I said, “Okay, but why would Pine’s missile system have registered ‘ready,’ at takeoff?”
Drayton said, “Yeah, that’s weird. I think there was minimal conductivity through the projectile fragment—enough to indicate that the system was in order, but not enough to cause the launch.”
I said, “You really think that makes any sense at all?”
Drayton shook his head. “Not really. All I can say is, I took care of the repair of the problem I noted. Officially, everything is shipshape now. Just what I mean by that, though, is anybody’s guess.”
I said, “I get you. Thanks for what you did. Do you want to bring the ship into the fighter bay?” Drayton was a qualified pilot—not for combat, but for routine activities.
“Glad to.”
I contacted Pine and recounted my discussion with Drayton. We were all satisfied. We adopted an “all’s well that ends well” attitude, which is so often the position we fall back on when we don’t know what really happened.
I just hoped that the problem with the Banshee’s missile-launch system wasn’t deeper and more subtle. Drayton was the best in his specialty, but he wasn’t all that certain that the real problem had been found, or was even findable. If I had unlimited resources, I probably would have destroyed both the Banshee and the missile, to play it safe. On the other hand, even new factory-fresh Banshees sometimes exhibited problems, so it’s all a game you can’t win.
Ultimately, I had Drayton check the missile-launch systems on all of the Banshees. I also had four electronics guys go over all the key electronics on all six Banshees. Lastly, I had a crew check and double-check everything mechanical. Well, “everything” might be going too far. I had them do what we call a “forty-hour check,” which is supposed to take forty man-hours, per ship. It’s an intermediate-level check, but it’s reasonably comprehensive. Unless an emergency arose, we weren’t going to take any fighters out until all of them were determined to be shipshape.
So, multiple teams were on it, and they worked in shifts. They managed to complete three of the Banshees in thirty hours. Then they moved on to the other three. On the first three, they found several minor maintenance problems, but none of them had posed any safety problems.
Boarding Party, Chapter 28 The Hot-Runner
Pine’s Banshee was one of the first three that Drayton’s people finished with, as was mine.
A couple of hours after that, Pine and I were out in our Banshees, on what we called a routine patrol. It was mainly a dry run, to make certain that everything was in working order. I saw no cause for concern. I expected to return to the Invicta after about twenty minutes.
Everything went fine for the first fifteen minutes. But then, just as I was beginning to feel good, a rocket blast came from one of the missiles mounted under Pine’s fighter.
Pine clicked into my line and said, “Astrid, I got a hot-runner forward of my ventral B-missile.”
This was the very nightmare I had feared after Drayton and I decided that Pine’s missile launch problem had been resolved. A “hot-runner” is a missile whose engine ignites unexpectedly while it’s still mounted to the fighter.
Since the hot-runner was forward of the B-missile, that meant that the rocket blast of the malfunctioning missile was engulfing the warhead of the B-missile, as well as its fuel compartments. The A-missile had not accepted the launch command when it was made, a day earlier. Now, for some reason, the command was accepted, without Pine initiating it, and without the missile releasing from the Banshee.
This looked to be one of those rare instances of three or four unlikely things going wrong at once.
Realistically, Pine was as good as dead.
I tried to think. I had never confronted this situation before. Still, I had my training to fall back on.
I said, “Pine, you need to get free of the cockpit, now!”
“I can’t. No EVA suit.”
I knew that. Not sure why I made that suggestion. I then said, “Rotate one-eighty.”
The Piranhas have an anti-circular-run mechanism that keeps them from circling back around after launch. In theory, the Piranha’s engine will shut off if the missile reaches an angle of greater than ninety degrees variance from its angle at ignition. This normally didn’t help when the missile was still mounted to the fighter, but it was worth trying.
Within seconds, Pine’s ship was pointed in the opposite direction. Nothing happened. The rocket blast continued.
It was weird and frightening to see the full blast of the forward Piranha’s engine enveloping the missile immediately in back of it—and knowing there was someone in the cockpit.
[End of Extract.]
Read more in Alan Householder’s Boarding Party: The Boarding of the USS Invicta.
Boarding Party:
The Boarding of the USS Invicta
by Alan Householder
Book Two in the Astrid Amundsen Series
Release date: January 14, 2020
Special price until then!
Available for pre-order on Amazon,
or read for free on Kindle Unlimited.
Astrid's War Page 16