Suddenly, there were five less blips on our plot and our entire segment of the globe was temporarily empty of fighters. We jumped to max acceleration and began racing away from the quickly expanding balls of gas that were all that remained of six fighters, plus the drifting hulk of one destroyer. So far, we had done quite well.
As the time counted down toward zero we watched in fascination as the greatest light show we’d ever seen lit up space behind us. There seemed to be hundreds of lasers firing every few seconds. We were actually illuminated twice by their energy weapons. Our Hawks should have no problem with those lasers, but I was concerned with missiles, and ordered the other three Hawks to remain alert for any enemy craft lying doggo along our path. We could see over two dozen fighters and several destroyers accelerating out towards us but they would have no chance to intercept us.
Suddenly, our screens hazed up as our capital missiles activated their jamming systems. It didn’t seem to help them. As the missiles neared the mother ship the bugs began to get better locks. Elian said, “Their targeting systems don’t seem to be very capable – they’re having trouble achieving and maintaining lock on our missiles.”
One missile was hit, then another, causing enormous explosions. Six remained and I told Elian to try to shut the jamming down. A third missile was hit, then a fourth. It was beginning to look bad, but by now the missiles were streaking in at such a high velocity that their targeting systems seemed to not be able to track fast enough.
There was an immense explosion against the side of the ship, then a second and a third, closely followed by the fourth and last missile. No human had ever witnessed the detonation of four Mark 65 missiles against one target. It was an incredible display, and it was followed by an immense fireball that spewed out from the side of the ship. I kept my eye on the space ahead of us but Carolyn was monitoring the ship closely. She said, “Robert, we’ve got at least one secondary explosion but no other good signs – the ship is still moving, in fact it’s accelerating. I’d say we’ve damaged it, but that’s all.” I nodded my head solemnly – we weren’t through with that ship yet.
We continued to accelerate straight out from the ship. Their pursuit was falling further behind with every second. I radioed the other Hawks to maintain this acceleration for one more hour before shutting down to three G’s and turning back towards home.
Hawk 04 radioed that he had to shut down one fusion bottle due to fluctuations. That was serious but not critical. He would be able to maintain this acceleration with just two bottles up, but it might prove to be serious if we had to shoot our way through enemy fighters and accelerate at max. I had been counting fighters and had come to the conclusion that there were more fighters than I previously thought that ship could support. We counted a total of eighty-two fighters in space as we fled away from them, and they seemed to still be able to launch fighters despite the horrendous explosions we had caused. That ship was tough, very tough, and I was beginning to suspect it was not alone.
At the agreed upon time, Carolyn took control of all four Hawks and reduced our acceleration to three Gs. She selected a new course and we began to loop back toward galactic west and our fleet. It would take us many hours to reverse our course and it would take us additional hours to sneak back to our freighter and reload. I preferred taking the additional time to getting dead.
We were now coming down from some very big adrenaline rushes and I worried about getting lax. I authorized two people in each Hawk to try to get some sleep, and hoped that they could actually get the much-needed rest. We were now a very long way from anywhere that served a good doughnut, and had yet a few more kilometers to go before dawn.
We continued our slow acceleration and gradually changed from a heading directly away from the enemy fleet to one that was paralleling its course, but now well behind it. I had determined that if our enemy was half bright it would put out some ships in a radial pattern between our fleet and our probable return course, so we kept our shield and defensive systems continuously hot.
The navigator on Hawk04 took over operation of the Hawks and Carolyn and I ate. I had asked for some better tasting rations for this trip and was pleasantly surprised with the results. I heard that some emergency rations had been rifled for our benefit. As soon as we finished we reclined our couches and took naps.
I maintained a triangular formation with a hundred kilometers separation between each ship. At that distance we could communicate using our lasers on a very low power setting. This was another of Carolyn’s suggested modifications that we tested and found to be eminently effective. I had come to feel that she was more useful to this effort than I was.
I was certain that we were going to run into some lurkers with both those slow but tough missiles and lasers, and I was willing to extend our flight time in order to minimize the chances of contact. I heard zero complaints – they’d all seen that ship take four Mark 65’s.
At about the time we came back abreast of their fleet, which wasn’t accelerating at all now, apparently, we picked up a quick gravity pulse that died away almost as soon as it came up. I grinned, knowing that somewhere ahead of us, someone was probably getting reamed. I hoped to be able to do an even more effective job with him.
Our four ships were able to triangulate that pulse, courtesy of Carolyn – at my request at least - and decided to try to pass by inside of it. I was impressed by the enemy’s tactics; those ships were right in our path. I calculated that it would take us approximately an hour to reach the general area of the skulking bug ship, so I had everyone eat something and stretch their legs a bit before we arrived.
I realized with a start that I was getting much more comfortable with command, not only with my own ship and crew, but with the others as well. I realized something else: I liked having four ships to control, it was more difficult, but I was able to visualize our relative positions to the enemy ship, our own carriers, the logical locations for the placement of enemy destroyers and the position of our reloads. It came easily to me, unlike all the technical stuff that Carolyn found so easy. Perhaps, I thought with a trace of surprise, we each had our own type of intelligence, and just maybe I wasn’t as inferior as I had always supposed. Food for thought, but for some other time.
We adjusted our course to place the suspected bug ship on our port side, and then shut our drives down completely. We were able to remain aligned to each other and stay in formation thanks to our laser comm system.
I suddenly had another realization: I felt totally alive, mentally alert, and as happy as I’d ever been, with the possible exception of that first kiss with my first girl friend. I shelved that thought as well.
We drifted like smoke past that destroyer and I regretted that we didn’t have any more ER-15’s to send his way. It would have been easy to have them curve around to take him one hundred eighty degrees away from us.
Hawk 05 found another ship, this one bigger even than our cruisers, and it was lurking above our plane but at approximately the same heading. We made another course change to avoid it as well. Without those wonderful little missiles, I didn’t want to get into a pissing contest with potentially much bigger lasers than our Hawks sported.
Once again we slipped silently past. To date, the enemy didn’t know anything about our craft, other than the fact that each attack against their carrier was harder on them. We had four unused mounts on the outer winglets and I decided to see about loading them up as well. Those small missiles were worth their weight in gold.
Once our separation to the enemy ships began to open up again we resumed acceleration and made a final course change to take us back to the hopefully waiting cargo ship. After another twelve hours we sent a burst transmission to the approximate neighborhood the fleet cargo ship was supposed to be waiting in. We got a nearly immediate reply and I told its captain that we would go to it – I didn’t want him doing anything other than sitting.
We made rendezvous as planned and one by one space-suited figures swarmed out
of the cargo ship and carefully maneuvered the huge Mark 65’s under each mounting point and locked them in. In space those missiles had no weight, but they still had the same mass, and inertia. The process of reloading the Hawks took six hours of backbreaking labor to mount the Mark 65’s, the twelve ER-15’s in the internal launchers and four additional missiles on our wing points.
We passed over complete records of our first mission, just in case, and then we were loaded. The last thing they did was deliver another small box of meals for us. We didn’t really have much spare room left over after the conversion process filled up the interior.
We traded some last minute messages with the cargo ship and began accelerating back toward the enemy. I decided that we would bore straight in rather than try something fancy. The first two times we had come in from supposedly unusual angles, so perhaps we could catch them unawares by using the most obvious position – the one nearest our own fleet. Our enemy had shown it could quickly adapt to our weapons and tactics, and in both cases it had destroyed half of the capital missiles we’d fired at it.
Although it wasn’t new, the Mark 65 was the most sophisticated capital weapon in fleet inventory. We had no other weapon that was capable of causing any damage whatsoever to their mother ships and I worried that the bugs would develop better tactics that would render utterly useless the single missile we did have.
We discussed the puzzling fact that the bugs seemed to be able to detect the missiles without actually pinpointing them until they began accelerating hard enough to produce a noticeable gravity field. The only logical conclusion pointed at the capacitor fed drives of those missiles.
We maintained the same diamond formation, all four ships being controlled directly by Elian via Carolyn’s board. We were resting two crewmembers at a time, in the knowledge that we soon would not have that ability.
A buzzer sounded and Elian reported that his systems were picking up gravity pulses of several destroyer-sized ships heading towards our fleet at a high rate of acceleration. Their bearing indicated that they had come from the bug fleet we had just recently attacked. Their heading was also directly at the estimated position of our fleet. This was one possibility I hadn’t prepared for.
I commed our other ships and talked about it with them. They were smart enough to realize I wasn’t asking for direction from them, I was consulting before making my decision. These were shaping up as pretty good crews, and well they should be. Their pilots and navigators came from amongst the Dash 6 survivors.
The consensus seemed to be that those destroyers represented Very Bad News for our fleet. While our two attacks against their fleet had been relatively successful, we had not yet learned how to defend ourselves from their fighter attacks, and these were not fighters.
We were about five million kilometers in front of them, on converging courses. We couldn’t see their mother ship, so it was possible it had reversed course to head away from us or it had shut down its drive. By this time, I had good readings on the ships, and there were eight of them, five being the same approximate size and emissions as the missile destroyers we had run into, and three being significantly larger. I seriously doubted that our remaining Dash 6’s could stop their attack, and I wasn’t sanguine about our own abilities.
Our own destroyers and cruisers would be able to inflict significant damage to these ships, but if the bugs were willing to accept possibly severe losses, they could destroy both carriers.
We had come to the conclusion that they did not want to send all their fighters against our fleet as long as we were lurking around in their neighborhood. They sent these eight ships instead. It was a very logical decision, and once again demonstrated how adaptive our enemy was.
I made a command decision and gave us a new mission. We would use our eight Mark 65’s on these ships. We had more missiles sitting behind us, but we only had the two carriers.
We made a sharp course change in order to get us directly in front of the ships. I hoped we could set our missiles directly in their path and let them run over them, giving them little or no time to react. We could see no fighters accompanying them as scouts, and due to their acceleration, didn’t think there could be any lurkers hanging about.
I tried to balance our acceleration against their ability to see us, but the outcome was just too important and I ended up having to take the chance they would see us before we could get into position.
If they saw us, we would still have to take them on, but we stood a better chance if we could remain hidden. On the other hand, if we didn’t hustle, we’d spend all day trying to catch them.
It took us three hours to get in as good a position as possible. We were still off to the side and the Mark 65’s would have to accelerate for perhaps a half hour before shutting off their drives. It would stretch the missile’s capabilities and leave very little time left on their drive systems for the final dash, but that is what war is about, taking chances. Well, there are other things war is about too, death being one of them.
On command, all eight missiles dropped free and accelerated away. One ceased accelerating almost immediately, so we sent a signal to it to drift and detonate in twelve hours. We didn’t want a deaf and dumb missile wandering around and screwing things up. That left us with seven good – we hoped – missiles and eight ships. We were going to get some gouges in our nice, expensive armor in the very near future, because the very best scenario left one ship alive, and we’d seen that only half of our missiles were actually getting in. That would mean three, four or possibly even five ships might be left. Now that we were committed to this plan, I was determined to follow through.
The pilot in Hawk 02, a lieutenant with far more hours in a Dash 6 than I, had asked me about my decision, and I told him, “Because the carriers serve up a terrific hamburger on Tuesday evenings.” He laughed and replied, “That’s as good a reason as any other. I concur with your decision.” I was the commanding officer of this mission, so he was really telling me that he agreed with my decision, rather than agreeing to accept my order.
At the appointed time, the eight ships came into the approximate zone occupied by our Mark 65s, which had reached their final attack position with no further problems. We were angling in from their port side and had fallen a little behind them, creating a rough triangle.
We had turned off the missile anti-radar systems, believing they weren’t helping, and might possibly be making it easier for our enemy to target them.
Suddenly, seven missiles appeared on screen, moving at maximum acceleration. We hadn’t placed them perfectly, so they were coming in at a small angle and from further away than we had hoped for. Our missiles were approximately thirty seconds away from their targets, but they were starting their final run with virtually no relative velocity, giving the enemy’s defensive systems more time to acquire our missiles than we would have preferred.
All eight ships shut off their drives and appeared to turn sideways to the approaching missiles, unmasking their energy weapons. They opened up with all their lasers and we were able to clearly see just how potent these ships actually were. By now they were just within range of our ER-15’s and we flushed all of them. We would be able to redirect any that were targeted on a vapor cloud or a wounded ship. Almost immediately, one Mark 65 detonated, still fifteen seconds from impact. This was a very bad sign, but as the seconds ticked down, the other six bored in without a problem. At five seconds to target a second Mark 65 was hit, leaving us with five. All five hit their targets and within five seconds, five large warships and an unknown number of beings were dead. That left three very tough ships.
Our ER-15 missiles were retargeted on to the three remaining ships, one of which was significantly larger than our own cruisers, and seemed to be crawling with lasers. Their systems acquired our missiles, which were coming in under high acceleration but from a much greater distance than the Mark 65’s.
Their incredible laser fire erupted again. Missile after missile was hit and only twenty o
ut of the forty eight made it all the way in. Of those, fifteen targeted on the cruiser and began exploding in a quick, fiery succession. Fifteen was a large number of missiles to hit one ship, but it survived with an unknown amount of damage. Of the other two ships, the nearer one got hit with four and broke up before exploding when one or more fusion bottles let go. The other got one missile, causing no apparent damage.
We waited, wondering what the two remaining ships would do. They now had no practical chance of destroying our fleet. They turned and accelerated slowly back towards their own mother ship. I heaved an intense sigh of relief, as I imagine the other fifteen members of our little expeditionary force did as well.
We turned back for more missiles. We had enough for two more attacks. I was beginning to believe that was not going to be nearly enough.
It took us twelve hours to get back to our cargo ship. Once again, space suited figures heaved enormous missiles out of their hold and one by one hooked them up to our Hawks. This took another six hours. I was intensely happy not to have that job. One man was seriously injured when a ‘weightless’ twenty-ton missile crushed a leg. The FFC’s crew had to be exhausted by now. Our own crews were taking naps whenever possible, but naps in the tight confines of our Hawks were no substitute for real sleep.
Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk) Page 11