Wing Commander #07 False Color

by William R. Forstchen

  Even with the back-breaking work of refitting Karga, Tolwyn had found these past months among the most worthwhile he'd ever been through. For at least this brief period he had felt truly alive again, the pressures, the worries about other things secondary. Indeed, they were following their chosen course, the other things—that was a machine all ready running, just waiting for the moment to be unleashed. If anything, these weeks out here had been a final respite, a rekindling of older days before the events of things to come were finally shaped and unleashed. It was something special to see the battered derelict come alive again bit by bit, and to know that he had played a part in making it all happen. A decisive part, in fact, given the way he'd been forced to maneuver Richards and Bondarevsky into going ahead with the project.

  Whole days had gone by in which he'd never even thought about the Confederation, or the conspiracy, or his career. He wished, sometimes, that it could always be like that, but tempting as it was to throw himself wholeheartedly into the service of the Landreich he was still committed to serving Terra any way he could. Getting Karga back into service was the only way he could help right now, but when the time came he'd leave Kruger's navy and go home to carry on his struggle over fresh battlefields.

  "Ring System transit coming up in fifteen minutes, sir." Lieutenant Clancy, the helm officer from Sindri who'd been helping out with the refit had the conn today There were a whole series of tests scheduled for Karga to attempt, and Clancy knew the helm and navigation systems better than any of Karga's regular crew.

  "Thank you, Helm," Tolwyn said. He keyed the intercom pad at his arm. "Engineering, are you ready?"

  "As ready as we'll ever be, sir," Commander Graham's voice responded. "I think the generators will stay on-line this time."

  "Do your best, Commander," the admiral told him. He touched another key. "Sindri, this is Karga. Shield test commences in thirty seconds."

  "Roger that," Sindri's captain replied. "Thirty seconds."

  Tolwyn watched the event countdown roll by on his monitor. As it hit zero, the lights flickered in CIC for a moment, and the ship's status board beside him came alive with multi-colored lights as Graham switched on the shield generators and a whole new part of the ship awakened from a year-long slumber. At first the lights were a mixture of red, green, and amber, but slowly the red lights went out as section after section adjusted to the new configuration of the power grid and the shielding subsystems.

  They'd been through this before—three times, in fact. Each time the shields had gone down almost immediately. Tolwyn hoped they wouldn't have to go through a fourth failure and another week or two of tracing connections and bridging weak spots in the shield emitter arrays.

  Seconds crept by like hours, and the shielding held.

  After two full minutes, Tolwyn activated his intercom again. "Sindri, my board shows green. Shields are nominal."

  "That's confirmed, Karp. Looking good from here. I'm switching our shields to stand-by mode . . . now." And Karga was generating her own protective field at last, unaided by the tender still riding her superstructure like some kind of bizarre metallic symbiotic. "Engineering," Tolwyn said. "Good work, Commander Graham. I think this time you've got it."

  Graham's reply was pessimistic. "They're holding, sir, but I'm not real happy with some of these readings.

  There's still something wrong with the power flow to the upper superstructure emitters. I'll need to do some more work before I can guarantee any kind of combat-rated shields."

  "But in the meantime we don't have to depend on Sindri just to keep from frying," Tolwyn said. "And that counts for a lot. Keep me appraised, Commander."

  "Aye aye, sir," the engineer responded. 'We'll try to maintain shields through the ring transit, and see how they do. But don't start thinking about cutting the cord just yet. We need Sindri to fall back on if a glitch develops."

  "Ten minutes to ring transit," Clancy announced. "Anything on sensors, Mr. Kittani?"

  Karga's First Officer, Captain Ismet Kittani, was peering over the shoulder of the technician on duty at the sensor panel. He straightened up slowly and turned toward Tolwyn with an aura of finicky precision Tolwyn found irritating. But the man had an impressive service record as CO of a destroyer, and although his personal style clashed with Tolwyn's he'd done some good work in the refit project.

  "We are still not getting reliable readings through the ring plane," the swarthy Turk from Ilios said gravely. "We will have to do something to improve sensor performance before we attempt any sort of active operations."

  Tolwyn frowned. The sensors, like the shield generators, had become one of those on-going problems that seemed to take up increasing amounts of refit time that should have been going into less essential systems by now "We'll get them when we can." He activated the intercom system again. "Flight Wing, from CIC. Captain Bondarevsky, we will be entering the ring system in nine minutes. What's your status?"

  "Four Hornets on patrol," Bondarevsky replied. "Four Raptors on Alert Five."

  "Very good. Please have your fighter patrol take position ahead of us. They might not be able to help much, but I'd like some eyes out in front, just to avoid what happened last time." On the ship's previous ring transit two days earlier a particularly large chunk of ice had very nearly hit the ship, and Tolwyn didn't want a repeat of the threat today. Not while Graham's shields were still not fully reliable.

  He checked the status board again, pleased to note that the shields were still holding steady despite the chief engineer's concerns. Despite the problems that continued to crop up, he was still confident of success. With luck they'd soon have the shields permanently on-line, and maneuvering drives ready to lift them into a better orbit before the next time their present elliptical path brought them back through the rings again.

  With luck. . . .

  Hornet 100, VF-12 "Flying Eyes"

  Orbiting Vaku VII, Vaku System

  1454 hours (CST)

  "Watchdog, this is Kennel. Put a couple of your birds four minutes ahead, same orbital vector. And keep your eyes peeled for anything big enough to be a bother."

  "Kennel, Watchdog. Copy. Viking, we'll take point. Lefty, Drifter, you two maintain your position." Babe Babcock accelerated her fighter to the new vector, settling in ahead of Karga with her wingmate close by. She was feeling irritable today, the result of a whole string of petty frustrations that had started with the hot water heater in the squadron's ready room showers going belly-up just when she wanted to use it that morning and culminated in the discovery that her regular Hornet had earned a down gripe from Lieutenant McCullough and had been pulled from the flight line to have a navicomp fault repaired. As a result she'd been forced to take out Hornet 100, the fighter normally reserved as a back-up craft and designated for use by the Wing Commander when he chose to fly a mission with the lesser mortals of his command.

  She didn't like Hornet 100. The target lock system was slower than it should have been—though it was still within acceptable tolerances, a good pilot knew the difference in a combat situation—and it was fitted with an APSP rather than the extra pair of missiles she would have preferred to mount. But it would have taken too long to reconfigure the fighter's load, so she'd taken the fighter despite her preferences. After all, it was another routine patrol, more practice than anything else—for the carrier's flight crews as much as for the Flying Eyes.

  She was starting to regret her new assignment to the Karga. She'd liked duty aboard the Independence, and had regarded Kevin Tolwyn as the best kind of Wing Commander, a CO who was willing to delegate responsibility to his squadron leaders and let them have their own heads most of the time. Bondarevsky, her new Wing Commander, might have been a big-time war hero and an intelligent, capable officer, but he was a hands-on type of leader who wanted to have a part in anything and everything going on around him. It made Babcock uncomfortable to know that he might turn up to look over her shoulder any time, any place, always ready to offer an opinion or point
out an alternative.

  But more than the change in personalities, duty aboard Karga wasn't exactly what she'd signed up for. The crew and officers' quarters were still a long way from being refurbished, and recreational facilities were something between horrible and nonexistent. And the daily flight ops were becoming something of a joke. Vaku was a backwater even among backwaters, and Karga's endless orbit was a study in monotony. The pilots who had come across from Independence weren't even involved in much of the refit work, since they had to do flight duty, so they didn't even have the technical challenges the rest of the crew faced to keep them fresh.

  Babcock was starting to think she ought to volunteer for one of the squadrons designated for the Kilrathi birds. At least then she'd get a crack at extensive combat simulations, instead of nothing but routine patrol work.

  "Come on, skipper, we're coming up on the rough spot!" The voice of her wingman, Lieutenant Eric "Viking" Jensson, brought her back to reality. "One minute."

  "Copy," she said. "Stick close to my three, Viking." "Close enough to reach out and touch you," he replied, drawing his fighter in tight beside hers.

  "You do and you'll be up on charges," she said sweetly. "Again." Viking was a big, blonde, handsome Dane who'd grown up on Terra but drifted out to the frontier after being turned down by the ConFleet Academy as unsuitable officer material. He'd done better on Landreich, but three times in a relatively short career he'd landed in hot water by making unwelcome advances to female officers. If he hadn't been a naturally brilliant fighter jockey he would probably have been cashiered long since. Still, despite his reputation, Babcock was glad to have him in the squadron . . . as long as he knew where to draw the line in his personal pursuits.

  They were coming up fast on the arbitrary "edge" of the gas giant's rings. They were impressive by any standards, out-showing even Saturn in the Terra system, but though they extended for thousands of kilometers outward from the superjovian world, they were less than a hundred kilometers thick. Made up of ice ranging in size from dust up to chunks like small boulders, the density of the ring field was fairly low, so that ships could pass through without much danger of major collisions. Unshielded, Karga had passed through the rings hundreds of times since being damaged, and had collected only a few extra scars as a result.

  Still, a ring system wasn't exactly a pleasant place to fly. Particles of debris clouded sensor scans and confused computer imaging systems, and an unlucky encounter with a substantial ice boulder could ruin your whole day. It was particularly bad here and now. Normally a carrier had enough sensor arrays and sufficient computing power to compensate for the inhibiting effects of the rings, but Karga's systems still stubbornly refused to resolve the data gathered into anything useful. That meant she and Viking had to be doubly careful making the transit. And they also had to be the eyes for the carrier. If they picked up anything large enough to be a threat, they'd have to deal with it. Karga still couldn't maneuver away from danger under her own power, and her point-defense batteries couldn't fire as long as the sensors weren't able to distinguish individual targets.

  "Here we go!" Viking called. "Hornet one-oh-six, feet cold!" That was pilot's slang for approaching any airless chunk of rock or ice, up to and including small planets.

  They passed the boundary set arbitrarily by the navicomps. At first there was no noticeable change, but then the particle density began to rise until Babcock felt like she was flying in atmosphere. Although the rings were not very thick, the supercarrier's orbit was at a very low angle from the plane of the rings, and it took nearly half a minute on that vector to pass through them. As abruptly as they'd entered the orbiting ice cloud, they were through.

  And, all at once, the threat tone sounded loud in Babcock's ears.

  Bridge, Guild Privateer Bonadventure

  Orbiting Vaku VII, Vaku System

  1458 hours (CST)

  "Targets! Targets! Two targets, bearing zero-zero-two by zero-one zero! Range ten thousand, closing."

  Zachary Banfeld rose from the captain's chair and crossed to the tactical control officer's position. "What are they?" he demanded sharply.

  "Mass is just under fourteen tons each," the TACCO reported. "Length 'prox twenty-five meters . . . warbook calls them Hornet fighters."

  "Hornets." Banfeld didn't bother to hide the contempt in his voice. Obsolete light fighters from ConFleet's old stock didn't pose much of a threat to his squadron.

  "They will be posted as patrol craft," Gedi Tanaka commented. He was nominally the captain of the privateer, a one-time Confederation Fleet officer who had been discharged for failing to prevent a Kilrathi raider from knocking out three ships in the convoy he'd been assigned to escort. Despite that blot on his record he was a fine tactician and a capable leader, and he had flourished since coming out to the Landreich and joining the Guild. "There will be heavier fighters ready to respond to an attack."

  "But not enough to stop our attack," Banfeld replied. "Not if we can get the first blow in by surprise."

  He checked the tactical plot. Bonadventure had settled into orbit well ahead of the Karga, keeping the rings between the two ships. Springweather's information had made mention of a sensor glitch, and that was just the thing he needed to achieve complete surprise.

  His orders from Williams were to destroy the supercarrier, but Banfeld had no intention of doing so if he could possibly knock it out without severely damaging it. Those Landreichers had worked hard restoring the ship to something like working order, and he fully intended to take advantage of their hard work. But to take out the ship's shields without causing collateral damage he'd needed an edge, and the obscuring rings had given him just what he wanted.

  Bonadventure was the perfect ship for the mission, and she was ready to strike. Originally a bulk ore carrier, she'd been taken over by the Landreich government ten years back and refitted as a sort of makeshift escort carrier, with a single flight deck and a capacity of no more than twenty carried fighters. Before she was finished the Landreich Navy had pronounced her hopelessly outclassed for combat service against the Empire, and the project had been abandoned. But the orbital shipyard where she'd been building had belonged to a member of the Guild, and Banfeld had paid to have her completed and crewed as the largest of his fleet of privateers. Though she might not be able to face a stand-up fight with a Cat battle group, she was an excellent convoy escort . . . and an equally effective raider.

  Against an enemy with no drives and dependent on a tender's thin-stretched shields, Bonadventure's fighter contingent would be more than adequate. Striking with surprise, they'd have the tender's shielding battered down before the carrier could scramble its available fighters, and that would be the end of the fight. Banfeld could sit back and wait for the supercarrier to fall into his hands, intact and ready to have her refitting completed by the Guild.

  Of course, Mancini and Williams didn't have to know if the supercarrier was captured. Let them think he'd been forced to destroy it. They were pleased to call him one of the best agents of Y-12, but in fact Zachary Banfeld remained his own man. It was convenient—and lucrative—to work with the confees from time to time, but in the end what mattered to Banfeld was preserving the balance of power out here on the frontier. He'd take down the Landreichers before they could put a ship into service that would force Ragark to back down . . . but later it might be the Cats or the confees who needed to be cut off before they became a threat, and with the Karga he'd be nicely placed to do whatever was needed to keep the fires of war stoked high.

  Banfeld smiled. He enjoyed the dangerous game he played, balancing opposing sides and growing wealthy from the profits. He imagined Ragark would offer a tidy sum for information about Murragh, the kil Springweather had claimed was the heir to the Imperial Crown. He'd kept that bit of information from Williams and Mancini, figuring that Ragark would pay more than they would. How much would it be worth to the warlord to have this rival eliminated? With luck, Banfeld would have a chance to find out.
But, as he'd told Springweather, he wouldn't be telling the Cats about Karga. That was too valuable a secret to let Ragark discover. For now, at least.

  The tactical plot showed the wedge of fighters shaping their course toward the oncoming Hornets . . . and the supercarrier that would soon be coming through the rings. Bonadventure's sensors were tracking the supercarrier well enough. They were top-of-the-line modules salvaged from a Kilrathi cruiser, coupled with a computer imaging program he'd picked up from the ConFleet by way of a black market source who had an inside line to the CSB. He smiled at the thought. According to Springweather that was just the sort of thing they were doing aboard Karga, cobbling together different technologies to produce an effective compromise between Cat and human systems.

  Banfeld knew he'd feel right at home when he sat on the bridge of the supercarrier. . . .

  Hornet 100, VF-12 "Flying Eyes"

  Near Vaku VII, Vaku System

  1459 hours (CST)

  "We have multiple targets! Repeat, multiple targets!" Babcock strove to keep her voice level. "Looks like a cruiser and . . . twenty small craft. Maybe fighters." "Nonsense," Viking argued. "A cruiser can't carry that many fighters."