Chapter Five

       29 June, 2425

      USNS/HGF Concord

       4-Vesta

       0128 hours, TFT

      With Charlie One having already passed the closest point to Vesta on its outbound trajectory, Concord could no longer move to block the alien’s path. She could start chasing the other ship, however … or, more specifically, she could start accelerating toward the point far ahead of Charlie One where the alien should be when Concord intercepted it.

      An intercept would be possible, of course, only if Concord could pile on a little more acceleration. Fortunately, while High Guard cutters weren’t armed to the teeth, they were designed with high-velocity intercepts in mind. An asteroid flung into a dinosaur-killer trajectory by unpleasant aliens might well have a considerable velocity once the course change had been discovered, and the sooner the ship could rendezvous with the incoming rock, the easier it would be to nudge it once more onto a safer course. Concord was a Lexington-class WPS-100 cutter, streamlined to reduce the drag that became significant at relativistic velocities within the dust-filled volume of the Sol System. She would be able to catch Charlie One in another hour—unless, of course, the alien flipped over into metaspace.

      Regardless, she would make the rendezvous before the star carrier America.

      Back home, in New New York, Dahlquist had a dog—a genetically modified pocket mastiff named Bumble who had a psychotic tendency to chase aircars when they passed overhead.

      Like Bumble, Dahlquist wondered what he was going to do with Charlie if he actually caught the thing.

       VFA-96, Black Demons

       In pursuit

       0131 hours, TFT

      Connor was flying blind. Her scanners still showed the alien craft about five hundred kilometers up ahead with AI-resolved magnification enough to show some detail, but she wasn’t getting any signal at all from the drone, which minutes earlier had dropped into Charlie One’s pocket of intensely warped space. The device should be falling forward along the alien’s hull, now, in free fall toward the intense, flickering point of projected gravity out ahead of the alien’s nose … assuming, of course, that the alien’s flight technology worked along the same line as that of human ships. Everything she’d seen suggested that the technology was the same, right down to an apparent upper level of acceleration.

      The escorting fighters had worked well clear of the alien and were decelerating now. Connor and the other three Starblades were already past them. Possibly, they were deploying to engage the Hawes and the Elliot, which still were following in the fighters’ wakes, but that wasn’t her concern.

      She needed to stay focused on Charlie One.

      Her Starblade shuddered, and an inner awareness—her link with the fighter’s AI—warned her of trouble: gravity waves. Powerful gravity waves. Her fighter literally was passing through ripples in spacetime.

      And then Charlie One was tumbling, its power plant dead, its acceleration at zero.

      “Got him!” Connor yelled over the tactical channel. Communications between squadron members were always a bit iffy at relativistic speeds, but she got an immediate acknowledgement from Commander Mackey. Still accelerating, Connor’s fighter closed with the alien very swiftly now, passing it within a hundred kilometers. There was no response from the vehicle, and no indication that she was being tracked or targeted. There was power being generated on board, she noted, but the main power plant appeared to be off-line.

      Good. Flipping her fighter end for end, she began decelerating. Rendezvousing with Charlie was going to be touch and go, since the alien spacecraft was still coasting along at very close to the speed of light. But with its singularity drive switched off, it was no longer accelerating, and that made the problem a little bit simpler.

      She checked her nav data and realized that she was the closest of the four fighters to the target.

      “This is Demon Five,” she reported. “I’m going to try to close with Charlie One.”

      “Copy that, Five,” Mackey’s voice came back. “For God’s sake watch yourself.”

      Watch yourself get blown out of space, she thought, but she said only, “Affirmative.”

      She began closing with the alien.

      USNA Star Carrier America

       In pursuit

       0140 hours, TFT

      “One of our fighters is docking with the alien,” Commander Mallory told Gray. “It’s confirmed: Charlie One has stopped accelerating.”

      “About goddamned time,” Gray said. “Pass the word, though. Do not attempt to board the alien alone. I want them to wait until we have some capital ships there to back them up. And we’ll need SAR tugs to slow Charlie One the hell down.”

      “Aye, aye, sir.”

      America carried a number of search-and-rescue craft, and the UTW-90 space tugs of the carrier’s DinoSAR squadron were specifically designed to rendezvous with streakers: ships damaged in combat at relativistic speeds, hurtling off into deep space at near-c velocities and unable to decelerate. SAR tugs could link up with fast-moving hulks, recover their crews, and slow them down to more manageable velocities.

      “They can try for an AI link,” Gray went on, “but no physical contact.”

      They were going to do this right. There were too many unknowns floating around out here to risk some fighter pilot putting his or her foot in it.

      “And what if the aliens decide not to cooperate?” Mallory asked.

      “Then they’ll keep until we get there with the big guns.”

      “I presume you don’t mean literal weapons.”

      “No,” he said, a little exasperated by the question. “But America’s AI should be able to pry them open electronically.”

      Combat for over half a century with half a dozen different Sh’daar species had given humans plenty of opportunity to learn about Sh’daar computer networks and protocols. In particular, contact with one alien species, the Agletsch, had introduced humans to various Agletsch artificial languages—especially their trade pidgins, which allowed various members of the Sh’daar Collective to communicate with one another. Language, it turned out, was as utterly dependent on a given species’ physical form as it was on their psychology. There were galactic species that communicated by changing color, by modulating burps of gas from their abdomens, and by the semaphore twitchings of appendages on what passed for faces. The huge, floating-gasbag H’rulka broadcast on radio wavelengths. The Turusch lived in closely bonded pairs, and the speech of one harmonized with the speech of its twin, giving rise to a third layer of meaning. The Slan, who “saw” in sonar, communicated in patterns of rapid-fire ultrasound clicks at wavelengths well beyond the limits of human hearing. With such a bewildering range of communication types and styles, it was amazing that anyone in the Galaxy could exchange even the simplest ideas with anyone else at all.

      But that was where the super-AIs came in, the immensely powerful computer minds billions of times faster and more powerful than mere organic brains. Some were designed solely to crack alien languages; shipboard systems had language software developed by those specialized AIs.

      Even so, it was never easy.