Dark Mind. Ian Douglas

can’t go on the defensive, Admiral. We need to hit them, hit them hard, away from the fleet!”

      That was the conventional and established naval-fighter doctrine.

      But this wasn’t a conventional fight.

      “That won’t help if the fleet is wiped out of the sky, damn it. Pull in the fighters!”

      “Aye, aye, sir.”

      It was becoming almost impossible to pull useful data from the furball spreading out around the battlegroup. Thousands of alien craft continued to converge on the human capital ships, while a scant forty or so human fighters tried to hold them off. America’s AIs sifted through the mess and extracted the most important info for human analysis, but increasingly the fight was in the electronic hands of the ship’s combat system.

      A bright flash snapped through the CIC. “What was that?” Gray demanded.

      “Checking sir …” Mallory adjusted the display field to show the Glothr emissary ship Nameless. “It was the Glothr ship, Admiral. Looks like she has teeth.”

      “What the hell did they use?”

      “Not sure … but I think they might’ve just time-twisted a laser into gamma ray frequencies.”

      Gray wasn’t sure he understood what that meant, but that wasn’t surprising, as Glothr technology embraced several concepts that most humans didn’t yet understand. One of the more startling involved actually bending time. How they managed that trick was a mystery, but human xenotechnologists thought they might do it by using intense but short-ranged gravitational singularities tightly focused next to their hulls. By stretching time out—making an instant last seconds or longer—they could dissipate the energy of a thermonuclear explosion—a neat trick if you wanted to avoid getting fried by an incoming nuke.

      Apparently, they could use the trick offensively as well. By turning a second into an instant, they could vastly increase the electromagnetic frequency of a laser, pumping it up to far more destructive energy levels.

      Gray frowned. The extra energy had to come from somewhere, but he wasn’t sure he saw how it worked. Then he gave a mental shrug. Dozens of Sh’daar fighters had just evaporated in that beam. He would accept the gift-horse advantage of Glothr tech and worry about the details later. Maybe it was just the equivalent of firing a laser continuously for an hour, but compressing all of that energy into a single pulse.

      At this point all he cared about was the fact that when the Glothr vessel fired again, more enemy ships flashed into hot plasma.

      But there were simply too many of them. Each ship in the battlegroup now was surrounded by its own cloud of fighters, and they were pressing in close. Individually, they weren’t that powerful, firing particle beams in the gigawatt-laser range of destructiveness. When fifty of them fired at once, however, aiming at the same target … or a hundred … or five hundred …

      The railgun cruiser Leland was in trouble. The largest warship in the battlegroup after America herself—eight hundred meters long and massing a quarter of a billion tons—she was built around a magnetic accelerator tube nearly as long as she was, a mobile artillery piece designed for planetary bombardment or engaging large enemy vessels. Her primary weapon was useless against fighter swarms, however, and the elephant’s point-defense batteries were swiftly being overwhelmed by clouds of Sh’daar mosquitos.

      “Verdun!” Gray called. “Deutschland! Close in on the Leland and give her some support!”

      The two ships were Pan-European heavy cruisers, former enemies now incorporated into the USNA battlegroup as a show of political will. Gray hoped their point defense weaponry would help keep the larger Leland from being mobbed.

      But the European vessels were already fighting their own enemy swarms … and now the aliens attacking America herself were getting past the carrier’s PDBs. The ship shuddered again, a vicious jolt, rolling heavily to starboard.

      “We just lost Turret Five,” Mallory reported. Damage control imagery showed that one of the big particle-beam turrets mounted on the carrier’s central axis had been ripped away. For a moment, air vented into space from pressurized areas, mingled with clouds of debris and, horribly, several flailing human figures, made minute by the scale of their surroundings.

      Then the open compartment was sealed off, and the escaping air—rapidly freezing into glittering flecks—dwindled away to nothing.

      Gray knew he would remember those human figures—so tiny against the dark!—for the rest of his life.

      A number of Sh’daar fighters slammed bodily into the long, lean hull of the French cruiser Verdun. They seemed to be eating their way in through the cruiser’s hull … and then all of them detonated in a chain of white-hot flares that devoured the vessel’s central spine. More explosions followed … with the wreckage crumpling in upon itself in a seething storm of radiation, heat, and light.

      We’re losing, Gray thought. We’re going under.

      “All ships,” he ordered. “Come about and make for the TRGA.”

      There was no choice. They’d stuck their collective nose into this time and space and gotten it bitten off.

      They had to retreat. If they were going to save even a few of the battlegroup’s ships, they had to retreat now.

       Lieutenant Donald Gregory

       VFA-96, Black Demons

       0516 hours, TFT

      “Pull back and cover the America, people,” Mackey ordered. “They’re using fucking kamikaze tactics! We’ve got to stop them from getting through!”

      Gregory had heard the order from the carrier’s CIC already, and had witnessed both the destruction of the Verdun and the damage done to America herself.

      It was a hopeless fight. So far, he’d run through about half of the missiles in his magazine, but as the fighting enveloped the carrier more and more tightly, he was having to shift to his Gatling cannon, firing high-velocity kinetic-kill rounds of depleted uranium. Nuclear detonations were tricky things to employ close to the hulls of friendly ships, and the USNA fighter pilots were being forced to use more surgical methods in their defensive tactics.

      Surgical methods took longer—you couldn’t yell “Fox One” and blow a dozen enemies away with a single highyield detonation, and you had to be frustratingly precise in the placement of your warshots.

      One alien fighter, gleaming silver and irregular in shape, came in across America’s stern and raced up the length of her spine, Gregory in close pursuit. He fired a burst of KK rounds, but the angle was bad and the rounds glanced off the hurtling spacecraft with minimal damage. The rounds that missed slammed into the underside of the carrier’s shield cap forward … though with minimal damage as well, thank the gods. The carrier’s hull shields absorbed or deflected much of the impact.

      For a terrifying moment, he thought the enemy craft was trying for one of America’s three landing bays in the steadily rotating hab section … but the fighter slipped between two of the moving bays and plunged toward the blunt, forwardleaning tower between hab module and the underside of the shield cap.

      Damn! They were trying for the bridge and CIC!

      The alien vessel struck the bridge tower at its base, just above the main hull of the carrier’s spine; Gregory’s Starblade flashed past an instant later, twisting around his grav singularity and angling out and away from the carrier. Braking hard, he reversed course and dropped toward the ship’s spine again, gliding past the blurred hull metal of the bridge tower. His AI signaled a target lock on the alien, which was melting now into America’s hull, sinking through the low-level bending of space, just above the ship’s outer hull, which deflected incoming energies. In another moment it would detonate,