That requires so much electricity that a generator for it wouldn’t even fit on most starships. So even if the laser could be strong enough to cause damage, the cost requirements prevent it from being that useful. The same with the electromagnetic forces required to contain a plasma beam, which is much more destructive than a laser, and very little could be done for plasma bolts.
So what happened to the warfare in space?
Two things happened in weapons technology to give battles between starships a practical chance of destroying each other.
The first was the development of near to light speed shells and other solid objects. It wasn’t a new theory, a bullet that could be made to go further and faster had been in development in the twenty-first century already. Modern technology had just improved on the design to make it affordable and small enough to put on starships.
It was called the rail gun and came in different versions.
The basic principle was that a set of magnetic couplings would accelerate a shell along a barrel. This shell would then be much faster than any gunpowder or rocket-based missile. There were a few factors involved like the length of the barrel for more speed and other engineering requirements.
But the rail gun became the most effective weapon to mount on a starship. In a turret form, it could launch shells at different speeds up to about a quarter of the speed of light. Longer and bigger rail guns would use the length of a starship to achieve almost the full speed of light.
Starship battles then entered a new era of destructive potential even at the great distance of many light seconds apart. Radar and sensors would track ships with seconds of lag, rail guns would fire along predicted paths and captains would set evasive flight plans. The use of FTL drives could bring starships closer together to shoot and then escape a return attack.
Combat became strategic and complex.
It was during these battles that the second round of offensive technology came about.
The fighter craft made a comeback, with modern miniaturization and superior flight technology. A smaller vessel than a starship which could travel in short FTL bursts could get close to a target and fire off various weapons in less than a light second response over radar.
There was a brief period where the weapons went back to lasers, and plasma beams but fighters that got close enough to use them on a starship got blown away by defensive rail gun turrets. So these fighters changed tactics and would travel within thousands of kilometers of an enemy starship instead of less than a kilometer.
Rail gun technology expanded into different kinds, for an attack there were different materials for the shells, the harder the shell, the more damage, also more expensive. Explosive shells, very difficult to use considering the speed of the rail gun firing. Flak cannons to disperse shrapnel against fighters targeted shotgun kinds of rail guns to spread debris in space in case of FTL movement.
As with wars on Earth space combat became dangerous very quickly.
Defensively the starships had to become more protected, for spaceflight and FTL they already had electromagnetic shields to divert impacts from space debris, micro-meteorites and so on. Improvements in the technology made these shields stronger and cheaper to install.
Some versions even carried a plasma layer within the shield that was projected around the ship.
The problem with these shields was that they blocked everything both ways. Income fire from even a rail gun would be stopped by the shield but firing from inside the protection required the buffer to be turned off. So the placement of shield generators became part of starship design and kept a lot of engineers employed.
Starships would have several shield generators situated around their hull, covering specific areas specifically. The other reason was that a shield would only be able to take a certain amount of impacts.
The shell of a rail gun moving at a velocity of close to the speed of light created a massive impact force. The standard rule of weight applied as mass times velocity produced the impact potential which was almost entirely diverted by a strong enough magnetic field generated by shields.
The radiation and ionization of the impact blast though would travel through the magnetic fields, entering the projection point, the shield generator. There would only be so much feedback that the generator could take before burning out or shutting down, so a good captain had to monitor which shields were still good to go.
The more hits you could get onto a shield the quicker it was going to overload, which brought battles back to the fighters. With all the design changes the various fighter craft could hit the shields repeatedly but didn’t need to have any specific design.
The urban term for these fighters caught on quickly. Just about every army, navy or commercial starship fleet began to call them Jackhammers because they just pummeled an enemy starship until it broke apart.
*
His Jackhammer, serial number two-two-seven disconnected from the heavy carrier along with the other twenty-five on his row and slid out into open space. The pilots didn’t keep track of real names; mercenaries didn’t need to get acquainted after all. They just used their nicknames, call signs. The pilot of Jackhammer two-two-seven’s call sign was Spindoctor.
He got the name because he could describe every situation or problem in a positive light. Some of his friends or comrades thought he was shallow, but he did find it fun to see a silver lining in everything.
It kept him positive in this dangerous field of starship battles.
Each squad joined up in sets of fives and used their maneuvering thrusters to push away and align on trajectories facing space around the target. The heavy carrier spun on her central axis, Spindoctor still thoughts of ships as she, detaching each group of Jackhammers outwards, so there wasn’t a traffic jam.
Spindoctor fired up the main drive and felt the two gee acceleration kick in just before he went into FTL. His ship wasn’t one of those really advanced versions with luxury magnetic fields folding around the pilot to manage inertia from heavy acceleration.
Spindoctor enjoyed the feeling, so he wasn’t worried. Swarms of dogfights were fun, and if they did happen, he wanted to feel his turns when chasing down and evading the enemy Jackhammers.
A second later and his squadron were back out in space ten thousand kilometers out from the target vessel. All one hundred of the Jackhammers were now positioned in a sphere formation with the starship caught in the middle. At this range, they couldn’t miss, and without Jackhammer cover of their own, the target was already outmaneuvered.
Scans of the ship revealed nothing of the interior or exterior equipment, as far as he could tell it may as well have been a metal hull adrift in space. The group communication band had been silent, now the order came through.
“All jackhammers stand by, squadron one the target vessel has not replied to our order to surrender. Proceed to fire warning shots.”
Oh well, Spindoctor thought to himself, his fingers rolling on the manual controls. This would be far less exciting, at least he got paid the same amount.
Each jackhammer was of a standard design, mass-produced from factories all over known space. A thruster at the back for main propulsion, eight pods for quick, turns situated along each of the corners of the main frame. The pilot was in a sphere ahead of the blocky engineering compartment that connected the central systems to the thruster and the frame.
In front of that sphere was the extended cone ending in a larger block which was the main rail gun, giving the Jackhammer primary firepower and the overall appearance of the age-old tool with the same name.
Squadron one each fired a single side mounted rail gun; individually each Jackhammer had the main gun to cause severe damage to large starships. The side-mounted plasma weaponry for fighter to fighter combat coupled with smaller rail guns was custom, but also a typical configuration.
The five tungsten coated aluminum projectiles came at the target vessel from wide angles, covering the starship from a sphere ten thousand kil
ometers out was still a reasonable distance. Each round vaporized against the shields of the target in bright purple and white Cherenkov radiation as the solid mass of the slugs burnt up.
Readings on the shields were still inconclusive; Spindoctor fiddled with his instruments a bit but couldn’t get a better resolution. Whatever that starship had was good, good enough that the five hits had been too small to show a field pattern when the electromagnetics flowed along through the generator and back.
The carrier would analyze the sensor readings on their side from three light seconds away, including the collection of scans from each Jackhammer. Whatever discussion they had would take a little while to work out before their next order came in. Meanwhile, Spindoctor and the other Jackhammer’s kept a close eye on any energy surges on the enemy ship.
Their communication channel opened.
“Squad one Jackhammers, launch main gun salvo a……” The transmission broke up into a brief spurt of loud static.
At the same time, Spin-doctor’s sensor pickup received the three light second delayed update on the carrier.
It exploded, out there where it should have been entirely safe the carrier was consumed in a plasma cascade and vaporized.
There shouldn’t have been anything out there that could fire enough ordinance at the carrier to do that much damage in such a small space of time. Spindoctor was absolutely sure that their target vessel hadn’t fired anything.
No rail guns or energy spikes.
That thought was quickly followed by panic, every Jackhammer pilot had prepared for a quick FTL jump away from the vessel. Standard evasive maneuvers and Spin doctor was already halfway through his primary drive activation.
Then the target ship fired, plasma beams stabbed out from the half spheres set along the longer part of the hull. They didn’t start and end like a bolt, they were actual beams; each one connected with and wiped out a Jackhammer.
In a heartbeat, forty of them disappeared into space dust.
Two gee thrust pushed Spindoctor back into his seat, and he modified his FTL to take him three light seconds along the elliptic away from where the carrier had been destroyed. While he did Spindoctor ran through what he had seen in his mind.
It was a sheer impossibility that any vessel could have sustained a weapon of pure energy plasma at that range, thousands of kilometers out it traveled near the speed of light, effective but it shouldn’t have been able to happen.
Especially not forty times at once.
A quick shudder as his Jackhammer entered normal space and recombined its matter with the limitations of speed based on Einstein’s equations. Spindoctor check his scopes, his sensors were clear except for the some of the Jackhammer squadrons exiting within a light second distance of him.
He kept his main engine going, making a quick turn away at an angle from any angle of attack that would have come at the carrier and the weapons of the target vessel. He wasn’t going to take any risks.
It was good that he had prepared, most of the Jackhammers within his sensor range disappeared in smaller but no less intense globes of plasma just like the carrier had.
The rest of them including Spindoctor immediately went back into FTL, pushing maximum thrust into their engines. The speed of the Jackhammers had them light minutes away from their aborted confrontation in moments, his heartbeat racing Spindoctor felt very alone without being able to see outside the neutrino bubble of his FTL.
The first thing he knew there was a problem was when his engineering systems recorded an outside neutrino pattern which pierced into his own FTL bubble. There was nothing he could do, his rapid heartbeat thundered in his ears and ended with the ultra-hot plasma that poured in and vaporized his Jackhammer.
All of the remaining fighters from the carrier exited their FTL jumps as ionized particles that couldn’t be detected, let alone investigated by any follow-up mission.
There was no one left to see the strange arrow shaped vessel twist space-time with applied gravity fields of immense power. The ship opened up with its large rear engine and shot through the wormhole opening to a destination unknown.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
Day 1…
Vague recollections…
Day 2…
A memory of a very long time ago…
Day 7…
Map of the Prison
A memory of being special…
Day 9…
A memory of lessons…
Day 27…
A memory of exhilaration…
Day 34…
A memory of discipline…
Day 41…
A memory of pain…
Day 56…
A memory of fear…
Day 59…
A Memory of a great task…
Day 64…
A Memory of Love…
Day 127…
A Memory of Betrayal…
Day 152…
A Memory of the Prison…
Day 215…
A Memory of Convenient…
Day 243…
A Memory of Revenge…
Day 297…
Epilogue…
Excerpt from “Fugitive Fenix”.
Excerpt from “The Boloi”.
Excerpt from “Abductees” the first book of the Gravitonics Chronicles.
Excerpt from “Conlin Shaw and Orion’s Arrow”.
Convict Fenix Page 55
