Solomon Family Warriors II

by Robert H. Cherny

  “Roger that!”

  “Give me status reports on all ships on my primary displays,” Wren shouted.

  Wren saw Kim running ahead of him and sprinted for Tracker’s docking bay. Kim was in her seat with her helmet on when Wren arrived. She flashed a quick thumbs up as she ran through her checklist.

  Suddenly Wren realized they had not named the group. He had no way to address them all as one. His mind flashed on Tobias Running-Water and he knew the name. “Ladies and Gentlemen! We are Hawk Squadron. Hawk Squadron, hear this, report as soon as you are ready to move out. When we are all ready to go we will exit through the primary travel lane at maximum safe speed until we are clear the shipyard. Further instructions to follow on encrypted channel 21.”

  Wren heard the display shell close behind him. “Kim, can you sync with the defense net? What are we looking at?”

  “We have bogeys in sectors 10, 12, 22, 104, 110, 190 and 208. Which do you want?”

  “Which is closest?”

  “Sector 10.”

  “Alert control that we are going after whatever is in sector 10.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Tracker, ETA on the bogeys in sector 10.”

  “One hour to missile range.”

  The last of the sixteen icons on Wren’s display flashed green. “Hawk squadron, in numeric order, follow me in single file. Maintain safe distance between yourselves. Tracker, let’s move out.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Wren?”

  “Kim?”

  “Are you scared?”

  “Out of my mind.”

  “That makes me feel better. I didn’t want to be the only one.”

  “If you weren’t, you would be the only one.”

  “Wren, today is December 7.”

  “Remember Pearl Harbor.”

  The ships pulled into the main travel lane. Wren could tell by the traffic on the unsecured channels that Charlie had his hands full. There was no telling what was going on over the secured channels. “Hawk Squadron is deploying to engage the enemy.”

  “Roger that, Hawk Squadron.” Charlie sounded rattled for the first time Wren could remember.

  The P I ships slid out from between the docked freighters that were desperately trying to get under way.

  Tracker flashed an icon on Wren’s display. Elizabeth was under way. Wren wondered how many of her crew she had left behind.

  A few minutes later, Tracker flashed another icon. Wren’s parents’ personal convoy escort ship was moving into the traffic lane. Freighters were beginning to flee the yard.

  When Wren’s group had cleared the dock area, but were still within the bounds of the shipyard, Wren called, “Hawk Squadron, form up on finger fours. Hawk one, you are red leader. Hawk five, you are blue leader. Hawk Nine, you are white leader. Hawk thirteen, you are green leader. Form up!” His most experienced pilots were now flight leaders.

  Wren could see on his display that four finger four formations were lined up behind him. They cleared the boundary of the shipyard. “Hawk Squadron, form your fours into a four. Red leader, center on me so that I am below you forty five degrees. Blue flight move left of Red. White flight move right of red. Green flight move right of white.” When the formation was stable, Wren called, “Hawk Squadron stay with me. Accelerate to four G on my mark, 3, 2, 1, Mark!” With four G of acceleration left uncompensated for by the inertial compensators, the human component of Hawk Squadron was crushed against their seats. Without the support of their flight suits, they would most likely have blacked out.

  “Tracker, put the incoming on my display. What do you think they are?”

  “They are a Swordsman design. Intelligence has very little information on them except that they are relatively short range. We do not know what their weapons are.”

  “We can assume they have lasers of some kind and missiles. What is our ETA to missile range?”

  “Ten minutes. We have enemy targeting radar lock,” Tracker reported.

  “Surprise, surprise, surprise.”

  “It looks like about fifty of them.”

  “At least that many. When they are this close together, it’s hard to tell.”

  “Well, four to one odds, we’ve been there before. We’ll deal. Where is the tender?” Wren asked.

  “Stand by,” Tracker reported.

  Wren drummed his fingers impatiently as Tracker searched the sky for a telltale heat signature.

  “Found it!” Tracker rattled off a set of coordinates.

  Wren took a deep breath. “Kim, we’re going after that bad boy all by ourselves. Please load four heat seekers in the aft tubes. You have missiles and lasers. I’m going to see if I can get us in there and out again without getting us killed.”

  “I have faith in you,” Kim said.

  “Too late if you don’t!” Wren laughed. “Hawk Squadron, formation change! Green flight move directly beneath red flight equidistant below me as red is above. Blue and white flights roll 90 degrees so your heat shields are facing out. Red flight roll 180. Extend your weapons pods.”

  Once the formation had stabilized, Wren called, “Load proximity detonators in aft tubes.”

  “Wren,” Kim asked. “Didn’t your grandmother use this formation in the Saturn shipyard battle? Did it work?”

  “Yes, she did and it did work, but she was in destroyers without heat shields,” Wren replied.

  “Didn’t she lose a bunch of her ships in that battle?” Kim asked.

  “The problem was she lost faith in her own judgment and changed what she was doing.”

  “Ah, I see. What are we doing?”

  “Punching a hole.”

  “Ho-kay.”

  “We have missiles incoming,” Tracker said.

  “Hawk Squadron, call your targets. We don’t want any getting through because everyone thought someone else was getting it. Lasers engage at will!”

  Seventeen unmarked P I ships, each carrying forty-eight lasers engaged fifty missiles and destroyed them. They turned their attention to the ships that fired them.

  “YEE-Haw!”

  Kim had drawn first blood. Wren smiled. That was his girl! A second enemy ship fell to the coordinated barrage of lasers. A third fell and then a fourth. Lasers licked back, but were ineffective against the P I ships’ heat shields. For totally green pilots, they were holding their own.

  “Hawk Squadron, from your external racks, on my mark, fire one proximity sensing missile.”

  Wren watched the dozen or so enemy that were directly in his squadron’s path. “Here chicken, chicken, chicken.”

  “Hawk Squadron, 3, 2, 1, Mark!”

  Seventeen missiles bored straight ahead destroying those enemy ships that had not dodged out of the way. Lasers raked the Swordsman ships as Hawk Squadron blasted through the center of their formation. One Swordsman pilot drew a bead on the last ship in Hawk Squadron to pass through the formation. In spite of the efforts of the others in green flight, the Swordsman rammed Tobias and Sunshine Running-Water’s ship destroying both.

  “Stand-by to fire aft tubes.”

  Hawk Squadron had punched through the center of the Swordsman formation. As soon as Wren felt he was clear enough to not get shot down by his own missiles, he called, “Fire aft tubes!” All the remaining ships except Tracker fired their aft tubes at the enemy ships which were turning to engage now that Hawk Squadron was between them and their tender. Executing a tight turn was probably the least intelligent thing the Swordsman could have done at that point. The broad sides of their ships while they were in the turn gave the radar on the proximity seeking missiles easier targets. Even after the Swordsman had turned to pursue, the missiles had their target locks and decimated the Swordsmen force.

  The Swordsman strategy had apparently been based on the Federation standard practice of engaging the initial line of fighters in a more “gentlemanly” form of combat than what Wren was doing by going straight for the tender. A Federation force would capture the ten
der’s crew for interrogation and ransom once the defenders had been vanquished. Wren had no intentions of dealing with prisoners.

  Wren’s displays showed that they had destroyed half of the enemy ships in his vicinity.

  “Hawk Squadron, divide into flights. Choose targets of convenience. Talk to each other, we’re going on ahead from here. Happy hunting!” Wren punched in the coordinates Tracker had given him for the tender and initiated the short jump. As soon as Kim had a target lock on the tender’s propulsion units, she fired the aft tubes. Wren spun Tracker around so that even though inertia carried them backwards, they could bring the front missiles to bear. Kim fired eight heat seekers from the front tubes while maintaining laser coverage of the small picket ships in their vicinity.

  Wren spun Tracker around again and programmed another short hyper jump. They waited just long enough to see the beginning of the end for the tender. Wren, Kim and Tracker rejoined Hawk Squadron and assisted in eliminating the few enemy fighters that remained.

  When Wren regrouped the squadron, he noticed that another ship was missing. In his first mission as commander he had lost four people and two ships, but the number of enemy ships destroyed far outweighed his losses as painful as they might be. Wren realized that his dash though to the tender had placed him well behind enemy lines. It seemed to him that the most logical course of action was to destroy their support and supply.

  “Tracker, have we cleared this sector?”

  “I can detect no heat signatures that match known vessels in the immediate vicinity.”

  “What is our next nearest enemy vessel?”

  Tracker displayed the statistics on another relatively unprotected tender.

  “Tracker, relay this information to all Hawks. This is our next target.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Hawk Squadron, form up as a cylinder with shields out as we did before.” When the formation was established, Wren called a four G acceleration and the squadron raced toward its next victim.

  “Tracker, ETA to the next target?” Wren asked.

  “One hour.”

  “White leader, what happened to Lindsey and Twyla?”

  “Caught in a cross fire. Too many missiles, we tried.”

  “I am sure you did your best. I don’t care what the engineers say, there is only so much abuse these things can take. I think this formation works well for us. From now on this is formation Alpha. The flat finger four we made when we exited the ship yard is now formation Beta. We will employ the same strategy we used last time. The formation will go straight in. Tracker, Kim and I will jump behind for the kill and then we move on until there is nothing left to shoot at. Theoretically, since we are coming at them from their flank, we should not see as much resistance as we did on the last tender. Everyone take a moment to inventory your missiles and evaluate your damage.”

  “Hey, Wren,” Kim broke into his thoughts. “Can we make a ring with the lasers that are inside the formation so they form a cylinder? That many lasers pointed both forward and back would incinerate anything in their path and since they are invisible, the enemy would not know they were there until they ran into one. We really can’t do much else with them or we will hit each other.”

  “Hawk Squadron, what Kim just described will be called ‘Kim’s ring’. I think it’s a great idea. Be careful when you set it up that you don’t shoot us.”

  “Kim’s ring” demonstrated its power as they approached the tender. Picket ships scrambled to challenge them and were torn apart by the invisible ring of lasers as the formation advanced relentlessly toward the minimally armed cargo ship. “Kim’s ring” quickly became an “All ring” alignment. The lasers from all the ships raked the length of the freighter and ripped it open. Wren finished the tender off with a four missile volley from Tracker’s aft tubes as they sped toward the next target.

  A dozen tenders and troop transports later, Hawk Squadron found itself out of easy targets. Tracker had expended all his missiles, but most of the other ships still had workable inventories. Wren led the squadron back in toward the ship yard.

  “Tracker, is there anything going on that we could assist?”

  “There is a battleship heavily engaged in sector 208. We appear to have lost a large number of our ships against it.”

  “Let’s go. ETA?”

  “Two hours.”

  “A lot can happen in two hours. I wish these ships were hyper ready. We’ll get there when we get there. Hawk Squadron, one more time.” As they raced toward the battleship, Wren had a thought. “Tracker, where is Elizabeth?”

  “Stand-by.”

  “Elizabeth is at your two o’clock high headed for the battleship.”

  “What’s her status?”

  “Do you want to talk to her? She’s hailing you by ultraviolet laser.”

  “Hello, Wren.”

  “Hi, Grandmother.”

  “It’s ‘Rachel’ to you, boy.”

  “So, Rachel, what’s your status?”

  “We’ve lost all our support ships. We are fighting with what we have on board. How about you?”

  “We lost two ships and crews. I am out of missiles, but most of my group still has enough for another engagement, maybe two. We thought we would join the assault on that battleship.”

  “Your parents are in there now with their convoy escort. They’ve been hitting it pretty hard, but every time they try to go for the pipes, it dodges. Can we coordinate our attack to keep the battleship distracted long enough to let your parents get behind it?”

  “Roger that. Hawk Squadron, as soon as we are close enough to the Queen Elizabeth to do it, we will form Alpha formation around the Queen. Make sure flight leaders are far enough behind the battleship head portion that you do not get in the way of her lasers,” Wren ordered.

  “When did you become Hawk Squadron?” Rachel asked.

  “When we pulled away from the dock.”

  “Hey, Kim, how are you doing?”

  “I put a few notches in my gun belt,” Kim replied.

  Rachel laughed. “We all did.”

  The tactic worked. The “all ring” centered around Elizabeth drew the enemy battleship’s attention long enough that Saul and Fiona could get their convoy escort behind the battleship and put a volley of missiles into its vulnerable propulsion system. When the explosion cleared enough to evaluate the results, Saul and Fiona’s convoy escort was nowhere to be seen.

  “I’m sure they hypered out before the blast,” Kim said softly.

  “Perhaps. No way to know unless they turn up,” Wren said.

  “I have no evidence of any ships in our vicinity except for Hawk Squadron and Elizabeth,” Tracker observed.

  “Hawk Squadron, let’s go home,” Wren ordered.

  WREN - CHAPTER EIGHT

  HAWK SQUADRON’S TENDER had escaped unscathed. While the battle raged around them, nothing had approached within missile range of them and they had not even used their lasers. The dock area, however, was a different story. What had been a row of gleaming new docks was a mass of twisted metal fragments. A volley of Swordsman missiles had caught a freighter attempting to leave the yard. The resulting explosion had shredded a large portion of the yard’s infrastructure.

  Hawk Squadron slowly passed the destruction in silence. Wren called a set of coordinates and told Hawk Squadron to meet the tender there. The individual P I ships docked to the tender.

  Wren gathered his staff in the meeting room. “Ladies and Gentlemen, you performed incredibly well in the recent engagement. I have reviewed your reports and I am impressed. I have seen veterans not do as well as you did. We still have much work to do before I consider us fully operational, but I am confident in our ability to meet the challenges ahead. In a few minutes we will conference with the Queen Elizabeth’s intelligence staff. At that time they will update us on the status of the station and our company. In the interim, I would like a moment of silence out of respect for the six of our colleagues we lost. Please bow y
our heads.” Several voices softly whispered, “Six?”

  After the minute passed Wren said, “We lost six of our comrades in the battle. Four were human and two were ships. Effective immediately, we will consider our ships as more than our weapons systems. They are our friends, comrades and above all else, our strategic partners. Tracker, on screen please.”

  “Hello, Wren.” Tracker appeared on the large monitors in his Buffalo Bill persona.

  “Folks, this is the Tracker Kim and I know. Tracker is as sentient and self-aware as you and me. Tracker and I will not explain how we did this, but we will be doing it with all your ships. Kim and Tracker will be in charge of the project.”

  Wren waited for the stunned murmurs to subside. “Most of you are probably aware of the first four sentient ships. As nearly as I can tell, Peter, Greg Solomon’s cargo ship, self generated. There is no evidence that Greg set out to create a sentient ship, but by the time of the battle of Homestead, the ship was sentient. It deduced on its own that it had been hijacked and sought human assistance. Following the battle at Eretz, the cargo ship transported my grandmother, her sister and their initial battle group to the Space Force Academy. During that voyage, the ship’s sentience became so apparent to them that they named it ‘Peter’ after the legendary ‘Peter Pan’. In fact, they took code names based the characters in the story. While they were at the Academy, Peter recognized a threat and on his own initiative brought both of the P I ships that had accompanied them to a sentient state. He alerted the humans in his care to the danger and they confronted the enemy. The battle statistics of those two P I ships so far outclass any other ships of their type that many attempts have been made to replicate the process. None have succeeded. Until now. Tracker is the one exception.”

  Wren paused to let the implications of what he said sink in. “The last remaining sentient ship Peter created is the one that I consider to have raised me more than I consider any human to have done. At my grandmother’s request, Peter repeated the process and made the ship you know as the Queen Elizabeth sentient. Elizabeth, are you there?” Elizabeth’s avatar in full royal regalia complete with crown and scepter appeared on monitors around the room. “Hello, Wren.”