by A. D. Bloom
Shafter and Burn wore stern masks for the briefing before C-block launched. The 44 nuggets sat on their bug-eyed flight helmets while Burn set her matchbox computer down on the deck. The wide-field projector flickered on. In the air above it the little computer showed them a full-scale bandit, 10 meters high. It loomed over the nuggets, all those spikes threatening to stab at them.
"This is a red bandit," Shafter said. "This is the Squidies' primary intercept fighter. You've seen them before, but those times you were looking down the barrel of their guns or up at their bombs. Now, I want you to take a closer look because very soon, you're going to be killing them."
In motion, the alien fighters had looked like symmetrical bundles of knives, spiked hulls stabbing in all directions, always half-blurred with speed. Sitting completely still, the red bandit didn't even look like the same craft. It looked like something that belonged underwater, like something between a spiked sea-creature and a rock formation. "They're fast," Shafter said. "And they can turn before you know it happened. That small-bore particle stream there," he pointed to the stubby protrusion on the front that didn't even look like a gun. "They spit streams of hyper-accelerated nuclei in half-second or two-second bursts. Can stab right through a hull in one shot if it lands right. I've seen them cut an armored junk in half."
He'd heard the alien pilots' cockpit was somewhere above the gun, but he couldn't see any hatch or canopy. "The cockpit is windowless and armored," Shafter said. "It's deep inside the hull, but if you score a square hit, the shells will reach them. Aim here." He pointed to a spot a meter over the particle cannon. "The red color of the hull isn't painted on," Shafter said. "It's a property of the organic coating. Little alien microbes grow on the hull to produce a magnetite shell from the materials underneath. That's where the color comes from." It looked like pressed leather.
Markings had been painted on by an alien hand – by whatever Squidies had for hands. In the one picture he'd seen they had palmless things with boneless digits that were hard to count when they were dead.
"It's easier to see the markings with your helmets on," Shafter said. "They show up better in infrared." They were red on red and hard for an unaided human eye to read, but through the helmet it looked like lots of different, curving, headless arrows drawn inside of triangles. "Don't know what these markings mean for sure. Maybe designations like the ones painted on our own fighters."
Maybe it was some Squidy pilot's nickname. Those markings had been painted with a brush. The line was gestural. In places where the brush had been thirsty the line had broken, and paint only covered the raised texture of the hull. He pictured the thing that made those strokes and shivered.
"Note the maneuvering jets," Shafter said. The exhaust ports set into the spikes coming off the hull obviously function as maneuvering thrusters. Even though their nozzles didn't look big enough to spin and jink the alien fighter around in space, they were the only part of the craft that made any intuitive sense to him. "Their spin rate is superior to ours. Their main thrusters are more powerful, too. And the gun... The Squidies can only aim their fire a few degrees off their direction of travel, but that's enough to give them a hell of an advantage in a fight. In addition, they will accelerate faster than you will. The Squidies' fighter uses an inertial negation pinch that's far superior to ours. It can compensate for more of the inertial gees generated by violent ACM than ours can – significantly more. They means they can pull maneuvers we can't. I've seen one pull a sixty-gee loop. They have a turning radius so much tighter than a Bitzer that if you get drawn into a turning contest with a red bandit, it won't matter what you do because that Squidy will soon be behind you with zero angle off your tail, in a pure pursuit, raking that beam across your engines or stabbing it through your reactor for a quick kill."
Colt glanced around to see if anyone was hearing the same thing he was. Snooze looked stone-faced scared, but Gusher and Holdout didn't look like they got it until Shafter came right out and said it: "To sum up all the good news, the Squidies' fighters are superior in nearly every flight characteristic. They're faster. They're more maneuverable. Their weapons are more dangerous."
"How are we supposed to fight them?"
"That's what we're going to teach you."
*****
Forty-Four Staas Company F-151s hung high over Europa, shifting on their jets while they waited for their turn to tango with Shafter, Dig, and Topper. Burn watched from Arbitrage's bridge with a god's eye view.
She said, "Look alive, look alive, nuggets! Dessert tonight for the winners is Baked Alaska. Flight #1, you're up. OPFOR is coming from the other side of this moon. When you engage Squidy, you will survive by employing mutually supportive formations like Loose Deuce and Fluid 4. You will rotate offensive and defensive roles constantly and you will rely on each other. Remember, when Squidy gets you in his sights, the only thing that can shake him off you is your wingman."
"You heard the lady," Dolly said. "All we gotta do is cover each others' asses, split 'em up, and smack 'em down." Her flight of four pitched over, rolled on their thrusters, and dove out of the pack.
Her wingman, Duke, tucked up above and behind her, sixty degrees off her port side. The second element of Dolly's fluid four was Poppy and Flats. They swung into echelon like Dolly's element and followed them from behind and to the rear so they could give her support.
Dolly must have misjudged how fast Shafter's flight was coming because by the time she got around to actually maneuvering, they were almost on her. She pulled her fighter's nose away from the enemy and called "Weave! Weave!" She and Duke flew a Thatch Weave. Their fighters curved in and out in intersecting s-patterns so that their paths crossed. It gave each of them the chance to blast anything that came for their wingman. It was a strong defensive tactic, but right away, Dolly gave up the initiative. She gave the next move to the enemy and never got it back.
Flight 1 got dusted in seconds.
Flights 2 through 8 didn't fare much better. No matter what any of the nuggets tried, Shafter and his aces out flew them. Most of them died before even getting a shot off. All the exercise seemed to reinforce was that one way or another, no matter what they did, they were all going to die. "This is bull's dust." Cleeg was right about that.
"It isn't even half-fair," Gusher complained over local comms. "We're just target practice for Shafter's last aces. All we're learning how to do is go and get dusted."
"Stifle it, C-Block." Burn said, "Flight 9, number nine... J. Colt, Snooze, Holdout, Gusher. You're up. Try to last longer than Hooter's flight did."
He put Holdout on his wing today. He needed Snooze to lead the rear element of his Fluid 4 to make sure it was there when he needed it. Hopefully, Snooze would limit himself to the low-gee maneuvers like he told him and wouldn't end up taking any naps.
They tore over the icy moon on a vector they hoped might actually surprise Shafter, but the OPFOR didn't show. He had timed out how long it usually took them to come around Europa. "They should be here by now," he said. "Everybody gimme eyeballs and arrays. They're gonna come at us out of nowhere, I know it."
"Heck. Shafter and them don't need to surprise us to kill us," Snooze said.
Thirty seconds later, Shafter's OPFOR flight still hadn't shown. He considered using comms, but he knew what Burn would say if he called in to complain that they couldn't find the enemy.
Almost halfway around the ice-encrusted, watery moon, there was still no sign of Shafter on LiDAR or infrared. He only found them because Holdout picked up bounce traces of active search radar from down near the pole on a frequency the Bitzers didn't use.
Colt and his flight rocketed themselves over Europa's southern pole and couldn't believe their eyes. Shafter's OPFOR was already engaged. He could make out their pale, bluish plasma trails corkscrewing and doubling back, locked in violent maneuvers with a constellation of three, rose-colored stars that chased them in tight formation as they stabbed and slashed with rapier-thin particle streams. "Squidies
," he said. "Real Squidies."
And all Shafter's flight had loaded in their guns were harmless training rounds.
"Keep your eyes open," Snooze said. "There might be even more of them."
The Squidies turned faster and tighter than Shafter said. They herded the Bitzers with their fire. The veteran pilots were flying like hell to keep from getting dusted, and without anything but dummy rounds, all they could do was evade. They had nothing to fight back with.
He didn't think about it and he knew that was how bad things happened, but the words just came out of his mouth. "Holdout, you 180 back around Europa and when you get line-of-sight to the 151s, you call for help. Gusher, you stay loose on Snooze. Snooze, you stay loose on me. We're going into that furball."
"All we've got is training ammo," Gusher said. "It's not even going to dent them."
"The Squidies don't know that."
"But look at them," Gush said. The slowest moving planes in that furball were three times faster than the nuggets' Bitzers. "Our planes can't hack that. We got no business in there, man."
"That's what the big red button is for," he said. "See it on the port side of your cockpit? Hit it, Gush! Hit it!" Gusher asked him if he was trying to get sent back to prison, but he had already mashed the button with the meat of his fist and slammed the main thrusters hard and now, pressed back in his flight couch from unbelievable acceleration gees, he could barely hear anyone on comms over his own uncontrollable screaming.
Instantly, a buzzing hum started shaking every cell of his body. It felt like being lifted by a wave and dropped, but it happened ten-thousand times a second. This had to be the stolen, alien inertial negation system that let them fly hard without killing themselves with gees, but a properly working inertial negation system wasn't supposed to feel like this. He had a gut feeling that whatever it was doing to his body was bad enough that he should be very, very concerned, but the thought fell behind him with everything else as he accelerated.
Shafter spun wildly and rolled on his jets, flying fully defensive like Topper and Dig, desperately trying to evade the aliens and their raking beams. When Dig came in from underneath the Squidies to drive them off Shafter, they went for Dig.
Colt wasn't prepared for how his 151 flew now, and his input was sloppy and muddled, but the fighter's AI helped him hold the offensive roll as he closed the last Ks and fell into a lead pursuit on the alien flight leader. A little spin pulled his nose ahead for a snap snot, and he fired.
The Bitzer's six cannon shook the whole fighter as he stitched the vacuum bright with brilliantly burning, 140mm dummy rounds. He missed, but the alien flight leader couldn't fail to notice the fire coming from above and behind his formation. He pulled away and left Dig's tail in a chandelle, a 180 half-loop with a half-roll at the top, like an Immelmann turn, but off-angle. The alien maneuvered so tightly that in less than two seconds, it had already come around to face him.
He looked down the wide-mouth aperture of the vectoring rings just before the Squidy fired. The stream stabbed his Bitzer on the starboard side, on the edge of the hull, between the spurs of his maneuvering jets. There was a shower of sparks and orange drops of metal spattered like blood and the whole fighter shook like he'd been hammered by a warship's main gun. It knocked the 151 spinning and killed his thrust and once he stabilized himself and recovered with maneuvering jets, he looked out to see that alien malevolence still with him, now matching his motion and hanging seemingly still in front of him with the streaking stars behind it. It pointed the gaping barrel of that particle cannon between his eyes. "Do it!" is what he tried to shout, but comms filled with Snooze's and Gusher's wild screams and the black vacuum all around him lit up with sparks.
A thick storm of burning, osmium-tungsten sabot and HE shells tore across the Squidy, drilling it in a dozen places and burrowing deep before they detonated. When the alien flight leader cooked-off, it lit up the 50 autonomous Dingo QF-111 drones with Snooze and Gusher as they rocketed past, strafing in a massive pack like a gorgeous, fire-spitting swarm. It wasn't much of a tactical formation, but there were a hell of a lot of them – enough to convince the last Squidies to use their superior speed to bug the hell out while they still could.
The Dingoes couldn't catch up, but they tried. As the last two bandits escaped, Colt shivered violently in his cockpit. It was like being cold, but he was sweating. He shook all over – not his hands so much as everything else. He knew that feeling. He used to get it after a ballistic glider run. It's what happens when your body releases too much adrenaline at once. Now, just like then, willpower alone kept him from shaking apart.
Chapter Eight
Despite the rips in the armor and outer hull, his Bitzer flew mostly fine on the way back to Arbitrage. He'd been lucky and the enemy's particle stream hadn't holed anything critical. There were no warnings of reactor problems from the hit he took, but Arbitrage wasn't taking any chances. They didn't want to lose every craft in the launch bay if one wounded bird suddenly blew.
While the rest of the squadron landed, the ship's redsuits made him park the fighter 200 meters outside the launch bay and sent a pair of knuckledraggers with a team to check it out. They said it would take a while and they'd portage his fighter in by hand. He didn't really want to leave his 151 with them, but Burn told him to get out and swim for it like he had a pair.
It was only 200 meters to the ship and the bay was 170 meters wide, so he wasn't worried about missing. All he had to do was power down, grope around until he found the manual release system, open the cockpit, and extricate. Burn even talked him through it. "After manual cockpit opening, you will egress the cockpit. You will face Arbitrage's bay in a crouched position, aim with your eyes, and push off with your legs."
"What do I do when I get inside the bay?"
"You will decelerate using the launch bay's rear bulkhead."
"The wall? You want me to just smack into the wall? Is that the best procedure you came up with for this part?"
Burn was all quiet on comms for a couple of seconds. "Okay then, zoomie. Just for you, we'll make up a better procedure. When you launch, aim for the doors of airlock 2. They're softer."
He got a good launch. He went right where he'd aimed himself. Problem was, that was the airlock 2 doors. From fifty meters out he saw the light over them began to flash. That airlock was cycling. Someone was coming through the lock.
Up on the bridge, watching on camera, Burn was laughing her ass off.
As he crossed the threshold into Arbitrage's launch bay, the local .3 gees of artificial gravity from Arbitrage's pinch pulled him down, but he was still headed right for the doors more than a meter and a half over the deck. To his right, he saw his fellow pilots exiting the cockpits of their fighters and pointing at him, the orange blur-streak ripping across the bay.
It looked like maybe he'd catch a break and hit the doors before the airlock door opened, so he rotated his feet to land on it instead of smashing flat into it like an idiot. Then, it opened.
It opened, and he saw the maintenance crewmen inside. The redsuits in there had nowhere to go. He was headed right for them. Impact was imminent and if he'd spread out his arms and legs and belly flopped into them, it might have dissipated his kinetic energy over the first row of redsuits he hit. Instead, he tried to make himself small so maybe they could all get out of the way. He tucked his knees in and grabbed them and turned himself into a human cannonball that plowed deep into the crowd and sent at least nine of them careening off the bulkheads and bouncing off each other until all their bodies and limbs tangled in a heap of cursing with him in the middle.
Burn laughed over comms before she put her professional voice back on and said, "This is Burn. I am impressed. J. Colt, you are deadly ordnance. You are now J. 'Ordo' Colt."
"J. Ordo?" Shafter wasn't convinced. "Nah... try Jordo. He's Jordo. That way, the stupid, stand-alone 'J' in his name finally stands for something. Write it on your helmet, nugget. Jordo. That's your name."
/> *****
Everyone got Baked Alaska that night. After they finished their burger-filled buns, they went back for it, and Cook himself set it on their tray and lit it on fire. Jordo ate his and felt like he deserved every spoonful. Snooze savored it. Holdout and Gusher did the same. But the rest of the C-Block pilots ate theirs without the same satisfaction. It was like they questioned the taste of victory. Jordo told himself they just weren't having as good a day as he was.
When Burn came through the hatch, the nuggets noticed her entrance. She was never around without a reason and he saw it when she spotted him. She didn't look at him again until she'd walked down the ranks of tables and benches to the one where he and his flight were basking along with six other pilots. "Jordo. The boss wants to see you. Don't make him wait." And then she was gone.
"You don't think they're gonna' washout Colt for hittin' the red button do you?"
"Call me Jordo," he said.
*****
The Staas Security Guards had been stationed in pairs to keep C-Block below decks, but when the two at the lifts saw him coming, they didn't even glance at him. He tried to walk like he knew where he was going as he stepped into the lift.
Shafter's quarters were on the upper decks, in what they called officer country. Officer country on Arbitrage smelled better – just like the redsuits' jokes said it did. Jordo knew it was mostly just because there weren't very many officers, but the maintenance crews said it was because officers never actually worked up a sweat.
The hatch hung open. Jordo rapped the belt-iron steel with his knuckles, and Shafter turned in his chair. He sat at his desk with a matchbox computer projecting the local stars in front of him. He had maps and charts Jordo had never seen before. "The yellow spots and dotted lines between adjacent systems mark the locations of interstellar transits," he said, "viable FTL passages from system to system."