by Ian Douglas
Gray felt a surge of relief…mingled with adrenaline-sparked terror. We’re going!
His “provisional op plan,” as the CIC officer on America had put it, had been the rather strongly worded suggestion, made hours ago, that the twenty-four Starhawk fighters now orbiting at 1.3 AUs begin boosting immediately toward Point Libra. America had sent five squadrons toward Libra some four and a half hours ago—fifty-some fighters against a Turusch invasion fleet of unknown but certainly powerful composition.
Throwing twenty-four more fighters into the ongoing battle out there might, might make a difference.
He checked the attached transmission, an imbedded signal…and saw that it was an intercept picked up first at Earth, then transmitted under a classified security lock to the America, then retransmitted back to the rest of America’s battlegroup, including Green Squadron.
Opening the imbed, he and the others in his squadron watched the final seconds of the Gallagher and the other unarmed High Guard ships at Triton, watched until the final camera view spun crazily, then vanished in a burst of white noise.
“Jesus, Qwan-yin, and Buddha!” someone muttered.
“It’s okay, people,” Gray said. “We’re going in the other direction—out to Point Libra.”
“Yeah, where it’ll be worse,” Lieutenant j.g. Harper pointed out.
“Volunteers only,” Gray said. “If you’d rather sit here feeling useless until the Tushies come to you, do so. I’m boosting out to meet the bastards.”
“I’m with you, Lieutenant Gray,” McMasters told him.
“Yeah, Skipper,” Lieutenant Tolliver added. “Let’s go kick Tushie tush!”
Gray was already feeding orders to his AI, his Starhawk rotating sharply, bringing its prow into line with an invisible point against the sky in the direction of the constellation Libra. One by one, the other pilots chimed in.
All twenty-three would follow him out toward Point Libra. He checked the time—0738 hours. “Kick it,” he told his AI.
“Transit Squadron, this is the Jeanne d’Arc. Our CIC notes that you are leaving formation without proper authorization. Explain yourself.”
The French light carrier had assumed the responsibility for control of local space traffic. The Jeanne carried three fighter squadrons—Franco-German KRG-17 Raschadler fighters, according to the fleet Warbook—and all of her bays were full. Gray had requested permission to dock when he and the newbies had arrived, and had had his request denied.
“Jeanne d’Arc, this is Green Squadron,” he replied. “We have new orders.”
“Negative, Green Squadron,” came the reply. “Captain La-Salle says that you are under his jurisdiction now. We need confirmation before releasing you to another command.”
“Stuff it, Jeanne,” Gray replied. “We’re going where the action is.”
And, followed by the rest of the fighters, he accelerated to fifty thousand gravities.
Red Bravo Flight
America Deep Recon
Inbound, Sol System
0814 hours, TFT
Marissa Allyn’s Starhawk was out of missiles, but she still had power for her PBP and rounds for the KK cannon. Pulling her fighter into a hard turn, feeling the heavy drag of tidal forces as she rounded the projected drive singularity, she brought her ship into line with another Turusch ship and fired, sending a particle beam slashing cross the vessel, knocking down defensive shields and boring into the hull metal beneath. White flame—metal flash-heated into vapor—exploded across her forward display, and in another instant she’d hurtled through the fireball, debris flaring off her own shields.
“Red Five!” Lieutenant Huerta called. “You have a Toad coming down on your six!”
“Thanks, Red Seven! I see him!”
No need to risk a turn. She spun her Starhawk end-for-end, the ship continuing in a straight online as she now faced back the way she’d come. A Toad, malevolent and chunky, burst though the expanding debris cloud of the destroyed Trash ship, and her AI immediately achieved a target lock, signaling her with a tone in her ear.
Switching to guns, she triggered a long burst of kinetic-kill projectiles, accelerating a stream of depleted uranium slugs toward the target at twelve per second. The Toad’s shields had been up at around 90 percent to bring it through the debris field unhurt, shrouding the craft in a hazy blur, but as soon as it was clear of the evaporating fireball, this forward shields dropped to allow it to fire…and in that instant Allyn’s volley struck home.
White flashes sparked and scintillated across the Toad’s prow. Allyn kept firing, kept hammering at the oncoming Toad, which suddenly ripped open under the punishment in a spray of fragments and molten metal.
She spun her fighter through a full one-eighty once more and kicked in the acceleration. The sky around her was filled with ships, with drifting fragments, with flaring, silent explosions of light.
The lopsided battle had been continuing for over an hour now. Allyn and the other three Starhawks in her flight had been harassing the Turusch fleet, making high-velocity passes through the enemy formation, creating as much damage and havoc on each pass as possible. There’d been two casualties. Lieutenant Cutler in the first run…and Lieutenant Friedman had been skimming low across the outer hull of a Turusch Echo-class battleship when a pair of homing Golf-Mikes had closed with his Starhawk and detonated. The blast had actually damaged the Echo; Nancy Friedman’s ship had been obliterated, half vaporized in the triggering detonation, half crumpled into the singularity in an instant.
As the minutes slipped past, however, other Confederation fighters had begun arriving. All of the other Black Lightnings were now in the fight, along with ten of the Impactors and four Nighthawks—a total of twenty Starhawks and four SG-55 War Eagles. Red Bravo had been constantly broadcasting a streaming update on the engagement; the CTT by now had reached every Confederation fighter within one light hour of the battle, and they were coming in now from farther and farther away.
A Turusch Sierra-class cruiser appeared on her combat display, five thousand kilometers ahead, and she adjusted her course to intercept, kicking in her grav drive to a full fifty thousand gravities, accelerating at 500 kilometers per second squared. She let her AI handle the weapons release. When she passed the enemy battleship four and a half seconds later, she was moving at over 2200 kilometers per second relative to the target; mere human reflexes were simply not quick enough to react at such velocities.
There was a flash of motion, a flicker of something huge as she hurtled past the target at a range of just over one hundred kilometers, and she felt her Starhawk pivot, felt its beam weapon trigger. Unfortunately, not even her AI could give her a damage assessment. The target was gone before whatever damage she’d inflicted could register on the fighter’s scanners.
But all she could do, all any of them could do, was continue buzzing the ponderous enemy fleet, hitting individual ships when they could, where they could, as hard as they could.
The blue icon representing one of the Nighthawks flared and winked out, and she winced. The Nighthawks’ older War Eagle fighters wouldn’t last long in this kind of knife fight. They just weren’t as maneuverable in a close-in fight as a Starhawk. Survival in this type of space combat depended on speed and maneuverability, on not being where the enemy expected you to be at any given instant.
And then another Black Lightning was hit—Hector Aguilera’s ship—and she heard him scream as his Starhawk spun out of control, whipping around its own drive singularity with impossible speed before it ripped itself into white-hot fragments.
Twenty-three fighters left, of those that had arrived so far.
She wondered how long any of them would be able to keep pressing the attack.
Green Squadron
Outbound, Sol System
0848 hours, TFT
“Green Leader, to all Greens. Anything yet?”
The answers came back, distorted by high velocity and the tightly curving geometry of spacetime at near-
c…all negative.
“Keep listening. Trust me. It won’t be much longer.”
They’d accelerated for ten minutes at fifty thousand gravities, crossing six tenths of an AU and reaching a velocity of 299,000 kps—99.7 percent of the speed of light. For the next hour, then, they’d flashed out into emptiness under free fall, traveling another seven AUs, past the orbit of Mars, past the orbits of the Main Belt asteroids and the orbit of Jupiter, and into the Abyss beyond.
Green Squadron—Gray kept wondering if America’s CIC had given them that designation because the nugget pilots were green—would reach the thirty-AU shell, the orbit of Neptune, by 1148 hours Fleet Time—another three hours, or a bit less. The total near-c coast time for the squadron, though, would seem to be only seventeen and a half minutes, subjective time versus objective, thanks to the effects of relativistic time dilation. From Gray’s point of view, fewer than fifteen minutes had passed since he’d given the order to boost, including the acceleration period up to near-c.
To make matters really exciting, there was the distinct possibility—even the probability—that the Turusch fleet had begun accelerating for the Inner System at some point during the past four hours or so.
Gray stared at his navigational display, thinking about this.
He’d ordered the other fighters to deploy in a receiver rosette—a tactical flight formation designed to transform the entire fighter unit into a very large antenna array. Even at near-c, each fighter could receive incoming radio traffic, but unscrambling them could be a problem. Those messages tended to be garbled and static-blasted, as well as strongly blue-shifted from ahead, red-shifted from astern.
To counter this, ships traveling in formation sometimes assumed the rosette pattern while maintaining laser taclinks, allowing them to use wide-baseline interferometry to pick up and process weak or garbled signals. In effect, Green Squadron was now a single antenna over ten thousand kilometers across—the largest separation between any two of the twenty-four fighters in the formation.
He knew that when America’s squadrons engaged the Turusch out at thirty-AU, they would have begun transmitting combat report updates back to the Inner System. Green Squadron was now a quarter of the way out-system between the America and the thirty-AU shell, and in the perfect position to pick up a transmission from America’s fighters first, well before they reached the America.
If that transmission came, when it came, Gray and the rest of Green Squadron would know exactly where the enemy fleet was, and be able to make the necessary course corrections that would let them meet the enemy, somewhere out there beyond the dark orbit of Saturn. Depending on what that transmission told him about the enemy’s position and vector, he thought he might be able to make a solid tactical contribution to the battle. It was a long shot, certainly, but one of the time-hallowed bits of advice to anyone in combat had been playing through his brain for hours now.
Do something! It may be wrong, but do something!
Gray intended to do exactly that.
Red Bravo Flight
America Deep Recon
Inbound, Sol System
0930 hours, TFT
They were losing.
The enemy was becoming quicker, more adept, was learning how to anticipate the quick-pass maneuvers of the fighters and lay down heavy fields of fire—particle beams, clouds of kinetic impactors, gravitic missiles, blossoming thermonuclear warheads. During the past two hours, thirteen Confederation fighters had been destroyed and five incapacitated, their systems down as they hurtled on blind and unpowered trajectories into darkness.
The fighters were also having to route more and more of their power to their drives. The enemy had been accelerating now at about five hundred gravities for two hours, fifteen minutes, and were now traveling at 40,500 kps, after having crossed just over one AU. With their higher accelerations, the fighters could match that speed easily enough, but every kilometer per second per second applied toward matching the enemy’s course toward the Inner System made that much less power available for maneuvering.
And maybe, Allyn thought to herself, maybe we’re just getting too damned tired to think straight.
Lieutenant Theod Young’s War Eagle tumbled helplessly out of control, impacting against the shields of a Turusch behemoth, a small and heavily armed powered planetoid.
We’re losing, she thought again, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.
Green Squadron
Outbound, Sol System
1002 hours, TFT
A window opened in his mind, and Gray felt the inrushing cascade of raw data.
The antenna rosette maneuver had worked, plucking the speed-blasted signal from space as it passed the hurtling formation of Starhawks. The fighter AIs, working together across the laser taclink, had processed and enhanced the data, transforming it into something intelligible.
They wouldn’t know about it for hours, yet, on the America or back on Earth and Mars, but America’s five squadrons had engaged the enemy fleet Bravo some three hours ago, at 0712 hours. Gray saw the attack led by his former squadron leader, Marissa Allyn, saw the destruction of the Turusch mobile dwarf planet, saw the death of Lieutenant Cutler.
Perhaps most important of all, thanks to Commander Allyn, he now had precise coordinates for the Turusch fleet. As minute followed objective minute, he saw more and more Turusch warships being plotted on Allyn’s tactical display, saw them accelerating, ponderously, toward the Inner System.
Green Squadron had been traveling outbound on a heading toward 15 hours right ascension, declination minus 10 degrees, in the northern reaches of the constellation Libra, the “Point Libra” designated as a nav point for ships trying to intercept the alien fleet. Allyn had intercepted the Turusch ships at a different nav point, however…Right Ascension 15 hours, 34 minutes; Declination plus 26 degrees, 43 minutes.
This second point was located some 37 degrees across the sky from Point Libra—meaning that Green Squadron was 37 degrees off the proper heading. This was what Gray had been waiting for…an exact navigational heading. The new nav point was located, he noticed, within the constellation Corona Borealis—close beside the bright star Alphekka, in fact.
He wondered if there was any significance in that. His onboard sky charts listed Alphekka as an A0V/G5V double star seventy-two light years from Sol. The system was only about 300 million years old, though, and thick with proto-planetary dust and gas—too young for a planetary system to have fully formed.
Perhaps it was only coincidence that a bright, relatively nearby star lay close to that point. But possibly not….
“Green Squadron, all ships,” he called. “Set your nav beacons for Right Ascension fifteen hours, thirty-four minutes; Declination plus twenty-six degrees, forty-three minutes. On my mark, execute a thirty-seven-degree course change to the new heading. In three…two…one…mark!”
Still moving at close to light speed, the fighters threw out drive singularities, putting a steep gradient into space ahead, their straight-line courses bending through curved space and onto the new heading. Gray was holding his breath, waiting as fighter after fighter called in, acknowledging completion of the maneuver. At these speeds, the slightest miscalculation would mean disaster, a fighter literally vaporized by impossible tidal forces, or devoured by its own drive singularity.
Fortunately, the pilots might be green, but the AIs handling the details of the maneuver were, if not experienced, very highly skilled. Every ship came through perfectly, dropping onto the new outbound heading.
All of the stars of the surrounding sky were crowded by the effects of relativistic travel into a narrow band of light now, some 30 degrees off his bow. The stars of Corona Borealis were among them, of course, but quite unrecognizable in the photic distortion. Gray told the AI to transmit the course change to Earth. They would learn of it shortly after they got the signal from Allyn’s fighters.
“AI,” he said. “I need a theoretical plot. Take the positions, course, and
velocities of all of the Turusch ships in Allyn’s transmission, and work up an extended targeting estimate.”
“That estimate will, necessarily, be inaccurate,” the ship’s AI told him. “The enemy will be changing acceleration, if nothing else, while fighting Allyn’s wing.”
“Best guess,” he told the system. “We’re not God.”
“This will take several minutes.”
“Fast as you can.” Several minutes subjective could be an hour objective, and they didn’t have much more time than that.
Sooner than he’d feared, the AI announced, “Calculations complete.”
“Transmit it to the other ships in the squadron,” Gray said, “as targeting data.”
“Which weapons?” the AI asked.
“Something that will make a mark at ten or fifteen AUs,” Gray replied. “AMSOs.”
They were going to throw sand at the oncoming Turusch ships.
Red Bravo Flight
America Deep Recon
Inbound, Sol System
1012 hours, TFT
All of the fighters launched from America had joined the engagement, a rapidly moving fur ball hurtling toward the Inner System now at 58,500 kps. Assuming the enemy pulled a mid-course flip and decelerated the rest of the way in, the total voyage was going to be on the order of fifteen more hours.
The handful of America’s fighters simply weren’t going to last that much longer. Twenty fighters had been destroyed total so far…and seven sent spinning away into space, helplessly out of control. They’d started this op with fifty-six fighters. Thirty Confederation fighters were left…close to 50 percent casualties.
