“Twelve on two. I don’t like those odds.”
“They’re the only odds we’ve got, Hammer. We’ll make do.”
“Roger, Witch.”
“Hard burn. Concentrate all of our Lances on the Drakes. The Serpents we’ll take out with guns.”
“I thought we had to be careful with the missiles,” Hammer laughed.
“That was before we had a dozen Jaxers in our sights.”
“I need no convincing. Let’s do this.”
Their Wildcats accelerated, dumping reaction mass in huge blooms behind them. Simultaneously, their targeting sensors acquired locks on the four Drakes. Each Drake was the beneficiary of an Iron Lance missile. These weapons fled from their launch bays of the Wildcats, leaving streams of ionized particles in their wakes. The Drakes detected the launches and took evasive maneuvers, pulling away from the onrushing missiles and dispensing electronic countermeasures in futile bids to fool the Iron Lances. All four of the Drakes disappeared as the Iron Lances came near and their proximity fuses detonated.
“Zoom and boom, Hammer.”
The Wildcats accelerated hard, and Imagawa was pressed into the cockpit’s blastcouch as the g-forces weighed on her. The internal inertial dampers of the Wildcat were strong, and they prevented her organs from being squeezed out her back. It was nonetheless extremely uncomfortable, as her felt weight had suddenly quadrupled, if only for a few moments. It was like being caught in a vise, and her breathing was labored.
The distance between the Wildcats and the enemy machines decreased rapidly, and the Ajaxians were soon within range of the wing-mounted M53A laser cannons on Imagawa’s fighter. Streaks of x-ray laser light raced through the darkness, scoring the hulls of a Serpent nearest to Imagawa. The K-75 bucked as the lasers burned their way through the armored casings of their fusion powerplants. The nuclear reaction inside burst through when the magnetic bottle that had contained it suddenly collapsed, and the machine exploded in a ball of atomic fire.
With the range falling, Imagawa added guns to the mix. Her Sorensen-Horan GEM-71 railcannons fired tungsten-cored penetrators at high velocities at the Serpents. These tore through the Ajaxian fighters, causing two to break apart as they ripped open powerplants and cracked fuselages.
Imagawa and Percy sped off after making their attack run. Percy had been just as accurate as she, and together they had accounted for six Serpents and four Drakes.
“They know we’re here,” Percy deadpanned.
The remaining enemy fighters, both Serpents, had peeled away from their attackers and were pursuing the Wildcats.
“They don’t mind leaving the civvie ships all alone,” Percy said. “That settles it, just in case there were any doubts. They are under Jaxer control.”
“Never had any doubts myself,” Imagawa insisted. “I can smell bad actors.”
“Zoom and boom again?”
“Are there still Jaxers who need killing.”
“Looks like two of them, Witch.”
“Then let’s go back for the rest.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“On my mark, we burn hard back the way we came, smoke the last Serpents, wait for Steadfast to lay down the law for those ships, get back aboard her, shower, and have beers on me.”
“I’m in.”
“Four, three, two. . .”
The delay in the countdown puzzled Percy. “Witch, what’s wrong?”
“My scope just lit up like fireworks.”
Imagawa’s Wildcat counted fifty new fighters coming toward her. Percy’s passive sensors soon picked them up too.
“I didn’t invite company, Witch. Did you?”
Imagawa had flown with Percy for years. She could sense the anxiety beneath the calm humor.
“No I didn’t,” she said. “This party just got bigger with a bunch of uninvited guests, and we’re all out of Lances.”
“Then we burn hard and hope to stay alive until the Steadfast arrives.”
The Wildcats turned in a tight arc away from the just discovered Ajaxian fighters until they had come upon a parallel course with the hospital ship and the freighters. The superior acceleration of the Wildcats enabled them to outdistance the remaining K-75 Serpents, which were thankfully not equipped with missiles, and to stay out of missile range of the others.
“Hammer, this many fighters had to have come from somewhere.”
“Agreed.”
Imagawa’s radar receiver began to chirp. “Hammer, we’re being painted by a very powerful search radar.”
“I know. It can’t be something carried on one of the fighters. They are too small to mount something this strong.”
“Understood. I’m going active. We have to know what’s following us. We can’t have Steadfast come riding to the rescue and dropping in on something we should have warned them about.”
“Steadfast is four light minutes away. It may get our first transmission and displace here before it gets our second.”
“We have to try.”
Imagawa turned on her active radar. It would give her an accurate picture of what was around her that her passive sensors could not detect. It would also let everyone else know where she was. It was a risk she’d have to take. The Ajaxian fighters were already on their tails. Best to learn who else was out there in the dark.
The radar pulses raced from her Wildcat, across the thousands of kilometers of space that separated her and Percy from the trailing Ajaxians. In less than a half-minute she’d gotten the answers she was seeking. Part of her wished she hadn’t looked. There were the three Aquitainian ships that had to be under Ajaxian control, a little bit behind them, now that she and Percy had overhauled them. Fifty-two Ajaxian fighters, K-15 Pythons, K-29 Black Dragons, K-75 Serpents, and K-76 Drakes, were chasing in the distance.
Worse followed them. Trailing at a distance of four hundred thousand kilometers were two Scourge-class destroyers, four Deathbird-class corvettes, seven Gremlin-class sloops, and a single Wyrm-class light carrier. In answer to the question Imagawa hadn’t needed to ask, her Wildcat’s computer identified them all as Ajaxian.
“You picked up the returns too, Hammer.”
“The whole of the Domain Navy is behind us, heading for Arles!”
“Not quite, Hammer, but it sure feels that way. This isn’t a raiding force we’ve stumbled on. It’s an invasion fleet, looking to grab Arles.”
“They’ll turn the orbital into a staging post against the outer system.”
“We’re not going to let that happen.”
“What do we do?”
“For the time being, exactly what we are doing. Running away very fast. Hold on.” Imagawa was silent for several seconds. “I’ve just sent another message to Steadfast. Let’s hope Heyward hasn’t already jumped. He’ll be outnumbered and crushed to powder if he comes. As for Arles, I’m praying they’ve got some weapons and a shield capable of taking a pounding from the Jaxers.”
“Arles is a very old station, Witch.”
“Yes, and that’s what worries me.”
Imagawa and Percy’s Wildcats continued their hard accelerations, eating up the distance between them and Arles. A response from the orbital came two minutes later, encrypted, voice only. “RHN Wildcat, this is Arles. Colonel Dat Duran, commanding Aquitainian Army officer of Arles Station. We have received your message. Please tell me that help is on the way.”
“So far it's just us.”
Duran’s exhalation of dismay was audible.
“Do you have armaments?” she asked.
“We’ve got some missiles, guns, and magnesand projectors. Nothing that could trouble that fleet out there for long.”
“Any fighters?”
“We have six F-215B’s, transferred from Halifax to us. Not much help against the DN.”
Imagawa frowned. F-215 Arrow’s were old, obsolescent by the time Imagawa had herself joined the Navy years back, and Arles had too few of them. What did she expect in a backwater system?
“The pilots are getting into their machines as we speak. Our shield is tough enough. It won’t be able to take a repeated pummeling.” Colonel Duran did his best to hide his worry, though it seeped into his voice nonetheless.
“We can’t let them line up and batter their way through your shields,” said Imagawa.
“What are we going to do?”
“Get your Arrows into space,” Imagawa said. “I have an idea.”
*****
“Witch, I’m aware you have issues with the Jaxers, but this is certifiable.”
“Okay, Hammer. Here’s the method to my madness. We hit the carrier with all of the missiles on the Arlesian F-215’s. They’ve got Sledgehammers. Good weapons. Two per, that’s twelve in all. We blast a path through the enemy fighters for them. We run like hell once their birds are away, back to Arles.”
“There was nothing different about your plan this second time you explained it to me. Still crazy.”
“Right, but I was hoping that you’d have gotten used to it. Maybe I thought it would be more palatable to you.”
“No. Familiarity breeds yet more contempt.”
“It’s what we have to do.”
“It will be something to take out a carrier. They’ll have to get very lucky.”
“They’ll do something. Maybe if we take out the Wyrm, they will have to call off the attack.”
“That sounds like wishful thinking.”
“Maybe. But without the carrier all of those fighters will be stranded here. That will be a huge logistical headache for the DN to retrieve so many small craft. The Ajaxians can’t just write off that many fighters. So maybe they back off. And the two destroyers and the swarm of little ships with them might not be enough to take Arles on their own. They might call off their attack.”
“Fair points. Still, very low probability of either occurring. It also depends on what they plan to do with those civilian vessels.”
Imagawa pondered what trick the Ajaxians planned to play on the station with the three ships. What have you got in store, barbarians from another star?
“We can’t let them use Arles for target practice,” Imagawa said at last. “Are you with me?”
“Of course. Old age never held any attraction for me.”
“Me neither. I hate gray hairs.” Imagawa had found a gray strand in her long, dark brown mane not a week before. Stress would do that to you, she’d been told. She hadn’t believed it. Now she did.
The six Arlesian fighters closed the distance with Imagawa and Percy, who took their Wildcats ‘up’, relative to the station ahead of them, so that, after completing a long arc, they were now heading back toward the hitherto pursuing Ajaxian fighters. The Arrows formed up behind the Halifaxian Wildcats, trailing them by five hundred meters.
“Captain Marcello Petrov, I presume?” Imagawa asked.
“One and the same,” came a voice over Imagawa’s comm. “Glad you’re here.”
“Good. We will have to work together to make this happen.”
“You’ve got our support,” assured Petrov. “Unorthodox plan you’ve got.”
“What Captain Petrov is too polite to say is that, in the annals of military history, there is no other example the equal of the lunatic thing we are about to try,” Percy interjected.
“I prefer ‘unorthodox,” Imagawa said. “Let’s get on with it. I’ve got an incoming message from Colonel Duran.”
Duran’s voice wafted over the comm. “Ready to eject now, Lieutenant Commander. It will be coming out fast.”
“Excellent. That’s what I need.”
“It will overtake you inside sixty seconds, give or take a few. Here it comes.”
Orbital stations were ordinarily fitted with powerful ejectors to expel solid and liquid waste. It was easier and cheaper to dispatch garbage on a sunward trajectory every so often rather than recycling it or finding a place to stash it on the station. It was called ‘solar disposal’ among the professional sanitation engineers, and ‘sun dumping’ by nearly everyone else. At any one moment there might be two dozen streams of junk floating toward a system’s primary, and many more if the system was heavily populated or hosted a large number of orbital stations within it.
Instead of tossing the trash sunward, Arles’s electromagnetic refuse ejectors had flung it out in the direction of the oncoming Ajaxians. Imagawa’s Wildcats and the Arlesian F-215’s were quickly overtaken by the garbage, and their machines became lost in the debris. Some of the junk was mildly radioactive, and Imagawa found herself ironically thankful for this, as it helped hide her fighters from enemy sensors. Between the knots of refuse and radiation, the Jaxers’ space search radar could no longer find purchase, and the locks that had been held on the Wildcats for the last fifteen minutes were broken.
Imagawa commed to the lead Arrow. “You understand what you have to do, Petrov?”
“Unfortunately, all too well. We pop out of the junk cloud, follow you in, and drop Sledgehammers on the carrier. What could go wrong?”
“I like this guy,” Percy said. “Proper outlook on things.”
“That’s it, Petrov. We won’t be getting a second chance at this so let’s make these shots count.”
“Will do,” Petrov said. “We’ll be sitting ducks going in. Lugging one Sledgehammer slows me down enough. With two we’ll accelerate like cold molasses.”
“Arrows aren’t the optimal machines to haul big antiship missiles around,” Imagawa acknowledged. “We don’t have any strike fighters on hand, so they’ll have to do. You won’t have to stay on your attack run for long, remember. Once your birds are away, you turn and pull hard-g’s. If any fighter is willing to chase after you they’ll have to burst a blood vessel or two in their brains to catch up.”
“Affirmative. Luck.”
Three minutes elapsed. The pursuing fighters, unable to gain locks on either the Wildcats or the Arrows, turned, bleeding speed as fast as they were able, pulling up and below the trash cloud. Several of the smaller machines, the svelte Black Dragons and the zippy Pythons, descended into the debris field to hunt for Imagawa and her charges, who were following just inside the trailing garbage elements.
“We’d better keep an eye out for space junk too, Witch. If we collide with any of this we’re as dead as if a missile hit us.”
“Right. Average spacing between the debris elements is eighty meters, or so my computer is telling me. Think you can handle that, Hammer?”
“Now that you’re using mathematics, okay, I’d be embarrassed if I couldn’t fly between this stuff.”
The flash of a muzzle caught Imagawa’s attention, as gauss slugs were slung at a nearby wedge of junk. With a nudge of the gravitic panes on the port side of her Wildcat, she oriented the nose of her fighter toward the source of the shots. It was a Python, cruising happily to starboard, just above her machine at a distance of two kilometers. She selected grapeshot, railcannon-launched shells filled with hundreds of tiny pellets. She aimed ahead of the Ajaxian fighter, calculating how much time it would take for the grapeshot canisters to cross the distance. With grape, as with horseshoes and hand grenades, you didn’t have to be too accurate. Close was good enough.
Three seconds later she was rewarded with a bright blossom of orange fire as the Python exploded, its reactor breached. Several Pythons and Black Dragons that had come to hunt the Wildcats and Arrows reacted furiously, bouncing around looking for the unseen assassin.
A shriek then burst from Percy over the comm. “Uh-oh!”
There was a blast of gauss cannon fire and a blaze of orange light expanding noiselessly in the field.
“Hammer! Where are you?”
“I’m okay. I’m okay,” Percy said, breathing hard. “A Black Dragon sidled up alongside me when you smoked the other bandit. Five meters, tops. He was looking the other way. I shot first. End of story. I’ll need to have my flight suit laundered when we ge
t back to the Steadfast. That’s all.”
“You had me worried there. You shrieked like a banshee.”
“I prefer to think that I merely expelled unnecessary air from my lungs, in a manly manner, clearing them for combat.”
“You tell yourself that. We can’t stay.”
“The Ajaxian carrier and company are still too far, Witch. At least two thousand kilometers.”
“The fighters will find us soon, and I don’t want to stay in here to fight them. We make a break for it, run at the ships, and scoot away.”
“Roger that.”
Imagawa commed to Petrov and the other Arlesian Arrows. “Petrov, still with me?”
“Ready to go.”
“In five seconds, we leave this cloud and head for the Jaxers. Closing speed will be high. You won’t have to stay on your attack run for longer than thirty seconds.”
“Good. On your mark.”
Imagawa began to count down. “Five, four, three, two, one. . . break!”
The Wildcats and Arrows accelerated out of the debris field, heading straight for the light carrier that was at the core of the Ajaxian fleet.
Imagawa and company accelerated hard for the enemy ships, each machine pulling close to twenty g’s. Hard stuff. It would have killed her but for the Wildcat’s inertial dampers. Imagawa could scarcely breathe with the extra weight pressing down on her struggling lungs. It felt like an eternity, but the clock in her fighter ticked down the seconds, showing that only twenty-five seconds had passed. Two heartbeats later, the first of the Sledgehammer antiship missiles screamed past her fighter, followed by the rest of the Arlesian munitions. Once the last of the missiles had been fired, the Arrows tore to port, doing a hard burn away from the Ajaxian fleet. Several Ajaxian fighters peeled off from the greater mass and chased the Arrows. Imagawa saw they had a long headstart and a speed advantage over the Black Dragons and Pythons following them. She hoped it would be enough.
“Hammer, time for some countermeasures!”
Each Wildcat began to spew a half-dozen M-11 electronic countermeasures pods. Each canister mimicked the multispectral signature of a Wildcat. Up close, no eyeball would be fooled, but at a distance, it made things difficult for machine sensors. At speed, the M-11’s followed alongside the Wildcats, each having the same velocity as the machines that had dispensed them.
The Ajax Incursion Page 7
