Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk)

by Little, Robert

  I looked at her and realized in the depths of my being that I had already married her, already given her my love. I said, “I am married to you, have been since we exchanged our vows on the street. Yes, this is what I want.” She kissed me and giggled, “Robert sign your name please, people are waiting. There is a war, you know?”

  I signed my name and the woman said, “Congratulations. Next?”

  We walked out of the building and Nastya said, “Where are your friends? Elian, Chief Kana, and Carolyn?” I grinned and told her the name of the cantina. She said, “Robert, please introduce your friends to your wife.”

  I laughed out loud. I said, “Say that again!” She looked startled, once again for just the merest moment, than she laughed, “My darling husband, before you drag me to your chamber and ravish me, many times, you must take me to your friends. To show them your wife. Then, of course, the ravishing.”

  I splurged for a private conveyance, which vehicle had an archaic word in script that said, “Taxi” on it. I briefly wondered at the possible connection between taxes and a people mover.

  I waited for the hatch to open and then helped my helpless black belt wife into the vehicle. We sat and I gave the name of the cantina. The hatch slid down and the vehicle lurched into motion. This was one of the first times in my life that I had taken a private conveyance anywhere. They were very expensive on Earth, and our family knew how to pinch credits.

  We passed through streets with hordes of sailors and civilians, intermingling with the usual small amount of tension, but with no animosity, especially now. It took twenty minutes for the somewhat decrepit vehicle to finally reach the cantina where it shuddered to a stop. Poor maintenance, or perhaps none. Age, certainly.

  I paid via my pad and we stepped out into a crystal clear and very balmy evening. It was my first recollection of the weather. We walked, with my hand growing a little numb from her delicate fingers, which I realized belatedly, were incredibly strong.

  The entrance opened for us and we entered into bedlam. It was early yet, but the place was full and noisy. I input a query into my pad and an arrow popped into view, leading us to the left. We followed the arrow through a seething crowd of people, through a crowded dance floor and into an area of tables, a large contingent of which were of course crowded together. Nastya pointed and said, “Robert, my love, your friends.”

  Elian saw me, despite being somewhere along the path to being inebriated. He shouted and a loud cheer rang up, voiced by what seemed like the entire Hawk and Genera complement. The chief stood and waved his hand and two chairs appeared magically.

  I stepped forward and then paused, not sure what to say. Elian, of course came to my rescue. He shouted, “Oh my aching Aunt Agatha! You married her! You are so very much smarter than you look! Let me kiss the bride! I must kiss the bride, if only so she may know what it feels like to kiss a real man.”

  A huge shout went up, and Carolyn leaped to her apparently unsteady feet. She rounded the table and leaped into my arms. She kissed me somewhat inaccurately on the corner of my mouth and then shouted, more or less in my ear, “Robert, Oh Robert! I am so happy for you!” She promptly dropped me and hugged Nastya, who hugged her right back. They parted and I saw that Nastya was crying. Immediately, Carolyn began crying, and they hugged again.

  The chief approached and I tensed. He was going to crush me like a bug. I almost cried, but at last the sensation of being dropped into a gravity well abated and the chief said, loudly, “Lieutenant Padilla. May I offer my congratulations to you and your lovely bride. May the two of you live a life of joy and happiness, discovering in each day a new reason to fall in love with your heart’s content. May each morn bring the sun of happiness into the dark recesses of your soul, may your loins surge with the seed of life, and may that I be granted by the God of mercy and of might, to dandle your hopefully take-after-your-wife looks offspring on my knee, where I shall tell them tales of heroism and courage, and perhaps, a tale of their father as well.”

  The room erupted into laughter, not the least of which sprang from Nastya. We suffered through a seemingly interminable line of smiling faces; bone crushing handshakes and not a few attempts to kiss with an exploratory pilgrimage to the Mecca of her lovely mouth via his tongue, my brand new wife. Beer, of course.

  When finally the line ended, we were led to our seats, and I was handed a drink that I sniffed carefully. Elian laughed delightedly and said, “Cider, my poor, weakly young friend. Cider it is. May I ask, Mrs. Padilla, or Mr. Tretiakov, as it may be, what the lovely bride wishes to imbibe this fine evening?”

  The room hushed and Nastya found everyone waiting for her response. She looked at me and with a grin said, quite loudly, “Elian Turner, if mere cider can produce such a man as my husband, I fear for the world if he were to change to something more powerful, such as you yourself have lately become so well acquainted with! No! I say no again! I shall drink cider!”

  The room roared with laughter and Elian's was the loudest. He flushed with happiness and said, somewhat quietly, “Nastya, you have married my best friend in all the universe. He is all that is good, and none that is bad, save for the cider thing. I wish for you happiness and joy, and six or eight ankle biters, who, the lot of ‘em, look like their mother.”

  Nastya blushed, but stood up and gently kissed Elian on the cheek, then the other cheek, then, very lightly, the lips. She said, so quietly that only those people in close proximity could hear, “Elian Turner, you are Robert’s best friend, and we could not ask for a better man. When there is the time, we wish to marry in the military way, among our friends. I know that my lovely husband would wish for you to stand up with him, be his best man.”

  Elian looked at her and said, “I could not be the best man, were I in the company of Robert. But, I accept your offer. Where do you wish the military ceremony to take place? She said, “I would have loved to marry Robert on the Essex, but she is gone, and with her so many wonderful people. I choose the Netherlands, where we have friends, all of us.”

  Elian turned to the chief, who at the moment had a foaming beer mug at his lips. Elian said, “Master Chief Kana! This ravishing beauty with limited good sense wishes a military wedding on the Netherlands. You must alert the honor guard, we must have drums, and bugles, and swords! Yes, we shall have swords, under which my best friend and his near sighted bride shall walk up to the captain, who will most certainly ask Nastya if she is seriously considering marrying my charming but slightly dim and very special friend, the Robertito, if you catch my meaning.”

  Nastya looked at him in puzzlement for that very short moment that I was learning was so typical of her, then she blushed, but recovered lightning quick, “Ah, Elian, as you know, some men cast their imagination, their fears, their knowledge of their own, shall we say, inadequacies, onto other men, in the hopes that the wishing will make it so.”

  There was a moment of puzzled silence as their muddled brains parsed the fairly convoluted sentence, then they roared with laughter. The chief put his beloved beer down for a moment and said to Elian, “Ah, so much is now clear, my diminutive friend.”

  Even louder laughter greeted this less vague reply. The beer, you see.

  We spent two hours in the company of my friends. We did not mention our lost companions, but they were on our minds, and we all, in our own ways, made a vow to wreak vengeance on these beings who had come into our home and destroyed so many lives.

  At midnight I stood and found that Nastya was at least as quick if not a bit quicker to get to her feet, which did not seem in the slightest to have become cold.

  We endured more congratulations and left. Another private conveyance returned us to Nastya’s hotel, to our room, our bed, the beginning of our life together.

  We both had to return to duty the next day, but much to our surprise, we received comm calls from our respective superiors and were told not to come in until the following day, the result, apparently, of very good friends in low places. On the he
els of these highly pleasing messages we received a comm from the Krakow, telling us that our presence was required. We also had friends in high places. We would join specified members of our Hawk teams for another meeting, similar in form and function to what we had held for the Netherlands. So much for a honeymoon.

  We blew another amount of money on another creaky private taxi – or possibly the same one – to the base, where we discovered that a shuttle had been standing by for us. We flew directly up to the Krakow. Mere moments after saluting and requesting permission to come aboard, we were met by two aides, who somewhat brusquely motioned us into a brisk near-trot through seemingly endless corridors with antiquated ‘knee knockers’, air-tight hatches that had been all the rage one hundred years ago, until someone important got tired of banging his or her shins.

  We arrived at a berthing area where we were met by Carolyn and Elian, each of whom carried a change of fresh clothing for us. Carolyn and Nastya hugged once again, this time gently and soberly, respectively, and then Carolyn dragged Nastya off to shower and change. Elian pointed imperiously down the hall, not wishing to take my hand. I grinned and zipped into the changing room, undressed, showered and reappeared in, oh, a couple of minutes. Guys can do that.

  Apparently, so can girls. Nastya’s hair was very long, reaching to the middle of her back, but she had washed, dried and put it into some sort of a wrap or bun, something that allowed her to wear her garrison cap. It was my plan to learn how she did that. I expected to spend a great deal of time observing her doing this very thing. Both the doing and the undoing.

  We met with our people, who had been waiting for us. They began applauding as we appeared, and Nastya took my hand, my unresisting hand in a very un-officer like manner.

  I was greeted up front by Elian and company, who had things well in hand, as did I, come to think of it. We were to offer the same suite of services to the Krakow crews we had given to the Netherlands, including work ups, crew assessments, inspections of the Dash 6’s and Dash 4’s, plus of course, the six Hawks, four of whom were configured in the now accepted attack configuration, two as long range scouts.

  Just a few minutes before 1300 we were ushered into one of the hanger decks which had been aired up and given a bewildering assortment of seating. It appeared that the entire complement of the ship was present. As it happened, we were wrong. There were now two additional carriers in close orbit to the Netherlands, and their pilots, navigators, some additional technical, maintenance and support staff, and Hawk crews were also in attendance. We did not have enough time to work through each ship, one at a time, not even enough time to properly help one ship, but we would do what we could. I later heard that we had something on the order of one thousand personnel in attendance.

  Virtually all our Hawk crews were in attendance, including Charley Squadron. Elian and the chief worked out schedules so that after this mass meeting, each ship would get sufficient Hawk personnel to allow them to do work ups, starting with individual maneuvers, moving up to squad tactics and finally to joint exercises with other ships. We were given one week to do what we could.

  I was introduced and walked up toward a raised podium. As I approached, the entire mass of men and women rose to their feet and began applauding. It bewildered me, but it did not stop me from stepping up and standing with a grinning face. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know why they were applauding. Was it because of my obvious good sense in marrying Nastya? I didn’t know and I could hardly ask.

  I pointed down to the Hawk crews, who now sported patches similar to the one we had worn on the Essex. They had retained the name of the Essex on the patch, but it now had, underneath, the words Hawk Attack Squadron. Each squadron had a large letter denoting which squadron.

  Just a few moments earlier, Elian had showed me the new patch. I was intensely moved that the name Essex would live on, even if the ship did not.

  They stopped finally, and resumed their seats, in those cases where they had one. I looked around at my brothers and sisters and smiled. I said, “Once, we were few, and we did not know of the coming threat. We were on a voyage of exploration, with a small number of fighters as protection against the unknown. We were attacked, and most of us died at the hands of a race of beings that made no attempt to talk, made no effort to communicate peacefully with us. They killed my brothers and sisters, my comrades in arms. We found an elderly, retired relic of a past age in a hold of the Essex, and we crammed into her as many mag bottles as she could hold, we replaced her puny twenty-five cm laser barrels with thirty-five, and later forty cm barrels. We took that war craft and we turned it into a black hole of death. We…”

  I was interrupted by cheers and shouts that slowly changed into a chant. ‘Hawk, Hawk, Hawk, Hawk’. It got louder and I stood in almost awe as the sound washed over me.

  They ended in a cheer and subsided back down into their seats. I grinned again and continued, “We ventured out with our new weapon, seeking our self-declared enemy. We found him, or her, or it. Whatever!” More laughter. I found that I was having a great deal of fun. In that moment, I realized that this, what I was doing right now, might actually have a greater impact on the war than anything I had done in space.

  “We easily penetrated their outer and shell and ghosted around their immense mother ship. We saw no freighters, no cargo ships, no passenger liners. Instead, we saw only weapons of war, fighters of immense power, destroyers and a cruiser that would chill your soul. The mother ship, we later discovered, masses approximately twenty eight million tons. On that journey, we sent two presents, one of which the bugs rejected. The other blew a hole in the side of that ship, and it seemed as if they barely noticed. Oh, they did get angry, and sent some representatives who tried to impede our exit. We killed them.” More cheers.

  I waited until they stopped, and said, “Officers of the Netherlands, the Krakow and the venerable Lexington, do not cheer. Men and women of our beloved Fleet, do not rejoice in the death of a handful, when so many thousands remain.”

  That silenced them.

  I spoke on, less poetically now that I had their minds engaged. I described the bug’s ability to adapt and adopt. I said, finally, that our last assault sent seventy two mark 65’s in from three directions, and a mere handful struck home, doing what we assumed was negligible damage. I said, “That was our surprise. Their surprise was the destruction of one destroyer and sixty five fighters!”

  They didn’t know whether to cheer or not, and I held my hand up to forestall anything. I said, “If we cannot kill their mother ships, we will lose. It is black and white. We are expecting a replacement for the Mark 65, and that replacement is both an absolute requirement, and unavailable. Admiral Lee has sent his aides, along with federal marshals to earth to help and encourage our reluctant vendor to see the wisdom of giving into Fleet hands the tool with which we may destroy our enemy and preserve the lives of our children.”

  Deathly silence followed this statement. I knew there would be some serious questions concerning my open discussion of this disastrous situation, but these men and women had to know the truth. It actually astonished me that I had been pushed up onto this platform with absolutely no ‘guidance’ from any superiors. Perhaps my vague attachment to Admiral Lee put me into a category in which nobody felt they had the right or duty to guide my very junior perspective of things into the ‘correct’ path.

  I concluded ten minutes later, “This week, we will not get much sleep, my fellow pilots and navigators, maintenance crews and probably cooks and bakers. The officers who are tasked with leading this fresh assault out into the Void do not want to hear about lack of sleep, they do no want to hear how this or that is not possible. They are not going to listen to reasons why not. They will demand from us our all. In the coming weeks, some of us will give our all. From this moment, we will have no life, save for our cockpits, our controls, our sensors, and our weapons. These Hawk crews who sit off to the side, they will go to your ships, they will tell you wh
at you must do for our survival, and what you must do to kill. Between those two limits, there is no choice to make. We must kill, or we will be killed.”

  I stepped down and Elian stood off to the edge. I walked up to him and said, “Your turn.” He stared at and said, “You are never going to speak first, ever again, you son of a bitch.”

  I started, but he smiled hugely at me and said, almost under his breath, “Well, here goes the act that came on after Elvis Presley.”

  Before I could ask what he could possible have meant he walked briskly up to the podium, where he received a standing ovation. That shut the man up, temporarily.

  Chief Kana received the biggest ovation of all. It thundered and thundered on, and despite his awkward effort to still them, the men and women, officers and enlisted applauded and yelled even louder. Before this afternoon he had been a well-known Master Chief. Now, in this moment he became a living legend.

  Served the man right, his bear hug almost killed me.

  The meeting finally, mercifully ended. For the chief, it had been extraordinarily difficult to stand and listen to the tumult. I think that if it had been possible for this man to encounter one situation that he would run from, that would have been it. As it was, he stood like an immovable object, an ancient and fierce warrior who was still standing, still unbowed despite all that the enemies of humanity could hurl at him.