Battlespace

by Ian Douglas

  One minute. You are the ship. The ship is you….

  He tried to relax to his old mantra.

  In the old days of Marine and naval aviation, pilots had talked about “strapping on” their fighter and flying as though their aircraft were an extension of their body. That was more true than ever with modern Wasps and Starhawks. His cerebralink, an IBM-Toshiba Starbright 8780 Aviator-mod A-12K, with specialized hypermatrixing and cyberavionic direct control interfacing, was far larger and more complex than the standard military-issue implants nanochelated within most Marines’ cerebral cortices. With direct socket inputs at each wrist, each ankle, behind his ears and in a double row up his spine, he was physically jacked into his fighter by his crew chief so that its neural analog really was an extension of his nervous system.

  The arrangement was absolutely vital for modern fighter combat. The Starbright 8700, when kicked into flight performance mode, increased the parallel processing capabilities of the human brain and slashed biological reaction time. That, frankly, was the only reason why organic pilots still flew combat aircraft at all; robots were far faster, lighter, were more maneuverable, required no life support, could take a much higher G-load, and were not distracted by such minor factors as fear, pain, unconsciousness, boredom, or full bladders. The only advantage human pilots brought to fighter combat was their judgment…and even that was criticized by proponents of AI-operated combat systems.

  Greg Alexander had always wanted to go into space. A great-grandfather had been an archeologist with the Marines on Mars during the U.N. War a century ago, and his mother had been a xenobiologist at Europa’s Cadmus Base before she’d joined his father’s line marriage. He’d joined the Marines straight out of college and gone on to Annapolis. When he learned he could combine space deployments to exotic locals like Mars, the Jovian satellites, or even the worlds of other stars with his other great love—flying—he’d immediately applied for aerospace pilot training, and then applied to the Marine Space Fighter Training Command at Point Arguello, California.

  He’d jumped at the opportunity to volunteer for exosolar duty. Of course, the fact that his parents were dead, their line marriage dissolved, and that his engagement to Lena had just been rather abruptly broken off helped with that decision. He was Famsit One—no husband, no wife, no parents, not even any close friends other than the other Redtails of 5-MAS.

  Ten seconds.

  His attempt to relax, as always, failed.

  “Five-MAS, all systems appear nominal,” the voice of PriFly announced. “And you are go in five…four…three…two…one…”

  He never heard the word “launch,” for at that instant, a giant’s hand slammed down over his chest, pressing him back into the liquid-filled cells of his acceleration couch at just over fourteen G’s. Seven to ten G’s was the normal limit a human could endure without blacking out, but the combination of implant technology, the design of the seat, and the design of the flight suit he was wearing, which helped keep blood flowing to his brain, kept him conscious—just barely. For a long moment, he felt as though he were looking down a long black tube with a tiny far-off opening. Breathing was flat-out impossible. An unbearable weight was crushing his ribs, a pressure that went on and on and on….

  Two seconds later his Starhawk emerged from its launch tube at almost three hundred meters per second, propelled by the powerful magnetic impulse that normally was used to hurl white-hot plasma out the aft drive venturis at a speed approaching that of light. The magnetic field extended well beyond the end of the tube, however, and continued to accelerate him for another 1.7 seconds.

  And then he was embraced by the blissful silence of free fall, traveling now at over half a kilometer per second…but then his fighter’s AI kicked in the main drive and he was slammed into his seat back once more, this time at an almost benign five gravities.

  Controlled by their onboard computers, the sixteen Starhawks maintained five gravities for ten seconds, adding another five hundred meters per second to their velocity.

  And then the Starhawk’s plasma jet cut off and the hand of acceleration vanished. He was in zero-G once more.

  “Whee-oo!” he cried over the squadron channel. He always felt exultant after surviving another high-G launch. “What a rush!”

  “Roger that, Poonman!” Zipper—Lieutenant Andrea Thiery in Talon Four—replied. “I think my stomach’s still back in the launch tube!”

  “Heads up, people,” Gauthier, in Talon Six, said. “Stay alert! We’re tracking incoming. Release your launch tanks.”

  Each Starhawk had launched with a tank of reaction mass—water—that it used to fuel its initial acceleration out of the tubs. Those tanks were empty now after the five-G burn, and would get in the way of combat maneuvers. Alexander thought-clicked an icon. His fuel tank tumbled clear, blasted aside by a small explosive charge. With luck, the enemy’s long-range sensors might mistake it for another fighter. The tank was large enough.

  It was still difficult to sort out the tactical picture ahead. It looked as though a small cloud of debris was hurtling toward them—and the fleet behind them—from the stargate. However, Constance, Alexander’s onboard AI, was showing that several of those chunks were accelerating on their own. Whatever they were facing, it was not debris.

  “Connie?” he asked his Starhawk. “What the hell are those things?”

  “Initial analyses suggests twelve spacecraft,” the female voice of his fighter’s AI replied in even and unhurried tones. “Two hundred seven are remote probes or, possibly, decoys or weapons platforms.”

  “Spacecraft? What’re their drive systems like?”

  “Unknown. They appear to be accelerating under some form of powerful magnetic induction field, but one sustained by the craft themselves rather than along a launch rail such as we use. Their propulsion system does not appear to employ a traditional reaction-type drive.”

  “Great!” he said over the squadron channel. “The bad guys are using some kind of magic drive. They really are freaking supertechs.”

  The nature of possible alien military technology—more, the likelihood that it would be superior technology to that employed by the Marines—had been the topic for discussion at the mess tables onboard the Ranger ever since the Redtails had been brought up out of cybehibe.

  “There’s no indication that they can outmaneuver us, though,” Talon One, Captain Ivor Matthews, reported. “Thank the Buddha for small blessings!”

  Despite the evidence portrayed by generations of Hollywood war movies, science fiction epics, and entertainment e-feeds, combat in space had little in common with combat in a planetary atmosphere. In atmosphere, fighters could use wings and control surfaces to perform banks, turns, loops, barrel rolls, scissors maneuvers and the like to outfly an enemy. In space, Sir Isaac Newton was god; an object—or fighter—once set in motion continued to remain in motion until acted upon by an outside force. Alexander’s Starhawk could fire maneuvering thrusters to give its course a new vector component—to port or starboard, “up” or “down,” for instance—but those were far too weak to make any major change to his original velocity and heading.

  Unless he flipped end-for-end and decelerated with his main drive—or found a convenient planet to provide him with a free gravitational assist and course change, he essentially possessed all the maneuverability of a bullet.

  But it was a bullet with teeth. The point of having a human in the cockpit of a space fighter was not to drop onto the enemy’s six with a brilliantly executed loop or scissors, but to direct the weapons systems.

  In his noumenal mind’s eye, the enemy spacecraft—or whatever they were—stretched across his field of view, still invisibly distant, but magnified to visibility by his Starhawk’s optics.

  He checked his range and vector data, flickering numbers and symbols in the corner of his visual field. The targets were a bit under one hundred thousand klicks distant…moving toward him at four kps. The Earth fleet was moving toward them at abou
t two klicks per second, and his Starhawk’s launch and subsequent boost phase had added another kilometer per second to that.

  Simple math. The two squadrons—the Redtails and the alien craft launched from the stargate—were closing with one another at seven kilometers per second. Without new changes in course or speed, the two groups would pass through one another in three hours, fifty-eight minutes.

  But they would be within firing range in perhaps another forty to fifty minutes.

  And so now came the hard part…the waiting….

  Combat Command Center

  UFR/USS Chapultepec

  2245 hours, Shipboard time

  “I really do hate the waiting,” General Dominick said.

  “Can’t rush the laws of physics, sir,” Ramsey observed.

  “We can’t,” Dominick growled. “We don’t know yet about them.”

  “They haven’t pulled anything magical yet, General,” Ricia Anderson told him. “Except for that reactionless acceleration after they launched. And that was only momentary. They may have the same power limitations we do.”

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So ran the aphorism first voiced by a popular science writer two centuries earlier. Everything in this confrontation depended on how advanced the alien weapons, drive, and power systems were, how much more powerful or more effective they might be as compared to those used by the MIEU battle group. The opposition had shown several bits of superior technology already, antimatter beam weapons and some kind of magnetic drive, but nothing that truly put them in the category of magic.

  Not yet, anyway. It was always possible that they were hiding their true capabilities. They would be as ignorant of human technology as the humans were of theirs.

  “The nearest alien craft are now within effective range of Daring and Courageous,” Admiral Harris reported. “General Dominick, should we commence long-range fire?”

  Dominick hesitated. So far, the battle group was on FIFO rules of engagement: fire if fired on. “Let’s hold for a bit longer,” he said. “We’ll let 5-MAS get closer.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Harris replied. He didn’t sound happy. “With your permission, I want to rein in the frigates. I don’t want them too far ahead of the support fire from the New Chicago.”

  “Maneuver the fleet as you think best, Admiral.” The reply was a snap.

  For the past forty-five minutes, the fighters had been hurtling toward the oncoming hostile fleet at two kilometers per second relative to the rest of the fleet. Half an hour ago they’d passed the two frigates Daring and Courageous, which were now a couple of thousand kilometers ahead of the rest of the MIEU and now were some three thousand kilometers ahead of them.

  At this point, the enemy spacecraft were eighty thousand kilometers from the Chapultepec and Ranger, seventy-five thousand kilometers from the Marine fighters, a range that continued to close at seven kilometers per second.

  Ramsey focused on the noumenal graphic of the fleet. Harris was creating multiple layers of defense—the fighters out in front, the two light frigates next, then the larger battle cruiser New Chicago, and finally the Ranger, the Chapultepec, and the three transports. It allowed him to probe the alien force while retaining a flexible in-depth defense.

  At least, that was the idea. With both the alien capabilities and intent unknown, how could any plan cover all eventualities?

  No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy, ran the old military adage.

  The two frigates, moving mushroom-caps forward, fired their forward thrusters, decelerating sharply. Harris was having them slow to keep them from getting too far ahead of the main body of the battle group.

  And an instant later, the largest of the oncoming alien craft opened fire.

  A burst of white noise momentarily scrambled the noumenal graphics, as a powerful electromagnetic burst caused a temporary dropout of data from the surviving Argus probes. The positron beam was clearly aimed directly at the Courageous. There was a flash, an expanding cloud of vapor and debris…but the frigate appeared to be only damaged.

  Ramsey wished he could better see what exactly was going on. Another alien craft fired, and then both Daring and Courageous opened up with both lasers and railguns.

  And after that, the battle became too fast and confusing for merely human minds to follow….

  SF/A-2 Starhawk Talon Three 75,000 kilometers from

  Sirius Stargate

  2246 hours Shipboard time

  “What the hell was that?” Alexander yelled. For an instant, his electronic feeds had been overwhelmed by a burst of white noise and data dropout, a kind of explosion inside his skull that was not painful but which had certainly been disconcerting.

  “We’re being shot at!” Gauthier yelled back. “Is everyone okay?”

  Call signs appeared in ragged sequence in a corner of Alexander’s noumenal display. The burst—a powerfully focused positron beam, it looked like—had passed through the widely dispersed fighter formation but hit no one.

  Gauthier was on the command channel. “Ranger Control, Ranger Control, this is Talon! We are under fire! Request free-fire order! Repeat, request free-fire!”

  “Talon, Ranger Control! Weapons are free. I repeat, weapons are free.”

  “Roger that, Control. Okay, Redtails, you heard the lady. Commence jigging, and bring CCN online.”

  “Jigging” was virtually the only combat maneuver the fighters could use in this sort of combat—using lateral thrusters to randomly jitter back and forth along different axes while maintaining their original overall heading. The fighters were still eighty thousand kilometers from the approaching alien vessels. That translated to a .26-second time delay between what the enemy gunners saw and where the fighters actually happened to be at that instant. Even if the enemy opened fire with a laser beam, the total time lag was over half a second and particle beams propagated at considerably less than the speed of light, making for an even greater time delay. At this range, it was impossible to pinpoint exactly where a target actually might be and what its vector was…especially a target as small as a Starhawk fighter.

  Of course, the speed-of-light time delay would dwindle the closer the two groups came to one another and that advantage would swiftly vanish. Worse, the fighters’ supplies of R-M were limited. There was only so much jigging they could manage before they didn’t have enough reaction mass to slow them down, turn around, and get them headed back toward the Ranger for pickup.

  “The hostiles are still pretty far off, skip,” Alexander said. “I don’t think Sissy will get a lock at this range.”

  Sissy was CCN, the Combat Control Network, an expert-system AI partially resident in each craft, which meant that it existed only when the fighters were linked with one another through a laser communication web. Sissy was very smart but of sharply limited purview, able to identify and track multiple targets and coordinate multiple weapons systems and platforms.

  “We do what we can. Try to pile on with the big boys.”

  Starhawk fighters could be loaded out with a variety of weapons modules, depending on their assigned mission. For operations outside of the atmosphere, lasers were the preferred weapon, since they didn’t require R-M and didn’t slow the fighters’ forward velocity when fired, as did missiles or plasma weapons. The power of the lasers were limited by the size of the fighters’ fusion power plants, but still packed a considerable thermal punch. Using CCN, the individual members of a fighter squadron could combine their total laser output with one another and with the laser and particle beam fire of their larger fleet consorts astern, acting as what, in military terminology, was known as a force multiplier.

  Alexander watched as his implant painted a scattering of moving green icons across his mind’s eye, highlighting the symbols marking both the nearest and the largest of the enemy spacecraft. One, designated Sirius Two, suddenly flashed, struck by the animated graphic of a particle beam fired by the Daring.

  “Let�
��s get in the fight, boys and girls,” Gauthier said. “Targeting Sirius Two.”

  Alexander focused his attention on the graphic for Sirius Two, the largest of the objects arrayed before them. Its magnified image showed a jet-black, misshapen brick with an odd geometry of angles and smoothed organic forms. Sissy estimated its mass at a hefty twelve thousand tons, over half that of one of the MIEU battle group’s frigate gunships.

  He increased magnification on the targeting image. The plasma bolt from the Daring had struck the enemy vessel on what passed as its bow, creating a thin, expanding cloud of debris. Sissy selected a group targeting point aft, clear of the debris cloud which might deflect or scatter incoming laser fire. His mental command to fire was accepted by Sissy, along with the commands from each of the other aviators in the squadron.

  Laser beams were invisible to the human eye when fired in the vacuum of space, but Sissy showed them as threads of sparkling green light converging on a single point. Intolerably white brilliance erupted at the target and metallic vapor puffed into space.

  “Got the bastard!” Lieutenant Oakes, in Talon Twelve, exulted. “We holed him!”

  “They’re not jinking,” Zipper observed.

  “Their fire isn’t being coordinated either,” Gauthier added. “That may give us the tactical advantage.”

  For the next several seconds Alexander was extremely busy—unmoving in his acceleration couch, but in his mind zooming in, locking on, directing his fighter to fire. Three times, Sissy coordinated the fighters’ joint laser barrage against specific points on the same enemy vessel. The fact that the hostile craft was not jinking meant that lasers aimed at the target—or, rather, where the target would be half a second hence—hit.

  On the other hand, if the target had been jinking, it would have moved clear of the expanding spheres of metallic vapor and debris that accompanied each hit. Those clouds kept moving with the spacecraft in accordance with Newton’s Laws, and they tended to reflect and scatter incoming laser light. That meant that attempts to lock on to damaged areas and keep pounding at them until the concentrated fire punched through the armor were doomed to failure.