Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk)

by Little, Robert

  He took a breath and resumed, “We’re conducting tests at this very moment and as soon as we get some more answers out of our rapidly tiring Etechs we intend to send the four Hawks back out with the task of blowing that misbegotten monster ship all to hell. In the meantime, your mission seems to have brought a halt to their attacks, earning you some free beer at our next planet fall. Oh, one other thing: We’ve been able to backtrack their course. Due to the nature and quantity of our missions the Essex has far more extensive sensor readings than most ships on our section of the galaxy. Based on your information, we believe that these beings have been under way for an as yet undetermined period of time, but easily decades, and possibly far, far longer. They do not possess FTL and in fact that is how we were able to backtrack them. We have readings from several sources showing them decelerating from approximately 50% light speed. What is more, based on those readings we have reason to believe that there may be as many as four and possibly five of these expeditions. We’ve located the solar system they left and are certain that it was not their starting point, as we believe it to be uninhabited. I am told that this race would have had to make periodic stops to take on bunkerage and possibly make repairs. The size of their mother ship or ships, suggest that this is possibly a colonization effort rather than a military expedition. Either way, they represent an enormous threat to our very existence.”

  That was perhaps the longest speech any of us had ever heard from our somewhat distant Commander Midori, but the gist seemed to be that while the Essex had kicked over a hornets’ nest, he was pleased with us.

  He stood up and said, “In a little less than five hours, we’re sending you out to do some work ups with the other Hawks. We’ve decided to hold off on jumping out, as that would simply delay a resolution. We’ve run out of courier ships so we sent the Perseus with all the latest information we have been able to develop. Her weapons systems were so seriously damaged that it was felt she was unable to defend herself, so we’ve lost very little defensive ability, not that we had all that much to start with.”

  He paused to catch his breath and continued, “We’ve developed some new tactics for our fighter jocks that should be more successful than what we had been doing. It couldn’t get worse. You performed your mission well, and we hope and expect that the next time you return you will report the destruction of that twenty-megaton spawn from hell. Excuse me, twenty eight megaton.”

  He finished with a very uncharacteristic grin, waved nonchalantly and disappeared.

  We looked at each other and then we began to smile. I turned to the chief and asked, “By any chance, was that maintenance that you were so unhappy with, performed, or not, on this particular craft?” He grinned and said, “No sir, it was not. They were in fact working on cleaning up my office.”

  I stared at him and he looked back at me with perhaps the best poker face I’d ever seen. After a suitable delay he said, “If my men think they can slack on the small things, they’ll think they can on the big ones. I won’t permit that, sirs.” With that, the chief stood up, nodded to us and left.

  Etech4 Carolyn grinned at me and said, “I had an instructor like him at wonk school. He never answered a question directly, always with another question. We tried, one time, to get him to answer a simple question, to wit, ‘What time is it?’” he answered by asking, “Why are you more concerned with the form of my answer, than the answer itself?” At the time, I didn’t understand a word of his answer, or even if it was an answer, but his question just kept running through my mind and I couldn’t put it down. Suddenly, I realized that he had answered our question by asking why we were so concerned with how he answered. He made us think, which for some of us is harder than for others. He was the smartest man I’ve ever met. Master Chief Kana reminds me of him.”

  Carolyn turned to her console and began scrolling through the menus looking for sections dealing with her new antennas. She must have found what she wanted because she froze in a posture of such intense concentration that it reminded me suddenly of how she behaved during much of our mission: totally focused on the issue directly confronting her. At the time, I had noticed but not noticed. Now, looking at her profile, I realized that this woman was in fact far smarter than I was, perhaps as smart as Elian, who I knew to be extremely bright. I sighed, then brightened – she was not only on my side, she was on my crew.

  We stayed on the ship until it was time to launch and meet the other Hawks. Our fleet had stopped trying to accelerate away from the alien fleet and was instead trying to imitate a very black hole in space. When I remarked on that fact Elian said, “Well, it’s not a bad idea. We can’t save humanity from the hordes of alien bugs if we’re all dead, now can we?” I smiled ruefully, and added, “True, very true. I can’t help but point out, however, that we’ve not done a very good job so far.”

  We had specially equipped launches circling around our fleet, looking for any type of radiation our ships may have emitted that could have led this new enemy to us. These launches had made the discovery that our capacitor fed gravity generators emitted low levels of energy at an extremely high frequency, and in the same band as the bugs were communicating on. This was a clue.

  It may have been a subject of discussion at some point in the far, dim past when this type of propulsion was being developed, but not in any recent times. We had never thought of that weak radiation as being significant in any way, nor detectable at any distance beyond a few meters, yet it seemed inescapable.

  Carrier Etechs had cobbled up a null transmitter that canceled out the capacitor radiation and we were now going to test it on our very own Hawk.

  There seemed to be a correlation between power output and the frequency and strength of the capacitor radiation. One astonishing result of these tests was that there didn’t seem to be much of much attenuation of the strength of the radiation due to distance, and that it could possibly indicate a heading as well as location. Sort of a ‘red shift’ effect, according to an Etech whose explanation I understood not at all.

  Our own Hawk had been barely moving when we penetrated into their fleet, and so the wonks believed that we radiated a signal that the aliens could detect, but not pin point. Only when we powered up did they find us. That would also explain why they had had so much difficulty finding the Mark 65. They had been shooting blindly at it and only when it ran right up on top of those two fighters could they see it. Perhaps it was the capacitor that gave it away and not its burst transmissions.

  We ran through the pre-flight tests and were tractored out of the hold into space. The other Hawks were several million kilometers distant from us and we were tasked with trying to find them via our new antennas. Carolyn’s console received signals from her ten new antennas, spread out over the entire craft, and her system was supposed to be able to detect the strength and the direction of the ‘triple ultra high frequency’ radiation – Carolyn’s words, and an attempt on her part to aid her dim pilot to understand - coming from the other Hawks, who would be powering up their systems for short, specified periods, previously agreed upon but not given to us.

  We flew away from the formation for an hour before bringing her new system on line. She ran tests on the system to zero out each antenna so that any signals received by each one could be compared and timed, giving a direction to the source, and hopefully, a distance as well.

  Over the next two hours we listened to her system and noted their results. She said at one point, “Sir, this system is a mess, and I’ve not been able to make heads nor tails of the signals it seems to be giving me, up until twenty minutes ago. I had previously identified possible problems with two of the antennas. When I finally cut them out of the system, I began to get some usable results. I think that we’re actually tracking three Hawks at a distance of over a million kilometers. I can tell when they power up their systems and when they power back down, but I can also get readings on them even when they’re idling along. Instead of a sharp line with a bright reference point for distan
ce, I get a fuzzy cloud that tells me something is there, but not what or where. I think we’ve got the answer sir. I’d like to request that we perform some additional tests at much greater distances, but I can already tell you that we’re going to be able to read those Hawks out to relatively immense distances, just as our newfound enemies did to us. Correction: are doing to us.”

  I asked her, “Can you see anything besides the Hawks?” She smiled and waved me over. Elian and I stood looking over her shoulders as she worked on her screen to give us a visual representation of the area of space around the ship out to a distance of ten million kilometers. She pointed out the locations of over twenty ships, some of them very bright blobs, some barely visible. She said, “I’ve got a list of the ships that have been modified to blank out their capacitors, and I’m betting that those are the very dim shapes we’re seeing. The two bright ones are the fleet carriers. They radiate like crazy. I can’t see our fighters at this magnification, but if I raised it, we could see them as well. This is real time information on the fleet, and if we can see it, so can our enemies.”

  I stared at her screen and said, grimly, “Give me a course to the other Hawks, please. Let’s go find us some birds.” She grinned at me over her shoulder and by the time I returned to my station she had a course laid out for me.

  I told her, “The tests are over. Now, we prove the theory.” I fire walled the engines and we began accelerating towards a dim cloud in space that was slowly moving. The course Carolyn gave me constantly updated itself as we approached. It was eerie. She had somehow designed a program, on the fly, that could update itself in real time. We were flying completely blind, using only these tiny antennas for guidance.

  As we accelerated I asked her, “Can you design that program of yours to actually control our engines?” She nodded her head and within five minutes she looked over at me and nodded. I waved my hands in the air and she gently poked a gracefully long finger at her screen. Her system took over control of my pilot’s system and I sat back in wonder and watched as the ship moved through space. At the presumed half-way point we began decelerating. I could see it make subtle adjustments and after a bit realized that those adjustments must correspond to the three Hawks programmed maneuvers. We continued to decelerate until our velocity relative to our targets was reduced to zero.

  Carolyn said quietly, “Sir, if you will briefly activate your approach radar I believe that you will see one Hawk – I don’t know which one, but it is the lead Hawk – dead ahead.

  I warmed up the approach radar system, an extremely low powered system used for docking. I toggled it on and off quickly and looked with interest at the screen. There, dead ahead of us was a Hawk, at a distance of ten kilometers, according to my readout. I used a laser comm to bring up communications with the very astonished crew of Hawk 02, as it was being called. I patched Carolyn over to her opposite number and by the time I had positioned my Hawk in a trail position behind and above 02, she had updated their system and was communicating with them via the laser, helping their crew set up her software.

  When Hawk02’s new software was installed and working I tasked that craft with finding the other two, which took all of five minutes, and most of that was due to Carolyn having to walk her counterpart through her software. We had a success on our hands, and I was developing a crush on our attractive and very bright young Electronic Technician, grade 4. She was a ten in my books.

  We headed back for the barn in a loose formation. By this time, Carolyn had set up a program that could pilot all four craft, communicating through tight beam communication lasers. I sat back and watched carefully as all four craft moved with precision through periodic adjustments to course and speed, all controlled by Carolyn’s system. It made me feel a little redundant and I told her, “Carolyn, when we get back, do you think I could get a job as a cook or dish washer?” She grinned her thanks to my left-handed tribute to both her well-remembered professor and her own genius, for that is what it was.

  We docked the ships in the old conventional manner and when the bay was pressured up lowered the ramp for our impatient Commander Midori. I greeted him and pointed to Carolyn, “Sir, we have some interesting results, but inasmuch as they all belong in Etech4 Kwan’s bailiwick, I’ll ask her to update you.”

  Carolyn blushed prettily for just a second and then explained succinctly what she had done and how the system had worked. Commander Midori turned grim when she told him that she was certain our enemy knew exactly where our fleet was, based on the results of her tests. He took a quick look as she used her pad to show him what her screen had shown us earlier. He stood for a minute in thought, then commed his superior.

  He walked back down the Hawk’s ramp, talking quickly and succinctly to the CAG, the overall flight commander of all the fighters and attack birds. That conversation lasted no more than two minutes. He called up from the now open hatch, “You have five minutes to visit the head. We have a meeting with Admiral Andreeson in ten.”

  He wasn’t joking. We had to practically run to make the meeting. The admiral had gathered his staff along with representatives of his tech staff, such as it was. On the way up to the meeting, I briefed Commander Midori, who proved to be a very quick study. As soon as we were settled in the large conference room, he explained our findings in fewer than thirty seconds. As soon as he finished he put up the recording of Carolyn’s system and jumped forward as she developed her program and then used it to find Hawk 02. The entire process took no longer than ten minutes, impressing the hell out of me. I knew I wasn’t smart when I went into that room, but I really knew it after listening to him present Carolyn’s results. He received a scattering of very intelligent questions but that was all. For the most part, the room resembled a funeral parlor.

  Admiral Andreeson turned to us and said, “Thank you. We’ll let you get back to your duties, but for now, please do not discuss your findings with anyone.” We saluted and left, feeling much relieved that we didn’t have the responsibility of handling this bombshell.

  As we descended into our crew area Carolyn said, “You know, my results indicate that their fancy schmancy cloaking systems only worked partially. We are screwed unless they can build some equipment that really does cloak our emissions. I’m glad I don’t have that job.”

  I looked at her somberly and said, “Carolyn Kwan, if you had that job, I’d feel confident you would have it solved in time for dinner.” She looked at me as if she thought I was being sarcastic, but I wasn’t and she saw it in my face. She blushed nicely and said quietly, “Thank you sir.” Chief Kana added, “I’d like to add that I’m impressed by your stick work, sir, and I’m very happy to be working with you – all of you, sirs and not-sirs.”

  He grinned that way he had when he added ‘sir’ on to the end of a sentence. He was much smarter than his battered face indicated. I felt like a retarded child with these people. Well, they were my people; I’d just have to periodically remind myself of that happy fact.

  Elian and I grabbed a quick meal and without discussion returned to the Hawk. For a change, we weren’t the last to arrive. In fact, the chief and Carolyn didn’t show up. We took our seats and linked to Carolyn’s system. We pinpointed the problem antennas and commed Commander Midori, asking for tech support to either repair or replace the antennas. Commander Midori told us that Ensign Kwan was busy going through the other three Hawks, along with the chief, checking their systems as we had just done with ours. That explained their absence.

  They were still smarter.

  The next morning after chow Elian and I were summoned to Commander Midori’s closet of an office. He waved us to seats and produced a flight plan that he passed over to our pads. Its outline listed the four Hawks and one surprise, a small, fast fleet cargo ship. The task was to locate the position of our enemy fleet, and attempt to destroy the ship at its center. We were to avoid confrontations with the other, smaller ships unless there was no choice. If an attack run was unsuccessful, or only partially succe
ssful, we were to resupply with a fresh load of Mark 65’s and go back until there was no ship. Left unsaid were the words, “or until there are no Hawks left to do the job.” It was now assumed that we were in a situation resembling ‘them or us’, and our brass had come down in favor of them. As in, dead.

  We asked about the results of our tests, and what was being done to deal with the results. Commander Midori said, “Lieutenant Padilla, that information is several grades above my rank. However, I can tell you that our resident wonks are working on it and claim to have developed a working solution. A better working solution. Whether or not that is the case should be determined by the end of this watch. I am reliably informed that the admiral has promised to personally ream his entire staff if its promises aren’t fulfilled. He added that the bugs have promised to do the same thing.”

  We were dismissed and told we were off the roster for the rest of the day. It was suggested we not spend all our time in the Hawk. I noted that we had not been ordered to stay away. We did, in fact, not spend all our time there. Some was spent eating, and the food was consumed just outside the hatch.