by J. N. Chaney
Thorn made note of the terms Farthest Star Three and the blackout ring. He had no idea what they were, other than sounding really ominous. But he just let the references pass for now and asked Urbanek the suddenly obvious question.
“Until when, sir? Under what conditions would we wake them back up? And would we let them restore their civilization?”
“All excellent questions, Stellers,” Urbanek said, then turned to the rest of the group. “I believe that will be sufficient for now. We’ll take a break and reconvene later.”
Thorn watched Urbanek leave. He wasn’t sure what to make of that non-answer, but it had seemed just as ominous as whatever the hell the blackout ring was.
21
The Allied Stars Council finally gave up on their fantastical idea that some sort of agreement with the Bilau would be even a remotely good idea. Urbanek instantly advocated for an immediate strike against the aliens, to probe their defenses and try to seize and keep the initiative. Fleet Command agreed but wanted immediate to be immediate, and tasked Admiral Scoville with making it happen. The job got handed over to Urbanek, who decided that this was a job best suited to their newest tech.
The upgraded Kestrel fighters had changed so much from their original design that they’d been designated as a new class, called the Goshawk. Armed with an equally upgraded multi-role missile system, the Killshot, they were formidable little craft with twin railguns, internal stowage for twelve Killshots or their equivalent mass in ordnance, and six external hardpoints that could accept an array of load-outs. Carried by yet another upgraded mothership, formerly called escort carriers and now called assault carriers, they could deliver a potent hit against any target on short notice.
Which was the case now.
Thorn now watched as the Corregidor prepared to launch her new wing of Goshawks. Externally, he didn’t notice much difference in the carrier, but under the hood, he knew she’d been almost entirely rebuilt. She could carry half-again as many fighters as she used to, and launch and retrieve them almost twenty percent faster, thanks to the new Imbrogul force-field tech Thorn had first seen on the Tobruk. The Hecate, the Corregidor’s sole escort, kept station about a thousand klicks away from the carrier. She would launch one squadron of Goshawks, then make an Alcubierre hop to the next launch point, deploy another squadron, hop again, and then again. By then, she’d return to the original launch point, recover the first squadron of fighters, then work her way back to collect the remainder of her Goshawks. It wasn’t a complex plan, but it did involve some pretty narrow timings.
And that was only one batch of targets. There were seven more assault carriers doing exactly the same thing, meaning that over 100 Bilau targets would be hit within just a few hours. The list included surveillance outposts, comms relays, replenishment depots, and a wide range of other installations. Thorn’s job was to try and watch over the entirety of the Corregidor’s deployed Goshawks, a job that was going to tax him for sure. He now knelt in the witchport, his talisman in hand, waiting for the first launches.
Curious, he extended his thoughts across the gap between the Hecate and the Corregidor and checked in on the launch preparations. He immediately encountered a pervasive aura of grim purpose, shot through a resigned and pragmatic understanding. The Goshawk pilots were under no illusions about the danger of their mission and knew that some of them wouldn’t be returning from it. Each of the Goshawks had a scuttling charge built in, intended to destroy the craft and prevent it from falling into the hands of the Bilau. They would trigger automatically if capture were imminent, but the pilots could activate them as well.
To their enormous credit, Thorn didn’t sense a single pilot that would hesitate to do just that if the time came. Moreover, the most prevalent emotion was one of determination. The pilots knew what the Bilau had done to the Meksun and would probably do to other races, humanity included, if they got the chance. Each one of these men and women were resolved that that wouldn’t happen.
Canopies closed and sealed, preflight checks were completed, launch checklists were ticked off. One after another, the Goshawk pilots reported them and their craft green and ready to launch. When the last had checked in, the big hangar doors silently slid open, and the first Goshawks were hurled into space by electromagnetic catapults. Each immediately pitched up, their drive lighting and maneuvering them clear of the launch zone without fouling the Corregidor with their exhaust. By the time they were out of the way, the next wave of Goshawks were hurled out of the hangar doors. It was a delicate dance, one performed with utter precision by pilots who’d been training the launch process for weeks.
“Wave complete. We’re ready to proceed to the next launch point,” the Corregidor announced.
“Roger that. Stand by for Alcubierre activation in sixty seconds,” Reynaud, the Hecate’s captain, replied over the comm.
Thorn sought one of the fighters, now forming up for their attack on the inner system, a planet hosting a tracking and surveillance facility. He’d already tagged one of the pilots, a hard-faced woman from the Skydancer Squadron whose call sign was Skydancer Two, with a ’casting that would let him keep track of her no matter where she went. By the time he’d done that to her, and to one pilot in each of the two other attacking squadrons—Firebrand Two and Stinger Three respectively—and then actually exerted himself to see the battle play out through their eyes, he’d be magically tapped out.
But he was the one sitting in relative safety, well away from the action. So he didn’t begrudge the fact he was pushing the limits here, kneeling in the Hecate’s witchport. The limits the Goshawk pilots were pushing were far, far deadlier.
“Skydancer Lead, this is Skydancer Two. I’m reading us figures one-zero-zero out from my breakoff point.”
“Roger that, Skydancer Two. Wait until Skydancer Four and Five are clear, then you’re cleared to break off and start your run.”
No sign of enemy return fire. Yet. Still just pings by surveillance scanners. Maybe they’d get lucky. Skydancer Two checked her six, confirming that her wing, Skydancer Three, sat in the slot. She wasn’t really keen on the idea of splitting the squadron up like this, even for the few minutes the attack would take. It was the best way with multiple targets, though. Get in, get the target, get out. That’s how you came back from one of these little jaunts alive.
“Firebrand Two, watch your nine o’clock low. Two bogeys coming up fast.”
“I see ’em.”
Firebrand Two flung his Goshawk hard to port and pitched down. He aimed for a head-on run. The Goshawk should be nimble enough to avoid the incoming fire, or that was the theory, anyway. But they didn’t have much experience with these Bilau outside of simulators, and even that had been based on incomplete intel.
The Goshawk surged ahead. Firebrand Two snapped into a tight roll, at the same time applying a lateral thrust. It induced a tight, high-g corkscrew that would have crushed him into his seat without the new anti-grav tech. The maneuver made the Goshawk a lot harder to hit, which gave Firebrand Two a brief shot of comfort.
That ended as he waited for the humming tone that said his Killshot missiles had a lock. The Bilau ship opened up with an energy weapon, pumping out nearly point-blank shots as searing, blue-white bolts. He caught just a hint of a scream as Firebrand Three, his wing, vanished in a flash and became just a racing cloud of debris.
Stinger Three watched as her target, a set of gantries extending from a dome-shaped facility, some sort of replenishment depot, grew in her sights. She raced nap-of-the-Earth over the pocked surface of the planet, an asteroid that had been excavated with who knew how many tunnels and chambers, which now served as a FOB for the Bilau.
She glanced at the heads-up, confirming she’d selected Ground/Stationary target mode for her Killshots. In the brief instant her attention had flicked aside, the Bilau defenses opened up. Stinger Three immediately snapped her Goshawk from side to side, snap-rolling one way, then the other, then pitching up and down. Most of the incoming
fire consisted of projectiles, but an energy weapon battery on a more distant facility had joined in. The pulses of coherent plasma reached for Stinger Three like grasping fingers, the missed shots either flashing into space over the horizon or slamming into the peaks of rocky ridges.
She got tone; the Killshots had seen and acknowledged their targets. Stinger Three didn’t hesitate. She launched the missiles, watched them flash away, then slammed her fighter into a hard left turn. She trusted her wing, Stinger Five, to stick with her.
“Damn, I love this ship. You go girl,” she muttered, thinking that such a maneuver in her old Kestrel would have left her and her fighter scattered across the asteroid’s rocky surface.
Skydancer Two snapped her Goshawk to one side like a cracking whip. An energy bolt flashed by close enough that she thought she could have reached out and touched it. Her target, a comm relay uplink, loomed ahead. The Killshots complained about her wild gyrations, petulantly starting and stopping their target-lock tone. It was the only way she stood any chance of surviving this, though—
Something slammed hard into the Goshawk, making it slew hard to one side. Alarms lit up across her instruments. She tried to apply thrust, swinging the nose hard, back toward the target. Fortunately, the Killshots once again sounded their monotone, and it stuck, a hard lock. She launched and was gratified to see the two Killshots streak away. Their hypervelocity drives were single use propulsion systems derived from the captured Nyctus prototype, and they kicked hard. The two missiles raced through a sudden storm of point defense fire, but by slightly varying their acceleration, they proved too elusive to take down. Both slammed into the uplink and detonated with ferocious blasts that flung debris in all directions.
Skydancer Two pitched the Goshawk’s nose up—or tried to. The fighter responded, but sluggishly, and desperately wanted to pull to the right. She still had control, though.
Again, something crashed into the Goshawk. The object, a chunk of debris from her own destroyed target, spun away. A few seconds later, the Goshawk went as dark as a grave.
The instant Firebrand Two’s Killshots returned a steady tone, he launched. The two missiles were flung from the weapons bay, their engines lit, and they sped off, seeker heads relentlessly tracking the Bilau ship. Halfway to the target, they split, their AIs coming to a mutual decision to engage a second Bilau fighter that had just zoomed into the dogfight.
Behind Firebrand Two, the rotating magazine spun, locking two more Killshots into place, ready to launch. He immediately got tone from them, but he held off because the first two missiles were almost at impact.
The closest Bilau ship disappeared in a searing cloud. The other missile missed the second as it jinked, detonated anyway, and caught the Bilau fighter in its blast. As it spun out of control, Firebrand Two hunted for anything standing in the way of his own target, a replenishment barge orbiting a gas giant close enough to scrape vapor from the topmost edge of its atmosphere. It represented an essentially infinite supply of fuel, including deuterium and helium-3, and made for a really high value target.
Nothing. Still, he was well aware that, without a wing, he was on his own. And on his own was not a great place to be in a growing dogfight.
Stinger Three let out a whoop of triumph as her missiles hit the replenishment depot. Both smashed through the dome and detonated inside, blasting it apart and scooping out a huge crater. She nimbly avoided the back-blast from the explosion, including a chunk of rock as big as the Goshawk. Once clear, she thumbed up the next target on her heads-up. The icon sat off to the left, so she reoriented on it, applied power, and smoothly accelerated toward it.
She took a second to glance at the part of the tactical display depicting the space behind her. Stinger Five was nowhere to be seen. Her heart sank, until she saw the IFF transponder return high above her. Her wing had engaged a pair of Bilau fighters and was keeping them off her back while she did her next run.
“Atta boy, Danny,” she said, settling the Goshawk onto its final trajectory as it flashed past the initial point. Once more, the Killshots got tone on the target, an uplink station to a platform orbiting directly above.
The Bilau defenses opened up, pouring fire toward as she closed. She began to jink and dodge, laughing almost hysterically the whole time.
Skydancer Two’s Goshawk sailed along a straight line, angling up from the shattered remains of the comm relay. With no thrust, Isaac Newton took over the controls, the fighter simply following the vector solution to whatever forces had been affecting it when the power died.
She ignored the tomb-like silence and hit the emergency restart.
Nothing.
She next switched to backup power and tried again.
Nothing.
Line by line, Skydancer Two worked her way through the POWER LOSS – IMMEDIATE ACTION checklist, as hundreds of hours had trained her to do. She reached the last item and switched the whole system over to emergency power cells. Minimal instruments and life support powered back up, as did the auxiliary thrusters. These injected pressurized gas into the regular thruster ports, giving her a scant ability to roll, pitch and yaw the Goshawk.
That was far, far from a solution, though. With enemy prowling nearby, it was like stepping into a fighting ring with handcuffs, then having your feet clamped into place. Her opponents would be the ones doing the skydancing around her, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Firebrand Two wheeled his Goshawk to one side, trying to throw off enemy tracking. Four more fighters from Firebrand Squadron were closing on the fuel platform from another angle and were taking the brunt of the defensive fire. It left him with a relatively clear run, with only two batteries lobbing shots his way.
He jinked again. And again. The Goshawk responded without hesitation, the combination of new drive and Imbrogul anti-grav not only making the extreme maneuvers possible, but also offering a smooth ride while doing it.
He checked his six. A bogey had fallen in behind him but had a lot of catching up to do. Firebrand Two reckoned he had time to finish this run and still turn to face the new threat. And once that was done, it would be time to start for home—
In the very middle of that thought, a stealthed missile fired by the trailing Bilau fighter smashed into the Goshawk, and Firebrand Two ceased to exist.
Thorn groaned as the pilot known as Firebrand Two just died. There was no warning, no preamble. He only knew what the pilots knew, and this one hadn’t seen whatever had killed him coming.
It took Thorn a moment to shake off the traumatic psychic echoes of a functioning mind suddenly ceasing to be. Grimly, he pushed himself back into the two remaining Joinings, Skydancer Two and Stinger Three.
Stinger Three whooped again as her Killshots blasted the uplink station into spectacular oblivion. She rolled the Goshawk onto its back to briefly admire her handiwork, then rolled back just in time to get a warning buzz that she’d been lit up by a new tracking scanner—and it had a hard lock on her.
She flashed her attention across the tactical display and saw that her wing had sailed up and away from the asteroid’s surface, engaging another Bilau fighter. Its wing seemed to have slipped away to come after her, though, and had managed to get close enough that a missile launch was only seconds away.
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
Stinger Three slammed the pitch thrusters to the firewall, flipping the Goshawk end-over-end. At the same time, she drove the main drive to emergency combat power. The Imbrogul anti-grav ate most of the sudden and extreme deceleration, but the excess still peaked at a brief, crushing eleven g’s. She groaned, then gasped as the abrupt force squashed her into her g-couch. Grey flowers blossomed across her vision, and a thin, shrill whine filled her head.
The Goshawk was smart enough to not kill its pilot, though, and dialed back the drive’s power. Stinger Three’s vision cleared in time for her to see the Bilau fighter, formerly behind her, now looming straight ahead. It suddenly found itself closing fast on the Gosh
awk, which now flew backward ahead of it, exhaust slowing it more and more. It put the Bilau’s would-be target inside the safety-arming range of his own missiles, costing him a second or two as he frantically switched weapons.
That was all Stinger Three needed. She opened up with both railguns, spewing streams of projectiles that shredded the Bilau fighter. She then flipped the Goshawk, the drive still burning, and desperately tried to pull away from the speeding wreckage.
A sawtooth ridge loomed ahead of her, jagged blackness truncating the stars. She pitched up hard, clearing the crest by less than a hundred meters. The wreckage chasing her didn’t and slammed into the rocky slope.
She glanced at the elapsed time. That whole maneuver, from detecting the Bilau behind her to the impact of the wreck against the rock, had lasted sixteen seconds.
Sniffing as her hands danced over the controls, Stinger Three reoriented the Goshawk while wearing a look of mild disgust. Sixteen seconds. Shit, she could do better than that.
Skydancer Two reached the bottom of the checklist, snapped out a curse, and started again.
There wasn’t much else she could do. She had no idea what damage the Goshawk had taken and couldn’t very well do an EVA to find out. And it wouldn’t matter anyway. The nature of the nimble little fighters was that they were generally either at peak performance, or they were broken. There wasn’t much in between.
She glanced at the comm. It was dead, too.
Finally, she put her focus on the one place she’d been avoiding, the trigger for the scuttling charge. She was a little surprised it hadn’t already detonated, but a quick check of its arming system showed it was offline, too.