That would be the last time she’d hear from the Nimitz’s flight controllers until she came back from the sortie. You couldn’t stay in touch with the mothership, not when the enemy could zero in on graviton transmissions and use them to target your crate. The same applied to the rest of Flight B, Strike Fighter Squadron Ten (a.k.a. the Dragon Fangs). She’d be all alone out there. At least, she would be according to the known laws of physics.
Transition.
Her designated target was an enemy dreadnought. All the fighters were going for capital ships, hopefully before they could launch their entire missile load. That many vampires under the control of sapient operators rather than dumb computer systems would probably wipe out half of Sixth Fleet before the first energy weapon was fired. She and the other five War Eagles in Flight B were going to emerge five thousand miles behind the target – beyond point-blank range in space combat – and take it under fire.
She spent the few subjective seconds of the trip in blessed, silent darkness. Her fellow pilots were close by, and their presence comforted her.
Emergence.
The six-fighters of Flight B were thousands of miles from each other, but Lisbeth knew where each of them were, as surely as her visual sensors revealed the dreadnought that was their target.
The Vipers went for sinuous, curving shapes in their warships; there wasn’t a sharp angle to be seen in the three-mile long capital vessel. The dreadnought looked almost like a balloon animal, its comical lines belied by its sheer size and the technical specs flashing on her imp’s tactical display. The six fighters had emerged behind the alien ship’s main thrusters, where artificially-generated gravity waves pushing against the fabric of space-time reduced the effectiveness of its sensor systems. That worked both ways, of course, but the fighters were relying on passive sensors, mostly infrared, and capital ships ran blindingly hot against the dull background of space.
She aimed at the pre-designated spot, one of the massive engines on the upper quadrant, and fired. The massive cannon was theoretically recoilless, but the fighter did not have the shielding a normal battleship mount would have, and residual gravity emanations made the whole craft vibrate slightly with each shot. Her firing computer corrected for the disturbance as she sent another blast of fundamental force towards the target, and another.
The entire flight did. They each had five shots before their main gun’s capacitor ran dry; they emptied them in under ten seconds.
Pinpoint accuracy in space combat was not possible, given the distances and speeds involved. A ship’s main gun had a Circular Error Probable of two hundred meters at half a light year away, and slightly over ten meters at the current, impossibly close range. The estimated hit probability for each fighter was in the order of twenty percent.
All six fighters hit the same two-meter spot on the Viper dreadnought with their first volley. The rear quadrant shields could not withstand two simultaneous blows, let alone five. Neither could the armor behind them; the impossibly-close barrage vaporized it. The following four volleys hit within twenty meters of each other. The combined blasts stabbed deep into the bowels of the ship, tearing engines apart and cracking the heavy-metal cores of massive gluon power plants. Ravening strange matter particles were released from their containment bottles, free to roam and generate physical reactions that transformed large amounts of matter into energy.
As soon as their fifth and final shots were fired, Flight B fled into warp. Their last sensor readings showed a massive thermal bloom on the rear of the Viper dreadnought.
From inside warp space, Lisbeth felt the death screams of fifteen thousand Nasstah. The dreadnought had been obliterated, something they’d never imagined possible after a single pass. But that was of minor importance next to the feeling that those deaths had somehow reached into warp space – and touched something there.
Flight B reappeared in normal space some hundreds of miles away from their carrier vessel. It took some maneuvering to get close enough to the carrier for its grav-grapples to bring them in, using a modified version of the systems that handled shuttle landings. The return trip ended with a familiar jolt as they were conveyed deeper into the ship, back to the catapult platforms that had launched them. Lisbeth’s first combat sortie was over.
“That’s a kill, Flight B,” the space traffic controller said, almost shouting in shocked enthusiasm. “Confirmed kill, scratch one dreadnought. Flight A inflicted severe damage on its target. Flight C downed another Sierra. You have destroyed two dreadnoughts and severely damaged a third on this sortie. It’s… it’s fucking incredible.”
Lisbeth shuddered in her seat while the flight crew rushed forward to replace her main gun’s power pack. In five minutes or so, she’d be ready to go out there again. She should be elated after she’d helped destroy a capital ship. Or maybe amazed: nobody expected they would inflict catastrophic damage on a heavily-shielded and armored dreadnought with a few shots, even at close range. The only reason they’d pulled it off was the psychic link she and her fellow pilots shared. That realization should have filled her with awe.
Instead, she felt drained, and strangely enough, afraid.
Something had happened in warp space. Something bad.
* * *
“Dear God Almighty,” Admiral Givens whispered. The tactical holotank display combined the input from hundreds of sensor systems and had been confirmed by multiple sources, but she still couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
Three Viper dreadnoughts and five battleships had been destroyed outright, and all the rest were heavily damaged; the enemy armada’s flagship was drifting at a mere two kilometers per second, essentially dead in the water. The fighters had ravaged the alien ships of the line, turning the stately maneuvers of the enemy fleet into a shambles as it tried to deal with the unexpected threat. The tiny warp emergences hadn’t even registered in the aliens’ sensor systems until after they’d fired their load and escaped. A hundred and eighty fighters were preparing for their second sortie; they’d suffered no casualties and destroyed more tonnage than Givens’ entire force had in all its previous engagements at Parthenon combined.
She wished she could enjoy the unexpected success of the new weapon systems, but her ships had problems of their own.
While the fighters performed miracles, Sixth Fleet had been dealing with another Sun-Blotter, eighty thousand missiles headed their way. The enemy hadn’t been able to perform a full launch before the fighters struck, but even half a mass salvo was a lot to handle. The swarm of vampires was thirty seconds away, and a lot of them were going to get through.
“For what we’re about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” she muttered. Her old mentor, Admiral Carruthers, had been fond of that sarcastic prayer.
Eight thousand American missiles flew towards the eleven thousand survivors while standard point defenses redoubled their frantic efforts. The ensuing fireworks were actually impressive even with standard visual sensors, a rarity in space combat. Thousands of flashes in the dark blinked malignantly on the main view screen; the tactical holotank ran the counter of survivors. Two thousand and seventy-six missiles emerged from the massive conflagration and entered the final energy weapon gauntlet. Twelve hundred and ninety-one reached Sixth Fleet.
The Halsey shuddered more violently than in previous engagements; the shaking was enough to knock an ensign off her seat. The foolish child hadn’t strapped herself in. Givens almost chided the crewmember for her carelessness, but shrugged instead and concentrated on the damage reports. The American dreadnought had taken four direct hits. No fatalities and only eleven light casualties among her crew, but one of her main gun turrets was out of commission, reducing her firepower by twenty percent. The last surviving President-class light cruiser in the galaxy, the USS Chester A. Arthur, was struck a dozen times, suffering catastrophic levels of damage; her surviving crew was taking to the escape pods. Two destroyers and one frigate had been destroyed outright, and several other ships had been heavily damaged.
Bad losses to be sure, but nothing like what would have happened if the warp fighters hadn’t disrupted the missile launches and the manual controllers aboard the now-dead and crippled dreadnoughts.
The Vipers had shot their bolt, and Sixth Fleet still stood. Even better, the enemy’s battle line had been brutalized, and hers had just begun to fight.
“Our turn,” she said. Then, in her command voice:
“Fire at will!”
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
The area force field burned out with a final cyan flash. A moment later, a second missile volley slammed into the fighting holes where soldiers and Marines were making their last stand.
Multiple impacts hammered into the smaller and weaker portable shields protecting the dug-in infantrymen. Some held, but those that didn’t allowed an entire trench section to be washed over by plasma explosions that broiled alive everyone inside. Seven personnel icons went from green to black in the space of a second.
“We have to fall back!” Captain Kruger said over the commander channel.
“Hold in place,” Fromm ordered curtly. “Send your reserves forward and plug the gap as soon as the area force field is back online. I’m sending you reinforcements. Repeat, hold in place.”
“Hold in place, roger.” The Army captain’s voice had a distant quality; the man was in shock and relying on his training to get through it. Robot-like obedience was better than panic, but Fromm shouldn’t expect much from the officer; the continuing losses had essentially broken him. That was the only explanation for the pointless plea to retreat.
They were surrounded. There was nowhere to go.
Destroying the trapped Viper battalion had been surprisingly easy. Its controlling computers had been destroyed at some point; nobody had been in charge of the hapless vat-grown troopers. Caught in a narrow cul-de-sac and too tightly-packed to deploy, the aliens hadn’t been able to defend themselves from point-blank LAV and Hunter fire that wiped out the entire unit while Second Platoon’s dismounted Marines kept a relief force from reaching the killing ground in time to do anything except dispose of their dead.
The maneuvers required to escape in the aftermath had cost them their last few drones, however. Without the ability to keep an eye on the enemy, it was only a matter of time before they stumbled into more trouble than they could handle. Fourth Platoon’s Hellcats had run into what they mistakenly thought was a Viper company. In the ensuing firefight, they discovered the hard way they were tangling with a reinforced battalion, and while trying to extricate the mobile infantrymen, the entire formation had found itself cornered. Only about a squad’s worth of Hellcats were still functional; half a dozen pilots had been forced to abandon their damaged battlesuits and become lightly-armed infantrymen.
His two companies, now down to about four platoons of effectives, had managed to gain the heights of a hill, one flank anchored by Copperhead Rapids, the other protected by a sheer cliff. There was a ravine leading out of the hill, but it led to an open area that would be harder to hold against an attack, and which would likely end up invested by other Viper forces. Breaking contact without taking massive casualties would require artillery assets he didn’t have. In the course of the running battle, they’d been forced to abandon most of the support platoon’s vehicles; those rear echelon troops were holding their pistols and carbines and readying themselves to fill the fighting positions being vacated by the wounded and dead.
The Viper battle computers would soon divert enough forces to overrun the American position. The enemy couldn’t make their numbers count at first, but after a while they organized their rocketeers into groups. Their coordinated volleys from beyond small-arms fire were overwhelming their shields and their few anti-air defense assets. The steady bombardment was slowly but surely grinding them down.
Fromm sent out Lieutenant Hansen and the dismounted Hellcat drivers he’d kept in reserve to bolster the Army’s position. That left him with a handful of walking wounded, a couple of squads of truck drivers and loaders, and the company communication specialists as his last uncommitted forces. The temptation to grab a rifle and rush into the fight was strong, but he knew that he would only be allowed that luxury when the battle was well and truly lost.
They’d found their death ground. The only option left was to fight.
Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC
It’s chasing us, Lisbeth thought. It’s getting closer.
As a child, she’d sometimes had nightmares about being pursued by something so terrible she didn’t dare to look back. Whatever was happening inside warp space was worse. Whatever she and her fellow pilots had woken up was becoming more active and aware with every sortie they launched. She didn’t know what would happen if it caught them, and she didn’t intend to find out.
Her War Eagle emerged five thousand miles from a missile cruiser, moving at an angle that was increasing the distance between her and the target by thousands of meters per second. She adjusted course and opened fire, noticing the ship’s point defense was shooting back. Her warp shield absorbed most of the incoming, but a few near misses reduced her force fields by thirty percent in the time it took her to fire a single shot into the target and flee back into warp.
She almost hesitated before jumping, even though to stay in normal space was certain death. Flight B had lost one fighter already: Goober had lingered a moment too long, and a Viper frigate had scored a hit from twenty thousand klicks. It hadn’t taken long for the aliens to realize what was happening, and to re-task light vessels to scan for small warp emergences and target them with their main guns. They no longer could afford to fire their full ordnance load between jumps. It was shoot and scoot time, and even then they were taking losses.
Transition.
A feeling of pure dread washed over her. She and the other pilots were sharing warp space with something else. The presence chasing her was getting closer. In the few seconds she spent there, she became certain it was gaining on her, even though a chase should be impossible in a place where neither time nor space mattered.
Too many jumps. Every time a living mind entered warp, it broadcast some sort of signal. Do it enough times, and it would be detected and traced to its point of origin. By who or what, she didn’t know. The real warp demons, maybe. Or the thing she’d seen in that Marine’s eyes, back during training.
Emergence.
She reappeared on the other side of the enemy cruiser, a mere handful of miles away, close enough she could have seen the vessel clearly with the old Mark One Eyeball if she had a window to look out from. She took two shots while a point-defense laser fired ineffectually into her warp shield, and jumped just before a massive explosion devoured the Viper vessel and nearly enveloped her fighter.
“You do not belong here,” Goober told her. The dead pilot was sitting next to her, even though there wasn’t enough room in the cockpit for another person. None of what she was seeing was real, of course; the images were just a story her mind created to make sense of surroundings that didn’t conform to any natural law.
“Who are you?” Lisbeth asked the apparition.
Goober grinned. His face began to change, to run down like melting wax, revealing something glistening, dark and hungry.
Emergence.
She was back in the vicinity of the Nimitz, the terror of the last few moments beginning to fade away like a half-forgotten dream. Just another warp-induced nightmare, she told herself. Just because psychic powers were real didn’t mean other things were, things like monsters and demons.
Going through docking procedures in the middle of a battle distracted her enough to stop thinking about it. The important thing was the fact she’d gotten another confirmed kill, this one all of her own. They were directing individual fighters after cruisers and destroyers now, because there were no other higher-value targets left: the Viper dreadnoughts and battleships were all down. The battle had been as one-sided as pitting a 21st-century aircraft carrier group against a World War One fleet
would have been.
That was her last sortie. The strike group had done enough, and its casualties were mounting unnecessarily. The ordinary vessels of Sixth Fleet now outnumbered and outgunned the survivors, and they were mercilessly cutting them down. The hopeless battle had turned into an enemy rout.
A few bad daydreams were a small price to pay for victory, she decided.
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
Bringing the ALS-43, his Iwo and ammo for both on the long hike to the top of a hill hike was a pain in the ass, but Russell didn’t want to part with any of his firepower. He was the last member of his fire team left on his feet, and he was going to make the tangos pay.
“Move it, shitheads!” Gunny Wendell growled. The non-com was in command of what was left of Third Platoon after the new El-Tee had his LAV shot to shit. Lieutenant Hansen wasn’t dead, but he was down for the count. Not that it mattered; there were a whole twelve Marines able to fight in the weapons platoon.
Everybody was loaded beyond capacity, but they kept up the pace. The assaultmen were the worst; each of them was lugging five full reloads for their Light Missile Launchers on their backs. The remnants of the Guns squad were also carrying two portable field generators, which would come in handy since they were moving beyond the area shields protecting the main force.
By the time they made it to the top of the ridge, Russell’s power supply was down to twenty-five percent. On the other hand, he had a great view of the battle below.
The Vipers were moving forward in dribs and drabs under the cover of massed laser and missile fire; Russell’s sensors turned the light beams into a beautiful lightshow. The scurrying ant-sized figures looked like scaly tarantulas. Plasma bullets from the Marines and Army dog-faces firing on the ETs flashed like fireflies when they hit their shields. The effect when they finally took down an alien grunt wasn’t very spectacular: the tango would just stop moving, or would sometimes break into two pieces. It all looked pretty tame from the top of the mountain, unless you knew what it was like down there, all swirling panic, deafening sound and sudden death. It sucked to be down there.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 61
