Deep Space. Ian Douglas

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      It was a woman’s voice, but with the precise diction and phrasing that likely indicated an AI, an artificial intelligence.

      “Copy. Black Demons on docking approach,” Mackey’s voice said. “Morphing from sperm mode to turkey. Okay, people. Switch to AI approach.”

      Maneuvering to approach over the immense vessel’s stern, the Black Demons shifted their hull structure from their high-boost configuration—popularly known among the pilots as “sperm mode”—to flight mode. The nanomatrix hull of an SG-92 allowed the craft to mold itself into a variety of shapes during flight. In atmospheric or flight mode—“turkey mode” in the pilot lexicon—growing wings that better allowed the landing bay magnetics to trap inbound fighters. Massing just twenty-two tons—her usual weapons loadout massed more than that by a considerable margin—the bulk of Gregory’s Starhawk flowed like water at his thought command, extending delta wings, negatively charged to give the flight deck something to grab.

      The first two fighters, Lieutenants Anderson and Rivera, dropped into their final approach side by side, sweeping up along America’s spine from tail toward the base of the mushroom cap. The next pair followed twenty-eight seconds later—Esperanza and Nichols—followed by Mason and Del Rey.

      Next up on the list were Gregory and his wingman—Lieutenant Jodi Vaughn. Fighters didn’t use their gravitational drives for maneuvering close aboard a carrier, not when the microscopic knot of a twisted spacetime comprising the craft’s drive singularity could shred the fabric of a capital ship’s hull like a particle cannon. Cutting their drives, Vaughn and Gregory opened aft venturis and fired their maneuvering thrusters. Jets of plasma, using super-heated water as reaction mass, bumped them into their final vector at three Gs—a kick unlike the free-fall acceleration of a gravitational drive.

      Dropping into a landing approach, Gregory’s AI adjusted his ship’s velocity as America’s long spine blurred overhead. The landing-bay entrance yawned wide ahead, rotating around to meet him, his onboard AI microadjusting his velocity and attitude to meet it. The landing bay was rotating at 2.11 turns per minute, providing the module’s out-is-down spin gravity. The bay’s entrance swung around every twenty-eight seconds, just as each incoming fighter pair was there to meet it.

      Traveling at 100 meters per second, they flashed into the shadow beneath the carrier’s spine, the domes, blisters, and sponsons housing the ship’s drive projectors blurring past, seemingly just above his head. It took them almost ten seconds to traverse the length of America’s spine. At the last instant, his AI tapped his starboard-side thrusters to find the moving sweet spot that matched perfectly the 7-meters-per-second lateral movement of the rotating landing bay. The moving opening ahead suddenly appeared to freeze motionless in space, as Vaughn and Gregory flashed across lines of approach-acquisition lights.

      When the fighters hit the flight deck’s magnetic tangle-field, he felt again a sudden shock of deceleration, and the side-by-side fighters came to rest. Magnetic grapples embraced his fighter and moved it forward to a nanosealed patch on the deck. A moment later, he was dropping through the seal to the pressurized deck one level below.

      His neural feeds cut out, and abruptly Gregory was enfolded in a tight, close, suffocating darkness. He thoughtclicked the cockpit open, and the hull melted away around him as he emerged into the bustling noise and glare and movement of the pressurized hangar bay. A robot, all arms and spindly plasteel framework, met him on the access scaffolding, its optics adjusting independently as it scanned him and his fighter. “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant,” the machine said.

      “Move your metal ass, damn it,” a human flight chief said nearby. As the robot shifted to one side, a crew chief appeared. “Hey, Lieutenant. Welcome aboard the America.”

      Gregory removed his flight helmet, blinking under the harsh lighting filling the cavernous space, and nodded. “Thanks, Chief.”

      He wasn’t home, but maybe, maybe, someday, if he was lucky, the star carrier America would get him there.

      TC/USNA CVS America

       USNA Naval Base

       Quito Synchorbital

       1440 hours, TFT

      “VFA-96 is recovered, Captain,” America’s CAG reported.

      “I see it, Connie. Thank you.”

      Back on board his ship, now, after the shuttle flight up from Columbus, Captain Gray relaxed in the embrace of his command seat on the carrier’s bridge, allowing incoming streams of data to flood through his consciousness. With his cerebral implants hardlinked to the carrier’s artificial intelligence, he could follow all of the preparations for getting the immense vessel ready for debarkation directly, as though he himself was the central awareness of America’s AI network. Through the AI’s electronic eyes, he’d watched the Starhawks of VFA-96 hurtling in, two by two, and trapping on America’s Bravo flight deck. A shift in perception, and he was watching now as the Starhawks peeled open and the pilots emerged.

      Gray had a special fondness for the old SG-92 Starhawks. As a raw, newbie lieutenant twenty years earlier, he’d flown a Starhawk as part of the long-disbanded VF-44 Dragonfires. Those fighters were considered relics nowadays, compared to the much newer and more powerful SG-101 Velociraptors, the SG-112 Stardragons, and other modern space fighters. There was talk of retiring the Starhawks permanently … but the Navy had been dithering on the issue for several years, now, and if the scuttlebutt was true, if the Sh’daar were coming back, that procrastination was a damned good thing. Earth would need a lot of fighters in the coming months, if Endeavor had been burned out of the sky by Sh’daar clients … and if the Sh’daar were planning on moving in from the Ophiuchan colonies.

      Hell, even if the Sh’daar had nothing to do with the Endeavor attack, the Slan capture of 36 Ophiuchi meant that Earth was going to need every fighter available, and now. There wouldn’t be time to grow new Velociraptors or Stardragons, not when every moment counted in intercepting the aliens before they reached Solar space. America and her battlegroup had been on full alert since the news of Arianrhod’s capture and of Endeavor’s destruction had come through from Mars. Supplies for an extended deployment were coming up through the space elevator now, or arriving down-tether from Anchorage, the small asteroid 36,000 kilometers farther out that kept the elevator structure taut and in place. Crews on liberty and leave on Earth and on the moon were being recalled, and two fresh squadrons—VFA-96 and VFA-115—had just arrived.

      Similar preparations were under way on board all of the ships in CBG-40, the designation for America’s current battlegroup. The expectation was that they would be getting the affirm-go from Geneva at almost any moment.

      The only real question was where the battlegroup would be deployed … Omega Centauri, as originally planned? Or to a much closer objective, to 36 Ophiuchi?

      Gray pulled back from the interior view, shifting instead to America’s logistical displays. Supplies of raw material—carbon, nitrogen, and the other elements necessary to nanufacture food and most other consumables used by the nearly five thousand personnel on board—were stored in sponsons along America’s kilometer-long spine. Hydrogen, oxygen, and water itself were tapped from the 27 billion liters of water stored in America’s shield cap. While the carrier could resupply from convenient asteroids in almost any star system, Gray wanted to have every stores module full-up before they departed Solar space. Faced with a hostile unknown, there was no telling how long it would be before they would have the luxury of resupply.

      “Connie?” СКАЧАТЬ