Baldwin looked skeptically at her, “You’re not treating my wing as a stepping stone. You’re here to fly–you’re also here to gain experience in fleet tactical operations and unit command. Member of the Gray family, plus Chris Fox’s student…”
Veronica felt something twist in her gut. “Captain, I know you’re meaning well, but while my family has a long history in the Navy, while I’m here I’m nothing other than an Interstellar Naval Officer, trying to do her duty for her squadron and her star nation.”
“Of course, Lieutenant. I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t.”
She held Captain Baldwin’s challenging look with more steadiness than he seemed to have expected, and he nodded.
“We’ll see how you do in exercises tomorrow,” Baldwin got up from his chair, “Good to meet you, Lieutenant Gray. Hope you’re in for the long haul here.”
Veronica turned back to her crew as the wing commander made his way back to his own table.
“Sca-ry.”
Later in the evening, tired enough to make a good impression of drunkenness, Veronica finally returned to the berthing quarters set aside for the crew of Dog Two-oh-Seven. A steward had placed her space bag on the single low cot in the back-center of the room, reserved for the corvette’s commanding officer. She didn’t have much to unpack–Naval officers learned to pack lightly between assignments and not to pick up too much in between.
But there were a few personal knickknacks that few officers avoided, like a gold-plated sidearm, a memento of her earning sharpshooting qualification, and a handful of electronic congratulatory messages from friends and family.
She picked a message at random and clicked it on.
“Hello, Scary! If you’re getting this message you must have gotten to your next assignment.” The woman in the picture was short, intense, dark-eyed and –haired, with the distinctive features of the House of Huýnh, the royal house of the planet Cyrene and the Star Queendom of Artemis. She was Princess Sandra, third daughter of Queen Elaine VI. “Congratulations on getting your first command, even if it is a dinky little corvette. My first ship is still building. They’re going to give me a tac officer slot on the next ship to come out of the docks–I think she’s Boudicca, but I could be wrong. You’d think being a member of the royal family would help with spending months waiting shore side while they put together your next assignment, but they wanted to put me on the newest ship in the fleet. I suppose I’m lucky they’re even willing to put me on something that isn’t one of the Home Fleet fortresses.” Veronica paused the recording to laugh at Sandra’s obvious frustration, “So anyway, I’ve got some months to kill and you’ll probably be getting a lot more of these as time goes by. As long as Admiral Song doesn’t decide she can’t find any ship glorious enough to merit the honor of being sullied by the boots of a member of the royal family. I swear I ought to have Tallest give her a talk. Assuming she’s not totally busy with Crown Princessing.”
Veronica paused again to recover her composure from the princess’s utterly informal tone and obvious frustration.
“Anyway, I’ll be back in space in a few months, it’s just annoying that I’ve got to sit tight and wait right now. Besides, I owe you for that last war game.”
Veronica smiled as Sandra’s message ended, pulling a soft purple blanket out of her space bag. It was decidedly non-regulation but she’d carried it with her to every assignment anyway, because it was a comforting reminder of friends back home. She just had to find places to stow it during inspection time. Wrapping herself up in it, she considered the ceiling above her bunk.
Deep inside the structure of the starship, there was little or nothing to tell her that she might have been in space at all. There were no windows–not in the pilot berths, certainly. The senior officers of a carrier probably had them; she’d certainly had a spectacular view of space as senior officer during Aquarius’ refit.
Captain Fox’s steadiness and Princess Sandra’s teasing buoyed her heart as she lay on her bunk. Lights out would be in a few minutes. Sleepiness pressed down on her, and so she barely noticed when the rest of her crew filed in.
Chapter 4
The following morning, at an hour where only the magic of many, many cups of coffee allowed anybody on Avenger’s flight line to be functional, it was time for the newly full-strength air wing to test itself.
Skin-suited pilots and aircrews sprinted for their planes in the eerie, silent precision of vacuum ops. The last wisps of frozen atmosphere that the flight deck ventilation system couldn’t suck away curled around pilots’ legs, giving the impression of mist clinging to the deck. Under combat launch protocols, the carrier’s control systems initiated auto-start sequences on all small craft, sending ship power flowing in for a last-minute drink as their fission piles came up to full power.
The crew of Dog Two-oh-Seven split up as they reached their corvette–Alyse and Leblanc dove through the small ingress door in the side of the bow while Veronica, Yeboah, and Bowman took the ladder up to the cockpit above. Their seats rested under an expansive canopy augmented by virtual visual projection--a gloriously expensive panorama from which to find and destroy enemy starships. Today the enemy starships wouldn’t be real; with a lack of convenient alien or otherwise hostile fighter assets to test his squadrons against, Commander Baldwin had decided that pitting them against each other was the next best thing.
Veronica glanced over the sill of the canopy as she ran her checklist, and watched with a certain envy as Baldwin’s already-mounted crew raced through their preflight sequences with practiced efficiency. She knew that her own people would get to that point, but it was hard not to feel a little inadequate comparing their eager not-quite-fumbling to the casual smoothness of their long-connected counterparts on Double Nuts. That crew had been flying together for over a year now, and it showed.
Veronica felt a muffled clank as a rotary launcher filled with missiles was lifted into position from deck storage. A ground chief held up a hand with four pins on each finger–the rotary launcher was ready, its missiles live and hot.
A muffled curse came from below just as the cabin air pressure gauge came up to 609 torr, standard flight pressure. “Captain, we need a yellow light; Leblanc’s stuck in her straps.”
Veronica blew a sigh through her teeth and slapped her hand down on the button marked Five Min Hold. Her ship’s place in the launch line auto-reshuffled eight places back.
“Baldwin won’t be happy about this,” she groused.
“No he won’t. Ivey had them drilled to a T, I wonder why Leblanc’s suddenly slipping things up now.” Yeboah looked as irritated by the delay as Veronica, as a pair of Wasp interceptors rolled past them to take their place in the queue.
“New captain jitters, Alyssa?”
“Probably. I hope she gets over it soon.”
“If she doesn’t, there’ll be hell to pay. Being taught to run a tight ship has its advantages.”
Alyssa rolled her eyes. “Very, I bet you’ve never been that patient with small screw-ups.”
Veronica shook her head. “Not when I can help matters, no. I’ll try to be gentle and forgiving on Leblanc this time, since her new plane captain just came aboard and this is only her third major flight war game since she came to Avenger. Next time, her ass is grass.”
That actually had Veronica worried. Sixty percent of her flight crew–herself included–were relatively new to the world of fighter piloting. Anything could happen, and to a certain extent probably would, but she had to keep on top of it and stifle any problems, just the same.
“I’ve got her untangled and buckled, Captain,” came Kellie’s voice, “Call us clear; I’ll be strapped in by the time you finish.”
“Roger that. Flight control, this is Dog Two-oh-Seven, ready for liftoff.”
“Roger. Dog Two-oh-Seven, this is Avenger launch control, you are third in queue.”
Two craft ahead, a focused distortion in space built behind Striper One-One, a long, slende
r Wasp-class interceptor. The ship’s deck on the catapult level was designed to absorb and safely redirect the spacewarp of a fighter’s drive–but the people on a flight deck weren’t, so they were safely behind shielded doors. The catapult fired, and the fighter screamed down the deck, approaching and then breaking a kilometer per second before it hit space.
Veronica looked over at Alyssa and grinned. In just a couple more minutes, they’d be on that cat as well, getting ready to fly out into space. The mood on the flight deck was one part frantic, two parts electrical as commander and pilot ran through the last points on their checklists.
“Flying Wolfcats Two Zero Seven, this is control,” Veronica startled herself into remembering that “Flying Wolfcats” was the official name of her squadron, “advance along the yellow line to catapult one and hold.”
Releasing the wheel brakes and inching the throttles past idle thrust, Veronica rolled her craft forward along the yellow line as commanded. Ahead of her on catapult two, Dog Two-Oh-Eight, her wingman, shot into space.
There was a loud clunk as the catapult nose tow dropped into place on the cat shuttle.
“Flying Wolfcats Two-Zero-Seven, catapult in three. Two. One.” Veronica pushed her throttle forward by halves, bringing the tremendous power of the fighter to its utmost a second before control counted “Launch.”
The holdback tractor disengaged just as the catapult induction motor fired. Even with inertial damping set to maximum, the ride was brutal–then her fighter was out in the endless black, surrounded by tiny points of light that were her fellow pilots.
“Pukin’ Dogs, this is squadron lead. We and the Pit Vipers are to accelerate outsystem for an hour. We’re going to practice a carrier assault. For the purposes of this assault, Avenger is playing the part of a joint Hesilan-Imperial strike squadron.” Everybody shuddered. A war with even one of the major foreign powers was likely to severely task the Interstellar Navy; both at once would be nearly impossible to fend off without resorting to the assistance of the Alliance’s foreign allies–and many of those had convoluted political strings attached. “Her fighter squadrons are Red Force; they’re defending the strike package as it advances on an Allied planet. We are Blue Force, we’re a strike sent out to disrupt the enemy formation and hopefully mission-kill its carrier. We’re outnumbered and outgunned, so we’ll have to think smart. On our way to the initiation point, any plane captain who has a bright idea had best comm me. Baldwin out.”
Baldwin didn’t fade from Veronica’s screen.
“Ok, new kid. You’ve got a reputation of being some pretty hot shit, I want to see what you’ve got for us.”
Veronica’s throat went dry and closed suddenly, and she coughed.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want, Lieutenant, but you’ll probably be buying drinks when we get back to the carrier if you don’t. Commander Josephson’s got an uninterrupted string of successes in protecting the ship from attack, in exercise at least.” Veronica figured Baldwin was probably exaggerating–but her aggressive side was piqued, and she wanted to take Baldwin up on the challenge.
“Captain, you know the problem with a dispersed attack group is the potential to be defeated in detail.”
“I’m well aware of that, Lieutenant, wasn’t born yesterday.”
Veronica resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Childish displays of sarcasm weren’t going to endear her to her commander just now. “Sorry, Sir, I’m just setting up the basics of the scenario. A basic attack formation’s just a group of lines of attack in multiple waves, to engage and attrite enemy air defenses before the real core of the strike shows up. Well we don’t have the raw numbers in our strike package to push a successful strike home using basic tactics–but if we use some of our torpedoes ahead of time to create convincing enough decoys, we can make the enemy believe we’ve got a much thicker strike package than we do.”
“We’re in a pretty good position, there are about forty decoys in our strike package, so it’s just a question of when to deploy them and with whom.” He grinned. “You know we cheat too…”
Veronica shook her head, not entirely certain where the sudden non sequitur was going. “Change the parameters of the sim?”
“You did that once before, Lieutenant.”
“I exposed a serious hole in the exercise staff’s operational security by doing it. Got commended for it.” She grinned. “I’ve got an idea I think will work. Get me six comms officers and thirty minutes, I’m going to simulate some attack chatter that will improve the appearance of these drones.”
“Lieutenant, if this plan of yours works, I’ll buy you drinks.” Baldwin’s voice softened and his face lit.
“Not just me–everyone on my ship.”
“Well bargained and done, Lieutenant. Let’s go hunting.” Baldwin’s link went dark and Veronica transmitted the attack plans to him. It was risky, and definitely required the flight control systems to accept forces that weren’t in the original wave.
Wait.
Veronica punched some last-minute changes into the system, sequencing the launches and the ships so that there were three attack waves instead of only two, before hitting sim. She calculated probabilities and vector traces, and was satisfied with the results.
“Captain Baldwin, plans laid in and confirmed, Sir.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant Gray. I’ll forward the plans to the rest of the squadron and our support craft. We’ve got about another forty million klicks to go before we’re part of the interplanetary noise.”
She unstrapped herself from her seat. “Chief Alyse, meet me in the aft crew room. Sub-lieutenant Yeboah, you have the stick.”
Two separate “Aye-aye, Ma’am” came in prompt reply.
Commander Jennifer “J.J.” Josephson watched the outbound traces of the corvettes and their bombers fuzz out while her fighters remained on CAP near the carrier.
“Think Baldwin’s gonna pull something sneaky, J.J.?” came the voice of her squadron exec, Victor Avalon.
“Baldwin’s a sneaky-ass bastard and he just got a new pilot who’s got a rep for sneakiness. I’d be shocked if our intrepid CAG didn’t.” She rolled and turned her fighter to its new course, spreading the tac net outward. “If he’s going to be sneaky, we should encourage that sneakiness–right until we cut his legs out from under him. CAG owes me a beer, and I’m thirsty.” Josephson’s grin looked like it would be at home on a shark’s face.
She pulled her flight onto a new vector and slid away from the rest of her squadron. “Listen up, people. Baldwin’s out there and we all know he’s the second best pilot on this tub, though we might disagree on who ‘best’ is. His newbie’s going to want to make fools out of us. We don’t want to let her. So let’s keep up our watch and our professionalism, and show both of ‘em that there’s more to a strike than getting the ordnance off.”
Time ticked by while Josephson’s CAP package wheeled about the carrier in predetermined patterns. Josephson was annoyed and bored, but it had taken an hour to go out and it would take at least a half to come back in. Counting burn time for deception maneuvers, it could be anywhere from two to six hours before she saw Blue Force again. Red Force in a game like this was being trained just as surely as was Blue. “Ma’am, sensor returns are inconclusive, but it looks like we’ve got about a third of the expected strike package inbound hot.” One of the pilots on the furthest forward fringe of the starboard side CAP transmitted his sensor data back to Josephson’s command bird.
“Visual confirmation? A straightforward trap lure like that isn’t Baldwin’s style, and I’m positive it’s not Gray’s, either.”
“Negative, Ma’am–but drive signatures are consistent with three corvettes and six fighters.”‘
“Acknowledged, six-twelve. What in the blue bloody hell is Baldwin up to?” Josephson clicked through her available fighters, “Hatters, shift to oh-two and check those contacts. I want to make sure that what we see is what we get.”
A hundred thousand kilo
meters aft, ghosting along the edge of the spacetime distortion fringe of Avenger’s drives, the ships Veronica had picked as her main strike package carefully positioned themselves to pounce.
“Think she’s going to fall for it?” asked a bomber pilot whose name Veronica had yet to learn.
“I doubt it. I very much doubt it,” she replied. “Baldwin’s got too much of a rep as a trickster, and I came in with much the same rep. She’s expecting an unorthodox attack maneuver. On the other hand, she can’t just ignore an incoming strike on other vectors–my sims are showing she’ll have to divert at least a quarter of the Red Force flight wing to deal with it.”
“Attacking from zero-zero off a cap ship’s drive plume isn’t unorthodox–it’s more ‘suicidal.’ There’s no way she won’t see us coming.”
Veronica grinned. “That will be taken care of in about ten seconds.”
The second jaw of her trap closed exactly nine seconds later, as the second wave of fighters and drones came roaring in from seventy degrees off the carrier’s bow. Though they couldn’t see the attack through the drive field aft of the ship, the fighters and corvettes racing in forward were very impressively simulated by Captain Baldwin, three hand-picked assistants, and a full squadron’s worth of decoys. Which meant that Josephson should be taking the bait, and she’d very soon have too much velocity built up in generating an intercept vector towards Baldwin to intercept the actual strike package.
Veronica counted off twenty seconds just to be sure. “Here we go.”
The strike group broke away from the sensor distortion of the carrier’s drive plume, building velocity from the base vector of the ship with every second.
Josephson recognized the ruse as soon as the third group emerged, but her fighters already committed to meeting Baldwin’s. They were too far for visual confirmation, but some of Baldwin’s craft were already evincing the characteristic fuzzy-edged signature of a decoy drone at close range. She could send her trailing reserves to reinforce the carrier’s CAP, of course, but most of her defenders would be unable to engage the main body of the attack.
Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) Page 3