“My favorite subject, Escort One. Over.”
“Excellent. Well, then, you have come to the right world because Rashid IV and its environs are home to a great many antique rifle collectors. Over.”
“Is that so? What kind of rifle collectors? Over.”
“All kinds. Most of them are friendly enough. The ones you want to avoid, though, are the ones who have great affection for the United States Army rifle that preceded the Model 1903 Springfield. I forget the name but I’m sure you’ll remember it specifically. Not that these people actually make the rifle, mind you. But they are extremely fond of it and are happy to work with it. Over.”
Max snorted, then keyed to transmit. “Message understood. And thank you. You can ride my wing any day of the week. Glad to have the company, Escort One. One-one-four out.”
“I’m glad you understand, because I am utterly clueless,” said Dr. Sahin.
“Well, Bram, it’s like that message from Wortham-Biggs. It was written for you, so you got it and I didn’t. Well, this message was meant for me, so I got it and you didn’t.”
“Are you going to translate for me, or do I have to access the ship’s database and start reading about antique military rifles?”
“Not that some time in the database wouldn’t do you some good, but I would rather have you reading about naval customs, military procedures, and filling in the gaps in your knowledge of warships than looking up material about old rifles.
“Before the Model 1903 Springfield, a bolt-action rifle firing the thirty-aught-six cartridge, the standard issue rifle in the United States Army was the Model 1896, a bolt-action rifle chambered for the ‘.30-caliber army’ cartridge, also known as the thirty-forty.…It was better known by the names of the men who designed it: the Krag-Jorgensen.”
“Aahh. So, whoever would want to stop us from landing would be someone who is friendly with the Krag. Interesting. That gives me a very good idea of what we are doing here.”
Just as Max was about to ask precisely what that idea was, he noticed that the proximity display showed Escort Two pulling rapidly out of formation and accelerating more or less at right angles to the course of the other two ships. Two beeps. Escort One was about to talk to them. In the intervening twenty seconds, Max started to configure the active sensors to do a focused scan in the direction the fighter was going.
“One-one-four, this is Escort One.” The pilot’s voice had the tone that everyone who has ever served in the military associates with an officer giving orders, “Maintain your current status. Do not change course or speed unless directed by us. Do not alter the directionality of your active sensor scans. Please acknowledge this message and your intention to comply with these instructions. Over.”
“Escort One, this is one-one-four. Message received. No yoke and throttle action. No waving the flashlight. Will comply. Any word on what’s going on? Over.”
“Only that we have some visitors. Nothing that Escort Two can’t handle. Escort One out.”
“Well, that was not particularly informative. What are you doing, Max? He said not to do anything with our sensors.”
“Actually, he said ‘do not alter the directionality of your active sensor scans,’ ” corrected Max as he continued entering commands on the Clover’s small but capable sensor console. “He didn’t say a word about passive sensors. Let’s see how much I remember from my years in Sensors. I’m just altering the gain on this sensor”—he pulled up a screen and entered some commands—“tweaking the resolution on that one”—more commands—“changing the bandwidth and the sampling frequency here”—about twenty seconds of configuration changes—“integrating the feeds through a tactical interpretive algorithm, and then telling the algorithm that it is looking at interception of an unknown number of vessels of unknown type by one small Rashidian fighter”—that took almost a minute—“and…comme ça.”
The display in front of him, which had been showing various graphs and waveforms that meant nothing to the doctor, went blank for an instant, after which three icons appeared on it. One was labeled “RASHID FGTR” and the others had labels that said “UNID FGTR 1” and UNID FGTR 2.”
“See here, Doctor, this is what’s going on. Here are two fighters. Let’s call them Uniform one and two. With the limited sensors on this ship, I can’t give you an ID. I can give you their bearing, range, course, speed, and their mass, but that’s all. Uniform One and Two are on an intercept course with us. If nothing changes, they will be within missile range in about six and a half minutes.
“And here’s our friend, Escort Two, accelerating to intercept the fighters.” He grunted appreciatively. “Nice acceleration profile. I didn’t know the Rashidian fighters could crack on like that. That’s some useful intel. He’ll be in missile range of the fighters in about forty-five seconds, but if he’s smart, he won’t shoot just then. Uniform one and two would see the firing and be able to track the missiles’ seeker heads, maybe giving them a chance to evade. So, he will probably take a bit longer to get into the optimal firing position. The other fighters probably don’t see him, so it’ll be a rude surprise.”
“Why is it that we can detect him and that the fighters likely cannot?”
“Simple geometry. Escort Two’s engines are pointing in our direction, so they show up like a spotlight on practically every sensor I’ve got. Hell, if you went in that little passenger compartment back there and looked out a porthole, you could probably see the damn thing with the Mark One Eyeball. A fighter is a whole lot harder to spot from nose on.”
“But the attacking fighters have their fronts to us, do they not? Why can we detect them?”
“Because I’m not detecting the fighters exactly. I’m detecting their missiles. They have activated the missiles’ seeker heads, so they can acquire the target the moment they’re in range, fire quickly, and get away. The seeker heads are broadcasting conventional RF and tachyo-graviton radar, which our sensors are picking up. Remember, they think they’re hunting a standard microfreighter with only rudimentary sensors. So, the seeker head detection gives me a bearing to focus our mass detector on, and based on their mass I can verify that they are fighters and not just slow missiles.”
“What happens now?”
“Very shortly, there will be an engagement. Since this is a fighter engagement in space fought with nuclear weapons, I can guarantee that someone will die, and based on the tactical situation, I can almost guarantee you, it’ll be Uniform One and Uniform Two. The only question is how.”
“How can you be so certain? The Uniforms do, after all, have a numerical advantage.”
“In this case, that won’t matter. The greatest tactical advantage known to man is for you to be aware of your enemy while he is not aware of you. That means, if you have the firepower, you can kill him before he even knows you’re there, and that is what Escort Two is going to do.”
“How will he do that?”
“I don’t know how he will do it, but I know how I would.”
“How then?”
“The sneaky way, of course.”
“Of course. And that is?”
“Let’s watch and see if he does it.” A few moments of silence ensued while both men watched the tactical display.
“Yep. There he goes. Just what I would do. He’s going ventral—that’s under their bellies. Inexperienced pilots tend to rely on their eyes too much and go by what they can see out the canopy, which is generally ahead of them and above. Even when they do use their sensors, fighter sensors are very good at looking straight ahead, and pretty poor in every other direction. Fighter pilots tend to ignore what’s under their bellies so naturally that’s where I like to go.
“You put yourself three or four thousand kills ventrally to his course, cut your drive, and let the targets zip by right over your head. Look, you can see him going ventral right now. The two attackers aren’t even t
witching either. They have no idea he’s there. Now he cuts his drive and lets them pass. And there they go. He lets them get far enough past that he won’t pick up too much of their drive trails. About now. Now, watch as he turns around—there he goes—and slips himself in right behind them. Like that. Then he sets his missiles for passive thermal–seeking mode so that there isn’t even a missile seeker radar for the target to pick up as warning—we aren’t going to be able to detect that—and closes the range a little…to right…about…there, and then he stops closing. We can’t see it, but I bet he just fired his missiles. They lock in on the heat of the bad guys’ drives and fly right up their tailpipes.”
The icons representing the unidentified fighters disappeared from the display. “Score two kills. It’s one of my favorite tactics. The enemy doesn’t know I’m there until after he’s dead.”
After the requisite attention signal, Escort One was back on the comm. “One-one-four, this is Escort One. Please respond. Over.”
“One-one-four here. Over.” Max responded.
“One-one-four, please be advised that Escort Two has just extended to our visitors the warm hospitality for which Rashid is justifiably famous. Over.”
“I’m sure you baked them a Teller-Ulam soufflé. You know, the one with the recipe that starts off with ‘preheat oven to ten million degrees Kelvin.’ Over.”
“Indeed. That is the very dish. We have had a few opportunities to serve it in the last hour or so. Now, one-one-four, I have new instructions for you. Am I correct in surmising that your vessel is a horse disguised as a camel? Over.”
The pilot probably spotted the subtle modifications to the engine nozzles, the well-disguised but larger than normal bulge in the hull to accommodate the enlarged fusion reactor, and the military-grade sensor emitters, all of which—to a well-trained eye—said that the Clover’s performance would be decidedly more sprightly than that of a stock Piper-Grumman Shetland class microfreighter.
“You have keen eyes. Over.”
“How many Gs can you sustain safely? Over.”
“Fifteen. Over.” That was the rating anyway. Max and Brown had gone over the design and the naval upgrades and jointly decided the real number was closer to eighteen or twenty, but Escort One didn’t need to know that. Before the Navy modified it, the little vessel could pull no more than 3.3 Gs.
“Very good. That will blow some sand in our adversaries’ faces. I have new instructions for you. It’s too dangerous for you to proceed to your landing as planned. Rather, you will rendezvous with some of our forces in space, and they will see you safely to the surface. I am transmitting a set of coordinates. Pull your best acceleration all the way to that point. No terminal deceleration—the vessel with which you are rendezvousing will match velocities with you. Escort Two will clear your twelve and I will cover your six. From their present trajectories, none of our visitors can pull enough delta V to catch you at fifteen Gs. There are several that were stealthed in orbit here, and they are accelerating hard now, thinking that they can catch the camel. They will be very disappointed to see that you are a horse, especially now that by redlining their drives they have given away their positions. They will not live very long to regret the miscalculation. Over.”
“I wonder who actually sent those fighters,” said Max. “Escort One hinted that it was someone who was working with the Krag, but I have no idea who that might be.”
“I have a reasonably probable hypothesis,” said Dr. Sahin.
“And?”
“It’s one of the emirs. In the Union, most people think of the ‘Unified Kingdom of Rashid’ as a truly unified kingdom when, in reality, it is anything but. It is a singularly complex polity. Roughly half of its worlds are ruled directly by the crown, as in any other hereditary monarchy. Another 40 percent or so are emirates, small groups of two to seven worlds ruled by one of the six emirs—the heads of the ruling families. The remaining 10 percent are the Protected Islamic Worlds, mostly low population planets consisting mainly of universities, seminaries, Islamic scholars, and independent scientific research institutes. The emirs, of course, owe allegiance to the king but can, from time to time, be somewhat wayward. This ‘waywardness’ can become somewhat awkward, as each of them commands a small but capable set of defense forces loyal only to him.”
“So, you think that one of the emirs might want to stop us from meeting with your friend?”
“That would be a distinct possibility, Max. The hypothesis certainly fits the data quite closely.”
“It does. It’s not very comforting, though. Not very comforting at all.”
At the specified coordinates, the Clover encountered the immense Rashidian carrier, the RRS Riyadh, which had been conducting operations just outside the orbit of Rashid VI only 2 AU from the Clover’s initial position. About forty-five minutes after the new instructions from Escort One, twelve Rashidian SF-89 Qibli (“Scirocco”) fighters appeared to escort the microfreighter the rest of the way to the carrier. Max had hardly set the landing skids on the carrier’s deck before it the giant ship pulled a high G, two-axis course change that must have raised her chief engineer’s blood pressure thirty or forty points. When the carrier straightened out on her new heading, Max could feel dissonant vibrations transmitted through the deck to the soles of his feet as he and Dr. Sahin walked through the ship; they told Max’s exquisitely sensitive sense of warship machinery that all three mains and both auxiliary coolant circulating pumps for the carrier’s four massive fusion reactors were being redlined.
The Rashidians assigned an earnest but selectively communicative lieutenant commander to escort (and keep an eye on) Max and the doctor. The young man, about Max’s age, explained their course, rate of acceleration, and how the Clover would be ejected upon arrival at Rashid IV at a suitable distance. He went on to detail how, by redlining its drive, there would be just enough time and space for the Clover to decelerate from the carrier’s velocity to entry interface, how Rashidian flight controllers would clear a path for it from entry to the landing pad, and how fighter/interceptor aircraft would escort it to a safe landing. The only thing he did not explain was why the entire Unified Rashidian Kingdom was putting forth such a profligate expenditure of men and resources dedicated to seeing that one lieutenant commander and one doctor/acting ambassador were deposited safely on the surface of Rashid IV at the earliest possible moment. What could be so urgent?
At least, now that they were on a gigantic carrier surrounded by the aggressively defensive swarm of its Combat Area Patrol fighters, there was no chance of any further attempted ambush. Which, of course, was the point.
The ejection maneuver took place exactly as planned. The Clover simply lifted off the hangar deck and nudged itself out the port side of the carrier on maneuvering thrusters. Even though the microfreighter had the same forward velocity as the carrier, the larger ship was under full acceleration, while the Clover was not. As a result, the two vessels rapidly separated. The carrier’s enormous, blunt shape dwindled in only a few moments to nothing more than the brilliant pinprick of light created by its huge fusion drive, seeming to move ever so slowly against the background of fixed stars, the vastness of space reducing the carrier’s great speed and enormous bulk, as it reduces all the puny handiwork of man, to insignificance.
After separating from the carrier, Max programmed the Clover’s ID transponder, in accordance with Escort One’s instructions, to broadcast Kilo Papa Lima Charlie. Within a minute of leaving the carrier, the microfreighter was surrounded by a veritable cloud of thirty-six Qibli fighters arrayed in a flying wedge, defying any foe to challenge them. Max never knew whether these fighters were launched from the carrier, in which case they would have a long flight back home, or whether they were based on or near Rashid IV.
After several minutes of hard deceleration, the Clover encountered the tenuous outer fringes of Rashid IV’s atmosphere. The leading surfaces of the vessel
began to heat as the ship entered the transitional regime in which space gives way to atmosphere, and where fusion and rocket engines propelling ships in silent obedience to the tidy maxims of Kepler and Newton give way to air-breathing jets pushing aircraft, with a deafening roar, through buffeting gases subject to the laws of Bernoulli, Navier, and Stokes.
When the formation had descended to about a hundred kilometers, the space fighters peeled away, a single two-ship element at a time in quick succession, their brightly blue-white drives tracing graceful curves against the deep blue-black sky as they soared back to the infinite dark that was their natural abode.
Each element was instantly replaced by a pair of sleek AF-97 “Haboobs” (“Sandstorm”) atmosphere fighters built jointly by the Rashidian Kingdom and the Romanovan Imperium (the Romanovans called it the “Gladius”). The hand-off took place in a series of maneuvers so beautifully choreographed and so quickly and precisely executed that Max knew he had just seen a crack atmosphere fighter squadron take the place of a crack space fighter squadron. This was yet another sign of how important his and the doctor’s safety were to the Rashidians. As an old saying of obscure origin goes, “They cared enough to send the very best.”
As Max explained to the doctor what was going on and why he was so impressed, the comm panel called for attention with two beeps. Twenty seconds later, the business-like, yet studiously relaxed, voice of a Rashidian pilot came into the cabin.
“Union Microfreighter Galaxy Papa Galaxy Charlie seven-two-one-one-four, this is the Tabi’a Commander, my call sign is Yarmouk Three, please acknowledge. Over.”
“Yarmouk three, this is one-one-four. We read you. Over.”
“One-one-four, does your database include the communication protocols from the Equilateral exercises held last year? Over.”
For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2) Page 7