Center of Gravity

by Ian Douglas

  VFA–44

  Alphekka System

  1637 hours, TFT

  “I’ve got a group of twelve missiles inbound!” Gray yelled over the squadron channel. “Targeting, locking on with proximity fuse . . . and Fox One!”

  A VG–10 Krait with a warhead tuned to a twenty-kiloton yield slipped from the belly of his Starhawk, its grav drive visible as a fiercely hot point of light flickering into the darkness. The enemy missiles were locked on to the America, but they were tightly clustered. A single nuclear detonation directly in front of them should vaporize them all, or so badly mangle their circuitry that they became inert, tumbling lumps of fused metal.

  “I’ve got another missile swarm at three-three-seven by two one,” Lieutenant Tucker called. “Locking . . . Fox One.”

  A dazzling, silent fireball blossomed ahead of Gray’s fighter, followed seconds later by another. His AI scanned space ahead and reported a clean field. The two missile swarms had been wiped from the sky.

  But more missiles were coming.

  Gray’s AI, linked in now with the capital ships of the battlegroup as well as the other fighters, was coordinating targets. In essence, all of the fleet tactical AIs were joined together into a single mind, noting threats, determining strategies, assigning assets. Because many of the threats were still light seconds, even light minutes away, the “mind” worked slowly. A major reason that human pilots still strapped on fighters was the need for creativity and intuition to overcome the tactical limitations imposed by the speed of light.

  Gray’s IHD showed fields of fire and tracking locks as transparent lines and cones of light. A massive collection of cylinders and struts behind the characteristic mushroom cap of a forward shield appeared ahead—the AKE Remington. The AKE prefix designated her as an underway replenishment ship, and she was, arguably, one of the more important vessels in the battlegroup. The planners of Operation Crown Arrow expected that the America battlegroup would be away from Sol for a long time, operating far behind enemy lines. The two AKEs in the battlegroup, Remington and Lewis, carried the SKR–7 Scrounger spacecraft that could extract necessary metals, hydrocarbons, and volatiles from asteroids and comet nuclei, while nanufactory facilities on board the AKEs allowed them to grow almost anything the fleet might need while on deep-space deployment, up to and including new fighters.

  If the Turusch managed to disable or destroy the Remington, the fleet’s operational range and flexibility would be sharply limited.

  Gray’s fighter hurtled past the dark, shadowed bulk of the Remington, which was still accelerating in an attempt to catch up with the main body of the battlegroup. The nearest Toads were just 220,000 kilometers beyond, already decelerating hard in order to engage the Confederation fighters. There were twenty Toad fighters in that pack.

  “Remington, Dragonfires,” Commander Allyn called over the tactical channel. “Watch your fire. We’ve got your back.”

  “Copy that, Dragonfires,” a worried-sounding voice replied. “Glad to have you with us.”

  An AKE like the Remington mounted twelve turret-mounted point-defense weapons, a mix of high-velocity KK Gatlings and StellarDyne pee-beeps, both essentially identical to the RFK–90s and PBP–2s mounted on the Starhawks. Enemy tactics would involve trying to overwhelm the Remington’s defenses with missile and beam fire, seeking to burn out shields and knock out active weapons.

  The Dragonfires added some flexibility to the AKE’s defense. The battlespace astern of the AKE, however, would have to be very carefully managed, or the good guys would be scoring some own goals.

  “One volley of Kraits,” Allyn ordered, “then blow through and return. Target front to center of the pack . . . and fire!”

  VG–10 Krait missiles, nuclear-tipped and deadly, rippled out from the oncoming Starhawks, streaking across intervening space. Five were disabled by the Turusch defenses, beam weapons and sand clouds, and then nuclear fireballs were pulsing and strobing through the enemy fighter group. One hit scored . . . two . . .

  And then the first Turusch missiles began exploding among the Starhawks as well. A dazzling wall of light unfolded directly ahead of Gray. His fighter punched through the debris cloud an instant later, his sensors shrieking, warning of particle impacts and hard radiation searing across his forward shields. . . .

  . . . And then he punched through into open space, one of his shields flickering on the verge of failure but still holding. Lieutenant Dulaney’s Starhawk was tumbling, shields down, power failing, but the other eleven fighters closed with the enemy fighter swarm. Other fighters, like Gray’s, had taken minor damage.

  But now the real slugging match began.

  Gray targeted a Toad coming in directly ahead. The differences in vectors—the two fighter swarms had a combined difference in velocity of nearly forty thousand kilometers per second—meant there was no time for fancy maneuvers. Gray’s AI jinked left to avoid a head-on collision, pivoting right at the same instant to train a stream of high-velocity kinetic-kill slugs on the enemy as it passed less than fifty kilometers to starboard.

  His targeting sensors indicated a hit, but he was too far away now to check the damage personally. Flying tail first now, facing back the way he’d come, Gray locked on to the Toad with his particle beam and fired. In general, if you couldn’t burn them down with nuclear weapons, it was best to fight enemy fighters with kinetic-kill projectile streams. The Toads, with heavier shields and power plants than Confederation fighters, could generally use those shields to deflect incoming particle beams and laser fire. But KK rounds depended on kinetic energy to make a kill, and when the enemy was receding at high speed, those rounds lacked the solid punch necessary to do any real damage. If his first volley had damaged the enemy’s shields at all, however, a particle beam traveling at close to c might be able to burn through.

  He fired and, an instant later, saw a bright flash in the distance.

  “Dragon Nine,” he reported. “Score one!”

  “Dragon Five,” Collins said. “Kill!”

  “Dragon Four!” That was Will Canby. “Got one! I got one!”

  But the battle now became a twisting confusion of mass and movement, “turning and burning” as the slang term from ancient aerial fighter combat so succinctly termed it. The Turusch swarm had numbered twenty fighters coming in. Gray’s AI was only tracking ten now, which suggested that the initial salvo had killed seven, and three more had been burned down as VFA–44 passed through the enemy formation. The odds now were almost even as the fighters slowed and reversed course, and now the true ship-to-ship capabilities of human and Turusch fighters would be tested.

  Tactical studies carried out by various Confederation military research groups gave Turusch fighters the advantage overall. Toads were bigger, could accelerate faster, had more powerful shields and screens, appeared to carry heavier and more powerful weaponry, and could absorb more damage than the lighter Starhawks. Perhaps even more important, the enemy deployed Toads in much greater numbers—typically in fighter swarms of anywhere from fifteen to thirty, compared to human squadrons of nine or twelve. Those advantages, especially the numerical advantage, had been brutally telling at a number of space battles over the past thirty-some years—Beta Pic, Rasalhague, Everdawn, and First Arcturus Station.

  And yet, the human Starhawks had demonstrated a clear advantage at more recent battles—Eta Boötis, Sol, and now Second Arcturus. They were much quicker on the uptake, quicker in their response and counter-response than the heavier Toads . . . and the pilots who survived one ship-to-ship encounter with the enemy, both human and cybernetic, were proving that they could skew the statistics. One study suggested that humans learned faster than their Turusch counterparts.

  Toads, it was now known, carried two pilots apiece; the Turusch appeared to be closely paired biologically, with two beings actually thinking of themselves as one—a bit of alien neurobiology that humans were
still struggling to understand. Possibly, a single human pilot in tandem with his AI simply made decisions more quickly, was better able to intuitively respond to a threat.

  Whatever the reason, Turusch fighter losses tended to be a lot higher than those of the human squadrons, especially when the humans were able to take the fight in close—“knife-fighting range,” as the Confederation pilots called it. Toads preferred to stand off and pound the enemy with long-range nukes; human tactics preferred high-speed point-blank encounters one-on-one.

  And VFA–44 was now making the best of that one slim advantage they possessed.

  The fighter swarms merged, as nuclear fireballs flared throughout the battlespace.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  25 February 2405

  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

  Alphekka System

  1655 hours, TFT

  “We’ve completed correlating all of the targets,” Commander Sinclair told Koenig. “The sooner we release the KK volley, of course, the more velocity they’ll have at the target.”

  Long-range kinetic-kill weapons were typically fired when the ship was moving as fast on approach as possible, before beginning deceleration. The more velocity they had when they hit the target, the bigger the release of energy.

  “Of course,” Koenig said. He used a cursor to indicate the leading, heavily shielded end of the ship factory, freeze-framed for the moment in the tactical tank. “But I’d like to avoid targeting this section here. It looks like it’s massively shielded. It would have to be, since it’s plowing through clouds of dust and meteoric debris at a fairly high velocity. Any hits here will be a lot less effective than elsewhere.”

  The working group consisted of Sinclair and several of America’s fleet weapons and tactical officers, plus their counterparts from the other combat ships of the fleet. Their task was to work out the best times and angles for both an initial volley from several AUs out and for targeting the enemy during the flyby. They would be passing the ship factory at over ten thousand kilometers per second. They’d been running various possibilities through simulators, to give them the best possible chance of success.

  “It’ll be tough to hit anything behind that shield,” Commander Horton, of the weapons department on board the Kinkaid, pointed out. He pointed to the image of the factory. “The shield is mostly facing us, with only this thin crescent here visible from this angle.”

  “The good news,” Sinclair said, “is that the thing appears to be a satellite, not a ship. It’s in a two-hundred-sixty-eight-year orbit around Alphekka at a slight inclination to the debris field. We can be confident that we’ll know its precise position four hours from now.”

  The worst issue in planning space combat was the realization that what you were seeing in your tactical display was out of date by however many light minutes separated you from the objective. You had to cover vast distances in a naval battle, and you could never assume the enemy was going to do what you thought he was going to do. But a space station that massive was going to keep moving along in its orbit; this one was moving at a relatively sedate 7.5 kilometers per second.

  Koenig studied the screen for a moment. “It appears that the factory is traveling just a little faster than the debris. Its orbit is somewhat eccentric, so it’s cutting across the debris field slightly, coming from behind and catching up with the rocks. That suggests that the intake there might be a weak point.”

  “Can’t be too weak,” Craig said. “Otherwise it would have chunks of rock smashing into whatever’s inside and gumming up the works.”

  “No. But it isn’t designed to have KK slugs slamming into it at 10 percent c, either. Maybe we can ‘gum up the works’—as Commander Craig put it—ourselves. Even if the leading hemisphere of that thing is heavily shielded, a direct high-v bombardment ought to do a hell of a lot of damage.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sinclair said. “Then, as we scoot past, we have our AIs rotate our ships so we can drop fire into the thing’s ass end, where there’s nothing but struts, exposed hardware, and newly minted starships.”

  “I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some shielding aft as well,” Koenig replied, “but it sounds like a plan. Everyone start feeding this to your AIs.” He checked his implant’s time sense. “We have two hundred fifty-four minutes to passage. I want to get off our long-range volley as soon as possible—five minutes if we can swing it. Questions?”

  There were none.

  “Let’s do it, then.”

  “Admiral?” Craig said.

  “Yes?”

  “You should probably check the dogfight aft. Things are getting pretty nasty.”

  Koenig shifted his IHD to a battlespace channel, one showing a graphic presentation of the firefight unfolding astern. The incoming Turusch fighters appeared to have broken off their run on America and the nearby ships of the battlegroup, and were concentrating instead on the Remington.

  As he watched, a pair of Toads dropped onto the tail of a Starhawk, slashing at the Confederation fighter with a barrage of particle beams until it flared bright and vanished.

  VFA–44 was fighting for its life.

  Dragonfire Nine

  VFA–44

  Alphekka System

  1656 hours, TFT

  “This is Dragon Four! Dragon Four! Two on my tail! I’m—”

  Lieutenant Will Canby’s Starhawk vanished in a blossoming cloud of fragments and hard radiation as his shields fell and the Toads’ CP beams tore his power plant apart. Gray and Tucker, in close formation, had been pulling around to drop onto the two Toads’ tails, but they pulled out of the high-grav turn too late to help him. “Target lock!” Gray yelled, and then he mindclicked the trigger. “Fox One!”

  A VG–10 Krait streaked from beneath his fighter, arrowing toward the two Toads. The Turusch fighters broke left and right; the missile followed the one to the right, passing the Toad by a scant few meters before detonating just ahead of it, a 20-kiloton flash engulfing both of the enemy spacecraft in a silently unfolding blossom of light.

  The Toad to port emerged from the fireball tumbling and scorched; the one to starboard didn’t emerge at all. Tucker snapped her fighter past the out-of-control Toad, pivoting as she overtook it to rip it apart with a KK burst from her RFK–90.

  “Ten, Nine,” Gray called to Tucker. “Let’s close in to the Remington.”

  “Copy that, Nine. Looks like it’s getting a little intense back there.”

  Together, their Starhawk AIs in close synch, they threw their drive singularities off to the side and whipped around them in a five-G turn. The Remington was now some 300,000 kilometers ahead. Since the AKE had continued to accelerate while the main battlegroup decelerated, the rest of the fleet was growing close, now, just over half a million kilometers away and closing fast.

  Collins’ accusation that he’d left his wing at the fight over Alchameth still burned a bit. In fact, given the realities of space-fighter combat, sticking close to your wingman was more of a suggestion than a rule. There were times when piling two on one provided a significant tactical advantage, and it helped to have someone close to brush a bad guy off your tail if you couldn’t shake him; but the fact that fighters could flip end-for-end to directly confront an enemy fighter coming in from behind weakened the argument that you needed someone on your wing to provide cover.

  Instead, winning a fighter action meant dominating the local battlespace, and that was easier to do with twelve separate but coordinated fighters than with six fighter pairs. In most dogfights out here in the night, you stayed linked with the tacnet and didn’t wander too far off, but you only rarely found yourself relying on—or being relied upon by—your wing.

  Nonetheless, Gray was sticking close to Tucker.

  Along with Ben Donovan, Lieutenant Katerine Tucker—“Katie” or “Tuck” to others in the squadron—was as close to a friend as Gray had in
the Dragonfires. She wasn’t a Prim—she’d been born and raised just outside of the Toronto Arcologies, deep in the heart of the USNA.

  Still, citizens of the former Canadian Commonwealth suffered their share of prejudice at the tongues of so-called real citizens, career discrimination, and jokes about Canucks and “eh?” Katie seemed to understand what Gray had been going through in attempting to integrate with the squadron, and sympathized.

  Sometimes it was awfully good to know that you weren’t alone.

  So he was sticking close.

  The Turusch fighters were beginning to hammer at the Remington close enough now to savage the AKE with particle beams. Gray and Tucker were coming in behind a couple of Toads that appeared to be focused completely on the all-but-helpless replenishment ship ahead.

  “I got the left, Tuck,” Gray called.

  “I’m on the right. Target lock . . . Fox One!”

  The term “Fox One,” an ancient holdover from the days of oceangoing naval aviation, referred to the launch of any self-guiding or AI-controlled missile—usually a Krait with a variable-yield warhead, but occasionally other forms of intelligent ordnance as well.

  Gray called “Fox One” as well as he loosed another VG–10 Krait. It was a long shot—at a range of nearly 100,000 kilometers—but both missiles settled onto the Toads’ gravitic signature and relentlessly streaked after them at one thousand gravities. Just over 130 seconds later, Tucker’s Krait, traveling now at over 1,200 kilometers per second, reached the target and proximity-detonated, followed an instant later by Gray’s strike. Other nukes were strobing throughout the volume of space encompassing the Remington. The Starhawks of the Death Rattlers had moved in close to the AKE, catching the Toads between the two squadrons. For a brief moment, a handful of Toads stood sharply silhouetted against Rattler fire. Then the fighter swarms interpenetrated, passing through one another in a swirling confusion of velocity, fire, and death.