Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk)

by Little, Robert

  That was a question for which there seemed to be no simple answer. Straight-line acceleration was not a problem, but pulling positive G’s was. After conferring for several minutes the head engineer said, “We think you should not exceed seven positive G’s; straight line or negative G’s should present no problem. Exceed that seven G parameter and you run the risk of the weapons ripping apart or loose, and damaging or destroying your ship.” Elian grinned and said, “Sir, just give us the Hawk and we’ll be happy to stuff those Mark 65’s up somebody’s, um, orifice.”

  Everyone smiled and that was that. Normal peacetime procedures were not even mentioned. Good thing, since putting Mark 65 missiles on an ancient attack ship was so far outside of normal as to boggle the mind.

  We were ordered to get some sleep and headed back toward our tiny quarters, stopping for a quick meal before turning in. We actually managed to get some sleep. We’d seen the enemy, and this time there might be a chance to hurt him, or her, or it. Whatever.

  We returned to the flight deck after getting four hours sleep, more or less. Elian and I were suited up, more from habit than need, as this ship didn’t actually require the same suits a fighter did, but the suit was designed for fairly long operations and was comfortable. We stood in a loose circle and Lt. Cdr. Barshefsky verbally went over the mission assignment.

  Pulling very low G’s, we were to head to Galactic south for ten hours. Then, when the Hawk was sufficiently far enough away from the fleet’s position, it would turn and begin looping back toward the general area it was thought the enemy was in.

  We were given coordinates for reuniting with the fleet, which would attempt to meet us, if at all possible, in four to five days time. It was an admittedly unusual situation that called for an entire fleet to arrange to meet up with one small craft, but these were not normal times.

  Our instructions were to use the missiles only if we found a big enough target to merit their use and could do so with a reasonable certainty that we could do so without getting killed in the attempt.

  The main mission was to get into passive sensor range of the enemy fleet and get reads on the number, quantity and type of their capital ships. To date, we had zero information on them, and this had to change if we expected to have a chance of surviving, much less defeating these beings.

  We walked around the ship and inspected the missiles, which were indeed huge, nearly thirty meters long. I noticed a new feature up near the nose of the ship and went closer to look. Someone had painted “R.E.venge” in red letters, and below it there was a picture of a pilot astraddle a huge missile with snorting nostrils, calling to mind a horse. There were also three small red fighters with a line through them. I grinned in appreciation and Elian asked, “Who painted that?” Master Chief Kana grinned and said, “Our technician has many talents, sirs. What say we get this pig out of the barn?”

  We nodded and went up the ladder. The passageway was jammed with the four fusion bottles, capacitors and their cabling, all of which were very securely tied down. It looked good, like a neatly packed closet that one didn’t want to open the door to for fear everything would tumble out.

  We strapped into our couches and began running through the flight diagnostics, finding nothing had gone wrong over the last few hours. Elian concentrated on the weapons and the controls that would feed targeting information to the two missiles, as well as the two lasers. These were not new weapons but they were new both to us and to the Hawk, and we would depend on them if we ran into one of our recently introduced interstellar neighbors.

  The defensive shields all tested green, but once again, their effectiveness wouldn’t be known for sure unless we got within detection and weapons range. I did not want to do that, as much as I itched to kill a few bugs, or whatever these beings looked like. I grinned over at Elian and said, “I really hope that they actually look like bugs – it would make hate propaganda so much easier to sell.”

  We finally finished the lengthy checklists and were given immediate permission to get underway. The hanger emptied of what had turned into a large crowd of engineers, officers and the merely curious, and then the doors were opening. The Hawk powered up and we waited impatiently until it was tractored out and ejected into space.

  As soon as possible I put on some acceleration and the Hawk began to move away from the immense ship, which just seemed to get bigger as the Hawk began to pile on acceleration. Three G’s doesn’t sound like much, but after an hour you’re traveling relatively fast.

  For the next ten hours we moved out at ninety degrees to port of the fleet heading. We maintained radio silence, as it was possible our enemy was as aware of high frequency transmissions as it was seemingly unaware of missile technology.

  At ten hours we changed heading and began accelerating back toward the general area of the original contact with the very hostile aliens. We kept the radar and all other energy emitters in standby mode. We couldn’t assume that finding the enemy would be as easy as finding our own fleet, so we maintained data feeds to the two missiles, making it a much faster process to update targeting information and launch the monsters.

  At twelve hours I was beginning to lose my edge, so I put the ship on autopilot, reclined my couch and dozed. Elian spelled me and Kwan spelled Chief Kana. Much to my surprise, I actually fell asleep. War seems to be endless hours of intense boredom coupled with a few moments of almost paralyzing fear. There had been an excess of the latter lately, and not much sleep.

  Chapter 10

  After running under low G’s for seventeen hours on the new heading a blip finally appeared on our gravity sensors. It matched the profile of the fighters we had seen way too much of and it was slowly traveling on the same heading the Essex had been on. The sighting produced mixed feelings. We'd correctly guessed the approximate location of the enemy fleet, which was generally good. On the other hand, we may have found the enemy fleet, which was not necessarily specifically good.

  I made a command decision and concluded that the single fighter was an advance scout. I adjusted our own heading, began decelerating and ran checks of all systems.

  We ate a quick meal of emergency rations while the plots gradually filled up with additional fighters, all moving in the same general direction. The flight computer displayed the position of all the visible fighters and predicted the logical positions of others. Lots of others.

  It looked like a huge elongated globe, leading us to believe that somewhere inside was the prize, or prizes. We had readings on far more fighter escorts than human fleets used, but far less than the enemy apparently had available, which indicated that a very large number of additional fighters were probably either away or sitting in bays, waiting for Elian and Robert to arrive for the party.

  Elian computed a zig-zag course that would pass the Hawk between the three nearest fighters and inside that outer layer. That was more normally a task that would be initiated by the pilot, but Elian had a real flair for this and we had worked so closely together that I had learned to trust him. Of course, after I trusted him, I checked his work.

  I was fairly confident that if the Hawk was spotted it could outrun one or two fighters, but if there was a third in the wrong spot, we would have to fight. The odds were better if the Hawk could tackle them one at a time, but much better still if it didn’t have to tangle with them at all. I was still uncertain of our ability to sneak past them, and it felt all wrong: I’d been trained to fight, not skulk.zzzz

  I gently decelerated and changed course to enable us to move between two fighters that were holding station roughly two hundred thousand kilometers apart. Once past them I would change course again to avoid the third fighter without exceeding our arbitrary limit of three G’s.

  There was something about the enemy and its formation that puzzled me for several minutes. Then, it hit me. This seemed too easy. I had been unconsciously worried about traps, but then it struck me: their formation was designed to prevent one of their own craft from penetrating their outer scree
n. Their fighters, and presumably their other craft, were not nearly as well shielded as our Hawk, especially when they were powered up. I talked about this with Elian and he said, “Yeah, I had expected to have to fight in and out – this is strange. Not complaining, mind you, but strange.”

  We grew extremely tense as we arrowed in at an angle to their course. Until we got close enough to read their infra red or other emissions we wouldn’t be able to see enemy fighters, meaning there was a chance that we’d bump into someone who was drifting rather than under power. Our computers gave that scenario an extremely low probability, as we had been observing them for quite a while now, and there had been no sign of an enemy craft going ballistic.

  I shut down the drive and we drifted past the two outer fighters with no sign of discovery. I realigned our course and added in a small amount of acceleration to keep us away from the third blip on our sensors and watched as it proceeded along with no change in course.

  We had not picked up any radio noise on any frequency we used, and Kwan begun to look above our frequencies, as well as below. They communicated somehow, and one possibility among several candidates held that they had been able to find us through our radio transmissions. If that was the case, we badly wanted to discover how they had done it.

  We spent some very tense minutes as we approached the closest point of possible contact, but then the range to the third fighter began to grow and everyone sighed in relief.

  We were now heading into the center of the globe of fighters, an area with a diameter of over two million kilometers. Our sensors now had readings of a single mammoth ship in the center of it all. Their fleet was traveling under low acceleration, just as we had been, and at a question put to her by Elian, Kwan spent some time on her station before reporting that the enemy was following our own Essex. It knew our fleet’s location and was maintaining position outside of our own sensors. Elian said, “This tactic seems to indicate that their sensors are roughly as good as ours. At the least, they seem to think this, judging by their behavior”.

  I changed course again to angle in towards that ship and match courses with it. Its gravity well indicated that it was significantly larger than our own carriers, which massed nearly five million tons. If it was indeed a carrier, it could carry a huge number of fighters. Hell, it could carry a fighter factory.

  As we approached, other, smaller ships became visible. Their size seemed to be close to that of our own destroyers and cruisers, but they were in close proximity to the huge ship, rather than running out near the edge of the globe, where our destroyers were normally used. A fighter was reasonably useful as a scout, but they had limited endurance – the pilot was squeezed into his flight station with virtually no ability to move around more than a few inches. And most importantly, their sensors were less sensitive and powerful. At least, that was the case with our own fighters.

  Kwan asked Elian, “I wonder why they’re running so slowly, and why do those smaller ships run in so close to that monster in the center?” Master Chief Kana said, “They seem to be skulking along very slowly, as if they’re trying to make up for their seeming lack of any cloaking technology. At this level of acceleration, their infrared signature is quite small. I’d guess that they’ve noted that our craft emit less heat than theirs, so this may be an attempt to compensate. Either that, or I have no idea.”

  Elian was watching his screen – we all were paying avid attention to our sensors – and asked Carolyn, which was the first name of our technician, “What is the estimate for the size of that ship in the center?” Chief Kana answered for her, “I’d guess that it exceeds twenty million tons. I’d love to see it run a little harder, it would be easier to plot its mass.” Etech4 Kwan said, “If you are correct chief, that they are powered way down because of us, then they are reacting to our technology.”

  I looked over at the chief and asked, “What would something that large look like, theoretically? And, why would someone build something so large?” He grinned at me and said, “Well, theoretically, I have no idea what it would look like, save for the fact that it would be dammed big. If it were a carrier, it could conceivably carry as many as two hundred fighters, but at this point we don’t know if it is in fact the carrier for all those fighters. We won’t know until one actually approaches it and is taken aboard. In addition to that, we don’t know if they have other types of fighters, if they have destroyers, or combat craft would pass for a destroyer, or even if this monster is in fact the only one they have in this particular piece of emptiness. Other than that, we know, well, not much.”

  I grinned at him and turned my attention to Carolyn, “Do you have any readings on the small, er, smallish blips we can see? Anything to indicate whether those blips are combat craft?”

  She frowned at her screens and looked up briefly, “Yes, it looks as if there are three different types of fighter craft. The craft in the outer shell we passed through have the same energy characteristics as the fighters we already know so well, but there are two other types still inside us that show up as being slightly larger, in one case, and about twice the mass in the other. The ‘destroyers’, for want of a better name, seem to mass about three hundred thousand tons, which is a lot bigger than our own. I’m beginning to see some differences between them as well. May I suggest that we fly an orbit around to the other side? I’m getting some readings but we’re too far away to see anything clear.”

  I looked at Elian and the chief and nodded my head. Elian plotted a course that would curve us around the monster ship in the center while staying inside the outer shell of fighters. I would never have contemplated doing this within our own fleets, but here it seemed possible. I changed course and asked, “How long to get around to the other side?” He played with his screen for a few seconds then said, “Ten hours, approximately.”

  I said to everyone, “OK, let’s fly Elian’ route. I want Elian and Carolyn to get some sleep – we’ve been up long enough that I’m worried about getting sloppy or missing something that might bite us in the ass. It looks like we are between the inner and outer shells of their fleet and we should be safe enough. Chief, please take over Carolyn’s scans and I’ll take Elian’s’”

  Everyone nodded and Carolyn and Elian reclined their seats and we lowered the interior lighting. Elian and Carolyn would spell us for the last four hours or so before we got to the other side of the immense ship.

  After four hours, the chief and I took a nap while Elian and Carolyn watched the house. Elian and I had been together for many months and we had both worked hard at learning each other’s skills. As a result he was a fair pilot, probably as good as many of the pilots we flew with, or rather, used to fly with. I was merely passable at his duties compared to him, but he was extremely good at them, so my passable was probably good enough. I hoped so.

  I was able to sleep for a couple of hours and was awakened when a sensor went off. We had a blip coming up from astern that, if it continued without changing course, could possibly come into detection range. It was one of the much larger ships we hadn’t seen up close yet, so I wanted as much information as possible, save for knowing how good its weapons were. Elian gave me a revised course that would keep us at least two hundred thousand kilometers away from the approaching unknown while keeping us inside the outer shell.

  Carolyn said, “You know, we’ve been monitoring these buggers for something like fifteen hours and something is bothering me. If those were our fighters, we’d have seen them return to the carrier, if that is what it is, every four to eight hours or so. They haven’t done that, and I would love to know why. Something, I’d love to know something.”

  I had kept one eye and most of my concentration on the blip coming up behind us, and it took me a moment to understand her concern. Then, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it earlier. I looked around and asked, “Any ideas?”

  I liked getting input and Elian was used to my style, but Carolyn and the chief were new to me. I added, “If you have an idea or thou
ght, don’t sit on it – let us know what you’re thinking. I’ve found, working with that idjit of a JG over there that, despite his dimness, he sometimes comes up with a decent idea from time to time.” Elian snorted and asked, “Like, for example, this very own craft that you are piloting?”

  I grinned at him and replied, “Yeah, it was such a good idea that now we are within spitting distance of the very same guys who took our fighter out.” Carolyn laughed, the first time any of us had heard that particular sound in a very long time.

  At that moment, another sensor flashed and Carolyn tensed for a moment. She relaxed a bit and said, “Well, perhaps we’re going to learn the answer to my question – we’ve got lots of fighters leaving their mother. To answer your very next question, they don’t seem in any hurry, or heading in our direction, so it looks like a normal rotation.”

  Over the next two hours we jockeyed our course several times to stay away from the new fighters that were streaming out in all directions. They appeared to be replacing the ones already on station. As the new fighters arrived, the old ones turned and headed in. We had our rotation, and it was a huge one, equal to the entire complement of two of our fleet carriers.