Rebel Fleet

by B. V. Larson

  The lights stopped whisking by for a second, and soon we were inside the barrel. Effectively, the launch system was a giant rail gun. Using powerful magnetics on Hammerhead’s tiny hull, it was designed to accelerate us to around twenty thousand miles per hour in about a second.

  I knew we shouldn’t feel anything when the launch system went off, but I braced myself anyway. My crewmen around me did the same, baring their teeth and squinching their eyes down to slits.

  There was shaking, then a rumbling sound filled the fighter. For a split-second, everything went black. We were used to being able to see through the walls of the fighter, and the change was alarming.

  We knew from experience it was because the barrel of the rail gun launcher didn’t have any lights inside of it.

  The barrel was rifled slightly for accurate fire, so we came out spinning hard. We were spinning so fast the stars resembled streaks of fire. I tried not to look as the twin white blazing suns which flashed around us in a corkscrew pattern.

  “Counter that spin!” I shouted at Samson unnecessarily. He’d already activated the appropriate automated stabilizers.

  He made no comment, other than to work his virtual touchscreens. We all had touchscreens—or what we sometimes called air-screens, because they appeared to hang in space around us.

  Laying in a course toward our designated rendezvous point, I watched as our fighter slowed its corkscrew motion and arced gently toward our designated position. Behind me, I saw more fighters come out of an array of four stubby barrels. They fired in a rapid succession, like a Gatling gun.

  Glowing blue streaks trailed each fighter as it poured out. Each tiny craft swung onto a new course as soon as it was able, banking to join its squadron at our checkpoint.

  I made sure I applied no additional thrust, other than what the rail-gun had given me. We were one of the first fighters out of the gate, and I was going to have to linger and give the rest a chance to catch up.

  This brief period gave me the opportunity to take stock of the situation directly. Reaching out with my perception system, I saw the bulk of the Fleet off to my starboard side and below us in angle.

  The big ships were on the move, just as we were. They looked like a bunch of scrambling soldiers, puffing out fighters, dumping acceleration waves and maneuvering drastically.

  Why should such a thing be necessary now? I asked myself in frustration. These captains had been waiting for this outcome, supposedly. Now that they were finally faced with the forceful response they’d hoped for, they seemed surprised and out of position. No Earth Navy would’ve been caught slouching like this.

  Ahead of us—that was where it became interesting. Our fighter squadron was being deployed ahead of the main body of the fleet, that much was clear, because the enemy force had begun to appear there.

  The stellar rips in space-time were numerous, and they all glowed with red fire. Wherever this opposing fleet was coming from, it had to be a single location.

  “Dr. Chang, what are we facing?” I asked.

  “I’m seeing two hundred fifty-six breaches. Not a single ship has come through yet in this region.”

  I nodded to myself. “They have to be Imperials,” I said. “They know how to read a clock. Samson, all defenses forward.”

  “Active.”

  “Mia, gun-check.”

  “All green,” she said. “Can I fire to be sure?”

  I glanced at her. “Sure. Go ahead—but keep it to a short burst.”

  A pulsing streak of projectiles ripped ahead of us.

  “Main gun ready. Wasps ready—can I fire off a few of them, too?”

  “Negative. Let’s save our ordnance for the enemy, huh?”

  She pouted a bit, and I laughed.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “if we make it to their line at all, you’ll get to fire every missile we have.”

  That brightened her expression.

  “The enemy is coming through now, Chief!” Gwen said from the back.

  I threw my attention forward again. Looking outside the ship, zooming toward a target with my mind, had become almost second-nature for me. That part of the Rebel training had been effective.

  Two hundred and fifty-six rips in space all gave birth at once. Each of them emitted a single cruiser. I doubted a single Imperial ship had scattered. The Imperials didn’t screw up like that.

  “What have we got?” I asked Gwen.

  “Cruisers, mostly. I’m seeing some bigger ships—battlecruisers. A few carriers are setting up in the back line... Wait a minute… some of the rips are flickering like they’re active, but I don’t see anything coming through.”

  “Throw me the coordinates of one of them,” I snapped quickly, already having a suspicion.

  She did, and I saw the situation for myself. A rip in space tended to shimmer when a ship passed through it, and every one of the rips were reacting now. But the one she’d sent me wasn’t showing any kind of silhouette slipping through.

  “That’s got to be a phase-ship,” I said. “They’re sliding through already phased. I didn’t even know they could do that. Connect me up to Shaw, Gwen.”

  She worked the air with her fingertips, and Shaw answered.

  “Don’t get impatient, Blake,” Shaw said. “The bulk of my fighters are right behind you.”

  “Sir,” I said, “we’ve spotted breach points that show wavering radiation, but no visible ship coming through.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ll throw you a clip,” I said, nodding to Samson.

  He looked alarmed. He worked his fingers, but he shrugged helplessly.

  “Dr. Chang?” I called to the back. “Could you pull that out of the stream?”

  Dr. Chang did as I asked quickly. I tossed it to Shaw and waited for him to analyze it.

  Soon, fighters were streaking by us. I put on a little gas, chasing after them. The latecomers were suddenly eager to get to our checkpoint before we did. Everything was a race with these people.

  One fighter, however, didn’t plunge ahead of us. It came up on my wing and stuck there. I didn’t even have to look, knowing it was Ra-tikh.

  “Blake?” Shaw asked. “I kicked that file up to the CAG. He said he’s gotten two other reports, fleet-wide, of the phenomenon.”

  “It’s a phase-ship, isn’t it, sir?” I asked.

  “I think it must be. But our knowledge of phase-ships indicates they can’t do that. They can’t come through a breach already in subspace. That’s very strange—and worrisome.”

  “It’s been a while since we’ve fought the Imperials, right Lieutenant?” I asked. “Maybe they’ve improved on their tech.”

  “Let’s hope not, by the stars. We’re outclassed as it is.”

  “But sir,” I persisted. “We outnumber them by almost two to one. This is what the admirals wanted, isn’t it?”

  Shaw didn’t say anything for a second. “We’d hoped for less opposition,” he said at last, then cut the connection.

  That last part worried me. Shaw hadn’t sounded confident. He had sounded very concerned.

  =32=

  We massed up our fighter squadron in the assigned sector and once we were all there, we were given the go-ahead to attack.

  The other two squadrons were given the same target, thank God. I hadn’t wanted to fly into the teeth of an Imperial fleet with only my staunchest brothers on my flanks.

  “Our mission is to swing out of the plane of battle and dive low,” I told my people, showing them our orders as soon they were received by my command unit. “Then we’ll reverse and come back up under their carriers. Those are our primary targets.”

  The Rebel Fleet commonly used concepts such as “low” and “high” despite the fact there was no such thing in space combat. As a matter of expediency, Command used a flat plane as a baseline for explaining battle positioning. It was artificial, but it helped many of the more primitive crews to cope with three-dimensional battles outside of their ex
perience. They simply weren’t used to fighting outside of their home planet’s gravity-well.

  My crew sighed with relief at the orders. Most of our fighter wings had been ordered to plunge directly into the teeth of the approaching fleet. We had a lot of fighters, about ten times as many as the enemy had, and our admirals had apparently decided to send them out as screens to give our bigger ships time to position themselves perfectly.

  This made me grind my teeth. The waste was going to be tremendous. Sure, no one could have known exactly where the enemy would appear and have built a perfect formation to face them. But did that mean we had to throw away our fighters in an early, unsupported attack?

  Reminding myself I wasn’t brass, I banished such thoughts from my mind and kept pace with my swarming brothers. The squadron was plunging downward now, out of the line of fire in-between the two fleets.

  We came to the low point all too quickly and had to turn upward again. The bulk of the enemy cruisers were now arrayed above us, forming an oval-shaped plane of ships. They were so tightly organized they looked like they were having a parade up there. My own squadron, in comparison, looked like a swarm of bees who didn’t know where the flowers were. Similarly, our main fleet looked like a ragged line of charging warriors.

  “Here we go,” I told my people, “I’m ramping up for a high-speed pass. Since Shaw hasn’t seen fit to give me a specific target, I’m going for the last carrier in the line.”

  “Chief!” Gwen shouted. “I’m tracking incoming fighter cover.”

  “Display them.”

  The air around me lit up. A squadron of interceptors had been deployed to guard the carriers’ flank. We had to get through them first.

  The Imperial fighters were quite different in design. They were much smaller craft, for one thing. I doubted they had a crew of more than two men each.

  Dark and sleek, they looked more agile than our heavy fighters, if not as tough. If I had to guess, I would say they were designed to operate as short-range interceptors, meaning they were fighter-killers. That made good sense given the fact our Rebel forces had so many more fighters than the Imperials did.

  “Shaw,” I said, “do we fight them or punch straight through?” I asked.

  “Fight them,” he said. “If they get behind us, they’ll melt us before we get close enough to fire on the carriers anyway.”

  I’d come to the same conclusion, but I’d wanted to hear it from him. A few moments later the squadron spread out and slowed down. We wanted to finish this in deep space. If we got closer to the main line of big ships, they could help the interceptors burn us down with their secondary weapons.

  We met the interceptors at speed. Our main gun sprayed bright gushes of radiation, and Mia released her wasps in trios without asking. I didn’t mind. She knew her job by now, and I had plenty to do just piloting.

  Large shapes came out of nowhere a few seconds later. Two of our nearby fighters were instantly transformed into their component molecules.

  “What the hell was that?” Samson demanded.

  The answer came from Shaw to the entire squadron, even though he couldn’t have heard Samson’s question.

  “They’re firing magnetized kinetics. Start randomizing your positions and deploy countermeasures.”

  Kinetics were dumb-fire weapons that struck fighters without using AI and rocketry to guide them. They contained very powerful magnets and simply got in the way. When a small ship was moving at speed, hitting a flat rock was like hitting a brick wall.

  Kinetics were hard to detect, but deadly when the targets made their intended course obvious—as we’d done.

  “Turn on our magnetic sensors, full amplification!” I demanded.

  Gwen did as I asked, and a wave of incoming projectiles appeared. I danced our fighter with violent movements. We were going so fast, escape was largely going to be luck, but I worked the controls anyway. If nothing else, it made me feel better about facing death.

  Three more of our fighters vanished before we closed with the enemy. We were now outnumbered and shaken up.

  Some of our pilots panicked at this point and broke off from the core of our squadron. Pairs of Imperials, moving like smooth predators, swung after these stragglers and began to destroy them.

  “Ra-tikh, stay on my wing!” I said.

  Technically, I had little grounds to give him orders, but he followed them anyway. Maybe he was beginning to believe in me.

  We plunged after a pair of Imperials who had run down one of our fighters. Even as they riddled the hapless ship with close-range fire, we came in blazing. Ra-tikh and I both concentrated on one fighter, then the other. They both blew up with a satisfying puff of decompressing gas and plasma.

  Our move hadn’t gone unnoticed, unfortunately. More enemy fighters peeled away from the main force and chased us. We did a stunning turn-around, a maneuver that would have killed a pilot without an anti-grav field, but it only served to leave us facing nine incoming enemy interceptors.

  “Mia, stop firing that cannon!” I ordered. “Release a cloud of wasps instead. Samson, full forward defenses.”

  Ra-tikh mimicked my moves. We survived the pass, but we took hits and I heard a hiss in the back.

  “We’ve got a breach,” Gwen said.

  “I’m on it,” Samson said, climbing out of his harness and drifting back to the aft region with a patch in his hand.

  Taking a chance, I swung toward the core of the squad which was fighting in a tangled mess with the Imperials. Getting caught isolated from our comrades again would be deadly. We’d used up most of our limited supply of countermeasures.

  I was hoping the nine fighters we’d slipped past would seek an easier target, but it wasn’t to be. Either they were raging because we’d nailed their buddies, or they’d decided we were still their easiest prey.

  They did a one-eighty and plunged after us. They accelerated so smoothly, so powerfully, that I felt outclassed by them for the first time. They were going to catch us before I could rejoin the mass of Shaw’s squadron.

  Looking around desperately, I saw a group of six of our allied fighters standing off from the battle. They were hanging there, at range, barely firing at the enemy interceptors and refusing to engage with the maelstrom in front of them.

  Narrowing my eyes, I veered toward them.

  “Dalton,” I called, contacting my wingman’s pilot. “You see that bunch—the ones farting around at the rear of the battle?”

  “…yes… What’s the call, Chief?”

  Dalton sounded like he was nervous, and he had good reason to be.

  “Let’s head straight into that group of laggers. They can either help us, or they can eat these nine interceptors for breakfast.”

  “Roger that.”

  We swung around and flew right toward the chicken group. They didn’t do anything for a few seconds. The enemy interceptors meanwhile were poking at our tails with laser-fire. Two more holes were punched through Hammerhead’s ass despite the fact Samson was dumping aerogels in our wake. Once they caught up to us, they’d take us out fast.

  Finally, the laggers woke up to the fact we were bringing the fight to them. They had two choices: they could run, in which case Ra-tikh and I were toast. The problem with that plan was the fact nine interceptors were almost certainly going to chase down the laggers next, as they would be nearby and separated from the core battle.

  Their second option was to join the fight. That’s what they chose to do, fortunately. As a single coherent team, they approached us, firing at the interceptors on my tail.

  The battle was fierce, but it was decisive. We whirled and joined in before the end. Our heavy fighters pounded the interceptors, who were faced with head-on fire.

  Maybe the Imperial pilots had made a mistake, I reflected when it was over. They’d been so angry, so determined to kill Ra-tikh and I, that they’d plowed into a head-on stream of projectiles and radiation.

  Whatever the case, we killed all nine with onl
y one lost ship. Our chicken-shit friends were down to five ships, rather than six. It was hard to feel too sorry for them.

  “Incoming communication request,” Gwen said.

  “From the laggers?”

  “Right.”

  I displayed the face that appeared in front of me for everyone aboard to see.

  It was ugly, it was bug-like, and I was pretty sure it was angry. It was hard to tell for sure, though.

  How were you supposed to know if a flesh-beetle was glaring at you or not?

  =33=

  Although I’d had a couple of run-ins with the beetles, I’d never actually talked to one of them. I found myself looking forward to the experience as I banked my fighter and headed back toward the rest of the Squadron.

  “Chief,” I said, greeting the hideous face that hung in the air before me. “Thanks for helping me defeat those Imperials.”

  “Your gratitude is not helpful,” the being said. “We’ve lost a ship. A full crew of five died due to your actions.”

  “Yes, but we destroyed nine of the enemy, and both of my ships are intact. That sounds like a bargain to me.”

  The bug looked at me for a second. I wasn’t sure if he was thinking over my statement, or what.

  “Again, you fail to grasp the obvious,” he said at last. “Your actions have caused five of the Chosen to die. This is unacceptable.”

  I was beginning to lose interest, so I cut the channel. Ahead of us, Shaw’s group seemed to be winning the battle. We’d lost about half of our total fighters—a grim price—but we’d won through. Our heavier ships were better able to face the interceptors when they stayed together and fought in formation.

  “Chief…” Samson said, “the bugs are swinging around and pulling up behind us. They’re right on our tails.”

  “Good,” I said. “Maybe they’ve learned they can’t sit this battle out.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what’s going on in their bug-brains.”

  I glanced over the incoming data, and my victorious smirk transformed into a frown. “What the hell… they’re lighting us up?”