Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk)

by Little, Robert

  Admiral Lee said, now serious, “Lieutenant, we don’t have the time to waste on men like Captain Hodges. I am turning the debriefing over to one of my assistants, and I am turning this ship over to you and your people. I want an accurate assessment of her condition, and what repairs are required to get her operational. Next, I want to know what modifications are required to turn this ship into a bug killer. Keep me informed on a daily basis. Let my assistant know of any requirements or needs. She has been given carte blanche to make decisions in my name on this project. Well, almost carte blanche. Gold plating of the galley is right out. I suggest that you bring in some of my maintenance people. My assistant will know who to recommend. Just let her know. If anyone, and I mean anyone, acts more like a hindrance than help, tell her and I’ll handle it. I expect you to behave sensibly, as your decisions will affect careers, but I will not allow anyone or anything to impede us. Any questions?”

  I didn’t have one single question that wouldn’t have sounded really, really stupid, so I said, “No sir.” He nodded his head and turned away. He was talking to someone, quite angrily it seemed, before he’d taken ten steps. This was a clue.

  The four of us stayed near the ship and within less than fifteen minutes a harried lieutenant commander showed up. I saluted her and she said, “Lieutenants Padilla and Turner? Excellent job with this ship. I have been told by Admiral Lee that you are in overall charge of this project. If I may, I would like to get my crews aboard her and begin the process of determining just what is required to return her to operational status. Will that be all right?”

  I asked, “Sir, do you have any idea of how long this process might take? At present, there are no red flags, and everything seems to be functioning.” The Lieutenant Commander must have been one of Admiral Lee’s people because she smiled and said, “Excellent news lieutenant. Barring problems, it should take us approximately seven full shifts to certify its operational status.”

  I nodded and asked, “Seven shifts of eight hours? As in eight hours per day? Or, seven consecutive eight hour shifts, sir?”

  The short and slightly squat Lt. Cdr. looked narrowly at me and asked, “Do you have a preference?” I said, “How about we just work like crazy and stop when we’re done?” She shook her head and said, smiling, “You’re just as crazy as the admiral. I think we’re going to get along swimmingly.” Apparently, another test had been passed.

  I commed my crew and told them to get off the ship and come eat with me. We clumped out of the hanger to a dressing area where we unsuited. Breakfast awaited us.

  Over the next five days we spent mornings being very thoroughly debriefed, and the rest of the day and evening aboard the DE/M Stone, one of only fourteen such craft still in existence. We verified that the ship was basically not only healthy, it was practically unused. Once that step was passed, we began upgrading its systems in much the same fashion we had done with the Hawks, not without the usual squawks. The Stone was much newer than any of our Hawks, but seemed to have been designed with the same criteria. In fact, she had been manufactured by the same yard.

  It took four days and change to get her certified as space-worthy. At my request, the admiral reluctantly gave us a day off. We slept most of it away, but that evening we went looking for some fun. There were no civilian areas on this base, although there were a large number of civilians. We found one location that served multiple functions. In it, one could get drunk and one could get entertained. It had an actual bar and performers, more or less. The entertainment consisted of live acts that had, perhaps, been known a decade or so earlier, and were now scraping along looking for whatever gigs they could turn up.

  The Hawks, as we had come to be called, went as a group and sat at small round tables, listening to a female singer who had had one hit song about the time we were being born. I had to admit that the years had been remarkably kind to her. Either that, or I was a very, very lonely man. Most of us drank, some of us a lot, but none of us got drunk. We had an early day ahead of us and our feelings about the admiral were such that if he asked us to build him an Ark, we would ask him how long a cubit was.

  During an intermission the singer showed up at our tables, which we had scrunched up together. She smiled and looked around searching. I guessed that she was looking for the head of our little group. I pointed at Elian, causing Carolyn to giggle. I swear, her giggle had come to be my favorite sound.

  The singer stepped over to the side of Elian’s chair and looked down at him with two of the largest and bluest eyes I had ever seen. Fake eye color in her case, but still beautiful. She said, “Gentlemen, I heard from one of the band members that you have recently returned from fighting the bugs. Is that true?” I snorted, quietly.

  Everyone in earshot turned their heads to see how Elian would handle this. He stood up and smiled in a war weary way at her, and said, “Why, yes miss. We have just recently returned from a number of raids against the bugs. What can we do for you?”

  She cast an amazingly shy, innocent, eye lash fluttering smile at Elian, who had been smiled at by enough women in his short lifetime to know her smile was just about as fake as her eye color. That said, Elian was in fact a man, a man who had been ‘away’ for a long time, and she was, fake or not, looking rather splendid right that moment.

  She said, a little breathlessly, “I am going to sing another set in just a few minutes, and I wonder, is there a particular song you would like to hear? If I know it, I would love to sing it to you.” Carolyn put her head on my shoulder and smothered another giggle. Elian, however, stood up to this test, and said, “I can’t think of a particular song, madam, but perhaps you might know one that would be appropriate. We here at these few tables are the sole remaining survivors of that first battle with the bugs. Do you know a song that might commemorate their loss?”

  She looked at him with eyes that suddenly brimmed with tears and said, in a more natural but emotional voice, “Yes, lieutenant, um, Turner, I do know a song that would be appropriate.” She turned and walked quickly away.

  I looked at Elian and he said, “Robert, you are a rat, a real rat. That woman was going to attempt to use her considerable wiles on me, hoping, we all know, to seduce me into losing my virtue. I, however, took the high road, and you see what I accomplished, in just a few well-chosen phrases? I have turned that wanton seductress into the path of righteousness and honor.” I grinned at him and said, “And, as, as a bonus, you get to sleep alone tonight.” Carolyn said, “You think he would have gotten any sleep?”

  Everyone at the table laughed and the chief came to his feet, with beer mug raised. He boomed loudly enough to be easily heard over the racket, “I salute you, oh officer of virtue! Oh sailor of honor! Oh man of rectitude! I salute you, oh gentleman! Oh soul on the path of the straight and narrow! And finally, I salute you, Oh commissioned officer! May your journey of life be smooth, your step be sure and strong, and finally, kind sir, may your brain shut the fuck up and let your equipment do your thinking!”

  Everyone roared with laughter and Elian nodded his head with a wry grin.

  The singer asked all the lights to be lowered, and an image of a fluttering, ancient national flag came to life on the wall behind her. She sat on a tall chair and began to sing, in French, the Marseillaise.

  I stood up slowly, and one by one, every other person in the room stood. Soon, other voices joined hers. By the end, virtually every person in the room was singing, many of them openly crying.

  At the end of her act, she stepped off the small raised stage to thunderous applause. She didn’t smile, but she bowed gracefully, and left. Moments later, a waiter appeared at our table and placed a small silver plate in front of Elian. On it was a small piece of paper, folded in half. Elian opened it, looked at it for a moment and stood up. He grinned at me and said, “It seems that France wishes to surrender.”

  We returned to work on the Dresden early next morning, having finally exhausted our debriefers. The Stone was beginning to come back ali
ve as system after system was uprated.

  Here on Jupiter base, we had access to virtually any piece of electronics, weaponry or military gear ever purchased by Fleet. This included a brand new generation of mag bottles and capacitors. When we first showed the base engineers what we had done with the Hawks, they practically fainted. However, when we explained to them what that remarkable craft could do, they shook their head in disbelief, as if we had violated a basic law of nature and gotten away with it anyway. They told us, as a teacher to a recalcitrant child, that what we had done ought not to have worked. We asked them if they would like to go for a ride, which offer they were delighted to accept.

  We modified one of the Hawks with a large quantity of test equipment and off we went for a stroll around the neighborhood. We had a Dash 6 fighter along, a mule that was being used by base engineers to see if it could be modified to be actually effective against the bugs. The Dash 6 was to be our chase fighter. I was told that it was the fastest Dash 6 to ever pass through the base. The chief grinned at me.

  Once we were sufficiently away from Jupiter’s monstrous gravity well, our head engineer, the one with the least amount of patience with our shade tree mechanic approach to modifying their precious toys, said, “OK hot shot, show us what ya got.” I grinned at Elian and casually ran my finger up the engine scale past ‘Max’ to what we referred to as ‘OH SHIT!’

  We caught the fighter by surprise and began opening up a lead on him. I turned around in my couch and told the engineer, “We are now registering slightly over seventeen G’s. What is your fighter capable of?” Before he could answer, Carolyn said, “Sir, the Dash 6 is falling behind. I estimate that he is capable of approximately sixteen G’s and change. Um, sixteen point four three.”

  I looked at the engineer and raised my eyebrows. He was studying his telemetry and studiously not looking at me. Finally, he looked up and asked, “How long can you run at this acceleration without blowing the fuck up?” I grinned and said, “We’ve had ample opportunity to, um, push the envelope, as we’ve been chased numerous times by bug fighters, which can do thirteen or so G’s. The longest we’ve run this hard is?” I looked over at Carolyn whose fingers were flying over her pad. She looked up triumphantly and said, “Two hours eleven minutes and thirteen seconds, sir.” The engineer returned to his telemetry, then he opened the hatch into the main compartment. He looked down on the array of mag bottles and capacitors which nearly filled the compartment. The remaining space was occupied by heavy cables.

  The Dash 6 continued to fall behind for over thirty minutes before he had to shut down his system, due to overheating. Our system was mildly tepid. I grant you, if we had been firing our lasers and running flat out, they would have gotten actually warmish.

  At a signal from the now quiet engineer, we shut down, turned around and fire walled the engines again. The Dash six was by now over a thousand kilometers behind us, but the distance began to plummet. The fighter swapped ends and began decelerating but it was still unable to run flat out. It flashed by us and returned to base almost thirty minutes after we did.

  As we lowered the main ramp, the engineer made one last attempt to, well, I don’t know what he was trying to do. He asked, “The other Hawks, uh, how much slower are they?”

  I realized that he assumed that we had chosen this one because it was the fastest. I grinned and said, “We’re not actually certain, but we believe that four of them are a tad quicker than this one. We’ve identified the problem to be capacitor 4. The slowest Hawk can run at 16.94 G’s, according to its own sensors. The fastest can do 17.28 G’s, again, according to its own sensors.”

  “While we’re on the subject, chief, we would like for your crews to pull out all our mag bottles and replace any that don’t meet specs. Master Chief Kana, that boulder over there with a slightly receding hairline can assist you. In fact, he can do it, but I’d guess that you would prefer your own boys and girls to do the work. Correct?”

  A sorely disgruntled engineer nodded his head. I took that to mean a ‘yes’ to my request. I looked at Carolyn and she simply nodded and began filling out an electronic requisition form for the work.

  I asked the engineer, “Now that you’ve seen what our Hawks can do, I request that we shoot for an acceleration of thirteen G’s for the Stone. According to chief Kanas educated guess, that would require twenty additional mag bottles and a second set of zerohm cabling which would parallel the primary system. Actually, the chief thinks the Dresden class is just as heavily over-built as the Hawks, but we tend to be belt and suspenders kinds of guy, especially as if we discover that we made a mistake in our calculations, we get very dead.”

  The engineer stared at me as if I were some form of heretofore unknown alien being. I was beginning to think it was time to place a comm to Admiral Lee. However, I quickly discovered that his look was one of stunned surprise, overlaid by feelings of almost joy. He was a man who ordinarily followed the book, but underneath that square cornered personality was a rebel. The idea of building a hot rod destroyer that could almost keep up with our fighters was irresistible to him.

  We walked down the ramp and the chief engineer ordered his people to remove the telemetry gear. He walked ahead of us in silence but before we reached the personnel hatch of the hanger, he stopped and turned to me. He said, “Sir, what you have just demonstrated to me is quite simply, mind boggling. For as long as I have been in the business, I have always believed that capacitors were the limiting factor in our engines, but you have demonstrated that as long as the throughput is constant, the capacitors don’t really have much to do. Now that I’ve seen it work, it makes sense to me, but that still doesn’t solve the problem of what happens if you accelerate flat out and have to fire your lasers. What was you experience? “

  I nodded in respect. It hadn’t taken him all that long to work through the problem. I said, “Well, as you can imagine, virtually every time we went to max acceleration, we were also shooting, for as long as five to fifteen minutes, off the top of my head. We noted that under those conditions the capacitors did warm up, although not as much as you might think. We could fire one laser every two and a half seconds, and it didn’t seem to create any problems. On my Dash 6, however, when we shot the laser in rapid succession it shut our system down and the capacitor had to be changed out. We’ve never run into that situation with the Hawks, although we’ve had a couple of instances where one of the Hawks had to shut down two bottles. Please note, however, that even with two bottles out of the system, the Hawk could still run with us, it just couldn’t run and fire simultaneously. So, perhaps the secret to this is that too much power is just the right amount. We do think that the Hawk suffers from insufficient ability to handle the power, but it hasn’t caused the craft to malfunction, not once.”

  The chief looked at me with a mixture of expressions on his face. He finally grinned and said, “Lieutenant, you are an interesting man. I can see why the admiral sets such store by you.” It was my turn to stare. I said, “Chief, the admiral doesn’t care a whit for me, what he wants is for humanity to whip those bugs ass, or whatever passes for an ass.”

  The engineer laughed and nodded his head. He waved to us and jogged away. Obviously, he’d been around the admiral.

  Within two days the chief engineer commed me and requested that we meet him in his office. It took us ten minutes to get there. He brought up a schematic of the engine room of the Dresden and began pointing out the modifications he had developed. About one half of the space had been lost to a veritable forest of mag bottles and capacitors. Once he accepted that the concept actually worked he’d gone to work like a crazed man.

  We looked at the schematics and liked what he had done, but I asked, “Chief, could you show us how the room will look?” He smiled and brought up, first, a plan drawing, then a 3D image of the room. It looked a bit crowded, but definitely workable. I asked him, “What does this do to our reaction mass?”

  He nodded his head and said, “Yes, well,
all that power comes at a price. However, I’ve been looking at ways to add more capacity. As designed, the ship requires one hundred and twenty two personnel, but I’ve been looking at ways to reduce that down to about one hundred. Frankly, the ship is overstaffed, but the original designers were thinking in terms of a small complement of marines plus some redundancy in case of battle damage. I don’t see a need for marines for this particular application, and if we take a little risk, we can run the ship with fewer personnel without losing any efficiency. That would free up some cubage for reactor mass.”

  I asked, “Once approved, how long?” He said, “Three weeks for the capacitors and mag bottles, with a possibility for one or two additional weeks if we were to convert some of the berthing spaces to additional reaction mass.”

  I asked another question, “Without adding more reaction mass, how long can this ship stay out?” He fingered his chin and said, “Well, there’s simply no way to know the answer to that question, because we don’t know how hard it’s going to be run. However, as a guess, you ought to be able to stay out for a month at least.”