Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk)

by Little, Robert

  That took five minutes to set up, ten more for all captains to get on the net. Admiral Chin said, “We have a problem, one that threatens the mission. There exists the possibility that the manufacturer of our Mark 65 has sold Fleet unmodified missiles, and has falsified their records to show that they were modified. We have the evidence of the almost total destruction of 48 missiles that our Hawk squadron launched just two weeks ago. Only five made it to their target, causing negligible damage. If twenty-four missiles had successfully reached their target, which is on average what we could have expected, it is our belief that the mother ships would have been seriously damaged. Instead, we lost three Hawks and their crews. I want you to carefully, very carefully, appoint a handful of officers to visually inspect every single one of your missiles. I’m sending over instructions. This inspection is to be kept absolutely dark. You will station marines at the entry to your missiles storage or launch bays, as the case may be. You will report your findings to me, directly, and to no other officer. You must inspect every single missile. I am told that the procedure takes approximately fifteen minutes per missile. I am putting a hold on our departure from Lubya. Any questions? If not, please expedite this.”

  I noticed that he asked if there were any questions but assumed that there were none. He turned to us and asked, “How did you learn of this?” Captain Yamata said, “Sir, after the disastrous performance of the Mark 65, Lieutenant Padilla asked his civilian missile technicians to go over their sensor readings from the attack and try to determine the reason for their failure to penetrate the bugs missile defenses. That report was hand delivered to Lieutenant Padilla some few hours ago. He shuttled to my ship and inspected four missiles on the Stone, in my presence. We discovered that all four missiles reported the same exact modifications. That is to say, they all said they had been modified at exactly the same time on the same day by the same tech. That is not possible. At this time, the captains of the other two Dresdens are personally overseeing the inspections of their missiles. There exists the possibility that the senior chief on Captain Taylor’s Zhukov knows something. She has sequestered him pending an investigation, but it seems certain that he knew at least something. At the last report, my crew has found every missile so far inspected to bear the same exact message.”

  The admiral looked at us and said, “I’m of two feelings. One, of extreme anger and horror at what has been done, at the lives that were lost, for no return. On the other hand, I am immensely relieved to have discovered this before we launched our attack. Lieutenant Padilla, I want to commend you for your actions. They represent an unusual degree of, um, common sense shall we say, and of intelligence. I want you to return to the Stone with Captain Yamata and report back to me and me alone when you have your figures. As I understand it, you believe, or hope, that there may be some missiles that were actually either modified or manufactured after the cut off date with the modifications built in, and which therefore may be effective, is that correct?” Captain Yamata said, “Yes sir.”

  Admiral Chin nodded his head and said, “Gentlemen, return to your ships. You have my thanks for some fine work.”

  We saluted and left. We spoke not a single word on the return ride. On boarding the Stone, we walked to the missile room and passed through the two marine sentries. We learned that they were halfway through the inspections, and had found the same exact information on every single one of them. Captain Yamata asked Chief Kana, who at my suggestion had been brought over to assist, “Chief, in your experience, is it possible that the manufacturer simply put the same information on all these missiles, but did in fact perform the prescribed work?” The chief shook his head, “No sir, fleet regs require that every time the inspection hatch is opened, the missile makes an entry of the date and time, and the name of the person opening the hatch. The only possible way that all these entries could be identical is for someone to have falsified them, which itself would be technically difficult to do. There is absolutely no other possibility.”

  The captain and I pitched in and within four hours we had a total of one hundred twenty falsified missile inspection reports. Captain Yamata returned to his office to use the secure comm to report in. It seemed that his report was not much different from that of the other two Dresdens. No difference at all.

  We ate evening chow on board the Stone and later that evening were ordered to return back to the Yorktown for a briefing. The ship was buzzing with talk by now. The planned launch of the mission was just hours away and yet the usual preparations for getting underway had not begun.

  Once we were settled around the admiral’s large conference table, he said, “Gentlemen, we have a problem. Out of the total load out of Mark 65 missiles, only two hundred and fourteen appear to be modified correctly, or at all. The floor is open for discussion.”

  Present was the admiral and three of his senior staff, the captain of the Yorktown along with his exec and missile officer, Captains Yamata, Zhukov and Goins, representing the Dresdens and myself. I felt distinctly out of my depth, but I was treated as if I belonged there.

  After hearing from everyone else, he turned to me and asked me for my recommendation. I had been thinking about what I would do were I in charge, and responded, “Sir we have in system three Dresdens that have been heavily modified by our own crews on Fleet Base Jupiter. I have every reason to believe they are as quiet and stealthy as possible. They are capable of carrying three hundred sixty capital missiles between then, and the Hawks are capable of carrying ninety-six. We could spread the modified missiles between the three Dresdens, load up the Hawks with sixteen Dash 15h’s and g’s, and send us back. We – the Dresdens - have the best chance of getting within missile range of the bug fleet, and I believe that the Hawks can fight off the bug fighters, at least long enough to get the missiles away.”

  The admiral asked, “Based on the defenses you faced on your last assault, what is your assessment of the chances for success?’ I said, “Sir, very high.” He looked at me and asked, quietly, “And Lieutenant Padilla, what will that success cost us in the way of Hawks and Dresdens?” I said, “Sir, it will, it will cost some blood.”

  He continued to look at me for a long minute, then sat back and asked, “Gentlemen, I have to agree with the lieutenant that the Hawks and Dresdens offer the best opportunity for success; however, I would like some discussion on ways to increase the chances, and to decrease the severe losses we would expect to take.”

  After several minutes of discussion it seemed that there weren’t any fighter experts among his advisors, and he seemed to realize it, albeit reluctantly. He turned back to me and asked, “You’ve been a fighter pilot, you know the capabilities of the newly modified -4’s and the -6. Is there any way to utilize them?”

  I had been thinking very hard along these lines, and said, “Sir, the fighters, if they were launched at long range and shut off their drives, could come in with us. In fact, I believe that there is a way to remotely pilot the fighters so that the crews could remain aboard the Dresdens until they were within, say, twenty million kilometers. Then, we could transfer the crews over to their fighters, and they would be fresh for the assault. That would greatly increase our missile defenses. On our last fight the Hawks killed sixty-five fighters in just a few minutes, but ran out of missiles. We can use the fighters in much the same way, by integrating them into an organized unit. It would require, um, perhaps three or four days at the outside to write and debug the code and ensure that it works.”

  Admiral Chin asked, “Lieutenant, you seem very confident that this extremely unorthodox approach would work. What evidence can you offer us to support your belief?”

  I looked at the admiral and realized, suddenly, that he knew that what I was proposing was doable, or at least that I believed it was technically possible. He wasn’t asking me to turn his disbelief into belief, he was telling me that I needed to present my proposal in such a way that it was reasonable and logical, allowing him to adopt it. He was going to do it.


  I discussed our various modifications to the Hawks and their processors. How we were able to control all the Hawks from one ship, and how we were able to fight them as if we were one ship.

  After ten minutes of questioning, the admiral seemed to have established a foundation for accepting my proposal. He sat up and said, “As of this moment, our launch date is canceled. Lieutenant, how many days will it take to develop this new system?” I took a deep breath and said, “Sir, it will require seven days to modify our software and give minimal training to the fighter crews.”

  He stood and said, somberly, “Lieutenant, I assume that you will keep Fleet informed?” He was not exactly smiling, but I sensed his strong approval. I said, “Yes sir, daily.” He nodded and said, “Exactly, every four hours, just as you said. Everyone, we have a lot of work to do. Let’s get on with it.”

  In later years, all I would remember of that week was a blur, constant handling of detail after detail until the world seemed to consist of people coming to me with questions for which only Elian, myself, Carolyn or the chief could answer.

  Carolyn wrote the initial outlines for the code for the fighters and the Dresdens, and then handed the balance of the work to her three programmers. Once they understood the concepts, they were off and running, although she was looking over their shoulders. Genius that she was, she trusted no one.

  We had three carriers, with nearly two hundred fighters. It was decided that this would be a roll of the dice – the bugs were continually expanding their search patterns and it was now only a matter of time until they got a sniff of Lubya, if they hadn’t already.

  From our standpoint, if one destroyer could enter the system, it could kill the planet. Despite the fact that it would take as many as fifteen years of sublight travel to reach the planet, we could not be absolutely certain that we could find and kill the ship or ships. The lives of six million people trumped ninety nine point ninety nine percent certainty.

  We would take the carriers forward to within one to two hundred million kilometers, launch their fighters, accelerate them to a modest velocity and coast toward the location of the bug flotillas, which continued to remain tightly grouped. We would attack all three flotillas with fighters, with one group containing the Hawks and Dresdens, ready to exploit an opening, attempting to get inside the formation and launch a huge amount of the dirty missiles at the third, while expending our clean ones at the other two, a change suggested by none other than Admiral Chin.

  We believed, or hoped, that the bugs would concentrate all their attention on the huge amount of dirty missiles directed at that third group and would not have enough time or resources to deal with the real attacks. We had to have success with this attack, and if it meant the loss of every single ship, but achieved our goal, we would consider it a success. Well, Lubya would consider it a success. We would be dead.

  In those odd moments when I had a moment to spare, I thought about the almost ridiculous state of affairs. Elian and I were mere lieutenants, and just recently promoted at that. Yet the fact remained that the only people who knew how to wage this type of attack were we four, including Carolyn and the chief.

  I faithfully informed the admiral every four hours. We, or that is to say, Carolyn and her three exhausted helpers, put together the code, and we tried it out with a handy Dresden and a flight of fighters. It worked almost perfectly first time out. Almost perfectly, in this case, would get us all dead. By the end of the second day, we were ready to begin workups. On the third day we attempted a full rehearsal, with one Dresden and seventy-two fighters. The Dresden didn’t have enough ‘throughput’ as Carolyn called it, to handle that many separate ‘attachments’, her term for the fighters.

  The chief asked her, if the ship’s processors didn’t have the capacity, why didn’t we just drop in three extra field processors, of the type marines used when they set up a forward field base? The processors were available, and it was a simple task to set them up in the berthing area where, interestingly, marines used to be housed. Presto digito, problem solved.

  The fourth day, we resumed testing, and after solving a couple of minor problems, a Dresden accelerated away from fleet with seventy-two fighters in tow, their pilots and navigators prudently along for the ride this time around. We maneuvered the fighters as if they were an extension of the Dresden. Again, minor problems were encountered, and solved. After eight hours of testing, we ran into a more basic problem. Keeping the fighter systems up and operating, even with minimal requirements, used up their reactor fuel – the water. They would not have enough time on their systems to be able to go forward with the assault and return to a carrier. In fact, not even close.

  It was decided to take along one tanker per Dresden and refuel the fighters after we put their crews back on them. It would be too noisy to allow anywhere near the bugs, so we decided to shut its drive down well before topping off the fighter tanks. Problem solved.

  On the fifth day we rehearsed with all three Dresdens and fighter components from each of the carriers. It was a mess, as expected, but we ironed out the bugs, and decided we would use four shuttles per Dresden to get the crews off and then back on the fighters. We would abandon them as well, if we had to.

  On the sixth day we conducted a full dress rehearsal. It was chaotic, but the core of people we had used from each ship taught everyone else on their ship and it worked. Clunky, weird as hell, but it worked.

  On the seventh day, we rested. Some of us.

  Our small Fleet accelerated out of orbit the next day. We four slept through most of the previous day, and other people handled the inevitable horde of questions. We had to be fresh. I would not be in a Hawk this time around, and it bothered me greatly. I was at heart a fighter pilot, and I was now stuck on a destroyer, giving orders to men and women who would carry out a plan with my fingerprints all over it. I didn’t like this responsibility; it gave me nightmares on those rare moments when I could sleep. I did get to talk to my wife on a daily basis. She missed me terribly, she said. Something to do, she casually mentioned, with her – our - recent introduction to sex. I had to agree with her that it had been, um, fun. We ought to do it again sometime.

  She suggested that we should consult an ‘expert’, as she put it, so as to benefit from the experience neither of us had acquired but could possibly utilize. She managed to word her suggestion in such a way that my ego was not deflated. Rather the opposite effect – I liked experimentation.

  Fleet carefully negotiated a series of jumps, different from our previous movements, designed to mask the location of Lubya. We came out in space over two hundred million kilometers behind the bugs. We immediately sent out the Hawks, all of them, in an expanding cloud, looking for any sign of scouts. We spotted and carefully noted the location of two of them, tagging along well behind their flotilla. We left them alone, and adjusted our planned incursion to miss them.

  The Hawk scouts continued to look for bugs, but the attack craft returned for a short refresher nap, and fuel.

  We began launching the fighters and placing them in position around a Dresden. Shuttles removed the crews and ferried them over to the destroyer, which was going to be packed to the point that its environmental systems would barely be able to keep up.

  It took twelve hours to get all two hundred sixteen fighters positioned. The Hawks would form an escort well outside the shell of Dresdens and their little chicks. If a fighter or small bug craft was encountered along the route, a Hawk would ghost in to energy weapon range on minimal power and attempt to take it out before any possibility of communication. We hoped. We didn’t know, but we now had no time left. We had to finish it.

  Finally, the Dresdens began a slow acceleration away from the three carriers and their escorts, which were going to remain in place, shutting down virtually everything save environmental and enough power to keep it alive. Nothing else.

  The Dresdens moved forward at three gravities for twelve hours. At the last minute, someone had thought up the idea of a
ttaching external tanks to the shuttles, so that they could expedite the refueling. We measured the shuttles radiation and found them, due to their very small power plant, to be only mildly noisy. We place it directly behind a Dresden in an effort to mask it’s engine.

  Two days of intense stress passed, almost seeming to take a lifetime. We had sixteen Hawks forward of us, sweeping the region of space for anything. They found and killed three fighters. In each case, the scouts were able to coast up to within less than twenty thousand kilometers at which time both lasers fired at what was practically point blank range. We would not have been able to get off a signal in that time, we didn’t see any sign of any kind of a signal from the fighters, and we worried anyway. All it would take would be for one destroyer to appear in our path and we would be screwed.

  We approached to within twenty million kilometers and began returning the crews to their fighters. It took three hours for that task, and another two hours to top off everyone’s tanks. We were now sixteen million kilometers distant from the flotilla. Improbable as it seemed, we now had over two hundred fighters, armed with a mixture of the two new 15’s, forty-eight Hawks, also armed with sixteen anti-fighter missiles each, and the Dresdens, each of which was armed with anti-fighter missiles and one hundred twenty capital missiles.