by Smith, Glenn
“Star Hawk thirty-seven, this is the CAG,” the air group commander’s voice suddenly broke in. “If you and the chief are finished bonding, Spinner, it’s time to go to work.”
“Affirm that, sir,” O’Donnell responded with a grin.
“Good hunting, Spinner. CAG out.”
“All right, L-T,” Simmons quickly cut in, getting back to business. “Let’s get you in the air. By the numbers now. Main power, initiate.”
“Main power...” He flipped the safety caps up and pressed the switches, “initiated.”
* * *
“Air Group reports all interceptors manned and preparing for launch, Commander,” Noonian reported. “Will advise when they’re all in the air.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Rawlins responded, standing up and backing out of the way as the med-techs rushed onto the bridge, medical kit and antigravity stretcher in tow, and quickly went to work on the still unconscious captain. “Helm, come to course...”
“Enemy vessel firing!” Irons interrupted.
“Helm, hard to port!” Rawlins ordered as he hurried back to the command station and sat down. “Come to course two four zero, pitch plus ten degrees. We’ve got to protect our ass end. All weapons with a solution, target the enemy vessel and engage at will. Weapons free, but for God sake, don’t shoot down our own interceptors!”
The deck shuddered beneath his feet for several seconds as a low rumble that sounded like the distant thunder of an approaching summer storm resounded through the bridge.
“Missile strike on the port side, aft quarter,” Irons reported.
“No appreciable damage, sir,” the engineer added.
“How the hell can you tell?” Rawlins mumbled under his breath. The port side aft quarter was so badly mangled already that any more damage wouldn’t really make much of a difference, unless of course the inner bulkheads were breeched deeper than they already had been. Missile strike, he pondered. Apparently the enemy hadn’t expended the rest of its ordinance after all. Either that, he considered as he glanced to his left to see the med-techs strapping the captain onto the stretcher, or there were more than one of them out there.
God forbid.
“Looks like a pretty serious concussion, sir,” the senior med-tech advised him when he noticed him looking. “She also has a fractured pelvis.” Then, as they powered up the stretcher and raised it up off the deck, he added, “Her head should be all right in a few days, but the pelvis is going to take a while.”
And with that, they hurriedly carted the captain off the bridge.
* * *
As the newest fighter pilot in the 117th Tactical Interceptor Squadron, Lieutenant J.G. O’Donnell always launched as one of the outboard planes in the last group of four. That way, if he inadvertently committed some stupid rookie error that led to catastrophe and fouled the entire deck, most of the rest of the squadron would already be in the air. Exactly what kind of rookie error he could possibly commit when all he had to do for launch was roll up to the line, wait for the catapult, and hang on, he had no idea, but that was beside the point. If he did do something that led to disaster, then the very worst he could do would be to prevent himself and three other interceptors from launching. While it was certainly true that launch accidents were rare, and that the few that did occur from time to time didn’t always involve rookies, the overall percentages were high enough throughout the fleet to warrant the practice.
At least that was what they’d taught him in flight school.
Nevertheless, he hated to wait until last. He wanted to go! Call it youthful enthusiasm, dedication to duty, or just a simple case of the nervous jitters. Whichever one, it didn’t matter to him. All he knew was that when the red lights flashed and alert klaxon blared, he wanted to jump into his plane, get into the air, and go to work.
The narrow indicator bar at the base of the instrument panel that he’d been staring at for the last few anxious moments changed from red to green. His turn, finally.
He gazed out at the space-suited launch safety officer, the LSO, who pointed his bright green guide lamps at him and then waved him forward. Following his signals very carefully, O’Donnell slowly maneuvered his plane forward, turned slightly to the left, then hit the brakes as soon as the man crossed his lamps over his head and switched their color to bright red. Then he watched on the small monitor between his knees as the catapult, still smoking from the previous launch, quickly returned from the far end of the deck and locked into place on his front landing gear strut.
The entire image turned green, indicating a positive lock. He glanced out at the other interceptors to his right, already in position, and rested his head against the extra thick padding inside the back of his helmet. Then he grasped the safety handles on either side of the cockpit, and held on tight.
The thrill of high-G launch came exactly two seconds later, giving the LSO just enough time to duck under the wings to avoid being decapitated. Three seconds after that, O’Donnell found himself in open space once more, which as far as he was concerned was exactly where he belonged...and was where the rest of his squadron had already maneuvered into assault formation and was arching wide left to come around and approach the enemy from their left forequarter. Their sister squadron, O’Donnell knew, would come in from the right at virtually the same time and go low, while his own squadron would go high.
He and his wingman broke hard left almost as one and moved into their positions quickly—for a pair of fighter jockeys who hadn’t flown together for very long, they’d sure learned to anticipate each other well—as did the other pair who’d launched with them.
“All right, boys and girls, heat ‘em up,” the squadron commander ordered. “Weapons free. You know the drill. Stay with your wingman. Concentrate fire on weapons and drive systems as much as possible. And remember, they recently altered their tactics, so you can expect to see enemy fighters in the air at any time. And whatever you do, stay out of the Victory’s firing solution and watch out for the one-eighteenth! Major Landau and I don’t want any more losses in either squadron. Least of all, stupid ones.”
O’Donnell opened the feed ports to his plane’s twin 32mm pulse cannons and energized the ammunition, then powered up the missile launch systems and set countermeasures to deploy automatically if the enemy got a lock and fired on him.
“Incoming ordnance twelve o’clock level!” another pilot warned.
O’Donnell looked up from his instruments just in time to see a missile heading straight toward him from dead ahead. He cut the throttle and threw the stick forward and hard left as the surge of adrenaline flooded through his system, breaking low left and rolling right under his wingman, then quickly throttled up to full and rocketed away like one of his own missiles.
“Jesus Christ, Spinner!” his wingman shouted. “Warn me next time! You damn near cut me in half!”
Spinner. O’Donnell still didn’t care much for his call sign. All through flight school he’d hoped to be tagged with something flashy like ‘Firehawk’ or ‘Viper’. Something that sounded strong and dangerous. Something to be feared. But by the time he began starfighter training he’d already logged over two hundred hours in atmospheric fighters, and he’d developed a tendency to roll out every time he had to pull a hard maneuver. His wingman in training had tagged him with ‘Spinner’ after seeing him do it just twice, and the name had stuck.
“Sorry, Caesar,” he responded to his Roman-born colleague as he caught his breath. “Didn’t have time to talk first.”
“All right, cut the chatter, boys,” the squadron commander ordered. “We’ve got a job to do, so let’s do it. Spinner, get your ass back in formation, on the double.”
“Be there in five seconds, Major, but someone better shoot that thing down. It’s heading right for the ship.”
“That’s what the follow-on team is for, Lieutenant?”
O’Donnell huffed, annoyed with himself. “Way to go, O’Donnell,” he mumbled. “Try concentrating on your
own damn job.”
Use of a follow-on team was an unofficial tactic that the CAG had instituted soon after they arrived on station in the Rosha’Kana system. Rather than join their fellow pilots in combat, a single pair of interceptors stayed back to defend the carrier against any hard ordinance that might slip past the rest of the squadron. The assignment rotated with each mission, so everyone got a turn—O’Donnell and his wingman were of course last in line. The tactic had proven quite effective and had literally saved the ship on at least three occasions—a fact the major had already reminded him of once before.
“Splash two missiles,” one of this mission’s follow-on pilots reported a few seconds later. “Now quit lettin’ ‘em, through. We’re tryin’ to get some sleep back here.”
“All right, boys and girls! Here we go!”
Like they had so many times before over the last several days, the pilots of the starcarrier Victory’s 116th and 117th Tactical Interceptor Squadrons, with the single exception of the 117th’s pretty little Asian ‘Sunshine’, who no longer had a plane to fly—she’d spend the duration of this battle at the CAG’s side, watching and learning—swooped in and took full advantage of the Veshtonn battlecruiser’s single biggest design flaw. Its lack of effective close-in defenses. They swarmed the enemy vessel like dozens of angry killer bees, mercilessly stinging every vital and vulnerable section they could target with their 32mm rapid-fire pulse cannons, shield neutralizing proton beams, and even a few armor-piercing hellfire cluster-rockets.
“Enemy vessel’s fighter bay doors are opening!” someone warned as O’Donnell and Caesar soared sternward over the battlecruiser’s dorsal superstructure. “We overshot! Won’t get a clear shot in time to stop the launch!”
“This is Star Hawk thirty-seven,” O’Donnell eagerly responded as he and Caesar passed head-to-head between the caller and his wingman. “We’ll be in position in five seconds.”
They passed beyond the vessel’s main engine baffles, then quickly spun their planes a hundred eighty degrees lateral to face their stern and hit the afterburners. Thank God for G-suits, O’Donnell thought as his plane’s rapidly slowing inertia pressed him deeper into his seat. Otherwise, he had no doubt he would have blacked out. He had to be pulling close to nine G’s!
He flipped the selector switch from pulse cannons to rockets, and his targeting computer immediately started beeping as its reticals tracked toward the target he’d chosen—the left half of the enemy’s fighter deck. Caesar would take care of the right side. Then, just as the last of the excessive G’s eased and he started closing on the enemy, the targeting computer stopped beeping and started emitting a steady tone. “I have target lock,” he advised his wingman.
“Hellfire enema coming right up,” Caesar replied. “FIRE!”
“Firing!” O’Donnell confirmed. He jerked the trigger twice in rapid succession and launched his first pair of hellfire cluster rockets.
“Firing!” his wingman echoed.
Just as the first group of enemy fighters lifted off their deck and launched into space, all four rockets shed their outer shells and dispersed their payloads—twenty glowing, white-hot, hypersonic, dart-like armor-piercing high explosive missiles each, each one on its own slightly different trajectory. The eighty mini-missile shower of death rained down on the enemy barely a second later. Many of them tore into their fighters as if they were made of cheap tin and blew them all straight to hell in a chain of nearly simultaneous bright green explosions that stretched back into their launch bay. Those missiles with no fighter in their path rained down on the launch deck itself and had much the same effect, until one massive orange-yellow blast erupted so brightly that the Star Hawks’ canopies instantly blacked out for a few seconds. At least one of the missiles must have found its way into below-decks refueling tanks, O’Donnell concluded.
When the explosion cleared and the debris field dispersed—O’Donnell had half expected something to hit him—the enemy’s launch bay and all of its fighters had been annihilated.
“Wuhooooo!” O’Donnell shouted ecstatically. “Splash everything! Launch bay and all enemy fighters destroyed!”
“All right, Star Hawks! Let’s blow this devil straight back to hell!”
“Come on, Caesar! Let’s finish this thing off and go have a drink!”
Caesar didn’t answer.
“Caesar?” Nothing. “Star Hawk thirty-eight, this is thirty-seven, come in,” he called, growing concerned. “Caesar, do you copy?”
“Go find him, Spinner,” the major ordered. “The rest of us will finish this.”
“Copy that, sir.”
O’Donnell reversed thrust and turned his plane away from the burning enemy vessel, then stopped. Ahead of him, Caesar’s wrecked plane tumbled end over end, growing smaller as it drifted farther away. “Aw shit, Caesar.”
“Go after him, Spinner. His comm could be down. He might still be alive.”
“Copy that, sir. I’m on it.”
* * *
The older and more experienced combat veterans among the bridge crew knew better than to celebrate their apparent victory too early. So, too, should the younger among them have known, considering all they’d been through over the last few weeks. Nevertheless, their exuberant shouts of victory filled the bridge, but only for a few short seconds.
“Enemy vessel closing on a collision course, Commander!” Lieutenant Irons hollered over the noise, putting an immediate damper on the elation. “Velocity increasing steadily.”
“They mean to ram us,” Rawlins knew instantly, stating the obvious. He also knew from over a dozen years of experience that that could mean only one thing. They had indeed beaten this enemy, and this enemy knew it. For the Veshtonn, ramming was the tactic of absolute last resort.
“Helm, take evasive action. Miss Irons, what’s the status of their defense shields?”
“All readings indicate they’re down, sir,” she reported almost before he finished asking, having already anticipated his inquiry and scanned the approaching vessel for everything she could think of.
“Good. It’s about damn time we caught a break. Arm plasma torpedoes, Lieutenant. I want a full spread...”
“We’ve already expended our torpedoes, sir,” she reminded him.
“Proton cannons then!” Rawlins shouted. “Prepare to carve that thing into scrap metal, Lieutenant!” He slapped the comm-panel. “CAG, X-O. Recall the interceptors. Wide approach. We’ll be firing cannons!”
“Affirm, X-O.”
Rawlins counted down five seconds in his head to allow the CAG time to relay the order, then gave the word. “All cannons, fire!”
Like energized blades of searing blue-white death, three beams of concentrated protons lashed out from the Victory’s port side cannons, crossed the rapidly shrinking gulf between the warring vessels, and tore into the enemy’s weakened, unprotected hull with an angry vengeance. Dozens of small yellow-green explosions with a few larger orange-red ones mixed in flared up all over the alien vessel but faded quickly into oblivion as the pockets of atmosphere or fuels that fed them bled off into space. Then, suddenly, several much larger and more violent blasts erupted amidships, and large sections of the dying vessel started breaking off and tumbling away in random directions.
“Blow, you son-of-a-bitch,” Rawlins cajoled as if speaking the words might actually make it happen. And then, almost immediately after he said it, as if out of blind obedience to the victor, what was left of the burning, slowly tumbling out of control Veshtonn battlecruiser’s main superstructure did exactly that.
Everyone cheered as the massive multicolored fireball engulfed the expanding field of wreckage in a blast so bright that the viewscreen automatically dimmed, then completely blacked out so as not to burn out altogether. But when it lit up again a few seconds later, Commander Rawlins saw immediately that their problems were far from over.
“Oh hell!” he intoned as he watched the huge, still burning section of the enemy vessel’s main hul
l tumble end over end, coming right at them. “Emergency evasive, Mister LaRocca!” he barked. “Push those thrusters past the red line if you have to!” Then he slapped his hand down on the all-call button and shouted, “All hands, brace for impact!”
* * *
The first thing O’Donnell saw when he maneuvered alongside Caesar’s slowly tumbling wrecked plane and slowed to match its velocity was his wingman drumming his fingers impatiently on the inside of his intact canopy. The sight actually made him chuckle for a second or two, but his sense of relief at not having lost his friend far outweighed whatever humor he saw in the situation. Dented and disfigured, deeply scarred and partially burned black, Caesar’s reinforced cockpit had nevertheless done exactly what it had been designed to do. It had survived the collision with whatever had mangled the rest of the plane and had saved the pilot’s life. And for that, for keeping his friend alive, O’Donnell was grateful. Though probably not as grateful as Caesar was, he mused.
The second thing he saw—realized without seeing, actually, since he couldn’t see his friend’s face very well through his helmet’s face shield—was that Caesar was talking.
O’Donnell glanced at his instruments, saw that he wasn’t picking up Caesar’s carrier wave, then looked back out at Caesar and tapped his fingers to the side of his helmet to let him know that he wasn’t coming across. In response, Caesar motioned as if to check the time on his watch, then threw his hands in the air. ‘About time you got here.’ O’Donnell grinned, then rested his head against his praying hands for a moment. Caesar gave him the finger with both hands, and he laughed.
Then Caesar did something else with his instruments—tried another comm channel maybe, or tried to slow his pitch with the thrusters, or whatever—and a brief shower of sparks suddenly exploded in front of him, like fireworks bursting in the night sky on the fourth of July. Flames began to flicker and rise from his panel, and his cockpit began to fill with smoke. He slapped frantically at the flames, but they would not be denied there life. If something else happened and that cockpit suddenly filled with pure oxygen...
