Mavericks (Expeditionary Force Book 6)
Page 6
“That hamster crew chief will blow a gasket when he sees fish guts in his precious turbines,” Derek said with concern. He had kept the turbines turning over at minimum power, a setting normally used only for inspections while the Dobreh was on a ramp or in a hangar. With the turbines rotating, they created a pressure that prevented troublesome aquatic organisms from going up inside the delicate parts of the engines. If any fish or snails or things Derek didn’t want to think about got near the intakes, they were gently sucked in and hurried along past the slowly-rotating turbine blades out the exhaust ports, which were fully open. Anyone on the surface of the river might notice a change in water flow, but the current was already disrupted by having a Ruhar fighter submerged on the stony bottom. Unless the observer was familiar with the usual pattern of water flow in that part of the river, nothing would look unusual.
“That wrench spinner gave you the idea,” Irene snorted.
“He didn’t intend to!”
“Ah, that’s his problem. I know he is part of the reason we got assigned this hangar queen instead of a frontline warbird,” Irene was still angry about that. Three days before the wargame commenced, the two human pilots had been thrilled to learn they would participate as part of the Green team air support, then their hopes for getting into action were crushed when they saw the sad piece of crap Dobreh they would be flying. That particular airframe had literally been sitting in the back corner of a hangar for months, being steadily stripped for parts to keep other birds in flyable condition. Even with a battlegroup now based at Paradise, supplies of some critical materials were in short supply. Some genius at Ruhar Fleet Command had thought it important to get an impressively large number of ships and aircraft to Paradise as quickly as possible, probably hoping to dissuade the Kristang from any adventuresome thoughts of retaking the planet. While the amount of military gear arriving had indeed been impressive, the follow-through effort had been weak and poorly organized. Aircraft, dropships and even a few smaller ships had been pulled offline within weeks due to lack of replacements for worn-out parts or consumable supplies.
So, when the local fleet commander announced plans for an extensive wargame covering a quarter of the planet, the supply personnel had nearly panicked. A significant number of aircraft were not airworthy due to one fault or another, and some of the aircraft assigned to flying duty lacked their full complement of weapons or had glitchy sensors. Irene understood the supply problem, as a US Army helicopter pilot, she had experienced frustrating issues with keeping her Blackhawk in flyable condition going back even before her service in Nigeria. If the Ruhar had shrugged and explained there were not enough aircraft available to waste on lowly humans, she would have been pissed but she also would have accepted the rationale behind the decision. Rather than being honest and giving a good effort to find a flyable hull for Irene and Derek, the maintenance people at the airbase had done the absolute minimum they could to comply with high-level orders to assure the primitive humans were able to participate in the wargame.
That is why the two human pilots had been assigned to a fighter hurriedly cobbled together from whatever used parts were available. The missile bay was empty not because the exercise was only a wargame, they were empty because the rotating magazine in the missile bay was missing entirely, only a couple sad and lonely brackets occupied that space. The Dobreh was not capable of carrying missiles, and only one of its maser turrets contained an actual maser cannon, although the crew chief had insisted strongly that no one attempt to fire the cannon, and the power leads were disconnected. The crew chief had also warned the pair of humans not to run up the turbines past thirty six percent of max power, to the point where Irene and Derek had to sign a formal acknowledgement of that warning to earn the dubious privilege of taking the piece of crap into the air.
Derek had been pissed to the point of suggesting they run up a turbine until it burned out on the ramp, forcing the Ruhar to admit they had provided a substandard aircraft to their pet humans. “Derek, chill,” Irene had chided her fellow pilot. “We fly this piece of crap, or we don’t fly at all. I want to fly,” she tapped his chest with a fingernail.
“Getting in the air is all this thing can do,” Derek had kicked a landing gear strut in disgust. “No way can we keep formation with a combat air patrol,” he knew the Green Team air commander for the wargame would not have hampered her chance for success by including humans in her defensive air patrol anyway, the poor condition of their Dobreh only provided a convenient excuse. “They’ll assign us to fly recon, or as a decoy.”
“Probably, but we don’t have to stick to whatever role they give us. We know what this bird can’t do. Think, Derek, we need to think what we could do in this thing.”
Derek had thought, and Irene had thought, and they had discarded a dozen ideas before Derek made an off-hand comment about how he had once watched a Dobreh undergoing testing, back when he was working as a sort of mascot at a Ruhar airbase, before Perkins and her team had blasted Kristang ships out of the sky with giant maser cannons nobody knew existed. Derek had intended the comment as a joke, but Irene thought of the possibilities, and after discussing the idea with Perkins, they got approval for their crazy stunt.
That is why, twenty minutes into the wargame, they had faked a turbine blade failure and been ordered to set their crippled bird down and wait until the wargame was over. The air boss for the wargame was happy to have the two pesky humans off his board, as that was one less thing for him to worry about.
Instead of setting down as ordered, Irene and Derek had turned off their transponder and flown at treetop level or below, sometimes following roads or streams where gaps in the tree cover allowed their Dobreh to almost hover with the wings retracted most of the way. They had flown a course along air corridors that Green Team intel had indicated were gaps in Yellow Team sensor coverage, until they reached a stream and followed it down to where it met a river. At a bend in the river was a deep pool, overhung by large trees and with a stony bottom that was mostly clear of sticky silt. There, they had hovered lower and lower until the Dobreh touched the water, and Derek had cut power. The sophisticated Ruhar gunship fighter settled into the water, sinking to the bottom where it remained, its active sensors powered off and with turbines turning very slowly.
They had sunk the Dobreh before dawn that day, now it was early afternoon. Through a super-thin whip antenna sticking above the surface, they had been able to follow progress of the wargame through the Green Team tactical datalink, and through the Dobreh’s computer picking up Yellow Team signals and guessing what the other side was doing.
“Heads up,” Derek whispered, interrupting Irene’s train of thought. “Sensors are picking up multiple bogeys,” he warned of unidentified contacts, then the system gave him positive confirmation; the contacts fit the signatures of Yellow Team aircraft. “We’ve got company,” he transferred the sensor data to Irene’s console in the front part of the tandem cockpit. “Three bandits, weeds at zero forty two.” Derek used the term ‘weeds’ to indicate the enemy aircraft were at such low altitude they would be scraping the treetops.
“I see them.” The Dobreh’s passive sensors showed her one troop transport aircraft escorted by two fighters. Using typical cover formation for a three-ship flight, the fighters were ahead and slightly above the transport. Irene’s lips curled in a wolfish smile inside her helmet and she pressed the button to flip her visor down, automatically putting her flightsuit on internal power and life support. With the Yellow Team aircraft already passing overhead, those fighters would be badly out of position to defend the transport from an attack that came behind them. “Button up, we are outa here.”
“Buttoned up, turbines ready,” Derek reported. “Rocket assist online and at your command.”
“Acknowledged,” Irene said tersely, all business now that they were going into action. Although the gunship’s twin turbines were powerful and their blades made of a super-tough composite, they could not apply enough power
for takeoff while the engines were submerged. If they had to rely only on the turbines, their Dobreh was going to remain at the bottom of the river. Fortunately, the Dobreh was equipped with rocket thrusters. Those compact but powerful units could be used when the fighter climbed to an altitude where the air was too thin for the turbines to provide useful thrust, or for a quick burst of speed, but they mostly had another use. When a heavily loaded Dobreh was taking off vertically, the rocket thrusters provided the extra energy to get the aircraft off the ground and up to speed where the wings provided lift. With the Dobreh submerged in a river, Irene set the thrusters on low power for an easy, sustained burn rather than the sudden kick in the pants they provided on full power. “Three, two, one, go,” she announced in a calm voice, and the Dobreh rocketed off the river bottom. Her view was instantly clouded as the thrusters stirred up sand and caused water under the ship to flash into steam. Anyone above the river could not fail to see an unusual disturbance under the river’s normally placid surface and that sight would soon give their location away to the Yellow Team aircraft, but Irene increased power to the thrusters and the Dobreh burst free of the water in seconds. She had a momentary view of a very terrified fish when the creature slid off the canopy and into open air above the river, and seeing the fish’s wide-open mouth and bulging eyes almost made her laugh, then Irene pulled her focus back to the task at hand.
“Nose is cold,” Derek advised, reminding the pilot their active sensors were still powered down.
“Go active, light ’em up,” Irene authorized.
Derek turned a selector switch to bring the sensor pulse gear from Standby to Active and pulses of energy radiated from the Dobreh’s forward sensor platform. “Targets painted, targets acquired,” he announced from the rear seat’s weapons console. He did not need to wait for Irene’s acknowledgement or order, as they had agreed on tactics for various scenarios, and there wasn’t time for back and forth chit-chat in modern air combat. The pilot was flying a dash profile straight at the enemy aircraft, pushing the turbines as hard as they could go. As the Dobreh soared above the tree canopy that lined the river, the Yellow Team fighters began to break in hard turns that rapidly bled off their airspeed. The transport went to full power, surging forward and upward, deploying countermeasures to supplement its stealth field. Derek was impressed by the opposing team’s reaction time; they must have turned immediately after their sensors detected the Green Team Dobreh coming out of nowhere. He imagined the Yellow Team pilots and the remote Air Boss had to be screaming the Ruhar equivalent of ‘where the fuck did that Dobreh come from’ but they weren’t acting panicked. The hamster air crews were skilled, they were disciplined, and they were in command of awesomely capable aircraft. And they were doomed. While still underwater, Derek had selected targets and flight patterns for all of their missiles theoretically carried by the Dobreh. The fact that their weapons bay was empty made no difference in the war game, for the computer system that ran the game and functioned as referee acted as if their fighter was fully equipped as it would be in real combat. Even before the Dobreh climbed above the treetops, Derek had opened the weapons bay door and the virtual rotary launcher spun rapidly, ripple-firing every virtual missile they carried, plus decoys and their own countermeasures. “Winchester on birds!” Derek announced, indicating their entire supply of theoretical missiles had been expended. The air around the fighter remained clear except for river water explosively evaporating as the Dobreh approached the speed of sound, then there was a burst of vapor as breaking the sound barrier compressed the air in a cone shape behind them. In reality the air remained clear, but in the enhanced synthetic vision of their helmet visors the air was filled with angry yellow flares of missile launches then white contrails, twisting violently as their missiles and decoys jinked to avoid defensive maser fire from the targets. Without taking time to comment, Derek poured maser fire at the transport from his own powerful maser cannons. Though he knew the transport’s shields would deflect most of the maser bolts, the energy impacting the shields would create a plasma that would light up the target for his missiles while fuzzing the transport’s point-defense sensors.
As he watched, the missiles he had fired lanced in toward their targets, several going off course as they were confused by enemy countermeasures or falling victim to defensive maser fire. The loss of a few missiles made no difference to the end result; Derek had launched so close to the enemy aircraft that they had only seconds to react and it was not enough. First the transport exploded as two missiles scored direct hits almost at the same time as another missile ripped into one of the fighters. The second fighter survived long enough for Derek to switch his maser cannons onto it and send one pulse of maser energy toward it, then the wargame computer determined the second fighter was also disabled and falling, breaking apart in midair.
Derek did not pump a fist to celebrate, he did not exult at their victory, he focused on staying alive. Before they died, those two fighters had each launched two missiles which were now racing toward the Dobreh that did not have any protection from an effective stealth field. While the wargame computer had somewhat reluctantly agreed that a partly-disabled Dobreh might be able to fly after spending part of the day submerged in a river, the computer also decided several of the fighter’s systems would be offline or damaged. That included the stealth field and defense shield generators. “Incoming!” Derek warned.
“See them,” Irene replied quietly as she pulled the Dobreh into a tight turn and pulled the nose up, crushing her down in the seat as her suit compensated for the high-Gee maneuver. Airspeed rapidly bled off and she pushed the nose down, aiming again for the river.
“Splash three vampires!” Derek called out to alert the pilot that only one imaginary missile was now tracking them.
Irene had no time to express surprise or pleasure at their unexpected good fortune; she had to concentrate as the surface of the river was coming up fast in her forward view. At the last second, she was forced to fire the nose thrusters hard when she realized they were going to hit the water much too fast. The action of the thrusters full-on slammed her forward against the seat restraints and her nose hit the helmet visor, leaving a smudge and she tasted a trickle of blood running down her lip. She barely got the engine air intake doors closed before the Dobreh’s belly smacked the water with bone-jarring force. The fighter bounced off the surface once, twice, three times out of control, heading straight for a sandy beach and a watery bog east of the shoreline. “We’re gonna hit!” She shouted to her copilot, and forced herself to relax so she wouldn’t tear a muscle as the Dobreh careened across the water then dug into the beach, throwing up a cascade of sand and dark mud as the fighter crashed over the beach and into the swampy bog beyond. Irene had absolutely no control, all she could do was try to manage her frantic breathing and watch the threat display. That screen lit up as the wargame computer decided that last Yellow Team missile had exploded above the bouncing Dobreh, and in sync, all the cockpit instruments went dead while the Dobreh’s forward belly hit something more solid than sloppy bog mud. Irene’s right hand instinctively wrapped around the ejection handle, ready to yank it upward and explode both her and Derek safely upward and out before the fighter’s nose dug in and it flipped over onto its back to crush them for real. Just as her thumb depressed the safety button to enable the ejection handle, the Dobreh stood on its nose, then flopped back down onto its belly, rocking side to side a few times.
“You Ok up there?” Derek asked, his voice strangely sounding as if he was talking through a mouthful of water.
“Yeah, you?”
“Holy shit, what did you do? I thought we were gonna have to punch out for a second there.” Ejecting while the aircraft was in the mud was a situation Derek had not trained for or even imagined.
“Sorry, that was, uh, kinda unplanned,” Irene could feel her cheeks reddening.
“Oh, what the hell. In a wargame, you’re supposed to act like we’re in real combat, right?”
“I bit my lip, pretty hard,” Derek explained. “It’s all right, I-Ow! Damn it! One of those slugbot things is trying to staple my freakin’ lips closed. Go away!” He shouted at the slug-shaped Ruhar medical device that had emerged from a storage pouch in the neck of his flightsuit, and was attempting to treat the human’s injury as best it was able. When the slugbot halted but would not let go of his bleeding lip, he flipped his helmet visor up and gripped the tiny thing between two fingers, gently prying it away and flinging it onto his instrument panel, leaving a bloody trail across the displays. “Uh!” He jabbed a warning finger at the devoted little bot as it began crawling back toward him. “You stay right there, I-” he paused to think for a moment, then found the controls to disable the slugbot. “Hey! Irene. You see that in your display?” Derek asked as he lowered his visor halfway.
“Uh huh. Wargame control says this ship is totally disabled, but we splashed all three bandits.” She switched her comm system to the guard channel and her ears were blasted by the Yellow Team commander screaming a demand to know how the hell a Green Team fighter had just appeared out of nowhere and wasted an entire assault team. The Yellow Team’s shocked Air Battle Manager was screaming to clear all her aircraft away from a safe-fly corridor that was now demonstrated to be anything but safe, which threw her entire air defense plan into disarray. And various Yellow field commanders were scrambling to discard carefully crafted attack plans that now had to be revised on the fly. Green Team commanders were seizing the opportunity to regain the initiative, and also demanding to know who the hell had been flying that phantom Dobreh? “Sounds like we have both sides pissed at us, we must be doing something right,” she chuckled.