by Rick Partlow
“Have a seat,” Gomez invited, leaning back against a shelf that held a coffee-maker, a food processor and half a dozen containers of spirulina powder and soy paste for it.
There was a general mumbling and shuffling and Ash and I wound up seated at the table closest to her, while she stayed standing.
“Okay,” she went on, taking a deep breath and letting it out in a sigh. “We’re mounting a raid on a Tahni refueling station in the atmosphere of a gas giant in a system they used for support when they launched the attack on the Martian shipyards,” she explained. “I hope I don’t have to explain why this is vital and time-sensitive; if we give them time and don’t take these support stations out, they’ll launch another attack, this time maybe on Luna, or even Earth.”
“That kind of target,” one of the other pilots, a tall, slender man with skin the color of old teak, said a bit hesitantly, “they could hit it with conventional forces, like a cruiser.”
“They could,” Gomez admitted, nodding to the man…I think his name was Modi. “But we don’t have as many cruisers as we did a few months ago,” she reminded us darkly. “And the brass is very worried about a possible strike on Earth, so the ones we do have are staying close to home. As of right now, and for the foreseeable future, the Attack Command is it as far as the Commonwealth military projecting its power on an interstellar level.”
I saw Ash swallow hard at that, but it made sense.
“How many Strike Wings is the Attack Command going to have?” A mousy, brown-haired, nondescript-looking woman asked. Her name was Weisz.
“As many as they can crank out, as fast as they can produce them.” Gomez’ words were grim, and we all knew why. They wouldn’t be producing that many if they didn’t expect to lose a lot of them.
“Do we have any guidance on tactics?” I asked, finally feeling safe asking the question. “The training course was a bit…light on that subject.”
“It’s all on-the-job training,” our squadron leader admitted. “No one’s ever fought with this sort of craft before. For now, they’re going to go with what I honestly think is a move-for-move imitation of the Tahni tactics at Mars: serial missile-launch swarms, coming out of T-space at about five-minute intervals, launching and then jumping out. Meanwhile, we’ll have maybe a half a squadron tying up their point defenses as a distraction.”
“Shit,” I muttered, remembering how well that had gone for the crews of those corvettes.
“We don’t meet our crew chiefs till tomorrow?” Ash wondered plaintively. “Isn’t there any way we could get them involved in the simulator runs?”
“Not possible,” Gomez said bluntly. “They’re needed to get the birds ready for launch in time.”
“How do we decide on wingmen?” Weisz wanted to know.
“I’ll let you decide on that.” Gomez waved a hand dismissively. “You’re all adults and officers and you all have flight experience. Get it done.”
I nudged Ash and he grinned slightly in response. At least there was some good news.
“Okay, we’ve spent enough time jawing,” she decided, clapping her hands together enthusiastically. “Get to the training bays, jack in and start logging simulator time. Everyone concentrate on coordination with your wingman, run missile launch scenarios for an hour, then point defense distraction for an hour. Then I’ll hand out assignments for the mission.” She looked around at us, then made shooing motions. “Go, now, get going.”
“Glad we already had lunch,” Ash muttered next to me as we made our way out of the break room. “I don’t think we’re going to have much time for dinner.”
***
My eyes were stinging and tungsten weights were dragging my shoulders down and I felt my head bobbing with the motion of the open utility sled over the heat-twisted pavement. Sunrise was hours away and the stars were invisible behind layers of clouds and haze, but I could see the lights of the spaceport shining on its high, white walls a few kilometers away.
The port was for transports and couriers and VIP shuttles. Us garden-variety pilots got to park our rides out here on the open tarmac of the landing fields. And there they were, lit up by the glare of the security floodlights, row upon row of the delta-winged monsters, lined up wingtip to wingtip in a square a kilometer on a side. They’d appeared as if by magic; they hadn’t been there the day before when we’d passed through. The maintenance crews were retreating as the flight crews moved in, taking their tractors and cargo trucks and running back to their hangars and sheds and warehouses.
I made myself look at the other three pilots on the sled. There was Ash, of course, leaning against me, offering a supporting shoulder, always solid and dependable whether as a friend or a lover. On the other side of him was a broad-shouldered, square-headed blond who looked like he spent every off hour in the base gym; his arm barely fit into the sleeves of his blue Fleet fatigue top. His name was Warner, and he had probably the thickest Australian accent I’d ever heard. I figured he must be able to regulate it over the comms or they wouldn’t have let him into flight training.
Then there was Weisz, looking even more unkempt and haggard than she had before we’d spent the last twelve hours hooked into a ViR simulator. She was good…on the simulator. If she could do the same thing in a real bird…dammit, boat, now. I’d never get that straight. If she could do the same thing in a real boat, maybe she’d be handy to have on the distraction team.
I shook my head. I don’t know if I’d realized that the reward for doing especially well on the simulator was to be made a sacrificial lamb. The four of us, along with Commander Gomez, would be sitting on the target for the whole attack sequence, keeping the defenses busy to make it easier for the missiles to get through.
And yippee, we’d get to sit around in a cramped box for nearly a week with someone we’d never met before and think about it. As the sled began to slow, I could see them waiting at the bottom of the belly ramps of the cutters, the crew chiefs. It was an inapt job title for what they were doing, but this was a new ship design and the nomenclature would have to be worked out. They weren’t really a crew chief, because they and the pilot were the whole crew, and they were enlisted, so they weren’t chief of anything.
They would be the repair technician, the gunner at need, the medical specialist, basically everything except the pilot and navigator, because we were both of those rolled into one. I stepped off the sled before it stopped, right in front of my boat, and Ash jumped off a second behind me, closer to his own. He caught my eye and grinned.
“See you on the other side,” he said, with confidence and bravado I knew him well enough to know he didn’t feel.
I tried to think of something to say back, something that would sound badass or uplifting or that would tell him how I felt about him. But I was dead tired and scared and had no idea how I felt, so I just waved and smiled, then walked up to the belly ramp of my ship.
The woman waiting for me there looked as tired as I felt, her hands in the pockets of her sweat-stained fatigue pants as she leaned against the ramp stanchion. Her hair was close-cropped and tightly-curled and her eyes gleamed darkly in the light from inside the ship. Her ebony face was ageless, but the lines around her eyes from squinting into different suns hinted she was older than me by at least ten years. She reluctantly pushed away from the stanchion and sketched a salute. I returned it, then offered her a hand and she shook it with a dry, firm grip.
“You must be Lt. Hollande,” the Crew Chief said, her voice harsh and gravelly, maybe because she’d been working on the ship for hours back into the previous afternoon, or maybe that was just how she talked. “I’m Master Chief Burke.”
“Nice to meet you, Chief,” I told her. I nodded up the ramp. “Want to show me our ride?”
“Aye, ma’am,” Burke said, waving for me to follow her.
The ramp took us into a utility bay, a lot like the ones in an assault shuttle except larger and with twice as many equipment lockers. A service airlock was off to one side fo
r use when docking or for Extra-Vehicular Activity. It all seemed very new, newer and shinier and cleaner than any spacecraft I’d ever been on.
“You got your flight suits here,” Chief Burke rapped a knuckle on the door of the nearest locker. “EVA gear in here,” the next door received the muted knock. “And personal weapons here.” That was the last one on the port side. The Chief grinned crookedly. “I don’t know about you, ma’am, but I hope to hell we never need that one.”
“Your lips to God’s ears, Chief,” I agreed.
“Missile bays are on either side of us,” she pointed downwards at the deck, “but those are serviced externally. There’s a small hatch we can get into them through in case of emergency, but again, I’d rather not. They can take up to a Ship-Buster each, but today we’re loaded with Anti-Radiation Missiles, lucky us.”
She kept her finger pointed at the deck, but swiped it back and forth from stem to stern.
“The proton cannon is a spinal mount, emitter is just portside of the nose, again serviced externally. We also have a Gatling laser turret that’s wing-mounted, you can slave it to the targeting computer for autonomous point defense use or I can control it manually from my station.”
She chuckled. “And that’s the full extent of our armament, unless you want to pull a carbine out of the locker and lean out the airlock.”
She led me up a narrow passageway, pointing at a series of doors along the way.
“Your cabin.” She indicated the one to port. “My cabin.” This time it was starboard. “The head, with the smallest shower you’ve ever seen in your life.” That one was just past her cabin on the starboard side.
Then we were just outside the cockpit and on the portside there was a tiny, U-shaped couch jammed in around a small table. Above it was a food processor built into the center of a series of cabinets.
“Shitty food is there,” Burke said, nodding at the shelf. “Standard military soy and spirulina with a machine that tries to dress it up as something edible.” The other side of the passage had a fold-down gurney and medical scanners stacked to the overhead. “That’s our half-assed med bay, just in case either of us gets an owie along the way. We don’t have an auto-doc or anything fancy, so I hope neither of us needs it.”
She ducked through the cockpit hatch and fell into what would have been the copilot’s seat on an assault shuttle, and I slid past her to the left-hand position, my spot. I buckled the harness, then powered the acceleration couch around to face forward, instantly finding the interface cables and plugging them into my implant jacks with rote motions.
I was bombarded with data, so much more than I’d been used to with an assault shuttle; it would have been overwhelming if I hadn’t had so much time on the simulator.
“I’m assuming you were given the specifics about the reactor, the capacitor banks, the Teller-Fox warp unit, and all that crap.” Chief Burke’s voice sounded far away, like an echo from another room, and I had to force myself to concentrate enough on it to comprehend what she was saying.
“Roger that, Chief,” I said absently, parroting them from the learning packet I’d audited over and over. “Two hundred Mega-Watt fusion reactor, standard plasma drive coil. Two superconductive capacitor banks, so we can keep one charged up to jump and the other as a sink for the warp field.” I thought of something and withdrew my focus slightly from the process of warming up the reactor and spinning up the turbines for the atmospheric jets.
“Does she have a name?” I asked Burke. The older woman chuckled, as if she’d expected the question.
“Officially, she’s ATC1011345678211,” she rattled the designation off as if it were her own serial number, “but a name…” She shook her head. “You’re her first pilot, so you get to name her.” She waved a hand around to indicate all the birds…dammit, all the boats…warming up around us, getting ready for takeoff. “They all do.”
I started feeding power from the reactor to the turbines, sucking in air through vents in the front of the wings and running it through the reactor to heat it up before expelling it from the belly jets.
“ATC1011345678211,” I heard the automated tones of the military traffic control system echoing in my head over the interface, “you are cleared for takeoff.”
The ship rumbled with power as she lifted off the tarmac, the landing treads folding gracefully into her belly. I’d done this thousands of times in a simulator, but reality still felt so totally different. The belly jets roared their defiance of gravity and carried us fifty meters up before I began bleeding power from them to the rear engines and we moved forward and upward with three dozen other ships in formation around us.
I felt a rush of warmth at the power of the ship, of all of them moving together with one purpose like the pride of lions I’d seen on the hunt in the Great Plains Wildlife Preserve when I was a kid. Mom had taken me there for my twelfth birthday.
“Any ideas, ma’am?” Burke asked casually, seemingly unaffected by the experience. “For a name, I mean.”
“Yeah,” I murmured, just before I let the interface swallow me up again. “I’m calling her Huntress.”
Chapter Seven
The Teller-Fox warp unit ripped a hole around us in the fabric of Transition space and spat the Huntress out like a watermelon seed back into the mundane realms of our native universe. I felt the gut-punch disorientation of Transition travel through my body and even up the interface jacks, passing over me like a wave of nausea. But then it was gone and I was part of the ship again, and the ship was part of a larger web of the Squadron.
Well, part of the Squadron. Commander Gomez, Weisz, Warner, Ash and I had come out of T-space together, the way we’d entered, with the others a minute or so behind us. Reality hammered at me from the ship’s external cameras as the absolute nothingness of T-space gave way to the sullen, ashen face of the gas giant, a monster as large as Jupiter and only about half the distance from its primary star as Earth was from the sun. It dominated the system, with no other intact planets for competition, just an asteroid belt farther out, and it lacked even a single moon large enough to support an atmosphere. It was a Tahni system, but they’d never had a major colony here before the war because of the lack of habitables.
Now, though, I could already detect the thermal signature of the gas mining complex skimming the upper atmosphere of the giant from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away…and I could also detect the missile launches from the surface of one of the captured asteroids that was the largest of the thing’s moons and was much, much closer.
“Evasion course,” Gomez ordered tersely. “Launch ARMs.”
I could feel the jolt as the Anti-Radiation Missiles separated from us, kicking out of the launch bays on puffs of inert coldgas before their main engines ignited, then rocketing away to seek out the source of the targeting radars and lidars trying to spot us. Before they were more than a few kilometers away, I’d fed power to the plasma drive and felt it push me back into my crash couch with three gravities’ worth of acceleration. We could manage up to six g’s or maybe a smidge more in an emergency, but this fight was going to last a while and there was no use running out of reactor fuel early.
I slaved the Gatling laser turret to the computers and set it to free-fire when the incoming missiles got within range, powered up the proton cannon and headed in towards the anti-spacecraft batteries. I could sense Ash’s cutter accelerating to match my course, only a few thousand meters off my port side, pinging on lidar as well as with his IFF transponder. The other paired ships would be a few thousand kilometers more to our starboard, while Gomez would hang back and direct us from behind our formation.
Our missiles could afford to accelerate a lot harder than us, and they were nearly at the moon already, the input from their nose cameras just another piece of data added to the collage the computer was painting in my mind over the interface. Point-defense batteries had opened up on them, but they were small and fast-moving and aimed at stationary targets and some of them
got through. Thermal blooms flared in the sensors as hyperexplosive charges detonated and radar dishes and lidar projectors were blown to fragments…and then it was their turn.
Their missiles, unlike our ARMs, were radar-guided. Nothing in their arsenal was unguided, and no weapon was autonomous. According to the intelligence briefings we’d received in the Academy, it was part of their religion: they saw themselves as the divine hand of their god-emperor, and taking a life was something only to be done by the will of a living mind. That didn’t mean that, after a century of fighting us, they hadn’t developed some kick-ass electronic warfare techniques, which was why we didn’t use armed drones ourselves, aside from the legalities of it.
Being guided, though, meant that destroying their radar and lidar gear left the missiles with nothing to home in on but thermal emissions. At nearly the same time, in a move ingrained in all our pilots by doctrine and training, all of our ships cut their drives and launched countermeasures. The flares spread out around us, burning at tens of thousands of degrees and drawing the Tahni weapons towards their thermal signatures while we maneuvered as wide as we could on maneuvering thrusters.
The fusion explosions were white Christmas tree ornaments hanging in space, lacking in the dramatics they would have had in an atmosphere with no air around them to cause a shock wave, and none was close enough to be a radiation danger. I counted the IFF transponders and breathed a sigh of relief that we were all still there.
We had one other advantage here, and that was the fact that the Tahni wouldn’t use Gauss cannons against us. They had the power and the raw materials to pretty much fire endlessly if they’d cared to, but this was their supply depot and their freighters would have to navigate it, and the thing about solid kinetic-energy rounds was, they just kept going at really high speeds, and they were just as likely to hit your own ship coming in a month from now as they were the enemy.
“Where the hell are the other squadrons?” That was Weisz, breaking communications protocols, but it was a damn good question. We’d been at this for several minutes; they should have been here.