with the hull of the alien sliding past him like the wall of a sheer cliff. Despite continuous calls to overbroad-band radio channels, there’d been no response. Still, the huge vessel was moving toward the Nazi colony on the planet.
“What do you make of it, Marv?” he asked his RIO.
“Damfino, Skipper. Not getting a peep out of them. I . . . uh-oh.”
“Talk to me.”
“We have auxiliary craft coming out of that thing. Might be fighters.”
“I see them.” They looked like sparkles, spilling from an opening in the big craft’s side.
“On approach vector, from two-zero-niner. I count ten . . . twelve . . . shit. TNC.”
TNC—Too Numerous to Count. This was not good at all.
“I don’t like it. I’m pulling us back.”
“That sounds like an absolute wizard idea, Skipper.”
“Thunderbolt One, Thunderbolt Twelve. We’re disengaging. Large numbers of small craft emerging from target . . . possible fighters. Repeat, large numbers of possible fighters . . .”
One of the sparkles accelerated straight for them.
Duvall’s eyes widened. He’d seen one of those before. . . .
In 2014, he’d been a young aviator flying the USS Nimitz southwest of San Diego when he’d been vectored toward an unidentified radar target—a UFO. The target was rounded and somewhat elongated, forty feet long with snubbed-off ends. “Tic Tac” was how others in the squadron had described it.
And it had been as maneuverable as hell, pulling right-angle turns and high-acceleration maneuvers that would have pulped any merely human pilot.
Now he was facing a swarm of them, coming straight at him like bats out of Hell.
He twisted his Stingray around in a maneuver that would have pulped him had he tried it in another conventional aircraft and tried to put some distance between him and them. Gravitics shielded him from the sudden maneuver.
They followed him. . . .
Ahead, now, he could see the cruisers closing the range. Samford was in the lead, and Duvall could hear her continuing radio challenge. “Unknown vessel, unknown vessel, what are your intentions, over?”
The alien fired.
The beam was so dazzlingly intense that Duvall was momentarily blinded despite the automatic cutouts in his Stingray’s optical systems. It almost appeared solid, a razor-straight bolt of lightning glowing a distinct green around the edges, blue-white at the core.
“What the hell was that?” Duvall yelled, blinking to clear his eyes.
“Samford is hit!” Martel yelled back. “Oh, my God . . .”
Duvall, vision clearing, looked at one of his monitors. That energy beam had caught Samford head-on, blasting through her defensive shields and burning through her hull, damned nearly slicing her in half. In horror, Duvall watched clouds of twisted, burnt debris, droplets of molten metal, and of people spilling through the shattered hull and into frigid emptiness.
“Weapons free! Weapons free!” Blakeslee called. “Hit ’em with everything you got!”
Duvall reversed course once more. From a range of just twenty kilometers, he loosed all six of his AMRAAM missiles. Around him, the other Thunderbolts were firing as well, but Duvall doubted that they had any hope of damaging that monster vessel. AMRAAMs might be effective against other fighters, but this target was the size of a mountain.
Inman and McCone opened fire, high-energy lasers and plasma beams slashing into the alien, followed by a cloud of AMRAAMs and cruise missiles. Solar Warden had learned at Zeta Retic that Saurian spacecraft shielded themselves by warping the space around their hulls, dissipating energy beams and disrupting incoming missiles. The trick was to fire so fast with so much ordnance that the Saurian’s defenses were momentarily overwhelmed, allowing some fraction of beams and warheads to get through. The tactic worked well against the Haunebu saucers, but this target was larger and tougher.
A trio of cruise missiles flashed against the target’s distortion screens and made them flicker, just enough of a breach that the squadron’s volley began to slip through. Each cruiser mounted three high-energy lasers—called HELs—and by coordinating their fire control computers, Inman and McCone could focus six intense beams against a single spot.
The shields were up again, but Duvall saw ripples spreading out across the Saurian ship, distortion waves in its shields creating a refraction effect in the light from the target. Again, the shield flickered, and cruise missiles and AMRAAM began pounding home. If they could do enough damage to even a small part of the alien’s hull, some of the shield projectors might be taken out, dropping a large portion of the enemy’s defenses.
Duvall now had four Hellfire missiles remaining in his weapons bay. The AGM-114L was a fire-and-forget missile that had been in the US inventory since the 1990s, carrying a 9-kilo warhead and its own on-board millimeter wave radar that let it home on a target without guidance from outside. On Earth, Hellfires had a range of only about eight kilometers; but in space, they kept moving even after their fuel was spent. With the unlimited range, the missile could hit targets within twenty kilometers, though with little opportunity for corrections after they lost thrust. Duvall slammed his Stingray into a high-velocity approach vector, and when his Hellfires dropped free from his fighter, they added their thrust to his vector—which was now nearly five kilometers per second.
Flashes and blossoming flowers of light peppered the leading edge of the alien, and a thin haze of dust and debris had appeared in nearby space. They were hurting it, though they still hadn’t managed to burn through that armor. How thick was it?
Duvall also wondered when the vessel would loose another of those terrifying energy blasts. Possibly the weapons mounts had already been damaged or maybe required recharge time between each shot. So far, there’d been no further fire; both Inman and McCone were jinking about under their gravitics, making it tough for the enemy to nail them with a targeting lock.
Duvall pulled his fighter into a savage dive, streaking across the landscape of the alien vessel. The surface was wrinkled with hills and valleys, giving it that walnut-shell characteristic across its exterior. Windows gleamed along the equatorial ring of the thing, and he targeted those with his nose-mounted Gatling cannon. The alien’s shields were tattered now, coming and going as the ship absorbed damage.
Ahead, the titanic energy beam switched on once more, targeting the McCone . . .
“What was the time between those two shots?” Groton demanded. Around him, the CIC crew bent over their consoles in tense anticipation. Things were happening swiftly.
“Two minutes, fifteen seconds,” Commander Reid announced. “That’s objective, outside of our frame of reference of course.”
Hillenkoetter was now traveling so quickly—nearly 90 percent of light speed—that her clocks were slowed by time dilation, a relativistic effect caused by such high velocities. Two minutes fifteen seconds was only a minute six for Hillenkoetter’s crew. At .89 c time passed half as fast, which meant that the rest of the universe appeared to be moving at double time. That could be an advantage or a liability, depending on the situation.
“A weapon that powerful has got to have a hell of a recharge cycle,” Groton said. “That gives us a window.”
“We can hope, sir,” Reid said.
Groton ignored the quip. He checked the orientation of the Carlucci and the Blake, positioned to port and starboard and slightly aft, matching the velocity of the Big-H. Good, they weren’t in the line of fire.
“Bring the MAG on-line, Commander Reid.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” He hesitated. “Sir, at this speed—”
“I know, Commander. Target that big saucer.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“And give me a readout on the range.”
“Currently passing twenty million kilometers, Captain.”
Groton stared at the main CIC screen. From just over one light minute out, he couldn’t see the enemy target directly. Charlie was there, made tiny by distance. Daarish was a star, a pinpoint of light to one side. A smaller monitor to the right showed a close-up view, one transmitted from the Inman. The image was slightly puckered, the distortion generated by the Hillenkoetter’s tremendous velocity. They’d seen the first flash of weaponry from the alien and the destruction of the Samford. Two and a quarter minutes later, they’d seen the second shot, which had narrowly missed the McCone. Both cruisers were jinking about violently to keep the enemy from being able to target them, and the constant maneuvering had just saved McCone from sharing the fate of the Samford.
“Weps! Any information on that weapon yet?” Groton demanded.
“It’s a graser, sir,” his weapons officer replied.
“Gamma ray laser. We estimate the yield at five times ten to the twenty-two watts per square centimeter,” Lieutenant Sid Bowden added.
“That doesn’t tell me a hell of a lot, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir. That’s the equivalent of all of the sunlight reaching Earth’s surface focused onto the point of a pencil.”
“Okay. That’s . . . intense.”
“Yes, sir. So intense that even Saurian gravitic shielding wouldn’t be able to stop it.”
Groton understood that part well enough. If you could see a target, even blurred and fuzzy due to the effects of a gravitic shield, you could hit it with a laser weapon. The incoming beam might be scattered, even dissipated, but hit the target with enough energy and something would get through.
As for human vessels, they mounted magnetokinetic shields that blocked solid objects—including charged particles of radiation.
They wouldn’t do squat against a gamma ray laser, since photons didn’t carry a charge.
His mind went back to the UFO sighting reported by Private Wall during the Korean War. That attack had almost certainly been done by an X-ray weapon, though it had been diffuse and scattered enough that it hadn’t vaporized its human targets.
Then there was the recent attack on Hunter’s recon team. Groton still had people down in sick bay after they’d tangled with that weaponized technology.
A gamma ray laser was a definite jump up in the technological hierarchy, one that would be deadly in combat.
As John Holcomb and the 146 members of his crew had just learned.
“Coming up on firing time, Captain,” Reid warned him. “Range ten million kilometers.”
Thirty-three light seconds. Still too far. . . .
The alien fired its weapon for the third time, a discharge bright enough that he clearly saw the flash on the big screen, close beside Daarish. It was bright, far brighter than Aldebaran. On the relayed image from the Inman, he saw the beam slash past the McCone, burning along her port side, ripping open her hull in a razor’s gash, unleashing a cloud of molten debris that glittered as it froze in hard vacuum.
“Nine million . . .”
One minute, six seconds in Hillenkoetter’s relativity-distorted time, until that weapon fired again. McCone was drifting now—its power down, weapons down, tumbling slowly, unable to defend herself, unable to move out of harm’s way.
“Eight million . . .”
He ran the numbers in his head: Eight million kilometers . . . about twenty-six light seconds . . . call it roughly thirty seconds at point-eight-nine c . . . sixty in the real world . . . but it had taken twenty-six seconds subjective for the light from that flash to reach them . . . so make it thirty-four seconds . . . Aha.
Plenty of time.
“Com!” he snapped. “Alert all ships. Get clear of the target! Now!”
“Aye, sir.”
The tough part was targeting without a visual. Hillenkoetter’s fire control computer was using data relayed from the Inman to precisely orient the ship’s primary weapon.
“Five million . . .”
They were out of time.
“Fire MAG,” he ordered.
And the Hillenkoetter shuddered like a living thing.