They accelerated away from the huge fleet, arcing away from anything that might possibly be an enemy. Destroyers were much harder to hide than tiny fighters, even when not under drive, so this time around they had to spend more time avoiding enemy contact, which is to say, numerically superior enemy contact. Their goal was to ensure that the enemy wasn’t hiding in-system. Well, that was their secondary goal – their primary goal was to avoid becoming victims of bad luck.
It took two days to sneak back to the system. If they’d jumped they would have alerted any possible enemy to their arrival, a potentially fatal eventuality. Just before entering the system Chamberlin’s fighters linked up with the destroyers and took on another full load of fuel.
The destroyers separated into two two-ship elements, with eight fighters escorting each element as a light screen. Four destroyers and twenty-four fighters were held back as a reserve. They entered the system with a high relative velocity. The two small detachments started with the outermost planet, a typically airless, not quite round frozen ball. The reserve was positioned close enough to be able to respond to an attack.
They spent three days scouring the system. One half of John’s pilots were on alert while the other half tried to sleep in their cockpits. It was a relatively brutal way to spend a few hours, much less a few days.
They found no sign of ships, but they did find a nasty surprise orbiting the fourth planet.
Edging carefully in closer to the planet, one of the destroyers got a sniff of a faint heat source where none out to exist. It turned out to be a missile pod that had been crudely modified to serve as an ad-hoc platform. Instead of active radar or infrared sensors, the pod used a very creative adaptation of astronomical equipment that compared stored memory against newly captured images. Its rudimentary brain compared the old and the new. Once something new appeared, and if it was within range of the missile, the pod was designed to launch. It was actually an elegant arrangement, utilizing inexpensive, off-the-shelf components. Fortunately, the destroyer captain had been in the war from the outset, and considered paranoia as a good starting point to survival.
He put the body of the planet between him and the pod and spent some time analyzing the odd signals. His techs compared it to all known examples of military technology and came up blank, but a wider search found a match with old, off-the-shelf astronomy equipment. Once they figured out what it was, they sent a fighter inside the orbit of the platform and it drifted up underneath the pod, where a nervous space-suited technician disabled the potentially deadly weapon.
After examining the pod they gave it a shove, sending it tumbling into the atmosphere, where it burned up.
Two days later they boosted for two hours at a relatively low G and then went ballistic for several more hours. After deciding that they truly were alone, they went to a high acceleration.
In their absence, the fleet had jumped, but it left behind their carrier with a screening element. It took them twelve more hours to hook up with their ride and the all-important shower.
Chamberlin’s crews hadn’t accomplished much of anything other than explore their fighters limited ability to handle bodily functions and the attendant odors. Nevertheless, they gathered for an hour and discussed tactics, fighter maintenance and pilot training, all elements to longevity that Chamberlin believed ranked higher in importance than prayer or a good cup of coffee, two things he also happened to believe in, not necessarily in that order.
They spent three days performing maintenance on their fighters. Chamberlin encouraged - another way of saying ‘ordered’ - his pilots to participate in the work of keeping their fighters in as good a condition as possible. He felt that the more they knew about their tiny space craft, the longer they would remain alive, and his growing reputation as a lucky and very successful commander seemed to corroborate that approach.
Over the next month his crews flew fairly boring security patrols. The rebel fleet, or possibly, fleets, had managed to create a large enough separation that there existed considerable doubt as to exactly where they were. This had become an old story to Chamberlin and his men and women. Over the course of the war the federals had consistently lost the initiative due to what some politicians referred to as ‘deliberative caution’ on the part of military leaders. The men and women in the ranks referred to this lack of enthusiasm to prosecute the war as cowardice and an almost awe inspiring amount of ineptitude, that had led to the deaths of thousands of lives and extended the war into several years of agony. For obvious reasons, the enlisted failed to mention these attitudes to their officers, most of who felt the same way.
Fortunately, most of the inept, corrupt and cowardly officers had been weeded out, either by enemy weapons or the growing impatience of the various federal worlds.
Today, despite the failure of the federal fleet to maintain contact with the enemy, Chamberlin could see a definite improvement and growing professionalism in the way the war was being waged.
This was the sixth month of their current deployment, which was to last several more months before they were to head in for yet another refurbishment. However, in a hasty change, the DeKlerk was ordered to detach from the main fleet, and in company with a light escort of four destroyers, it jumped into Rossiyyeh, one of the younger worlds in the federal camp.
Rossiyyeh had a small but very good orbital manufacturing infrastructure, and a year earlier had begun construction of a new class of light attack carrier. The first of this class was getting ready to begin her sea trials, an old term that had survived several centuries of space flight, possibly due to the fact that Rossiyyeh was seventy eight percent ocean, and it was reported, twenty-two percent swamp, plus two hundred percent rain.
Chamberlin and her complement of fighters were to transfer to the new ship, and would be tasked with ‘his’ workups. John was looking forward to working with new technology, something the DeKlerk seriously lacked, along with armor, weapons, acceleration or good coffee. On the other hand, and due in large part to the lack of these other elements, it had enjoyed a great many very fervent prayers.
After settling into orbit, Chamberlin and his crews were given a forty-eight hour shore leave.
Chapter 9
John Chamberlin was thirty-two years old, stood a reasonably tall two meters, well above the average for fighter pilots, had dark brown hair, typically cut very short, and brown eyes. Save for his height, he was a poster child for the typical inhabitant of most worlds, where centuries of mixing had produced a racial majority of mutts – people who had traces of Asian, African and European races in their genes.
In the rather more important non-physical measurements however, Chamberlin figuratively stood head and shoulders above most people. He was extremely intelligent and very well educated. Additionally, he was modest, quiet and athletic, three traits that tended to hide his brains.
He’d grown up on Maya, a planet settled in the third wave of human expansion, had a doctorate, and prior to entering OCS he’d taught history at Tenochtitlan University, the oldest such institution on the planet of four million. Of course, it was the only university on the planet.
In addition to his coldly distant father and overly enthusiastic younger brother, he had an older brother who followed his father into a military career, and an equally cold character.
The Chamberlin brothers grew up in a home that personified the warrior ethos, one that almost revered physical accomplishments. John grew up playing multiple sports and had been trained in three different martial arts. With the onset of puberty, he began to shoot up, concurrently developing a very strong will. He grew into manhood and away from his domineering father, in the process losing his youthful enthusiasm for sports and acquiring a love of history. The fact that his father abhorred the thought of his son becoming a professor may have been a factor in his becoming a professor.
He completed his mandatory schooling ahead of schedule, applied for university and ended up having to work two jobs in addition to his heavy load
of studies. His father was the reason for the jobs – he’d cut off his son.
Now, years later, he was in the hottest part of the war, while, in a piece of irony, his father commanded a backwater military supply base. His older brother did something in intelligence, but John didn’t know what, and since that brother had knuckled under to his father’s dictates, John thought that he was unlikely to get a birthday card any time soon.
James was two years his junior, had a degree in mechanical engineering and was the reason John was presently in uniform. Two days after the breakup of the federal union, James came to him and told him that he was joining up.
John began the discussion by trying to talk James out of his decision, and ended up joining with him. Much to his surprise, his years of athletics, coupled with superb genetics and that doctorate, ended up getting him a slot as a pilot. His brother, courtesy of the same upbringing, good education and physical attributes, easily qualified with John, and months later they were fighter pilots in an explosively growing Federal Navy.
After a day on the planet surface, eating good meals, sleeping in a soft hotel bed, and not getting shot at, Chamberlin shuttled over to the new carrier for a tour. After meeting the builder and a representative of the admiralty, they entered the ship via a pressurized tube. The man assigned to be captain didn’t show, putting off the day when John would have to learn how to work with a nominal superior whose task it was to do what John wanted.
The ship had not yet been commissioned, so their entry was disturbingly casual. John’s first impression was that the ship was smaller than the more than fifty-year old DeKlerk, but from that point on he could find little to find fault with.
The DeKlerk had spent many decades as an inter-system freighter and had basically come to the end of its service life when the federal Navy discovered itself in a shooting war. That same navy had spent the better part of two centuries as a cross between a civil defense organization that assisted in civil disorders and natural disasters, and as the principal contractor in terraforming planets. It had possessed a few destroyers, but even those were barely armed enough to be considered warships.
The insurgency changed everything.
Today, over three years later, the navy was still largely a hodgepodge of ex-freighters cum carriers, destroyers that in a previous life had possibly been small passenger liners, and fighters, which both sides had managed to produce in large numbers, principally because they were relatively inexpensive and easy to design and build.
The rebels had gained the allegiance of the majority of able military personnel, with the result that an insurrection that everyone thought would last just a few months was now over three years old, with no end in sight.
The federal forces were just now beginning to receive useful numbers of purpose-built ships, and Chamberlin thought that the ability to produce combat craft in significant numbers was going to trump the other side’s superior military leaders. On that score, the federal navy was also beginning to shape up into a professional military force, as the recent conflict had just demonstrated, so that even there, the federal forces were making progress.
Despite its smaller size, the carrier was designed to carry a complement of 80 fighters, with hold space for ten spares. John was delighted to discover that shiny new fighters were part of the bargain. When he asked about the makeup of those fighters, he was told that he would receive ten of the new, sixteen-missile craft. He immediately spent several minutes asking sharp questions, designed to find out why the navy didn’t go for a fifty-fifty mix of the small craft. After answering those intense questions, the builder assured him that there was no practical reason that would preclude a greater number of heavy fighters. Actually, there was, and it was called ‘red tape’.
He spent another three hours touring the ship from stem to stern, becoming steadily more enthusiastic with each passing minute. The carrier would be able sustain a higher acceleration than the arthritic DeKlerk, was lightly armored and actually had some decent automated missile defenses. Finally, the crew quarters were, to Chamberlin, shockingly, not uncomfortable.
As soon as he returned to his ship he initiated a request for a meeting with his group captain, the man in charge of all the fighters in his four-ship element. He was given a prompt reply and even more surprisingly, an immediate appointment.
He shuttled halfway around the planet to another platform. He had to run to make the meeting.
He was ushered into the office of Captain Aaron Lee, an officer of approximately four months seniority over John, and a good man. His position as John’s superior was due entirely to the fact that he’d seen the writing on the wall and entered the military ahead of the breakup, rather than three days after the fact.
They shook hands warmly and John was offered a seat. Captain Lee had some coffee brought in and they exchanged small talk for a few minutes before getting down to the reason for John’s visit.
Chamberlin quickly summed up his opinion of the new carrier in a few words - if he’d used just one, it would have been ‘miracle’. Captain Lee responded enthusiastically, but he knew there was a ‘but’ in there somewhere, so he waited patiently for Chamberlin to get to the point. John saw the realization in Aaron’s eyes, and said, “The ship will have a complement of eighty fighters, seventy of the older design, ten of the heavy fighters with sixteen missiles.” John opened his mouth to continue, but his friend was already frowning, “Just ten? Why? Is that why you’re here?” John nodded unhappily.
Captain Lee held up his hand and commed his aide. When he answered, Captain Lee said, “Will you please contact fleet and set up an appointment to see Admiral Nomura? As soon as possible. Yesterday in fact.” He listened for a second, smiled at his aide’s obvious reply about the difficulty of complying with that request, and turned his attention back to John.
He spent ten minutes grilling John about the new ship, and came to the same conclusions that John had – the ship was terrific and they had to make a change in the fighter complements.
His desk buzzed and he politely held up his hand. He listened, and simply thanked whomever he was listening to. He cleared up that mystery by explaining, “We’ve got an appointment in three hours. I hope you’re available.” John almost laughed, “I’m so sorry sir, but I’ve got an appointment to wash my hair.” Captain Lee burst into startled laughter – John’s hair was cut in the current military style, meaning he had almost nothing to wash.
They went to the officer’s mess for a late lunch, and boarded another shuttle for a trip back around to the same station John had visited early that morning.
They were ushered into the office of Admiral Nomura, who turned out to be even taller than John. After shaking his hand the admiral told him, “Commander Chamberlin, I’m pleased to meet you in person. Since you transferred into our group I’ve read your detailed reports and analyses, and of course I’m well aware of your superb record, first as a pilot, and your achievements since then. Captain Lee tells me that you’ve just today visited the new carrier, and that there is a problem. What can you tell me?”
John was startled when Captain Lee waved to him, so he succinctly explained the situation of the fighters, ending with the request that they attempt to change the makeup to forty of each type. The admiral did almost the same thing Captain Lee had done; he held up his hand and commed his own aide. He asked for information on the availability of the new fighter. After a very short pause – he was an admiral – he thanked his aide and said, “The problem seems to be one of supply. In fact, the fourteen heavy fighters you have been working with were and remain the only ones to have seen action. We won’t be getting any for two more weeks, and you’re supposed to transfer in…” he looked at his desk and continued thoughtfully, “…two weeks.”
He looked closely at the information on his desktop and wrinkled his brow. “We seem to have an opportunity here for some creative paperwork. Captain, let me work on this. It just may be possible to speed up the delivery, and if not, w
e may be able to do something else. You say you want forty?” Captain Lee nodded affirmatively, and that was it.
At the shuttle bay, the two men parted company.
On the way back to his ship John put together notes on his inspection of the new ship. His crews were going to be thrilled.
Apart from John and his fighters - the only offensive weapon on the ship - the DeKlerk captain and its crew had performed brilliantly. The elderly ship had been hurriedly transformed from an empty shell of a bulk carrier into a rough-edged carrier. Its engines had been reconditioned, but not updated, and it must have been a nightmare for the snipes – navy lingo for enginemen. Unfortunately, he didn’t know much about the new captain he was to get, even by reputation, only that he hadn’t shown up for the tour.
Chapter 10
Two days later, Chamberlin discovered the reason for the no show – there had been a small skirmish, and the captain’s ship had been hit with a missile, killing most of the bridge crew, and the captain.
Two hours later the captain of the DeKlerk sent for John. He appeared at Captain Ahmadiyeh’s door, knocked and was admitted.
Hawk Genesis: War (Flight of the Hawk) Page 8