Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk)

by Little, Robert

  At exactly noon the next day, we were tractored out of the hold and assumed lead position in a flight of four Hawks and one rare and relatively fast fleet cargo ship, loaded up with Mark 65’s and ER-15’s, our weapons of choice. In response to our wish for even more powerful lasers, our two 35cm barrels had been replaced with a pair of 40cm barrels, the only two spares on the Essex. That upgrade in size gave us the ability to double the power output, at the cost of lengthening the interval between shots.

  We hadn’t had the opportunity to test fire the new barrels, but we had backup 35 cm barrels tucked away very carefully in the ship, just in case. Our capacitors had some added fixtures attached to them, which we were assured, would entirely mask our radiation. We hoped that was the case. Carolyn used her system on our five-hour leg and seemed satisfied if not happy with the results.

  In addition to the new hardware, fleet technicians had tied the ship’s systems into a program that used our own antennas to measure and feed back a null field. When we fired up this system the other three ships reported that the very dull haze that their antennas had been picking up completely disappeared. Each Hawk had the new system and after checking each of them in turn, we fired the systems up. As soon as we did, I instituted a radical change in course, angling us in toward the supposed location of their fleet.

  In case they had been able to track us, even if only partially, I wanted to move somewhere else after we went dark. The cargo ship, which could pull ten G’s, wasn’t so well shielded, although it did have the mod one system that served to turn its radiation from a bright pinpoint of light into a hazy cloud.

  Its addition to our tiny force was a very mixed blessing. We might well require the reloads, but that cargo ship was not only a sitting duck, it was now a much more visible sitting duck than we were. I decided to have it power down its systems and drift along behind us. It was a compromise between having it close to hand, and painting our position to the enemy, or having to travel much longer distances to reload.

  We were now far less concerned with our radio transmission, but I still ran blacked out, save for our laser coms. Thanks to Carolyn, the Hawks stayed in perfect formation. She had added some new twists that allowed any of the four ships to both control and alert the others and disengage itself from her control.

  These additions made our flight out much easier. I could sleep or walk around the immense flight deck, which was about two steps by two steps in size. Chief Kana was his usual, taciturn self, speaking only if required, and never, ever, engaging in chitchat. Carolyn seemed to be more confident this time around. We now had much more information on our enemy and a better handle on our own capabilities, which had also been upgraded quite a bit. She had lost her former reticence to speak up, and now participated in the give and take process of communication that I preferred to the normal top down structure our military imposed on its personnel.

  Elian had done some esoteric ‘guesstimates’ to try to determine just how effective our little missiles would be against their fighters, destroyers and Big Fat Mama, as he had come to refer to the immense, egg shaped ship. He said that he thought it might possibly take out a fighter, but felt that two missiles ought to be targeted against each one if at all possible. Apparently, its warhead was smaller than the antique we’d been using, as it was designed to counter the Dash 6 fighter. On the other hand, its brains and engine burn time were much improved.

  One other Hawk seemed to have a very competent Etech. She had spent virtually all her waking hours working with the Hawk power systems and had made a couple of improvements to the way in which the capacitors were fed power. Chief Kana received her changes and was able to run some tests with the current software and with hers. He reported that the changes would extend the life of the capacitors and shorten the charge time by a small but possibly vital amount of time. I gave him the authority to upgrade our system, but asked that he be able to delete the changes if they caused trouble. I passed those instructions along to the other three Hawks, who were under my command, despite the fact that I was the most junior of the four pilots. I marveled at the way we were cobbling together software while en route to attack the enemy. It was a testament to the way imminent death can focus the mind.

  At the twenty first hour we began to pick up signs of the enemy fleet, or at least, of ‘an’ enemy fleet – we had not yet determined if all the fighters we had first encountered were from the fleet our Hawk had found and attacked a week earlier. By this time our cargo ship was over twenty million kilometers astern of us and our new systems couldn’t get a whiff of it. We hoped we were equally invisible to the enemies now coming into sensor range.

  I had decided to allow burst transmissions from the cargo ship under certain specific conditions, most of which would constitute an emergency. It was now decelerating, in relation to the enemy fleet. We wanted it far enough away to keep its existence a secret, but close enough to be able to get to it.

  Gradually, a veritable cloud of fighters took shape on our sensors. The enemy fleet had apparently decided that the sixty fighters we’d encountered last time around hadn’t managed by themselves to keep us out, so it had increased its number of fighters to at least seventy to eighty, based on what we could either see or extrapolate.

  It was going to be significantly more difficult to get inside that screen, but we were working on options as we approached. We had tentatively planned to loop around and come in from behind, where we hoped they would least expect us.

  Their present course, when we compared it to their previous location and course seemed to indicate that they did in fact know where our fleet was located. We did not understand why they had attacked us in the first place, although it was thought that our subsequent counterattack, small as it was, had caused them to concentrate on protecting their own ships. I took all logical conclusions relating to our enemy with a boulder of sand – just because something was logical didn’t necessarily mean it was so.

  It was our hope that within the next twenty-four hours we would eliminate those questions, along with their massive mother ship. Elian felt reasonably certain that they were doing much the same thing our fleet was – making changes to their tactics in response to the challenges of our own technology.

  The other, smaller ships did not seem to represent much of a strategic risk to mankind, and we did not think they would be able to long operate without that immense ship to supply them. That was a guess, but an educated guess. Those ships did, however, represent a significant tactical threat to our own carriers and escorts.

  We sailed past them at a distance of fifteen million kilometers, heading in the opposite direction, and began to curve gently around in a maneuver that would eventually put us behind their formation with a low overtake. There were no indications that we had been spotted, and this time around, their fighters were being replaced approximately every five hours, which is about what we would expect. It also seemed to underscore our invisibility to their sensors.

  When we came within ten million kilometers of the enemy we assumed a tight formation. Our gravity wells were about thirty kilometers across at the tiny acceleration we were using, so by maintaining that amount of separation we hoped to mask our signature even further. It worked with our own sensors, so we hoped it would work with theirs.

  When we were within seven million kilometers of their outlying fighters and approaching them from their rear, I had the other three begin to spread out again. I had decided, after running several simulations, that a simultaneous penetration would give us a better shot at ruining their day.

  We had plotted different scenarios, with the initial favorite being the insertion of one ship at a time into the area between the outer and inner shells of escorts. Unfortunately, they had seriously complicated that task by changing the outer shell into several shells that greatly increased the difficulty in easing into range and then remaining hidden while the other three ships tried to repeat it.

  We had observed the faint signatures their fighters
made as they cruised slowly through the emptiness of space. They once again utilized a repeating pattern that puzzled us. Judging by the careful placement of each fighter, and how precisely they were able to maintain that placement it appeared as if all their scouts were being controlled centrally. Fortunately, the volume of space they were patrolling was immense and they left just enough spacing between their fighters that we were confident we could sneak past them.

  I also decided to target all eight Mark 65 missiles at one portion of the ship. We had no way of determining where we had hit it last time around, so I just arbitrarily made a determination that we would target the area closest to us. We were trying to sneak four ships into position this time, greatly increasing the opportunity for us to screw up, so I tried to balance that increase by decreasing the missile flight time as much as possible. Once launched they would sneak into range and go boom, unless one – any one – was spotted, in which case all of them would immediately go to max accel. While the missiles were sneaking in, we would be trying to sneak out.

  I told our three other crews that they should run constant targeting solutions on all the fighters within range of their smaller missiles, and the moment we saw the 65’s jump to max, we would flush our internal missiles at all the fighters and destroyers in our immediate area to create a bug free avenue for the big missiles. We would reserve our lasers for defense as we streaked away. It looked like a workable plan.

  As we approached, the tension ratcheted up. We were still within laser comm range and our systems continued to update each of us, so that if one ship was lost, the others would be able to continue with the mission. There was no thought of calling it off.

  We went to max preparedness when we approached five million kilometers and it took us another two hours before we were finally able to ghost past the outer layer. We picked a gap between three fighters that gave us a separation of over one hundred thousand kilometers, which was less than the first attack. This time, however, we had to edge past multiple layers of fighters, each carefully sited so as to eliminate our ability to easily penetrate into close proximity of the mother ship.

  They had adjusted their tactics during our absence, making it much more difficult to get in close, but we had learned a great deal about them as well, and our ships were now less noisy, so on balance I thought we had gained an advantage.

  Our missiles were well within range even now, but I felt that a launch from this range would probably have a close to zero potential for seriously damaging the ship. We needed to eliminate, as much as possible, their opportunity to destroy the 65’s and the only way to do that was by getting in much closer than before. Our first assault was basically a freebie: this time around, they knew about our capital missiles and would be looking for them.

  We eased past the next fighters with seeming ease and I began to relax minutely. This is not to say I was relaxed. We had to cease laser comm due to the possibility that a fighter might accidentally pick up the backscatter. Each Hawk was to proceed inward until within one million kilometers of the target, release the Mark 65’s and slowly ease its way back out the way it came. One million kliks was a lot of distance to traverse, but there were fighters everywhere and the odds of one of them spotting us were becoming too high to ignore any longer.

  We had timed our penetration to come just before the end of the approximately five hours the fighters remained on station, hoping that they would be less vigilant after the long hours in the saddle.

  We finally reached the launch point and watched anxiously as the two huge missiles separated and slowly eased away from us, followed by six ER-15’s, targeted on two different fighters that would be roughly in line with the mark 65’s when they went to sprint mode. We decelerated at three G’s and watched as the outer fighter screen started to catch back up to us. This was to be our first experience with the smaller missile. We fervently hoped that it worked better than the elderly ER-12’s we’d been using.

  I had learned that those new missiles had been consigned to other units of Fleet and it had taken several days to discover their existence, buried in a cargo hold. I’d be willing to bet that when we returned to base, someone was going to catch hell for the ‘misallocation of fleet resources’.

  Carolyn reported, “Robert, we’ve got a destroyer sized ship coming up from astern. It’s moving pretty fast and unless it changes course, it will pass by us within sixty thousand kilometers. Its signature matches that of the ship that launched those missiles last time.”

  I groaned inwardly. The operation had gone forward without a single hitch, and we had gotten so close. All eight missiles were now in flight, and within four minutes of the target at sprint mode. Unfortunately, I didn’t believe that very many of them would actually make it through the intense energy weapons fire this enemy could generate. We badly needed for them to get them in as close as possible before discovery.

  Elian gave me a course change, but we didn’t have all that much maneuvering room. There were just too many fighters out there, and they were dancing around in a complex pattern that had taken us hours to decipher.

  Elian reported to me in quiet satisfaction, “Robert, they are using a base 8 system. I bet they have four digits rather than five.” It took me a moment to focus on what he had just reported. I asked him just how he was able to come up with that determination and he just looked at me with his goofy grin. I’d learn later, I supposed, if I was smart enough to understand his answer, if there actually was a ‘later’.

  The destroyer approached to within sixty five thousand kilometers without detecting us and continued inwards toward the mother ship. Five minutes after passing us it abruptly

  made a course change that would take it within probable detection range of another Hawk, one hundred thousand kilometers distant from us. I could see no logical reason for that course change, so we had to assume that the destroyer had picked up an emission from our Hawk.

  I nodded to Elian and our weapons bay doors opened and all six remaining missiles eased away at their lowest acceleration, targeted on the one destroyer. We didn’t want the destroyer’s missiles flying up someone’s ass while we struggled with fighters in our face.

  Since we had now jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, I radioed the Hawk the destroyer had apparently gotten a sniff of and said, “Zeke, we’ve launched all six remaining 15’s at that big destroyer at your nine O’clock. The moment he blinks, they’ll go to sprint mode, so don’t accelerate or shoot at him unless you absolutely have to.” He clicked his mike twice.

  The destroyer was accelerating almost directly toward the other Hawk, and I couldn’t say why. That bothered me a great deal, but there was no time left to discuss the matter. Elian was targeting his energy weapons at the two closest fighters and I shrugged my shoulders resignedly and nodded to him. He keyed the ER-15s into sprint mode, which was certain to alert every ship in the area. The missiles had spread out as they approached the destroyer, and they began streaking in along an arc of approximately thirty degrees. Their acceleration pleased me as it was better than the junk we’d become accustomed to.

  Within moments enemy ships began bringing up their search radars, although none of them seemed to have locked onto our Hawks yet. We might never know why that destroyer changed course – it may have merely been a course change. Whatever the reason, before it could do anything, the missiles slashed in and began detonating just as its defensive systems began to come on line.

  It was a good thing we sent six of them, because it took just about six to finally cause an internal explosion that was suitably large to at least disable it. Scratch our first destroyer of the war, and our tenth enemy craft. Double aces.

  Meanwhile, we were still moving slowly, but the Mark 65’s were showing up clearly on our screens as they made their final run in to the target. The bugs, however hadn’t been sleeping and had developed a plan for destroying our missiles: it seemed as if every laser in the inner system went to nearly continuous fire. Within thirty se
conds Carolyn reported, “They don’t seem to have a lock on the missiles yet, they’re just shooting at a particular quadrant, better than doing nothing, but barely. Three minutes to contact.” A moment later she added, “They’re getting more accurate.”

  I nodded my head and kept a close eye on the two fighters that were still outside of us, and blocking our escape route. This time around the fighters seemed to be unaware of our location, indicating that our new shielding was effective.

  Finally, a fighter got a sniff of Hawk 03, and went to max accel, directly at it. The Hawk immediately fired both lasers at it – it was obviously prepared. The fighter exploded nicely, but now the enemy finally had a target. Every fighter in our area turned and began accelerating towards the one Hawk. I painted two fighters that were now heading away from us and Elian fired, for the first time, our new and improved lasers. They worked very well, and both fighters exploded.

  The three other Hawks launched their entire remaining complement of ER-15 missiles, twelve of which targeted a mere six fighters, all of whom were hit and destroyed within just a few seconds of each other. One missile wasn’t enough for an assured kill, but two seemed to work just as Elian predicted. The other missiles streaked inwards after the capital missiles.