How the hangar rats got used to it was beyond him. He barreled downward, fleeing from the inter-dimensional energy waves, as an entire wing of X-Boats launched. His body felt stretched to unbearable thinness, his mind pulled, re-knotted and recombined in impossible geometries.
It was more than Arun’s mind could contain. He slammed into the hangar deck at 90 meters per second.
He lay immobile for several seconds, lost in the bone-shattering vibrations thundering through the deck, and the energy exhaust flowing through him and on into K-Space.
“Barney!” he queried, not sure which was the strangest: that his AI hadn’t taken control and shifted Arun’s position or that he hadn’t been shot. Gotta move!
But Barney emanated a sense of calm, his tac-display summary showing the deck battle had been won for now. Marine reinforcements had come from space, taking the boarders from behind.
A gauntleted hand reached down for him.
Arun took it and allowed himself to be hauled to his feet.
Barney gave the figure the yellow halo that meant he’d identified this individual as the tactical commander. He didn’t display the Marine’s name. He hated it when Barney tried to play games.
The Marine officer was a head shorter than Arun. She blanked her visor, and his heart skipped in excitement.
Who else could it have been? Colonel Xin Lee looked up at him.
Barney gave him a tactical update: Xin had led a regimental-sized force to retake the carrier group’s flagship.
He stared back at her. Xin’s eyes blazed with vigor, but the seemingly carefree girl he had once shared a rack with on Antilles was long gone, replaced by a woman hardened, chastened and experienced, and no less a magnificent force of nature.
Arun fought to cage these badly timed feelings for this woman that welled from deep within.
“Thank you for saving my life,” said Arun, shaking Xin’s hand. “I’ve lost track of the score. Are we even yet?”
“That’s one difference between us, General. I will never stop counting. You’ve still saved my life more than I’ve saved yours. Don’t expect that imbalance to last long.”
He laughed. “I don’t. It’s good to see you.”
The stiffness left her a little. “Likewise, General Twinkle Eyes. Despite keeping our children secret from me… it feels good to be at each other’s side.”
You’re magnificent.
“Let’s not go all weepy eyes, General.” The corners of her mouth pinched with amusement. “And we both know how action makes you feel. I’ve may have eliminated the enemy boarders but there’s still a battle to be fought.” She grinned. “We’ll probably both die before the day’s out, so… oh, what the hell? I know you, Arun. Sitting this out as a passenger must be driving you nuts. Want to tag along with me?”
“It would be fun, Xin. But I’ve a better idea.”
She raised a teasing eyebrow. “Better than being at my side?”
Arun heart lifted, but then his spirits were shot down when Barney identified one of anonymous Marines guarding Xin as a person of interest. A painful text label appeared: Springer. “No, Xin. Not better. Not even close, but more useful, I hope. I’m going to help bag a flagship.” He shook her hand again. “Good luck, Colonel.”
He glanced up at Springer. His legs itched to move closer to her but his head told him that would only end badly.
Instead, he sent her a private message – “Stay safe” – before turning and running to one of the three X-Boats left stranded on the launch ledge because all the remaining pilots were dead or wounded. All but him.
Arun was proud of himself for succeeding in wiping Xin from his mind. She was a complication he found difficult to handle even at the best of times, and going into battle against a superior enemy definitely wasn’t that. As for Springer… no, he didn’t dare let his mind go there. She’d cut herself away from him and they could never grow back together now.
Arun’s suit took him up into the air and over to the only remaining Mustang on the launch ledge.
The two-seat Mark1 was the first of the X-Boat variants to be developed. It was essentially a shrunken Tactical Unit. With a spherical hull, and a centrally mounted engine that could swivel rapidly to connect with any one of the 12 exhaust ports drilled through the hull, it had seemed the obvious design. The single-seat Mark2 was a little faster but production had been abandoned in favor of the sleek one-seater Phantom fighters. The other X-Boat variant, the Swordfish fighter-bombers, had wings, not for lift but to release their disk-shaped bombs. But Arun had trained as a Tac-Marine, which meant he had expected to live his adult life inside a tactical unit. The Mustang felt like home.
Arun settled into the pilot seat of Slayman Feg’s X-Boat and closed the cockpit. “Boss. Give me flight codes for X47- Alpha.”
“X47- Alpha is yours, General,” Coombes replied. “You’re cleared for takeoff.”
As the instigator of the training program that had turned Marines into Flight Marines, Arun had learned to fly himself. Piloting a shuttle was not much different from traveling through the void in a battle suit. Taking off and landing were another matter entirely.
Arun resisted the temptation to go full throttle, and slowly released a jet of reaction material from a maneuvering thruster. The Mustang lifted, pitched forward and then spiraled up out of the hangar, only once brushing the side wall.
“Squadron Leader Caccamo. This is Flight Marine McEwan, reassigned to your squadron.”
Laban Caccamo sighed. “Squadlead to 3rd Squadron. We’ve picked up a noob. A flight virgin called McEwan. I’m giving him the call sign FNG. You’re in Blue Flight, operating low protection. Keep low 10 klicks behind the Phantoms and Swordfish in the strike group. Can you handle that, FNG?”
“Roger.”
“And for frakk’s sake, FNG, try not to bump into anything important.”
“I’ll try.” Arun grinned. “FNG out.”
The rest of his squadron was already several thousand klicks away from the Lance. Arun checked his momentum dump system was operational and engaged main drive. His Mustang accelerated at 10g, then 15g… 20g… He was accelerating faster than a missile but in so much comfort that he could put his feet up and sip at a mug of coffee… if only his legs weren’t strapped in and his battlesuit helmet weren’t in the way.
His gaze was drawn constantly to his heat exhaust dial, which lifted from blue to violet, but kept well short of the red danger zone. This simple mechanical dial bolted onto the flight console was so crude it could have come from pre–Contact Earth. Its function, however, was anything but crude. The Klein-Manifold Region, which connected via D-Branes to conventional spacetime, was not a limitless store into which energy could be dumped without consequences. K-Space, as it was known, heated up just like normal spacetime, only cooling with glacial slowness. As Arun flew his Mustang through space, he also moved through the corresponding region of K-Space, and the dial showed the local heat in that higher dimension. Once they hit the red zone, K-Space would be too hot to push any more energy there. Deep in the red zone and K-Space would be dumping energy back into real space.
Within seconds he was in formation tucked behind and below the main strike force of 3rd Squadron, which was itself toward the rear of the spearhead formation that was 2nd Wing with its hundred human-piloted X-Boats. 1st Wing with its more varied mix of craft types and pilot species was forming up only a few minutes behind.
The heat dial pushed further toward the red line. Playing tail-end Charlie meant those dozens of X-Boats had already heated up K-Space.
They were burning impossible gees, making directly for the largest capital ship he’d ever seen. Three minutes out from the Lance and his velocity was over 100 klicks per second and rising fast. Compared to the enemy flagship, the X-Boats were minuscule, mosquitos trying to take down a grav-tank.
But the Legion had K-Space technology.
The enemy didn’t stand a chance!
— Chapter 50 —
Caccamo magnified the image of the target and examined it in realsight while he still could. He gave a low whistle. The 3rd Fleet’s flagship was a big bastard all right, over two klicks from nose to stern and about a third as much across the beams. Every square meter seemed to be loaded with armament.
The New Empire weren’t generous enough to share their ship designations, so the Legion had named this beast themselves. The Blunt Arrow they called it, and the warship’s outline did resemble a blunted arrow – a deadly one with main armament angled to point in a forward direction. With such a length, it would take several long seconds to swivel the Arrow around to any orientation it desired. To the Legion’s lumbering capital ships, burdened with irresistible levels of momentum, the Arrow could change bearing as near as practical to instantaneously. If Lance of Freedom tried to get on the Arrow’s tail, the enemy flagship would simply pivot through 180 degrees and direct its fire back along its direction of travel. But a nimble X-Boat could flit about faster than the Arrow could turn, always keeping just off the target’s bow, out of range of its engine backdraft and its main armaments.
Or so Caccamo had explained to his squadron before training them in these attack tactics.
Keeping on the enemy’s tail was just one of the X-Boat ideas that were either brilliant or batcrazy dumb. They would soon discover which.
The Arrow loomed closer.
The other warships of the enemy fleet were closing in to protect their flag. A short distance behind Caccamo’s squadron, the Legion’s 1st Wing were holding position in reserve. Holding position meant spraying defensive munitions, fighting off attacking warboats, and taking hits from long-range missile attacks, but 1st Wing could handle the heat.
All that mattered was his wing and the Arrow. One or the other would die over the next twenty minutes.
Caccamo blinked sweat out of his eye. Shit! His squadron could be wiped out within seconds. The thought terrified him, and the realization that he was scared made his heart pound. He could hardly breathe.
They were making this drent up as they went along. All that confident talk of victory he’d given his pilots… that made him a liar. A fake whose lies could lead his people to their deaths.
His AI nudged out a memory to calm him.
The time was a year earlier. The pilots and deck crew were paraded on the deck of the Lance’s X-Boat hangar in front of Puja and the squadron leaders. By that time it was only when paraded that Caccamo looked into the eyes of his pilots and thought their mix to be strange. Diminutive ship rats were invisible if they stood behind the flight-trained Marines who comprised the majority of the X-Boat pilots. Even the Marines came from various design models and from more depot planets than just Tranquility. They looked strange lined up at attention, but what mattered was that these volunteers had graduated top of the flight-training school. All had earned their place in those lines, as had the AIs they had partnered with.
“Will this crazy X-Boat idea work in a real to goodness space battle?”
The question was aimed at the parade by General McEwan. It had been Arun who’d first pushed Marines to cross-train in Navy roles to fill the roster gaps on Beowulf.
“If you haven’t asked yourself that,” continued Arun, “then you don’t have the imagination to deserve a place on this hangar deck. Your first battlefield test will be against the New Empire 3rd Fleet, the unbeatable force that has swept aside everything the Old Empire has thrown against it as it makes it way to the home planet of the White Knights. Your mission is to beat the unbeatable 3rd Fleet.”
The pilots listened. Arun wasn’t the kind of pompous skangat who thought his rank elevated him to godhood. The only way to assess the pilot training program was to go through it himself. He’d said that right from the get go. General McEwan had graduated flight school himself. He’d earned his place on this hangar the hard way.
“Many of you will feel terror. Some of you will doubt. That doesn’t matter, not so long as you carry out your missions. If your resolve falters, remember this. You will be tasked with destroying immensely powerful capital ships. But we are opening up a new chapter in warfare where it isn’t length, mass, or volume of the target ship that matters, it is the heat it generates. And bigger means hotter.”
The memory vanished the moment Wingco’s voice came over the command channel. “Cacco, your squadron gets the honor of the first attack. Proceed immediately. Good luck.”
Wing Commander Narciso’s voice was a steady as a ship’s gyro-stabilizer, but then Puja had always been as hard as ceramalloy.
Which was how others described him…
“Roger that, Wingco. Initiating attack run.”
Caccamo felt floods of relief to hear the steel was back in his voice. The wait had nearly crushed him. But now there was no time to think, and barely enough to act.
He broadcast to his squadron. “SquadLead to all call signs. Pleasure cruise is over… thank frakk. Remember we’ll be diving into heat, so keep watching those dials. Hell, I don’t need to tell you that. 3rd Squadron, Attack Scenario One. Go! Go! Go!”
Caccamo pitched down the nose of his Phantom and gave his AI permission to perform constant evasive maneuvers. The world in realsight blurred into a smear.
He switched to virtual tac-view in which the continual shifts of speed and direction were smoothed out. In this, less chaotic, view of space, the squadron was a box of layered flight elements swooping in a wide arc toward the rear of the enemy flagship.
They were not alone, though. From the Blunt Arrow’s cavernous interior emerged a swarm of drones that rose up to meet the X-Boats.
This was going to get ugly.
— Chapter 51 —
Arun thumbed the firing stud and watched twin cherry red laser beams lance out through the blackness of space, seeking his prey. He led the predicted path of the enemy drone, which was little more than an engine, a gun, and a bulb that housed the sensors and controlling intelligence.
None of this is real, he reminded himself.
Despite the drone’s constant yawing, pitching and rolling, Arun could predict its approximate course. It was chasing the rearmost of the Legion fighter-bombers that Arun’s flight group was tasked with protecting.
He felt Barney’s contempt for the drone AI system. Battlesuit AIs were far more sophisticated intelligences that White Knight design protocols required to be partnered with a flesh-and-blood operator to fire weaponry. The drone was controlled by complex algorithms, not an artificial sentience. It could think with lightning speed, but only along pre-programmed lines.
It was the way the White Knights wanted their empire to be engineered. It was why the Legion would win.
Sure enough, the drone soon flew into the path of Arun’s lasers, and was sliced into four separate pieces of spinning debris.
In reality, Arun’s laser beams had been invisible, and his Mustang’s flight path churned so violently that Barney had to provide a sanitized and steady view of space that didn’t spin beyond human comprehension. The drone’s destruction had been real, all right. So had been the threat to the strike group.
“Good shooting, FNG,” said the Swordfish pilot the drone had been chasing.
“Any time, Firegirl,” replied Arun offhandedly because his full attention was on scouring the area for more hostiles. But there were none left. He’d just finished off the last of that drone attack. “Your six is clear.”
“You cut it fine,” said the Swordfish pilot. “We’re making our dive now.”
“Hit hard,” Arun wished her.
Firegirl was a Navy flier, a ship rat who had earned her call sign during training by hauling a suited Marine pilot out of a boat that had caught fire on take-off. She was a survivor with nerves as steady as a robot, and that was why she’d been selected as a Swordfish pilot.
The Mustangs and Phantoms were dancing through the vacuum to clear their way, but it was the Swordfish who would deliver the punch to the target. Only the best were selected.
; And Firegirl was the best of them all.
— Chapter 52 —
Claudette Peronique – call sign Firegirl – pushed her Swordfish to its maximum acceleration, a choddingly insane 60 gees, and screamed into her attack run. She was moving too fast for enemy targeting systems, frequently braking in an instant before zipping off on a completely different vector. But the enemy point defenses only had to guess her intentions to throw up a barrage of lethal ordnance.
She danced all around the Blunt Arrow’s stern, closing steadily with each step. A spray of railgun darts caught her craft, and for the first time she could feel the Swordfish move as it shuddered under the attack. She dodged across, inside the exhaust of the enemy flagship’s main drive, and glanced at her status displays.
Must be nice to be a marine cyborg and talk to your AI with mind control. She had to fly the human way, with eyes on the displays, and fingers on the controls.
Her kinetic shields had held firm, but by dumping the energy they absorbed into K-Space, the heat dial had shot closer to the red.
The Blunt Arrow’s point defense found her, tearing into her craft in a scream of protesting metal and ceramalloy. She reversed direction until she was out of range.
Guess I’m gonna take a few hits, she told herself. They call me Firegirl after all.
The X-Boat energy dump output could be switched to prioritize three different systems: kinetic shields, energy shields, and the momentum dump. She dialed down maneuver capability and ramped up her kinetic shields. She’d take more hits that way, but with stronger shields might actually survive them.
She threw her Swordfish at the target, a point near the port bow. Her shields absorbed the railgun darts, fermi beams and laser grids, but only by pushing the heat dial into the red.
Human Empire Page 28
