StarFight 3: Battlecry

by T. Jackson King

  “Low probability. The wasps know their top wasp left with his fleet from close to our emergence spot. They do not know he and every other wasp ship are dead and gone.” His deep blue eyes shifted to her. The look was sober and serious. “Still, I favor us arriving at Alert Unknown Enemy, as fleet captain Renselaer has ordered. This is an enemy system. Perhaps there is another fleet preparing to launch for Kepler 10. We could arrive in the midst of dozens of enemy ships. Best for us to have combat alertness on our side.”

  She totally agreed with his points. “Lorelei, move us to Alert Unknown Enemy status.”

  “Moving ship status to Alert Unknown Enemy,” spoke Lorelei the AI in a high soprano.

  Yellow lights began blinking on the room’s ceiling and hooting sounds filled the room as ship status changed from Alert Alcubierre Transition to the new status.

  Rebecca looked ahead to the middle-aged man seated in front of her at the Tactical control pillar. Howard Jones was a seasoned warrant officer who had beat every tactical scenario posed to him when a cadet at the Stellar Academy. Like her he was black as a bottle of ink. But being from Baltimore he was a part-time leisure sailor. Or he was whenever not on a spaceship. Like most of the Bridge crew he was a capable pilot. Most vital was the way his brain shuffled three dimensional tactical arrangements to the benefit of her ship. It was thanks to him that her ship had managed to shield the smaller frigates from most of the incoming wasp laser and lightning fire in battles in both systems. But his tactical abilities had not been able to save his fellow Baltimore buddy Adrian when her ship’s right side proton node was destroyed by the wasps. Gone with Adrian was her lover Jason, a Reform Jew with a sense of humor she had found delightful. His loss, with its ending of four years of wonderful intimacy and togetherness, had left her feeling hollow inside. She shook herself. Adrian and Jason were among the fifteen people she’d lost in the final battles in Kepler 10. Those losses still hurt. As did the absence of Jason’s smile. She sighed. The fact she had fifteen replacements from the admiral’s own Battlestar did not help. Living for months with fellow crew while on deep space patrol or trips to one of the seven colony systems made for a tightly linked crew, and for deep pain when anyone was lost. Especially Jason.

  “Howard, be prepared to shift us sideways away from the Lepanto as soon as we emerge. I want us clear of them so we can rotate as needed to fire on any enemy.”

  “Commander, we are now prepared to move away from the Lepanto upon emergence,” he said, his deep baritone resonating against the metal walls of the Bridge. The man’s dreadlocks swung freely above his helmet neckring as he looked to a holo.

  Next to Howard was Weapons. Astrid Hendriksdottir had served on a destroyer of the Norwegian navy before volunteering for America’s Star Navy. She knew weapons with long reach. And she understood the necessity of targeting right the first time. Light-speed weapons did not allow for slow thinking or guessing.

  “Astrid, load our silos with x-ray laser tipped thermonukes for launch upon my command. And fire up our tail and nose carbon dioxide lasers. I want them ready to fire within seconds of emergence.”

  The blond did not look back at her but nodded quickly, her braids swinging above the clear fabric of her vacsuit. The suit’s flexible helmet lay atop her seat. She tapped her pillar’s touchscreen. “Activation orders sent. All lasers are now at Battle Condition One. As are the missiles in all four silos.”

  Rebecca smiled briefly, then wiped the look from her face. The presence of her image at the top of Jacob’s wallscreen, flanked by the images of Joy and Joan, was a fact that kept her alert and focused on presenting a fully professional appearance. While young Jacob lacked her years of command experience, he had proven himself a chip off the block of Fleet Admiral Renselaer. Some of the battle formations ordered by Jacob had surprised her. But they had proven to be what was needed to, first, protect the battle group during that surprise attack by the wasps, then later in the running battles against the pursuing wasp ships. The man’s decision to run his ship’s fusion reactors and fusion pulse thrusters well beyond their ratings had been vital to his ship’s escape from the black hole field of the largest wasp ship. That ship had been commanded by Hunter One, who now sat on Jacob’s bridge, watching all that Jacob saw. As did young Daisy Stewart. She felt for her fellow Chicagoan who had inherited the XO duties on the Battlestar. Daisy had had to deal with the persistent cultural bias against mixed-race people as she grew up. Even though such bias was prohibited in the Star Navy, still, some of the older officers carried with them the assumption that love could not cross racial groups. Silly it was. And personally painful to those who were born of such love. As she knew from an early romance right after her own academy graduation.

  She shook herself and did her best to look seriously professional. While young Jacob would be unlikely to chastise her for frivolity, still, every ship-to-ship neutrino transmission was being recorded by his ship’s AI and by her own ship AI, for later review by Earth Command. Which fact reminded her of something important.

  “AI Lorelei, prepare to move ship status to Alert Combat Ready upon our emergence from Alcubierre space-time,” she said, counting down the seconds in her mind.

  “Your command is accepted,” said the high soprano of the AI. “Do you feel like a Valkyrie?”

  She winced. Her ship AI was now imitating the highly personal behavior of Jacob’s AI. While her Science Deck chief put it down to the human imitation module of the AI, she was beginning to have her doubts.

  “I happen to be the wrong skin color for a Valkyrie,” she said, taking a deep breath as the timer that glowed in the situational holo to her right counted down the seconds to emergence.

  “My research documents the acceptance in Nordic culture of Valkyrie myth types who were darker-skinned females,” the AI said. “Anyway, one’s actions defines one’s identity, or so you have said several times.”

  Rebecca wished vainly for a forgetful AI. At least Grayson O’Henry at Engines, Dolores Yang at Navigation and Meredith Thompson at Communications had not snickered. All three were well-known practical jokers with a tendency to puncture over-inflated egos. Or so she had learned in her first year on the Chesapeake. Now, she did her best to give as well as she got in the joking competition. Leastwise she did during Alcubierre travel, when her ship was not at risk of harm from anything alien.

  “Thirty seconds,” called Louise from the Lepanto.

  “XO, activate our All Ship vidcom,” she said quickly.

  “Activated.”

  “All crew! Prepare for Alcubierre emergence in twenty-three seconds. Prepare for immediate combat upon emergence. There could be hostile wasps waiting for our arrival. Commander out!”

  She took a deep breath, breathed it out slowly and fixed her gaze on both the front wallscreen and on the situational holo to her right. Soon she would know whether her ship and her people would be fighting for their lives.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Emergence!” called Louise.

  Black void filled the Lepanto’s wallscreen. A distant yellow sun glowed in its center. The white slash of the Milky Way filled the lower right of the image. Specks of color shown in the hundreds as distant stars filled the image. Jacob felt relief at the visual absence of wasp ships. But what of any hiding among nearby comets?

  “Tactical, report!” he called.

  “No moving neutrino signatures nearby,” spoke Rosemary from her function post. “Arrival site is 42 AU out from Kepler 22. System graphic going up.”

  The right side of the wallscreen now filled with an overhead presentation of the planets, asteroid belt and Kuiper Belt of the wasp system. The magnetosphere boundary showed as a dotted line that circled the star. The loose collection of comets that made up Kuiper formed a broad ring that began at 39 AU and ran outward. Further in lay a thick asteroid belt at ten AU. Planet four, the one occupied by the wasp colony, lay on their side of the system’s ecliptic plane at nine-tenths AU. Bright sparks lit its small cir
cle while a cloud of neutrino emission spots hung above the circle. What was happening above the wasp world?

  “Tactical, are any of our spysats still alive above that world?”

  “Yes!” called Rosemary, giving him a thumbs-up gesture. “I’m picking up a neutrino broadcast from a spysat. Its AV imagery is going up on the wallscreen,” the Irish woman said, her red ponytail swinging as she leaned over her control pillar.

  A night-dark world grew large on the left side of the wallscreen. Orange spots glowed brightly on the dark landscape. Purple neutrino dots clustered in geosync orbit. Lots of them.

  “Shit!” yelled Daisy from below him.

  “Fuck,” grunted Richard. “Is that a wasp fleet?”

  “Oh no!” cried Alicia.

  Behind Jacob came similar exclamations from Lori and Carlos. Quincy was at his station in charge of the forward laser node on the right side outrigger pontoon of the Lepanto, while Kenji was working in the Mess Hall. He shared their surprise and their reaction. Too many ships were orbiting above the wasp world.

  “All ships, assume battle formation Alpha Anvil!” Jacob ordered, relying on the open neutrino comlink with the other ships to convey his command.

  “Going to battle formation Alpha Anvil,” said the image of Rebecca, which was part of a strip of ship captain images that ran along the top of the wallscreen. Joy and Joan gave the same order to their crews.

  “Those purple dots are not wasp ships!” cried Daisy. “We know the unique signature of their fusion pulse thrusters. And look at the system graphic!”

  The graphic image showed 25 neutrino signatures clustered above the wasp colony world. They were in geosync orbit. Between the asteroid belt and the start of the Kuiper comets were two moving neutrino signatures pursuing a third signature, which showed as a red dot. The two chase neutrino emissions and the ones above the planet were all colored purple for unknown. Near to the Lepanto were three green dots. They were the Philippine Sea, the Aldertag and the Chesapeake, which was thrusting sideways, perhaps opening room for combat maneuvers.

  “Only the red dot being chased by two purple dots is a wasp ship,” called Akira from Engines. “That red dot’s fusion pulse exhaust profile matches our rad profile for wasp ships.

  “Those orange spots are nuke explosions down on that planet!” yelled Oliver from Weapons. “Our forward sensor array is sucking in the emissions data. Blast sites being overlaid on the spysat AV imagery.”

  The sensor imagery filled the middle of the wallscreen, displacing the image of black space and the distant yellow star. The fourth planet’s night side showed. Twenty-five purple dots hung above the world’s equator in a loose oval cluster. Below them, seventeen orange spots showed on the equatorial continent, denoting gamma ray emissions from atomic bomb blasts. Thermonuke blasts were usually shown as white dots, according to standard Star Navy doctrine. Or so Jacob recalled.

  “Louise, how old are these images, both neutrino and atomic blasts?”

  “Captain, at our distance from planet four of 41 AU, they are 5.6 hours old,” she said.

  “Oliver, what’s the nature of those nuke emissions?”

  “They are mostly gamma rays with an energy close to ten mega-electron volts per blast, plus plenty of hard x-rays and neutrons, sir.”

  “What’s the power of each blast, in your estimation?”

  “Seven hundred fifty kilotons,” Oliver said.

  “What! I thought the highest possible fission-only nuke blast was 500 kilotons, like the Ivy King blast of America back in the early 1950s,” Jacob said.

  Oliver looked back from his Weapons station. “Sir, captain, Ivy King was a highly enriched uranium device without plutonium in it. But the British Orange Herald blast achieved 750 kilotons, thanks to a lithium-boosted uranium core. Its yield was likely the peak for fission-based atomic blasts,” the Brazilian said.

  “I stand informed,” Jacob said. “What do these blasts mean for the planet’s landscape, assuming they are air bursts?”

  Oliver looked back to his control pillar and touched it, then gave a loud sigh. “Sir, the high level of neutron, x-ray and gamma radiation suggests these blasts are what used to be called ‘clean’ neutron bombs, similar to the high rad emissions of our x-ray thermonukes. The impact result is likely to be very low fallout but highly intense neutron irradiation of anything living on the surface.”

  “Those are Swarm Pod landing sites!” came the translated voice of Hunter One from the pheromone signaler that stood in front of the big wasp. “They are killing our larvae!”

  Sickness filled Jacob’s gut. Both from the intense odor emitted by the wasp leader and from the image in his mind of baby wasps being vaporized by the miles-wide plasma cores of the nuke blasts or turning blotchy and fatally sick from the rads. The hundreds of Pods that had landed the larvae and adult helpers were surely no shelter from such blasts.

  “Four more blasts now showing up,” Oliver called. “This appears to be a sustained bombardment aimed at exterminating the wasp colony sites.”

  “Stop them!” came the loud words of Hunter One as a new miasma of scents flowed out from the red and black-striped insect as its two brown wings flapped quickly, lifting it off the bench. “Kill the attackers!”

  “Hunter One, I share your feelings.” Jacob looked back to the system graphic image on the right side of the wallscreen. “Rosemary, what are the flight speeds of that wasp ship and the two unknowns chasing it?”

  The woman looked down at her pillar touchscreen, tapped several times, then looked back to him, her green eyes bright. “The wasp ship is moving at one-tenth lightspeed. The two pursuing ships are moving at eleven percent of lightspeed. They will overtake it before it reaches the edge of the Kuiper Belt.”

  A chill ran down his neck. His gloved fingers began to shake. His breathing came fast. This was a command moment no one had expected. What should he do? What could he do, in view of the age of the events they were now seeing?

  “Hunter One, why is your Swarm ship heading out on that vector track? That vector is forty degrees away from us. Why is it not heading for this location, which leads to where other wasp ships went?”

  The giant wasp’s two black antennae trembled. Its triangular head twisted his way. Five black eyes locked on him. “That flying nest is heading for the flight site that will take it to our nearest colony. It is the place from which my nest and other nests arrived. Protect it! The Primes of my world must know of this horror! We must come back and cleanse this system of these killers of our larvae!”

  Jacob understood the fury of the wasp. Its reaction was much the same he would expect from any human captain who saw a human colony world under nuke bombardment. It was to prevent such an attack on Valhalla that he and his father had sacrificed ships and people in order to protect 70,000 colonists. Could he do less here? He fixed on the Communications post and the stiff back of Andrew.

  “Osashi, provide Hunter One with an outgoing neutrino comlink. Connect it to the pheromone signaler in front of him.” Jacob looked to his right. “Hunter One, send your pheromones out to that flying nest! Tell it to head toward us. My ships and my people will do all we can to protect it from those pursuers.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Hunter One felt shock at the words of the Soft Skin leader, then urgency. That flying nest was his only way to return to the flight of fellow Swarmers. The nest of Support Hunter Seven had no working engines. While it could transit through the alternate dimension to any world known to the Swarm, it could not evade these terrible invaders. Whatever the nature might be of these attackers, the strongest scent must be sent to the Primes on Nest. His people’s history was one of fighting off and killing any life that attacked the Swarm. These humans had entered this system and flown above this Colony world. But they had not attacked the Colony. They had even allowed Seven’s nest and other nests to plant Pods on the third world of their own colony system. And they had fought to defend their own colony from the attack of Swarm
flying nests. Perhaps the Soft Skin who sat elevated above his fellows would prove to be an ally in the fight against these attackers. Fury twisted his inner gut at the thought of newly hatched larvae being burned and blackened by the particle disruption seeds launched to the surface of his Colony by these unknown aliens. The time to act was now.

  “Your aid is accepted, Soft Skin leader.” He twisted in air to face the pheromone signaler. From his antennae and from his spiracles came a rush of mixed scents.

  “Flying nest leader! Wing to me! I am Hunter One, returned from the Soft Skin sky light. My only flying nest is broken and unable to fly to you. Wing toward us! These Soft Skins say they will protect you and your Matron from the attackers.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Daisy looked up as the image of a large yellow wasp appeared at the top of the wallscreen, next to the image of Joy. In the background of its yellow-white lighted bridge were other wasps sitting on or hovering above benches as they worked before control panels that resembled giant iPads affixed to upright poles. The big wasp’s triangular head turned to face its imager. Two large and three small black eyes looked at them. Its sharp mandibles opened to either side. The red and black-banded creature bent its two antennae forward. The circles of the breathing spiracles on its thorax and abdomen pulsed as they emitted pheromones.

  “Support Hunter Thirteen responds to Hunter One. Why are you here? Where is Hunter Prime? Where are our fellow flying nests? We must kill these terrible invaders!”

  She sniffed the odors of cinnamon, lemon, wet rain, dry dirt and something that resembled chicken poop coming from the pheromone speaker block that stood before the former hostage. That wasp leaned its antennae forward, lifted its stinger-tipped butt and pulsed its own spiracles.

  “Sad news do I convey. Hunter Prime is gone. All our flying nests that went to claim the new colony world are gone. These Soft Skins hold me captive. Their leader offers his aid in fighting your pursuers,” One said in a flow of sharp odors. “These Soft Skins call themselves humans. They allowed our ships to drop Pods on the world within their colony system. They promise our colony can survive and grow! We are Swarmers. We must join with these four Soft Skin nests to save your flying nest so the Primes on Nest can learn of the terrible killing of our larvae!”