Captain and Command

by Scott Bartlett

  “Enemy forces closing, sir,” said Chief Orlo, Husher’s Tumbran sensor operator.

  “Acknowledged,” Husher said.

  The Hornet was holding orbit just below one of Summit’s defense platforms. Husher hadn’t bothered ordering her parked directly below the platform. The ship’s position was less about avoiding detection and more about remaining within the various platforms’ protective envelopes until it became necessary to emerge. That wasn’t yet.

  As expected, the Gok force was pointed straight down into the planet’s gravity well—straight at the platform beneath which the Hornet maintained orbit. Attempting to fly through a gap in the orbital defense platforms’ coverage would be foolhardy. The platforms’ arsenals were too powerful, and their range too far. Any attempt to slip through would end in catastrophe for the attackers, with up to five platforms all within optimal firing range of them.

  The designers of Summit’s defensive suite had even built that fact into their design, placing the planet’s various orbital shipbuilding facilities equidistant between the defense platforms. The facilities were positioned there as bait, to lure guileless commanders to their doom.

  But a savvy commander would know that heading straight at one platform was the best call, and it surprised Husher a little to see the Gok commander making it. Even though the enemy’s trajectory would take them straight into a storm of ordnance and laserfire unleashed by the platform they approached, the surrounding four platforms would have poorer firing angles, in addition to being forced to shoot from a farther distance.

  “The lead warships have entered maximum firing range, Captain,” the sensor operator said.

  “Noted,” Husher said.

  His Coms officer turned toward him. “Sir, should I transmit the order to launch?”

  “Not yet.” Over the years, Husher and the Gok had stared at each other across many battlespaces, and he knew he could count on them to fully commit, with barely a second thought for what Husher might have prepared for them.

  The nearby defense platform opened with a barrage of kinetic impactors from dozens of turrets. Having entered optimal firing range seconds before, the Gok warships returned the favor, and suddenly the battlespace was filled with rounds being exchanged across the void at blistering velocities.

  “Tactical, add our forward guns to the platform’s,” Husher said. “We don’t want to let on that we’re here for anything other than lending incremental support to the platform’s arsenal.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The Coms officer kept shooting nervous glances at Husher, which he found annoying, but at least the man didn’t prompt him again for the order he would soon give.

  The XO, however, did. “Sir, you’re squandering our window,” Nelson said, having twisted bodily in the XO’s seat to gape at Husher with widened eyes.

  “Shut up,” Husher snapped. He didn’t have time to explain his thinking to his XO, nor should he have to.

  Incredibly, Nelson rose to his feet, his hands shaking at his sides. “Captain Husher. I have to insist that you send that order immediately. The Gok ships are well within range, and if we wait any longer, they’ll have punched a hole through the planet’s—”

  “Commander Nelson,” Husher barked, and the man’s head jerked, probably at the volume of Husher’s words. “When IGF Command assigned you to my ship as XO, they did so with the tacit understanding that your captain has the experience to navigate situations for which you have no facility. This seems to be one of those situations. Take your seat, Nelson—that’s an order.”

  But instead of sitting, Nelson turned to rush toward the Coms station, which caused the officer sitting there to lean away from the approaching XO, his expression aghast.

  Husher sprang from his seat, bounded across the CIC deck, and grasped his XO by the back of his uniform before he could reach the Coms station. Bracing himself against the deck, he flung Nelson in the opposite direction, sending him sprawling across the cold steel.

  “Get a pair of marines in here, now,” Husher ordered the Coms officer, who only wasted a second gawking at the downed XO before turning to his station once more.

  Less than a minute later, his CIC was clear of XOs having nervous breakdowns, and the marines had been given orders to confine Nelson to his quarters until further notice.

  At last, Husher was able to return his attention to the tactical display—to find that the optimal window for action had almost closed. Suppressing a curse for Nelson, Husher barked, “Coms, send the order to launch, now.”

  To his credit, Ensign Peterson didn’t take the time to acknowledge the order before completing the transmission. “It’s done, Captain.”

  Husher nodded, and the entire CIC seemed to hold its breath as every officer’s eyes were riveted to the main viewscreen.

  Condors streamed out of the ten closest orbital shipbuilding facilities—almost every Condor that had been active on the Providence during the Second Galactic War, as well as several that had been sent here from hangar bays all across the galaxy, to be decommissioned and then sold or scrapped for parts.

  Nearly six-hundred starfighters sped toward the thirty-four Gok ships. In response, the carriers among the enemy force launched Slags, the Gok version of starfighters; asymmetrical lumps that would have looked more at home in a scrap heap than flying across a battlespace. Nevertheless, each Slag packed some serious artillery, and even though the Gok had lately shied away from kamikaze tactics when it came to their warships, their fighter pilots had no such reservations.

  The Condors opened fire with kinetic impactors the moment they entered maximum range, and their target selection left a lot to be desired. IGF doctrine was similar to what the UHF’s had been, in that it encouraged concentrating fire on targets until they went down before moving on to the next. In contrast, the Condors’ shooting today resembled a rainstorm more than it did an intelligent engagement strategy.

  Under normal circumstances, Husher would have been disgusted by such a sloppy display, but these weren’t normal circumstances. For their part, the Slag pilots didn’t seem to notice—or at least, their tactics didn’t deviate from their own species’ usual military doctrine. They returned fire in almost as slipshod a fashion, and as the two fighter forces closed, each Gok pilot adopted a collision course with a Condor.

  Then, the Condors did something that was also radically out-of-line with typical IGF tactics: they flew straight at the Slags, as though they were inviting a collision.

  Clearly, the Gok had no idea how to react to that. A few of them even peeled away, perhaps finally sensing that something wasn’t right.

  The Condors who’d won those individual games of chicken continued on at full speed, not moving to pursue the Slags who’d veered away. But the Condors that were still set to collide with Slags instead pulled up at the last second. Several collisions occurred anyway, as the Gok pilots involved proved fast enough to make the necessary split-second course corrections.

  But most of the Condors were successful in dodging their adversaries, and together, over four-hundred surviving Condors blasted past the Slags—straight toward the enemy warships.

  At first, the enemy vessels just sat there, clearly unsure how to react to a tactic they’d almost certainly never encountered before. Then, they began targeting down the Condors, but it was far too late.

  Three full squadrons—a total of forty-eight fighters—dove toward the hull of the nearest ship, a destroyer. Point defense turrets blazed to life all along the great ship’s length, mowing down several of the IGF fighters, but it didn’t have a prayer of stopping them all.

  The Condors had never been designed to serve as missiles, but they proved fairly effective at it all the same, mostly because they carried several actual missiles. They exploded on impact, and the sixth Condor to dash itself against the destroyer caused the entire ship to rupture, sending gouts of shrapnel-speckled flame shooting into space before quickly sputtering out in the breathless void.

 
; The remaining Condors had already chosen targets and were speeding toward them. By the time the Gok force had managed to neutralize the kamikaze Condor fleet, seven of their warships had been neutralized—two missile cruisers, three corvettes, and a frigate joining the destroyer in fiery oblivion.

  Seven down, twenty-seven to go.

  The tactic could only be called a success, but celebrations failed to erupt inside Husher’s CIC. The odds were still too stacked against them, and too great a price had been paid for the success they’d had—but only in steel and ordnance, not in the lives of Union citizens.

  The Condors had been empty, hastily loaded with primitive protocols to fire on the nearest targets and to take last-second steps to avoid collisions with Slags. That done, they’d followed their final directive unflinchingly—to plunge into the hulls of whatever Gok warships they could reach.

  “Nav, all ahead toward the enemy formation, and Coms, send the other captains the order to start making their way around the planet,” Husher said. “And tell Commander Fesky that it’s her turn.”

  Chapter 3

  No Worthier Death

  Fesky opened a wide channel with her entire Air Group, such as it was. She had serious doubts about whether the collection of pilots under her command deserved to be called an Air Group. They certainly lacked the cohesion the term implied. Even the way they’d taxied onto the launch catapults, which the Condors had so recently vacated, had been haphazard. The Pythons weren’t even meant to launch from catapults, or at least, it wasn’t optimal. Most of the Fleet’s carriers had already been installed with launch tubes to accommodate the new fighter.

  In addition to her Hornet pilots, who she knew she could rely on, there were also the beings who the IGF had sent to be trained on the new starfighters, plus the Summit planetary defense group, who were skilled enough, though extremely resistant to following an outsider’s orders.

  Which was exactly what they needed to do right now.

  Shunting aside her reservations as useless for the present moment, Fesky spoke to her pilots: “I just got the go-ahead from Captain Husher. His gambit with the Condors took out seven enemy ships, and the defense platform just got two more. But there are plenty of Slags left, and in terms of warships they still outnumber us five-to-one, which is counting our four ships that haven’t arrived yet. The defense platform’s taking a beating, with three major turret batteries neutralized already. If that platform goes down, the day is lost. The captain’s depending on us, the people of Summit are depending on us, and in all likelihood, the galaxy’s depending on us too.

  “I know most of you have never trained on an actual Python outside of a sim, and I know some of you haven’t even done that. But the principles are the same, and your onboard computer should be smart enough to provide you with relevant information when you need it. We can’t afford for you to feel intimidated. We can’t afford for you to get overwhelmed. The Gok won’t show anyone in this system mercy, so if you’d like to survive, I need you to push past your fear. If you die today, there is no worthier death. So don’t be afraid. Pythons, launch!”

  They did, more or less as one—rocketing into the vacuum of space from the Hornet’s twin flight decks. More Pythons would be launching from the flight decks located on the periphery of the shipbuilding platforms below, but she and her regular pilots would have a head start, given the carrier’s forward position.

  Fesky knew the Pythons had power—it was merely a question of whether they could properly harness that power with little to no training. As her Python screamed toward the enemy ships, Fesky reviewed the fighter’s new capabilities.

  Advanced electronic warfare tech…improved track-before-detect systems…unbelievably sophisticated sensor fusion…and the new augmented HUD.

  It was the last feature that elicited the most skepticism, from Fesky and others. Where Condor sensors had interfaced with flight suit helmets, displaying relevant data on a HUD in the bottom corner of a pilot’s vision, Python pilots were instead required to wear what amounted to glorified contact lenses. The lenses projected whatever data was needed right over the pilot’s field of vision, obscuring the cockpit along with anything else she cared to see.

  The lenses were adapted Kaithian tech, not specifically meant for military use, but they’d been adapted easily enough. That wasn’t what bothered Fesky—it was the fact that she and her pilots were used to the old tactical display. The lenses made space combat into a video game, as far as she could see.

  Whatever the case, she was stuck with them, since the Python didn’t support the old HUD. You could always tell when designers were too enthusiastic about their new creations. It was when they denied you the option of using anything else.

  Her Python came into range of the enemy, and all conscious thought ceased as she sought her first target. She got more than she bargained for: three Slags made a beeline for her craft, firing kinetic impactors at full bore before following up with two missiles each.

  Her first instinct was to engage her fighter’s gyroscopes in order to whip it around, angling the engines toward the enemy. I need to buy some time to deal with those rockets!

  But she knew doing so would take her out of the battle for precious minutes they didn’t have—they needed to take down Gok ships as quickly as possible, and fleeing from missiles wasn’t conducive to that.

  Instead, she decided to leverage one of the Python’s new capabilities. Let’s see if this thing is all it’s cracked up to be.

  Unlike Condors, which had lacked electronic warfare capabilities unless they belonged to specialized squadrons, every Python came equipped with a suite of EW features.

  Maintaining her trajectory toward the missiles, she extended the Python’s corner reflectors and deployed four decoys, with the aim of re-reflecting enemy radar energy and producing false target returns. That done, she hoped for the best as she began targeting down the incoming rockets.

  The first enemy missile exploded faster than she would have expected. Intellectually, she knew the Python’s railguns had a faster rate of fire than the Condors’, but she hadn’t squared that with the reality of just how much more effective they would prove in combat.

  As she used her gyros to switch to the next missile, the smoothness of the controls also came as a surprise, as did the speed with which her target popped, emitting a brief flash to signal its destruction.

  Maybe I can get used to this after all.

  She managed to take down two more missiles before the remaining pair closed the distance—but neither struck her craft. Instead, they passed through the ghost Pythons she’d tricked their sensors into detecting, hurtling past her harmlessly.

  The Slags behaved similarly: unsure how to react to a cloud of Pythons where only one had been before, they each chose a target and made for it.

  They chose wrongly.

  Her tactic wasn’t foolproof. The Gok pilots could have easily gotten lucky and chosen correctly—but it had definitely saved her. Fesky engaged her gyros once more, rotating to angle her main gun at the Slags, which were struggling to come around as fast as they could for another pass.

  Too late. She took them out in quick succession, with only the third Slag managing even to come about before getting turned into shrapnel. The remaining two missiles had succeeded in turning, but she dealt with them well before they reached her and her ghostly copies.

  The space around her was clear of hostiles for now, and she took the opportunity to check how the engagement was going overall.

  Not good. Over a third of the Hornet Pythons were down already, and judging by the large number of Slags still in play, the slain pilots hadn’t even managed to take down an enemy pilot with them. The fighters that had launched from the shipbuilding facilities were arriving now, but they too started taking heavy losses immediately.

  Their objective was to buy enough time for the other four IGF warships to come around the planet and flank the enemy force, but at this rate, they’d be defeated well befor
e their backup arrived.

  She jumped on the wide channel again: “All pilots, engage mechanical and electronic jamming capabilities immediately!”

  Her order had a rapid effect on the battlespace. The Gok sensors were woefully outclassed by the Pythons’ capacity for sensor deception, and they clearly hadn’t accounted for every Python having EW capabilities.

  The Slags were thrown into disarray. In less than a minute after Fesky’s order, they ceased their kamikaze tactics altogether, instead trying desperately to shoot down what their sensors told them were viable targets.

  They might as well have been shooting blanks. A few more actual Pythons went down, but their losses were nothing compared to what the Gok racked up in short order.

  Within minutes, the entire Slag group fled toward their carriers, which were inching closer to the defense platform to help their pilots reach safety faster.

  “Should we pursue?” one of Fesky’s lieutenants asked.

  She studied the tactical display. Their job was to buy time, not to win the battle by themselves, and she doubted they’d be able to even if they wanted.

  She was about to give the order to pull back to the relative safety of the defense platform when a new icon appeared on her tactical display. It had appeared over Summit’s horizon, its shape a scaled-down version of the ship it represented instead of the triangular blip of the old tactical displays.

  Another tiny ship appeared, then another. The cavalry’s here, she thought to herself as the fourth IGF ship rounded the planet.

  “Press the attack,” she said, and no sooner than the words had left her beak, the Hornet began moving toward the enemy formation as well. The orbital defense platform began to burn through its main capacitor charge quickly, firing powerful laser blasts repeatedly into the enemy fleet. The laser fire was joined by similar blasts from the surrounding orbital platforms.