Torchship Pilot

by Karl K Gallagher

  “What do we have, ma’am?” asked Hector.

  Mitchie pulled up the visual and thermal spectrums. Both had matches in the database. “Peltast-class destroyer. Not maneuvering. Whoa, thermal just jumped way up. Radiators deployed?”

  “Yes’m. That’s a good analysis, Lieutenant. Jacks, if you want a nap I think we can spare you.”

  “Hell, no,” snarled Jackson. “It just got interesting. Three more jumped in while you were looking at that. One of them a heavy cruiser.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of making you miss it. Send a quicklook report. Ma’am, may I have my seat back?”

  Mitchie went back to hovering at the ceiling. The Fusion Navy put its ships through the gate at the maximum safe rate. No—faster than that, she thought. The ships were scattered farther than usual from the center of the arrival zone. A gate shook a bit when a ship went through but the vibrations damped out quickly. Passing through a still shaking gate added random factors to your jump. It could send you anywhere in the target system. Or nowhere.

  “Reply to the quicklook,” reported Jackson. “Report hourly.”

  “Fine by me,” said Hector. “We don’t need to attract attention.” A Fusion ship crossing through their tightbeam could backtrack it. One farther away might detect the signal’s sidelobes and start to wonder why a freighter was loitering in a combat zone.

  Most of the enemy warships were maneuvering. The three of them worked together to identify where the Fusion ships would meet. The coordinates went in the first hourly report.

  “The good news is we’re well clear of them,” said Hector.

  “Yep,” replied Mitchie. “Bad news is they’re setting up for a major engagement. This isn’t trying to evade the blockade. A dense formation means inter-locking anti-missile defenses. They have a lot more practice at that kind of fight than we do.” The Fusion Navy regularly fought off incursions from the AIs controlling former human worlds.

  “Why aren’t we attacking?” asked Jackson. “They’re completely disorganized now.”

  Mitchie answered, “They might be bluffing. We don’t want to start a war if we can avoid it.”

  “That gives them the first shot,” grumped Hector.

  “That’s why admirals get the big coins,” said Mitchie.

  The next time Joshua Chamberlain’s spin brought the Disconnect forces in view the observers took a few minutes to see what the admiral was doing. Half the force had pulled into a loose disk. The rest had scattered, closing slowly on the Fusion fleet.

  Hector worked his console. “Dispersed ships are all missile frigates. Everything heavier is in the formation.”

  “Sensible. Frigates rely on maneuver for missile defense. Don’t play well with others.” Jackson’s first tour had been on a frigate.

  “Back to the bad guys,” said Mitchie.

  The observers had bet five grams of silver on whether there’d be a hundred ships in the second report. Jackson was winning. The emergences were coming closer together.

  “Wow! That one must really have been crowding the gate.” Hector displayed the new blip on the center screen. “It’s way outside the usual emergence angles.”

  “Outside everything else, too,” said Jackson. “I can’t find a match to it. Visual signal’s closest to an ultra-class freighter. Thermal’s unique. It’s putting out a bunch of radar signals I can’t match to any known system either.”

  “I’m stumped,” admitted Hector. “Must be something new.”

  Joshua Chamberlain’s maneuvering thrusters drowned out conversation for a moment, the deck transmitting the vibration to their suits. Mitchie had asked the captain to take the spin off the ship. The new bogey was now centered in the open door.

  “Ma’am? Couldn’t that attract attention?” asked Hector.

  “We’ll have to risk it,” she said. “Can you give me a range to that ship?”

  “No’m. Can’t figure out the size. I’ve just got a direction.”

  “Assume it’s a six hundred meter sphere.”

  “Ma’am, did you say six hundred?”

  “Plug it in,” Mitchie ordered.

  Hector typed amazingly fast for someone in a pressure suit. He put the calculated position on a map of the system. “That’s outside the emergence zone. Closer to our frigates than its buddies.”

  “Signal from the Flag,” said Jackson. “Angles on Fox 93, that’s their label for the new guy. They want us to triangulate. Data’s almost six minutes old.” Light-speed lag was a routine issue for this kind of problem.

  “Put ‘em in the system,” grunted the senior PO.

  The intersection of the angles appeared on the map, almost touching the dot projected from the estimated size. Hector sheepishly said, “I guess that is a six hundred meter hull, ma’am.”

  “Yes. Not good news for us. Jackson, send them that. And the rest of the report, they can have it a few minutes early.”

  “Yes’m.”

  Hector was still analyzing the target. “It’s been turning. Just stopped. Now it’s firing its torch, I think. Odd spectrum, very cool.”

  “You’re not seeing the whole plume, just where it’s spread out wider than the ship. So it’s boosting toward us.”

  “Toward their rendezvous. About the same vector from there. Hmmm.” A side display showed the Fusion ships converging on each other. “The dozen ships closest to Bonaventure just flipped around. Headed toward the new guy. Fast. Most of ‘em went from ten gravs to forty. Rough on the crews.” More typing. “Going to take hours to meet up though.”

  “Which gives us a shot at winning this battle,” said Mitchie. “Jackson, message to the Flag.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Take this down.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The junior petty officer pulled up the communications interface.

  “Fox 93 is a Kydoimos-class battleship.” She paused to spell the name for Jackson. “Six hundred meter diameter sphere. Has a spinal directed energy weapon capable of destroying any ship. Large numbers of standard weapons. Fusion has kept existence of this class secret until now.” Matching Jackson’s typing speed required many frustrating pauses. Mitchie kept her tone even.

  “Fusion Navy would not reveal the battleship unless it intended to use it for a decisive victory. Its presence proves the Fusion plans a battle here. Attacking Fox 93 while separated from its support fleet is the best opportunity for victory. Recommend full assault on battleship. Nearby ships should use jitter maneuvering.”

  She took a deep breath. “Signed, Lieutenant Michigan Long. Akiak Space Guard. DCC Intelligence. Send it.”

  “Encrypted and sent, ma’am,” said Jackson.

  “If you don’t mind me saying, Lieutenant,” said Hector. “Admirals don’t like being told what to do.”

  “If we win he can reprimand me.”

  Neither had an answer to that. The silence lengthened as they stared at Fox 93’s blip. Mitchie switched channels. After briefing Captain Schwartzenberger she found a private channel to talk to Guo on.

  “I hope you don’t get court martialed,” he said after hearing her story. “I’m not sure I could handle being married to a civilian.”

  “Jerk.”

  “Do chief petty officers make enough to support a wife? I never checked.”

  “Didn’t Master Chief cover how to collect your pay?”

  “Nope. Making sure I got every other round was the only money he talked about.”

  “Maybe I should’ve talked the Skipper into making you a warrant. Easier on the liver.”

  “Nah. We had one drinking with us. I don’t think he had a liver.”

  Hector waved at her.

  “Gotta go, love you!” She switched back to local comm. “News?”

  “Ma’am, we have maneuvering on the whole Disconnect force. They’re all heading for the battleship.”

  Mitchie grabbed a strut to pull herself closer to the displays. The green friendly blips all had acceleration arrows attached now.

&nb
sp; “Correction,” he continued. “Some of the frigates are going around it. Looks like they’re trying to get between Fox 93 and the ones coming to reinforce it.”

  “Not someplace I’d want to be,” muttered Jackson.

  Looking over the displays Mitchie realized most of the orange Fusion blips wore yellow “stale data” halos. Holding still to focus on the battleship had put the fleet’s rendezvous out of their field of view. Time to talk to the Skipper again.

  The observers flinched as Captain Schwartzenberger sent out a warning to brace for maneuver. A few thruster blasts later the cargo doors framed the majority of the ships in the system.

  The Fusion fleet was no longer a smooth ball contracting into the rendezvous point. Only the original dozen accelerated hard toward Fox 93. Many still headed for the rendezvous. The majority had changed course toward the Diskers or just cut thrust.

  “What a mess,” said Hector.

  “Loss of control,” said Mitchie. “The big boss is on the battleship. He’s too wrapped up in his own problems to issue orders for the whole fleet. So everyone is guessing if they should stick with the original plan or join in the rescue.”

  Jackson broke in. “Picking up voice signals. Surrender demands.”

  “Going through the motions. Not our problem. When we’ve got updated vectors on all of them send a report in.”

  “Yes’m.”

  Over the next hour the Fusion ships all turned toward the battleship. The observers calculated the new rendezvous point. Mitchie expected the fighting to be over before any ships reached it.

  “Missile launch!” yelled Jackson.

  Mitchie snapped awake. She’d started to doze off watching the crawling blips on the displays. Now the Disconnect blockade flotilla hid behind a solid mass of missile icons.

  “Nothing from the frigates,” reported Hector. “Correction—a few of them are launching late.”

  Jackson laid circles on the display centered on Fox 93. “They’re ahead of the rest. It’s a time-on-target attack.” More frigates spawned missile clouds in turn.

  “Battleship’s cut thrust,” reported the senior petty officer. “It’s turning.”

  “Report that to the flag immediately,” snapped Mitchie.

  Jackson keyed in the transmission. “Sent.”

  Mitchie looked at the display. It would take nearly three minutes for the warning to reach the flagship. “Are the frigates maneuvering?”

  “No, ma’am. Straight thrust.”

  “Crap.” Mitchie looked over Hector’s shoulder. One of the Disconnect ships trying to by-pass the battleship put on a red halo. Mitchie ran through her memory of the training sims to identify it. Red meant bad data. In the sim rebooting the sensor array had fixed it.

  Hector was already debugging the system. “No visual data on the frigate. But still getting consistent data on the other ones. High infrared but the spectrum doesn’t match anything.”

  “It’s dust.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “The battleship hit it with the spinal weapon. Nothing left but dust.” Mitchie’s tone was bitter. She’d warned them, dammit.

  “Dust would have a cooling rate of—” Hector quickly ran a simulation. “Curve matches. Yes, ma’am. Dust.”

  “Lost another,” said Jackson.

  Mitchie considered messaging the admiral again. No, the staff is looking at my earlier message right now and realizing I meant it. And I’m in enough trouble already. They were minutes away from the flagship, the staff would probably have new orders sent out before any message she sent out could arrive.

  “They’re starting to evade,” reported Hector. The display hadn’t changed. He must be looking at the raw data.

  “Good.”

  “Missile launches from Cavalry Squadron.” That was the tag they’d put on the dozen ships trying to get to Fox 93.

  “Targets?”

  “Can’t tell.” Jackson typed some more. “Too much overlap. Spreading out a bit so not just one target.”

  Yelling at them wouldn’t improve the data so Mitchie gritted her teeth. A bicuspid had been regrown two years back. It was oversized, pressing into her jaw. She bit down harder.

  “I’ve got some identifiable missile groups splitting off,” said Jackson. “They’re going for the frigates. The big mass is still spreading out. Heading roughly toward the blockade flotilla.”

  “Sounds like a counter-missile barrage.” Mitchie ordered her to relay the new data to the flag. Another frigate had been lost to the battleship’s superweapon after several misses.

  “If we keep transmitting sooner or later someone’s going to pick it up and send a missile our way,” fretted Hector.

  “That’s why we get the big bucks.”

  “Does this boat even have any anti-missile jammers?”

  “We can do evasive maneuvering,” said the pilot.

  “In this barge?” Hector was incredulous.

  “She’s evaded cannon fire.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Someone tried to kidnap one of our passengers. It’s a long story.”

  “I thought you didn’t carry passengers.”

  “We usually don’t. ‘Cause they’re trouble.”

  Jackson interrupted the argument to announce more missile launches. The bulk of the Fusion force was firing on the Disconnect formation. “It’s pretty random. Going to arrive as an irregular stream.”

  “Suppression fire,” said Mitchie. “Trying to discourage a follow-up attack on the big one.”

  “Frigates launching now. Looks like that’s trying to counter the counter-missile shots from Cavalry Squadron.”

  “Wonder how many levels deep we’ll go,” muttered Mitchie.

  “Not many, ma’am,” said Hector. “The time on target is getting close.”

  After sending in another update they set the largest display to track the attack on Fox 93. The countermissile wave was destroyed by a combination of the new frigate missiles and some more peeled off from the main attack. The Disconnect trusted their missiles with better brains than the Fusion would allow any unsupervised system to have. The countermissiles had some pre-programmed surprises but their opponents adapted faster. The main attack had been weakened by less than ten percent. Most of the missiles were coasting, not wanting to come in so fast they wouldn’t be able to maneuver on the final assault.

  The attacking missile swarms stretched into a half-globe around the fleeing ship. There were gaps where frigates had died before making their launches. Other missiles slid over to fill them. The networked decision algorithm decided they were ready. The missiles doubled their acceleration as they aimed straight at their target.

  The battleship had cut its acceleration, not bothering to try outmaneuvering them. Counter-missiles spat out in all directions.

  Hector said, “Odd, there’s a gap in the CM coverage.”

  The incoming missile icons in a thirty degree cone turned red and stopped accelerating.

  “That’s a new trick,” said Mitchie. “Are they dust?”

  “Looks like it, ma’am.” Fox 93’s icon went red next. “That’s jamming.”

  The display kept zooming in as the missiles closed. The counter-missiles disappeared just before reaching their targets, exploding in clouds of shrapnel and EMP. The center of the screen became a fuzzy “NO VALID DATA” zone.

  “How long does it take for that to disperse?” asked Mitchie.

  “No idea, ma’am,” answered Hector. “This is a bigger attack than anything I ever simmed. And it’s not like we had real battles to calibrate those sims against.”

  “Right.”

  A magnified visual display was more interesting. A cloud of dust and gas glowed and flickered with explosions inside it. Pretty, even if they couldn’t tell if the flashes were counter-missiles weakening the attack, missiles striking the battleship, or fratricidal collisions between deflected missiles. A few missiles emerged from the cloud, frantically decelerating so they could go back for
another pass.

  “I’m getting something!” cried Hector. “Strong signal. Too big to be a missile.”

  “It survived?” gasped Jackson.

  “Pretty hurt if it did. I’m picking up a strong spin.” More typing. “No. This is about two hundred and fifty meters by one hundred. Irregular. That was one tough ship.”

  “I’m picking up lifepod distress beacons,” said Jackson.

  “Spotted another chunk, smaller than the first one. Damn tough ship.”

  “Relay it all. What’re the rest of the bad guys doing?” asked Mitchie.

  Hector shifted his sensors. “Cavalry Squadron turned over. Going the other way, still at forty gravs. That must’ve hurt. No change in the rest. Well, some of them have cut thrust.”

  Mitchie laughed. “They’ve got no plan. And probably no admiral.”

  The Disconnect’s admiral was still alive. He stayed that way through the missile barrage on his command. Counter missiles, interceptor fire, and interlocking plumes destroyed almost all of the Fusion attack. One light cruiser was lost to sheer bad luck.

  A few boring hours passed until they received a signal from the flag. “Ceasefire agreement established. Fusion ships will leave system. Joshua Chamberlain will proceed to Fox 93’s location at best acceleration to perform search and rescue.”

  The techs let out cheers.

  Mitchie said, “I’m going to the bridge. Get this stuff secured then strap into your bunks.”

  First Battle of Bonaventure.

  Chapter Three: Lifeguard

  Bonaventure System, acceleration 3 m/s2

  The Fusion made the best lifepods around. They were sturdy enough to handle bumping into debris. A torchship’s plume would still pop one like a soap bubble. So a minimum-time approach to the wreck was out.

  Mitchie calculated the best way to approach was to overshoot it to the side, then accelerate back to where they needed to be. Captain Schwartzenberger felt he could handle flying that course so he sent her off for a couple hours’ nap before she needed to put her pressure suit back on.