Live Free or Die-ARC

by John Ringo

  "Oh, you're not going Iron Eagle on me, are you?" Steve said as the bird wobbled off axis again. "Concentrate! That never works. This isn't a movie."

  "This is two people trying to work in synchronicity," Tyler said. "What do you listen to?"

  "Heavy metal."

  "Gah. I'm a country fan," Ty said.

  "Ain't gonna happen," Steve said. "I am not going to die listening to country."

  "What kind of metal?"

  "Hang on," Steve said.

  The plants were perfectly capable of playing music. And linking.

  "What the hell is that?" Ty asked as the plane bobbled again and lost altitude.

  "Godsmack," Steve said. "And you're right. Even with you not particularly liking it we're still more in sync." After the bobble they were definitely gaining.

  "It's not bad," Tyler said. "Just sort of a surprise. What else do you have?"

  "A lot," Steve said. "I've even got a playlist. Which is . . . set. And now we can concentrate on killing Horvath."

  "They're not closing faster than normal," Tyler said. With the two of them more in sync the plane was now well out of the atmosphere. Of course, they still had to pick their way through the trash belt around the planet. "They're advancing in an almost . . . ominous manner."

  "I . . . don't think they see us," Steve said.

  "With the plague and then the bombardment, the news channels are jammed with other stuff," Tyler said, doing a quick scan. "Ditto blogs, astronomy channels . . . There is not one single reference to us except news reports talking about how the SAPL isn't powerful enough to take out the Horvath ship and the 'Star Fury' isn't capable of even flying."

  "Radar? Satellite?"

  "Local FAA radar was shut down by the time we took off," Tyler said, still scanning. "The sat net has been pretty much secured over the last couple of years. Steve . . . we're not getting noticed by anybody."

  "What about the Horvath systems?" Steve said.

  "They have a gravitics sensor system," Tyler said. "We're still in the grav well . . . Let's accel as best we can, go silent and slingshot around the moon."

  "Accel on the way out?" Steve said, setting it up.

  "We'll be in a position to ambush them on the flank as they come in," Tyler said, considering the plot. "We can't stop the missiles, they have to be pretty much shot out. All we have to do is keep them from getting into orbit."

  "All," Steve said, setting in the course. "This is getting easier."

  "I think Athelkau put some Turing code in the software," Tyler said. "It's learning as we're learning."

  "Right," Steve said. "Time to dump some power into this bird."

  "Whipping the hamsters," Tyler closing his eyes and concentrating on simultaneously dumping power to the grav plates and not letting them fly apart. He grunted in surprise at the response. "Oh, yeah, no inertial damping!"

  "Just crunch," Steve grunted back. "And don't black out on me!"

  "I'm good," Tyler said. Getting the limping 'space fighter' to accelerate using the plants felt almost like pushing with his brain. "I think that's about as much as we're going to get."

  "That's better than I thought," Steve said. "About seven gravities of delta-v. We need to hold this for about twenty minutes, though. Can you do that?"

  "Sure," Tyler said. "No problem. Anything you can do, I can do better."

  "You have to breathe . . ." Steve said, laughing.

  "Fighter pilot bastard. Did I mention I have to pee?"

  "Recalculating trajectory and . . . shutting down," Steve said. "Heh. Speaking of Apollo Thirteen, we're about to do a flyby of the back side of the moon."

  "Fortunately, we can do it quicker," Tyler said, breathing deeply. He had not enjoyed seven gravities. He'd taken more on rides and the vector hadn't really done more than press straight down on his body, but it was different when you were trying to plot a course in space. Not to mention he had had to keep his stomach muscles clenched to prevent a hernia. For twenty minutes. They hadn't even gotten into combat yet and he was already exhausted.

  Steve, the bastard, seemed to take it as just another day at the park.

  "Yeah, we're going to be going low," Steve said. "And at our velocity, we won't get much of a slingshot. And we're not going to have much time to do an attack run."

  "So we'd better make the shots count," Tyler said. They were still getting data on the Horvath ship through the hypernet so he carefully examined the approaching cruiser. "You know what? I think they're doing that slow approach because that's the only one they can do."

  "Explain?" Steve said.

  "They've only got about six gravities of acceleration," Tyler said. "They've used, basically, the same approach every time. I think that might be their flank speed. Think about it. They got a lot of advancement by the Glatun at first but making really good grav systems, as we have found out, is tough. And they were horse and buggy days when they started."

  "You think that's pretty much max drive," Steve said.

  "Which means . . ." Tyler said. "God, I wish we had better modeling software."

  "Should you be using the hypernet so much?" Steve said.

  "If they can detect it, no," Tyler replied. "But here's the thing. Remember Baghdad Bob?"

  "Those were the days," Steve said, sighing. "You mean the guy who was insisting the American forces had been destroyed when the reporters could hear tank fire?"

  "Same," Tyler said. "What I'm looking for is where we got the intel on the Horvath cruiser. And I just found out, it was from the Horvath. It's their technical specifications on their cruiser screens. Six hundred gravities of sheer. And it's identical to a Glatun destroyer."

  "Which we would find pretty much impossible to take down," Steve said. "But, Tyler, you understate your open source data. Subs go a lot deeper than two hundred meters."

  "And faster than twenty knots," Tyler said. "We understate. But I don't buy it. The Glatun don't help with military technology. They're not going to give the Horvath the most advanced shield technology. Just enough technology to make them better trading partners."

  "Stolen?" Steve said.

  "The Russians stole stuff all the time in the Cold War," Tyler said. "They couldn't equal any of our systems. If their cruiser has six gravities of delta-v, that would make their maximum grav output . . ." Tyler muttered to himself for a while and then shrugged. "I get it as a one hundred twenty gravity sheer. I'm not sure how much that's going to take to take down, though."

  "This is either going to work or it's not," Steve said. "By the way, speaking of going to work or not, have you taken a look out the window?"

  "No," Tyler said, looking through the small porthole. "Yipes! You weren't kidding about low!"

  The view was cluttered and blurred given their velocity. But Tyler could tell mountains, very close mountains, even when they were blurry.

  "We're actually heating up a tad from atmospheric effects," Steve said, musingly. "Given the paucity of Luna's so-called atmosphere."

  "Did we have to go this low?" Tyler asked.

  "Yes," Steve said. "We built up a good head of velocity when we were accelerating. It was go low or basically shoot out on a vector that had us behind them and completely out of position to fire. Remember, we have to be able to get physical rounds on target. When we come in view of them, which will be in about thirty seconds, we'll be slightly ahead of them in relation to their course. We're actually vectored so that we'll hit their stern if either of us don't change course."

  "Ramming speed!" Tyler yelled.

  "Very funny," Steve said. "Thing is, with our present vector, we'll be coming in on their flank at, if you're right about their systems, a very high velocity. We got some delta from the slingshot."

  "We're black," Tyler said. "And, I just realized as my cooling system went on overload, that we're coming in out of the sun."

  "Now if it was just dawn it would be perfect," Steve said. "Okay, time to bring the systems back up."

  "And this is go
ing to hurt," Tyler said, breathing deep. "I've got the gun, if you can handle the bird."

  "The way things are going, I can handle the bird," Steve said, bringing the grav plates up and spinning up the plates on the gun.

  "Any last words?"

  " 'From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of the Lunar Mare!'"

  "That's music I can dance to," Tyler said. "But it doesn't scan."

  "Gravity source at one-one-eight mark four point two," the Horvath systems operator commed. "Very scattered. Primitive."

  "That is the space fighter," the tactical controller stated. "Lasers to engage."

  "The space fighter is non-operational," Intelligence commed. "And human systems cannot penetrate our shields. Further study is required."

  "Reality overrides theory," tactical commed. "And intelligence."

  "Higher gravitational gradient detected," the sensor center commed. "Analysis is gravity driven mass driver. One hundred gravity gradient."

  "Holy hanna!" Tyler said. "I think we holed ourselves."

  Tyler had not quite gotten around to thinking about what firing the gun would be like. The 'rounds' were 150mm chunks of steel and depleted uranium with the breacher drive buried in the middle. And the Boeing engineers had managed to get one hundred gravities of acceleration, in relation to the rounds, out of the drive system. The rounds massed a hefty two hundred and thirty eight kilos. The entire craft had a mass of barely sixteen tons.

  Firing the gun felt like the nose of the plane was being hammered by Mjolnir. The first round had caused them to go into a flat spin. Fortunately, in space that's not hard to correct but it nearly caused Tyler to pass out.

  "Just keep firing!"

  "Unkph!" Tyler said, sending another round downrange. It was kind of hard to target because the Horvath ship might be big but they were a long way away and Steve was jinking all over the place trying to avoid Horvath lasers. "Ow! Frack!"

  "I'm going to stabilize for just a second," Steve said. "Fire as fast as you can."

  "Firing," Tyler said as the craft stabilized for just a moment. The targeting reticle had the distant Horvath ship centered. "Uhnk! Unkh! Uff!" The last round, he thought, sent them into another spin.

  "We're hit," Steve said. "I've lost stabilization."

  "And they're maneuvering," Tyler said. "I don't know if we're going to hit them with anything."

  "They're not maneuvering fast," Steve said, trying to get the craft oriented again. "Okay, just start firing. We'll fill the space with chaff and hope for the best."

  "Space is a big place," Tyler said then set the system to fire as fast as possible and crunched up. "I wish I had a space suit."

  "Be glad you're not on earth," Steve said.

  * * *

  "Report," the CJCS said, coughing. "Do we have anything?"

  "Hypernet is still up," the colonel in charge of NMDC said. She wiped some blood from her lips and coughed as well. The air was filled with dust and the ring of plasma screens that had given instant access to information around the world was now a shattered mass of expensive plastics. "We're getting scattered reports. New York, Washington and SF are all hit. Energetics are about sixty megatons. They're all gutted. I'm surprised we're here. The round in DC looks to have landed more or less on the Capitol. We tried to deflect the SF round with THAD, but it didn't even phase it."

  "Casualties?"

  "Megadeaths," the colonel said, shrugging. "Until we get satellite BDA we're not sure how bad. People were trying to get out of town but . . ." She shrugged again.

  "Who else?"

  "Every major capital. London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo. Then Jakarta, Seoul and Mumbai. We got pasted. I don't think they like us."

  "There were fourteen rounds," the general said, counting on his fingers. "Is there one still circling somewhere?"

  "The last one is believed to have hit Vernon Tyler's 'Lair,'" the colonel said. "We don't have BDA from that but given the energies . . . it's probably gone."

  "What about VLA control?" the general asked. "Do we still have SAPL?"

  "For what it's worth," the colonel said. "We still have control through the controls at SpaceCommand."

  "What's the word on the Fury?"

  "They're . . . engaging," the colonel said, looking at the papers she'd been handed. There wasn't a surviving printer in the place and reports were what the techs and NCOs were getting off the remaining hardened computer systems. "It doesn't look good."

  "You know how I said I had to pee?" Tyler grunted. They'd fired off all their rounds and now we're just trying to survive the Horvath laser fire. It wasn't going well. "Forget it."

  "Thought something smelled," Steve said. "Coming around to port . . ."

  "I think the stabilizer being shot off is helping," Tyler said. "I never know where we're going. How can they?"

  Lasers move at the speed of light. But The Tub had opened fire at about a hundred and sixty thousand kilometers or a bit over a half a light second. The likelihood of any of the breacher rounds hitting was, therefore, low. On the other hand, getting closer to the Horvath ship was suicide. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

  Tyler's guess about the Horvath ship's abilities, though, appeared correct. The 'cruiser' maneuvered even worse than the Tub.

  The ship took a sudden, hard, lurch and all the power shut down.

  "We're leaking air," Tyler said, looking through the rear porthole. "I mean, like blowing it out. I think something broke." He craned his head around more and winced. "Let me rephrase. They just shot off the rear of the bird."

  "That's something you don't see often," Steve said, quietly.

  "The rear of your ship floating away?" Tyler said.

  "No," Steve said. "A laser in space. I think it hit a chunk of debris. Well, nice knowing you."

  "Same," Tyler said. "I wonder how it's going on earth?"

  "We need to engage," Dr. Foster said. "It's a second and a half from the point that we open fire until we even hit the Horvath ship. And they are dead in space."

  "Their telemetry is gone," the commander of SpaceCom said. "There's no gravitic emissions, there are no particle emissions, there is no hypernet transmissions. They're dead. So losing our one chance to take out the cruiser is out of the question. See the ripple of distortion around the Horvath ship? They have their shields at maximum. We can't punch though that, right?"

  "We hit them from every BDA array," Foster said. "Maybe we can overwhelm them. The full SAPL is damned near one hundred and sixty terrawatts. We just hold back the VSA mirror. That we've only got one shot with."

  "Do it," the general said.

  "Setting it up . . ." the laser technician said, starting to hit the icons.

  "Let me," Foster said with a sigh and closed his eyes. "I can do it with plants faster. And all the arrays are . . . retargeting."

  "Hey," Tyler said. "I can see your house from here!"

  "More importantly, I can see the Horvath ship," Steve said. "Barely. It's just a dot."

  "Can you see if they're still firing?" Tyler asked.

  "You can't see lasers in space," Steve said. "But they haven't hit us. Yet. That's a good thing."

  "Again," Tyler said. "Got to wonder about their targeting systems. I mean, we'd have a hard time hitting something this small from that far away even with the SAPL. And I think that mirrors in space are probably less jittery than a ship. So . . ."

  "Whoa!" Steve said. "I can really see it, now."

  "Why?"

  "I think they just opened up with SAPL."

  Tyler had been building a lot of mirrors. Mirrors to pick up sunlight. Mirrors to reflect it. Mirrors to move it around. It all added up.

  Forty separate BDA systems, each capable of concentrating their reflected four megawatts of solar energy to a beam the diameter of a coffee cup, had engaged the Horvath screens. Which turned black as night as they attempted to deflect the massed photons.

  "Screens at maximum," the defensive technician said
. "They are holding."

  The entire ship was thrumming like a steel guitar, though.

  "The power is intense," the engineering technician noted, cautiously. "There is a possibility of failure of one of the systems under so much load. Also, it is using a significant amount of fuel to maintain power. Engineering recommends ending this condition at the earliest possible moment."