by Ian Douglas
There was enough heat and light glaring from that scar, she thought, to mask the fighters from enemy sensors, from some of them, at least. The Starhawks might be tagged by radar—though their hull configuration was already shifting to stealth mode to hide them. And the Toad pilots wouldn’t be watching the eruptions on the planet. They would be focused on America and the other capital ships ahead.
The Choctaw shuttle and the four gunships were already angling off in another direction, racing for the distant star carrier.
“Dragonfires!” she called. “Stick close! We’re going to give those bastards one hell of a surprise!”
CIC, TC/USNA CVS America
Haris Space, Eta Boötis System
1948 hours, TFT
“Dragonfires have acknowledged, sir,” the comm officer announced.
“Then what the hell are they doing?” Koenig asked. The shuttle and its Nightshade escort was breaking for the carrier, but the five fighters were maintaining their course, straight-line from the planet’s surface into space.
“Analyses of their vector suggests they’re performing a pop-up, sir,” Hughes told him.
A pop-up—an ambush by fighters lurking within the atmosphere of a planet, then “popping up” out of the atmosphere to attack. Usually, the relative positions within a local gravity well dictated that the force farther from the planet held the gravitational advantage. Even with drive singularities, it took a lot of energy to fight up out of the bottom of a planetary well. But in some cases, surprise could outweigh the disadvantages, especially if the enemy wasn’t paying attention.
And this time, the enemy appeared to be completely focused on the carrier battlegroup. The question was whether five gravfighters could make any difference at all in a scrap against ten times their number.
“God help them,” he murmured.
Dragon One
Haris Space, Eta Boötis System
1949 hours, TFT
Allyn cut her drive singularity as she flashed into the path of the oncoming Turusch fighter swarm, targeting the nearest Toad and cutting loose with her RFK-90 KK Gatling at a range of less than ten thousand kilometers. Her AI pivoted her ship as she moved, twisting it to keep the Gatling aligned with the enemy fighter. A stream of magnetic-ceramic-jacketed slugs of depleted uranium, each massing half a kilo, snapped out with a cyclic rate of twelve per second.
With a launch tube five meters long and an acceleration of three hundred gravities, those slugs were traveling at 175 meters per second when they left the Starhawk’s prow. The impact of that stream carried the punch of a fair-sized tactical nuke; the Toad’s shields went down as the hull opened up with a zipper effect, ripping out its guts and sending molten chunks of debris tumbling through space.
“Dragon One, scratch one!” she cried over the com link.
The other Dragonfires were scoring as well. Lieutenant Tucker was using her PBP-2 in short, controlled bursts, flipping her Starhawk this way and that, acquiring targets, locking on, firing. Collins and Spaas were tucked in close together with a separation of only a few hundred kilometers, their battle AIs linked as they concentrated their fire, one using KK slugs, the other particle-beam bursts to maximize their combined effect. Sandoval was firing his Kraits…serious overkill for a Toad, but the results were dramatic enough as white nuclear blossoms swelled and faded against black space, silent and devastating.
“Sandoval!” Allyn called. “Save the Kraits for the big boys! You’ll need ’em later!”
“Is there gonna be a later?” he shot back, but he switched to his KK Gatling.
The sudden appearance of the five new Starhawks appeared to have thrown the Toad formation off balance. Intertwined with the Black Lightnings, they’d been focusing their attention, it had seemed, on closing with the remnant of the carrier battlegroup. Now, however, they were faltering, breaking sharply, accelerating in different directions, trying to put distance between themselves and their tormentors.
Turusch fighters were designed to put down heavy fire on capital ships, and they tended to work best at distances of from five to fifty thousand kilometers from their targets—medium range in space combat. They were not as maneuverable as Starhawks, and weren’t good dogfighters.
Starhawks, on the other hand, were designed for close-in knife fights, getting in to within a thousand kilometers or less of the target, outmaneuvering it, and taking it down with concentrated KK and PBP fire. If they could get close enough to a Toad, they enjoyed a considerable advantage ship-to-ship…but at medium range the Toads’ advantage in heavy weaponry could be devastating.
Sandoval twisted in toward a Toad already exchanging fire with one of the Black Lightnings. The Lightning was pacing the Turusch fighter, working to drop squarely onto its tail at a range of less than a hundred kilometers.
At the last moment, the Toad spun end-for-end, hammering at the Black Lightning, which rolled to port, using its drive singularity to jink randomly back and forth, making itself a difficult target. Sandoval was farther out, almost three thousand kilometers, and at that range the Turusch particle beams had bloomed, becoming far wider, far more likely to hit, than when they were fired close-in.
The beam caught his Starhawk aft, slashing through shields, vaporizing critical portions of the gravfighter’s projection bootstrappers.
Fighters under drive fell toward an artificial gravitational singularity projected in the desired direction of acceleration; bootstrapper was the slang term for the electronics that continually refocused the singularity ahead of the ship from picosecond to picosecond. With the bootstrapper disabled and the singularity still powered, Sandoval’s Starhawk fell into its own drive field, its nose crumpling as the fighter began whipping around the pinpoint singularity in a high-velocity blur. In another instant, about a quarter of the fighter was consumed, smashed down into subatomic debris at the singularity’s event horizon. The rest sprayed into surrounding space, most of the mass transformed into a blinding flash of energy.
The remaining four members of the Dragonfires continued the attack.
Squadron Ready Room
TC/USNA CVS America
Haris Space, Eta Boötis System
1950 hours, TFT
To the uninitiated, the squadron ready room looked like a place for Dragonfire personnel on board the carrier to relax between missions, a lounge with comfortable recliners, indirect lighting, and soft-padded decks. In fact, it was the nerve center for the pilots of VFA-44, the place where they were briefed before each mission, where they debriefed with the carrier’s combat intelligence officer afterward, and where they waited out the hours of a ready alert, waiting for the order to strap on their fighters.
The overhead, vaulted like a planetarium dome, could be set to project maps or combat plots. At the moment, it was set to display an exterior view of space as relayed back by hundreds of drone surveillance modules scattered through battlespace. Lieutenant Gray was alone in the compartment, stretched out on a recliner and watching the battle unfold.
It was a strange and unsettling feeling to be here, knowing that the rest of his squadron—what was left of it—was out there, facing the oncoming enemy in a desperate bid to save the heart of the battlegroup.
Gray had not yet been signed off for flight-ready status. He felt…alone. Alone and helpless. He saw Sandoval’s gravfighter hit, saw its spectacular end. Flashpoint, the phenomenon was called in the milspeak slang of fighter pilots, when a gravfighter and its pilot were both devoured by its own drive singularity.
The Toad Sandoval had been stalking exploded as the Black Lightning pilot savaged it from point-blank range with KK fire.
The sky projected across the ready room dome was sliding smoothly now from one side to the other as the America continued to accelerate. The black bulk of Haris, the planet, shifted with it, blotting out the sun with an artificial sunset. The battlegroup, Gray knew, must be trying to swing around behind the planet, using its bulk as a shield.
He wondered if the
fighters still rough-and-tumbling it with the Toads out there would be able to trap.
The Draghonfires’ chatter was coming through over the ready room’s link from CIC, faint voices, adrenaline-shrill with excitement and fear.
“This is Dragon Two! Dragon Two! Got one on my tail!
“Hold on, Two, I’m on him!
“Shit! I’m hit! I’m hit!”
“On him, Two! On my mark, break high and right! Ready…mark!”
Another Toad exploded in white silence. But Dragon Two had been hit, his telemetry showing serious damage to his ship.
Gray’s fists clenched at his sides.
Back on Earth, back in the Manhattan Ruins, you survived by watching out for the others in your extended clan, watching their backs. It was a psychology that translated easily to the military culture, and particularly to the men and women of your own gravfighter squadron. With few exceptions, he hated the others in VFA-44. Sandoval was a stuck-up prig. Spaas, especially, and his partner Collins, were always there riding him about his being a prim, telling him he wasn’t good enough to be a part of their elite.
But they were still a part of his new clan. Family.
And they were dying out there, all of them, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.
Chapter Thirteen
26 September 2404
CIC, TC/USNA CVS America
Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System
2015 hours, TFT
“Captain Buchanan?” Koenig said. “Bring those fighters aboard!”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Under savage, close assault by the Confederation Starhawks, supported by the deadly and accurate batteries on the Spirit of Confederation, the Kinkaid, and the other vessels of the shrunken battlegroup, the Turusch fighters, what was left of them, had broken off the attack. America, after swinging behind the planet, had aligned with distant Sol but not yet begun accelerating.
The Choctaw shuttle and its Nightshade escorts were rendezvousing with the America now, gliding in from astern, aligning their approach vector with the opening at the aft end of the rotating Number Two docking bay. At the last possible moment, they gave a final, brief burst of acceleration before killing their drive singularities and drifting dead-stick into the swinging maw of the docking bay, entering a tangleweb field that slowed them abruptly for the final fifty meters of their approach.
“CIC, PriFly,” sounded in Koenig’s head. “The shuttle is aboard.”
“Thank you, PriFly. I saw.”
He had a screen at his CIC station set as a repeater off of PriFly’s main board. He’d watched the Choctaw enter the gaping opening, could see the gunships coming in through the entrance now, in staggered formation to match the docking bay’s rotation, one after the other. Nightshades were essentially large, two-man fighters, but slower and less maneuverable than Starhawks or War Eagles, with a maximum acceleration of only twelve Gs. That made them good for chewing up ground targets and serving as close-support for the infantry, but not of much use in a gravfighter fur ball.
Koenig turned his attention to the fighters—four from VFA-44 and eight from VFA-51. They were eighty thousand kilometers astern of the America now, but catching up fast.
“Admiral?” Buchanan’s voice said in his head. “Permission to begin accelerating the America.”
“Granted,” Koenig told him. The slow movers were safely on board now. The fighters easily had the acceleration necessary to match velocities with a capital ship. The sooner the last seven capital ships of the battlegroup were pushing c, the better. Koenig still expected Turusch warships to be coming in on the tails of those fighters; they could appear on feeds from the more remote battlespace drones at any moment.
On the tactical display, the ships of the battlegroup began moving faster, as data readouts showed the vector change. The fighters were already going all out, the distance between them and America dwindling rapidly.
Come on, he thought, the words fierce. Get your butts in here….
Dragon One
Eta Boötis IV
2020 hours, TFT
“Okay, chicks,” Allyn said. “Final correction is coming up. Lose the dust balls.”
At her command, each pilot switched off his or her forward singularity and decelerated, sending the atom-sized collections of dust and debris hurtling into the void. The maneuver was vital; those submicroscopic specks could wreak untold havoc with America’s internal spaces if they struck the carrier.
They hadn’t been in flight for long, and the dust masses were so minute they likely would have caused no damage. On the other hand, they were traveling slowly enough that the specks might not pass all the way through the carrier. They could become imbedded in her hull, where they would continue to feed and grow.
There were horror stories still told in the service from the earliest days of gravitic engineering, of ships infested with neutron-sized black holes, of ships and their crews dying slowly.
One by one, the fighters dropped into staggered approach vectors.
“Howie!” she called. “What’s your sit?”
“Doing okay, Skipper.” He sounded scared. Medical telemetry showed his heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure all significantly elevated. “VG is out. So are half my thrusters and some of my sensors. AI off-line. It’s gonna be a dead catch.”
“Stay with us,” she told him. “We’re almost home.”
Spaas’s Starhawk was badly mangled, still flying, but only just. That Toad particle beam had grazed his starboard side, killing both his variable geometry controls, his “VG,” and it had knocked out half of his control thrusters and some critical instrumentation, including his onboard computer. “Dead catch” meant he was going to hit the tangleweb as a dead chunk of metal, with no way of fine-tuning the last second of the approach.
His setup for trap would have to be bang-on perfect.
If America wasn’t in the middle of getting the hell out of Dodge, the likeliest scenario would have been to have Spaas match course and velocity with the carrier, then punch out, allowing SAR tugs from the America to come out and pick him up and recover the inert fighter. But they didn’t have the luxury of time now, and having the America maintain a steady velocity on a constant course for more than a few minutes would invite a barrage of hivel KK rounds that could reduce the carrier to half-molten fragments in seconds.
So they had to do it the hard way—with Spaas landing his crippled Starhawk on America’s rotating deck.
Howard Spaas wasn’t the best Starhawk driver Allyn had ever known, but he was good. He could be arrogant and elitist at times—he made a game of picking on the nuggets, the new pilots in the squadron—and he’d been written up more than once for disciplinary problems.
But he was part of the Dragonfire’s tight-knit family, and she didn’t want to lose him.
“Dragon One, Dragon Three.” That was Collins.
Here it comes. “Go ahead, Three.”
“Request permission to ride Dragon Two in.”
Collins wanted to make the trap side-by-side with Spaas. With her ship coming in just off Spaas’s forward quarter, he could check his alignment and vector by eye, and not have to rely so much on possibly malfunctioning sensors. Experienced pilots sometimes rode in with nuggets, or with other pilots experiencing instrumentation or thruster problems.
“Negative, Two.” Allyn switched to a private channel, so Spaas wouldn’t hear. “Damn it, Collie-dog, I don’t want to lose both of you if this goes bad.”
“Acknowledged.” Collins’ voice was tight, the word bitten off and hard.
Allyn switched back to the squadron channel. “Final turn, people. Let’s do it by the book.”
The America was still invisibly distant, some eight thousand kilometers up ahead. Their dustcatchers jettisoned, the fighters used brief applications of their singularities to align themselves precisely with the ship, then switched them off. The carrier was traveling directly away from them at ten kilometers per sec
ond, accelerating at fifty gravities, which increased its velocity by half a kilometer per second every second. The fighters were coming in faster, but slowing; by the time they were a hundred kilometers off America’s tail, they would be moving just three hundred meters per second faster than the carrier.
“VFA-44, you are cleared for trap. Landing Bay Two.”
“Dragon One. Copy.”
“Switch to AI approach,” she said.
“Confirmed,” her computer said. “AI in control of final approach.”
When everything was working right, the computer network between fighter and carrier did a much better job of nudging the ship into the aft opening of a rotating landing bay.
The AI triggered a five hundred grav singularity aft, braking her sharply, just as the America appeared ahead, rapidly swelling in apparent size. The singularity snapped off when she was moving just three hundred meters per second relative to the America.
The carrier looked so damned tiny, a hard-edged toy almost lost among stars and empty night.
And then the carrier’s aft end swelled to fill half the sky and she was into her trap.
Moments before, the carrier had switched off her own grav drive, simplifying the complex ballet balancing velocity and distance. Though conventions like up and down and above and below didn’t exist in free fall, the fighter’s attitude on final suggested that she was skimming in just beneath the vessel’s huge, aft quantum tap power module, the dark, silver-gray metal of the hull blurring past just above her head. Ahead, Landing Bay Two slowly swung in from the right.
The carrier’s hab modules were stacked around America’s spine, like layers in a cake, bent into a disk nestled in behind the mushroom-cap shield. The modules were in constant rotation, creating a steady out-is-down artificial gravity. A rotation of 2.11 turns per minute created the feeling of half a G at the outer rim, one hundred meters from the ship’s spine. A point on the outside rim was moving at twenty-two meters per second, or nearly fifty miles per hour.
