Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk)

by Little, Robert

  Chapter 1

  August 17th, 2413

  The Void

  On board the Federal Auxiliary Fleet Carrier Essex, I wandered through the depths of an immense cargo hold with my navigator, Lt. JG Elian Turner. We were looking for a particular object, following directions provided by his pad. It was a very large object, but one, nevertheless that was proving difficult to locate. The hold we were searching through was the size of a large city block, and so far the search had proved frustrating.

  Elian and I were navigator and pilot, respectively, in the Seventh Fleet, a component of the Federal Navy. This ship was our first assignment following graduation from the Naval Academy and the subsequent flight schools. We had been serving on the Essex for seven months, and were two months into what had been scheduled to be a six-month cruise.

  The Essex, although it was nearly as large as a Fleet Carrier, held fewer fighters and attack craft than the other, slightly larger ship but it had a significantly larger cargo capacity which could be configured in any number of ways to suit the needs of a particular mission, which in this case was a combination of highly interesting extra-solar exploration and mundane fleet cargo hauling.

  Just two days ago our fighter had been shot out from underneath us during one of a series of ferocious running engagements between our fleet and that of a just-encountered race that had attacked without prior detection, much less provocation.

  It was a minor miracle that our two races were at approximately the same technological level; unfortunately the other race was attempting to kill us, and the word ‘almost’ seemed to have come down slightly in favor of this new and heretofore unknown race.

  An elderly destroyer, the Horsham, sounded the first alarm. This ship was positioned approximately five million kilometers out from the main components of the fleet. It went to battle stations when its sensors detected a large number of small craft approaching on a converging vector with a high relative velocity. It was only when the craft began decelerating that the Horsham detected their gravity drives.

  It was quickly obvious that these unknown craft must have accelerated from well outside sensor range so as to prevent our fleet from detecting their drives, which were similar in nature to our own. These facts indicated that they were aware of our fleet and had positioned themselves to intersect our course without our being able to evade them.

  The Horsham brought up its search radar, which promptly identified the incoming craft as fighters, due to their size and because their rate of deceleration was roughly the same as our own fighters. Under existing peacetime restrictions, the Horsham was not permitted to launch its missiles unless it was being fired upon. In any event that would have been of limited utility, as it only had four launchers, loaded with aged missiles, two of numerous cost cutting measures, collectively known as peace.

  The Horsham immediately signaled the Essex, sending real time sensor readings to the flagship. Even at that short a distance, that data took roughly twenty five seconds to transit.

  As its crew ran to their battle stations the destroyer turned away from the approaching bogies and began accelerating towards the protection of the other ships. Before it was able to do so it came under fire.

  Contact was lost less than three minutes after the Horsham reported it was being fired upon. Its report indicated that the unknown fighter energy weapons were equal in power to its own thirty-five centimeter lasers. There had been no reports of missiles, but the abrupt cessation of communication from the lightly armed destroyer was ominous evidence of the power of the weapons that had been used.

  Moments later, a brilliant red icon lit up on the bridge of the flagship, signaling the loss of the destroyer. The Horsham was the first fleet ship to be lost due to combat in over a generation. It would not be the last.

  The two carriers - the Essex and her even older sister, the Invictus - lay at the center of the small formation of ships, and were the reason for their escorts’ presence. Within minutes fighters began launching out of the two carriers. The official name of those tiny craft was the Lightning F/A 191-6, shortened by their pilots to ‘Dash 6’. Unlike the aging capital ships that for the most part comprised the fleet, the Dash 6 represented the latest in fleet military technology.

  Due to the fact that we had just returned from training exercises, we were not armed with live missiles and there was no time to load them. That proved to be critical, as the Dash 6’s only other offensive weapon was a twenty-five centimeter laser, which would soon prove to be no match for the far more powerful energy weapons used by the encroaching enemy.

  That first engagement of the two groups of fighters quickly turned into a disaster. We discovered that our new opponents were very maneuverable and capable of nearly the same acceleration. Unfortunately the enemy fighters utilized energy weapons of much greater power, and the Dash 6 shields were not able to successfully deflect the intense coherent light beams. Seventeen fighters were blotted out of existence in the first five minutes. Fifteen of those were our own.

  Even when our fighter’s laser was on target we failed to destroy or even cause noticeable damage to our incredibly tough opponents. The two enemy kills we did manage were achieved when the pilot was able to target the enemy craft at virtually point blank range.

  Elian and I was the only crew that managed to destroy an enemy fighter and survive.

  Behind that first wave of fighters came a second, which blew through our beleaguered fighters and pressed on right into the middle defensive shell of destroyers, killing five in an orgy of boiling light and silent explosions, in the process losing an equal number of their fighters. Close to one thousand men and women lost their lives in less than fifteen minutes, and dozens of emergency beacons squawked the locations of the few personnel who managed to get to escape pods before their ships disintegrated.

  The enemy fighters often continued to target ships even after they lost power or lost the ability to return fire. As bad as the losses were, only the poor timing of the two assaults prevented much greater loss of life.

  The two carriers, with both cruisers and several fast fleet cargo ships, turned away under maximum acceleration and attempted to gain enough separation to jump out. The two cruisers pulled in as close to the carriers as their drive systems would allow and screened the lightly armed and armored carriers. The cruisers’ more powerful energy weapons engaged at long range and succeeded in keeping the fighters at bay, although they were not able to totally block the incoming energy beams, or disengage from the fierce attack long enough to jump out.

  It took many long minutes before the ship's missile systems came online, but they finally began firing anti-fighter missiles into the swirling mass of tiny craft, despite the risk to our own fighters.

  That desperate defensive action was paid for by the lives of additional fighter crews and resulted in moderate to severe damage and loss of life on several of the remaining fleet combatants.

  While we were not able to regain control of the space surrounding our fleet, the outnumbered fighters, destroyers and cruisers were able to prevent the outright destruction of the carriers and huge and unarmed fleet cargo vessels.

  Only the fact that the enemy fighters abruptly broke off their attack prevented a far greater loss of life.

  It was determined – later - that their failure to press home their attack when they were so close to success was due to the fact that they had exhausted either their life support or energy systems. This conclusion was another indication that the craft had been launched at a very great range. Our fleet possessed good surveillance out to at least fifty million kilometers, and hadn’t seen any sign of the distinctive gravity drives modern ships possessed.

  Elian
and I were lucky to survive the first few minutes of that initial attack. We were not armed with missiles, but neither was the enemy. Unfortunately one hit from their far more powerful laser was usually sufficient to destroy the lightly protected Dash 6.

  Tactical control of the area was lost almost immediately. Most of the Dash 6 crews that managed to eject from their craft after being hit were never rescued, despite repeated, heroic and unsuccessful efforts by rescue crews in their unarmed shuttles.

  Almost as soon as we came into contact with the enemy we found ourselves outnumbered and severely outgunned. As Elian shouted warnings, I slammed our craft through a dizzying series of purely defensive banks and turns. Our cockpit was lit up with overload lights, strident proximity alarms, targeting radar warnings and the warbling of a rapidly overheating capacitor.

  I discovered that we were able to turn inside our larger opponents by a small but significant margin and I used this advantage ruthlessly. Twice within less than one minute we were able to cut the corner on two different enemy craft, putting us into excellent firing positions. We fired our laser and scored solid hits without causing any noticeable damage, except to our heart rates.

  In desperation I closed to a range of less than ten kilometers – close enough that I could actually see the ship. Elian hit the craft three times in quick succession and it finally exploded. Earth Force fighters were accustomed to being able to damage or even destroy maneuvering fighters at ranges out to as much as twenty thousand kilometers, and no one had ever even contemplated having to fight at such close ranges.

  Over the decades, earth fighters had gradually evolved away from an emphasis on energy weapons and into nimble missile platforms. Their high performance came at a price however: they had virtually no protection from energy weapons, while their own energy weapon was designed primarily as a secondary offensive weapon capable only of destroying other fighters. The trade-off in smaller energy weapons resulted in increased acceleration from the standard fusion bottles that fleet used.

  As soon as we saw the explosion of our opponent Elian reported the successful tactic to all our remaining fighters. Immediately after that jubilant broadcast, Elian told me that our weapon system had gone into emergency shutdown. Without any weapon we were forced to break off and attempt to return to the Essex.

  Firing three shots in less than three seconds had severely overheated our system, and was Absolutely Prohibited by standing regulations, but it had kept us alive to return home to get a reprimand, a far better fate than getting turned into an expanding cloud of gas.

  As it turned out there was no reprimand. Instead everyone on the flight deck wanted to know how we had accomplished what only one other crew had succeeded in doing, and they were no longer able to report anything. Not even their emergency beacon survived.

  Maintenance crews worked feverishly to exchange out the spent capacitor, and loaded our fighter with four obsolete ER-12 missiles. We launched in under fifteen minutes and returned to the melee that continued to swirl closer and closer to the inner core of our fleet. Our mechanics had performed a minor miracle in getting us back into the fight so quickly, but fifteen minutes was a veritable lifetime to the beleaguered pilots who were attempting to stave off a complete collapse of our defenses.

  The learning curve for pilots and navigators was brutal, and only the very good or very lucky survived long enough to gain sufficient experience to stay alive. Only a very, very few learned how to successfully fight back.

  In just a few minutes we had been transformed into veterans, and as I accelerated away from the Essex and toward our new enemy I hoped fervently that we didn’t get transformed into heroes.

  The two cruisers had begun to add their missiles and powerful lasers to the support of the beleaguered destroyers, which had proved to be barely more capable of fending off the fighters than our Dash 6’s. Those missiles accelerated into the mix of earth and alien fighters, causing still higher heartbeats as they slashed past our own fighters. Fortunately, those missiles were smart enough to avoid destroying us, although they didn't seem terribly capable of hitting the enemy, so on balance, they simply terrified us.

  Shortly after we entered the zone of combat, we scored a second kill with a missile. Elian launched three of them from within a swirling fur ball of banking and turning fighters. One lost lock, probably due to the large number of nearby targets, the second was destroyed by an energy weapon, but the third struck home, sending the fighter tumbling out of control. We felt a surge of contradictory emotions; elation that we had managed to kill another enemy and rage that our outdated missiles were nearly as useless as our laser. We knew that fleet had much better missiles, but we were not armed with them at the moment, another cost savings measure that we feared may well result in the total destruction of our tiny force.

  Within less than five minutes of our introduction of fighter missiles, the enemy fighters broke off contact and opened up a gap of nearly one hundred thousand kilometers between them and our ships. Our crews were happy enough to let them go.

  The two remaining flight leaders attempted to form us up into four ship elements, but so many fighters had already been destroyed that they were forced to throw us together haphazardly.

  After just a few moments the enemy reversed course and resumed its attack, but now their fighters maintained a much larger separation between themselves and our fighters, simultaneously reducing the effective power of our own already inadequate lasers and giving them more time to evade or destroy our missiles. Their extremely rapid reaction to the introduction of missiles indicated that they were at least aware of this type of weapon.

  Our fighters were equipped with missiles that could track both actively and passively, but despite having extremely hot enemy fighters to home on, few missiles managed to score kills. Fleet actually possessed far newer technology, but we were paying the price of massive cutbacks, brought about by several decades of peace.

  Not only were our missiles old technology, they were old.

  During our fifth sortie we scored a third kill with the laser after closing once again to within less than one hundred kilometers, but immediately after causing the enemy fighter to lose power and begin tumbling, we were swarmed by multiple enemy craft. I ruthlessly exceeded the design parameters of our fighter in an effort to keep our opponents at bay and almost succeeded.

  A fourth fighter that had just entered the fray shot and missed us, but the beam of light was so close that the ‘scatter’ sent a large spike of energy back into our fusion bottle, causing it to go into emergency shutdown. Without any power, the Dash 6 was just a target.

  We had been in a flight that was tasked with keeping the alien fighters occupied while a severely damaged destroyer attempted to pull away from the swirling melee. To the extent that the destroyer was not further damaged we were successful.

  After becoming disabled, we immediately ejected, shut off our emergency beacons and drifted away from the scene of our fighter’s further destruction, which occurred just moments later, almost killing us when the fusion bottle exploded. We’d witnessed other disabled fighters get the same treatment, filling us with white-hot and impotent rage.

  We had not been given orders to turn off our beacons, but as we shot away from the dying fighter Elian shouted that it was possible that our homing signals might attract the attention of an enemy fighter, which attention would result in our becoming part of another expanding cloud of plasma. Absent our ability to control the space surrounding our fleet, rescue craft had no chance to pick up crews that successfully ejected, but we still preferred a slow death due to asphyxiation rather than getting hit by an enemy laser.

  As I drifted in the middle of a small cloud of expanding debris, I felt a mixture of intense grief over the loss of my fighter and equally deep feelings of rage and frustration at having been hit. Like virtually all fighter pilots, I thought I was invincible. I now knew better. Elian calmly reminded me that it had taken four fighters to take us down, but that
didn’t alter our present reality nor put a stop to my string of expletives.

  We waited for over one hour before turning on our homing beacons. We had no real expectations that we would be picked up, but by that time our suits held less than one more hour of air. We hadn’t seen any explosions in some time, but space is vast and we couldn’t be certain that our own ships remained or that the enemy had departed.

  In one of those miracles that defy explanation, another crew had suffered a weapons shut down and had decided to simply power down all their systems and hide amidst the debris that had once been their friends and crew mates.

  That fighter crew took a huge risk in shutting down but at least their new enemy ignored them in favor of the remaining earth force fighters that were still shooting back.

  When we saw the running lights of the approaching fighter, which its pilot had turned on for that purpose, we shouted with joy but even then we did not use the radio. Instead, Elian flashed a light in the direction of the fighter.

  We attached our suits to the empty weapons attachment points of the fighter, placing us inside the craft’s gravity field, and watched our air supply diminish as we returned to the fleet carrier. Our discomfort was largely mitigated by the fact that we were still breathing. As we approached the Essex I asked the pilot how she had known where to find us. She replied bleakly, “We lost five fighters and two destroyers in this vicinity, the odds were someone survived.”