Over the next two days the Hawks were gone through completely. The ablative material that we lost was not repairable out of the fleet’s resources, but all the capacitors, fusion bottles and attendant hard and software were thoroughly tested and replaced as necessary. Once they were repaired the Hawks were maintained at Bravo 15, meaning they must be launched within fifteen minutes of receiving an alert.
The crews who had manned the Hawks as a temporary emergency measure – that would be us - were now permanently assigned to them, at least for the duration of the cruise. We were also assigned new berthing quarters that allowed us to get to our ships in less than thirty seconds from an alert. This turned out to be a mixed blessing, as these new quarters had until recently been occupied by other fighter crews. The belongings of those crews had been boxed up, waiting a time when they could be shipped to their families.
Elian and I shared relatively large quarters and Caroline and the chief were just steps away. We had a tiny common mess and spent some of our waking hours rehashing our tactics and getting to know each other a little better. Elian and I continued to research the Hawk class of attack craft, looking for ways to increase its firepower, endurance, survivability and comfort, the latter being particularly important after a long mission.
As we delved into the history and development of the Hawk we learned just how difficult it is to reinvent the wheel – these ships had been refined and improved over decades of extreme use, and represented the best compromises possible for its original mission.
During our absence – we mostly slept - a group of officers, appointed by the admiral, met and reviewed all available sources of data on the battles that had been fought and mostly lost. The goal of this group was to complete a white paper listing every decision and action on the part of our fleet personnel, with appraisals of how effective or ineffective those decisions and actions had been. Recommendations would be made to improve the fleet’s ability to defend itself and to project power to areas deemed important by duly authorized fleet personnel or authorized civilian representative. The competency of the civilian governments as regards Fleet had long been a source of very quiet unease and was only mentioned obliquely. The purpose of this report was to help Fleet and the civilians it reported to prepare for the battles that lay ahead, and it was sent to the nearest human world by courier as soon as it had been vetted.
In light of the near uselessness of the Dash 6 to maintain tactical superiority in the region surrounding the fleet, to protect the various units of that fleet and to project power to regions within its range, the white paper recommended the addition to each fleet of two squadrons of Hawk 7g attack craft, one squadron per carrier, for a total of eight craft. Mothballed Hawks were to be returned to service, and modified roughly along the lines of the recommendation of one Lt. JG Padilla, as amended by Master Chief Kana, who appeared to be one of the best-known individuals in the entire fleet.
As Elian and I slowly became aware of his fleet-wide reputation, we began to attempt to research the reasons for such a gold plated reputation. Unfortunately, the Essex did not have very good archives on naval history, at least, insofar as we could ascertain using authorized methods.
According to the best information available, the service maintained nearly one hundred Hawks in reserve status. Many of them were earlier 6 and even 5 series, but it was felt that there were enough Hawk’s in its various configurations to enable Seventh Fleet to develop several different variants. One would be designed for long-range scout duty with only two personnel, a pilot and first officer, who would share all duties. Another variant would be an attack craft, our own scarred versions, capable of carrying an assortment of missiles on internal launchers and external racks. It was envisioned that other models may be developed in the future. Not said was that that future was in some doubt.
This paper recommended that the service develop a new Hawk, utilizing all available technical and scientific advances that had been achieved in the interim since the 7 had been introduced, with an eye to constructing a limited number of them.
All of this, however, happened at levels far above the flight deck where Elian and I and resided.
Carolyn and Elian worked up new patches for our uniforms and may have actually obtained prior permission to wear them – I'm not absolutely certain of that. I do know that we wore them on our left shoulder. The patch showed a stylized Hawk clutching a missile in its claws.
As soon as we were settled in our new quarters we began practicing emergency launches and managed to get the ship launched out of the bay in under ten minutes, so the fifteen minute launch window was not going to prove to be difficult. We only hoped that we would actually have that much warning. By this time Carolyn knew far more about the software inside the Hawks than anyone within one hundred light years and had made the recommendation that the systems remained ‘hot’ while on Bravo status. This suggestion was reviewed, found not to have any apparent flaw and was adopted, cutting the launch time down still further.
Our fleet had not known about this new species of enemy until three weeks ago, and two weeks ago we were on the verge of being destroyed. Today, we felt more confident of our ability to defend ourselves. The Dash 6’s were now armed with four ER-15’s each, and were being modified as rapidly as possible to reduce their emissions. This was not an easy task, especially out of the resources we had available to us.
These changes would theoretically enhance their ability to take on the enemy’s fighters, although I was very happy not to be among the pilots who would have to try. No matter how stealthy it could become, it was so lightly armored that even a glancing shot would put it out of action. I liked driving a tank. A lot.
We stayed in the general region of space for another ten days, still not wanting to reveal the existence of our jump technology, or the locations of any of our planets. Finally, after a general sweep by flights of fighters as well as our own Hawks, our fleet jumped out in a direction chosen at random. We sat for two days without attracting any unwanted attention before finally beginning a series of jumps that took us to our original destination, the planet Lubya, Russian for love.
Russians are a passionate bunch and they had poured immense resources into developing a hospitable new home. The fact that much of the planetary surface was subject to arctic-like conditions seemed to the inhabitants to be a plus.
Even as we settled into orbit above the lovely planet, whose surface was covered with even more ocean than humanity's home world, we learned that the news of our encounter had caused a predictable amount of dismay. Earth fleet stationed a few ships permanently at Lubya, but nothing that could stand up to even the battered fleet we left behind us.
Unfortunately, we now knew that there was more than one alien fleet. Our long range scouts reported that there were a minimum of three mother ships actually in the same vicinity of the one we’d encountered, and the effort to backtrack the enemy’s path was slowly revealing a several century’s long journey that had brought this species into our region of space from an as yet undiscovered solar system. The reason or reasons behind that journey were totally unknown to us.
We had been attacked by one of these invaders’ expeditions, and retaliated sufficiently to keep it occupied with its own defense, but the minimum of three others in that same general vicinity meant that the danger to humanity was not over, it was merely temporarily abated.
It had been decided that what we had encountered was not a tactical fleet, along the lines our military was arranged. There were many theories, but the one most of our newly minted ‘experts’ felt was the most likely, was that we had run into a colonization effort. This was definitely bad news, as these beings seemed to be instantly hostile. They saw us, they tried to kill us, and they were looking for real estate in our part of town.
As soon as it was determined that Lubya had the facilities needed to repair our Hawks, we took them down to the surface. It was an unusual experience for both Elian and I. We had trained on fighters, whi
ch never entered atmosphere, so this was our very first experience at taking a small attack craft down to the surface.
We landed at a military field situated nearly a thousand kilometers from the largest city on the planet. City is a grand word to describe New Novosibirsk, population 600,000. That said, we were all anxious to see it and sample its restaurants and bars, not necessarily in that order.
Our four Hawks were the center of a great deal of interest. Even before we landed, all of the Hawks that had been sitting in a distant hanger for, in a few instances, several decades, had been re-activated and were receiving all of the upgrades that we had performed on our own four. Within one month our fleet would receive sixteen, possibly more additional Hawks. Four would be configured as long range scouts, but the other twelve were going to be attack birds, giving us eight attack craft and two scouts for each carrier.
I asked why they were configuring four of the mothballed craft as scouts, as our own Hawk could perform both functions. I was told that those four were older models and could not mount the huge Mark 65 missiles.
All of our destroyers and both cruisers had received moderate to severe damage and were the center of feverish activity. One destroyer and both cruisers were in huge space docks, and large sections of the ships were being opened up to space, although in fact large sections had already been violently opened by enemy weapons. One of the cruisers was probably going to be there for a long time, and wouldn’t be available for even local system defense.
Half of our fleet was maintained at combat readiness well outside of the inner planets’ orbits. One carrier, the Invictus was being used as a platform for nearly all of the surviving Dash 6’s, which were being used as very long range scouts. It was very boring and terribly wearing duty for the two-man crews, who were routinely out on station for upwards of twelve hours at a stretch. Twelve hours in those cockpits was torture.
Elian and I both knew that it would not be realistically possible for those enemy fleets to approach Lubya without being detected; however, there were six million citizens on the planet surface who had a vote, and they didn’t want to learn that Elian’s logic was flawed.
Lubya had a limited supply of reserve remote sensors and they had all been placed in orbit within twenty-four hours of our arrival in-system. Our fighters were filling in the holes in coverage, although that is not quite an accurate description. The sensors we had were able to adequately cover the elliptic, the typical approach into a system. The Dash 6’s covered some of the remaining less likely points of ingress into the system. In all, we had perhaps five or six percent coverage.
Elian and I, along with Carolyn and the chief were put to work interviewing prospective crewmembers for the twelve Hawks. Fighter pilots were a special breed of men and women. Taken as a group, they had the biggest egos in the entire military, and most of them looked down their nose at the graceful Hawks. However, word of our exploits, and successes, had gone through our fleet like influenza, and a surprising number of volunteers showed up at our door, wanting to know if we could use another World’s Best Pilot. It seems that we could.
I was tasked with setting up a training program, and the first thing I did was assign Elian, Carolyn and the Chief to actually design and run it. I’m not the smartest stick around, but I delegate like no tomorrow.
Due to my lowly rank, I was not actually in command of this new Command, but I was in charge of recruitment and training. I got to interview prospective crews, many of who were embarrassed to be sitting in front of me. I could relate to that emotion, but I ruthlessly squelched it at every opportunity.
In each case, after I described our two attack missions to the pilot sitting in front of me, nearly every one of them became enthusiastic. Elian and I were now ranked in the all-time historic top five aces. There hadn’t been a hot war in decades, so every pilot worthy of the name positively ached to pull the trigger on a “bug”, which is what we were calling our newfound enemy. Not a terribly scientific description, considering that we knew nothing about its anatomy, but it did serve a purpose: some people liked insects, but nobody liked bugs.
My new boss was a Lt. Commander with twenty years experience in various cockpits, not all of them fighters. My initial skepticism was nearly instantly replaced by respect, not only for his wide range of experience in both fighters and tactical assault craft, but for his amazing ability to use some of the most profane language, in four languages, that I had ever heard. The first time Lt. Cdr. Jawarski let fly with a modest example of colorfully descriptive and ruthlessly precise invective, I thought a hole was going to open up, leading straight to hell. Much to my amazement, the recipient of this outburst, a very senior maintenance chief, merely grinned and responded in kind. I soon realized that these two practitioners of the Profane Arts had known each other for at least two tours, and were not only excellent examples of officers and enlisted men, they were good friends who had been competing for years to out ‘blue’ the other.
There was actually a long running office pool with a fairly complicated set of rules. The chief was currently ranked slightly ahead of my new boss, but by only the slimmest of margins. There were others in the list, but these two were clearly the pride of Seventh Fleet. In this company, I was less than an amateur, despite having grown up in, under and around spacecraft since I was old enough to drop a tool on my foot.
I chose to rise above this competition, knowing that I would just embarrass myself. Chief Kana, however, was welcomed into this elite company of the practitioners of blue language with a certain amount of almost gleeful anticipation. His reputation had preceded him, and although the few examples I had witnessed of his ability to turn a corporal into a puddle of shame had all been accomplished without the use of even one expletive, more than one person assured me that he may actually be capable of even more profanity than our Lieutenant Commander.
Within two days I added fourteen new four-man crews and five two-man crews to our roster, and all of them were getting dirty working on their elderly Hawks. I believed that a crew ought to know its craft in as many ways as possible. I had more than enough candidates for all positions, and hired extras in the belief that having more crews than ships was preferable to the reverse.
We didn’t know how long we would have on Lubya, so our new crewmates were run ragged. If they weren’t physically working on their Hawks, they were in simulators running through a series of missions that the chief and I had put together, based on our own experiences. We also had them working on their physical conditioning. We’d discovered that after a week in a cramped cockpit
One of the scenarios was designed in such a way that there was no way to survive – we wanted to know just how our new crewmates would respond. Most of the crews did the expected thing, and tried to inflict the most damage they could before being blotted out of space. Two crews, however, separately from each other, actually found ways to fulfill the mission objectives and survive.
The chief and I were amazed, and after conferring for a bit, we decided to leave the tiny chance of survival in the simulation. When the other crews learned that it was actually survivable, they all clamored for another shot. With the exception of two of the crews, all of the others eventually discovered how to complete the mission and survive. Those two crews were returned to their former assignments. We had observed them under stress, and they didn’t function well enough.
The two crews that made it on the first pass were made flight leads. I greatly valued the courage and dedication that would allow men and women to die protecting the fleet, but I valued even more the sort of men and women who would find a way to survive the unsurvivable.
In our own way, Elian and I had accomplished just that, in those first few days when our situation was so desperate. We had gone out knowing that we probably wouldn’t return. We always found a way, however, and I wanted all my crews to fight, fight hard, and refuse to die, no matter how bad the situation.
In the immortal and badly paraphrased words of a famous
pre-space earth General, what was wanted wasn’t brave men and women who would die for their home, but rather, men and women who would find a way to make the other poor bastard die. I would have liked to meet that general. I’d read that he was wildly profane as well as a brilliant, albeit flawed, leader of soldiers.
As soon as a Hawk was returned to flight status, one of my new crews were permanently assigned to it and began the arduous task of learning what it could and could not do.
Our four original Hawks were getting their ablative exteriors patched up and were not available, so Elian, Carolyn or the chief would go up with the new crews. There was no opportunity to actually fire off the incredibly expensive Mark 65’s or even the merely extremely expensive smaller missiles, but we had simulations for that task, so I wasn’t worried about it. Those simulations were run right in the Hawks, so that the crews were gaining experience with the same equipment they would soon be taking into harm’s way.
I was astonished at how expensive that ablative material was. These Hawks, despite their age, represented some of the most costly technology in the entire military inventory. Even today, there was no better solution to surviving a laser hit, although we had come up with better ways of avoiding one, and those solutions were being added as rapidly as possible.
Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk) Page 13