Center of Gravity (29 page)

I
HAVE MERGED WITH THE
AI
DESIGNATED
“G
UARDIAN
”
AND AWAIT FURTHER ORDERS.

“Christ,” Buchanan said. “
That
throws some quantum uncertainty into things.”

“It does,” Koenig agreed. “Looks like it’ll be Plan Gamma.”

Chapter Fifteen

29 January 2405

Demon Twelve

Alchameth-Jasper Space

Arcturus System

1401 hours, TFT

High-G space fighters enjoyed considerable advantages in close combat with capital ships. Their speed and maneuverability made targeting them with beam weapons extremely difficult, especially at ranges where speed-of-light time lags made predicting a target’s future position more a matter of guesswork than of mathematics. At longer ranges, smart missiles were the only reliable way to kill fighters… and fighters possessed sandcaster rounds and other point-defense weapons specifically designed to knock out incoming missiles.

Inevitably, though, as the space battle continued, those advantages began wearing away. The sheer size and mass of enemy capital ships, the numbers of weapons they possessed, the amount of raw power they could direct to shields, screens, and beam weapons began to tell. Fighters carried sharply limited supplies of expendable munitions—thirty-two VG–10 Kraits, generally, and forty-eight anti-missile rounds, ninety-six AM decoys, and two thousand depleted uranium slugs for the RFK–90 KK cannon. After more than two hours of steady combat, the Confederation fighters were beginning to run low on missiles.

More and more of the Confederation fighters were dying.

There were nine Night Demons left in the fight. Chalmers, Ball, and McKnight were gone, picked off one by one by the increasingly accurate and deadly fire of the Turusch heavies.

Commander McKnight had been the squadron’s skipper, blown out of the sky when a couple of Toads had dropped onto his ass ten minutes ago and hammered him with pee-beep fire. Lieutenant Commander Jonnet had taken command of the squadron… though at this point it was tough to tell if
anyone
was in control.

“Break left, Demon Twelve!” Jonnet was yelling. “Break Left!”

Lieutenant Shay Ryan rolled her Starhawk left, pulling around a projected singularity with a savage pull of G-forces as three Turusch missiles swung in from high and off her port stern quarter, then kicking in a ten-K boost. By turning in to the missiles, she had a chance of shaking them off her tail, or at least of forcing them to slow in order to match her turn.

The sky around her was filled with light—pulsing flashes of nuclear weaponry detonating silently against the night. A quarter of the sky was filled by the ringed, banded giant, Alchameth, bloated in half phase and red-gold in Arcturian light. Her new vector was carrying her toward the swollen planet at over one thousand kilometers per second. Jasper and Arcturus Station were somewhere behind her, she wasn’t sure where.

White light blossomed astern as one of the missiles detonated, a desperate attempt to disable her. She punched out two decoys—hand-sized robots that moved and reflected like a Starhawk fighter—hoping to ditch the remaining two incoming warheads. One of the Turusch missiles veered off, tracking the drone… but the other stubbornly completed its turn and continued homing on her ass. It was less than a hundred kilometers away now, and closing at a leisurely fifteen kilometers per second.

“Impact in six seconds,” her AI whispered in her head.

“I know,
I know
!” she yelled into the close embrace of the fighter’s cockpit. She was out of sand… and the loom of the super-Jovian gas giant ahead was rapidly cutting off her tactical options.

With the seconds to impact dwindling away, Ryan flipped her Starhawk end for end, dragging the targeting cursor floating in her in-head display onto the red icon marking the fast-approaching missile. She triggered a burst of high-velocity Gatling fire, hosing the incoming warhead. The target was tiny, less than four hundred centimeters wide, impossibly small for a targeting ship even with AI-assisted aim. The warhead was jinking as it approached, and she continued to squeeze off bursts at twelve per second.

The enemy warhead exploded just four kilometers off, the wavefront of fast-expanding debris and radiation washing across her fighter like a tidal wave, knocking out screens, killing her forward drive projector, sending her Starhawk into an uncontrollable tumble. The fireball dimmed, then faded.

Ryan was falling helplessly toward Alchameth.

“This is Demon Twelve,” she broadcast on the general tactical channel. She felt strangely relaxed, almost accepting.

I’m going to die
, she thought. “I’m hit. Mayday, I’m hit. I’m falling in… .”

Dragonfire Nine

Alchameth-Jasper Space

Arcturus System

1406 hours, TFT

Gray saw the fifty-kiloton nuclear detonation close by the green icon marking Shay Ryan’s ship, heard her calm announcement over the taclink. He was twelve hundred kilometers behind her and closing—pure chance in the freewheeling chaos of a space-fighter furball, but fighter pilots relied on chance, on luck, as often as they relied on the predictions of cold, hard numbers.

Alchameth was just half a million kilometers ahead. At Ryan’s current speed, she would tumble into the outer layers of the giant’s atmosphere in another seven or eight minutes.

“Night Demon Twelve, this is Dragonfire Nine,” he called. “I’m following you down from twelve hundred out. What’s your situation?”

“Dragon Nine, Demon Twelve,” she replied. He could hear the stress in her voice. “Main power out, primary drives out. I’m tumbling… about fourteen rotations per minute. I’ve got… shit… looks like seven minutes and something before I burn up.”

When Ryan’s fighter hit the gas giant’s outer atmosphere, friction would turn it incandescent, then vaporize it in the flare of a brief-lived shooting star.

He was closing with her fast. “Twelve, Nine. Can you control your tumble?”

There was a long pause. “Negative, Dragon Twelve. Maneuvering thrusters are dead.”

He accelerated harder, until the green icon drifting in his view ahead gave way to a black delta shape—an SG–92 Starhawk in combat mode, crescent-shaped, with forward-arcing wings, tumbling slowly.

Gently, Gray edged his Starhawk closer, maneuvering with brief, precisely controlled bursts from his thrusters. Using his fighter’s AI, he projected vectors in his in-head display, lines and angles of light accompanied by flickering blocks of alpha-numerics, showing direction, spin, and momentum.

Starhawks weren’t designed for this kind of work. It was going to be a bit on the hairy side.

“Hang on, Ryan,” he said. “I’m going to connect in three… two… one…”

In combat mode, a Starhawk’s wing-arcs curved forward and down, creating a sheltered area beneath the fighter’s belly. Gray was trying to use those wings as arms to capture Ryan’s tumbling ship, to bleed off momentum and stop its end-over-end roll.

His fighter bumped against Ryan’s ship, hard enough to jolt him and knock his fighter up and back. The transfer of momentum had robbed her tumble of some of its speed. She was still tumbling, but more slowly now.

Ahead, Alchameth filled the sky, its rings a brilliant slash across heaven. The fighters were falling toward the planet’s night side, toward a point just below the dark curve of the horizon.

“You okay in there?” Gray asked Ryan.

“Yeah. A little shook up, is all.”

“I’m coming in again.”

“Damn it, Gray, you’re not a freaking tug.”

“Well, SAR tugs are in kind of short supply right now. Brace yourself.”

He approached the other fighter again, once more nudging it with the body of his own ship. The impact this time was a heavy, dull thud, and the vector lines on his internal display vanished save for the big one showing Ryan’s downward plummet.

“Still okay?”

“Uh. What are you doing, slamming my cockpit with a hammer?”

“Worse. I’m using my ’Hawk. I think I’ve about got that spin neutralized, though.”

“So I’ll auger in nose first, nice and neat. You can’t pull my ship out of this fall. I just ran the numbers. You
can’t
.”

Gray was looking at the same numbers, as his AI fed them through his IHD. A Starhawk massed twenty-two tons unloaded. The projected artificial singularities used for acceleration and for turns were precisely balanced in both virtual mass and in distance. If a fighter was too close to a singularity by even a matter of meters, tidal forces could stretch it and its pilot in the so-called “spaghetti effect,” resulting in both being ripped into their component atoms. Gray was asking his AI if it could handle the changes necessary on the fly to project a turning singularity that could accommodate both fighters together, a combined mass of over forty-four tons.

The results coming back were not encouraging.

He’d gone into this thinking that he might be able to lock the two fighters together with mooring lines, his ship above, hers below, then project a turning singularity forward and above, causing both fighters to go nose-high, turning away from the planet looming ahead. The hull structure of an AG–92 simply wasn’t up to that much stress. If the mooring lines broke as the fighters went into the turn, hers would be flung “down” and into the gas giant, while his fighter had a good chance of being nudged the other way, and into its own singularity.

He ran the numbers for simply holding onto Ryan’s fighter with mooring cables and throwing a deceleration vortex astern, slowing the two of them. Again, the forces involved were far too great for the mooring lines Gray had available. Ryan’s fighter would continue to fall—a bit more slowly, perhaps, but still with more than enough speed to slam into the planet’s atmosphere within a matter of minutes.

He couldn’t project a singularity through the other fighter in order to draw both onto a new vector.

Damn it, there had to be
something
. . . .

Alchameth had grown noticeably larger in the past minute, sliding off to one side. The two fighters were dropping beneath the sharp-edged plane of the outer rings now, Ryan’s Starhawk nestled in spoon-fashion beneath Gray’s fighter and between its drooping wings. They would plunge into significant atmosphere, Gray saw, in six more minutes. Damn it, the infalling vector was close. With only a small boost applied in the right direction, they could change vector enough to skim above Alchameth’s horizon, rather than plunge beneath it.

He looked at firing his maneuvering thrusters in such a way that he could nudge both fighters higher on their descent path. The amount of reaction mass he still carried for his plasma-jet maneuvering thrusters, however, was limited. He looked at combining his reaction mass with what was left in Ryan’s tanks.
Still
not enough. The numbers were close, tantalizingly close… but just not close enough.

Just a
little
nudge…

“Got it!” Gray said. He had the AI run through the numbers again, checking the new configuration. There
was
a way… hairy, but it gave them a chance.

“There’s no way, Trevor!”

“Trust me.” Reaching out to the touch pad, he fired a mooring line from his fighter’s belly into the dorsal surface of Ryan’s Starhawk. The tip imbedded itself in her hull’s nanomatrix, anchoring the two together.

With his AI’s constant help and finely calculated assistance, Gray used his maneuvering thrusters to reorient the two falling Starhawks, then start them tumbling nose over tail once more.

“
Trev!
What are you doing?”

“Trust me! This is going to work!”

He hoped.

He ran the calculations past the AI a third time. Human reactions would
not
be fast enough to pull this off, and it was entirely possible that the stresses he was setting up would render both humans unconscious. But his AI would remain aware… .

The tumble increased. Centrifugal force was tugging hard at Gray now, a steadily increasing sensation of out-is-down weight, of fast-growing pressure threatening to force the blood out of his legs and torso and up into his head. His vision blurred, becoming red.

The AI was in control now as Gray slipped across the ragged edge of consciousness.

And at a precisely calculated instant, Gray’s fighter released the mooring cable, and the two ships, their connection broken, hurtled apart. Both were still falling toward Alchameth at seventy thousand kilometers each second, of course, but the spin-and-cut maneuver had imparted new vectors to both craft, which were now flying apart from each other.

Of course, the maneuver had added energy to Ryan’s fighter, and that energy had been taken from Gray’s. His new trajectory was plunging him deeper and deeper into Alchameth’s gravity well.

Gray was unconscious… but his AI recognized the danger and engaged the fighter’s gravitational singularity drive.

A fiercely powerful knot of compressed spacetime appeared ahead and to one side of his Starhawk’s prow, and the fighter, under AI control, whipped around it in a ten-G turn.