Ghost Squadron

by Kevin McLaughlin

  “Yes. And I agree, it would be completely impossible,” Max said. “But we might just be able to pull it off, because we have an alien intelligence with us which has already demonstrated an uncanny ability to hack military-grade software and hardware.”

  “Gurgle?” Sam asked, her eyes widening. “You want to stake humanity’s future on Gurgle?”

  No one said anything.

  “Think he’ll do it?” Stein asked.

  “Do it? Sure. He’ll try, anyway. But this is insane,” Sam said.

  “He hacked the Intrepid. If he can do that, then he might just have a shot at doing this too,” Max said.

  “I like this plan,” Stein said, laughing. “It’s utterly insane, and therefore there is no way the enemy will be able to predict it. Let’s work on the details.”

  Twenty-Seven

  The Intrepid and Andromeda popped out of jump-space a light minute away from the gate at precisely the same time. That was a good start, Thomas figured. So much of this gambit was going to depend on teamwork and timing. If they were off by more than a little bit for any step of the way, the whole thing would come tumbling down like a house of cards.

  He had a contingency plan in that case. It involved taking the Intrepid into jump-space and driving it into the ring. Physicists had mixed feelings about what would happen if a jumping ship collided with an object too massive to be swept up into the jump. Small particles were just carried along, of course. But an enormous thing, like a planet - or the gate? It was hard to say.

  None of the possibilities looked good for either the object or the ship, though. It would almost certainly destroy the gate, but the Intrepid would be lost as well. Thomas didn’t like thinking about Earth having just the Andromeda as a jump-capable defense. It was a sturdy little ship, but would it be able to take out the remainder of the alien fleet alone? He wasn’t confident.

  “Set a one-minute timer on the main screen,” Thomas said. The countdown appeared as he ordered. That was how long they’d have before the aliens spotted their arrival light. By the time they saw that he intended their ships to already be gone.

  Meanwhile, the Intrepid was getting updated scan data. Damn, but they’d brought in even more reinforcements. There were five dreadnoughts now, alongside six cruisers and the one behemoth of a ship. Their formation was interesting. The biggest ship drifted nearest the gate. Then the dreadnoughts orbited at a little greater distance. Lastly, the cruisers circled at an even greater range. The whole setup looked a little like an atom, with the ring and biggest ship as its nucleus and the ships as electrons.

  “Identifying the big ship as Zulu One, the cruisers as Alpha one through six, and the dreadnoughts as Delta one through six,” Thomas said. The computer updated his display to match the command. Now they could better coordinate fire. He picked out one cruiser from the crowd. “We’ll hit Alpha Four.”

  “Understood, sir. Receiving you fine. I’ll jump in and hit Alpha Two a few seconds after you arrive,” Knauf said over the radio. The cruiser he’d picked was on the opposite side of the ring from the one the Intrepid would strike. It was a good matchup.

  “We have enough power for two small jumps, sir,” Edwards said.

  “Engage the jump drive,” Thomas replied.

  There was a flash of light on the main screen as they swept forward through space, only to reappear in a small burst of light almost on top of the alien cruiser. It was on a collision course with them! The thing had changed direction. Instead of appearing off to the cruiser’s side, the Intrepid was directly in its path.

  “Evasive action!” Thomas shouted. “Hammer that thing with everything we’ve got!”

  The Intrepid groaned as Melson fired every thruster he had to shift their course. The alien cruiser fired on them. Excellent response time, Thomas thought. Their crew had to be startled by the appearance of a human ship right in their face, but they opened up with a dozen smaller laser batteries. The Intrepid shuddered under the repeated impacts - there was no way the aliens could miss at this range.

  But the Intrepid couldn’t miss, either. Its railguns blazed, hurling iron through the small gap between the ships. Torpedoes flew from tubes all along the Intrepid’s flank as the vessels slipped past one another at a distance of less than a hundred kilometers. The range was so short that the missiles hit almost instantly. There was no time to shoot them down.

  The alien cruiser rocked with a series of blasts, one after another, as the missiles slammed against its armor. The Intrepid spun, facing her nose back toward the enemy ship so it could bring the railguns to bear again. Even as the two ships flew further away from one another the Intrepid’s fire blasted into the rear of the alien vessel, blowing apart the engines and raining devastating fire up the ship’s spine.

  A second later the cruiser blew apart.

  “Excellent shots! Get a firing solution on the nearest dreadnought and launch a full spread of missiles,” Thomas said. “CAG, ready on the fighter launch?”

  “We’re set. So is the special package,” Keladry replied.

  “Time your launch with our missiles,” Thomas said.

  His eyes went back to the holo display. Their arrival had caused the aliens to act like a disrupted school of fish. They were all leaving their assigned orbits, changing vectors to come after his ship. Which was precisely what he’d been hoping would happen.

  Then the Andromeda appeared. Its arrival wake missed the targeted vessel, but it had teeth enough to make up for that. The ship was all missile tubes, and it fired every one of them. Scores of lines appeared on the holotank, zipping through space toward the hapless cruiser. It didn’t survive.

  Now the aliens were in true disarray, unsure which target to chase. The Intrepid was firing on a dreadnought; the Andromeda was moving to engage another cruiser. All around them the alien ships writhed in their orbits, straining engines to get into firing range of the human vessels.

  “All fighters are away, sir,” Edwards said.

  “Very well,” Thomas replied.

  The missile fire ought to mask the fighter launch. The Wasps would put out only a brief burst of thrust and then go silent, drifting toward the ring quietly. Meanwhile, he needed to retain the alien fleet’s attention.

  “Jump out two light-seconds,” Thomas said.

  “Aye, sir,” Melson replied.

  Godspeed, Kel, Thomas thought. He hoped she and the other pilots would be all right. Their role in what lay ahead was crucial.

  Twenty-Eight

  “This is a really bad plan,” Sam said. The fighters were using comm lasers only, no radio. They couldn’t afford to broadcast anything. The whole point of this exercise was to prevent the enemy from knowing where they were. Then they’d get in close and keep that big ship occupied while Gurgle…did whatever it was he was going to do.

  “Gurgle think is good plan. Any plan where Gurgle is hero is good plan,” her friend replied.

  Gurgle wasn’t flying a wasp. He was in one of the Intrepid’s shuttles instead. They’d retrofitted the thing, tearing out everything involved in life support and filling the entire crew space with computer systems. He was going to have all the processing speed anyone could possibly ask for at his disposal. Sam still wondered if it was going to be enough.

  “You sure you can do this?” Sam asked him.

  “Sure? No sure. But Gurgle try,” he replied. “Just like Intrepid.”

  “I knew that was going to get you in trouble. I just wasn’t expecting anything like this,” Sam said.

  She checked her passive scans, still feeding her information about the battle around them. The Intrepid’s missiles had done some damage to a dreadnought. The Andromeda had taken down a second cruiser and then jumped out in the opposite direction from the Intrepid. And the alien fleet was breaking into two segments and chasing both ships. They knew the human vessels had jumped at least twice, and probably three times. It would be a while before they could jump again. That would give the alien fleet a chance to kill b
oth human jump-ships. There was a very real chance they could succeed, too.

  That still left one gigantic enemy ship floating right next to the ring. It was almost as big as the ring itself and must have had close to the same mass. Sam felt like making a ‘that’s no moon’ joke, but it didn’t feel like the time and Gurgle wouldn’t get the joke anyway. She was pretty sure he hadn’t seen the movie.

  All the other fighters were around her, drifting through space as quietly as she was. She couldn’t see them, but that was a good thing. If her instruments couldn’t pick them up, then probably the enemy wouldn’t spot them either.

  “Five minutes until go time. You ready?” Sam asked. She was tasked with keeping a special eye on Gurgle. That’s why they’d risked a comm laser between their ships. He wasn’t human. Of all the Ghosts, Gurgle had never been human, so he was something of an unknown quantity.

  He’d started existence as a non-player character, a creature created by the Valhalla game system to be an adversary for the players. Sam had managed to befriend Gurgle, and over time he’d grown to be a lot more than that. Now she wasn’t entirely sure what he was. He didn’t talk like he was intelligent; his speech patterns were still the same broken English they’d always been.

  But he sometimes spoke with such insight that she wondered just how smart he really was. Was he a new AI? Something different altogether? She didn’t know.

  “Gurgle ready,” he replied.

  He was her friend, no matter what else he was. Sam wished there was another way to do this, one which didn’t involve so much risk for him. But as Admiral Stein pointed out, Gurgle was as much at risk as the rest of them. If the aliens won, it wasn’t like he would be allowed to survive. They were all in this together, win or lose.

  The timer ran down. Sam lit up her engine and gunned the throttle. “Let’s do this!”

  “Gurgle do!”

  All around her, drive plumes flashed to life. The Intrepid was down to only thirty-four fighters - plus the special shuttle. Every single one was in the formation, all of them loaded with as much weaponry as they could carry. Heavy torpedoes were mounted beneath each Wasp and smaller rockets on their wingtips.

  The torpedoes were fired first. Thirty-four firey plumes shot away from them as the fighters continued to accelerate toward their target. The monstrously large ship ahead of them might be too big for them to take down with just the weapons they had, but that wasn’t going to stop them from trying!

  “Detecting enemy fighter launch,” Grim said over the radio. Now that they were in the open, their attack evident, they could afford to talk again.

  “I see them,” Sam replied. How could she miss the vast cloud of fighters swarming from the big ship? Her computer worked at tallying the enemy fighters. The number hit sixty and continued climbing.

  “Pick your targets and hit ‘em good,” Keladry said. “Stick with your wingman. This is going to be a target-rich environment in a minute, but we’ll engage the fighters at close range so its harder for the big ship to nail us. Sam, stick with the package and make sure it gets delivered. Protect it at all costs.”

  No shit. Gurgle was their one shot at making this all work. Plus, he was her friend. No way she was letting him get shot down. An enemy fighter tried to zip in behind him. She took it out with a missile. Another came in from the side, spurting a particle beam. Sam twisted her Wasp sideways and took it out with a well-placed railgun shot.

  “Two down. Who’s keeping score?” Sam said.

  “Three here,” Harald replied.

  “Asshole,” Sam shot back in a good-natured manner. She was glad he was back to bantering with her. It sucked to have him mad. He laughed in reply.

  “Plenty of targets for all of us. Keep the pressure up,” Kel said.

  “Gurgle almost to target.”

  Sam kept her overwatch of the shuttle all the way to the ring. The battle was all around the mothership, wings of fighters engaging each other. There were huge scars along the length of the massive vessel where their torpedoes had struck, but it seemed unfazed by the damage. They didn’t have anywhere near the firepower they needed to deal with that thing. She wondered if even the Intrepid and Andromeda together could take it out.

  Gurgle slowed his shuttle and docked with the ring just like they’d seen the alien fighters do. That part of the plan was working, at least. Sam jetted back toward the furball, keeping one eye on Gurgle. It didn’t seem like the aliens had spotted him shoot past, but his safety was her top priority.

  Twenty-Nine

  Gurgle’s shuttle was special. Not only was it filled with the best computer equipment the UN Navy had access to, but it was also retrofitted with a small robot drone attached to the outside of the hull. As soon as Gurgle docked with the ring, the drone set off looking for an access port to plug into.

  That was one of the most significant advantages of capturing enemy ships during the fight over Neptune. Humanity might not understand precisely how the alien tech worked, or be able to replicate it. But learning how to interface with it had been one of the first steps human scientists had taken. Connecting with the ring turned out to be the easy part of Gurgle’s mission.

  Gurgle was frustrated with every other part.

  The ring didn’t seem to house a computer. In a way, it felt almost like the ring was a computer. Which made sense in some ways, but not the rest of what he was feeling from the thing. The ring felt a little like home to him - like Valhalla Online. It felt like it was a world with many minds inside it. Did the aliens use artificial intelligence to help them control the ring? That would make hacking the thing even more difficult.

  They were all pushing back against his attempts to even enter the data streams, let along modify any part of them. Gurgle had a lot of processing power at his disposal, but there was no way he was going to brute force this attack.

  On a lark, Gurgle tried using basic numeric passwords. Humans reportedly made the mistake of protecting data with such things. Perhaps the aliens did as well?

  No, they didn’t. Unfortunate but not unexpected. Gurgle tried another hundred thousand hacks and tactics, each one failing. But every failure taught him more about the nature of the ring. The more he learned, the more Gurgle felt like he could indeed hack his way into the system. He just needed enough time. It was a strange system, but parts of it felt familiar. He went digging into those and found that the system seemed to recognize and even echo back to him.

  “How’s it going, Gurgle?” Sam’s voice came to him as if from very far away. She sounded stressed, which worried him.

  Gurgle extended a bit of his processing power away from the ring so that he could better examine the situation around the ring. It wasn’t dire but was fast headed that way. He used the shuttles scanners and saw almost half the Wasps had been destroyed. Both the Intrepid and Andromeda were heavily engaged, so no help was coming from there.

  Most disturbing, a trio of alien fighters were headed directly his way. They didn’t look friendly. They did look like they knew precisely where his shuttle was parked.

  “Sam, Gurgle has been detected,” Gurgle told her.

  “I see them. Hang on, buddy. I’m coming,” Sam replied. “Folks, they’ve caught on to Gurgle. He needs some cover fire.”

  Three more Wasps peeled off to follow Sam as she dove toward the oncoming enemy. All four Wasps opened up with their guns. Two of the alien fighters were blasted to scrap. The third zipped past the incoming railgun fire and burned on full thrust directly at Gurgle.

  It was going to ram the shuttle, Gurgle realized. At that speed, both shuttle and fighter would be annihilated. The ring would take some small damage, but apparently the aliens felt that was acceptable. Part of Gurgle’s awareness found this to be heartening news. After all, it meant that his actions had been perceived as a serious threat if they were willing to risk damage to the ring in order to blow him up.

  But Gurgle didn’t want to be blown up. His primary mission was to support and defend Sam. G
urgle couldn’t do that if he was blasted to atoms.

  He kicked on his thrusters as the alien fighter swooped in for the kill. The shuttle jetted sideways, breaking away from the ring at the last possible moment so the alien couldn’t react to his movement in time and adjust course. The fighter missed his shuttle by meters, slamming into the ring at several thousand kilometers per hour.

  The explosion blinded all Gurgle’s cameras for a moment. When the light cleared, half his cameras were still out. They’d been burned away by the blast. Gurgle had waited perhaps half a second too long before jetting sideways. The explosion must have caught his shuttle and damaged it.

  He tried to get attitude control without success. Engines were offline as well. In fact, more of the shuttle was broken than was still functioning. Shrapnel from the explosion had lodged within the engine, taking it offline. He had enough power to maintain his own systems but not much more. Gurgle was in a flat spin, the explosion-imparted velocity rocketing him away from the ring.

  “Gurgle’s ship is hurt,” he called over the radio. “No control.”

  “OK, Gurgle. I’m coming for you. Hang on,” Sam said.

  “No time,” Gurgle said. He’d already plotted his trajectory. His shuttle was falling directly toward the underbelly of the massive alien ship. In a few minutes, it would impact. The explosion would barely be noticed by the mighty vessel but would obliterate the shuttle. He’d escaped one immolation only to wind up facing another.

  Thirty

  Sam saw what he was talking about. There was precious little time to get to him and somehow get him turned around. But she wasn’t giving up on her friend that easily. She and Gurgle had been through far too much together. She slammed her thrusters to full, sweeping down toward him.

  “Sam, watch your tail,” Kel said.

  She checked her rear cameras. Two fighters chasing her. Damn it! She was going to have to ditch them somehow. Sam spun on her axis, turning her nose back toward the fighters while still firing her thrusters and guns at the same time.