by B. V. Larson
“Kher cruisers,” I said. “Heavies, if I don’t miss my guess.”
“No enemy fighter-cover then?” Samson asked me.
“None that I can see. Doc, give me a fuel charge calculation given this distance.”
I passed my equipment’s range guesstimate back to him, and he began crunching numbers.
“I’d hoped there would be fighters,” Samson said.
“Why?”
He shrugged. “You can’t become an ace crew without kills.”
“We’ll just have to kill cruisers instead of fighters,” Mia said.
This set off a round of excited exclamations. My crew had no idea what they were whooping about. Samson had seen action before in war, but air battles were different. Speaking historically, a fighter in the middle of this mess was like a rowboat caught up in a pitched battle between two fleets of large ships.
This fight might be different, but I had no reason to assume it would be after all my training. Losses would be high for everyone when fighting the Imperial Kher.
“Chief,” Gwen said in sudden concern. “There’s a ship pulling up on our tail. A heavy fighter—looks like one of ours.”
“Identify and contact him.”
“It’s—it’s Ra-tikh’s ship. He must have gotten it under control and chased us down.”
“Ra-tikh?” I called on a close-range beam. “What are you doing?”
“I’m not going to allow it, Blake,” Ra-tikh’s words rang in my aural nerves via my sym.
“Allow what?”
“You will not humiliate me again. You should have left me to die aboard Killer.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, “but I don’t see the rest of the squadron. You wanna be my wingman?”
“Blake?” asked a new voice, overriding Ra-tikh’s. “This is Shaw. Switch on your friend-or-foe transponder.”
Cursing, I ordered Samson to get his ass in gear. We were supposed to turn on our transponder as soon as we left Killer’s hold. That had been Samson’s job.
“Sorry Chief,” he said, activating the unit.
“There you are,” Shaw said. “I’m now acting squadron commander. Tand is dead. Killer has been disabled. I’m taking tactical command until someone higher up the chain takes over from me.”
“Got it, sir. What are my orders?”
“Circle back toward Killer. What are you doing so far out, anyway?”
“We saw those cruisers out there and we thought we’d go for them, sir.”
He was quiet for a second.
“Brave to a fault,” he said. “For a primate, you show unusually intense predatory instincts.”
“Uh… thank you, sir.”
“Ra-tikh will be your wingman for the duration of this action. Your orders are to locate the enemy ship that ambushed Killer.”
In confusion, I scanned local space. “I don’t see anything out here, sir.”
“No, you wouldn’t. They hit us the moment we jumped into this star system and disappeared. It’s a phase-ship, it’s got to be. They’re small and slow, but they can hide in a pocket of hyperspace. The enemy will look like a sensor-ripple unless you’re very close.”
“Can they see us, sir?” I asked, scanning the surrounding space
“Not as well as a cruiser could, but they can passively detect local objects in normal space. Your mission is to do a sensor-sweep starting with sector 8-2-6. Check the transmitted regional mapping. Make sure the enemy phase-ship isn’t in that sector.”
Hammerhead was already banking, fighting against inertia. Dumping grav waves and spinning around, we were heading back toward the damaged mess that was Killer. The maneuver caused the little ship to shake violently, but otherwise we didn’t feel the physics as we were inside our anti-grav bubble.
Ra-tikh shadowed our movements without comment. He’d heard Shaw’s commands, and although he probably wasn’t happy about them, he followed orders.
When we were close to the sector he’d assigned me to, I plunged Hammerhead into it.
“Turn on every active pinging sensor we have,” I told Gwen.
“We’ll be lit up like a Christmas tree, Chief,” she complained.
“I know that, but we’ve got to find something called a ‘phase-ship’. It’s hidden out here, and we’ve got to find it.”
“A what, Chief?”
I explained to the crew what we were looking for, as best I understood it. In our training missions, we’d learned about a broad number of topics, but we hadn’t studied enemy ship classes much yet. The cruisers had been easy to spot and identify, but a phase-ship? I’d never even heard of one.
“Ra-tikh wants to talk,” Gwen told me.
“Mia, free up your weapons. We might not get a lock on this thing. Look for anything strange on the sensor feed. If you see something, blast it.”
“Excellent…” she purred with excitement. Her eyes were wide open, wider than a human girl’s eyes could go. Her hands flexed and stretched on the controls. I could tell the hunt was thrilling her. In comparison, the rest of my crew looked stressed and nervous.
“What is it, Wingman?” I asked as I opened up a channel to Ra-tikh’s ship.
He made a coughing sound. I’d heard that noise before. The cat-people made that sound when they were building up a rage.
“What is Shaw doing?” Ra-tikh demanded. “This is insane. Two ships against an enemy vessel of size? Every sector patrolled separately? Why not hunt in strength with the whole squadron?”
“I don’t know exactly what Shaw’s thinking,” I admitted, “but we’ve never fought a phase-ship. I would guess he wants to find this thing before it can come out of hiding and hit Killer again.”
“Why did it stop attacking? What is this game?”
“I told you, Ra-tikh, I don’t know. Contact Shaw with your questions. Until then, follow orders.”
“I am sticking to your side. Dalton is my pilot. He smells like a rodent and insults my females, but he can fly a fighter.”
I smiled at that. I’d seen Dalton in flight training, which everyone had gone through in case the pilot was disabled. Dalton had been wild and unprofessional, but he’d definitely shown promise.
Ra-tikh disconnected, and I went back to scanning the feeds with the rest of my crew. We spent several minutes moving around sector 8-2-6 before giving up. We were given another sector to scan that was adjacent, and we moved onward.
In the meantime, I occasionally turned my long-range perception in the direction of the primary battle. The carriers had gotten the upper hand. We’d lost seven of the big ships, by my count, along with another half-dozen that had been disabled and sent to the back of the line.
The enemy cruisers were taking a beating, however. Without fighter-cover, they were getting melted to slag by thousands of small stinging hits. When half of them were destroyed, they pulled out, abandoning the ambush.
“They broke off,” Gwen said.
“I know that. Look for the phase-ship.”
“I doubt anything else is out here,” Gwen said. “Wouldn’t it have phased out, or whatever, and retreated to safety?”
“Maybe,” I said, “but that’s speculation, Gwen. We’re here to destroy the ship that nailed Killer. We have to protect our carrier.”
She shut up, and we kept scanning. There were other fighters out here doing the same. About a hundred of them. They were all patrolling sectors around the carrier one at a time, working their way farther out when each sector was cleared.
“I’ve got something!” Mia said suddenly.
“Blast it!” I ordered.
You didn’t have to give that order to Mia twice. Her hand twitched, and twin wasps flew out of the undercarriage of our tiny ship.
Wasps were small ship-to-ship seeker missiles. They were only good for short-range battles, but they were fast and had excellent onboard AI. During training, I’d found them very effective.
The wasps darted from my ship at an angle, and
I spun us around to follow them. What happened next was something of a shock. The hull of a vessel appeared, almost like a wall, and it completely blotted out my view of Killer in the distance.
My crew cried out or growled, depending on their vocal chords. Slamming the controls into a dive, I reversed our thrust and tried to go under the ship, rather than smashing into it.
I wanted to warn Dalton, but there wasn’t time. If he hadn’t seen what was right in front of us, he was doomed.
It turned out that a phase-ship wasn’t as small of an affair as I’d been visualizing. It was about three hundred yards long, if I didn’t miss my guess, and a quarter of that in girth. Looking like a pipe with various appendages, it was cylindrical in shape.
My wasps splashed against the hull harmlessly. They’d served to flush the ship out of hiding, but they hadn’t done any serious damage. I had a moment to wish Shaw had clued me in concerning what we were going up against.
We made the plunge, and I was gratified to see Ra-tikh was still on my tail. Dalton was a good pilot, Ra-tikh hadn’t been bragging emptily about that.
“Use our main cannon, Mia,” I ordered. “Tear this ship up before she kills us!”
She was already on it. Her sym had her in a VR environment with the enemy phase-ship.
Streaks of radiation were visible outside our ship, connecting the fighter with the larger target. I knew these were the equivalent of virtual tracers, as the radiation wasn’t actually visible to the naked eye. For purposes of aiding in our aiming efforts and to better illustrate the tactical situation, computers displayed the radiation in this manner.
It looked like we were having a paint-fight with glowing pigment. Gushes of bright blue tore into the enemy hull as we circled her at extremely close range.
Rather than breaking away and making a new pass, I hugged the enemy vessel. Hammerhead spiraled around that long armored tube from prow to stern.
The situation was potentially deadly in a dozen ways. Our vessel could strike the enemy hull, or some protuberance I couldn’t avoid. We might be nailed by any of the defensive fire turrets that now swung and attempted to lock onto our tiny ship. Even if we were successful, a killing strike on the enemy might blow all of us up in the final release of gas, shrapnel and energy.
I could feel a presence probing for communication through my sym-link, but I couldn’t compromise my focus to respond.
“Gwen!” I called out between clenched teeth, “alert Shaw, tell him we found the phase-ship.”
“He knows, Chief. He wants to know what the hell we’re doing spinning around it!”
“Tell him we’re killing the damned thing!”
“Hull breach on enemy ship detected,” Dr. Chang said calmly.
I glanced over at him. He had his eyes shut down to slits, only taking occasional glances at his screens. Maybe the wild show outside our walls was making him sick.
“Breaking off!” I shouted.
Without further warning, I threw us into a loop and swung Hammerhead away toward open space. We moved to the aft of the phase-ship, then she was gone to our stern.
“They’ve got a lock on us!” Gwen shouted.
“Cover our stern, Samson. Mia, kill your guns. We need the power.”
She hissed in disappointment, but she didn’t argue.
Radiation bolts flew past us. They seemed shockingly close. I ducked reflexively, even though I knew it couldn’t possibly help. A direct hit on our stern would knock us out. We wouldn’t even know what hit us.
“Chief…” Samson said. “The phase-ship isn’t coming after us. It’s going for Killer.”
He was right. The long, tube-shaped vessel wasn’t bothering to hide any longer. She’d been spotted and damaged. A long trail of plasma and gasses, made visible by software on Hammerhead’s walls, showed she was hurt—perhaps too hurt to run.
“They’re going to try to finish off Killer,” I said with certainty. “Where’s the rest of the squadron?”
“They’ll be here in one minute, tops,” Dr. Chang answered.
“Chief,” Gwen said, “I’m getting a reading from the prow of that ship. There’s an energy surge. We have to assume it’s some kind of heavy gun.”
I nodded. “Yeah… I agree. Maybe we knocked out her phasing system. Or maybe she’s dying. In any case, they’re going to try to finish the carrier before they’re destroyed by the rest of the squadron.”
“Ra-tikh wants to know why we’re sitting on our butts, Chief,” Gwen said.
I glanced at her. She was afraid, I could tell that. We’d fought an enemy ship at insanely close range, and we’d lived somehow. But that was no reason to think we could pull off that kind of stunt again.
“Launch every wasp we have,” I told Mia. “Aim at that breach in their hull. Blow it open.”
“Missiles away!”
“Now, we’re going to have to swing under her, to get to that belly she’s hiding. We’re going to have to put our gun to that hole in her gut, and you’re not going to miss, Mia.”
“Get me closer!” she shouted, all excitement and killer-instinct again.
I had to wonder if this was why most Rebel fighters were flown by carnivores. Maybe only they had the right reactions—even before formal training.
Ra-tikh’s fighter, piloted by Dalton with smoothness that belied how green he was to this sort of thing, followed me precisely.
Hammerhead was much easier to fly than any Earth-based fighter I’d ever flown, of course. That was part of the story. In this ship, we had many technological advantages over the comparatively primitive aircraft of my home world.
But skill couldn’t be ignored. Dalton had that skill, and he’d displayed it effortlessly. Sure, the control systems were so simple a child could spin one of these fighters around a goalpost, but you still had to have the guts and the steady nerve required to do it.
We swooped over the bigger ship, then dived low.
The crew aboard the phase-ship knew what we were up to. There was never any doubt. The ship spun, trying to keep her wounded side away from us.
But we spun faster. The wasps bobbed and weaved until they found their target and bloodied her further.
But the kill-shot didn’t come until Ra-tikh’s gunner and Mia unloaded their cannons simultaneously into the exposed guts of the enemy.
The fan-tail seemed to fall off the bigger ship. That was the first clue that we’d done catastrophic damage to her.
I was already retreating, catching splashes of defensive fire on the shielding Samson had diverted to face the enemy. Fortunately, phase-ships didn’t seem to have much in the way of supporting weaponry. They had a big gun that could nail a carrier, and a phasing system that could hide them from their enemies. That was about it.
She blew up shortly thereafter, sending plumes of gas and colorful fire into space. These existed only briefly before fading into a haze of dust and background radiation.
My crew yelled out in victorious cheers that rang inside Hammerhead, and I joined them. They clapped my back, and they grinned, and they shouted things I couldn’t even hear.
That’s when I knew we’d gelled all the way through. We’d become a functional unit. Come what may, this tiny crew was going to fight together as a single, coherent force from now on.
=25=
We returned to the limping carrier in a good mood. Our laughter and boasting soon died as we got close enough to Killer to take a good look at her.
The carrier was damaged internally. Cracks in the external hull leaked a constant frosty breath of valuable gases.
“Are the bulkheads all blown?” Mia asked in concern. “They should have had the venting under control by now.”
“Maybe they’re all dead—the crew, I mean,” Dr. Chang suggested.
No one spoke as we closed in and swung around to see the open hangar bay. Inside, the lights were still on. A mix of debris and stiff bodies floated everywhere.
Some of the spacers wriggled toward us in their
suit jets. We were glad to see that a few had survived.
“Blake,” Shaw’s voice spoke in my headset, startling me. “You’re approaching Killer without orders or authorization.”
“We knocked out the phase-ship, Lieutenant. We tried to report, but couldn’t get through. We thought we’d come back here and help out with the clean-up.”
“You knocked out the phase-ship?” he demanded. “You were supposed to wait for the rest of the squadron.”
“I know, sir, but we thought she might phase out again after we stumbled upon her.”
“Send me your automated logs,” he ordered.
“Just a second.”
I nodded to Samson, who uploaded the requested electronic documents. Vid files, readings and computer assessment reports. Fortunately, most after-action reports were done by machine in this service.
Shaw didn’t trust me, naturally enough. Only a month or two ago my crew had hit an officer over the head and attempted to flee back to Earth. Now, we were essentially claiming to be heroes that had just saved everyone’s hide. That sort of thing had to be checked out in order to be believed.
There was a delay as Shaw was no doubt perusing our documentation. At last, he came back onto the channel.
“Unbelievable. You went above and beyond, Blake. I knew you had potential, but I didn’t think it would show up like this.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Come aboard. Killer is stable enough for now, but she’s badly damaged. You’ll have to use your own suits for life-support.”
“That seems clear, sir.”
He disconnected, and I went back to the task of piloting my tiny ship into a maelstrom of wreckage. The floating debris we had to dodge and brush aside wasn’t dangerous as long as we kept our pace to a crawl. Eventually, I found my way to our berth.
Guiding my ship the last few dozen yards with spurts from her maneuvering jets, I managed to ease Hammerhead into her cradle again.
We climbed out of our fighter with our personal life-support gear sealed. There was no one to greet us, other than junk and corpses. The surviving yard people and crews were all busy cleaning up their own messes.
The hangar was dark for the most part. Shuffling and using my boot magnetics, we had to work to keep from kicking up a cloud of obscuring dust and filings. My crew followed me at a safe distance.
