Copernicus One hovered over the LZ at an altitude of 600 feet as the reactor assembly’s thrusters went into set-down mode. The frame touched down scarcely twenty seconds after it had been jettisoned from the corvette’s load bay. Eight explosive charges punched into the ground, followed by drill-clamps and tethers, which anchored the unit in place directly in the center of the location.
“Fusion reports our LZ is hot, ma’am. Request permission to deploy.”
“You are go, flight. Open a channel to the Argent.”
A moment later, Zony’s headset automatically activated on the landing party’s frequency. She was performing final launch checks for Jackrabbit 994 and trying to scare up a pressure suit that would work for her half-sized co-pilot. “Argent. Tixia. Go ahead, Copernicus.”
“Argent, Orbital Combat Engineering One One Seven has established an LZ at the Lethe Deeps planetary defense frontier and we have power.”
Thirty-Nine
“Bridge, Satcom. Report all contacts.”
“Satcom, Bridge. SRS has the cruiser Saratoga at two seven zero range four megaclicks. LRS is tracking two unidentified hostile inbounds designate Kilowatt X-Ray One and Kilowatt X-Ray Two.”
“All stop. Notify engineering to take us dark,” Captain Islington ordered. “Set satcom instruments to passive detection only. Radio silent. I’m on my way to the bridge.”
Hollis Meier was already on his feet when the Minstrel’s captain arrived on deck one. The tactical display told the entire story. At extreme range was an unidentified contact apparently trailing a plasma fire that had started during an explosion hours earlier.
“What have you got, XO?”
“At first glance I’d say the Saratoga took a shot at someone, but aside from all the magnetic noise, we’ve got nothing happening in this sector at all.”
Islington moved around the conn and stood by the forward display. The rest of the bridge crew watched intently. Cal was relieved to be back on a bridge that wasn’t the size of a small auditorium. “No residuals?”
“Negative, ma’am. If she launched a missile attack, we would at least have some kind of emissions tracking. I don’t think that’s what we’re looking at here,” Meier replied. “Whatever disabled that third ship did it without conventional weapons.”
“What about the SAR corvette?” Cal asked.
“That’s possible, but Commander Doverly wouldn’t give up her biggest advantage facing a frigate squadron,” Islington replied. “Nightwings are designed for stealth first. Their weapons are minimal and definitely no match for a Sarn picket.”
“Ensign, what do you make of that course for the two inbounds?” Meier asked.
“That is strange,” the tactical officer replied. He pulled up a navigational overlay and projected it on the main screen before turning to his own scope. “They’re pounding away with their active scanners, but everything is set for short range reflection signaling. It’s like they’re trying to work out a position for something they’ve already detected.”
“That would neatly explain why they haven’t found us yet. We’re just sitting here. We can see them.” Islington added.
“It also would strengthen our theory on how they were attacked. A stealthed ship would set off precisely that kind of SRS–”
“Whoa!” Cal jumped to his feet but kept his eyes locked on the scope. “I’ve got an energy wave inbound! Contact in twelve seconds!”
“Strength?” Islington asked, moving back towards the conn.
“Force fifteen! Eight seconds!”
The captain landed in her command chair and lashed up her shock harness. “Signals! Sound collision! Finn! Hard to starboard! All engines ahead flank! Tactical! Reinforce forward battle screens!” Yellow lights bathed the bridge in a golden haze as the shrill tone of the collision alarm filled the air.
The Minstrel’s pilot knew instinctively what the captain was doing. By ordering a starboard course, she was betting her strongest battle screens would protect her ship against the power of the oncoming wall of invisible destruction. The theory was well-tested. Instead of getting swamped by a wave, punch through it. Every fighter and gunship pilot learned that trick in about their sixth week of emergency maneuvers training. The sleek little escort frigate banked gracefully and leaped forward, diving directly into the teeth of the phenomenon.
“Impact detonation bearing two six–” The air was shoved out of Calvin Grant’s lungs as Minstrel’s bridge heaved. A bulkhead-ringing crash left the entire bridge crew stunned and unable to breathe for a few moments. The engineering console burst into electrically charged flames. Captain Islington’s ship tumbled forward as her stabilizing engines momentarily lost power. Lieutenant McCampbell fought mightily to regain control and finally managed to pull Minstrel out of her spin.
“Say again, tactical!” Islington shouted over the sound of the fire suppression system. Commander Meier unlatched his harness and went to the aid of the injured bridge engineer.
“I have the Nightwing located 80 clicks off the Saratoga’s port quarter! Designate Sierra Two Six One! Reading heavy damage to her outer hull! She appears to be drifting!”
It was difficult to decide which problem to solve first, as the Minstrel was now a prime target for the Sarn picket. “Report the origin of that wave!” Islington shouted over the mechanical hiss of the life support scrubbers.
“The origin was the Saratoga herself, ma’am! Designate Sierra Two Five Five! Sensors are not reading normal mass and gravimetric energy! But I do have indeterminate human life signs somewhere aboard!”
“Ma’am!” Meier said sharply. Captain Islington turned to the main viewscreen. One of the Sarn frigates had changed course directly towards the disabled Nightwing.
“Why weren’t they hit by that wave?” the captain muttered. “Finn, plot an intercept course. Signals, open a hailing frequency and engage translation protocols.”
“Affirmative, captain. You’re on.”
“Attention Sarn warship. This is Captain Rebecca Islington of the Skywatch Frigate Minstrel. You are encroaching in our command area during rescue operations. If you approach either of our vessels we will have no choice but to engage your formation. Acknowledge.”
“Captain–?”
“Hold your course, Finn. Bring us up on the Nightwing’s starboard leading edge.”
“It’s going to be close.”
“Just get me there first, pilot. XO, sound battle stations energy. All hands general quarters.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
Lights shifted red as the bridge was filled with the unmistakably urgent sound of the alert klaxon.
“Kilowatt X-Ray One now vectoring to intercept! Course suggests a missile run! Time out 64 seconds! Mark!”
“Come on. Come on!” Islington muttered under her breath. Her ship raced towards the crippled SAR corvette, navigational screens down and engines set to continuous acceleration. The enemy frigate was equally determined to get within range first, as even photographs of an honest-to-goodness Nightwing would be worth a thousand man-years of intelligence work. Captain Islington grabbed an overhead handset.
“Bridge to Engineering!”
“Engineering, Brogan!”
“Chief, I want you to take the reactor to one hundred five percent!”
“Ma’am, I’m forced to–”
“Acknowledged, engineer. Consider your regulation warning delivered. I need full power ECM and we can’t afford to reduce acceleration!”
There was a pause during which Rebecca Islington knew her engineering chief was trying to decide if he should talk his captain down. He didn’t. “Aye, ma’am. Safety mechanisms disengaged. Main reactor to one hundred five percent.”
“Very well. Divert all non-essential power to signals.” Islington slammed the receiver back in its base. “Cal, lock up the enemy scanners. Nothing gets through. Understood?”
“Affirmative. ECM to maximum!”
“Finn–”
“Kilowatt X-
Ray One is targeting us for range!” Meier shouted.
“That’s all I needed to hear,” Islington growled. “Target X-Ray Two’s engines! All acquisition scanners active forward! Weapons free tactical! Stand by!”
Without warning, Minstrel banked back to port and slashed directly into the lead frigate’s targeting envelope. The Sarn vessel tried to evade, but Islington’s attack angle made it impossible to avoid the first shot. Minstrel took full advantage.
“Missiles in space! Vampire! Vampire!”
Islington already knew when and where the other frigate’s weapons would engage. She was neither surprised nor disappointed. She kept her gaze locked on the rapidly growing image of the second frigate as it desperately tried to veer off. All at once the waveforms locked and her tactical instruments’ acquisition tone settled into an ominous tonic frequency.
“I have a waveform match and bearings lock on hostile target Kilowatt X-Ray Two!”
“All batteries! Fire!”
Minstrel opened up with a savage high-energy barrage. Cal’s targeting was as efficient as it was lethal. Islington’s rapid attack wing guns punched strobing explosive gouges and breaches along the Sarn frigate’s starboard engine cowling. The entire ship shuddered under the impacts.
“Direct hit!”
And then Minstrel was two thousand miles closer. The Sarn missiles closed in. Islington rose from her command chair.
“Fire!”
Blinding flashes of white-hot energy exploded from Minstrel’s weapons again and again as the fierce little ship bored in. Impact patterns tore across the enemy vessel’s already burning starboard deflection armor. Atmosphere-streaming pieces of the enemy ship’s broken hull tumbled into space as the two angry warships screamed past each other.
The captain landed in her command chair again and wrapped her shock harness around one wrist. “Hard a larboard!” Minstrel spun away and dove into a nightmarishly dangerous turn that subjected her entire crew to redline G-forces. Kilo X-Ray One and her missiles banked in pursuit while the damaged enemy frigate continued her evasive course, now veering away from the disabled Nightwing. The deck plating on the Minstrel’s bridge started to vibrate alarmingly.
“Secure from battle stations energy!” Islington ordered. “Stand by to engage new target! Helm, hard over! Starboard tracking! Execute new course zero three zero mark one eight six, all ahead flank! XO! Sound battle stations missile!”
A chorus of “ayes” and “affirmatives” responded from all around the conn. Below the flight deck, Minstrel’s precision trained crew raced up and down ladders and ran through the passageways to commandeer the warship’s deadly aft missile launchers.
In Rebecca’s mind at least three clocks were ticking. One was keeping track of the four inbounds. One was estimating how long it would take for Kilo X-Ray Two to recover and attempt to intercept the Nightwing again and the third was ticking off the amount of time left before she would get the call from engineering about her reactor cooling system reaching its first tolerance threshold.
But Captain Islington’s experience and training allowed her to concentrate on the most important priority, and that was the maneuver she was waiting for her pursuer to make. Her entire strategy depended on a range estimate with less than a seventy-mile margin for error.
Lieutenant Meier watched as his captain’s gaze fell from the screen and settled on the deck. Islington’s long hair fell over her shoulder. The sound of the tiny ship’s roaring engines and the deafening rattle of the consoles and deck plates made it nearly impossible to hear anyone who wasn’t shouting. It was as if the captain were trying to remember a memorized list of names. He saw her lips moving silently as she stared at nothing. Suddenly she shouted without lifting her gaze.
“Now! Hard over! New course one one six mark two zero five! Jettison launch aft! S-DAC Five! Six! Seven–!”
Captain Islington’s voice sounded bell-like over the responding “ayes” and order repetitions from her impeccably-trained bridge crew. As Finn pulled hard on the maneuvering conductor and shoved the throttle forward, Ensign Grant lunged and rammed both hands down on the weapons console scram bar. Minstrel performed a deranged reverse spin until she had completely inverted her X axis. Then it seemed the frenzied little ship just banked into invisibility in an exploding cloud of ravenous missile launch blooms. The blue streaks from the Phantom-class shipkiller sprint engines spiraled away from their launch point and instantly converged on the rapidly oncoming Sarn frigate.
Enemy missiles and Phantoms crossed in space, but it was clear Minstrel had an insurmountable advantage. Kilo X-Ray One was roaring full tilt towards Minstrel’s weapons, while Islington’s command was rocketing away from the Sarn missiles.
The enemy frigate twisted into a violent swerve in an attempt to avoid the deadly oncoming formation, but the ship had already made a crucial mistake. Because it was forced to match Minstrel’s continuous acceleration to hold range, the Sarn warship had dropped her navigational screens and disengaged her drive field. The sudden catastrophic stresses of its attempt to avoid the oncoming missiles was too much. Somewhere deep inside the vessel an explosion shattered several decks. A secondary blast tore the port weapons mounts from the hull. Less than two seconds later, S-DAC Phantom bird seven impacted the Sarn bridge at 540 miles per second closure. By the time the other missiles arrived, all that was left was a four-thousand-mile debris field. Staccato explosions ripped through space as the out-of-control Sarn birds veered in all directions. Then the entire conflagration was vaporized by the rupture of the vessel’s fusion containment field.
“Kilowatt X-Ray One is down.”
Captain Islington bared her teeth. “Maintain your speed, helm. Hard a starboard. Bring us up loud and fast. Target Kilowatt X-Ray Two. Secure from battle stations missile.”
DSS Minstrel screamed around in a wide turn before it rocketed out of the burning remains of the first destroyed ship and began bearing down on her already damaged squadron mate.
“XO, sound–”
“Ma’am, the enemy ship is veering off. Closure rate approaching zero.”
Rebecca Islington was still breathing heavily. The look on her face made her crew wonder if she was going to pursue the enemy warship anyway. Finally after a few tense moments, it seemed the fire in her eyes dimmed a bit. “Very well. Secure from general quarters. Take us to A-CON three. Raise our navigational shields and re-synchronize our drive field. Finn, plot an intercept course to contact Sierra Two Six One. Cal, raise the Nightwing.”
Forty
One thing all Skywatch pilots learned at some point in their careers was the hit-or-miss nature of civilian planetary outpost approach control. Keeping aircraft from crashing into each other was a job that required considerable technical training in or near major population centers. The combination of radios, scanners, weather monitoring equipment, RADAR and lookdown satellites was more than enough for the average specialist to digest.
But when spaceships were added to the mix, the job became an order of magnitude more difficult. Re-entry tracks, drive fields, military hardware, super-mach velocities and vertical recovery protocols were a complete career in and of themselves even if decon, communications and working with data systems and telemetry were left out. Finding someone who could do both jobs well was like finding a good knuckleball pitcher.
Lieutenant Tixia knew Starhaven was likely to be near the bottom of any good spacelane controller’s career ambitions. There were credible rumors it was a nice quiet place and blossomed beautifully at the changes of the seasons, but ultimately it was the space equivalent of a single-intersection town somewhere in western Kansas that just happened to grow one of the most valuable crops in any of the Core systems.
Having considered and rejected at least a half-dozen excuses for just flying up and plopping her fighter down on the mayor’s front porch, Zony decided to avoid forcing Captain Hunter to field the inevitable call from a 70-year-old man complaining about his hot-shot fighter jo
cks and their never-may-care attitudes about how we do things out here in the countryside. She sighed and scrolled through her civilian regs looking for Starhaven’s approach frequencies and ILS settings.
Aibreann was delighted. Watching the fields and animals from an altitude of several thousand feet was exhilarating. She kept herself plastered to the Yellowjacket’s thick canopy windows on first one side and then the other for almost the entire six thousand mile re-entry track. She didn’t know it yet, but by the time they landed, Aibreann was to become the only civilian on the entire surface of Bayone Three that had seen all three continents from the air, and one of only a dozen or so that had an opportunity to fly over practically the entire settlement and all its farmed land.
She was also the only Bayone civilian wearing a DSS Argent “Red Buccaneers” flight jacket complete with a Black Seven Tarantula-Hawk crew patch. Zony even found a way to get the automaster system to stitch up one that fit, sort of. Aibreann knew she would be the talk of school all the way through fifth grade and maybe even sixth.
“Starhaven approach control, this is Skywatch Jackrabbit 994 requesting ILS clearance and permission to land. Acknowledge.”
Zony’s Yellowjacket fighter soared along at just under 700 miles an hour. The Argent officer had wisely decided to request landing instructions early, as she was relatively sure it had been some time since a military fighter spacecraft had requested an approach clearance. She waited the regulation ten seconds and then keyed her commlink again, carefully looking from side to side to see if there were any other obvious ships airborne or in some kind of pattern over the village.
“Starhaven, this is Skywatch Jackrabbit 994 requesting approach clearance and landing instructions. Please come in.”
The data net clicked over and the channel patch thumped in Zony’s headphones. “Uhhh– that’s affirmative Jackrabbit. I’m uhhh– I mean this is Starhaven. What did you want us to do again?”
“Acknowledged, Starhaven approach. Do you have an ILS beacon keyed to the spacefield? Over.” The perimeter counter built in to Zony’s flight controls showed the fighter had about 40 seconds before the lieutenant would be forced to circle the village and make another approach over largely uninhabited farmland. Skywatch regulations were not too stickly about overflying civilian residences and farms, but experienced fighter pilots knew better than to just scream over someone’s patio furniture at 600 knots. True, she could always do a vertical re-entry and just cut her descent at 500 feet over the spacefield, but forcing the ground crew to change their underwear was likely going to cause just as many problems as exploding the windows and doors in every house for 150 miles.
Strike Battleship Engineers (The Ithis Campaign Book 2) Page 17