Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk)

by Little, Robert

  The MP’s almost smiled. The head MP said, “Sir, I am placing you under arrest. Charges may be brought against you within seventy-two hours. Until then, you will be held incommunicado. Please turn around and place your hands behind you.”

  We watched in silence as the engineer was led away. I had harbored no suspicions of any kind against him, other than that he hated to work, and his crews were worse.

  I commed the admiral’s office and gave his aide a quick rundown of the proceedings. She had an excellent mind, because she immediately saw other possible consequences. She said, “Sir, thank you for this information. Please do not discuss this with anyone until and unless you are cleared to by this office. For your information, this company has approximately sixty employees on site, and they have had access to virtually every data bank on Jupiter base. Under the authorization of the State of Emergency, Admiral Lee will be announcing in the next few minutes that all civilian contractors of this company are to report their location immediately to MP’s, who will take them into protective custody. In other words, we’re going to throw ‘em all into the brig and figure out who to hang later.” I thanked her and terminated the call. Even as we were speaking, an alert appeared on my pad, announcing the termination of all communications off base.

  I decided to hold a strategy session immediately. We had some of our people on the ship, some not, but via our comms we could communicate, if not exactly as easily as if we were face to face.

  We announced only that the civilian contractors were, temporarily at least, not going to be working on the ship. I wanted to tell them the details in person, as I wasn’t certain how secure our pads were, especially now that I’d seen what corruption looked like, up close. That tiny device, and its intended purpose had frightened me, in a way that the bugs had not.

  I asked for input on where we were on the modifications. We were about five percent along, it transpired. I asked what tasks were beyond the ability of our own people, and we put together a list. There were a few, mostly connected with the power systems, but less than I would have thought. I tasked Elian and the chief with going through the admiral’s aide to find other sources for those jobs we could not do ourselves.

  Using Carolyn and my fancy new pad, we projected on a convenient mess hall surface a calendar on which we plotted out all the tasks that had to be performed, in the order they had to be accomplished. We had two hundred and forty hours, if we were to keep to our arbitrary schedule. Once we had everything positioned on the calendar, we assigned each specific task to a person or group, whose responsibility it was to ensure that when that task came up, everything would be in place to get it done.

  I also tasked Carolyn with developing some software that would ensure that our own personal pads could not be compromised by anyone. I added the Hawks to that list, and then added the Stone. I was reasonably certain that adding our own private security to military equipment was probably a violation of several thousand regulations. I didn’t care.

  It took us four hours to complete our calendar. I had been involved in maintenance for most of my life, but nothing of this magnitude or importance. I know that there might be some more professional term for what we were doing, but I couldn’t think of it and didn’t much care. ‘Calendar’ was good enough.

  Elian and I met with the admiral late that evening. Very late. He was so furious at the discovery that one of our biggest contractors was stealing software from the fleet that he could barely contain himself. We went over the Stone project item by item. He hadn’t been an admiral all his career and he asked some sharp questions, some of which we were able to answer, others I had to tell him that I’d get back to him with the answer. In general, however, he was satisfied with what we had done, and signed off on it, including, specifically, our security protocols.

  I commed the team and told them that it was now our baby. The chief simply said, “This way at least, we’ll know who to shoot.” I laughed, but he wasn’t smiling all that much.

  Over the next week we worked almost non-stop, but even with twenty-hour days we slipped behind schedule. The most difficult and time consuming work involved constructing the support structure to hold the mag bottles and their attendant capacitors. Both devices were large and heavy, and the structure had to be built in such a way that everything could be serviced, as well as stand up to the shock of large to huge G-loads, imparted by enemy weapons. The task was orders of magnitude more difficult than had been the similar one involving the Hawk.

  The fleet had extensive machine and fabrication shops right on the base, so getting the pieces fabricated was possible, getting it in time was not so easy.

  Despite the public awareness of the bug invasion, it was slow to understand the possible consequences. Even on base it was generally the same. Only gradually did our own personnel grow to see that the threat was general and personal.

  On the eighth day we completed fabrication and installation of the twenty additional mag bottles, capacitors and attendant cabling, hardware and control devices. It looked really good, if very different from what the original builder would have done. We had just added a great many extra tons of equipment to the engine room, but the Stone was built to withstand extreme stresses, and our calculations indicated the structure was able to handle the increased stresses.

  We had two days in which to debug all the new software that Carolyn, with able assistance from three programmers fleet found somewhere, was writing to control the immense amount of additional power, as well as software to control the ten laser weapons, which of course we planned to modify, just a little. We’d heard of 45 cm lasers, and had found some that were just lying there. These were capable of nearly double the output of the 40 cm versions we’d installed on the Hawks. We built into the various power systems all of the best available cloaking software and hardware, and fleet personnel were installing hundreds of the same exterior antennas we had found so useful on the Hawks. We knew that what we were doing could be improved upon, but we didn’t have the time to waste while somebody somewhere came up with better answers. The admiral had an ancient framed motto above his desk that said, “A Day Late And A Dollar Short”. It had a red line running through it. He had to explain it to me when he noticed that I was attempting to parse the archaic statement.

  Very late in the tenth day, we paused for a moment to cheer. We had completed everything on our list, the now infamous calendar. Nearly the entire complement of our Hawk personnel were on board the Stone while its computers ground their way to a completion of diagnostics. The only crewmembers absent were actually overhead in a Hawk, and would follow us on our first test run. At 2132, we had an all green board.

  Admiral Lee wasn’t there, being off base for some emergency that required his physical presence, but he had commed us earlier in the evening to congratulate us on our accomplishment. Fortunately, his congratulations didn’t turn out to be wrong as well as premature.

  We had been forced to accept an actual destroyer captain who was sitting in as an observer, and to bail me out should I screw up.

  Carolyn looked over at me from her new position to my far right. Elian sat to my left and the chief between us. The fifth crew position was empty for the moment. We weren’t planning on firing off any missiles on this flight. We didn’t have any. The erstwhile Captain occupied a jump seat, but he was just along to observe, unless we screwed the pooch.

  It took twenty minutes to empty the hanger atmosphere, but finally the doors opened and the Stone was moved out onto the pad. I flipped a toggle switch, similar to the one found on our Hawks and we watched our panels as power slowly built up. I engaged the drive system and the ship shivered to life. The six crawlers moved away from the ship and into recesses, then the pad silently began raising us up to the surface.

  We had to wait for several long minutes as flight control opened up a large expanse of space for our personal and private use. Also, just in case we went off at an unplanned tangent, they wanted everyone else out of harm's way.
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  At last, control radioed our release and two seconds later I gave the destroyer an instruction to elevate up off the pad. It began to move up silently, all its drive systems controlled by a much more complex and sophisticated system than our tiny Hawks used, or needed.

  We rose up to an elevation of one thousand meters before I was given permission to leave the base proper. I grinned like a little boy and added in some forward thrust and we began accelerating at a stately three G’s. Carolyn was in communication with the Hawk crew that was crawling along on the same heading several kilometers ahead and to the port of us.

  We stayed at that power figure for thirty minutes as the four of us looked carefully at our panels, and several dozen fleet technicians looked at their own instruments and devices, and possibly tealeaves for all I knew.

  When nothing went ‘boom’ after thirty minutes, I pushed the acceleration up to six G’s. We remained at that power figure for ten minutes, and I was starting to think we had actually created that miracle when a technician commed us from the engine room to ask us to shut down immediately. I hadn’t seen anything that indicated a problem, but a half second after his request we shut off power to the engines.

  I asked for an immediate report, and got silence for my pains. I looked at the chief and he nodded and disappeared out the main hatch, running.

  Five minutes later the chief commed us and said, “One of the support cradles for capacitor 13 shifted slightly. It didn’t set off any of the ship alarms, but that entire room is wired up like crazy. One of the test systems alerted them to the problem. Actually, we’re not sure if it’s a problem. I’ll get back to you as soon as we know something.

  Our passenger asked, “What shifted?” I smiled, trying to figure out how to tell him what we had done to this perfectly fine ship, and decided on the truth. “Sir, we’ve stuffed the engine room with twenty additional mag bottles, along with their attendant capacitors and hardware. One of the bottles apparently shifted a few minutes ago, and a small army of fleet engineers and technician are trying to decide what if anything that means.”

  The captain stared at me and repeated, hesitantly, “Twenty mag bottles?” I smiled angelically and said, “Yes, sir, we fighter pilots like having a little extra power, for emergencies and such.” He continued to stare at me, then asked, “How many mag systems did the ship have in it before you got your hands on it?” I said, “Five, sir. Five mag bottles. Now, she has twenty-five. We think she might go a little bit faster now, but we’ll have to wait and see what all that fuss is downstairs.”

  My captain was still looking at me as if I were a lunatic. “Lieutenant, I served on a heavy cruiser three years ago. That ship, which massed something like ten times this tin can, had sixteen mag systems and could accelerate at nine G’s while firing half her lasers. Why does this ship require twenty five bottles?”

  My smile slipped away and I answered, “Sir, the bugs have something on the order of six hundred fighters, possibly one hundred destroyers, perhaps twenty cruisers and four mother ships which mass about twenty eight million tons. Each. We need a ship that is as invisible as a black hole, and which can go like stink. Their fighters are just as quick as our Dash 4’s, but they have hundreds of them. This ship may represent a means of getting one hundred capital missiles in close enough to a bug mother ship so that it won’t have the time or opportunity to kill enough of them before they take her out. That is the why of twenty-five mag bottles, sir.”

  The captain had stopped looking at me as if I were a crazed maniac, but he was still looking. He asked, “Are you the people who destroyed a bug mother ship?” Elian had been sitting quietly, and answered for us, “Sir, we are the survivors of the Essex. Forty-eight men and women who happened to be away attacking the bug mother ship when the bugs attacked our carrier. They destroyed the Essex, we destroyed one bug mother ship. I would give almost anything to exchange our people for that ship, but I can’t. What I can do, what we can do, is avenge their loss. We intend to do that sir, and this ship is beginning to look like one way to accomplish it. We, none of us, will rest until that has been accomplished. By accomplished, we mean, all bug ships, and all the bugs in them. Dead.”

  The captain said, “Well, what you’ve done to this ship is, well, I don’t know what it is, but crazy is one of them. I hope you know what you’re doing.” Carolyn spoke, “Sir, the Hawk that is accompanying us can accelerate at over 17 G’s. It originally did 10, as did this destroyer.”

  The poor captain was once again staring. “Seventeen G’s?” “Carolyn said, “To be precise, 17.127 G’s sir.”

  At this point Chief Kana reported, “Sir, we’ve been given permission to resume our tests. One of the bottles had been installed slightly cocked. It shifted position, but they’ve torqued all the fasteners and are happy with the results. Well, not happy, they think we’re too crazy to be let out of the cage, sir, but they can’t find anything to complain about. Uh, much.”

  I grinned and announced, “We’re resuming our acceleration tests.” I pushed the engines back up to 6 G’s and we resumed our inspection of, well, pretty much every instrument, meter, nut and bolt on the ship. I hated all this thoroughness. I wanted to stomp on the throttle and see if anything would fall off.

  At thirty minutes, we upped the acceleration to 10 G’s. We had seen no sign of a problem with any of the mag bottles, and they weren’t even warm yet.

  At ten minutes into this power level, and no negatives, I said, “I’m going to skip a few steps ladies and gentlemen. We’re going to see if this rust bucket can get out of the way of its own dust.” The captain looked sharply at me, whether for my use of very unprofessional terms, or my failure to Follow Procedure. Both, probably.

  I moved a finger up to the end of a scale that read “Max Accel”. From this point on, we were going to have to adjust and tinker here and there to get the acceleration we wanted.

  The ship jumped quickly to twelve G’s, then stalled at that number. I called down to the chief and he reported that the ship’s built-in safeties were holding the engines at that power level because the old and new systems were not synced properly. Carolyn was hard at work at her station, trying to find the bug in her programming. I dropped the acceleration back down to 10 G’s.

  It took her all of five minutes to snort, a sound I was familiar with. She said, “Sir, sirs, I’ve isolated the problem in this software here,” she pointed at a scrolling nightmare of what looked like hen scratches to me, but which made perfect sense to her. On a hunch, I asked, “Carolyn, who wrote that?’ She said, “I’d rather not tell you sir, with all respect. I want first dibs at throttling him.” I chuckled – it wasn’t her software.

  She took thirty minutes to fix the problem. She took an additional five minutes to cobble together from her little pad of goodies some backup software that would revert the system back to the earlier setting if something was wrong with the fix.

  I had to shut the engines off while she reset that system, which took another thirty minutes. Finally, she said, “Sir, you may proceed with your testing.”

  I brought up power to 10 G’s, held it for five minutes then once again fire walled the engines. This time our acceleration moved up smoothly, hit twelve G’s, slowed, hit thirteen, and crawled up to just over thirteen. I was delighted, but Carolyn was actually muttering, and talking privately to Chief Kana.

  She said, “Sir, may I have some time to work with this software? We’re pulling about eighty percent power now, and the chief and I think we can get more, perhaps a lot more.” I asked her, “Are there any problems with the engines now? Heat? Anything?”

  The chief answered from the engine room, “Sir, we’re starting to see a little heat now. It isn’t serious, but I recommend that we shut down and let Carolyn work on finding the problem.”

  I announced, “We’re shutting down our engines in ten minutes.” I commed the Hawk, which was pacing us off our beam, “Hawk03, give us your readings please.”

  Hawk03 repo
rted, “Sir, up until ten G’s, the ship was pretty quiet, but when you pushed it up to twelve, it got real noisy. You’re radiating like crazy right now.”

  I told the crew what the Hawk had reported and decided to shut down. We had problems, but having problems was much, much better than having, well, a slow and noisy ship.

  We drifted along toward the outer system while Carolyn and her three programmers worked on the software. The fleet programmers had a suite of very black software that allowed them to view the ship’s software in real time. It depicted the product of that software as a theoretical straight line. Curves down were bottlenecks, curves up from the straight line were also problems, but not necessarily a bottleneck. Carolyn fell in love with the software because it was far more sophisticated than her own. With it she was able to pinpoint the specific routines that were not working properly, and she made some educated guesses as to what to do.

  After six hours, Carolyn was so fatigued that she could barely sit up straight, but that fabulous software was now reading a nearly straight line in sym mode.

  I announced that we were resuming our test, and slowly increased our power. At ten G’s I asked the Hawk to begin giving us constant readings. We inched up through eleven, then twelve, and then thirteen. The Hawk said, “Sir, the Stone is making more noise than the Hawks do, but it’s generating so little right now that I think we could use the same general rules of thumb for it as we do for the Hawks.”