Jack of Harts 2: Angel Flight

by Medron Pryde

  “I think that’s the point,” Jack said with one eyebrow raised at the cyber.

  She blinked. “I see. Yes.” The cyber shifted back and forth on her feet, looking momentarily taken aback. But she was a quick girl. “I will do what I can,” she promised.

  “That’s all I ask,” Jack said with a shrug.

  “Good luck,” she ordered and faded away.

  Christine frowned and looked around. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope you’re wrong.”

  Jack chuckled. “Trust me, so do I.” Then he shrugged and Enterprise’s cyber shared a glance with Betty.

  Her lips pursed in distaste. “You just usually aren’t.”

  “You know, we might want to think about leaving,” Jack said with a raised eyebrow.

  She snorted. “Have you tried yet?”

  Jack frowned at the mere idea of running out on warships that needed his protection. “No,” was all he said though.

  Christine folded her arms under her impressive breasts and shook her head. “Well, several of our ships have. They report a stellar mass blocking the translation to hyperspace.”

  Jack looked around at all the displays and frowned. They were lightminutes from the local star, far outside any interference it could give. “Where?”

  “That is a very good question.” Christine drummed her fingers on her forearms. “We’re trying to ascertain that, literally as we speak.”

  And then the feeling finally hit him where it counted. “Oh, frak me.”

  Christine raised an eyebrow at him. “I don’t think that’s an appropriate request.”

  Jack snorted. “Sorry. I mean…this really is a trap. They’re holding us here.”

  “How?” Christine asked in a serious tone.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said with a helpless shrug. “I don’t understand gravitic science, but if I wanted to kill an enemy, I’d make sure they couldn’t run and then shoot them to death from a safe range.”

  Christine made a show of examining the displays showing the continuing missile salvo dying short of their wall of battle. “Your logic makes distressing sense. Even if your language skills need help.”

  “Hey now. I work real hard to sound this smart,” Jack said with a smirk.

  “I know,” she returned with a hopeless sigh.

  A display blinked and he saw Durango and Arizona turning away from the wall of battle. The American battleships moved towards his position, smaller cruisers, destroyers, and frigates turning to follow them. For a moment it looked like the wall was coming apart, but the Spanish Armada quickly spread to fill in the holes.

  Durango’s cyber appeared on his console, a smile on her lips. She looked similar to Santa Isabel’s cyber in many ways, easily as Hispanic as the Spanish cyber. But there was something indefinably American about her. He didn’t know what it was, but it was there. He liked it.

  “Hey, Amparo,” he welcomed her with an open smile. “Welcome aboard.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So, you come this way often?” Jack asked.

  Amparo shook her head with an exasperated smile. “We’ve been considering your thoughts. They make sense.”

  “So you pulled an entire task force out of the wall?” Jack asked.

  Amparo paused to look at him carefully. “You did say we needed to redeploy, didn’t you?”

  “I did.” Jack shrugged. “And I’m happy to have you. I’m just…surprised.”

  Amparo raised one eyebrow at him. “Don’t be. I never much liked the wall of battle. I’m built to face my enemies head on and these British walls hamper my mobility.”

  “You are a graceful and elegant instrument of war compared to those wallers back there,” Jack noted with a wink.

  Amparo cocked her head to the side with a knowing look in her eyes. “Flattery, Captain Jack?”

  “Truth,” Jack corrected.

  “Contact!” Betty shouted and he turned to see more missiles boiling out of what looked like a big empty hole in space. Nothing special at all was there moments ago. Now it was a bristling cauldron of spewing death headed in their general direction.

  “Wow,” Jack whispered as the numbers began to register.

  “Yeah.” Betty scowled at the displays. “I hate it when you’re right.”

  “Me too.” Jack paused for a moment and let loose with something he’d learned since joining the Marines. “Oh Lord, for what we are about to receive, may we be truly thankful.”

  “Amen,” Betty and Jasmine chorused.

  Jack interlaced his fingers, cracked his knuckles, and placed his hands back on the controls. Things were about to get busy. He scanned the displays, calculating speed, distance, and time for the missiles to reach his fleet. Unlike the bombardment coming from the other side, this was a single large volley with no follow up missiles. The Shang had obviously been hoping to hit them by surprise. Well, that wasn’t going according to their plans. Still, it was thousands of missiles and they were going to hurt no matter what he did. He shook his head, not liking what he needed to do.

  “Open fire at two lightseconds, spread across the entire front.”

  Amparo frowned. “You’re not going to get many hits like that.”

  Jack nodded. It would take the sunlight reflected from the surface of the missiles two seconds to arrive at his fighters and his laser attacks would take another two seconds to return. His cybers needed to guess where the missiles would be four seconds in their future, over one hundred thousand kilometers from where they looked like they were, to have a hope of hitting them. It was, in a nutshell, impossible to expect any reliable hits at that range.

  “I’m not looking for hits,” Jack replied with a smile.

  Amparo raised a disbelieving eyebrow at him.

  Jack chuckled. “Oh, I wouldn’t mind some, but I won’t demand the impossible.”

  “Then why are you wasting the ammo?” Amaro asked.

  “Not wasting. Paying for time. The more time we buy, the more time the wall’s point defenses have to shoot them,” he explained with a wave of his hand behind them.

  Amparo frowned at him. “So how do we buy time?”

  Jack shrugged. “I’m hoping that when the AIs on those missiles detect our incoming fire they’ll start up some serious evasion routines.”

  “Which will slow down their forward progress and buy us time,” Amparo finished for him with a nod. “We wouldn’t fall for it.”

  “It’s a bit of a shot in the dark,” Jack said with a wink.

  Amparo groaned. “You have a horrible sense of humor.”

  “I know.” Jack opened his hands, palms up, and gave her an urchin’s grin. “But it was funny.”

  “No.” Amparo let the word drag out and crossed her arms. He was getting used to that response.

  “Well, I thought it was,” Betty interrupted.

  “See?” Jack smiled at Amparo. “She thinks I’m funny.”

  “Not really,” Betty corrected with a smirk. “But a broken clock is right at least once a day.”

  Jack winced and opened his mouth to say something pithy when he felt the fighter shudder. All three gravitic cannons opened up, shooting a twisting cone of gravity towards the incoming salvo. Both missile banks began firing continuously and their laser arrays pulsed at maximum rate. A glance at one display showed their capacitors actually dipping down from the energy drain, and he held on tight.

  The other Avengers and the entire American task force around him opened fire as well. Jack aimed a raised eyebrow at Amparo.

  “So? Just because I mock you doesn’t mean you don’t have good ideas,” Amparo answered his silent question.

  “What was that?” Jack waggled his eyebrows at her. “I didn’t quite hear you.”

  Amparo cleared her throat and gave him The Look that meant he was treading on thing ice. And if anybody knew the dangers of thin ice it was a native born son of northern Minnesota. “Don’t be fishing for compliments in waters deep enough to drown you when y
ou find out you’ve hooked a whale.”

  Jack chuckled and waved a hand towards the wall. “They are whales. You on the other hand are a graceful and deadly shark.”

  Amparo measured him up one said and down the other. “Doesn’t that make me more dangerous?” she finally asked.

  “I laugh at danger,” Jack answered and punctuated it with a laugh.

  Amparo just rolled her eyes and looked at Betty. “Tell me you didn’t pick him for his sense of humor.”

  “Hey!” Jack protested.

  “I would never be that stupid,” Betty answered innocently.

  “You wound me,” he said with an indignant sniff, but relaxed back in his seat to watch the engagement.

  “You’ll heal,” Betty whispered as their missiles disengaged engines within seconds of launching. They didn’t have the fuel to maintain a burn over two lightseconds of space, but if they drifted on momentum they could wait until they reached attack range to light their drives up again. It was a cheater’s way of getting more range out of the missiles. And as Jack had always maintained, if you weren’t cheating you weren’t trying to win.

  He saw the slight puff that accompanied a handful of Shang missiles dying and smiled. The race was on. Then the displays began to flash and he saw thousands of incoming Shang missiles begin to swerve. “Yippie ki-yay!” Jack crowed and didn’t care one bit that every direct-fire weapon they had was now missing by tens of thousands of kilometers, if not more.

  “It really worked,” Amparo said in a shocked tone.

  “Hey,” Jack protested. “I thought you said it was a good idea.”

  “I most certainly did not say that,” Amparo returned, both eyebrows raised this time. “I just implied that sometimes you might have them.”

  “Oh,” Jack answered and chewed his lip for a bit. “So. Is this one of them?”

  Amparo gave him another measuring look before answering. “Maybe,” she finally whispered. “But we’re burning through a lot of ammo.”

  Another missile puffed out of life as they passed under one lightsecond away, but the vast majority of their weapons were still going wild.

  “It does no good in the bins,” Jack answered the battleship.

  Amparo just snorted and shook her head. “True. Sometimes I wonder if you’re truly as stupid as you act.”

  “As long as they underestimate me, I’m happy,” Jack said with a wink.

  Then the first of his missiles came to life, spewing blue fusion flames into space. All around them across the front, hundreds of missiles rocketed into action and streaked into the teeth of the nearest enemy missiles. Jack winced at the timer counting down the very few seconds left but watched the Shang missiles die by the hundreds to his counter-fire. They were moving slower now, arcing through grander and more evasive maneuvers impossible for the cybers to project with their lasers, but more and more missiles began to track them.

  Balls of light signaled the end of gravitic power plants torn apart, a roiling wave that rushed towards them like surf against the beach. Jack winced again at the thought. Sand after all tended to do rather badly on an individual basis when it came to ocean waves. And one Captain Jack Hart did not intend to be washed away like one of them.

  He watched the wavefront bare down on the far too thin line of fighters and warships guarding the fleet’s rear. At least his tactic had slowed the missiles’ approach and given them some time to adjust. The Cowboys were beginning to put an appreciable dent into the number of missiles but there were simply too many of them. He began to feel more like that grain of sand than he wanted to as he watched more and more missiles get within half a lightsecond of their formation.

  Then the wall of British dreadnoughts and Spanish battleships opened up with the point defense on their near flanks and it felt like the end of the world. Lasers and beams of twisted gravity passed by, and sometimes through, the American formation. Missiles streaked by, filling space with a thin mist of dissipating exhaust gases.

  “Give me countdown on those missiles,” Jack ordered and flexed his fingers.

  “For us or the fleet?” Betty asked.

  “Us.”

  “Got it,” Betty answered and one of the displays filled with a number. Five. Well, that was just lovely. He’d really been hoping for more time. Not expecting, but hoping.

  “Cowboys, break on my signal.” Jack glanced at Betty and she nodded in understanding. This was going to get hairy in a very bad way.

  Four.

  “They’re gettin’ awful close, boss,” Cat transmitted, her voice filled with concern. Explosions filled the space before them and hundreds more Shang missiles died. But the firestorm continued to move closer and Jack knew that no amount of point defense was going to get them all.

  Three.

  “They’re gonna get closer,” Jack returned as the gravitic cannons thrummed again, stabbing into the missile swarm. He thought he saw them rip apart dozens of missiles but there were still thousands more. He felt like he was trying to a plug a leak in the Hoover Dam with a tube of superglue and it just wasn’t going well.

  Two.

  “I don’t like them getting closer,” Cat announced and Jack chuckled. He placed his fingers back on the stick and throttle as their missiles and lasers went to continuous fire, laying down a stream of death that sent scores of missiles into oblivion. It was nowhere near enough.

  One.

  “Break,” Jack ordered and pulled the controls to the left. Thrusters flared and the formation of Avengers exploded into a chaotic mess of individually maneuvering fighters. Or so the complicated maneuver was designed to look to outside eyes. In reality it was a complex plan designed by the collective intellect of seven cybernetic intelligences, randomized by six Marine fighter pilots, and thrown into the teeth of the enemy missiles by seventy-two Avenger-class starfighters. The Shang AIs never saw it coming.

  The Avengers scattered, spinning to sweep over two hundred gravitic cannons across the missile swarm. Over a hundred missile batteries spat their vengeance as fast as they could reload and over five hundred lasers sent coherent beams of deadly light through the exhaust gases filling space. Missiles died by the scores, by the hundreds, but nothing could stop the missile swarm from engulfing them.

  Everywhere Jack looked he saw and felt missiles, exhaust, explosions, and death. There was no safe place to be but he let his mind go blank and just moved whenever he got the urge to move. He had a lot of urges to move and his hands twitched on the stick and throttle. Missiles exploded all around them and a warning light told him their deflection grid was failing. Another display came up, showing armor damage on the port wing. An Avenger ahead of him exploded and another missile flew by close enough he could have stepped onto it if he’d wanted to.

  And then they were through the storm, scattered Avengers spinning to keep firing on the missiles. Jack let out a shaky breath, glancing at the displays to see several Avenger drones missing. All piloted Avengers still lived though and he licked his lips in relief.

  “Bad touch!” Cat shouted. “That was a bad touch!” she repeated, and Jack examined her fighter on one of the displays. Her armor was riddled with holes and it looked like her main laser turret had been completely stripped off. The displays showed very few of his Cowboys had avoided damage and nearly all of their deflection grids were fluctuating or completely gone.

  If the Shang missiles had been focused on killing his fighters, they would have been in some serious trouble. No. They probably would have been dead. Jack was honest enough with himself to recognize that fact. Then he put the thought aside and turned to examine the results of the rest of the Shang barrage.

  Atmosphere and wreckage wreathed the American task force, radiating from almost every ship. The displays showed that every ship had taken at least one major hit and some appeared heavily damaged. Flames spewed from Durango’s flank, the very oxygen in her air burning from the assault. The air ran out as he watched, the supply either cut off or exhausted, and the flam
es sputtered away so he could continue looking at the task force. They hadn’t lost any ships. He frowned at the realization. That many missiles should have killed ships.

  And then his mind caught up to his eyes. The wave of missiles still lived, whittled down to a quarter of its original size. But the thousand remaining missiles bore down on the four British dreadnoughts anchoring Third Fleet’s center.

  “Ah, hell,” Jack muttered as the British point defenses laid down a final wall of death that swept missiles away as if slapped by the hand of God.

  But there were too many missiles, too few point defense batteries even on those behemoths, and too little time for them to kill more than a few hundred. The remaining Shang missiles entered attack range, the first hundred or so rending deflection grids in their last act of existence. Another hundred poured in through the open grids to rip armor apart. The final hundred or so missiles smashed into the heavy warships one last time, seeking any weakness their brothers or sisters had generated.

  Flames wreathed the wall of battle and Jack held his breath, hoping he’d done enough. He almost prayed but doubted the man his parents believed in would have much time for someone suddenly asking for favors out of the blue. He knew he wouldn’t and settled for licking his lips as he watched the dreadnoughts writhe in the grip of the Shang assault.

  There are easy times in life. There are hard times in life. There are times of peace, and times to make war. I like peace myself. Always have. But there’s no use in going halfway when it comes to war. Win or lose, live or die, they’re just sides of the same coin. And I will never toss that coin randomly. I will stack the deck, I will use loaded dice, and I will do everything else it takes to make certain that the odds are ever in my favor. Cause if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.

  Los Angeles

  The explosions faded, the wreckage of shattered missiles drifted away, and Jack’s displays cleared to show him the British dreadnoughts anchoring the heart of Third Fleet’s wall of battle. They weren’t the largest ships he’d ever seen, or even the most powerful. That honor went to Columbia. She was a true jewel of a starship, but the British built their dreadnoughts real tough.