Elian, the first name of the navigator asked, “What’s her experience?” Kana grunted and said, “She’s been working for me for over six months, and can work blindfolded on fighter flight systems, the laser targeting systems and defensive shields. She’s a lot better than her 4 rating, in fact she’s something of a freak of nature, but she hasn’t been in her present rank long enough to promote her again, especially with the ongoing downgrades fleet is experiencing. Oh, she also makes a mean cup of coffee. I think you’ll like her, sirs.”
The pilot looked at the ship and asked, “I’d like to get my hands dirty. Do you have anyone up in the cockpit?” Kana looked skeptically at him and asked, “Do you know your way around the innards of an electronics bay?” He said, “I’ve been working on nav and power systems since I was a kid – my family owns a maintenance service that works on shuttles.”
Kana looked up in surprise – that hadn’t been in his jacket - and asked, “What shuttles did you work on?” The kid rattled off a list of all the ships he was familiar with, which included nearly every type of civilian cargo shuttle currently in service, plus a number of ships that were designed to carry personnel rather than freight.
Kana was impressed, and pointed at the ladder. “The hurrier we go, the faster we can kill us some rat bastard enemy ships. Your tech has the list of changes to make to the nav system.”
He casually watched the young pilot approach his ETech, a young woman currently buried up to her waist in the nose, where she was working on upgrading the radar emitters, small, solid-state blocks. They casually traded names, she transferred the list of equipment that was to be switched out in the flight cabin, and Robert went up into the ship.
Kana’s ETech was something of a phenomenon. She was young, very pretty and exceptionally gifted. In a just world, she would have already been jumped into an OCS class and promoted to either a warrant or line officer. Unfortunately, with the long-term contraction of the Navy, she was fortunate to have a bunk.
Some time later the two fighter jocks went to lunch with Carolyn. Kana watched them leave and went up into the Hawk. Robert – the pilot - had told him that he’d finished changing out the modules and reprogrammed the software. According to the book, it should have taken far longer – Kana wanted to see for himself if the man was as competent with a wrench as he was with a stick.
As he was finishing up his inspection, the three returned from lunch. The work was completed and without a single problem.
Kana was beginning to realize that in these two young men he had a genuine find.
Over the next couple of days they fabricated new brackets for the heavy bottles and capacitors, moved them inside the extremely cramped cabin, connected everything, tested the new circuitry and finally got a go-ahead to test the hybrid craft.
Kana had decided he wanted to be a part of this, whatever it was. Their Dash 6 fighters were woefully inadequate to deal with the enemy fighter, and if those same enemy fighters were able to get past that craft, the destroyers were just as thin skinned. The Hawk was the only new idea he’d heard.
Robert, Elian, Carolyn – his ETech – and Kana launched for an abbreviated test flight with a precious fighter along as escort.
As the tiny craft moved away from the fleet Kana continued to pay very careful attention to the two men, the way they performed their separate tasks, the way they interacted with each other and with their two enlisted.
Over the next few hours he began to see that underneath the pilot’s studied casual attitude lurked a genius. Robert was a perfect complement to Elian, who tended to keep him honest, and both men seemed to be willing to adjust their relationship to include the brilliant Carolyn.
Elliot knew that part of that had to do with the fact that she was very attractive, but they were paying attention to her skills and abilities rather than her eyes. It was perhaps fortunate that the rest of her was covered in shapeless coveralls.
The Hawk ran away from their escort, making it nearly the fastest military craft in human space, exceeded only by a few unarmed couriers; even better, it was extremely hard to see, either with radar or with their gravity sensors.
Back aboard the Essex, they were given orders to launch a mission, designed to locate and observe the enemy fleet.
As they tried to catch up on some much-needed sleep, the other three Hawks were being brought up to the flight decks.
Chapter 39
Admiral Shin Ho Lee
Fleet Base Jupiter
Shin Ho was awakened out of a deep sleep by a blaring alarm. He sat up in bed and answered his comm. A technician announced, “Sir, we’ve just received notice of a major attack on Seventh Fleet.”
Shin Ho promptly said, “Ride, two minutes.”
He quickly dressed and carefully ran from his sleeping quarters into his office. A Marine appeared, still putting on his equipment. Within seconds, he had an entire squad. He was forced to wait while they ensured that he was protected from God knows what. But within ten minutes he was allowed to shuttle a half-kilometer across the base and down three hundred meters to a little used command bunker.
The Spruance was still overhead, and Shin Ho’s first decision was to return system control to the base. That would take a little time, but over the next thirty minutes radar stations came back up and passive sensors all over the Jupiter system began to pour data into his consoles. They hadn’t been upgraded in over a decade, and while that had been on Shin Ho’s list, it now moved well up.
The report, transmitted by a just-arrived courier from Lubya, was sparse on information. Seventh Fleet had been bounced by a large and powerful flight of fighters, similar in size and power to the older Dash 4, but with much more powerful energy weapons than the current Dash 6. At the time of the transmission seventeen fighters had been lost, along with five destroyers. Virtually all the other combatants had suffered mild to severe damage, and only the two carriers and their FFC’s had been spared.
The enemy was totally unknown, not from any human world.
As a matter of course, Shin Ho passed the message on to Earth, adding the possibility that they had just experienced first contact with an alien race. Within two hours Earth system defenses began mobilizing.
First Fleet was under the direct control of Haifa, but much of the naval infrastructure of the system was under his control, and within thirty minutes he had cancelled all leaves and liberties, ordered all naval vessels to get under way and head to pre-planned destinations, designed to ensure that they would not be destroyed in orbit.
None of the many possible scenarios that Fleet had prepared for included an invasion by aliens, but what little information he had indicated that this new enemy’s technology was roughly on par with earth’s, meaning he could adapt already prepared contingency plans. Unfortunately, those plans all included an operational Navy, something he didn’t have.
Eight hours later Shin Ho sent yet another report to Haifa. It said that the makeup of the enemy force was as yet unknown, that it’s fighters had approached Seventh Fleet on a ballistic course that allowed them to get very close without being detected, meaning the enemy had very good sensor readings on Seventh Fleet; that the enemy fighters did not utilize missiles, but their energy weapons were easily as powerful as the 35 cm lasers used by his destroyers.
He dispatched two couriers to Lubya, and he ordered Alexi to begin taking on fighters. He also ordered an emergency mobilization of reserves, including a squadron of destroyers held in Earth orbit.
At ten hours a new courier appeared outside of Jupiter orbit and transmitted new data, including recordings of actual combat and a reasonably detailed analysis of the enemy fighter.
As he viewed the footage it was quickly obvious that the older Dash 4 and 5 fighters would have fared much better against the powerful but technologically inferior enemy fighters. He also concluded that while the enemy didn’t have missiles, they seemed to be familiar with them.
The report included the information that Seventh Fle
et did have a good supply of the much better AR-15 missile, and was changing over. He didn’t have any information that showed how effective it might be, but the report clearly stated that the Dash 6 was no match.
Shin Ho promptly ordered a query on all mothballed fighters, including numbers, condition and location.
He ordered couriers to all human systems, ordering them to go to a war footing, and federalized their system destroyers. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t help him terribly much, since, save for Elyse, none of those systems had even a handful of active destroyers. Worse, he could guess what they were going to be saying: ‘give us more’.
He didn’t have more.
By day three he had enough information on what resources he did have to begin making recommendations to Haifa. He requested that two of the four First Fleet carriers be turned over to his control, along with twenty destroyers. As way of explanation, he said that he planned to move as many craft as possible to Lubya, which was the closest human system to the point of contact. Haifa took his request ‘under advisement’.
He was now receiving a steady flow of couriers from Lubya, but after those first few assaults, Seventh Fleet hadn’t been hit again. It didn’t know why, still didn’t have a clue where the enemy fleet was located, or any information on its makeup. As a result, the fleet hadn’t jumped out.
That was a potentially controversial decision, but Shin Ho strongly felt it was the right one. If they were to have any sort of a chance, they had to have information, not give it away. Seventh Fleet didn’t want to reveal that it had FTL ability, just on the off chance their enemy didn’t have it.
Shin Ho thought it unlikely that an attack near the outer edge of an immense empty void could have been launched without FTL, but he didn’t know.
By the end of the second week he was receiving large influxes of new people, ten destroyers were being brought back to life, and the Krakow was on station, her fighters flying sweeps. The carrier was still largely immobile, but it was able to operate fighters.
Chapter 40
Shin Ho was an ardent student of history; specifically, the history of war. During the civil war, battles had been fought involving thousands of fighters, hundreds of destroyers and tens of thousands of missiles. It had evolved into immense actions with carrier-launched fighters trying to get close enough to launch missiles, and other carrier-launched fighters fighting to prevent that from happening.
Now, he had one limping carrier with less than fifty fighters, plus another hundred fighters able to launch out of the actual base. First Fleet had another two hundred or so fighters and thirty destroyers, but if he’d been able to gather his entire armed might in one location, it wouldn’t be much more than a small blip compared to their recent past.
He had virtually no information on what humanity faced, save that they had been attacked without notice, without one word of warning, before or after.
He received one piece of good news, interspersed between a great deal of bad news. Seventh Fleet had modified an old Hawk and sent it out to try to locate the enemy fleet. The ancient craft had proven remarkably able and had returned with invaluable information. The enemy fleet wasn’t a fleet as much as it was an invasion, the very bad news.
He pored over sensor readings showing the Hawk sneaking past large numbers of enemy fighters and approaching an immense globe that was estimated to mass over twenty million tons. The enemy also possessed significant numbers of large to very large combatants. And, the enemy had missiles, which proved to be slow but shockingly powerful.
The Hawk launched two nuclear missiles at the globe, and one hit, causing an unknown amount of damage, but no noticeable effect on the ship. Of all the information this report included, that was the most alarming – those missiles were the largest in his inventory, and he didn’t have many of them.
At last report, the Essex had sent out all four Hawks it had available. The enemy was now reported to lack FTL, a good thing; but there were four, possibly five separate globes, each with hundreds of fighters and dozens of major combatants. Just one of those fleets was larger than the combined might of the Federal Navy, and there were four of them. Worst of all – so far, they were moving toward each other.
By now, Shin Ho knew how many Hawks he had in mothballs, and it was a mixed bag of bad and very bad. They were spread all over human space, and none of them were currently flyable. It may well have been that those four on the Essex had been the very last operating versions, an immense stroke of fortune.
He did have a breakdown of the modifications Seventh Fleet had performed, and he was struck by the ingenuity and creativeness they had displayed, converting an ancient ground attack craft into a blazingly fast, nearly invisible scout, sort of a combination fighter/attack/research Hawk. In addition to the external heavy missiles, they’d filled it with internal light missiles, and on their second sortie they had hit the globe with four out of eight missiles, causing ‘some damage’.
Shin Ho knew that just one of those missiles would easily obliterate any ship in the Federal Navy; he couldn’t imagine how four multi-megaton nuclear warheads couldn’t kill a spacecraft.
Alexi reported that the Krakow was now able to accelerate at its rated maximum eight G’s, although he added that he didn’t know for how long. The ship was still a mess, but Alexi was making it work, and even while he was out on station, he had his crew plus yard dogs working around the clock to bring it up to combat readiness.
Shin Ho ordered a team to begin tearing down a Dash 4 fighter with the aim of increasing its power and decreasing its visibility.
Seventh Fleet’s latest comm indicated that it had discovered, or possibly discovered, how the enemy had so easily located it. It seemed that fusion bottles radiated what everyone had always thought was a very weak and rapidly attenuated ultra high frequency. They’d been wrong, and Seventh Fleet was trying to cobble together patches that would eliminate that source.
Gravity drives had made human spaceflight practical, and over several hundred years nobody had ever studied this phenomenon. The report gave him a possible reason – the aliens possibly developed on a world with heavier gravity, and while they were ahead of humans in some areas, they were behind in others. For example, their ships radiated high levels of infrared, a relatively low frequency.
He put his people on Jupiter Base to work researching the issue, and sent the data on to Haifa.
Virtually every single human system was screaming for additional forces, and Shin Ho was finding that his ability to make policy decisions was rapidly eroding as panic spread up to the highest reaches of government. As soon as he got his hands on a warship, someone demanded that he send it to their system, leaving him with almost no ability to wage war.
By now, men and material were pouring into Jupiter Base, and he had the makings of an offensive fleet, centered on the Krakow and one additional carrier. He had long ago changed from asking for ships to begging, and finally, to threatening.
He commed Alexi and the two men spent forty minutes talking about the situation.
Alexi reported, “Sir, the Krakow is now capable of sustaining seven G’s acceleration, and can make almost eight for short periods of time; we’ve got fifty-two operational fighters, a full load-out of missiles and munitions, and our bunkers are full. We can get underway within thirty minutes of receipt of your orders.”
Shin Ho asked, “How many additional fighters can you take?” Alexi expected that question, “Sir, we can take thirty-five additional fighters. We could actually hold more than that, but we can only operate eighty-six.”
A moment later Alexi asked, “Sir, what about additional carriers?” Shin Ho said, “We’re bringing the Netherlands in from Elyse. It should be borderline operational by the time it arrives. That ship already has a complement of Dash 4’s, something I want for you. Some have been modified with a makeshift kit to mask their bottle noise, and the crew is modifying the remaining fighters on the ship.”
Shin Ho didn’t hesitate
, “I’m transferring thirty-five fighters up to your ship. It will take several days to set up, but I want you to consider this a warning that you will be heading to Lubya just as soon as possible. That will be subject to change, as we want to replace 6’s with as many 4’s as we can find. I intend to send you forward together rather than separately. That will mean that Lubya will be exposed for a longer period of time, but I hate the thought of getting whittled down piecemeal. Meanwhile, as soon as I have multiples of four Dash 4’s, I’ll send them up to replace the 6’s you now have. You’ll keep the crews. I expect you to accelerate your training tempo. This will provide you with useful feedback on reliability. Concentrate on anti-fighter tactics for the present. We know this enemy has large ships, but for the present, their fighters are our worry.”
Alexi said, “Yes sir.”
Chapter 41
Admiral Alexi Tretiakov
Fleet Carrier Krakow
Alexi stood on the bridge, watching a large display. His fighters were acting as defenders and waiting for elements of the First Fleet to attack the Krakow. He now had sixteen Dash 4’s plus seventy-two Dash 6’s. Since the 6’s were substantially stealthier to conventional radar, he kept the larger fighters in close to the carrier.
Hawk Flight (Flight of the Hawk Book 3) Page 22