Deathtrap

by Craig Alanson

  Except the Tiger didn’t move, and Jates turned to look at him. “Mister Czajka?”

  “Huh? Oh, you want me to drive?” Dave had assumed that Jates, who would have outranked him even if Dave was still in the military, would want to drive their new toy.

  “It is customary for one of my rank,” Jates tapped the Surgun insignia on his left sleeve with a claw-tipped finger, “to be assigned a driver.”

  “Yes, Sir!” Dave replied with an ear-to-ear grin, and reached down for the joystick between the seats. This, he knew, was going to be fun.

  “Oof,” Irene grunted from the right-hand seat as the Buzzard bounced. The air had been still when they took off early that morning, now sun warming the fields was popping up thermals that crested in big towering white clouds, and made the aircraft jump up and down as it flew through the invisible columns of air. “Can we climb above this turbulence?”

  Derek shook his head from the left seat. “The higher we climb, the more lizards down there can shoot at us.”

  “We’re burning a lot of fuel at this altitude,” she held onto the seat as the Buzzard bounced again.

  “Fuel that we aren’t paying for,” he reminded her. “We have plenty of reserves to get to the airbase, and we can top up our fuel there.”

  “I would like to keep my breakfast,” she began to get irritated. Derek was pilot in command on that leg of the flight, it was his call.

  “I would like to not get shot at, or to be close to the deck when the shooting starts.”

  “We will be on the deck without anyone shooting at us, if the wings break off. The crew chief was told that this bird is tired, we have to be gentle with it.” That particular Buzzard was a very old model, no longer in frontline use by the Ruhar military. Before it was put into reserves, that airframe had approached the limit of its useful life, now it was living on borrowed time. The wing spars had cracks that reduced the amount of weight the aircraft was allowed to carry, and when the instruments were powered up, warnings flashed. Most of the warning lights could be ignored, but the bright yellow message stating they should restrict aerodynamic stress to two point two times Ruhar normal gravity stuck in Irene’s mind. If the warning lights were not enough to remind her to be careful with their elderly aircraft, she only needed to see the permanent dents in the pilot seat cushions from decades of furry hamster butt cheeks. The seat material was a sort of high-tech vinyl and it was tough. It was also worn and there were patches where the underlying foam cushion was poking out. The pilot seats were not the only tired item in the cockpit, the displays were scratched and hard to see in direct sunlight.

  “Everything the hamsters supplied to the Legion is old and tired,” Derek argued. “I am being careful. Any more careful and we should leave this thing on the ground.”

  “How about we compromise, and you do what I want?”

  Derek peeled his eyes away from the forward display long enough to tilt his head at her. “How exactly is that a compromise?”

  Irene silently gave him The Look.

  “Oh,” Derek rolled his eyes. “That kind of compromise. Ok, how about this: we pretend we’re training for a low-altitude ingress mission, with the destination as a hot LZ?”

  “Oh, so we pretend to compromise, and we do what you want?”

  “Good idea,” Derek grinned. “I’m serious,” his smile faded. “Colter hinted they found something last night. If the Legion flips on the lightswitch and the cockroaches start scurrying around the kitchen floor, it could get hot real quick. Some of those cockroaches have shoulder-launched SAMs, and they may have full-size SAM batteries hidden somewhere. The last place we want to be if the shit hits the fan is cruising at fifty thousand feet in clear air.”

  Irene knew she should not have eaten a second helping of bacon and eggs that morning but the breakfast had tasted so darned good. The eggs had come from Paradise and were nothing special, but the bacon was another story. That laboratory-grown ‘fake-on’ as some people called it, was a gift from the Verd-kris and to Irene, tasted exactly like the real thing. That morning was the first time she had crispy, delicious bacon since she left Earth behind, so long ago. Now her meal was sitting heavily in her stomach as the Buzzard jostled across the sky. “Fine,” her tone making it clear she was not happy. “How about we compromise about compromising? I will find us a path between these damned thermals, you follow my guidance. If we really are training for a low-altitude ingress, drop us down to the deck and we’ll engage stealth.”

  “Ok by me,” Derek agreed, reducing power and dipping the aircraft’s nose. He flipped a switch to power up the stealth field and the air around the Buzzard began to go dark, as the field bent incoming light around itself.

  On the ground at the edge of a freshly-plowed field, two young Kristang warriors excitedly jabbered to each other as they watched the enemy aircraft begin to fade from sight. The guidance system of their portable anti-aircraft missile still had a lock on the twin-engine aircraft, which was generating enough heat for the missile’s infrared sensors to follow regardless of the stealth field. A single aircraft was no threat, it was a transport and not a gunship, and the two warriors had strict orders not to fire until they received the order for general combat.

  They were also young, inexperienced, sleep-deprived from being up all night, and full of the Kristang equivalent of testosterone. Most importantly, they were already considered screw-ups by their leadership, which is why they were stuck by themselves in the middle of nowhere along a seldom-used flight corridor. As the stealth field began to wrap around the enemy aircraft and it dove toward the ground, one thought overrode all others in their minds. This might be their only chance to hit the enemy, their one chance for glory.

  They triggered the missile early, figuring that, in the Kristang military like all others, it is better to ask forgiveness than permission.

  “Shit!” Irene let go of her seat and her hands flew over the flat-panel flight controls. “Missile warning red!” The controls she engaged made many things happen at once. The stealth field snapped on fully, its generators drawing a surge of emergency power from a bank of capacitors. The aircraft’s defense shield energized to protect against shrapnel and directed-energy weapons, and the point-defense maser cannon turrets were given authority to fire automatically at any approaching threat. Long, thin whip-like antennas extended beyond the stealth field to provide sensor data to the flight controls and defense systems. The engines went into stealth mode, their inlets expanding to gulp in far more air than they needed for thrust. The increased airflow cooled the exhaust and smoothed out the turbulent air behind the engines. Because the air blasting out of the turbines was still hot compared to the ambient temperature, chillers inside the rear of the turbines activated, dumping super cold air into the thrust. That cold could only be maintained for a short time as the heat had to go somewhere, and it was absorbed by heatsinks in the wings that were glowing cherry red.

  Because regulations required the pilots to make sure they were not firing on friendly forces even though nothing friendly was anywhere near the Buzzard, and because the Missile Threat Identification and Evaluation System activated automatically before Irene could shut the stupid thing off, a tiny drone was ejected to fall behind and below the aircraft. It waited until it was clear of the stealth field then its nosecone discarded itself and the needle-like interrogator was launched by silent electromagnets in the general direction of the incoming missile. The rest of the drone exploded into hot dust, creating an infrared bright spot to confuse the incoming missile.

  The interrogator package did two things. It sent an active sensor pulse at the rapidly-accelerating missile, and it sent a query for the missile’s identification codes. The sensor pulse returned first, showing a distinctive 3D image of an obsolete but still commonly-used Kristang portable AA missile. Right behind the returning sensor pulse was a garbled reply from the missile, stating that it was a friendly Ruhar-made sensor drone and not dangerous in any way. Within the transmissio
n were fragments of authentic Ruhar authentication codes, embedded to confuse the interrogator package and make it hesitate.

  The interrogator had a brain the size of a sesame seed and it had a limited set of instructions to optimize speed rather than complexity of analysis. Compared to most computational devices in the high-tech galaxy, it was not smart.

  It also was not that stupid. It knew the reply had been deliberately garbled because the enemy only had fragments of legit ID codes, it knew the approaching object sure looked like a Kristang missile, and it knew there were no friendly forces reported to be in the area.

  The interrogator made a snap decision and broadcast a message to its mother aircraft: missile threat confirmed.

  The brain of the Buzzard received the message and thought something like ‘Well duh.’ The Buzzard had already reached that conclusion and locked onto the hot flare of the missile with the maser turret on the portside belly. It had to act fast because the missile was already close. Flying close to the ground reduced the size of the cone in which threats could target the aircraft. Flying low also meant that any threats had only seconds from detection to impact.

  Fortunately, the short flight time of the missile meant it had little time or airspace to maneuver. Mostly, it flew straight at the area where its own little brain judged the stealthed Buzzard was most likely to be. Trying for a direct impact was too risky, the missile sent a signal to its warhead, switching the explosive device to fragmentation mode. Detonation would send a cone of superheated shrapnel into the-

  The missile ceased to exist before the detonation signal reached the warhead. A searing pulse from the Buzzard’s maser cannon vaporized the missile’s nosecone and the body of the missile flew into that cloud, which torched off the warhead and the remaining propellant with a BOOM that was felt inside the aircraft.

  “Splash one,” Irene announced in her emotionless combat-mode tone, eyes scanning the displays for other threats. Derek was flaring the Buzzard from the dive and was already gently increasing power to prevent the aircraft from skimming the treetops. Leaves and branches swaying from the passage of their invisible aircraft would defeat the purpose of all their complicated and expensive stealth gear.

  “Was that just one?” The pilot asked without taking his eyes off the instruments.

  “So far, looks like it,” Irene breathed a short sigh of relief. If the only threat was a small group of trigger-happy lizards, they could report it and resume their flight.

  That was not destined to happen. The Buzzard had automatically sent a line-of-sight laserlink burst transmission of the threat warning to a satellite in low orbit, which flashed the signal to Legion units all over the planet. The signal was also intercepted by unfriendly forces, whose decryptions systems were only able to make sense of a small part of the message. It did not take a genius to interpret the message, for Legion units immediately went on high alert.

  The Kristang attack, which had already been advanced when the Ruhar pulled their ships away from the planet, and again when drones began carefully examining the outflow cooling pipes of a fusion reactor plant, had to be moved forward again. The Kristang commanders knew the timing of their attack was not optimal, was not even acceptable, as many of their units were simply not in position or not ready. There had been a careful plan to use the gruesome public deaths of Keeper slaves to split humans away from the Legion, but that plan had been thrown out the window. Now the backup plan to the backup plan was also shattered, because of two trigger-happy hot-headed jackasses at the edge of a field near where a solitary aircraft had just evaded destruction.

  Those jackasses, who had been struck nearly deaf and knocked off their feet by the booming explosion of their missile, at first screamed joyous shouts of triumph, pumping their fists in the air and hopping up and down. Then Jackass Numero Uno saw with the corner of one eye an indicator on the missile launch tube’s display. Premature detonation, the display read. Attack failure.

  Seeing that caused more shouts, this time of outrage and defiance. Hurriedly, they removed the sensor package from the discarded launch tube and tried to attach it to the second launcher, fumbling in their haste and bending a connector pin. That sparked a bout of slapping each other on the head, knocking their helmets off. Jackass Numero Dos got his head together first, brushed his fellow warrior away, and carefully straightened out the pin, fitting it into the slot of the launch tube. With the missile ready, Dos lifted the launcher to his shoulder and the two began arguing whether they should launch the weapon on autonomous guidance, allowing it to soar above the trees and seek a target on its own. They could do that, or they could hold fire in case another target came into view.

  Both arguments had merit.

  Alas, the jackasses never had an opportunity to conclude their calm, carefully reasoned debate by punching each other and wrestling with the launch tube. In addition to forgetting all the discipline drilled into them, they had forgotten a basic principle of deploying any kind of anti-aircraft weapon: shoot and scoot. Once the missile’s ass end had cleared the launch tube, they should have dropped the launcher and run like hell in any direction. The aircraft they fired at had detected the launch flare of their missile and knew exactly where they were.

  In modern warfare, if you can locate a target, you can kill it.

  Irene Striebich had not forgotten her training. Because she was gratified that the pair of jackasses had given her aircraft the honor of opening the war, she had cared enough to send the very best. Instead of a Hallmark card, her heartwarming reply was in the form of a missile coming in just above the speed of sound. The hearts and other organs of the doomed jackasses were briefly warmed to ten thousand degrees by the missile’s thermal warhead, then all trace of them became a fine, blackened powder drifting across the freshly-plowed field.

  It was debatable whether the loss of two such fine warriors was a blow, or a boost, to the Kristang war effort.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Kristang task force, communicating through the very faintest burst transmissions sent and received on thin wires that projected beyond each ship’s stealth field, coordinated a jump. The five ships under Kekrando’s command had specific coordinates as targets for their jumps, the targets widely spaced because none of the navigators or captains trusted their drives to bring them anywhere near the desired endpoints. The four other ships repeated their specified coordinates, acknowledged the orders and synchronized their time-keeping systems.

  At the designated time, all five ships dropped their stealth fields, knowing sensors around the planet would not detect them for another twelve minutes. They all jumped within a second of each other, and three of them emerged reasonably close to the points Kekrando had chosen for them.

  The other two ships emerged much closer to the planet than they were supposed to, dangerously close. They were the ships provided by the rival Fire Dragon clan, two old and worn-out destroyers. The concern about Verd-Kris felt by Kristang clan leaders did not extend to providing front-line warships to the effort aimed at crushing the infant Legion. The two ships were of an unusual type, having not only an additional maser cannon but also a railgun. Stuffing that much firepower into a destroyer hull made the ships especially cramped and uncomfortable for their crews, and ships of that class also had a well-deserved reputation of exploding when the magnets of their poorly-designed railguns cracked. After emerging from jump, both ships fired their engines to get into position to hit targets on the surface.

  “No! You idiots!” Kekrando roared, shaking his fist at the main display. “Tiekum, signal those Fire Dragon ships to return to the formation!”

  Tiekum looked up from his console in fear. “They report trouble with their navigation systems, and beg the senior captain’s indulgence while they sort out the trouble. In the meantime, as they are close to the surface anyway, they intend to provide fire support to our glorious ground forces.”

  That time, Kekrando did let fly an outraged and inventive string of curses. “Th
ose glory-seeking imbeciles! They want to hit the enemy, and if their weapons strike close enough to cause collateral damage to our clan soldiers, those Fire Dragon scum will of course regret the incident. Signal them to break away and climb to jump altitude immediately.”

  The ship’s XO hesitated to report his lack of progress. “They are not responding, Captain. All I am receiving is a message that their communications systems are now experiencing difficulties. They are, however,” Tiekum fed the images to the main display, thinking seeing the events might slightly appease the senior captain. “They are striking enemy positions on the surface. Heavy fire, Sir.”

  The images did nothing to mollify Kekrando. “Tiekum, our ground forces do not need us up here hitting targets on the surface. The leadership of this infernal Legion have wisely dispersed their troops and facilities widely, there are no targets worth risking a starship to hit. Our ground troops, to the contrary, are by necessity gathered to protect vital facilities, and to provide the concentration of forces needed to cut through enemy lines. Our ground forces are vulnerable to orbital attack, what our troops on the surface need us to do is keep Ruhar ships away from the planet. We can’t do that securely if we lose those two destroyers!”

  “Y-yes, Captain.”

  “Tiekum, explain to those rash idiots that we have not cleared low orbit of stealth mines, and if those ships are lost to enemy action, their crews will not die honorably.”

  Mines. Tiekum had not considered that the devious enemy might have already saturated a sphere around the planet with hidden mines, weapons that were especially dangerous to ships moving slowly in low orbit and unable to jump away. “I have sent the signal, Captain. The ships are not- Sir, the ships are responding! They are breaking off their attack run and climbing. Still launching missiles and firing aft maser cannons at surface targets. They-” He checked the data again, wishing to be sure he did not falsely report terrible news. “Several of their missiles have struck our own troops. General Dethutra is demanding that you to halt the close-space support mission, it is killing more of our own people than the enemy. Captain,” the XO looked to his commander fearfully. “We must punish-”