Dark Matter. Ian Douglas

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      Three enemy fighters were following him down. Where were the rest?

      Where was Karyl?

      He didn’t know. The three bandits on his six were closing fast, though. It looked like they were lining up for a gun attack rather than another volley of antimatter warheads. Maybe their missile rails had gone empty. Maybe . . . maybe . . .

      A nuclear fireball blossomed to port, the detonation rapidly lost astern. They were popping nukes at him then . . . and one had just impacted the surface. He swerved to starboard, angling toward the tiny moon’s south polar region, still accelerating.

      His fighter shuddered, and he heard the rapid-­fire banging of small high-­velocity pellets against his hull. He cut back on his speed . . . then cut back again as the shuddering increased in strength and decibel level.

      A shimmering, hazy wall rose against the black of space from the horizon ahead.

      Shit! In the excitement, Gallagher had forgotten about the moon’s south pole . . . and the tiger stripes.

      Cassini, an early robotic probe exploring the Saturn system, had discovered the mysterious jets streaming out from the moon’s south polar region in 2005. The constant tug-­of war between Saturn and Enceladus created tidal heating and heavy tectonic activity, generating titanic cryovolcanoes erupting from four parallel fractures—­deep cracks in the icy crust popularly known as “tiger stripes” for their dark color. Geysers of water emerged at high pressures from the vents and froze almost instantly, creating plumes extending as far as 500 kilometers up and out into space.

      Much of this ice drifted back to the surface of Enceladus as snow, carpeting the moon’s southern regions to create a brighter, whiter surface much younger than existed in the north. The rest drifted clear of the satellite and formed the broad, highly diffuse E ring of Saturn, a 2,000-­kilometer-­thick belt circling the planet all the way from the orbit of Mimas, an inner moon of the planet, out to Rhea.

      Those cryovolcanic plumes had been the first evidence that Enceladus might harbor a liquid-­water ocean beneath the ice . . . and possibly life as well. Enceladus base had been established a century and a half earlier to search for that life—­a far more difficult task than on Jupiter’s Europa. While the subsurface ocean had a temperature close to 0˚ centigrade, the surface of the ice was a numbing 240 degrees colder, just 33 degrees above absolute zero. And unlike Europa, the internal ocean seemed to exist in pockets, limiting the areas where the xenobiology ­people could drill.

      The effort had been worth it, however. Life had been discovered beneath the Enceladean ice . . . very, very strange life, life based on hydrogen-­germanium chemistry—­on organometallic semiconductors rather than on carbon chains.

      Exactly how an ice ball like Enceladus had acquired enough germanium—­a relatively rare element on Earth—­to evolve life based on the stuff was a mystery; how it worked was a bigger mystery still. Simply identifying the flecks of organometallics exchanging photons with one another in the Enceladean oceans as being alive had taken the better part of a century . . . and a near-­total rewrite of the definition of the word life.

      Enceladus Station, located in the permanent blizzard 100 kilometers from the terminus of one of the tiger stripes, was a xenobiological outpost maintained as a joint venture by Phoenix University of Arizona and the Universidade de Brasília. With Brazil siding with the Confederation against the North American rebels, there’d been some understandable political stresses at Enceladus. VF-­910 had been dispatched to the moon to keep the peace . . . and the scientific neutrality of the base.

      Obviously, it hadn’t worked out as planned. The Confederation had dispatched a naval squadron to seize Enceladus and to isolate North America from the rest of Earth’s scientific community.

      None of this was of particular interest to Gallagher at the moment, as he skimmed above the polar ice toward a misty wall, which, at his current velocity, would have nearly the same effect on his ship as a cliff of solid ice. He gave orders to his AI, nudging the fighter into a slightly different path. Those tiger stripes each were about 35 kilometers apart. It would be like threading a needle, but he might slip between the plumes if he could maintain a low-­enough altitude.

      The Pan-­European fighters were still behind him, following him in.

      Hurtling between two towering plumes that filled the sky with misty light, Gallagher flipped his fighter end for end again, hurtling tail-­first and head-­down, meters above the roiled and jaggedly broken icy surface. He had one Krait remaining. He rolled back to keel-­down, giving orders to his AI in brief, staccato bursts of thought.

      “Fox One!”

      His last Krait dropped from his keel, ignited, streaked aft . . . and detonated on the ice. The flare was blinding . . . and an instant later a fresh and violent plume of freezing water geysered into space above the hole he’d punched into the surface, directly in the path of the trailing enemy fighters.

      Unfortunately, the expanding plasma shock wave from his missile caught the Starhawk and nudged it to one side, nudged it enough to send it skimming through the fringes of one of the other plumes. Gallagher felt a savage shock, saw pieces of his fighter ripping free . . .

      . . . and then the jolt of deceleration slammed against him, sending him hurtling into blackness as he lost consciousness. . . .

      Chapter Six

      4 March 2425

      Emergency Presidential Command Post

      Toronto

      United States of North America

      1640 hours, EST

      “The President of the Confederation Senate is on the link for you, Mr. President,” Marcus Whitney, the Chief of Staff, said. “The new President, I should say.”

      President Koenig glanced at the others in the room—­Pamela Sharpe, the Secretary of State. Lawrence Vandenberg, the Secretary of Defense. Dr. Neil Eskow, the Secretary of Science. All maintained facial expressions of careful neutrality.

      “You have the security issues worked out already, I presume?”

      “Of course, sir.”

      The security problem was far more difficult than merely one of virus control. A direct data link between Geneva and the emergency USNA capital in Toronto could easily serve as a conduit for a variety of electronic attacks—­viruses, worms, or brute-­force virtual assaults aimed at downloading confidential data or knocking out the American communications network. Powerful e-­security AIs would be monitoring the exchange on both sides of the Atlantic, making sure that only the video and sound being exchanged between the two government leaders would pass the firewalls.

      There was also the question of e-­psych attacks, which would amount to a direct assassination attempt. Koenig and his Confederation counterpart carried sophisticated nanochelated circuitry inside their brains, cerebral implants that let them interface directly with computers, vehicle control systems, medical scans, the Global Net, and, of course, mind-­to-­mind communications links. It was possible to hack another person’s implants, either to steal data or—­more viciously—­to infiltrate personal RAM and distort the victim’s perception of reality. Such an attack could leave a victim hopelessly insane . . . or so distort his reality that he acted as though he were schizophrenic.

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