by Aer-ki Jyr
“We still have a chance,” Paul reminded her. “Take your best shot.”
“Alright, here goes nothing,” she said, mentally plotting an intercept course, thanks to those painfully tedious navigational math classes. Once she had her first leg approximated, she activated her interceptor’s four main engines at partial thrust and began moving in closer to the planet.
“Where do you want us, Paul?” Randy asked on behalf of himself and Kip, the other two geosynch pilots.
“I don’t know yet. Let’s wait and see when he enters his coast phase.”
“What if he keeps the engines burning the whole way?” Kip asked.
“Then he’ll run out of fuel before he gets to us…and he’ll really get predictable.”
“Alright, we’ll sit tight,” Randy confirmed. “Let us know when you want us to go.”
That was the question, wasn’t it? Paul hoped it wouldn’t come to that and watched the display screen as Ivan chased after the blockade runner with both craft continuing to accelerate as they neared. The interceptor was on a slightly higher orbit, with the runner coming up from below almost as if it intended to rendezvous with the attacker, but another slight directional realignment pulled the computer generated intercept line off of Ivan’s trajectory again, leaving him with little maneuvering room.
The interceptors were, by design, faster than the blockade runner, but not by much and now that the two ships were pointed in approximately the same direction, there wasn’t much closure rate between the two, given that they were both accelerating at full power. With each course alteration the blockade runner made, and subsequent deviation for the interceptor, Ivan’s ship had to dedicate more thrust to lateral movement, which then took away from his forward acceleration, which was currently pegged at a consistent 56m/s or 5.8 Gs.
The blockade runner, now free of its second stage, was accelerating at 4.8 Gs, given that it was a larger ship about four times the size of the interceptor, and still several hundreds of kilometers distant, gaining altitude on a spiral trajectory around the planet.
Paul watched the speed numbers for both craft, guestimating their remaining fuel loads while assuming they were at maximum thrust, for every kilogram of fuel expended the craft would lighten and the acceleration rate would tick up slightly, meaning both would be at their fastest the moment before they ran out of fuel.
He knew their specifications by heart now, especially those of the blockade runner, and he guessed it still had half its third stage fuel remaining. That meant that it would have to cut engines and coast before too long if it wanted to save some thrust for later maneuvers…then again it couldn’t start conserving with Ivan so close behind. Even if he couldn’t take it down, he could force the blockade runner to expend its fuel earlier than planned.
“New plan, guys,” Paul said, keying for an open comlink instead of the ship to ship links he had available. “Run that bastard out of fuel making course corrections. Don’t let him coast.”
On Randy’s tracking display the ever changing projected course of the blockade runner showed it looping twice around the planet before it got to their altitude, and thanks to their geosynch position over the launch point, that orbital spire passed just beneath their position with minimal variation.
Seeing that the second of those projected pass-bys would take place several thousand kilometers below them, Randy pointed his nose down to the planet and kicked in his engines, intent on getting there first so he could line up for a parallel intercept, given that a head on approach would be useless at the speeds the blockade runner was now attaining, in excess of 20 kilometers per second.
“You staying here for our final shot?” Kip asked as he too depressed and headed down closer to the planet.
“Yes, but if he increases his orbital angle enough he’ll spiral out well above this position, so do what you can now to spook him.”
“Guys, I think he’s going to get past me,” Ivan said as he was nearing the end of his fuel burn. “I’ll try for missile lock, but I don’t think I’m going to get close enough.”
“Wait until the last second to keep him burning fuel,” Paul recommended.
“I’ve got 32 seconds left,” Ivan said, now able to see the blockade runner beneath him as a tiny, sunlight reflecting dot moving slowly in the distance. His rangefinder was decreasing steadily, but he was still 114 kilometers away as he primed his single, long-range missile, knowing that the shorter variety that he had slung under the stubby wing-like struts on either side of the ship would be useless at this range.
The belly-mounted, self-guided missile launched two seconds before the interceptor’s engines ran dry and Ivan’s forward acceleration ceased. The rangefinder immediately reversed itself and began scaling upwards in a hurry as the other ship continued its heavy acceleration.
The long, fat missile, however, had an acceleration rate far higher and began to eat up the distance between the two. The blockade runner’s pilot saw it incoming and made another course correction, adding a bit more distance between the two objects and succeeded in adding a few seconds to the missile’s travel time…but the precaution was unnecessary. The missile’s own fuel was expended before it even reached the halfway point, though it continued to coast forward a while at superior speed until the continual thrust of the blockade runner ate that up and began pulling away from the now truly ballistic missile that sat a safe 46 kilometers behind the fleeing ship.
“Damn it,” Jason swore, sitting in low orbit and helpless to do anything about the situation. The two computer controlled interceptors had already broken off, being further away from the target than Ivan had gotten. That left the four geosynch interceptors and three others rising at potential intercept angles to stop the ship, and two of those were now out of position due to recent course changes.
Brian’s interceptor still had a shot, minimal as it was, because he had thrusted directly away from the planet, gaining altitude in the quickest means possible, but wasting fuel as he fought against the planet’s gravity as he essentially jumped up to the blockade runner’s next spiral around the planet and got there before it did.
Problem was, he didn’t have the lateral speed, nor the fuel remaining to acquire it once at the target area, meaning he would be trying to hit a bullet with a water balloon as the runner would shoot past him faster than his eyes could see.
Apparently the trainer flying the ship didn’t realize that, because he broke from his fuel-saving coast stage and readjusted course to miss Brian’s ship by more than 10,000 kilometers.
Meanwhile, Paul continued to watch and calculate…suddenly wishing for a bunch of rocks he could throw out in the ship’s path. Those wouldn’t have to match speeds, essentially functioning as ballistic mines which would become more lethal the faster the target was approaching.
Hmmn…he’d have to save that idea for later. It was a messy tactic, and one that probably would require far too much debris to be useful, but the concept was interesting none the less.
Over the next hour the blockade runner’s course didn’t alter much, though Randy and Kip did manage to spook it somewhat, and Paul guessed it had to be running on fumes by now, but probably retaining just a bit of maneuvering capability. With that in mind, he made his best guess at an intercept and began accelerating at an angle towards the nearest intercept line.
They’d already been in the simulators for nearly two hours now, bored out of their minds with inactivity, but all hoping that they’d be able to pass this challenge and move on to the next one if Paul could in fact make the intercept, so they stayed in their simulator pods and watched it play out.
For Paul the situation was a mixture of tense and boring, reminding him of a chess game, only without the action. The closure of the two ships was a simple matter of math and basic navigation, with small corrections having to be made as the runner made some last gambit attempts to shake off Paul’s convergence point, but as the final moment approached it made no further adjustments and Paul hop
ed that was because it was now out of fuel.
If it was, they were going to win…barely. His remaining fuel was low and the actual convergence occurred 5.6 kilometers ahead of the blockade runner. Paul applied corrective thrust, nulling out his lateral drift and dropping in on an identical outward spiral from the planet, with the momentum of the two ships essentially even until Paul began to reverse course and ever so slowly crawl his way back towards the target.
He would have preferred to travel faster, but doing so would require a deceleration burn once he reached the target…meaning more fuel expended that he didn’t have. As he coasted back to the ship, his instruments showed that he had a mere 12 seconds of thrust left and he desperately hoped he wouldn’t have to use it.
He was already well within missile range, but given how long it had taken them to get to this point he wanted to pad their chances by decreasing the distance even further, so much so that the outline of the ship finally became visible on his screen. It was a fat conical cylinder on the end of a stubby fuel tube, now completely devoid of the solid rocket fuel that powered both it and the interceptors’ primary engines.
Now that he was within visual range, Paul activated his 5th engine, with a thin stream of plasma fanning out like a tail of muted flame behind his ship. It didn’t have nearly the kick of the candles attached around the hull, but it did provide decent maneuvering power now that the blockade runner’s extreme acceleration was taken out of the equation.
Paul closed half the distance to the ship, then targeted it with short range missile lock…saving the big bertha underneath in case the runner was just playing possum. A blue targeting reticule appeared around the ship, indicating a positive lock, and Paul depressed a trigger on the joystick three quick times.
Three short, fast missiles leapt off the racks and flew towards the target some 2 kilometers away, but still there was no response from the runner. Paul watched with sweaty anticipation as another monitor showed both ships and the missiles traveling in between. A few seconds later they merged with the blockade runner’s silhouette and disappeared.
On the viewscreen Paul saw a brief shroud of debris form around the ship and expand outward like the petals of a flower. A moment later a mission end message and challenge stats superimposed over the screen and Paul let out a sigh of relief, leaning back in his seat and wiping a few beads of sweat off his forehead, feeling the gentle flow of the pod’s air conditioning tickling his skin as he spun around and opened the hatch.
Up in the control room that oversaw the five adjacent simulator chambers, Gent climbed out of his own simulator pod and stretched as Wilson, who’d just arrived half an hour earlier after hearing of the trainees’ unusual progress, stared down through the one-way window as the 2s climbed out of their pods and congratulated each other amidst their own improvised stretching routines.
“That took way too long,” Gent said, cracking his back. “I thought this was supposed to be a 30 minute mission, max?”
“More like 20,” Wilson said, his brow furrowing as he thought hard. “We didn’t plan on them deploying so far out.”
“Well it needs changed,” Gent reinforced as he finished stretching and joined Wilson at the window. Several other trainers were at the control boards, preoccupied with two other challenges currently going on down past the other windows that ringed the room.
“I agree, but not for this one. We have to keep things even for all the teams.”
“Wonderful,” Gent said, anticipating several more hours sitting in that chair with nothing to do. “This may be important for them, but it’s downright dull. I’m pretty sure they’ll say the same if you ask.”
“I know,” Wilson agreed. “We’ve got our work cut out for us…but at least we’ve learned something today.”
“What?” Gent asked.
“They just taught us how to blockade a planet,” the lead trainer said with an obvious note of respect. “Now we can take that and make it more intense.”
“How?”
“I’ve got a few ideas already, but once we bounce it around with the design team I’m confident we’ll come up with something…interesting.”
“After the other nine teams get through with this one, you mean?”
Wilson looked away from the window and across his shoulder at Gent. “My condolences,” he offered sarcastically.
6
One month later…
Morgan sat in a simulator pod, one hand on a control board roller and the other on a joystick as she fired off medium-sized rail gun rounds at semi-distant moving targets. A hit counter glowed in red numbers in the upper right hand corner of the display screen, counting down from 500. The individual challenge would end when it hit zero and would be scored according to time, with a par of 22:35 needed for passing.
Morgan’s counter currently read 167, but there was no clock to keep track of the time, so she had to shoot as fast and as often as she could, slipping into a time-distorting zone where nothing existed aside from her trigger finger and the targets. She was peripherally aware of the count, but tried not to get distracted by it or anything else, knowing that a mental lull would cost her precious seconds. She kept the sluggish targeting reticule moving constantly, predicting where the distant dots were going and firing ahead of them as they crisscrossed the screen on random headings.
Fortunately for this challenge all the target spheres, each the size of a bus, were moving along linear tracks…meaning they weren’t maneuvering and their courses were predictable. The main problem with tracking the spheres was that the rail gun, a magnetically accelerated metal bullet the size of her arm, had a delay from trigger pull to impact. This meant she had to lead her targets, which were spaced at varying distances.
The larger the sphere, the closer it was, and vice versa, meaning a short delay for the big ones and a multiple second delay for the tiny ones, which were the hardest to hit. The roller underneath her left hand controlled the zoom function, with her using it constantly to pull in and out as she alternated between close and distant targets. All together, her hands were constantly busy, moving about in the jerky twitches typical of most action-oriented video games.
This ‘game’ though was based on a real weapons system that Star Force had quietly been field testing at one of its orbital facilities. The medium sized slugs were designed as a basic ship to ship weapon, with the smaller, more conventional ‘bullets’ used in a rapid fire device primarily used for short range defense. The large slugs, each the size of an Olympic bobsleigh but without the hollow core, were a heavy weapon prototype that had only undergone minimal field testing at low speeds, but enough data had been gathered to extrapolate the dynamics of the firing system and create the gunnery program for the trainees to familiarize themselves with.
Morgan hadn’t gotten to the large slug challenge yet, but had already passed the light rounds, using them to shoot down incoming missiles in the simulation. The spheres that she was currently shooting at were designed to represent small ships and a single hit from one of the medium slugs at 890 m/s would be more than sufficient to core all the way through the hull and out the other side of an unarmored ship, while significantly damaging or even destroying a hardened one.
The weapon system had a fire rate of 5.4 seconds, though for this challenge she was shooting from a quad battery on sequenced firing, giving her a shot every 1.35 seconds. Still, to beat par time she had to average 2.7 seconds per kill, which kept her firing constantly with an unlimited supply of simulated ammo.
Her screen was full of moving dots but they were spaced out, some on the far left and right, but also some way up and down, meaning Morgan had to continually tilt the turret using the joystick to even be able to see all the targets. Random as their movements were, they appeared in clusters, and after the first two tries she had established a dance-like pattern to her targeting movements where she would zoom in on an area, fire off several shots ahead of where the dots were moving, then roll her view back to a wide screen vi
ew, select another dot filled area, joystick her way over to it, then zoom in again.
This left her not even able to see if her shots hit the targets or not, because by the time the simulated slugs got to the spheres she was already firing at others.
Which was why she occasionally glanced up at the hit count to make sure she wasn’t missing. She had to trust in her accuracy…which was usually spot on…but given the varying distances, angles, and speeds of the spheres she had to make a mental recalculation almost every shot she took, though that wasn’t altogether unlike the other marksmanship challenges she’d gone through, but these new naval gunnery simulations were the most target rich environments she’d seen to date.
Her high score on the light rounds currently had her in 8th place, though that could change as others went back and tried the challenge again, as she might if time allowed, but for the moment the best gunners weren’t in the overall top 10 rankings, save for Jason who currently sat in 9th, but he wasn’t a real points threat to her lead at the moment, given that Morgan’s other gunnery scores traded off with his, keeping her overall lead intact.
Prior to the rail gun challenges Morgan had worked her way through the other two space weapon systems currently available to Star Force…lasers and missiles, though they too were primarily in the developmental stages. After going through all three varieties, Morgan found that she highly favored the lasers for their accuracy and range, even if they offered the least kill power. There was no visible lag from trigger pull to impact with the beams traveling at the speed of light, unlike the slow moving slugs that she was currently firing or the even slower missiles.
In fact, it was Morgan who had insisted on the 6s using laser weapons to pass their first naval team challenge less than a week ago. The 2s had passed the blockade challenge early on, but the other teams had spent two weeks trying to figure it out before the 8s finally found a way. Morgan and her 6s had been almost the last to pass, beating out the 1s by a day, and having to use an extraordinary amount of resources to do it…which incurred a heavy points penalty.
