The flight of the rebel forces led generally back toward rebel held systems, but in a roundabout way. Since the main threat to the occupied federal systems was the mobile force they were pursuing, there was no attempt to veer off to enter a rebel system. The rebels were capable of attacking another federal system.
By the third week of nearly constant workups, John was beginning to see some definite improvement in his new crews’ performance. They couldn’t have gotten worse.
In an effort to prevent any future repeats of the disastrous federal sortie, John was tasked with leading a heavy flight of fighters. They would do better against the type of surprise that had just been inflicted on the destroyers, which were capable of remaining in space for months, but not so good at fending off a few hundred missiles.
Two Years, Two Months Earlier
John wearily clambered out of his cockpit, stepped down the ladder and stood uncertainly on the flight deck. He approached his CAG and after being recognized, he asked, “Sir, has there been any word?” Lieutenant Commander Lister shook his head, “No, and I don’t think there will be. As of this moment, you are flight lead. Check on your crewmate, make certain he knows that you’re his lead, and get a bite to eat. Report back in thirty, and I’ll give you as much of my time as possible. I know you haven’t as much combat experience as some of the others, but you fly smart, don’t take stupid chances or make idiotic mistakes. I might be able to piece together four flights, and if so, you might get a full complement of four, but don’t count on it, and it would only be for the duration of this engagement.” He looked around the half-empty flight deck, his eyes reflecting the exhaustion and despair he was trying so hard to hide, and continued, “I have been promised some replacements, but if promises were sex, I’d be dead. I’ll try to get you at least one experienced pilot, but you’d best plan on two newbies.” John said, “Yes sir.” Commander Lister waved him in the direction of the mess hall, and John began the long journey toward a possible cup of coffee.
Chapter 7
Two days later he was ordered to lead a flight of forty of his fighters in a reconnaissance of an uninhabited planet in the inner reaches of an unnamed system that the rebels were using in an effort to draw out the pursuit.
He spent an hour going over operational procedures with his largely untested flight crews. He made several changes to his flights, one of them being to include all fourteen of the heavy fighters. If either fighters or destroyers jumped them, those fourteen fighters would more than double the number of missiles he would have available.
They accelerated at a high rate for thirty minutes before shutting down their drives. Rather than put out scouts, he held his fighters relatively close together.
At a distance of ten million kilometers from the uninhabited and uninhabitable planet, he ordered his crews to begin to spread out, although he had the flights of four remain in close contact with each other.
Compared to scouts, his fighters were relatively noisy, and their sensor suites were also limited, but to Chamberlin this was an old story, and he never allowed his crews to get too close to any potential unpleasant surprises. Planets and their usually attendant moons were the very definition of potential unpleasant surprises, and he didn’t intend to get closer than one million kilometers of any planetary body that could hide anything that might be inimical to his continued existence.
At four million kilometers alarms went off in his cramped cockpit, signaling the presence of a destroyer-sized craft. It was apparently orbiting the small moon, and had just come into view. Even then he wouldn’t have detected it if its drive had been shut off. He didn’t know if his fighters had been seen, but since the destroyer wasn’t shooting at them, he decided to hold off doing anything.
Within another ten minutes three more destroyers came into view, but they had yet to break orbit, bring up their radar or other active sensors. He radioed his crews to remain passive but to prepare to bring up their drives. Destroyers didn’t have a high rate of fire, but they held far more missiles than his tiny fighters, including the longer ranged heavy missile.
Chamberlin’s fighters continued to coast toward the planet. They didn’t radiate or use their drives, and the destroyers continued to orbit the moon, reappearing every forty-one minutes. He saw no sign that the ships’ drives were doing anything other than maintaining position in an odd orbit, a good indication that they thought they were alone and unobserved. Chamberlin smiled happily: they were wrong.
This course and heading gave Chamberlin a small advantage. His fighters were approaching the planet and it’s single moon with the system’s sun almost directly behind them. This was not an accident; the approach made it slightly more difficult for enemy ships to detect his tiny craft amidst the hash of radiation produced by the distant sun. He decided to flush twelve missiles each from his heavy fighters, leaving everyone with four. One hundred sixty eight missiles would present what he now knew to be large destroyers with a great deal of difficulty, and some ought to get through.
He patiently waited until his fighters were a mere seventy five thousand kilometers from the moon, and timed the launch so that all the missiles were in flight fifteen seconds before the ships were due to appear again. He assumed that the missiles would be noticed not long after the ships appeared from the far side of the moon, making for an unpleasant surprise for the officer on duty. Chamberlin had been on the receiving end of far too many nasty shocks, and he was happy to do anything he could to balance the scales.
The four destroyers were a little slow to react, and by the time they began to bring up their active systems his missiles were already several thousand kilometers closer to them. He had yet to see any sign of other ships in the area, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. He ordered his crews to begin turning to starboard, a direction that would bend them around in a tight turn away from the enemy ships, preventing them from using the moon’s gravity well to get a slingshot boost in his direction.
He needn’t have worried. Within forty-five seconds of going active the destroyers began launching light missiles, but they weren’t showing any signs of preparing to accelerate out of orbit.
His launch had been designed to create the impression of a larger force than he actually had, and it had the desired effect of pinning the destroyers in place instead of attacking. As long as he hadn’t used his gravity drives, his fighters were very hard to locate.
The destroyers began picking off the incoming missiles. Chamberlin knew that as the small weapons closed in on the ships the rate of destruction would go up. Based on what he’d seen so far, he calculated that as many as ten or fifteen would get through. That should be enough to heavily damage or destroy at least one and possibly all four of the enemy ships.
Meanwhile, he was undergoing a punishing turn that his fighters’ compensators couldn’t entirely eliminate. It took a very long ten minutes for them to come about on a new heading that would take them around the planet, using its gravity well to boost their acceleration, while forcing the destroyers to accelerate up out of the moon’s gravity should they want to pursue him.
He had been observing the planet for several hours and hadn’t seen any other signs of enemy ships, which only meant that he hadn’t seen any – they could have been doing the same thing this enemy had been doing, which was nothing.
The destroyers came about to present their broadsides to the incoming missiles, clearing their close-in systems to target and destroy the rapidly approaching launch, which had now been winnowed down to just over one hundred twenty missiles.
At a distance of thirty thousand kilometers, sixty plus missiles had been destroyed, leaving just over one hundred.
Chamberlin’s fighters remained in a relatively compact mass that would allow them to respond collectively. It would also make them easier to target, but his fighters could really only effectively defend themselves if they stayed together.
As they accelerated around the planet, just outside of its atmosphere and awa
y from the destroyers, Chamberlin monitored the small number of offensive missiles the destroyers had launched at him, while focusing most of his attention on the space ahead of him, the biggest potential danger to his small force.
His fighters dropped a string of tiny, short-lived satellites that enabled him to monitor the four destroyers, which still weren’t pursuing.
Twenty minutes after launching their missiles, Chamberlin’s fighters circled to the opposite side, and began to arc up out of the planet’s gravity well.
The destroyer’s missiles had never posed a threat, and he hadn’t detected even a hint of another rebel force. Chamberlin’s fighter digitally verified the number of remaining missiles in his augmented fighter force, and he decided to roll the dice.
He ordered a course change that would allow his craft to come around behind the last known position of the enemy ships.
They shut their drives down five minutes before coming out of the shadow of the planet, and immediately began to soar away from the planet. The four destroyers had performed what Chamberlin thought was an odd maneuver – they’d used their engines to remain in an orbit of the moon that placed them between that body and the planet. Destroyers tended to be hunters, especially of fighters and other small craft, but these four ships were hiding.
An initial scan indicated that they’d survived the relatively heavy missile attack. However, as his fighters approached, he caught a whiff of some atmosphere loss. Still, these ships seemed to have significantly more powerful defensive suites than any destroyers of that tonnage Chamberlin had either encountered or read about.
John set up an attack. He instinctively felt that these ships were either a new class of destroyer, or they had been heavily retrofitted. Either way, his fleet needed to know about them, and to do that he had to get closer. A missile attack would force the enemy combatants to concentrate on defense, hopefully allowing him to get close enough to get a better sensor read without getting dead.
The four ships were now alert and actively radiating, but since his fighters were coming in on a ballistic approach and not accelerating, he had a few moments before crossing the probable detection threshold. On command, all forty fighters began launching.
They were only about two light-seconds away from the destroyers. Six seconds after beginning the launch, they saw a reaction. Targeting radar came up and thirty seconds later, the ships began to accelerate out of orbit – heading towards his fighters.
Chamberlin recorded everything, including rate of acceleration and all active emissions. Nothing was out of the ordinary, save that the acceleration was lower than he would have expected for a destroyer, causing him to speculate that they were light cruisers. He didn’t worry overmuch about that, concentrating instead on ensuring that their own missiles launched properly.
A staggered launch provided one important benefit – if done properly, the lead missiles tended to mask the follow-ons, giving them better odds of getting in close. His launch included twenty lead missiles, followed two seconds later by forty missiles, and finally by a dense mass of sixty, all targeted on one destroyer.
When they were still ten minutes outside the destroyer’s most dangerous defensive perimeter, Conrad’s fighters bent into a punishing turn away from both the planet and its satellite, taking them away from the destroyers and toward their own fleet. They enjoyed a large relative velocity, a higher level of acceleration and they were behind the real threat to the enemy ships, their own missiles.
Chamberlin believed the destroyers would concentrate on the missiles rather than on his fighters, which fighters would presumably no longer hold any missiles. Conrad smiled and sent a silent prayer that the captain in charge of those four mysterious ships would behave like a reasonable man.
He did some quick mental math and decided that unless the destroyers launched within the next three or four minutes, they wouldn’t be able to reach out and touch him.
One minute later he prepared a message to his carrier and sent it off – the destroyers launched forty medium missiles, about twenty more than they should have been able to get off. He no longer had any of his own missiles, which could be used to target missiles as well as ships. That is, they could if they had any.
His system crunched some numbers and came up with the information that his fighters would be in extreme range of the missiles for thirty seconds or less, not a long time compared to the life of a solar system, but an eternity to a fighter crew in an unarmored fighter.
He ordered his fighters to spread into a disk-shaped formation that would allow him maximum defensive coverage.
His original crews had a great deal of experience with missile defense, but these were mostly new pilots and navigators.
Ten thousand kilometers out, the missiles began targeting specific fighters. His crews began lasing them. Forty coherent beams of light targeted the twelve closest missiles – many of the others were dropping off his screens as their drives died.
All twelve disappeared in angry bursts of energy. In one’s and two’s, the remaining missiles drives went out. For the moment at least, they were free.
They shut down their drives long enough to allow Conrad to orient his sensors on their enemy. All four destroyers remained under power, but the one they’d targeted was now severely damaged. John’s conclusion was based on the fact that its drive was faltering and it was leaking atmosphere. It should have been an expanding ball of debris.
Two Years Earlier
Looking splendid in their B dress uniforms, John and James stepped onto the main orbital facility of the planet Herot. It was the closest they’d been to an actual planet in nearly a year, and they were eager to smell something other than light lubricating fluid, seemingly a main ingredient of their meals, and possibly the one single thing their fighters were guaranteed to have in excess.
They were in the act of boarding a shuttle when alarms began sounding. They ran nearly a quarter mile to reach the fleet shuttle they’d just recently departed, making it with only seconds to spare. As James gasped for breath, John asked the co-pilot, “What do you know?” She shouted, “Strap in, the system is under attack.” James shook his head, “I have two bucks that say we’ll get back to the DeKlunker only to discover some stupid civilian forgot to turn on his IFF.”
John quickly strapped himself into an uncomfortable seat as the shuttle trembled on thrusters and backed out of the bay. He said, “First off, you don’t have two dollars, and secondly I happen to know the rebels staged this just so you wouldn’t have the chance to lie to half of the population of this planet.” James laughed, “Just so long as you mean the female half.” John said, “If we don’t get some leave, I don’t think you’ll care all that much.”
He looked anxiously into the open cockpit of the shuttle, “I hate being a passenger. Since you’re so eager to gamble with money you already owe me, what do you bet this pile of unplanned obsolescence runs out of fuel before it gets ten kilometers, and we spend the rest of our leave trapped without food or air.” James said, “No bet. Did you notice? Our copilot is kind of cute.” John groaned, “She’s kind of twice your age.” James grinned, “So, what you’re saying is, she’ll like me twice as much.” John was jammed into the seat as the gravity drive abruptly came up, “She’ll kill you twice as fast.” James laughed, “Not if the rebels get me first.” John groaned, “I think they’ll have to stand in line.”
Chapter 8
Twenty hours later he and his crews gathered for an after-action report. They’d gotten a little rest and some food, and best of all, they were all still in the land of the living.
They spent forty minutes discussing the battle. His experienced crews had done this many times, and understood what was wanted and why it might keep them alive next time around. His new crews remained mostly quiet, but they clearly understood the process, and Chamberlin knew from experience that their active participation would go up with experience.
Two days later John was tasked with supporting a squa
dron of destroyers that would be sweeping the same solar system. He wasn’t asked to provide any input, a not altogether unusual set of circumstances, but he knew most of the ship commanders and hoped that he would have the opportunity to talk things over on the way in-system. In his after-action report he’d included a verbal analysis as well as the sensor reading of the four super destroyers, as he called them, but he’d not received any feedback nor been asked for any additional information.
He took forty fighters again, leaving forty behind as security, and met up with the destroyers. He sent over a copy of his earlier report on the destroyers, and five minutes later the captain in charge of the destroyers radioed him. “I haven’t heard a word about those ships.”
Moments later, the information was copied to the other seven destroyers. He could remember a time when such logical behavior wouldn’t have been necessarily expected. The federal navy was finally becoming professional, albeit at a horrid cost in lives.
Hawk Genesis: War (Flight of the Hawk) Page 7