Ghost Wing (The Ragnarok Saga Book 4)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  What it seemed like the aliens could not do was maneuver very well at such high velocities. She filed away that information for future reference. It might be vital in some future battle. They tried to evade the missiles, attempting to scatter in all directions, but they couldn’t turn fast enough to make a difference. More laser fire took out another dozen of the Wasps’ missile attack.

  The human missiles tore into the enemy formation, lighting up one ship after another in a furious burst of energy. Sam breathed a sigh of relief as she saw each vessel vanish from her radar. No super-advanced shields on these ships. They were more advanced than what humanity had, but not by such a massive margin that the advantage was insurmountable. When the series of explosions concluded none of the ten alien fighters were anything more than drifting dust and debris.

  Sam heard the other pilots give a series of whoops and battle cries over the radio. She grinned, feeling much the same herself. The enemy wasn’t unstoppable. They could be hurt. Their ships could be destroyed. That made success in this crazy mission a hell of a lot more possible. But only if they could keep the Hermes in one piece!

  “All right, everyone. Let’s focus on those missiles. We need to take them apart or it’s going to be a very long walk home,” Sam said.

  Fifteen enemy missiles still cruised through space toward the Hermes. If they were anything like the human missiles, even a few of them impacting might cripple or destroy the ship. The enemy had knowingly sacrificed ten fighters for a shot at taking out the human carrier ship. It implied a level of callousness toward their pilots that Sam was uncomfortable with - unless those ships were drones of some sort. But it also told her they understood how important the mothership would be to their smaller craft. Without the Hermes to help them repair small bits of damage and re-arm, they wouldn’t be able to engage in any sort of protracted campaign out there.

  Sam opened up with her guns, but it was too early. She wasn’t near enough to target the missile yet. “Shit!”

  They were going to come close, but they weren’t going to quite make it.

  It wasn’t possible to get any more speed out of the Wasps. They were already doing twenty gravities of acceleration. The ships just weren’t capable of handling more than that. It was a dead race to see if they could close in time.

  “I’ve got a lock!” Xiang said.

  Sam watched one of the missiles disappear from her radar a moment later. That was one down! She was almost close enough to blast another. A few more seconds...! There - the sensors said she had a firm lock on the target. She fired a short burst from her railgun, blowing the missile apart. All around her the other ships were going after their own objectives, but most of their fire was missing. The rockets were simply too fast and too agile.

  The Hermes wasn’t defenseless either. Her anti-missile guns spewed iron pellets into space, desperately trying to track the enemy missiles as they shot in. It took down one missile and then another. Sam chased a second missile, but she knew she wasn’t going to catch it in time. One of her wing-mates managed to get a shot in and took the target out.

  In all, they managed to nail eight of the missiles. Seven made it past every bit of defense they could mount. Most of the enemy missiles stabbed home near the middle of the ship, but several of the shots came in at the front and stern as well. Sam held her breath, hoping the Hermes would be able to survive the assault.

  12

  Max watched helplessly as the missiles streaked toward the Hermes. He’d done everything he could. The anti-missile systems were automated. He’d plotted the best course he could, but the Hermes wasn’t fast enough to escape the attack nor nimble enough to evade it. The fighter wing was taking down one target after another, but he’d already done the mental math. It wasn’t going to be enough.

  Sensors couldn’t tell what sort of payload the missiles had. He wanted to swallow hard and missed having a throat to do so. He tried to close his eyes and not watch, but there wasn’t any way to do that either. Oh, he could turn his attention away from the ship’s sensors if he wanted, but that didn’t seem like the right thing to do.

  The impacts rocked the ship when the missiles struck home. One after another, all in the space of a couple of seconds, seven missiles slammed into the Hermes. The ship’s automated systems blared warnings. Multiple hull breaches, damaged hangar bay, a torn up anti-missile system, and more. Max waited for the series of fiery secondary explosions he felt confident were about to engulf the ship - but nothing came.

  That was unexpected. The Hermes was still intact. They still had power, although a few parts of the ship had lost connection to the engines. Max flickered to security cameras in the damaged sections and understood almost immediately what had happened.

  “Hermes, are you all right?” Sam asked over the radio.

  “We’re still here,” Max said. He checked the other crew to make sure his statement was correct, but the computer systems hadn’t been compromised at all. None of the missiles had come close to damaging that critical bit of hardware. If they had...it would have been a very different story!

  “What happened? I’m doing a flyby, and I don’t see evidence of explosions at all. Just a bunch of holes punched in the hull. Did they fire duds?” Sam asked.

  Max had to laugh. “No. SABOT rounds! They were trying to take the ship more or less intact. If we’d had an atmosphere on board, it would have sucked the air and everything else nearby out with each missile’s exit hole. With no air, the rounds just punched through like a knife stabbing a soda can.”

  Anti-personnel missiles, not explosive ones. If they’d been a human-manned ship, they would have killed at least half the crew and left the others helplessly cut off from each other. As it was, there was some damage, but nothing they couldn’t set the auto-repair bots working at quickly enough. Max went to ask Gurgle to set repairs into motion but saw he’d already started. Max checked over the work carefully, but Gurgle had triaged the repairs very well. He seemed to have the knack for the work Max had hoped.

  “Max, if they were expecting to take out most of the ship, doesn’t that mean they will want to board and kill anyone else on board?” Sam asked.

  “You’re absolutely right,” Max said. Alarmed, he initiated a scan of nearby space. If a ship was laying out there being quiet, it would be incredibly difficult to detect. If he was trying to set up an ambush, where would he put the boarding party?

  “Sam, send some fighters out to screen space ahead of us. I’m going to limp along on half thrust for a bit. We’re just braking right now anyway. We can bleed off some more speed as we get closer,” Max said. This was part and parcel of travel in space - the more you accelerated during the first part of the trip, the longer you’d need to decelerate at the end. They still had a lot of velocity to dump before they approached Neptune or they risked shooting straight past the target instead of stopping there.

  “You want them to think you’re hurt worse than you are?” Sam asked.

  “That’s my hope. I’m guessing they have a ship somewhere ahead of us. It would be nice if we could take it out before it takes us out,” Max said.

  “Will do,” Sam replied. “Wings One, Two, and Three - move ahead of the Hermes, seek and destroy any enemy targets in our path. The other three squadrons will spell you in a bit.”

  Max watched the Wasps streak away from him on his sensors.

  It was becoming easier as the days went by to think of the Hermes as his body, the sensors and video cameras as his eyes. Early on it had felt strange, like he was piloting a simulator. But each day that passed found him growing more comfortable with the new normal. He hoped his pilots were likewise becoming accustomed. The growing familiarity he felt with his systems made him more efficient at controlling the ship. With a little more practice everything would become automatic, second nature, just like moving or breathing had in his old body.

  The wings spread out as they shot ahead to screen his approach. Somewhere out there was the enemy. He knew they ha
d to be ready to take advantage of the SABOT attack. Soften up the inhabitants of the Hermes, then strike. He figured they would try to board and seize the ship.

  Which said something about the aliens, but he wasn’t quite sure what. His money was on curiosity. It stood to reason that most races venturing into space were probably innately curious. That was mostly what had driven humanity into space, the need to see what was on the other side of the mountain. And then the need to go build a farm there, of course, no matter how inhospitable it might be. Max grinned. Curiosity and stubbornness - perhaps those were humanity’s defining characteristics!

  Those missiles could have been tipped with explosives. If they had, the Hermes would be dust by now. The hull could probably take a few hits, but seven direct hits at the same time? There was no way he’d have survived that.

  No, they were out there. But where?

  Max watched the scan data coming in from his fighter wings, looking for anything out of the ordinary that might indicate a hidden ship. If it was somewhere ahead, it was damned near invisible.

  “I don’t think they’re buying it,” Sam said. “No sign of enemy ships at all.”

  “I’m watching the same scans you are,” Max replied. He was annoyed, but not really at Sam. The aliens should be coming out of hiding! He couldn’t afford to keep the thrusters on low very much longer. Either this would work and they’d fool the aliens into striking, or it wouldn’t and he’d need to resume course within the next few minutes.

  “Stand by to return to the ship. All wings, land in the bays. Bay three is damaged - wing three will need to wait on standby until it’s cleaned up,” Max said.

  The fighters out front flipped and hit their thrusters, slowing down so the Hermes could catch up with them. That was when Max saw the alien ship. It was almost invisible without thrust running, dark hull against the black space. He only spotted it because it blotted out a couple of stars for a second. Max did a size estimate on the vessel and immediately knew this was no shuttle full of combat troops. There was only one alien ship that large in the system. This was their main ship.

  “Abort the return. All fighters move to engage the enemy at the coordinates I am sending,” Max said.

  “Nothing there. I’m almost on top of that spot, and-“

  Whatever the pilot was about to say was cut off. A flash of light lit up space. The beam lit up his fighter for only a second before it turned into a fireball. Where the Wasp had been there was now a slowly expanding cloud of gas and dust.

  “Shit! All pilots, evasive maneuvers as you approach. Move to an envelopment globe. We don’t want whatever weapon that was turned on more than one of us at a time,” Sam said.

  Max saw a link for an incoming private line. It was Sam. “Any idea what the hell that was?”

  “I’m guessing some sort of particle beam weapon. High energy particles moving at a high percentage of the speed of light,” Max replied. It could be something else, but that seemed like the best bet. “It will burn a lot of power. If you can get them to waste a few shots, it might reduce their firing capacity.”

  “Zip around and be bait for big doom gun,” Sam said with a laugh. “Orders understood, sir! Sam out.”

  The Hermes would be in the theoretical range for that beam soon enough, but Max hoped they might not fire on him. They’d already gone to the trouble of wounding his ship instead of killing it outright. How much were they willing to risk to get a look at humans and human technology? Intel was one of the most important things in war. This species couldn’t know too much about Earth. The value of any intel this ship was able to obtain would be enormous. Max stayed the course, continuing to drift and decelerate on minimal power.

  He was able to track the ship more accurately now that his fighters were engaging the thing. It was a monster, several times the size of the Hermes. It was a closer match for the Intrepid. In a straight-up slugfest, there was no way he was going to come out on top. That particle beam by itself would carve him to shreds inside minutes.

  But that was only if he planned to fight fair. It was far better to let the enemy make assumptions and then use them to win. Right now he could fire missiles, but they were far enough out that the aliens would likely take out most of the shots before they got anywhere near the ship. But if he could fire the missiles when the enemy ship was danger close…?

  Another Wasp exploded, and then a third. They were losing pilots, but Sam’s people were making the aliens spend at least two shots taking out each fighter. Max tracked the time between particle shots. At first it had been ten seconds, but it was ticking up a little bit with each additional firing. There was now a twenty-second pause between shots. Whatever capacitor system they were using to run that thing was powerful, but it had limits and was pushing them.

  Missiles streaked from fighters that still had them. The hard armored hull around the alien ship shrugged off most of what they were sending. Those missiles weren’t carrying payloads heavy enough to kill larger ships. If they’d had torpedoes mounted it might have been a different story, but Max was saving their limited supply of those to deal with the ring.

  The Hermes had ship to ship missiles as damaging as the torpedoes, though. He watched as the time to cross between the vessels dipped and the time between particle beam shots increased. They crossed paths at twenty-six seconds. That was it! Max waited until the alien beam weapon fired one more time before unloading every missile tube he had at lightning speed. Sixteen missiles crossed the void between the ships, each less than half a minute from their destination. He brought the engines back up to full power, slowing the Hermes down so that he might be able to get off a clear second shot.

  It was a neat trap. The alien ship flashed past him, but his thrusters were braking hard enough that he’d slow down in time. The tubes cycled, getting ready to fire another volley.

  Then the alien ship began to sparkle. A bright light appeared at the nose of the vessel. Crackles of energy swept alongside the alien hull. One fighter zipped in too close and was obliterated by the light show. Some new weapon? Max didn’t know what to make of it at first. It wasn’t going to matter once his missiles hit, though. A few more seconds…

  But before the missiles could impact the alien ship, it disappeared from view.

  13

  Xiang kept a focus on his scans as he drifted through the area where the alien fighters had been destroyed, thinking how ironic it was that his wing was tasked with the mission of locating any remaining fighter shards. Commander Knauf was a wise man, to look for such information. Xiang knew the value of good intelligence better than most. Knowing his foes was after all the reason behind his meteoric rise to power in the life he had before he’d been uploaded to Valhalla Online. Failing to adequately account for his foes was directly responsible for his equally rapid fall from grace. He had to tip his metaphoric hat to the Steins; they’d proven to be the most competent of adversaries.

  Based on what he’d been able to glean from the newscasts he’d seen since returning to the real world, the Steins hadn’t abandoned his work as he’d feared. Instead, they’d seen the value of what he’d done and continued it! The United Nations was now the primary governing body of humanity. The colonies on Mars and Venus were given an equal membership as nations. Xiang’s thought was to retain them as UN-owned colonies to solidify the power of the United Nations. Instead, Nicholas Stein had managed to at long last alter the Lunar Accords enough to give the UN a space navy that was far more than a few toothless old patrol ships.

  Had their way worked better than his? It was hard to say for sure, since his own plans had been aborted. In the long run how unity was accomplished was less important than the fact it was. Only together could humanity hope to hold the aliens at bay, negotiate with them, and survive its launch into the worlds beyond their solar system.

  “I’ve got a large chunk of something on the scope ahead,” Tyrin called. That was his wing second; a good man, competent and efficient. Xiang hadn’t let him in on a
ny of the extra information he knew yet, but it was possible he might in time do so.

  “I’ll join you at those coordinates,” Xiang replied, jetting his fighter in that direction. “If it looks like viable salvage, we’ll bring it in to the Hermes.”

  The hope was they could learn something of the enemy’s capabilities by examining their tech. Even a few small fragments could give them valuable intel through careful examination. But as Xiang approached the rendezvous spot he saw that this was no fragment. He spotted a flash of light and zoomed in on the object. It was a capsule - intact! It had to be a pilot’s module, ejected from the ship in the moments before the missiles hit.

  As he drew closer, Xiang could see the side and bottom of the capsule were severely scorched. Holes punched completely through, shattering part of the frame. There was no way the thing could have maintained an atmosphere with so many holes. A pity. It would have been interesting to meet one of these aliens face to face. Even a dead one would give them more information, though. He shot a cable from his Wasp into the capsule. It connected with a vibration he could feel throughout the ship. Good that he’d been sent out on this mission, better still that he’d achieved such strong success. Now if he could finagle his way into assisting with the analysis his day would be complete.

  “Line connected. Soon as you connect yours we’ll drag this in,” Xiang said. “I think Commander Knauf will be exceptionally interested in what we’ve found.”

  Sam looked on as one of the repair bots fumbled through the process of opening the captured object as it drifted through space nearby the Hermes. They were examining it outside the ship. Max was worried the capsule could be booby-trapped, something Sam hadn’t even considered. Opening it up to take a look was essential, but doing it in space would give them the same data without the risk.