Earth Strike - Ian Douglas

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was for later. Right now, it was Mufrid that required his full attention.

      Two of the naval transports never had checked in … which might mean they’d suffered malfunction or disaster en route from Sol, or, more likely, that they’d emerged from Alcubierre Drive more than 1.3 light hours from the America.

      It would be the transports, he thought—the entire reason for coming to Eta Boötis in the first place. Still, if they’d made it this far, they would follow the task force in. Gray couldn’t hold up the mission any longer waiting for them.

      Over the course of the past eighty minutes, the task force had been pulling slowly together, until most occupied a rough sphere half a million kilometers across. All were now electronically connected through the laser-link tacnet, though the most distant vessels would lag fifteen minutes behind in receiving any message from the flagship.

      “Captain Buchanan,” Koenig said, “you may inform the ship that we are about to get under way.”

      “Aye, aye, Admiral,” Buchanan’s voice replied immediately.

      It was a formality. All hands had been at maneuvering stations since their arrival in-system. The announcement went out silently, spoken through each person’s in-head e-links. “Now hear this, now hear this. All hands, prepare for immediate acceleration under Alcubierre Drive.”

      “Make to all vessels on the net,” Koenig told the ship’s AI. “Engage Alcubierre Drive, acceleration five hundred gravities, on my mark … and three … two … one … mark!”

      That mark was variable, depending on how long it took for the lasercom command to crawl across emptiness from the America. The massive carrier began moving forward first, accompanied by the heavy cruiser Pauli and the frigates Psyché and Chengdu, close abeam. One by one the other vessels began falling into train, the sphere slowly elongating into an egg shape as more and more vessels got the word and engaged their drives.

      The principles of the Alcubierre Drive had been laid down by a Mexican physicist in the last years of the twentieth century. It was old tech compared to the artificial singularities employed by modern gravfighters, but it used the same principles. Essentially, drive projectors compressed spacetime ahead of each vessel, and expanded spacetime astern, creating a bubble in the fabric of space that could move forward at any velocity, ignoring the usual constraints imposed by the speed of light because everything within the bubble, imbedded in that patch of spacetime, was motionless compared to the space around it.

      Practical considerations—both size and mass—limited Alcubierre acceleration to five hundred gravities. At that rate, America would be pushing the speed of light after sixteen hours, thirty-seven minutes.

      However, after that length of time they would have traveled almost sixty astronomical units, which meant they wouldn’t have time to decelerate in to the target.

      Instead, they would accelerate constantly for just over nine hours, at which point they’d be moving at .54 c, then reverse their drives and decelerate for the same period.

      They would arrive in the vicinity of Eta Boötis IV ten hours after fighter wing Blue Alpha had engaged the enemy.

      And until that time, Blue Omega Strike Force would be fighting the enemy alone.

      VFA-44 Dragonfires

       Eta Boötis System

       1015 hours, TFT

      For Trevor Gray, half an hour passed. In the universe outside, six and a half hours slipped away, and with them another 7 billion kilometers, or forty-six more astronomical units.

      He was just over three quarters of the way to the target.

      He wondered how the other eleven pilots of the squadron were doing … but shrugged off the question. His AI would alert him if the tenuous data link with another fighter snapped. That hadn’t happened yet, so the chances were good that the others all were out there, as bored and, paradoxically, as nervous as he was.

      In another eleven subjective minutes, he would begin the deceleration phase of the strike, but that would be handled by his AI. Coordination of the timing within the flight of twelve gravfighters had to be exact, or they would drop down to combat speed scattered all over the sky, rather than in attack formation.

      He spent the time studying the world now just two and a half light hours ahead.

      His AI had last updated his target data from America’s CIC just before the squadron had boosted, which meant that his information about the enemy’s strength and dispositions around Eta Boötis were now a full seventeen hours out of date. That was the tricky aspect to near-c deployment; once you boosted to relativistic speeds, you couldn’t be exactly sure of what you were getting into until you were nearly there.

      His Starhawk’s forward sensors, at this speed, were all but useless. Radiation from ships around Eta Boötis IV was strongly distorted both by relativistic effects and by the “dustcatcher,” a high-gravity zone maintained ahead of the fighter at near-c even when the ship wasn’t accelerating, to trap or deflect dust and gas in the gravfighter’s path. Any information that made it to the fighter’s sensors was lost in the light-smeared ring representing the star dead ahead.

      According to the most recent electronic intelligence, though, there were fifty-five ships there—almost certainly all Turusch—orbiting Eta Boötis IV or on final approach. And there was a way to slightly improve the view.

      He moved his hands within the control field. On the mirrored black surface of his Starhawk, three sensor masts detached from the hull and swung out and forward, each two meters long at the start, but unfolding, stretching, and growing to reach a full ten meters from the ship. The receivers at the ends of the masts, spaced equidistant around the fighter, extended far enough out to let them look past the nebulous haze of the dustcatcher. As Gray watched, the inner circle of light on the cockpit display grew sharper and brighter. Incoming radiation was still being distorted by the Starhawk’s velocity, of course, but now he could see past the distortion of the singularity, and even take advantage of the dustcatcher’s gravitational lensing effect.

      Bright flashes silently popped and flared across the display now, however. Extended, the sensor masts were striking random bits of debris—hydrogen atoms, mostly, adrift in the not-quite-perfect vacuum of space and made deadly by the gravfighter’s speed. Impact at this speed with something as massive as a meteoric grain of sand could destroy the mast; his AI had to work quickly.

      The data came up less than five seconds later, and with a feeling of relief Gray retracted the sensor masts back into the hull, safe behind the blurring distortion of the dustcatcher. The fighter’s artificial intelligence had sampled the incoming radiation, sorting through high-energy photons to build a coherent picture of what lay ahead.

      Resolution was poor. Only a few ship-sized targets—the most massive—could be separated from the distortion-induced static. The AI did its best to match up the handful of targets it could see now with those that had been visible to America’s sensors hours earlier. By combining the America data with this fresh, if limited, glimpse, the AI could make a close guess at the orbits of a few of the enemy vessels, and predict where they would be—assuming no changes in orbit—in another 136-plus minutes, objective.

      Fifteen targets. Gray had hoped there would be more, but it was something with which to work. Fifteen large starships appeared to be in stable, predictable orbits around the target world, their orbital data precise enough to allow a clear c-shot at them. Of those fifteen, six, the data predicted, would be on the far side of the target planet 136 objective minutes from now, so they were off the targeting list. The remaining nine, however, were fair game.

      The actual targeting and munitions launch were handled automatically by the AI-net, requiring only Gray’s confirmation for launch. So long as there was no override from Commander Allyn, all eleven Starhawks would be contributing to the PcB, the Pre-engagement c Bombardment.

      Release

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