Jack of Harts 2.5: Wolfenheim Rising

by Medron Pryde

  The main engines and maneuvering thrusters flared with a dull light, maintaining just enough power to hold them on the crest of the grav wave. The total lack of drive plumes had the advantage of making them all but invisible to the standard shipboard scanners of a Shang warship, even as the grav wave propelled them directly towards the enemy fleet. They passed one percent of lightspeed in a matter of seconds, an acceleration that no warship could ever dream of matching, and continued to accelerate for the better part of a minute.

  Then the massive grav drive powered down, the main fusion drives turned off entirely, and the fighters became holes in space moving at nearly ten percent the speed of light. Malcolm glanced at the display showing their course and the projected Shang course. Assuming Murphy’s squadron continued to run, his little force of fighters should intercept the Shang in five minutes. She just had to hold out that long.

  Malcolm winced as the displays showed another missile strike breaking through the defense grid, and one of the Austin-class destroyers staggered to the side. Wreckage flowed out of her flank, telling the tale of catastrophic damage inflicted on the tiny warship. He looked to Dawn and she returned a worried gaze. Then she pointed him at another display, and he nodded in understanding.

  The Red Line denoting the edge of the Bosphorus jamming zone glowed behind them on the displays. They could no longer dive into hyperspace to escape. Once they started shooting, they would be committing to combat until they accelerated out of range the old-fashioned way. Malcolm smiled, at peace with his decision to intervene.

  He flexed his fingers on the controls, leaned back, and watched the missile engagement. The Shang disliked moving in close against the heavy gravitic cannons that American warships used. A well-placed, or lucky, gravitic beam could cripple a ship in seconds. Missiles didn’t have the ability to twist gravity as powerfully as one of those brutal cannons, but in sufficient numbers they could do the same damage.

  The Shang fired in those numbers, but the American defense grids attempted to stop those missiles with every weapon at their disposal. Scores of decoy drones broadcasting the electronic signatures of destroyers sucked missiles away from the real warships. Other drones simply sought to jam the missiles’ ability to track any targets at all. The real warships cut their electronic emissions to make themselves look like anything but warships, and missiles simply wandered off target to self-destruct after their fuel ran out. It was a complex war between Shang AIs and American cybers that no genetic human could possibly keep up with. It was a war in which the Americans enjoyed a pronounced advantage. Peloran cybertech was simply far more advanced than anything the Shang had, and the Peloran had shared it with the entire Western Alliance.

  What the Shang had was numbers. Scores of missiles dove in towards the destroyers, and even if the American cybers tricked scores of them into missing, there were always more missiles flying in, with their singular mission being to kill something and die trying. As Malcolm watched, a wedge of missiles dove in towards the destroyers, ducking and weaving through the defensive fire of counter missiles sent to slay them. Most died, but some made it through and closed with the destroyers. Lasers lashed them, ripping more apart, but two made it through everything.

  The first exploded just short of the target’s deflection grid, tearing at the destroyer’s control over gravity. A gravitic sheer powerful enough to bend even light away from the target failed, overridden in a split second by a missile throwing every last bit of its power into that single attack. A hole opened in the deflection grid, and the second missile flew through it without any resistance at all. The onboard generator became a miniature black hole, sucking everything in for the barest instant. It passed through armor, air, and anything or anyone unlucky enough to be in its path. And then the generator reversed, pushing everything it collected back out. The missile exploded, using fragments of the target to rip it open from the inside.

  Malcolm winced as the destroyer lurched, but stayed in formation and continued to fire at the incoming stream of missiles. She was an Austin-class destroyer, the best American destroyer ever built, and she would not go down easily. But she would go down if someone didn’t do something about it. Which made it a very good thing for her that someone was about to do something.

  “All fighters, attack pattern Alpha,” Smith transmitted.

  Malcolm glanced at Dawn and she nodded back. She was ready. He smiled as the grav generator powered up again and they effectively slammed on the brakes. All the other fighters in their formation did the same, shedding velocity as they dove towards their targets. Massive fusion drives fired at maximum power, filling space with kilometers-long blue beacons of exhaust, broadcasting to everyone with eyes that they were coming.

  “Hello, boys,” Malcolm said with a nasty chuckle as one of the destroyers flashed on his displays. “We’re here.”

  The Shang AIs responded to the sudden arrival of the Wolfenheim fighters with missiles and lasers that had been fighting Murphy’s squadron seconds before. But they didn’t have time to do anything else as the fighters closed. It was a perfectly executed high-speed attack coming out of complete darkness. Malcolm continued to chuckle as he imagined the Shang crewmen trying to come to terms with the idea that suddenly they were the ones in danger.

  “All fighters, fire for effect,” Smith ordered in an iron tone.

  I lived in a time of peace. It was a time of healing with new medicines, and a time of building hundreds of new colonies. We laughed and danced and loved. We weren’t perfect by any means, but it was a good time. But to everything there is a season, a time to every purpose in the heavens. Even war. Sometimes especially war. My time of war came later than others. I got to build something great. And then I threw it into The War. It was time.

  VIII

  Malcolm McDonnell held the controls as a dull vibration ran through his fighter. She was an old fighter, built a century ago when gravtech was the latest revolution in military technology. She was a work of art; graceful curves ran from nose to tail, and she was built to proclaim the power of America to all the worlds. Newer and better fighters replaced her in time, leaving her to be part of a system defense force until even they retired her for something better.

  Malcolm rescued her from her mothballs, and the Peloran replaced her age-warped structure with new alloys, her weapons with Peloran technologies. They made her into a fighter that could stand with the best of them once again. But no matter how much work they did, there was one system she’d never been built to use. The gravitic cannon in her nose warped the very fabric of space into a swirling vortex that twisted and tore at anything it came into contact with. That sent a dull vibration running from one end of his fighter to the other.

  Eleven more fighters of Malcolm’s squadron fired their gravitic cannons in unison with his. The beams of twisted gravity shot across space at targets still coming to terms with the idea that they were targets. The Artificial Intelligences running the Shang warships’ defense grids did everything they could in the time they had left. Missiles streaked out to meet Malcolm’s fighters, and the ships turned to perform anti-fighter defensive maneuvers.

  But the living Shang crews had known without a shadow of a doubt that they were alone with the eight destroyers they were here to kill. They knew they were winning. They knew they could simply turn away from any force that could threaten them and never be forced into any battle they didn’t want. And they knew they could kill Murphy’s squadron without taking any losses at all. The Shang were the superior race of humanity in their own eyes, and in those first seconds they simply could not conceive that they had been suckered. It was even worse for their destroyers. The cruisers had been firing on Murphy, but the destroyers had not yet fired a shot in anger. They were escorts, there to protect the larger cruisers that did the work of executing their targets from range. It took time for them to realize the execution had been called off.

  It took the counter missiles fired by their AIs several seconds to cross the half-
lightsecond between them and the fighters, but the gravitic beams traveled at lightspeed. A single half-second after firing, two of his squadron’s twelve gravitic cannons missed the destroyer. Half a second after that, when the light traveled back to Malcolm, he saw them miss. He smiled, though. Two misses out of twelve shots meant ten hits, and that was amazing.

  Dawn had spent the last several minutes monitoring the Shang evasive maneuvers until she knew what their AIs were going to do almost as well as they did. Ten of her gravitic vortexes smashed into the Shang destroyer’s deflection grid. The grid’s gravitic shear twisted everything trying to approach the warship. Missiles or other physical projectiles that came in contact with the grid were ripped apart to be absorbed into a ship’s material reserves in time. Lasers and other energy weapons found themselves twisted, deflected away from their target to fly through space until distance and inevitable dispersion left them unable to threaten even unshielded targets.

  The gravitic cannons tore at the deflection grid that was proof against any other assault, exerting the Blackhawk’s control. The warship’s gravity generators were far more powerful, but there were many Blackhawks, and their attacks were focused down to mere centimeters. The gravitic beams cut through the destroyer’s grid, dictating their will to the universe for a mere second, and cut into armor, sucking it from the ship. Atmosphere flowed into the gravitic beams as they bored further into the destroyer’s inner core, pinpricks of destruction that penetrated bulkheads, computer systems, and living beings.

  The wounded destroyer twisted away, trying to escape the fighter squadron, and the vortexes ripped through the maneuvering target. The cannons shut down, their capacitors drained, and the destroyer accelerated away, ten horrible claw marks riven deep into the hull, deflection grid rippling like a lake hit by rocks. Then it simply came apart. Sections of the ship broke away from each other, the structure holding them together cut by the gravitic cannons, and began to drift apart. It was almost an anticlimactic way for a warship to die.

  “Yippie ki-yay!”

  Malcolm blinked at Smith’s transmission as the fighters began to bob and weave in an elegant dance against the wave front of coming missiles. He glanced at the displays to see another destroyer disappearing in a massive explosion. Two more, the targets of the other Blackhawk squadrons, remained under power, but wreckage and atmosphere belched out of their horribly wounded flanks.

  There was nothing anticlimactic about Smith’s target, and with one glance Malcolm understood the man’s exclamation. Of thirty-nine gravitic cannons the thirteen Avengers fired, almost thirty impacted the Shang cruiser, and he watched explosions ripple out of the massive rents the cannons made in its hull. Again and again, each explosion more massive than the last, it took the ship barely two seconds to die. The final explosion left nothing but an expanding fireball in the formation of a fleet of mighty Shang cruisers.

  Then it was the Shang’s turn. Hundreds of missiles streaked in, many from ships already dead, hunting for the fighters that had dared to attack a Shang fleet. Malcolm’s fighters ducked and weaved around him in the best defensive maneuvers Dawn could conceive of. Decoys and jammers shot out, and scores of missiles lost target lock. Laser cannons pulsed against missiles still diving in, and scores more died.

  Malcolm relaxed back in his seat, sighed, and held his hands on the controls as the surviving missiles came in for the kill. His left hand rested on the throttle controlling movement in every direction, his right hand holding the stick directing orientation. It was deceptively simple and complex at the same time, especially for someone who’d never played fighter sims in his life. But training turned it into instinct. He no longer thought about moving, and that was the point.

  Thousands of years of civilization had taught humans to think things through before acting. But humans used such a tiny percentage of their mind to form coherent thoughts. The rest was always working, though. If a person paid attention to all the seemingly random feelings that pushed on the edges of the conscious mind, they could be so much smarter.

  At the moment, Malcolm felt the undeniable urge to be elsewhere, and he went elsewhere. He didn’t think about it. The training was enough that he moved the throttle to the left without taking time to form a coherent thought on the matter. He simply wanted to be elsewhere, and a dozen fighters accelerated to port, maneuvering thrusters flaring. A second later, a score of missiles his conscious mind did not have the time to recognize as a threat came careening through where he and his fighters would have been. The missiles vainly tried to swing back towards the fighters, but were no longer able to make the turn. They lacked the fuel, and even Malcolm’s subconscious mind paid no more attention to them.

  He had far bigger worries. The fighters’ engines sent long torches of flame into space, and the entire formation began a slingshot maneuver that would take them around the Shang fleet. One of the destroyers flashed on his displays, and Malcolm nodded towards Dawn’s holoform, sitting on console. She smiled and the gravitic cannon spoke again, reaching out to rip at their new target. Their new target was ready though, deflection grids and jamming systems oriented to protect against the fighters. Only three cannons found the target, and though the destroyer flinched, it continued to fight.

  This time though, missiles rippled out of the launchers on either side of the fuselage, adding their own brand of chaos to the developing battle. The missile fire of five dozen fighters filled space with wildly accelerating miniature guided weapons with a single goal. Death by mutual extinction with their target. Malcolm’s fire poured into the destroyer, even as its point defense grid ripped them apart by the scores. Cruisers and other destroyers joined in, adding their point defense to his target, and Malcolm smiled at the thought of cruisers actually protecting the ships that were meant to protect them.

  Only a few missiles made it through the first wave of point defense, most of them horribly blinded by the destruction of their fellows. They missed the destroyer entirely. But more missiles followed them, far enough back that their sensors survived. They flew through the expanding gases of their dead compatriots and shot into their target with a vengeance.

  The first missiles ripped the already destabilized deflection grid apart, leaving the destroyer open to the rest. Later missiles poured into the vulnerable destroyer, some of them carrying old-style chemical warheads that exploded around it, filling space with more flames and debris. Some attacked the destroyer with electronic countermeasures, blinding its sensitive systems to other incoming missiles. The last missiles came in almost unopposed, generating miniature black holes that ripped through the destroyer without mercy until nothing remained to fight.

  “Yippie ki-yay,” Malcolm said with a smile.

  Dawn snorted. “You need to work on your delivery,” she said in a wry tone.

  “Yeah, I’ll do that,” Malcolm responded and scanned the displays. Two more destroyers exploded from the fire of other Blackhawk squadrons, leaving the Shang flank almost denuded. Ten cruisers and ten destroyer escorts had started the battle. Now only five destroyers remained, three of them streaming atmosphere from the wounds in their flanks. As he watched, a second cruiser broke apart and Smith whooped another victory cry. Eight remaining cruisers.

  “We’ve got movement,” Dawn announced, sending a flicker through the displays. He followed the shift to see Murphy’s squadron of eight Austin-class destroyers. Three of them, each horribly damaged by the Shang bombardment, continued to run towards the Bosphorus forts. But as he watched, five of the destroyers snapped around in a swift u-turn to face the beleaguered Shang fleet.

  “Bloody hell,” Malcolm growled. Murphy’s destroyers leapt as their engines came to full power, and they began to close the range with the Shang. Malcolm shook his head. This was not supposed to happen. Then one of Malcolm’s Blackhawks took an engine hit from a Shang missile, and he forgot all about those other ships. The engine disappeared, fragments flying in every direction, and their fighters’ complex defensive mane
uvering pattern unraveled. Blackhawks scattered to avoid the fighter now spinning out of control. The fighter passed within meters of Malcolm’s cockpit before careening out of the battle, and the blood drained from his face. That had been far too close.

  Other squadrons’ Blackhawks, and even some Avengers, spun away from the battle or simply came apart altogether as missiles designed to shatter warships found mere fighters. Then five massive gravitic vortexes swept in from Murphy’s squadron, bracketing a single cruiser with their devastating power. Three barely missed the wildly maneuvering cruiser, but two gravitic beams smashed through the deflection grid. They tore into the nose, opening her armored core like a can opener. They dug deep into the structure and further into the core, ripping the ship apart from the inside. In less than a second, nothing but the lifeless wreck of a warship remained. Malcolm had to suppress a shudder as he realized how truly deadly those destroyers were.

  “Smith?” he asked.

  “Yes, I see it,” Smith answered, his voice unhappy to say the least.

  Malcolm pulled the right stick over and the Blackhawk spun to avoid an incoming missile. “We can’t abandon them now.”

  “Agreed.” Smith’s tone was full of reluctance, but the voice he used a second later was devoid of any hint of that. “All fighters, continue circling and maintain fire.”

  Malcolm glanced at the dropping fuel display as the five fighter squadrons swung around the Shang fleet, keeping half a lightsecond away. Far enough away to be hard to hit, close enough that the cybernetic minds could successfully calculate the movements of the far-dumber Shang artificial intelligences. Unfortunately, the Blackhawks were short-range birds, and he watched the display drop further down towards the absolute minimum it would take to return to Normandy. They would not be able to continue the fight for long.