Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles 7: Renegades

by Andrew Beery

  His onboard weapons systems gave the Scorpion quite a sting. He had access to two wing-mounted plasma turrets that could engage multiple simultaneous targets. In addition, the Rubble Maker carried twenty kinetic impact weapons called KIMs, a cloaked tactical nuke and four Sandys. These last were useful for minefield emplacements. The nanites contained in them could quickly disassemble anything unfortunate enough to wander into their midst that did not transmit a proper ‘friend’ identifier signal.

  He signaled his AI to open a channel to his Wing Leader. “Commander, this is Rubble Maker. My board is green. I’m ‘a go’ for ruining somebody’s day.”

  “Well then Rubble Maker, welcome to the debutant ball! The party will start as soon as the CAG signals a ‘go for launch’… which he just did. OK LADIES, Party Time. Break left as soon as you clear the tubes. Form up on me. LAUNCH! LAUNCH! LAUNCH!”

  Stone felt himself pushed back hard in the seat. Given the strength of the inertial dampeners, he was impressed. From his perspective he went from a relative standstill to 10% the speed of light instantaneously. He knew the tubes could launch the Scorpion fighters even faster but the fact was they didn’t need to. Even at 0.1 c the time in the engagement window was prohibitively short. Fortunately, Scorpions could trick the laws of local space time by instantly shifting relative momentum. As a result he could change direction drastically without any loss for velocity.

  The effect on the battlefield was stunning. Scorpions flitted about like humming birds around a flower. They could approach a target at mind-blowing speeds and effectively stop on a dime. In actuality, they never stopped. Their specialized hyperfield emitters changed the direction of their momentum such that they bounced a few meters left then right several thousand times a second when they were in hover mode.

  In the simulators they could pop over a target, drop a load of missiles and pop out before the adversary could react. Unfortunately for Lieutenant Stone, simulators rarely got the little details right and in battle it was the little details that killed you.

  He broke to the left as he was instructed by Jax who was his CO and, for this mission, his designated wingman. His fighter was called the Betty Boop.

  Jax signaled him on their private channel. “OK Lieutenant lets go kick some alien butt. I’m going to head over to that guy in the lead. I’ll approach from the right, you come in from the left. Fire your beam weapons at half power. They are a good bit stronger than normal GCP fare. We don’t want to give away our strengths any sooner than we have to. Once you’ve fired, bank up and I’ll bank down.”

  “And if they don’t do the job?” Stone asked.

  “Then we come around again and up the yield on our plasma guns to 75%.”

  “Sounds like a plan… if other guy cooperates.”

  Stone heard the sound of the other man laughing over their shared comm-link.

  “Just remember battles are always a democracy,” Jax said, “Our opponents get a vote. Let’s just hope the Admiral has stuffed that ballot box.”

  ***

  F1 saw two groups of enemy fighters belching out of the belly of the GCP Yorktown. His combat analysis computer was confused. The flight profiles of the enemy’s ships did not match anything his sources said the GCP should have. Admiral Kimbridge was a renowned innovator when it came to integrating and adapting technology to her needs. He wondered just what he was running into.

  The ships moved at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light. Even more amazing they seemed to be able to maneuver without regard to the G-forces that must be felt by their pilots. Either they had found a way to overcome those G-forces or the ships were remotely piloted drones. He knew from experience that drone aircraft often over promised and undelivered… and so he was leaning towards piloted aircraft that handled like drones.

  “Computer, forward shields to maximum. Engage auto-targeting of approaching aircraft. Fire at will.”

  Immediately his ship’s kinetic energy weapon began to spew out a continuous stream of depleted uranium pellets traveling at near relativistic speeds. They travelled so fast that as they encountered minute particles of dust in the vacuum of space they flash ionized those particles. The result was a light show rivaling that of any plasma beam weapon.

  He could see the kinetic rounds tracing a path towards the enemy ships but before they could intersect his enemy would jog in a different direction. Their maneuverability made them almost impossible to hit at range. Fortunately as they closed the distance the GCP fighters had less time to react.

  F1 was counting on this simple fact of physics to even the odds as the battle proceeded. He was in for another surprise. As his weapon finally managed to score a hit, the impossible happened. The alien fighter’s shields flared and the rounds he was firing at the ship reversed direction and took out F1’s gun. The force of the impact of his own rounds impacting with the very weapon that fired them tore a meter long gash in his ship and set his vessel spinning out of control. It took him thirty precious seconds to counter the spin and bring his fighter back into the engagement. By this time the enemy was out of range and his weapons choices had been reduced to a laser turret and a handful of nuclear missiles.

  As he watched the battle unfold he saw several of his wing taken out by their own railguns. He toggled his comms and signaled his wing. Several others broke off and were in active retreat.

  “Alpha group, stow your kinetics! They have shields that can reflect our rounds straight back at us. Go to lasers and plasma beams. Try to gang up on your targets. Ram them if you need to. All of you get back in the fight. I’ll personally kill any one of you I even think has acted cowardly. Flight Leader out!”

  He turned his ship towards the GCP Yorktown. He knew that ship to be Admiral Kimbridge’s flagship. As he raced towards the Yorktown at maximum speed he fired every missile he had and followed up with a full barrage from his beam weapons. His hope was that the beam weapons, traveling at relativistic and near-relativistic speeds would weaken the big ship’s shield enough for his nuclear payloads to do some serious damage.

  In the days before the Great Disruption, when the laws that governed hyperfield dynamics changed, his people’s ships had mastered hyperfield shielding. Such shields could reverse momentum and effectively cloak a ship. The Creators had solved the fundamental problems with creating hyperfields in this post-Great Disruption universe but they seemed to lack the nuanced control that the Yorktown taskforce was demonstrating. This had him perplexed as the numerous moles they had within the GCP had given no indication that these technologies had been recovered… and yet here was the proof.

  Before his missiles were within a hundred kilometers of the Yorktown two of the enemies fighters intercepted and destroyed them. They then turned to engage him directly. They flitted about like insects on a lake. Their rate of acceleration and deceleration defied explanation. As fast as he fired his lasers they would jip and jog out of the way.

  Meanwhile his ship took hit after hit. At first his shields held easily but it seemed their weapons only got more powerful over time. If he were a suspicious sort –and he was –he would think they were playing with him. Soon his critical failure alert system began to flag his shields. He red-lined his reactor to feed more energy into the system. It helped but not enough.

  When his shield harmonics started fluctuating beyond his ability to compensate, he attempted to break off the engagement. His adversaries had other ideas. One, who zipped in close enough to wave and whose call sign was Rubble Maker, attempted to take out his engines with a surgical strike. He decided enough was enough. He might not survive this battle but he was damn well going to take someone with him.

  He was going to take a play out of his enemy’s playbook. Normally his acceleration and maneuverability where limited by his ship’s inertial dampeners to control the stresses on his body. He was going to remove that constraint. He programmed his ship’s computer to go to overload acceleration directly at his tormentor the moment he reappeared within fifty yards.
At that rate of acceleration he would be rendered unconscious but it would hardly matter. The enemy would be dead and so would he.

  ***

  Lieutenant Anthony Grant Stone was ‘in the moment.’ In his mind’s eye he could hear the words of a legendary boxer by the name of Cassius Clay saying ‘float like a butterfly sting like a bee.’ Commander Jax had designated their current target as the one they would try to capture for Admiral Kimbridge. Some sixth sense the commander had seemed to indicate this was a flight commander and thus represented a more valuable prize should they be able to capture him.

  He maneuvered his scorpion in and took a point blank potshot at his target’s primary thrusters. Before his adversary could react, he reversed momentum and flew out of engagement range. Because of the limited duration of his attacks, his plasma beam was not penetrating the enemy’s shield but he could see them begin to fluctuate after each attack. Jax was doing his part by engaging from a different direction. One or two more stings and their target’s engines would be disabled.

  ***

  Cat watched the battle unfold from the bridge of the Yorktown. Two groups of enemy fighters had emerged from the hyperfield vortex that had formed several light minutes away thanks to her thought to place hyperfield resonators around the Hupenstanii home world. The time that trick bought them was time that the Yorktown taskforce put to good use.

  One group of Ashtoreth fighters vectored towards the Yorktown itself while the other headed towards High Orbital One. Orbital One, though, had a few surprises of its own in store for the attackers. Various engineering teams from the station itself as well as teams from her taskforce retrofitted hyperfield shielding, outward facing beam weapons and even a fighter bay – compete with four fighter wings –in each of the orbitals. Sadly those wings were woefully understaffed at the moment but that was something Cat hoped to address with Hupenstanii volunteers in the very near future. Assuming of course the Orbitals survived this engagement.

  That assumption seemed to be a good one at the moment. The enemy craft seemed to have grossly underestimated the abilities of the Yorktown’s combat fighters. In fairness to them, had they faced fighter wings from any other GCP ship the outcome would likely have been much different. The Yorktown had the advantage of fully functional Heshe and hyperfield technologies – that and the fact that her crews had more actual combat experience than the entire combined GCP fleet.

  As Cat watched, Orbital One launched the single wing of fighters they had secured pilots to fly. At the same time their point defense systems began to engage the oncoming fighters. The enemy aircraft began an elaborate weaving pattern in an effort to confuse the station’s PD flak fire.

  Several of the Ashtoreth fighters fired missiles that arched toward Orbital One. Had they been fired at the station even a few hours earlier the outcome would not have been good for the station. As they vectored in and continued to accelerate Cat’s throat clenched. This was the first real test of the systems they had put in place. The missiles were too close. She was thinking the shield must have failed to activate when suddenly the missiles began to impact against an invisible barrier.

  In response the remaining enemy fighters fired all their missiles. Suddenly almost a hundred of them were hurling toward Orbital One. The PD systems took out some but the remainder began to impact the shields. The shields flashed as nuclear energies roiled over their surface but the shields held.

  At about the same moment the station’s fighters reached the enemy. It was over almost as fast as it had begun. The Ashtoreth fighters were badly outclassed by the Scorpions that were attacking them. Eight scorpions were slightly damaged but the opposing force was devastated. Only three of the initial forty craft wing survived the vicious engagement. Those three raced towards their original jump point and made a hasty retreat.

  The other contingent of Ashtoreth fighters seems to consist of more experienced pilots. This was evidenced by their superior tactics in the face of a better equipped opponent. Cat watched as their fighters almost matched the Yorktown’s Scorpions despite the advantage in speed and maneuverability her fighters enjoyed.

  The Ashtoreth fighters soon stopped firing at where they though the scorpions were and instead fired where they anticipated they might jump to. Several of the Yorktown pilots were caught off guard with this tactic. Since the Scorpion’s shielding was its weakest attribute these unlucky ships were often taken out of the fight. At least none of her pilots had been killed thus far.

  She toggled her comm-link and reminded the CAG that she wanted a prisoner if at all possible. Commander Martinescu informed her that a team was working on that very thing.

  She turned back to the main view screen. Suddenly there was a blinding flash. As the glow of a breeched fusion containment chamber finally began to fade she saw one of the scorpions had been shattered by the blast. There was precious little of the fighter left. Cat had a horrible feeling she knew who the pilot was. The realization that she had just lost a dear friend left her gutted.

  Chapter 15: Stone Cold…

  Lieutenant Anthony Grant Stone was confused. He remembered approaching the enemy craft in his Mark 2 Scorpion combat fighter. He had been attempting to disable the vessel’s engines so they could capture the pilot. Something had gone terribly wrong. The enemy ship had anticipated his movements and deliberately crashed his ship into his adversary. He knew it was deliberate because the acceleration used to pull about the collision far and away exceeded the maximum acceleration envelope previously observed for the Ashtoreth fighters. It was unlikely the pilot would have remained conscious for the maneuver. Therefore it must have been preprogrammed in the tiny ship’s computer.

  The result for the newly promoted Lieutenant Stone was a blinding flash of light followed by intense pain and then a numbing cold. His ship literally shattered around him. He looked down and saw most of his torso and lower body shredded or just plain missing. He knew in that moment that he was dead. Only the recently introduced nanites operating within his skull kept him conscious as they fought to both preserve his brain’s function and transmit data back to the Yorktown’s newly installed training bay.

  It was a cruel joke. He could learn faster than any man alive thanks to the Ashtoreth technology that Admiral Kimbridge had adapted for her use… and yet it was the Ashtoreth that would teach him about death. At that moment he wished he could turn the nanites swarming his brain off. There was not enough of his body left to regenerate. He knew very well the limitations of current medical technology. It could do miracles but this was well beyond the scope of what was possible. As he wished for the kindness of death a darkness enveloped him… and then… there was light.

  ***

  “He’s waking up”

  The big man on the table struggled to move. Reinforced steel straps held his arms, legs and chest. Some type of transparent cocoon covered him. He could see a myriad of colorful lights dancing about its interior surface. It was beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

  He went to ask ‘what the hell was happening’. Something was wrong. Suddenly he realized he was in a chamber filled with some type of transparent liquid. As he breathed he could feel the viscous material move in and out of his lungs. The lingering terror that had been a shadow in the back of his mind abruptly rushed forward.

  He strained against the straps that held him – knowing full well that he would be powerless to break them. To his great surprise they snapped like dry kindling. He pushed against the transparent lid of his aquatic cage. His hands burned when the colored bands of energy brushed against them. The lid was harder to move than the steel straps had been and the energy coursing over its surface hurt but that just added urgency to his efforts to free himself.

  With a tremendous effort he arched his back and heaved against the transparent barrier. He could hear people screaming on the other side of it but he was too engrossed in his own efforts to pay attention to what they were saying. With one final push the latching mechanism that locked the li
d in place gave way and the lid flew off with enough force to send it flying across whatever room he was in.

  The liquid that enveloped him drained over the side of the table he was lying on into grates on the floor that seemed designed to accommodate it.

  As he wiped the gelatinous liquid gunk off his face and out of his ears he heard a moaning sound. A technician was on the ground some fifteen feet away. The lid had clipped her as it flew across the room. He tried to get up to help the young woman but his legs would not fully cooperate and he fell to the floor. It was then that he began to seriously cough. His lungs were still filled with whatever the heck that clear liquid was. His sides nearly split as he hacked and coughed the substance out of his system. By the time he was done every muscle in his body was pulled and he was exhausted.

  “Let that be a lesson to you Lieutenant,” a stern female voice said. “Next time you stay in the chamber until the regeneration cycle is done. You’ll save yourself a lot of discomfort and I won’t have to spend the time patching up my staff.”

  He recognized the voice. It belonged to Doctor Janice Pulaski. He had tried to date her once – she was, in purely military parlance –hot! An intelligent brunette with curves on her curves and legs that went from the earth clear up to heaven. That was before he had realized she was an officer. Fraternization rules forbade enlisted and officer entanglements… but wait… hadn’t she called him Lieutenant?

  He tried again to stand. This time a male orderly rushed to his side to help him up. He grasped the man’s arm firmly, intending to pull himself up. The orderly screamed in agony as his arm was unintentionally broken by the force of the bigger man’s grip. He let go immediately.

  He heard himself say gruffly, “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to… I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  “No one touch him!” Doctor Pulaski yelled. “He doesn’t want to hurt anybody but he has no experience with his new body. He’ll kill you before he’s even aware that he’s done it.”