Hawk Genesis: War (Flight of the Hawk)

by Robert Little

  John waved to James, who was apparently trying to play chicken with the robotic assembly arms at one of the stations. He was on his back, watching avidly as a heavy panel was affixed to the ceramic skeleton. James wasn’t looking in John’s direction, but his situational awareness was exceptional, and he promptly jumped up and walked over to join his brother.

  Mr. Padilla told the two women, “We should be several hours. We’ll meet you for lunch at noon. I apologize again for taking your husbands away from you, especially as you have so few hours together, and I promise you that I’ll try to make it up to you. I also want you to know that I expect great things to come out of this visit.” Castidad kissed her father on the cheek and said, “We’ll try to find something to do in accounting – you’re always short handed.”

  He smiled gratefully and thanked her, waved to Jessica and led the two brothers out the same hatch and further down the main passageway. This section was clearly new – they’d simply sprayed a heavy sealer on the bare walls. At the end of the passageway Mr. Padilla spoke his name into the air in front of what looked like an armored hatch. A moment later the heavy plug pivoted open and they walked into a space that looked to be roughly one hundred meters square by twenty meters high. At several points pipes ran from the ceiling to one collection point, where they disappeared back into the living rock, presumably channeling naturally flowing water.

  Off to one corner of the mostly empty space sat a mockup of an aerodynamically shaped craft. It wasn’t much longer than a fighter, but it was significantly wider. They walked up to it and John said, “This is about the same size as a small shuttle – was that intentional?” Mr. Padilla nodded, “Yes, it has to fit in the same size bay. We’ve got the general shape that we want, but that’s about it. This has enough internal volume to house ten suited infantry or marines. We’ve got three different teams working on the propulsion and power systems, avionics and armaments. Gentlemen, the disagreements have almost led to fights. We just don’t know enough about what the craft is supposed to do, nor how much the government is willing to spend to get something that works. Finally, we can’t seem to agree on what would work.”

  James and John were listening while they walked around the thing. John said, “This is going to have to perform well in the atmosphere, and it looks like you’ve got a good lifting body that will allow it to enter the atmosphere and maneuver without requiring its drive. What do the specifications call for in terms of acceleration, energy weapons shielding, observability?”

  Mr. Padilla answered by waving them to a simple table. He unrolled a large screen and turned it on, then attached it to the bulkhead. He skipped past several hundred pages of specification to get to the ones he wanted. He pointed to one and said, “They want a craft that can survive a twenty-five cm laser hit from a distance of twenty-five thousand kilometers. We know of only one process that would allow us to meet those specifications, and the coating alone would cost almost as much as one entire new-build destroyer! They want an energy weapon, but we haven’t figured out how to design the lens so that it can withstand the buffeting when it’s descending through the atmosphere. We’ve already come to the conclusion that their structural parameters are off by a factor of perhaps three – they specified a spacecraft that can land on a planet, but what they need is a heavily armored tank that can fly and operate in space. If we build what we think will actually work, the propulsion system they’ve specified would provide about thirty percent of the power required to meet their performance specs.”

  By this time Mr. Padilla was almost yelling. John asked, “How long have you been working on this?” He gritted, “Almost six months, way too long. We’ve got almost no time left before we have to submit our plans, and a bid.”

  James said, “Sir? If I might make a suggestion? Based on what you’ve told us, they don’t actually have a good feel for what they need. It sounds to me that you do. Design the thing with the coating you talked about, make a flying tank with the power it actually needs, and hide a standard energy lens under a hatch when it’s descending through atmosphere.” John nodded and asked, “I second that. What can you tell us about its observability?”

  Mr. Padilla was looking at James and ignored John’s question for a moment. He asked, “Hide it under a hatch? That’s…too simple. I’m going to kick someone in the butt. John, we are told that the combination of the ceramic hull and the coating turns it into a ghost. I have to take their word for that, as I’ve not been given actual performance figures, haven’t seen it, haven’t held it in my hand or talked to anyone else who has either.”

  John asked, “Can you show us the structural design?”

  They spent the next three hours talking animatedly. Mr. Padilla asked countless questions about actual combat, learning in the process that one glancing shot from an energy weapon typically put a fighter out of commission, that no matter what the Navy or manufacturer said, pilots routinely exceeded engine, weapons and engine specifications. John answered one question about capacitor overheating by saying, “Pilots assume that if they are going to die from an enemy weapon, there’s no reason not to overheat the capacitor. I know of no pilot who has ever complained about having too much power, and I know far too many who are no longer able to complain about insufficient power.” Mr. Padilla glumly nodded.

  They had a decent lunch in a small combination kitchen and dining room and returned to the deeply buried room that might one day birth an attack bird.

  That afternoon they spent working with the propulsion and power team on revising their own estimates of how much power the ship would need to survive to reach the surface, and get back off, something both James and John thought would be possibly more difficult than getting there.

  They went over what little they knew about the mysterious coating. If the specifications were not an outright fiction, it would almost instantaneously shed energy, making it harder to track via infrared. James said, “If these specifications are not just some engineers wishful dream, that coating would actually make this attack bird a workable proposition. Can you build it here? And, if so, would it fit in that tunnel or in the containers?” Mr. Padilla answered, “No, and no. We’d have to fly it out. I’ve got someone working on how to do that without drawing attention to the facility. We don’t think it would be much of a problem, as we could only build one a week, and that’s our best estimate – it would initially take a month for the first few.”

  They ended up eating supper in the dining room, and lifted off the hidden pad after dark.

  The flight back was quiet.

  Mr. Padilla hugged his daughter and Jessica, looking both tired and emotional. He said to John and James, “I can’t tell you two how helpful your visit was. I have never been able to pick the brains of anyone who has actual combat experience and had an education in engineering. I’m going with the parameters we’ve worked up today. I am not comfortable with designing or building a ship that I thought would just get our crews killed, and this project has caused me a great many sleepless nights. If the government wants an attack craft that can actually land troops on a contested planet, it’s going to be incredibly expensive to build, but I think we can actually do it, and once again, thank you, thank you very much.”

  Chapter 27

  Two days later, John and James were in uniform and in space, returning to the war.

  The Adams was still in the hands of civilian technicians and laborers who were attempting to replace several critical components of the power plants. It seemed that the lowest bidder may have misunderstood that the ship was meant to operate its drive systems for longer than five or ten minutes at a time, or that they might have to survive insertion inside a solar system with its attendant gravity wells. Warrants had been served, and the misunderstandings may have been cleared up. In order to ensure that no further similar misunderstandings took place, the federal government was putting up some new bids for the construction of federal penitentiaries.

  It took three excruciating we
eks to get the Adams back in space, and even then it had to spend an additional week to test the new and/or updated hardware and debug the new and/or updated software. The formerly good relationship between the crew and the civilian techs that came along for the trials had become seriously strained – the civilians were making extremely good money, the crew got small, free life insurance policies, and of course, a small headstone that, if provided, would prove to be highly expensive.

  Nearly one month to the day after John and James returned to the Adams, the craft jumped out of Elyse on its journey to reunite with the other carriers in its group. Any fears John may have had about losses incurred while he was away were put to rest when he learned that three other Adams class carriers had suffered the same or similar engine room problems. One ship suffered several casualties when a bottle lost containment. Its automatic ejection system functioned, but not swiftly enough to prevent relatively serious damage to the ship, and fourteen deaths.

  John gathered James and the other eleven CAG’s together for a refresher course on the basics of integrating nearly one thousand fighters into one cohesive whole. In his first independent assignment his tactics had been extremely successful, and by this phase of the war, everyone wanted to get it over with without any unnecessary additional loss of life. As a result, everyone in his group seemed to be on the same page.

  After an intense morning session, they adjourned for lunch. After they returned, he presented their next assignment. Their task force was being augmented by an additional six older carriers, and four additional cruisers, for a total of eight new-build armored cruisers. In addition, he had been promised a few new-build destroyers, the first to come out of the yards. John didn’t even mention that promise, assuming they wouldn’t be available within the time frame he’d been given. In fact, the destroyers he’d just recently been assigned had already been pilfered by home fleet.

  The federal navy had been concentrating on getting as many new carriers into production as possible. It now had a total of thirty new Adams class ships. A number of the original carriers had been decommissioned, but most had been retained for use in securing former rebel systems after they had been conquered. When they were conquered.

  Now that the navy had a decent number of carriers, it was beginning to turn out new destroyers. If they were able to perform anywhere near their design specifications, they would be a huge improvement over the current crop of former small passenger ships out of which the fleet’s destroyers were largely created.

  John’s orders were to to reduce the number of rebel-held systems. Their previous success had convinced admiralty that they could prosecute the war on more than one front: while their two main fleets continued to whittle down the rebel mobile combat forces, John’s assignment was to take the war directly to the rebel worlds. This tactic had the added advantage of creating panic within the rebel systems, potentially syphoning off valuable combat assets that would not then be available to the rebel fleets. Essentially, he was tasked with burning a path through the rebel systems, eliminating their ability to wage war and eliminating their support for the one large and two very small rebel fleets.

  Their first assignment was to reduce the system defenses of Oceania, a whimsically named planet that had only one large ocean and a great many deserts. It had been one of the earliest systems to be colonized, and under the present federal guidelines would not have been considered suitable. However it came to be, Oceania was now home to thirteen million people and boasted a fairly well established economy that had been largely self-reliant for over fifty years. Its defenses would almost certainly be far tougher than Orleans, although not as extensive as those found at Nasser. Hopefully.

  This time around he did have some intelligence on the system, possibly gained via scouts, possibly via “gifts”. Either way, he apparently faced somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand system-based fighters, fifteen to twenty destroyers, and an unknown but presumably large number of missile boats. There was no mention of missile ships, an unsettling omission, since they represented a fairly large possibility for disaster. The information given him didn’t mention carriers, but he hoped that he could get in close enough to the inner system to make the existence of carriers irrelevant. While he hoped for a large amount of laxity and poor training; he planned on Oceania having alert, well-trained defenses

  John had developed a very good working relationship with his CAG’s and ship captains, and after going over the analysis of the makeup and quantities of system defenses, he turned it over to a general discussion.

  It took but one minute for them to decide that the first goal would be the surrender without the destruction of the system orbital infrastructure. Absent that, sufficient destruction of enough of the defenses to force the system to surrender before losing its space-based assets. Last choice would be a prolonged battle or series of battles that culminated in a large loss of life, the destruction of most or all of their assets, followed by surrender.

  At that point in the discussion, John asked, “What if we accomplish the destruction of nearly all of their combat ships, and are forced to destroy their orbital construction, and the planet still refuses to surrender? They could presumably employ large numbers of fighters, surface-based energy weapons and missile launchers and they could stage their fighters from multiple locations, making the occupation of the planet extremely difficult. What then?”

  After an uncomfortable silence, Lieutenant Commander Hasan said, “Sir, under those circumstances, it would be a nightmare – we have no known way of getting large numbers of soldiers onto the surface of the planet, short of incurring thousands upon thousands of casualties, on both sides. I might add that even if we did have transportation, we don’t happen to have the troops.”

  John looked around the room and asked, “I have an analysis, prepared for Admiral Grigorivich, which tends to suggest that that scenario may well play out, if not here, on possibly three systems. As it stands, I believe we should be able to reduce their system defenses without significant federal losses; I also know that the federal government is pursuing the design of an assault craft that would be able to survive to reach the surface and land ten heavily armed troops. The problem is that this design has not even been formally accepted yet, and the craft would be stupendously expensive to build. Therefore, we need to begin planning now for the possibility that this system is not going to roll over and play dead.”

  James received permission to speak, and said, “From the point that we have achieved total control over their orbitals, and the planet refuses to surrender, how long would it take for the army to show up?” John said, “Figure, one month, minimum. I’ve spoken with the admiral about just this possibility, and although he has considered the possibility, he admitted that there are no plans in place to actually assault a planet. It is not our responsibility to come up with a plan; however, I wish, first, to avoid having to attack the planet; and second, I want to be prepared for the possibility. While we waited for the Adams to be released from the yard dogs costly embrace, Commander Chamberlin conducted some tests. He wanted to see just how difficult it would be for our fighters to be utilized in a ground attack role. Commander?”

  His brother said, “We used the Elyse System Defense Array for some simulations. We set up the test with a planet that held two thousand fighters and a large, interlocking defensive array consisting primarily of fixed energy weapons with missile arrays in settled areas. The fighters could be temporarily based out of virtually anywhere. We tried it with as few as sixty, up to as many as five hundred fighters. Losses ranged from thirty percent up to as high as seventy seven percent. Fighters are not planes, have no shielding, and would not be able to exceed four hundred knots in atmosphere. They are extremely vulnerable to energy weapons, which would be targeting them from less than two hundred kilometers to as few as five. We believe a fighter’s drive would be masked while operating on or near a planetary surface; however, the fighter would be warm, if not hot, from movem
ent through atmosphere, enabling it to be tracked thermally, providing an advantage to the defenses, as the assaulting craft would be targeted with a cold background. We tried numerous tactics, including multiple, simultaneous assaults, which produced the worst results, to one combined mass descent with three hundred fighters. Even with the advantage of mutual fighter defense, the scenario predicted that we would lose over two hundred fighters – on the initial descent. The single simulation that would enable us to prep a landing zone and safely drop troop transports down onto the surface involved the use of five hundred fighters, with the loss of approximately three hundred plus crews. That would not be the end of the problem, since we would have to be able to resupply our troops. We estimate that the first twenty-four hours would require repeated drops of missiles and other consumables, and we were not able to develop any sort of prediction as to the percentage that would get through, although, it wouldn’t be enough. Our conclusions are that if we cannot achieve surrender, at present we do not have the means of forcing surrender, short of bombardment from space. Um, these numbers represent a ‘bad case’, not a worst nor good case.”