“Stop trying to unload on a target, people!” shouted Major Harry ‘Eel’ Hendrix, the squadron commander. “One and done! They’ve got hundreds of lasers on continuous fire all around them. No more than three seconds between transitions. Is that understood?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” they all dutifully replied. They all knew that three seconds barely gave them time to land one hit, maybe two if they were lucky, and even their twenty-inchers couldn’t punch through a dreadnought’s armor and shields in one shot, not reliably. The Gimp big hitters took a lot of killing, and the super-dreds were supposedly worse, with multiple layers of armor and force fields that had to be defeated before you hit something vital.
He tried to relax while the flight crew replaced the power pack for the 508mm cannon and checked on the rest of the War Eagle’s systems. Everything appeared to be green, and his gluon plant was good for another six sorties before he was bingo power and had to head back to get a new one. Problem was, with the amount of flak the enemy was putting up, he didn’t think Flight A was going to live through six sorties.
His flight orders came in. The five survivors would be hitting a single target this time. A super-dred: hopefully five blasts hitting within a couple of meters from each other would stab deeply enough into the tango’s innards to achieve something useful.
“Clear for launch.”
Transition.
Bombshell’s voice followed him in the darkness, and that wasn’t fun at all. She sounded angry.
Emergence.
Flight A fired their single volley and dropped out in under two seconds. Even that wasn’t quite good enough. Fernando’s force field got depleted by ninety percent by a lucky glancing hit by a plasma weapon, a secondary gun meant to burn holes in cruisers, and more than enough to turn his crate into a molten puddle of components if it hit him dead on. They all made it back in one piece, but they had to hold for almost five minutes while they replaced several force field gennies; too many components had burned out under the unrelenting enemy fire. Next time they were going to lose another guy.
Time to try ‘the thing.’
“We’re gonna have to go full ghost, sir,” he told Eel.
The officer’s mix of fear and doubt came loud and clear through the psychic connection; so did the final decision.
“We’ll talk about it on the next sortie, but I think you’re right. God help us all.”
* * *
The Imperium battleship shattered into a thousand burning fragments when a salvo from the Undying Defender’s main guns caused a chain reaction that devoured the enemy ship. A visual display showed the massive bronze vessel being consumed by white fire. A few crewmembers barked in triumph, but quickly stopped under her steely gaze. This was no time for celebration. The Sun Blotter swarm was a mere thirty seconds away.
Admittedly, her ships had performed some excellent long-range gunnery, aided by their targets’ inexperience. A competent shield-management crew would have been able to shift their strength to match the Defender’s volleys with negligible damage to their ship’s hull, let alone its power plants. Their contemptible performance had doomed everyone aboard the battleship. Half a dozen other capital ships, two of them superdreadnoughts, had also gone up in flames, most of them at the hands of human fighter pilots. So far, all the losses had been on the enemy’s side; their energy weapon fire had been ragged and poorly coordinated. The lack of skill would become less important as the range shortened, however, at which point the balance would tip the other way.
Grace turned to the more immediate problem, the flight of missiles headed their way. The Joint Star Fleet had done its best, and destroyed nine-tenths of the first salvo; they would probably kill nine-tenths of the remainder during those final seconds. Which still left some three thousand missiles, and probably twice as many from the second wave, which was smaller but had been shielded by the first one. The Joint Star Fleet had launched its own anti-ship rockets, but their much-weaker volley would be lucky to score more than a handful of kills.
The human warp fighters had done well, but at great cost: out of a hundred and forty-four, half a dozen had been destroyed outright and another ten damaged. At that rate, they would all be gone before they could inflict enough losses to affect the battle’s outcome.
The Imperium armada continued its relentless advance and began to concentrate its fire on specific targets. Wyrashat light vessels were struck by main gun salvos; no destroyer or frigate could survive those even at long range. The tactic was simple and brutal: those ships were hideously vulnerable to even inaccurate fire, and their losses reduced the anti-missile defenses nibbling away at the approaching Sun-Blotter swarm.
The Undying Defender engaged a new target, an enemy dreadnought this time: her twenty-eight main guns hammered at the bronze monolith mercilessly, but without dealing a killing blow. The Imperium ship contemptuously ignored the Hrauwah’s fire and continued picking off one destroyer after another. Shortly afterwards, the remains of the Sun-Blotter swarm arrived.
Thirty-one-hundred missiles struck the Joint Star Fleet, and ships began to die in earnest. False stars flared up all around Drakul-Six, each burst of light marking the death pyre of a vessel. The Hrauwah were not spared this time; Grace winced as nine of her destroyers were torn apart out in quick succession. The ship-killers were following the same pattern as the enemy artillery, concentrating on point defense platforms and clearing the way for the next volley. The light vessels of the JSF suffered crippling losses in a few moments.
Their first fire mission accomplished, the Imperium heavy ships began to switch targets, going after the American carrier vessels, which were held as far back as practically possible and defended by the HEF’s destroyer screen. Destroy them, and the fighters would quickly become useless; the tiny gunboats required replenishment after every sortie. Distance and the carriers’ warp shields made them difficult targets, however, and they incurred no losses – for now. Several of their escorts weren’t so lucky; destroyers could be severely damaged even by glancing hits from a capital ship.
A mere thirty seconds later, the second missile volley arrived. Four thousand ship-killers reached the battle-line. Last-ditch short-range lasers reaped many of them before they could strike, some of them close enough to weaken force fields. The rest struck their targets head-on.
The Undying Defender shook like a small prey animal in the jaws of a Hrauwah blood-lizard. Grace held onto her throne, ignoring the barks of shock and fear coming from the Fleet Court crew. Her attention was on the tactical displays; she continued issuing orders, hiding her fear that the battle was lost.
Half of her light vessels were gone or unable to fight, and all the flotilla’s other ships were damaged to some extent. The Wyarashat Wing had suffered even more: four of their mighty dreadnoughts were no more, and only a dozen destroyers remained of their light forces. The humans, despite their warp shields, had lost half of their point defense ships.
In return, they had destroyed or crippled two Imperium superdreadnoughts, five dreadnoughts, twenty battleships, and fifty battlecruisers: easily ten times the tonnage the JSF had lost, but the balance of power had, if anything, tilted further in favor of the enemy.
“Missile launch detected,” the Lord of Tactics announced. “Two hundred thousand this time.”
* * *
Fernando Verdi and the rest of the Third Squadron were holding an impromptu last-second planning session while inside warp space, the kind of discussion they couldn’t have in the real world, where higher might overhear them and get creeped out. The top brass knew warp fighter pilots could do all kinds of weird stuff, but they still hadn’t figured out how to deal with it. Out of sight, out of mind seemed like the best way to handle things.
A two-light-second jump happened just about instantly in ‘real time,’ but the squadron’s two flights had learned how to spend a good five, ten minutes in warp space when they wanted to without altering their transit time. And right now they wanted to.
<
br /> Instead of the sensory deprivation most people experienced inside null-space, the pilots were in a simulacrum of their usual briefing room. They could see each other, hear each other, even smell the stinking cigar ‘Hardhat’ Rodriguez liked to puff on at every opportunity. It all felt real enough that Fernando often wondered whether being stranded in warp would be so bad after all. Maybe you could spend eternity living in a fantasy world of your own creation. He dismissed the idea, though: nothing good ever lasted very long. Warp or real space, it made no difference.
“You’ve seen their formation,” Eel said. “Lots of light ships all around, so no matter where we show up, they’ll spot us, and they’ve mounted light guns all over their hulls. If their gunners were as good as their tactics, we would have taken worse losses.”
Captain Turner ‘Big Tuna’ Jamieson nodded in agreement. He commanded Flight B of Third Squadron.
“The lasers ain’t so bad, but the close-in plasma weapons will wash over the warp shields every time. Soon as we pop out, we’ve got two seconds, tops, before they blow us away.”
Big Tuna had fought in the Battle of Hades before getting reassigned to the HEF. He’d learned his lessons the hard way, but anybody who bothered to read the reports could see how bad things had gotten. The ETs had improved their countermeasures, and the resulting losses had climbed until the last few fights had resulted in ten percent killed or damaged birds per sortie. After ten sorties you might as well blow your own brains out.
They’d talked about going full ghost before, and had tried it out a few times. Nobody liked it, and with good reason.
“We’re gonna lose people either way,” Big Tuna went on. “But doing the thing means we can actually get some licks in before we go.”
“Yeah, that’s how I see it,” Eel said.
“Getting killed isn’t the problem,” ‘Wild Thing’ Moretz said. “It’s what happens every time we ghost. It’s the Warplings, brah. We’ve got to go deep to ghost, and that’s where the Foos are.”
Foo Fighters was a term from pre-Contact aviation, unidentified bogeys that some had thought were ET ships coming to visit, although that had turned out to be bullshit. Fighter pilots had taken to calling the warp inhabitants by that name. The scientists insisted the Foos were nothing but vivid hallucinations, but everyone who’d spent enough time in warp space knew better. Getting killed was one thing, but what the Foos could do to you was something else.
Fernando had seen them twice. The first time happened during training, when something had shown up in the skin of a dead Marine. The second one had come after him while he was training some Foxtrot-Novembers. That had been a lot worse, despite all the safeguards they’d set up to prevent just that sort of thing. Wild Thing had a good point. Getting killed was bad, but losing your soul was a lot worse.
“Odds are still better if we ghost than what’s waiting for us back there,” Big Tuna said. “I’m ghosting.”
“Same here,” Hardhat and Dicky said at the same time.
Wild Thing and a guy from Flight B that went by Cowpoke stayed quiet. Either thinking about it or just saying no without speaking out loud, Fernando figured. He could have peeked into their heads and found out for sure, but decided not to. It was their decision.
“I’m not going to order you to do it,” Eel told everyone on Flight A. “You do what you think best. For what it’s worth, I’m going to ghost.”
The major could have made it an order, but if those two didn’t want to do it, they’d lose all hope and likely never come out. If you went into warp expecting to die, you’d disappear in transit nine times out of ten, or even more often than that. Better to let them make their own decision. Worst case, if they did their attack run normal-like, they’d get in a shot or two before they died. The job was risky no matter what, and it had to be done no matter what.
“Your choice. Y’all know the target. Let’s go.”
The shared illusion dissolved and they were back in their cockpits, alone in a way they rarely were anymore. They all had to concentrate on their emergence. And for those who chose to do ‘the thing,’ it was a lot more complicated. Ghosting was something completely different, something they still had trouble understanding.
A pilot from Sixth Fleet had discovered the technique by accident. He’d been about to emerge in a spot that he ‘knew’ was going to be hit by a main gun battery, but once you’re in warp, your only choices are to either emerge at the selected coordinates or stay in warp forever. What he did was sort of a compromise between the two.
As it turned out, if you willed it strongly enough, you could sort of remain in warp and still reach out and touch reality through the aperture you’d normally come out of. Sort of like opening a door and poking your head out without crossing the threshold to the other side. To do that, you had to anchor yourself in a ‘deeper’ part of warp space, though. The places where the Foos lived.
Fernando had ghosted twice before, and each time had been scary as hell. He went for number three. Everyone in Flight A did, even Wild Thing.
Emergence. Sort of.
It was like seeing the world at the end of a tunnel, if a tunnel was made of every color of the rainbow and a few others that couldn’t be seen with normal eyes, and if the walls were swirling around like the inside of a tornado. Everything in the real-world side was murky and distorted, but he could see the target, a damn Gal-Imp superdreadnought. Flight A fired at the exact same time, and five 20-inch blasts of graviton death came out of the warp apertures and struck within a few meters of each other, punching through heavy-duty force fields and about four feet of hyper-dense armor to spread death and destruction inside.
The Gimps had been waiting for them, just as they’d feared. Their emergence points were struck by several dozen plasma blasts apiece less than two seconds after they showed up. If they’d come out the usual way, they’d have lost one or two War Eagles. But they hadn’t. None of the fighters were really there, so all the plasma bursts and laser beams hit nothing but vacuum or were swallowed into null-space without touching them.
Just as if they were a pack of ghosts.
They fired three more volleys from their invulnerable position, and the super-dred began to burn as its internal power plants brewed up. Splash one bandit.
Transition.
The peephole into reality closed, leaving him back in the deep end of the pool. And something had noticed him. It was large and deadly and hungry, and it reached out for him. Fernando felt like a child swimming away from a dark fin in the middle of the ocean.
Nando.
The voice sounded just like his dead mother’s.
Nando, come here. I want to kiss you goodnight.
He wanted to curl up in a corner and rock himself to sleep, and the urge almost froze him in place. Almost.
Emergence.
They all came out, flying in formation behind the Walsh. Everyone was fine. Fernando knew that without having to check their status readings on his imp or cockpit displays. Wild Thing had a close encounter of his own with a big nasty, but he’d managed to escape as well. Everyone else had made it out without incident. As they maneuvered to enter the carrier, Flight B emerged. Five out of six: Cowpoke hadn’t ghosted and gotten deep-fried in plasma.
It was going to be one of those days.
* * *
The battle became a dance of sorts, one where the music accompaniment was provided by an orchestra of the insane.
Status icons changed colors in the holotank as vessels stopped maneuvering, crippled, dying or dead. The Undying Defender swayed back and forth every few seconds, each sudden move marking a missile strike powerful enough to overcome the ship’s inertial compensators. The enemy fleet was firing volleys individually as it closed the distance, resulting in a continuous storm of fire. The incremental damage on the flagship of the Hrauwah Volunteer Flotilla was mounting steadily. Soon, it would join the fallen.
“Shields down to thirty percent,” the Lord Protector announced.
<
br /> “Shift power from secondary weapons to force fields. And find the source of those missiles and tear out his throat with our primary guns!”
Grace let the King-Captain do his job; his curt orders were not what she would have given under the circumstances – reducing point defense would lead to more hits on those force fields – but that was a matter of taste, and valid arguments existed for each choice. In any case, the Undying Defender was unlikely to live up to its name.
It had been as brutal a battle as any she’d witnessed before. Both fleets had suffered losses that under most circumstances would have led one of both of them to break off and retreat before fleeing into warp. Most rational foes didn’t fight on after the loss of more than one fifth their tonnage; at that point the difference between victor and vanquished became academic. When the winner was weakened badly enough, defeat in the next battle would be all but inevitable. Starfarers knew when to cut their losses.
Ah, but this battle involves humans.
That thought was not unfair, unfortunately. Almost every major space action where the US Navy had been involved ended in the utter destruction on one side and horrendous losses for the other. In some cases, the Tree Cousins and their tormentors had annihilated each other. Fighting Americans was a bloody affair at best, a disastrous one at worst.
They have always had good reasons for fighting to the death, of course. Most of those battles were fought at their doorstep. They had nowhere to run, and battles where no avenue of retreat is available are the deadliest of their kind.
So was the case here. The Imperium armada and the JSF had no intention of retreating, and were slashing at each other with wild abandon as the range closed to under a quarter of a light second. Humans referred to such engagements as ‘a knife fight in an elevator.’ Crude, but apt. With flight times below thirty seconds, missile volleys got through in far greater numbers. The Imperium fleet could no longer unleash hundreds of thousands of ship-killers in every salvo, but it didn’t need to do so. And direct energy weapons struck with their full power. As the two formations became mingled, ships could target vulnerable points in their foes.
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 3
