by S. H. Jucha
Suddenly, their controllers located the alien ship off their port quarter at 10.6 degrees declination and switched into attack mode. The alien craft detected their presence as well and angled to meet them. They were closing on one another at over 1,100 km/sec.
Before they could reach missile range, Jase’s controller, anticipating the beam’s firing, yanked his fighter in a starboard spiral out of the path of the energy weapon.
This was the edge Alex had sought for his fighters against the enemy’s beams. Without it, the Daggers would have had no chance to evade them, invisible as the beams were. Julien had discovered the answer in a monitor ship’s telemetry. A Confederation Captain had the foresight to record a silver ship’s attack on their fleet across a broad range of electromagnetic frequencies, and Julien had identified an energy surge that built across the hull just previous to the weapon’s firing. He had programmed the controllers to detect the energy buildup and initiate evasion before the beam’s release.
Both fighters were jinking and rolling. The silver ship was forced to divide its shots between its two adversaries. Jase felt his fighter shudder as his controller launched two nanites-1 missiles, but they were still in stage-1 acceleration when a beam vaporized both of them. He didn’t even get a chance to swear before his Dagger swerved up and out of the path of another beam. Then they were past the silver ship without having scored a single missile strike.
As they flipped their fighters over, the silver ship mirrored their maneuver. The enemy ship targeted Jase’s fighter first since he’d turned quicker to reengage, breaking the formation flying that the pilots had practiced. While the alien ship concentrated on Jase, Robert, who kept his fighter in Jase’s shadow, was able to fire two nanites-1 missiles, which reached max velocity and ignited their second stages before detection. Twenty stick-heads launched from each missile. A single beam immediately destroyed eight of them.
With stick-head missiles deployed, the controllers shifted priority. Two buoy missiles launched from Jase’s Dagger and arced away to take positions around the combat area. Just before his ship rolled hard to port in a double spiral, his controller launched two nanites-1 missiles to join Robert’s. Both missiles achieved stage-2, and forty more stick-heads raced at the enemy fighter.
Jase switched his controller to manual flight mode to relish the personal defeat of the enemy. His controller signaled the charging of the silver ship’s hull, and Jase yanked his fighter into a starboard roll, but his reactions couldn’t match those of his controller. The beam cut through his port missile pod, igniting his remaining armament. The detonated missiles—now a mass of hot shards—tore through his fighter, exploding it in a fiery ball.
Of the eighty stick-heads launched from their four missiles, only nine struck the alien ship, splashing on its hull. The impacts kicked off reactions in their viscous payload. Embedded in an oxygen-rich, slow-burn, gel, the nanites began interacting with the silver ship’s hull.
Julien had loaded a variety of nanites in each stick-head, not trusting to one design. The nanites, which integrated with molecules in the alien hull, would co-opt the other nanites. Once a critical level was reached, the nanites would form a chemical signature. It was the job of the buoys to relay that signature to the controllers.
Robert registered the disappearance of his leader’s signal. He pushed his emotions aside as his fighter rolled again, first one way, then another, pushing the envelope of his inertia compensators. His cell-gen nanites worked diligently to treat his bruising.
Once more, Robert and the silver ship shot pass each other, and his controller executed an about face to reengage the enemy. He tried to calculate how far ahead of Flight-2 they had arrived, but found he couldn’t concentrate on the task. Instead, he tried to slow his breathing and concentrate on surviving. It crossed his mind that he wouldn’t be giving Jase the tongue-lashing for disobeying orders.
A buoy pinged and his controller uploaded the chemical signature from the nanites on the silver ship’s hull, revealing a crystal composition with an embedded metal amalgam. With the buoy information in hand, he realized their first goal had been achieved.
Their fighters were closing again when his controller signaled completion of the nanites-2 programming. Simultaneously, his helmet displayed Flight-2’s arrival. Relief shot through him—help had arrived. Abruptly, his fighter jerked straight up into a twisting spiral, but the alien ship seemed to have anticipated his movement. Its energy weapon cut through his fuselage, slicing his fighter in half.
* * *
The gas giant’s gravity had boosted Flight-2’s velocity. Andrea and Sheila, arcing around the planet’s 91K km radius, came in high on the alien ship in time to witness the strike on Dagger-2. Their controllers detected the buoys, uploaded the data, and programmed their nanites.
The alien ship flew past the remains of Dagger-2 and flipped over to engage them. As they closed within 20K km, their controllers fired four nanites-2 missiles. The silver ship targeted the fighters, ignoring the missiles, which allowed all of them to reach second stage. The nanites-2 missiles splattered against the alien’s hull, with only two misses.
Andrea signaled her wing.
The evasion programs were based on the best of the fighter games—not mathematical algorithms, but human ingenuity. The fighters twisted and danced away from the silver ship in an asymmetrical ballet with the pilots along for the rough rides.
The silver ship chose to dive after Sheila.
Sheila signaled her controller for maximum velocity. With the onslaught of heavy acceleration and her fighter’s twisting and turning, she couldn’t maintain consciousness and soon blacked out. This was the balance that Andrea had argued with her compatriots that could exist between a controller and pilot. After she lost consciousness, Sheila would have died if her controller hadn’t continued to evade the enemy fighter closing in on her.
As it was, the silver ship detected the compromise of its hull’s integrity and flipped end over end to return to the safety of the inner system.
When the enemy fighter had pursued Sheila, Andrea had flipped her fighter over and given chase. She was pushing max acceleration as well when the silver ship reversed course, abandoning its chase of Dagger-4, and headed straight for her. During the split moment that the two fighters faced each other, the silver ship fired a near point-blank beam shot, and Andrea’s controller violently twisted her fighter out of the way.
As Andrea fought the inertia overload, her display flashed a temperature spike on the tip of her port weapon’s boom. It had been a near miss. She flipped end over end and launched four warheads after her fleeing enemy. As her missiles chased the silver ship, Andrea urged them on with, “Go. Go.”
The buoys directed the warheads toward the strongest pools of nanites. But, the four missiles wouldn’t have struck the craft’s weakened areas. The pools were on the forward half of the ship, and the warheads were closing on its aft end.
Unexpectedly, the fleeing ship flipped over again, and its beam weapon took out three missiles. It missed the fourth one, which was rearward of the others, its release being slightly delayed due to the damage on Andrea’s weapons boom. Boring in on the strongest nanites pool, the warhead struck the weakened hull, slamming through the metal-exhausted crystal, and exploded. The entire force of the blast was pr
ojected inward.
* * *
Alex sat in the figurative dark and continued to second guess himself even though there was no opportunity to change the strategy. But he did make one tactical change. Trusting in the aliens’ penchant for their port maneuvers, he’d directed both his ship and the shuttle to move under the ecliptic beneath the gas giant in a port turn. If the alien ship defeated his Daggers, he expected it to continue on to where he was expected to be. So, he was taking their ships to the pincer point, where the silver ship had been. If they had to run, their ships would be on opposite vectors and he would have time to accelerate and gain FTL before the alien ship could catch them.
“Contact, Captain,” Julien sang out. “I have three images in close proximity. Two are under power. They’re our Daggers. The silver ship is drifting.”
“Julien, rendezvous immediately!” Alex ordered, decisions playing out rapidly in his head. “Show me the system, all ships, and the vectors to Libre and Méridien.” As Julien updated the holo-vid display, Alex zeroed in on a point far below the ecliptic. “There, Julien, send the information to Captain Manet.” It was a course that created a third axis to the two vectors for Libre and Bellamonde.
“Still playing hide-and-seek, Captain,” Tatia commented.
“We don’t know if that alien ship sent an emergency signal, and if we follow the shuttle on this heading we won’t be leading the silver ships back to either Libre or Méridien.”
“Julien, can you identify the two fighters and locate our other ones?” Tatia asked.
“That data is unavailable, First Mate. The emissions from the planet are overwhelming comms, and the signal buoys are out of range. At this time, I have limited telemetry.”
Julien displayed the local system on the holo-vid, color-coding the display as Alex preferred. The gas giant appeared in a swirl of red, orange, and green gases. The Rêveur was a blue dot, their red trajectory line curving to intersect yellow dots, the three ships emerging from behind the planet. The shuttle was in green and heading down and away from the system.
Examining the holo-vid, Alex’s immediate concern disappeared. The three fighters were headed above the ecliptic, away from patrolling ships. Fortune, Alex thought.
Julien attempted to relay a comm call but it was garbled. They proceeded to close the distance on the three fighters, which were leaving the envelope of the gas giant’s emissions. Then a comm came through.
They sat quietly. Both were haunted by the violent detonation of Jase’s fighter. He may have been an egotistical pain, but he was their comrade.
Sheila’s thoughts turned to Robert, wondering if he might have survived. He had become a good friend. A sweet man, she thought.
Julien focused his prodigious processing power on locating Dagger-2. As the Rêveur reached the buoys, he transferred their data and received the trajectory and velocity of the fighter’s two halves just after the fatal strike. Once he determined the direction and distance that Robert’s cockpit had drifted, he focused the ship’s telemetry on that section of space, sweeping the area until he found the fighter’s nose section.
“Captain, Lt. Dorian’s ship was cut in half by a beam strike. The tail section is entering the gravity well of the planet; the cockpit is drifting inward and above the ecliptic. I can’t communicate with the Dagger’s controller.”
“Okay, Julien, plan B. Get to Lt. Dorian, immediately. Let’s see if we can recover three pilots today. Send an update to Captain Manet and Lt. Bonnard on the change in plan.”
* * *
Robert sat in his Dagger or, at least, what was left of it. The controller’s last signal of engine separation, before he lost all power, had shocked him to his core. Absolute quiet had followed—no engine thrum, no helmet telemetry, and no controller. Stars slowly tumbled past his plex-shield’s narrow view. Not too damn good, he thought.
His flight suit would keep him alive till his oxygen ran out, which he calculated should last about two days. He wondered if they even knew to look for him. Cold, dark fear crowded his thoughts and he desperately tried to focus of something else. He played a recorded vid of Sheila telling him a joke and played it over and over. Later, he tired of the joke and froze the vid on a frame of Sheila smiling at him after the punch line.
* * *
In need of human contact, Sheila broke the comm silence.
Andrea prophesized.
Guessing where she was going, Andrea said,
Laugh
ing at her wing’s enthusiasm, Andrea replied,
-40-
The Rêveur closed within 220 meters of Dagger-3’s tumbling cockpit. Julien signaled Alex that they were within range of Robert’s implant.
Alex had Julien orient the ship for a starboard recovery and readied Chief Roth. As Julien eased their ship closer to the bow fragment, Alex worked to calm the distraught pilot. Tatia coordinated with Julien and the Chief to align the bay opening with the tumbling chunk of fighter.
The flight crew slowly powered the bay’s twin tractor beams, installed as part of the repairs, to stop the cockpit’s uncontrolled spinning. A third beam, at the rear of the bay, drew the wreck inside.
Once the bay was re-pressurized, the crew extracted Robert from the remains of his fighter. When he reached the deck, he hugged every crew member, including his surprised Chief. Then he stood beside the crew to stare at the metal hulk that was once Dagger-2.
As soon as Alex received Chief Roth’s confirmation of Robert’s safe retrieval, he ordered Julien to retrieve the other pilots. Their detour to catch the damaged fighter had taken them system inward and time was wasting. While he waited, Alex paced the bridge, throwing a glance every now and then at the holo-vid, worrying another silver ship would appear.
When Julien closed on the three ships, he commandeered the Daggers’ controllers and, one at a time, landed them in the port bay. As the fighters settled to the deck, the flight crew locked their skids down then sealed and pressurized the bay. Cockpits were opened and the women were guided to the deck, where they were met with back slaps, hugs, and a whole lot of cheering. Andrea and Sheila were grinning so hard, they feared their expressions would be permanent.
