Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk)

by Little, Robert

  We drew up plans to operate in flights of four, giving a combined firepower of eight lasers – all of the Hawks were getting 40 cm barrels – and a total of sixty four missiles in the flight, plus the Mark 65’s. That was very serious firepower for such small craft to wield. The first time I added up the numbers, I stared at them in something like awe: our destroyers and even cruisers could sustain a reasonably serious attack with missiles and lasers, but these few Hawks could place some concentrated and very heavy firepower right where it was needed.

  Our capital military ships were not capable of nearing bug space without being detected long before they could unleash any weapons, and they would not long survive the typically heavy bug fighter assault, much less a bug destroyer or six. The Fleet combatants, now that they were known to radiate their position, were receiving lots of attention, but the fix, or fixes, were going to be costly, time-consuming and only partially successful. Making a tiny Hawk even quieter was decidedly easier than doing the same with a five mega-ton carrier. Long term, Fleet would have to build new ships from scratch. Short term, we had very little with which to fight this new enemy.

  During our stay on Lubya, fleet sent scouts back into the same general territory where we had come under attack. They obtained additional long distance sensor scans that confirmed that our Hawks had engaged one of four separate groups. It was probable that our fleet had been attacked by one or more different mother ships. The one we attacked and damaged was being referred to as Bug01 on paper, “bugwon” otherwise.

  Our destroyers and cruisers were no match for the opposition, nor were our fighters, even with the addition of the ER 15 missiles. The problem lay in the fact that the Dash 6 could not take even a long-range energy hit without incurring severe damage. Therefore, while the official response was reasoned concern, panic was the unofficial reaction behind closed doors. The best defense was to keep the bugs on the defensive, because if they entered one of our solar systems, we had no realistic chance of stopping them.

  Lubya had been settled for nearly two centuries and was now the home to six million men women and children. If this new enemy found the planet, we couldn’t defend it, and there was every reason to believe that not one single human being would long survive if our fleet could not stop an attack.

  Couriers had been sent out immediately to earth with the ugly news, but the enormity of the threat to humanity was too great to predict how civilian and military leaders would respond. We hoped for an immediate and large infusion of new ships, but there were many planets where humans now called home, far more than there were fleets. In fact, our own ships represented over twelve percent of the total armed military might currently in space.

  We had been at peace for over two decades, and mostly at peace for six. Large numbers of ships had been either mothballed or decommissioned, and nearly all the remaining units were destroyers and a few carriers and cruisers. All capital ships and most of the larger units, such as battle cruisers and heavy cruisers, were gathering dust, mostly on the moons of Jupiter, headquarters of Fleet.

  Additionally, for nearly three hundred years humanity had banned the development of new types of weapons, limiting itself to missiles and one type of beam weapon, lasers. Theoretically, our new enemy could have brought to the party other types of beam weapons, such as bomb-pumped X-rays, grasers and others that we would have no answer for.

  We didn’t yet know if that was the case, but only because we hadn’t come close enough to their destroyers and cruisers to find out.

  Our own admiral spoke at length to his senior officers and they subsequently spoke to the crew. We were told that we had to assume that what we had in this system was what we had. As a result, our Hawks were the recipients of a great deal of attention.

  My crew had very few leaves, but on one memorable weekend, the four of us took a shuttle into Novosibirsk, the single large city on a planet with three continents and a great many islands.

  We checked into a hotel and then went right back out to find a restaurant. We had a lot of back pay to burn, and we ended up in what was one of the most expensive restaurants in four or five light years. We were in uniform, and the subject of a great deal of attention by the other patrons. It was obvious that we were a flight crew off of Seventh Fleet, and it was general knowledge that we had gotten the crap beaten out of us.

  We were received with mixed emotions. The other diners seemed to regard us as both saviors and as Bearer of Bad Tidings. It was a weird experience, and not one that we enjoyed. We were carrying the memories of many dozens of dead friends, and those memories were all that was left of them.

  We had very clear and explicit orders not to discuss anything even remotely related to the new threat now hanging over the heads of every man, woman and child on this very beautiful planet, but within five minutes after sitting down at our table it became clear that everyone already knew about the bugs. It’s very difficult to hide all that damage to our fleet from the very people who were doing the repairs.

  Our meal was not quite the joyous occasion we had anticipated. It was however, just as expensive as feared, roughly one week’s pay worth.

  After enjoying an after dinner drink – coffee in my case, we headed out in search of a bar. There were several that catered mainly to the military, and we entered the Barakas Bar hoping to find a lot of uniforms and even more alcohol. We were not disappointed on either count.

  Despite the fact that I did not drink, I was welcomed with a great deal of wildly profane humor. The exploits of the Hulk had preceded us, and we found it difficult to pay for anything. Every pilot in the place crowded around us and loudly demanded to hear about our strange craft and its ability to kill bugs.

  The chief looked at me and I shrugged. I decided to forget my orders and we spent the night telling and retelling the story of our attacks on the enemy. Fortunately, Elian was an extremely gifted liar, and he quickly took over after I fumbled around for fifteen minutes that felt like fifteen hours. These people had a genuine need to know the truth, but I had orders not to tell them, causing a certain conflict. I was a lowly JG and I was thrilled when Elian took over.

  He managed to make us sound like the greatest military geniuses since, oh, I don’t know, Custer perhaps. Carolyn listened to his descriptions with a certain degree of awe, but the chief merely smiled in approval, then took another swallow of beer.

  I found myself sitting next to Carolyn and I asked her about her pre-bug life. She surprised me a little by opening up and talking about her childhood. She grew up in Singapore and was the first person in her family, let alone woman, to enter the military in generations, possible ever. She grew up in a middle class family in a middle class environment.

  Her parents were intelligent and educated and expected their very bright daughter to follow them into a middle class marriage. She said that she didn’t know when or how, but at some point early on she fell in love with space and the navy which flew between the stars, helping humanity expand into the galaxy, and occasionally protect it from itself.

  She wound down after ten minutes or perhaps twenty, and blushed. It was apparent that she was not normally so open. She retaliated and I talked about my parents, four brothers and two sisters, all of whom were engaged in one fashion or another in our family business. I was the youngest and possibly the dimmest of my siblings, and, like Carolyn, was the first and only one to enter the military.

  I told her that after the usual shock and dismay, my family had decided to avoid either mention or contact with their black sheep. I ended my own biography by saying, “I hope that my family will be able to be proud of me after this is all over.” Left unsaid was the probability that my family would only be able to discuss this hoped-for-pride with other people – I wouldn’t be around.

  Carolyn looked intensely at me and nodded wordlessly.

  About this time I discovered that Carolyn was not merely a brainiac, she was also capable of being very graceful and feminine. This sudden realization caused a
certain amount of dismay in me. I did not need a lovely, graceful and feminine crewmate. I was quite comfortable around Elian, who didn’t care that I developed bad breath after two straight days of combat operations, and the chief was incapable of being offended, at least in the normal ways. Now, however, I was suddenly conscious of my own appearance, and my evident lack of intelligence, compared to, well the rest of my crew.

  Even Chief Kana was smarter than I by a huge margin. If he had ever forgotten anything, as unlikely as that seemed to me, that tiny amount would be more than the sum total of what I knew. At no time was he ever even slightly disrespectful of my person or rank, but he had subtle, or sometimes not so subtle ways of letting me know what decision I ought to make on matters that came within his improbably large area of expertise. Fortunately, I had never learned to be positively stupid to the point of ignoring wisdom when it nudged me in my backside.

  The one area where I felt competent was in tactics, in the ability to fight my craft in all four dimensions. I always knew where I was in relation to my opponent, and that was perhaps the one single trait that I possessed that had allowed me to survive the bug onslaught when so many of my crewmates hadn’t.

  I puzzled over this for many long, sleepless hours, and Elian had finally put an end to it. He told me, one week into the nightmare, “Hey! Stupid! Get over it. We survived, and it wasn’t by chance. We survived because we were better than the others, better than the enemy. I had my pick of pilots, did you know that? I chose to fly beside you, because I think you possess the gift of being always in the right place at the right time, looking in the right direction. If you weren’t a complete idiot you would realize that I’m the lucky one to be with you. After all, I would most probably be dead if I hadn’t been.”

  I had stared at him blearily for a moment, and then shuddered as I realized that he was right. All those other pilots that I had thought were better than I were mostly dead. Elian was closer to me than my own brothers, especially now, and the thought that he was alive because I was alive made me see me, and him, in a new light.

  I nodded, finally, and said with a trace of a smile, “You’re right. From now on I get your deserts.” He stared at me, and then laughed, the first laugh from either of us in a long time, and said, “When admirals fart flowers.”

  I helped my slightly-to-very drunk friends return to our barracks, still uncomfortably conscious of Carolyn. For one thing, she smelled like a girl. I realized this at approximately the same moment that she brushed against me in the ground taxi we were jammed into. I groaned to myself with the realization that it was now not only difficult to look at her as just another crewmate, now even in the dark she was bothering me.

  On top of all that, I knew that Elian liked her, and they spent some of our limited free time in each other’s company. I could tell that she liked him, although they had never behaved in any fashion other than friends. In fact, they were friends. It’s just that, well, as a teenager I was shy with girls, and now I’m a little reticent, if that’s the word, around women.

  Elian said I wasn’t reticent, he said I was retarded, that women liked me, thought I was kind of exotic, with my blond hair and blue or green eyes. I told him he didn’t know what he was talking about. At the time this conversation took place, shortly after we were assigned to our first command, we happened to be in a club; me, Elian and an attractive young woman, who was casually hanging on to his arm and playing with his hair. In retrospect, perhaps Elian does know a little more than I.

  Now, our night out had served to bring the four of us even closer together. We had gone through some very harrowing weeks, and still faced a grim and uncertain future, but the four of us had, together, slain the bogeyman. Each of us was different; Elian was an extremely intelligent man for whom everything came easily; the Chief was almost a legend in the navy, Carolyn was a genius in her own specialty, and of course, she was cute as a button. I, well, I had my moments.

  In the following weeks all twelve newish attack Hawks came on line and we began work ups, getting the inevitable bugs worked out of the craft and their crews and continuing to develop tactics. Most of the problems seemed to be found in the crews. I had the thought, many, many times, that on the Essex we’d brought the first Hawks up to readiness and put them in space within less than two days; now, we’d been laboring for weeks with seemingly less to show for it.

  The four older scout Hawks had only one internal launcher and were not capable of carrying external ordnance. They had been festooned with even more antennas than our attack craft and as soon as their jump systems were calibrated they left the system to return to the region of space where we ran into the bugs. With their limited bunkerage, they were unable to remain in space for very long, but the crews didn’t object to that particular limitation.

  We had additional scout craft lurking in the bug areas, but we knew them to be less stealthy than previously thought, and as soon as the Hawks arrived these craft returned to be retrofitted.

  During this same time our fleet specialists had been working around the clock with whatever wonks we could find on Lubya. Those initial sensor readings of Carolyn’s had led to all manner of new insights and discoveries and we had promises of even better shielding of our energy systems. Unfortunately, this planet didn’t have very much in the way of a high tech industry yet, so our ability to acquire said new technology was extremely limited.

  Our encounter had led to what amounted to a near panic at fleet headquarters. The implications of our disastrous early engagements and later findings had reached earth within less than two weeks of first contact. We had a very warlike race invading the particular region of space we had come to call home, and it didn’t seem likely to leave.

  Our latest scouting expeditions discovered that there were two flotillas edging closer to each other. These two were in addition to the one we had fought. I was getting profoundly tired of the term ‘at least’ followed by an indeterminate but improbably large number.

  These incursions had followed similar but different zig zag routes from solar system to solar system over hundreds of light years of travel but were now less than ten million kilometers from each other. This was deemed to be significant and terrifying.

  One specialist had speculated that this invasion was not merely a tour of the galaxy by rich elderly beings with digital cameras hanging around their necks, but was possibly an exodus from a solar system whose sun had become unstable. Another, even worse possibility put forward was that this race was escaping from an attack by an even more violent race of beings. This suggestion was received with nearly total skepticism. Nearly.

  No matter the reason, they were here and in large numbers. The quantity and quality of warships we had actually counted represented greater firepower than our entire fleet, by a factor of ten, and we had no reason to believe we had counted them all.

  Earth and the twelve technically advanced planets that formed the inner core of our federation began several crash programs designed to retrofit all of our currently active ships with the technology that would cloak them, and new and improved missiles were being rushed into production. They said. They also told us that mothballed ships were being rushed back into service. Unfortunately, we could guess how long that might take, and it was longer than Lubya and the two other human systems that lay in the path of these aliens might have.

  The ancient Hawk had suddenly gained a new lease on life and every single one of them was being brought back into service. Additionally, our reports, white papers and flight records were being used to help define a new class of ‘proposed’ combat ship. They would be roughly the size of destroyers, twenty five to thirty thousand tons, but would include the same or similar armor our Hawks used. They would have much larger lasers, as big as 45 cm, and as much as ten times as many gravity shields to protect them. They would be designed to be able to fight their way into range of the mother ships and launch capital missiles. They were going to cost nearly as much to build as our current fleet c
arriers, due to that ablative shielding. Oh, and they were not going to be available for several years.

  The Mark 65 had proved to be inadequate to the task, although we would certainly use them until such time as a better substitute was brought forward. The Dash 6 fighter represented a bigger problem. It had been designed in an era of fleet downsizing and its engineers downgraded the role of energy weapons in favor of missile technology. Short of adding better missiles to it, there was little that could be done. It was an extremely compact and lightly armored craft and there was just no easy way to increase the size of its laser or its ability to deflect energy fire, much less absorb it.

  Here again, an older design was possibly superior. The Dash 4 series was potentially better suited to our current needs. It was nearly fifty percent larger than the Dash 6, and it appeared that it could be retrofitted with a larger fusion bottle, enabling fleet engineers to upgrade its laser to a 40 cm and greatly improve its defensive suite. There were several hundred of them in mothballs, and early tests with mules were reportedly positive. We would get those fighters into service much faster than we could a new design, especially since many of the companies that designed and built ships for the federal navy had long ago down-sized or gone into business making paper flowers, or some such.