Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk)

by Little, Robert

  If we were spotted, we would have almost two hundred anti fighter missiles and twenty-four lasers with which to blow a hole through to safety. I nodded my approval and gave everyone six hours.

  We lost a few minutes with last minute problems, mostly with the modified Mark 65’s. The new circuitry that had been added to eliminate its emissions was virtually handmade, and a few missiles were reporting problems. We didn’t have the ability to repair them after we left the carrier, so we lost precious time while missile techs sweat bullets sorting them out.

  Once under way, I took a calculated risk and ran us at six gravities directly toward the estimated position of the target mother ship. I commed the group as we were under way, and passed over some last minute changes to my orders. Fleet had decided that the Hawks, valuable as they were, were not as valuable as the planets our people lived on. Accordingly, I stated that we were to ensure that the mother ship was non-operational. I did not ask for anything suicidal from the other crews, but stressed the importance of getting in close before launching the missiles. Once they were on their way, we could leave, although I planned on going sideways very quietly, rather than directly out. I also added that if we had a chance to take on one of those battle cruisers without having all the other destroyers and fighters shooting up our behinds, I wanted to try.

  As we ran toward the bug flotilla, we had a lot of free time on our hands and I encouraged conversation, believing that it wouldn’t hurt to get to know each other. We talked about our childhoods, where we grew up and how we came to be in this navy, fighting these bugs. By now, I knew that my orders to the crews were going to be obeyed, despite my somewhat unusual methods, so I opened up and talked about my own childhood, after Carolyn turned the tables on me.

  My family was large and every one of the children worked from our early teens onward in the family business. We were pretty rough around the edges, very blue collar. We received a decent education up through the obligatory ages, but beyond that we spent our time getting only the knowledge required for the job.

  In this, as in many other aspects of family life I was the odd man out. Although I enjoyed working on the endless streams of shuttles and other small craft that passed through our yard, and was quite good at diagnosing problems and repairing them, I was never in love with the work. I grew up a very lonely boy, despite having a large family, or perhaps, because of it. I was five years younger than the next youngest boy, although I bracketed my two sisters in age. As a result, I was too young to fit in with the other boys, and kept to myself a lot.

  I read voraciously and fell in love with the romance of the fighter pilot. Earth’s colonies managed to be a bumptious bunch and there had been a number of conflicts over the better part of a century. By the time I was born the expanding human colonies had managed to resolve their worst differences, and every indicator pointed to continued peace. As a young boy on the verge of becoming a man, I yearned for those days where a fighter pilot went out alone between the stars and dueled for supremacy. It was a very romantic image, but I somehow managed to retain it as I grew into manhood.

  I gained my shuttle pilot’s license at the age of sixteen and loved every minute in the pilot’s station, even if it was only to move it from one spot in our yard to another. I bugged everyone for the opportunity to fly one of the lumbering craft. My family humored this obsession and gave me all the jobs that required flying that they didn’t want to do.

  As I neared eighteen, and legal adulthood, I began taking distance learning classes in math and other assorted courses that I was poor in, and that I would need if I wanted a shot at the navy. My family continued to think I was weird, and not in a good way.

  The Federal Navy was not admitting very many recruits, due to a gradual and long-term downsizing as the short interlude of peace morphed into a peaceful stability. However, it did need a small but continuous supply of pilots, and so on my eighteenth birthday I secretly applied for the Academy. I feigned sickness to go to Haifa to take the test. I failed it, but my obstinate nature reared its very stubborn head and I redoubled my efforts to improve my math skills, which was the one area I did poorly on.

  Six months later I took the test again, and again failed. This time, however, I came close. By now, my family was openly suspicious of my goals and attitudes. The repair service was entirely a family affair, and although our family made it a going proposition, it was a close thing. There wasn’t much money left over to hire someone to take my place, and a number of fairly ugly arguments ensued, all of which I lost, not being terribly good at that sort of thing. My parents could manipulate a rock, a good skill for business, but not so good for raising children, all but one of who learned to do the same thing. It was a rare day when someone would actually speak directly to topic – they all seemed to speak in inferences, colors, vague shapes, and nuances that I had little ability with or patience for.

  Finally, I took the test a third time and passed it well enough to get the opportunity to take another very lengthy battery of tests. Those tests revealed that I would make an excellent fighter pilot and that I would most probably fail the courses I needed in order to get through the academy to become a fighter pilot.

  An officer spent a long hour interviewing me and seemed to take a liking to me. He gave me a list of math and math-related courses and told me that if I would take and pass those, I would be permitted to retake their battery of tests. The navy was interested, but it didn’t need me badly enough to give me remedial education.

  For the first time, I approached my family and explained what I wanted and what I thought I needed. The family’s reaction was pretty ugly. It was explained to me, whether or not I wanted that explanation, or even needed it, that were I to leave the family business, it would cause difficulties and hardships in a business that was already marginal. I spent a few sleepless nights struggling with the guilt that my entire family dumped on me. However, my dream survived intact and I announced my determination to try for the academy. My family tried to manipulate me via threats, and failed, badly.

  I moved out and took a job with another company doing the same work and making a great deal more money than my own family had ever paid me. I poured all my resources into taking the classes and getting tutors to help me not only pass but learn the material. I had done fairly well in the physical battery of tests, but I wanted to excel, not merely get by, so I also worked out at a gym, studied martial arts and ran two times a day, rain or shine. I was so close that I could feel it, and I became obsessive about it. My social life, such as it had been, evaporated into nothingness.

  Almost two years after taking that first test, I returned to Haifa, the seat of the world government, and retook the navy’s post entrance exam tests. I passed, and I was offered admittance to the Naval Air & Space Academy, located in Annapolis, Maryland, United States.

  I returned home, gave my family the news that I was leaving, and then I left. Only one sister was even willing to speak to me, and she did it very quietly so as to not anger my parents, especially my father.

  All through the four grueling years of the Academy my sister was the only family member I could talk to. I graduated, although my academic scores placed me somewhat near the wrong end of the class, and at the advanced age of twenty-five I was assigned to basic flight school in Florida, which I passed with an assignment to fighters. I received the coveted orders for Edwards and the only people who were happy for me were the other students who were going with me.

  After passing Edwards and getting assigned to the aged Essex, I wrote a paper letter to my family, telling it what I had accomplished and where I was going. There had been no reply, and no communication from that time up to today.

  Over the intense years of schooling I had gradually separated myself emotionally from my family. I concluded that they had divorced me, not the reverse. It didn’t make the hurt any less painful, but it did resolve any guilt issues. I shared very little of this with my crew, not wanting to depress anyone on the eve of b
attle.

  We began picking up the first tell tales of the bugs and I immediately reduced power to three G’s. We analyzed the faint signatures of a large number of craft and I angled our course to intersect them well short of their probable destination, the other huge conglomeration of bug ships, now approximately sixteen hours distant. Their emissions were very faint due to the fact that they were not accelerating.

  Our closing rate was very high so we began to decelerate with the aim of coming to rest relative to the bug flotilla at a distance of about five million kilometers

  We moved into a more open configuration that tests had shown served to mask our gravity drives by blending them into one very gentle and large curvature of the fabric of space. At the five million kilometer mark we had good reads on their ships, and moved forward at one G.

  I assumed that our enemy would have adapted to our technologies just as we had to theirs. There had been some dissent over this, but I held firm. Paranoia is a Very Good Thing when a mistake leads to a typically permanent death.

  We monitored their flotilla carefully and as we approached we continued to have trouble getting a firm picture of their formation. They had indeed changed their tactics. Their destroyers were now out at the extreme periphery of their huge cloud of ships, and their fighters, the ones I could see, were inside in several dense layers.

  Three hours out from them we caught a scrap of noise from a point well in front of their formation. Someone was skulking, and had gotten a little careless about their communications. We hadn’t seen a thing, but where there was a radio there would be missiles and energy weapons. This served to generate a feeling amongst our crews that I might know what I was doing.

  I immediately went to zero G and we redoubled our efforts to locate this bogey, whose presence increased my belief that others were out there. I had decided on a group approach as that gave us a lot of concentrated firepower with which to wade our way through all those fighters and destroyers, without adding much to our own visibility.

  We finally got a sniff of the source of that radio frequency noise when we were barely three hundred thousand kilometers away from it. We identified him as a destroyer, and he was situated ten million kilometers in front of the main mass of ships and off to one side. This caused me to look in the other logical positions his location indicated would be occupied by someone inimical to our purposes. We didn’t see anything, but this enemy was terribly logical and I felt that if one was there, others would be as well.

  We neared the destroyer and applied a small amount of acceleration to angle in between what we thought would be the positions of other, probable skulkers. All twenty-four Mark 65’s were receiving constant updates, but I hadn’t much information on what might lay between us and the monster at the center of all those craft. The reason for the lack of information was that they were doing exactly the same thing we were; they were drifting along, content to take their time and force us to look for them. Looking for them actively was the fastest way to get us dead, so we drifted along, nearly invisible and highly nervous.

  We began to get fuzzy indications that there were a large number of fighters behind the destroyers and in front of the mother ship. It began to look less and less possible to sneak in through the front door or any other avenue of approach without attracting attention. This wasn't a simulation that we could simply rerun if we failed.

  I talked to Elian and Carolyn and they both estimated that our chances of sneaking in unobserved close to the mother ship were extremely low. I decided not to take the chance. I told the other crews that we were going to drop off the Mark 65’s and let them just drift in a cloud formation into the approaching mother ship.

  We dropped the huge missiles off our winglets and began a gentle turn that would permit us to avoid all those fighters and sneak back out at about forty-five degrees off axis. We were all keyed up tightly but so far our mission had gone off without a hitch. If we could just get back out we could rearm and perhaps return for a second attack.

  We made the turn and were now moving away from the mother ship when we detected a destroyer dead ahead of us. This spooked me, as we had very good passive equipment and still hadn’t seen it until it was less than one hundred thousand kilometers distant. Unfortunately, this destroyer was mimicking a black hole in space and we didn’t have enough time or room to evade him without his noticing.

  On my orders, six Hawks flushed their external anti-fighter missiles, the new –b version that had the ability to skulk along at a very low power setting. I elected to just follow the missiles in, and finish the destroyer off with our lasers if that was necessary.

  We spread out to form a small globe about three hundred kilometers across, I was slightly ahead of the others and we watched as the missiles slowly edged ahead of us, using their lowest power setting. At approximately one thousand kilometers the destroyer’s radar suddenly went active. I was very pleased that we’d gotten our missiles in so close without being observed. Carolyn ordered the missiles to sprint in and at the same time she took all twelve Hawks under control. We went to max accel within just a few moments and it must have looked pretty spectacular to anyone who happened to be watching.

  We were close enough to each other that the signatures of each individual Hawk’s engine merged into one large gravity signature. We hoped this would make it more difficult to target any one Hawk.

  The destroyer began transmitting back to its brothers and sisters but it barely had time to begin to accelerate when our missiles struck. The destroyer disintegrated in a cloud of explosions. That was a promising beginning. In fact, we could have used fewer missiles. Better safe than dead.

  By now we were all using our active systems and we found plenty of nearby craft to worry us. We had three flights of four fighters behind us that were close enough to give chase. Additionally, we had a large craft well outside of us. It was larger than the destroyer and far enough out to be a threat to us while having enough time to seriously reduce the number of missiles we could launch at it.

  I directed Carolyn to flush the other six Hawks external ordnance at him, thinking that we had perhaps used too many on the destroyer. This time around, however, the cruiser-sized ship was going to have time to defend itself. All twenty-four missiles dropped off the winglets and sprinted away from us towards the accelerating ship.

  Lasers began firing from multiple points on the cruiser, targeting our missiles. I ordered Carolyn to shut down our drives and then bring us up at four G’s in the same plane but at right angles to our former course. We were far enough away from the fighters who were now accelerating towards us that I hoped we could throw them off for a few minutes while our missiles did their thing.

  The cruiser, if that was what it was, had a large number of lasers and all of them on the side closest to the incoming missiles were firing with an impressive cycle rate.

  Our sudden disappearance off their sensors seemed to confuse the approaching fighters, who were still over two hundred thousand kilometers away, too far to use their lasers effectively.

  At my request Carolyn ordered the Hawks weapons bays to open and another twelve missiles dropped away. She had programmed them to run at a low power setting for about two minutes before going to sprint mode. She picked out the two closest groups of fighters and directed six missiles at each at them. We had lots more missiles but we didn’t know how many targets we had left, so we were being a little conservative.

  About this time the cruiser began hitting our incoming missiles. It destroyed nine within twenty seconds, which was very good shooting. The remaining fifteen missiles were now within seconds of hitting it. Elian ordered the missiles to begin using their very limited countermeasures. Our screens fuzzed up for a few seconds then cleared. The cruiser hit three more just short of impact. Twelve missiles exploded against its tough armor, but the cruiser continued out of the explosions seemingly unaffected.

  Carolyn released another twelve missiles, directed at the cruiser. These missiles imme
diately went to full acceleration. We then changed course again and went back to full accel ourselves.

  The missiles we had sent back toward the fighters now lit up their drives, sending them streaking off almost one hundred eighty degrees from the others heading towards the cruiser, which we were still approaching, although not directly. This very tough ship was also accelerating and still lasing away at the new inbound missiles with twenty-five separate laser sources, actually one more than our largest battle cruiser was able to bring to bear at one time.

  I decided to send another twelve back at the fighters who were now eighty thousand kilometers behind us, and twelve towards the cruiser, which was proving to be extremely tough. I asked the chief to keep us informed of any additional threats, and sent this same message to the other Hawks, whose crews were not getting to do all that much, thanks to Carolyn. Cdr. Harrelson had a direct link to us and had been giving us commentary on what he saw and thought.

  Elian announced, “Robert, we’ve got missile separation from that cruiser. I count ten missiles. They seem to be the same type as the last time, with maybe three or four G’s overtake capability. Unfortunately, we’re going the wrong way, so I hope you prepare a suitable welcome for them.” I laughed and said to him, “Hand off one missile each to our Hawks – let’s see how good our shooting is. The extra Hawk is free to shoot at whatever missile it wants.”