Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk)

by Little, Robert

  I shrugged, not knowing what to say. To me, what I’d done was just normal: the quicker you could service a craft, the faster you could get to the next one. I had cut corners by making educated guesses as to the problem, and simply gone ahead and made the programming changes instead of waiting for the system to tell me what those problems were. I was almost always right which meant I was almost always very fast.

  I had grown up working on navigation and propulsion systems, and when I graduated from the Naval Academy I had to fight to avoid being assigned into a support or maintenance track. Every single one of my instructors had tried to dissuade me from my first love, which was to be a fighter pilot. The only thing that saved me from doing the same work I’d been doing all my life was the fact that I scored second highest in my class of three hundred in the various aptitude tests relating to piloting fighters.

  It was fortunate that I had scored so well in those tests, for I was barely acceptable in the other subjects that one had to do well in if one wished to get into a fighter. Fortunately I possessed a great deal of stubbornness, which enabled me to persevere and in due course I was assigned to fighter pilot school at the venerable Edwards Training Center in the southern California desert, the primary pilot and navigator facility for the entire planet.

  There, I met Elian and continued to struggle with the course material, as I’d done all through my years of schooling. I did much better, however when I had a stick in my hand. Elian spent uncounted hours patiently and good-naturedly tutoring me in my many areas of weakness. Thanks largely to his help, I’d graduated in the top third of my class this time, still second in piloting skills behind the same woman who had been first at the academy. She was the only pilot trainee who scored better than I had inside a cockpit and she was considered a freak of nature. Elian had decided he preferred being a navigator and despite spending much of his study hours working to help me, he finished tops amongst the navigators. I counted myself extremely lucky to be with him.

  The pilot who beat me had gotten first crack at assignments and chose the elite First Fleet that was assigned the protection of earth and its solar system. I had been delighted to get assigned to Seventh Fleet, which was stationed out at the very edge of human space. Components of that fleet spent many months at a time performing a variety of fascinating tasks, such as exploring new systems, and from time to time engaging in commerce protection and the suppression of “lawless behavior” on the various newly settled planets. It was this latter activity that pilots yearned for. This assignment also meant long tours of duty, which married crew tended to dislike. I was not only single, my only real friend flew at my side.

  I had wanted adventure more than prestige and was now getting rather more than I had bargained for.

  I sometimes wondered about the Academy student who had twice beaten me. I had survived these last two weeks, if barely, and was well on my way to becoming the first ace in more than a century. I hoped that Seventh Fleet would survive to get me and the thousands of other personnel back home so that we could wear those shiny new ribbons we were earning. Unfortunately, experience was teaching me that those bits of ribbon and metal carried a very high cost.

  Chapter 7

  Over the next thirty hours the two crews worked nearly non-stop to design and fabricate the cradles that would restrain the bottles. Once that was done, they had to redo nearly every power tap in the ship, no easy task. The inner hull was a fascinating design that allowed power and data to be rerouted around damaged areas, and it did it automatically. In addition to getting the power fed into the ship’s systems, they also had to dismount and replace the two laser rods with larger ones. The new barrels fit, if just barely.

  Now, after over fifty hours of work, the ship was undergoing its final self-diagnosis before powering up the antigravity systems, its sole means of propulsion. The weapon stations had checked out, after we changed out a defective barrel, which was actually a finely tuned lens for the eighty giga-watt output each laser could generate.

  We stood around, drinking coffee or tea as the main computer worked its logical way through every step of diagnosis. Everyone was sagging from two days of work without sleep, but we waited eagerly for the results. We were tired of getting our heads handed to us on an alien platter.

  The anti-gravity system that acted as the craft’s propulsion system also served as its primary defensive shield. Like all such spacecraft, it projected a deep gravity cone that served to accelerate it. In the Hawks’ case, it was originally capable of achieving nine gravities of acceleration, which had been considered very good when it was shiny new.

  An adaptation of that system was used to deflect laser beams and destroy missiles. With the power now available, the ship could project a far larger gravity drive field that would actually be harder to detect from a distance, making the source of that gravity well harder to find. It was estimated that it could accelerate at up to three gravities while causing barely a ripple in the texture of space. It should now be able to accelerate at an estimated maximum rate of possibly fifteen gravities, equal to or slightly faster than the current generation of fighters we had trained up in.

  I fervently hoped that those projections held true. I badly wanted to destroy these unknown enemies, who had killed so many of our friends during the last week. Projections indicated that the Hawks’ far greater mass would not permit it to be as agile as the enemy craft, so we intended to avoid confrontations with the hordes of enemy fighters in favor of putting a missile up their mother ship’s nose, or any other available orifice.

  Chapter 8

  There had been no contact with the enemy for over ten hours and the fleet had changed course while its remaining fighters kept watch. The fleet’s best guess was that the enemy fighters had come a very long way to attack, explaining the lengthy spells between attacks, as well as our complete lack of knowledge about our adversary, whose return was anticipated momentarily.

  Fleet analysts had not been able to develop a hypothesis as to why the alien craft were able to find us, despite repeated course changes. For our part, we no longer had fighters to spare for long rang searches.

  Now, Elian and I, along with our two enlisted, sat in the crew compartment running final diagnostics before powering up. I got the final green light and signaled to flight control that I was ready to power up the primary flight systems.

  The resurrection of Hawk 7 was at hand.

  After getting approval I looked around at my tiny crew and said, “Well, here goes nothing.” I moved an ancient and seemingly anachronistic toggle switch to the ‘on’ position and watched anxiously as the ship started to come to life.

  I could actually hear the capacitors as they began the process of powering up. They generated a sound that started below twenty Hz and sang up out of audible hearing. I watched my indicators for any sign of a problem. After thirty seconds the ship reported all green, and I radioed flight control that we were ready for departure.

  I stowed my pad in a receptacle designed just for that purpose. It would record all my actions and everything that happened in the ship, and could be used for later diagnosis, if, that is, it survived.

  The flight deck had been evacuated beforehand and alarms sounded as it began to depressurize. When the air pressure dropped almost to zero the massive outer doors began to open to space. A tractor beam took hold of the ship and we floated out of the hull and ejected at a walking pace away from the carrier.

  I made one last check of my flight instruments and brought up power to the anti gravity systems. The ship trembled and stopped drifting. I turned it away from the carrier and allowed it to accelerate at a very small rate. We needed to get out of the carriers’ immediate vicinity before we could fully test the ship, and that took several minutes.

  My own instruments depicted the space around us, with the curvature in space caused by the carrier’s own immense engines showing up clearly.

  I finally received permission to run up our engines. We had two precious
fighters along as escorts. I knew both pilots, and they were very caustic in their opinion of our new craft, which they managed to mispronounce as ‘Hulk’ instead of ‘Hawk’.

  I upped power to the drive and the Hawk increased its acceleration. Per instructions I held it at three gravities while everyone tested and retested. Miraculously, there were no red lights. After ten minutes of creeping along, Kwan reported, “We’re barely showing on the fighters’ monitors, and even less on the carriers. As a guess, we’d be invisible to our own search radar at anything beyond thirty or forty thousand kilometers – this ship is pretty much a black hole for radar, gravitics and infrared.”

  I reported our green status to the carrier and pushed the acceleration up to ten gravities for another series of tests. Elian said, “Hey, we’re probably accelerating faster than this piece of living history has ever previously managed.” The chief snorted but didn’t reply.

  We were heading away from the carrier and also away from the last known position of the enemy’s fighters. Fleet didn’t want us to give anything away or run into an enemy fighter with this completely untested ship.

  After ten minutes, the flight board was still green, and I was given permission to go to max power. I grinned with anticipation and said, “Here we go ladies and gentlemen, and you too, chief.” I eased the power up and watched as the ship accelerated from ten through fifteen gravities. The two fighters were now at max accel and I still had some reserve. I waited a bit to see if they could keep up, then pushed the power up to max and watched as the Hawk jumped to over sixteen gravities. To my intense satisfaction the two fighters began to fall behind.

  The fastest enemy fighter had been observed to do between thirteen and fourteen gravities, just a little slower than our own. I said, “Hulk my ass.” Kwan heard me and chuckled. It sounded good, I noted.

  We monitored our instruments and after running flat out for thirty minutes with zero problems I began decelerating. The two fighters were still on screen, but were now approximately ten thousand kilometers behind. They had been forced to reduce their own acceleration due to fears they might dink a precious fighter. At that range, a Dash 6 laser would momentarily bathe the hull of the Hawk in intensely bright light, and heat it up by a few degrees at best. That is, if it could have found the Hawk, a now unlikely occurrence.

  I set the power level to read three gravities and asked the fighter pilots for a reading. We were still running away from the fleet, but were slowing our relative velocity back down.

  The two fighters had been giving us constant readouts of the size of our gravity distortion cone, but suddenly, they could barely see us. Kwan waited several minutes and called again for a fix. I was feeling better and better about this shapely black craft

  The two fighter pilots finally activated their radars and still had difficulty locking on to the Hawk. At anything but relatively short ranges, our ship was invisible to gravity sensors, radar and infrared detectors. At a request from Kwan I began incrementally upping our acceleration, and she asked the two pilots to tell her when they could see us.

  Finally, at six gravities, one pilot reported that the Hawk became visible to gravity sensors. They were inside five thousand kilometers and the fighters knew exactly where to look, and yet the radar return was extremely faint. They estimated that under any normal circumstances, they wouldn’t see the Hawk with radar outside of twenty thousand kilometers. We knew that the radar systems aboard our destroyers were much more powerful, but even their systems would have trouble outside of fifty thousand kilometers.

  As I continued to decelerate at higher and higher levels the Hawk became more and more visible. Elian and I reasoned that if it was so hard to see at six gravities, it should be impossible to see it at three. Both Elian and Kwan ran continuous tests, measuring the reflected radar energy we were receiving from the two fighters, so that we would know how to operate near an actual enemy.

  Chapter 9

  We returned to the carrier and were immediately docked. Our experiment had started out with virtually no notice or hope of success, but we returned to find that situation had been drastically altered. Already, crews were working frantically to move the other three Hawks up to the hanger decks to begin modifying them. The ancient Hawk had just gained a new lease on life.

  Crews were waiting and as soon as the hanger pressurized, they began swarming over the Hawk. Its energy weapons had not been tested, due to fears they might draw some enemy fighters down on them. Maintenance was now planning to add external mounting points so that the ship could carry missiles on the two winglets. This was also going to be a fairly routine task as the Hawk had been designed from the outset to be able to carry weapons on exterior racks. It should be able to carry two of the huge Mark 65 missiles that were smart, stealthy, had excellent endurance and could go boom very nicely once they got into range.

  Those huge missiles had not been around when the Hawk served on active duty, and in fact the craft had never carried anything so massive, but the mounting points matched up, and a special missile carrier holding eight of the huge missiles sat in a corner of the hold. Neither the destroyers nor the cruiser launchers were capable of handling this missile, but in another strange twist, the Hawk could, due solely to the fact that it could mount them externally.

  Used against enemy fighters it would be like using a hammer to swat flies, but against those fighters’ own carriers, it should be able to put a nice hole in its, or their, hide.

  Elian and I were summoned to our flight leads tiny office, where we were taken in tow and led upward, both literally and figuratively. The three of us were ushered into the quarters of Fleet Admiral Andreessen, who returned our salutes briskly.

  He turned to our lead, Lieutenant Commander Barshefsky and asked him for details on the progress of the other three Hawks. He said, “They should be up and running within approximately forty hours, unless we run into problems that we didn’t find with the first one. We should have that one loaded with missiles and operational in perhaps four hours. It will carry the two upgraded thirty-five centimeter lasers and two Mark 65’s. We’re not planning to load any anti-fighter missiles in its internal bay, since we haven’t yet modified those systems and they are supposed to avoid contact.”

  He caught his breath, consulted his pad and continued, “Our current thinking is to send this first one out as soon as it’s refueled. It will be tasked with locating the enemy fleet. We’ve got no idea of the number, size, location or capability of these people, and we don’t yet know why they haven’t used missiles against us, nor especially why they seem to be able to find us despite all our efforts to evade them.”

  Admiral Andreessen asked, “Who are you going to put into it?” Without any hesitation Lt. Cdr. Barshefsky replied, “Lieutenants Padilla and Turner were the ones to initiate this project, and I want them in the cockpit when it goes out.” The admiral frowned and said, “I’d like more experienced pilots for this.”

  Lt. Cdr. Barshefsky said, “Sir, these two men have destroyed three enemy fighters – the last one they got when they were jumped by three – correction, four enemy fighters. Additionally, I’m impressed with their performance after they ejected. They turned off their beacons and drifted silently for over an hour before they turned them on, and even then they signaled with a hand torch in order not to alert the enemy. They are the best men for this job sir, despite their relative lack of hours with a stick. I stand behind them fully.”

  The admiral looked at the two of us for several moments while he tapped a finger on the desk. He nodded his head and asked, “Who do you have for the other two slots?” Lt. Cdr. Barshefsky smiled and said, “Master Chief Kana and one of his tech's, an Etech4, have volunteered, sir.” The admiral said, “OK, we’ll go with your choices.”

  The Admiral actually smiled briefly and said, “Master Chief Kana. What a small world. Well, let’s do it. We’ll get you the mission tasking within the hour.”

  The meeting was over. We saluted and left the
office. On the way back not a word was uttered. I was suddenly aware that we not only had a flying assignment, we had one that everyone was going to be paying attention to, and perhaps, depending on for the very survival of the fleet. My flight leader had crawled very far out on a limb to recommend the two of us, the ones who would be clear out at the very tip. That was a very heavy responsibility for a mere Lt. JG.

  Elian seemed to understand the implications as well, for he was silent, a very rare sign in a man that I had come to believe couldn’t even spell the word ‘stress’.

  Chapter 10

  We went back to the flight deck to check on the progress of our new baby and discovered that there were problems, two, each. The Mark 65 was larger and far heavier than any weapon the Hawks had ever carried, and it extended partially outside the ship's gravity field. There was a very real possibility that if the ship had to pull too many G’s they could tear it apart.

  We listened to a lengthy analysis of the problem and I finally interrupted, “Well, you seem to think that the Mark 65 is the best weapon we have, so we’ll just have to be careful not to have to pull any more G’s than necessary before we shoot them off. Just how many G’s can we safely pull with those things?”