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As the icon representing the enemy intersected the lead missiles, Vango saw the area turn milky again, a translucent representation of the VR processors’ inability to fully detect what was going on. That bubble of pale white marched forward as sparks brightened around it and then extinguished, and still it came on, even accelerated.
Vango checked the numbers and marveled as the Destroyers crept up toward .1 c, an amazing value for a tactical engagement. No doubt that velocity contributed to their survival; the missiles now had to calculate precise and accurate trigger time in finer and finer slices, as the closing speed with the missiles on opposite tracks approached .2 c.
And still the enemy flew.
More than halfway through the missile swarm and the Destroyers continued to accelerate. Over two thirds of the missiles had not even detonated, cruising on past, never getting within their blast radii. Programming reversed their vectors and reduced their accelerations to save fuel, and they began the long process of slowing down to relative rest, to be issued new instructions later or even recovered.
Now the lead ships’ time to intercept crossed five minutes, six minutes five seconds for Vango. All they had left were their centerline masers.
And their suicide bombs, of fifty megatons each. Just one of them, if it could be triggered close enough, might crack a Destroyer. Getting close enough would be the trick.
His whole life, in every tough situation, Vango had always tried to do what he thought his various elders would have done, and in this moment he realized he had only done half. With that prayer launched heavenward, he’d done what his father might have done – certainly what Aunt Cassandra would have. She had an unshakable faith in God’s plans, though she sure seemed to be willing to give Him all the help she could.
Now he thought he ought to do what Grandpa David would do in his place, who’d flown in Vietnam and had taught him, in his opinion, the best piece of poetry ever written: High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Vango opened up his squadron channel and slowly, reverently recited the first line:
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
He felt the surprise through the link, emotional phantoms that the technicians insisted were illusions, as his fellow pilots heard the words and responded –
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
A few echoes seemed to come back to him over the verbal comm as he continued.
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
By this time he could feel others join in: a few, then a dozen, and then many more as he realized Dick had opened the squadron net to the entire wing. Almost a thousand attack ships now heard the words, and as many as knew them, all of the Aerospace Forces personnel for sure, and a goodly portion of the Navy as well, recited with him, their voices swelling:
Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
The entire array of Aardvarks, awkwardly named and ugly, transformed in Vango’s vision into a sparkling of stardust, pinpricks of light converging on their hated nemeses, the things that wanted to kill their planet, their nations, their hometowns and their families.
The fleet’s nearest edge crossed the one minute mark.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
Open channels carried tens of thousands of voices across space, raised in the unison that only those who put their frail bodies between death and their loved ones can truly achieve: a oneness of fighting spirit that could not be matched or even understood by any hated alien.
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Vango lost himself in the glory of it, surrendered himself to onrushing death even as his senses heightened further.
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
A pause came then, a moment of silence, then a swell of cheering. It lasted for as long as throats could hold it, then the comm nets broke back apart as the commanders rescinded their overrides, taking back tactical control just in time.
At thirty seconds out the lead elements began firing, their puny microwave lasers reaching en masse across the distance, hoping to do damage. Vango, with almost two minutes until his turn came, had the luxury to take a close look at the enemy ships, to try to find out how they had survived the fleet’s missile storm.
What he saw caused him to grudgingly admire the Meme commander, whoever he or it was. Where before the two ships had been rubbing shoulders, now they had done something else entirely, something only two ships that were alive possibly could have.
The football of the damaged enemy had been split at the back and down four symmetrical seams, opening up like a flower from the tail. Wedges of armored skin five hundred meters thick now wrapped over the nose of the healthier ship, extending down to past its midpoint, as if the rearmost Destroyer had been shoved inside the other. In effect, it had just cannibalized its fellow and doubled the armor over its own front half.
A thousand meters of layered bio-ferrocrystal chitin, Vango thought with a shudder. And with these living ships...could one absorb the other? Could they graft together like trees, in time becoming one even bigger, more dangerous ship? Had there originally been one, and it had split into two, explaining the discrepancy in the intelligence reports? So alien...
He tried to recall the briefings he had on the enemy armor’s resistance to heat, blast and radiation and came to a stark conclusion: to have any chance of seriously damaging the enemy, one of the fusion bombs would have to detonate at impact, or so close to the skin as did not matter. In open space, all explosive effects beyond the fireball dropped off by a factor of one over the cube of the distance, which was very steeply indeed.
Looking closer, the VR was now able to show a high-resolution near-real-time image of the combined Destroyer. Great portions of it had blackened, and pits, bubbles and rents hundreds of meters wide and deep showed on the second skin. If that damage had been done to the healthy one itself, it might not have survived, but like a gunman shielding himself with a dead body, the Meme had made the corpse of one ship work for them.
And then there was no more time to think. With his virtual hands and feet on the controls, he lined up his attack vector to intersect the enemy ship’s future position. By itself the computer would get him close, but in simulations and exercises the value of the human-in-the-loop system had proven itself. Properly trained, a pilot who knew how to use his systems always made better, more intuitive decisions than a computer alone.
The single combined Destroyer bore forward, continuing to accelerate at what must be its maximum, though now less with all that extra mass on it. Instead of turning to use its drive to clear a path and thereby cause itself to slow, it was just bulling its way through.
One unexpected benefit of the enemy’s corpse-draped nose was its inability to use its bow fusors. Here and there one reached out from between the flaps of skin around the waist, angled forward as much as possible, but this had very little effect. At the current speeds, all of the incoming Aardvark maser fire struck the Destroyer’s front. Unfortunately that armored area, being dead already, could hardly die again, though it glowed a dull red in places with the heating effects of the microwaves.
Finally the first Aardvark met the enemy.
If it wasn’t General Yeager, then the next one or the next was, as the leading center of the mass EarthFleet formation naturally struck first. Suicide bombs, set to automatically detonate at the closest distance calculable, blossomed like fireworks in the path of the enemy.
Then one did not detonate, apparently striking the Destroyer itself, and a strange thing happened; the enemy seemed to stagger slightly, and chunks of the dead-skin armor peeled away after the impact fireball dissipated.
The enormous suicide device of the Aardvark that actually struck the enemy ship had not gone off. The shock of impact at those speeds had vaporized the ship, pilot and bomb in one titanic blast of heat, but slamming two objects into each other at such speeds created its own fusion blast, smaller but much more concentrated at the point of intersection, tearing hundreds of meters into the enemy armor. The materials of human and Meme crushed themselves together so powerfully that not merely hydrogen, but all sorts of elements up the periodic table fused and released their energy.
As the seconds ticked down Vango abruptly realized what must be done, if it was not already too late. He opened a channel to his wing commander, the highest he could reach, to request a flash priority broadcast to the fleet.
Two Alpha One must have been on the ball because he immediately granted Vango’s request.
Without time to prepare, he just said what came into his head. “All ships listen. We need to turn off our suicide bombs and just aim for the enemy. No fratricide, and at these speeds we’re doing more damage by impact.” And he almost went on, and if we miss we survive to try again, but he stopped himself, worried that saying so might seem cowardly or self-serving.
But he really did believe this was the best tactic. Now he realized why the Meme didn’t bother to put warheads on most of their hypervelocity missiles: they were cheap, and nearly as damaging at speeds this high.
“This is Wing Commander Reardon, acting fleet commander,” Vango heard over the voice net. “Do what that man said. He’s right. The bombs aren’t working.”
His communication came too late for over a hundred pilots, who detonated themselves in the path of the enemy, to minor effect. When the explosions ceased, Vango saw the cloud of Aardvarks tighten up into a stream, a line that threw itself into the enemy’s path.
Only a small percentage of the attack ships were actually able to maneuver into the path of the Destroyer. Most flashed past at enormous velocity. In the vacuum of space, a miss by a meter was the same as a kilometer, unless the hapless ship happened to get caught in the enemy’s fusion wake. Vango sincerely hoped no one disregarded orders and detonated his or her warhead, as the river of thousands of Aardvarks now packed themselves so tightly that doing so would take several friendlies along.
But discipline held, and no matter how the Destroyer twisted and turned, trying to use its fusors, eventually the dead armor was stripped away by repeated impacts, like shotgun blasts tearing through zombie flesh. Soon the dying heroes tore great gouges out of the enemy ship itself.
Whether from desperation or cunning, the Meme changed tactics again. Turning once more sideways, it rolled and spun, drive still blasting. This provided at least two benefits to the enemy that Vango could see.
First, it threw off the aim of the entire fleet, as the Destroyer’s thrust vector was now perpendicular to its path of flight. He was not sure that would matter much, as the cloud of Aardvarks now impacted the enemy more by luck than any particular skill.
Second, it allowed the use of a lot of the thing’s fusors even as it spun to present different parts of its armor to each successive impact. The blasts of plasma flame reached out ten kilometers to destroy some of the tiny ships before they could strike, and limited the possibility of repeated collisions tearing their way through a single place.
Even as he analyzed the battle, Vango’s hyperaware mind and psychomotor skills guided him in to his own rendezvous with death. Suddenly he had to reflexively reduce the zoom on his VR display as his real position overtook his apparent viewpoint. Now, at thousands of kilometers per second, he became just another part of the suicide stream, a fire hose blast of individual ships hoping to do their duties by dying well.
Five. He held the caret showing the intersection point steady on the enemy’s path, and set his maser to continuous fire. One advantage of such a weapon was that it had little effect on friendlies, its wavelength optimized for Meme flesh.
Four. He edged the caret over to the side a bit, Kentucky windage based on his instinct about the effects of the impacts of the ships in front of him.
Three. The Destroyer, the caret, and the target projection drew together, jittering around like beetles shaken in the bottom of a jar, but inevitably getting closer.
Two. The ability of his computer system to help him failed. He couldn’t bring the three icons closer together with any consistency. The best he could do was hold them as near to each other as possible.
One. He aimed Lark at the middle of the variables, and waited. In truth, he was not sure what he hoped: to die, or to live.
Zero.
Minus One. No impact. Lark missed, and Vincent Markis failed to die.
He felt his vision blur and he took a great shuddering breath as his body’s physical reaction bled over into the VR. Not dead...I failed. Shutting down the virtuality for a moment, Vango found himself back in his suit, snot streaming from his nose and his heart triphammering in his ears. He reached up to try to wipe his face but his visor prevented it, so he opened up and tried to use his gloved hand. Eventually he gave up and shut it again.
Laboriously employing the manual controls, he turned around and brought his engine down to minimum burn, aiming back along his path. Checking his fuel, he realized he had only seven percent remaining.
There was no way to reengage. If the Destroyer made it through the gauntlet, none of the fleet had the means to do anything about it. Ergo, his job was done. He could relax.
But he wasn’t going to make it home, either. Not unless the refuelers found him, so he set out to make that as likely as possible.
One more time into the VR, he thought. One more time, then I unplug and go to sleep. Then he remembered that he would have to stay linked in or he would just wake up in a few days. It was the virtuality system that controlled his consciousness, made the time go by faster, and reduced his need for food and oxygen to a minimum. Without it, he wouldn’t make it more than a few weeks.
Like the general. That feat still amazed him. If there really was an afterlife, he hoped to shake the man’s hand there.
Anxiety crept up on him again, hints of paranoia to be stuck here inside this little tube instead of part of Lark in open space, flying free.
Hell. I guess it’s better than dying, and maybe with the information sent back they’ll be able to treat VR addiction somehow.
So Vango gave up, linked in, and became well again.
Examining the situation, he found the Destroyer beyond the reach of the fleet and still accelerating, though with less fury. Zooming in, he could see a great deal of damage done to the giant ship, but he knew that such was only temporary.
Living ships healed.
Fleet Aardvark count stood just above sixteen thousand, out of more than thirty thousand at start. Some wings, especially First Wing that had detonated most of its suicide bombs, had been hit hard. Others had lost only a few. Vango wondered what the point was now, to have built all these little ships with each pilot in his or her isolated world. No chance of sitting down in a mess or wardroom, no drinks with friends, no gyms or bunks or lovers’ trysts.
Then he remembered that larger ships would have been spotted, would have been targeted by the enemy’s hypers, and wouldn’t have been able to keep up. Relatively overpowered for their size, only something like the Aardvarks had a chance to engage.
And they’d gotten one of the bastards. Whether there had been two originally or the original had divided, hoping to double their power before taking on Earth, didn’t really matter; either way, they had done their job. At a cost of some fifteen thousand heroes, they had taken down a Destroyer.
“All right, ladies and gents,” Dick came over the comm, “form up in standard squadron flight ranks, according to the plan I just uploaded. Our squadron lost five, and they’ll be missed, but we got one of the bastards and that’s something. Now we’re going home.”
“How?” came the question from one of the attack ship drivers, quicker than the others who echoed her. “We’re all way over bingo fuel. By my calculations we’ll make it back to Saturn’s orbit in about thirty years.”
“At least our families will have something to bury,” commented some wag.
“Hold up, hold up,” Dick overrode them. “There are three refuelers on the way, with grabships, spares and processing plants to turn some of these iceballs into hydrogen. They’ll be here in a month or two. All we have to do is sit tight, link in, and go to sleep.”
Vango asked, “Are the refuelers’ positions uploaded?” He’d tried to call up the info but had been unable.
“No,” Dick replied. “We don’t even have their plots, in case the Destroyer could somehow hack our systems or capture and interrogate a pilot. All I know is, they are over a month behind us, cruising in silent mode.”
“So no chance of that son of a bitch seeing and killing them on the way in?” Vango made the icon of the receding enemy pulse and highlighted the curving track of its predicted course, which looped back toward Earth.
“I can’t know for sure, but it only makes sense they should be somewhere around here.” Dick drew a circle around an area of space between them and the edge of the solar system. The Destroyer’s track came nowhere near. “So we’ve already done our bit. Nothing to do but wait. All of the intel is being pumped back home, and will get there at lightspeed long before the enemy. They’ll adjust strategy and tactics accordingly. If all of us out here beat one and drove the other one off, then I have every confidence the entire strength of EarthFleet can kill the second.”
Positive murmurs and chatter filled the squadron net, but Vango wasn’t listening anymore. Never the type to take things at face value, he began working on a report, including some very pointed questions, such as: Are we sure there were only two?
And then, overwhelmed, he adjusted his time sense to forty to one, giving him one or at most two subjective days to live through, and went to sleep.
