“That big bastard is getting closer,” Scoggins said as she highlighted the enormous Meme monitor, the Guardian ship that had been collecting solar energy when they first entered the system. Having witnessed the destruction of one moon Weapon and then its gargantuan brother ship, now it had configured for battle in the familiar football shape, and blazed toward Conquest at full speed.
Full conventional drive speed, anyway.
Once, that sight would have filled Absen with concern, if not fear. He remembered the terrible beating Task Force Conquest had taken at the hands of the Gliese 370 Guardian, and the desperate measures he had to employ to win. Even then, only the revolt of the Sekoi against their masters had saved them.
Where before he had spears and slings and arrows, trying to bring down this mammoth, now he had an enormous hammer. Like Mjölnir, the mythical magic weapon of the Norse god Thor, Absen finally had the means to smite his enemies with awesome and decisive blows.
Even better, he could fly, while the enemy could only walk.
Only six Exploders left, he thought. Maybe I should wait the thirty-six hours we need to replace the main weapons array, but even that isn’t enough to take down one of these monsters. A Destroyer, yes, but the numbers say we can’t even penetrate a Guardian’s two-kilometer-thick armor on the first shot. The Meme’s love of big ships is justified. Double the diameter and you can triple or quadruple the thickness of armor, if you don’t need to increase internal systems and crew very much.
“We’re going to use an Exploder on him,” Absen reiterated. “The remaining Guardian and the moon laser are our two major threats, and with the laser, all we have to do is stay away from it. That means ‘that big bastard’ is our number one problem, worth an extreme solution. Are we at full charge?”
“Only two actions, sir,” Klis replied.
“Can’t wait for three?”
“He will be upon us before we have a third full charge,” she responded.
“It will have to be good enough. Pulse in, fire the missile, and pulse onward. Make ready.”
“Missiles,” Ford said. “Now that they are at full battle alert, they will probably react within the time that our fastest shot will need. They could easily pick the Exploder missile out of space. We have to launch a full spread, and add in whatever direct fire weapons we can, just as distractions.”
“Understood. Conquest, if you control the actual weapons fire, how much time will we save?”
“Approximately point seven seconds, sir.”
“So we’ll get the strike down to one point three seconds?”
“No, sir,” Conquest replied with a hint of prim. “Three point three seconds, including the two seconds it takes to acquire the target after the pulse.”
Exasperated, Absen said, “Conquest, I just gave you carte blanche majeure. Now I need you to stop acting like a goddamn computer and show some initiative. Tell me what I need to know, not just what I ask.”
“Yes, sir.”
There came a slight pause, and Absen imagined Conquest’s powerful processors running through innumerable permutations of meaning in the English words, and the surrounding complex situation. He had left his goal deliberately ambiguous, seeking to teach his new boat-brain rather than merely lecture.
“If I control all necessary systems,” she finally replied, “I can reduce the exposure time to approximately two point nine six seconds.”
Absen stabbed his index finger at the avatar. “That’s the right answer. That’s what I need you to start doing. A good officer gets ahead of her commander and anticipates what he wants. Right now, I need the very best solution to kill the enemy while minimizing risk to this boat, using the tactics I have explained.”
“Aye aye, sir. I’ll do my best.”
“That’s what I require.” Absen sat back, folded his arms and watched his crew go about their business.
“Ready for pulse run,” Okuda said, his fingers lightly touching his console.
“Firing sequences ready,” Ford reported. “Exploder in the forward launch tube. All standard missiles ready.”
“Repairs suspended and all parties report secure,” Timmons said.
Klis said, “Engineering ready.”
Once the rest of the sections reported in, Absen stared at the screen and the oncoming Guardian for a moment, so like peering through a periscope at an unsuspecting surface target.
A very big, scary surface target.
Chopping his hand through the air, he said, “Execute.”
Thrum went the TacDrive, and then the captain’s time sense slowed to a crawl. As he was still linked, despite breaking open his cocoon, someone – Conquest, probably – had provided him with the perfect way to watch the action at a rate he could follow.
His muscles felt as if they were made of taffy and his head a block of wood. Speeding up time sense made the rest of the physical world seem dead slow, which was why the ability was normally only used in full VR. In hybrid mode, he could think and transmit fast, but even moving his eyes seemed to take forever.
For a handful of seconds all remained still. Then the screens flickered and the Guardian took shape on the main display, hundreds of fusors flickering like watchfires as hot plasma leaked from open ports. Immediately the enemy ship began spewing hypers by the thousands.
“Target locked,” he heard Ford’s words, oddly distorted. “Firing.” The weapons officer was reporting, not controlling, as Absen could already see Conquest’s missiles launching in a wave of two hundred.
Two hundred and one, as the Exploder added itself to the mix.
Deliberately using the same body as the standard rockets, it was now just one among many, gambling on getting close enough. Absen watched as lasers fired, ignoring the oncoming hypers and targeting the Guardian, the better to cover the speeding EarthFleet missiles. Red eyes winked as the bolts of light impacted, flaring and then disappearing like sparks above a bonfire.
The view swung ponderously to the side in slowtime, and then the screens froze yet again as the TacDrive engaged. When its field dropped once more, Absen’s time sense synchronized and the world righted itself. “Report.”
Aft sensors threw pictures onto the screens and his eyes drank the information. Explosions bloomed like New Year’s fireworks, filling the displays with artificial colors as the system tried to make sense of the overload.
“No det –” Ford began, and then came the gratifying whiteout of the Exploder scraping space clean of all matter more complex than a free particle. When the holotank updated, Absen could see a broken hulk, drifting through the void like a deflated beach ball.
“What are those?” he asked, pointing at an amorphous cloud.
“Hypers,” Scoggins said. “They lost targeting when we pulsed, and there’s no one to update them.”
“Spoke too soon,” Ford said darkly as the flock, like birds, suddenly wheeled around and accelerated toward Conquest.
“This is why I wanted to always keep one pulse in the can,” Absen snarled to himself, though the prime watch heard him easily enough. “How many?”
“About sixty thousand,” Conquest replied.
“Can we stop them?”
“Not with what we have.”
“Will we have a pulse before they hit?”
“No. They will impact in nine minutes.” The avatar waited, inhumanly still, for her commander’s decision.
“Dammit. We keep ending up behind the power curve.”
“Skipper,” a new voice broke in. “Sorry, but I’ve been monitoring the command channel. Sir, my squadron is waiting in the chutes for a mission. Do you need us now?”
“Vango,” Absen barked. “Do the Crows have fusion missiles strapped on?”
“Yes, sir. Two per bird.”
“Then launch, and aim those warheads at the densest parts of that hyper cloud. We have to cut down on their numbers enough for the lasers to handle.”
“Aye aye, sir. Aerospace will get it done.”
***
Vango, alone in Lark, led the way as the first flight of four StormCrows blasted out of the launch chutes. Every six seconds another four followed, until all forty joined in a loose formation that wheeled around into a rough disk, flat side toward the approaching hyper cloud. The refurbished fighters, with better linked cybernetics, had dispensed with the gunner position in favor of more power and ammo.
“Mission control, request optimal targeting coordinates,” he called over his secure link.
Conquest’s melodious synthesized voice – he was becoming familiar with it by now from working in the simulators – replied, “Uploading now.”
“Alpha Squadron, on my mark, fox one.” When he had confirmation that each of forty missiles possessed an aim point corresponding to a dense part of the hyper cloud, he said, “Mark.”
Forty standard missiles kicked loose, igniting their fusion rockets as soon as they had cleared the fighters to avoid blast damage. “Uploading second wave coordinates,” he heard.
Okay...if we fire our second weapons, we won’t have any more heavy hitters; but then again, there aren’t any ships to shoot anyway. Besides, we can’t dogfight with hundred-ton missiles strapped onto our fuselages. Better to go in clean.
Vango followed along in VR space as the first wave flew to its designated set of positions and detonated. While the hypers had obviously fixed their attention on the nearest enemy, without the positive control of the Guardian and its crew they simply arrowed directly toward Conquest. Thus, they took no evasive maneuvers and the forty blasts ripped into the dense clump like bursts of insecticide among swarming termites. Thousands died. Some vaporized outright, but most had their living integument burned, stripped or irradiated to death, leaving the internal ferrocrystal penetrators shooting pointlessly through space with no guidance.
The second wave did even more damage, simultaneous detonations timed to wait until the cluster had pulled even tighter as it approached Conquest. After that...
“All flights, merge and strafe, then come about and shoot them down. Hold your spacing. I don’t want any fratricide. Maximize timesenses and keep your safety protocols on. Anyone who overrides just to get a kill, I will have your ass.”
Interlocks prevented the fighters from shooting each other, even by accident in the swirl of a furball, but some jet jocks turned them off because they could cause a weapon to cut out at the wrong time. They depended on the “big sky, little bullet” theory to avoid shooting each other. Vango wasn’t so sanguine.
Forty StormCrows spread out and flew into the speeding cloud. Fully VR-linked, Aerospace pilots pushed the limits of machine and man, with their time senses artificially accelerated by a multiple of over two hundred. Even with the universe slowed to bullet time, the two forces interpenetrated at speeds that required computer predictive aiming to both hit targets and avoid collisions.
To Vango, he seemed back in some old space combat video game such as he played growing up. He lined up on a bogey and triggered his centerline maser, noting a hit. Not waiting to see the results – Lark’s maser was powerful enough to kill any hyper – he dropped pips onto two more and let the computer fire his wing lasers and railguns in pairs while he lined up on another.
Leaving the secondary suite of weapons on self-selecting automatic, he fired and took out another hyper. Once more, he set up a perfect shot, and then he mashed his thumb down on the virtual trigger but saw no result. Cursing, he remembered that at this fast timesense, the usual ten-second recharge time for a full maser round of two shots would feel like two thousand seconds – more than half an hour in his head.
So he concentrated on turning around and slowing down before the hyper cloud passed him completely. Lark spun, pointing herself backward as he watched the enemy projectiles flash past him, still accelerating on fusion engines. He realized that, given their enormous speed and acceleration advantage, his squadron would never catch the missiles before they made their runs at Conquest. Still, he lined up on his mother ship and poured on the power.
“Alpha Squadron, this is Alpha One,” Vango said over the squadron channel. “We got our licks in, and they’re past us. Nothing we can really do, but we knocked out at least half of the hypers. Hope that leaves us a home to go to.” That was a horrifying thought – stranded in an enemy-controlled system, in a one-man fighter.
“Push your thrust up to seven percent overload. Reduce T-sense to no less than one to one, but leave the kick on automatic.” That meant that any threat warning catapulted the pilot’s brain and link to maximum speed, while allowing him to slow down to experience time normally. Otherwise, a few minute’s travel might seem like days.
Dropping his timesense back to normal, Vango felt the Gs leak through the gravplates as he pressed Lark as hard as he could. Seven percent thrust over maximum was the statistical safety limit. Doing so would wear out the engines faster, but only slightly increase the chance of a catastrophic failure. Still, there was no way the squadron would get another shot at the missiles, unless some missed and looped back around for reattack.
Looking at Conquest, he saw a blizzard of small craft – grabships, pinnaces, and assault sleds – spreading out in a ring around the dreadnought, tiny and insignificant, but each with at least a laser. Automated maintenance drones joined them, and soon more than a hundred tiny helpers floated in the void. This was a tactic of desperation – probably very few would be able to take out a speeding hyper – but any reduction was beneficial.
Briefly his VR controller highlighted another launch from Conquest, something small, like a missile, heading at an oblique angle to the hyper cloud. He caused his viewpoint to swoop in on it but suddenly it disappeared from his data stream. Backtracking its path, he saw that it had also taken flight from the small craft bay. Instead of joining the fight, though, it had blasted away at high speed.
Then he had no time to wonder as the hypers entered Conquest’s defensive engagement zone. Increasing his timesense to maximum again, he watched medium lasers nose from their firing ports as their armored clamshells opened. Immediately they began rapid fire, using just enough energy to damage the incoming missiles without bothering with confirmed kills. At speed, blinding the enemy projectiles and causing them to miss was good enough.
Thrusters flared from their gimbals around the dreadnought’s rim, shoving the ship sideways so that those hypers losing terminal guidance would shoot through the empty space where she had been. The assorted small craft moved away in a perfectly coordinated dance, and Vango realized that they must be on automated control. That made more sense than manning them, anyway – so close to Conquest, with no transmission lag, the AI could fight them better than crew.
The evasive maneuvers and individual defensive shots saved Conquest from the leading edge of the hypers, but thousands remained. Closer and closer, the enemy missiles bored in, and each one that died bought its fellows a few more milliseconds, like a wave assault of screaming footsoldiers assaulting machineguns.
Finally, they broke through. Clamshells slammed shut even as hypers dove for the laser firing ports, weak spots in the hugely thick forward armor. With his speeded senses Vango saw Conquest spin on her axis like a top. In fact, that maneuver had begun several seconds ago, in order to complicate the hypers’ targeting and distribute damage over a wide swath of armor, rather than allow the things to slam repeatedly into the same spots and bore through.
Vango lost all vision in close, and he pulled his VR view back until he could see a boiling cloud of heat and debris. It seemed to take forever, until he remembered to adjust his timesense to near normal again. Then Conquest, spinning, seemed to fling off the mess and rise as it pushed forward on main engines.
Though the entire forward glacis of the dreadnought had been stripped of fittings and ten meters of armor, Vango was relieved to see no critical damage, none of the huge deep holes he had feared. Then he remembered that hypers depended on speed to do damage. The farther away they were fired, the harder they would hit on impact. These had flown for only a few minutes, and with the new armor, even thousands could not chip their way through without the relativistic velocities that usually made them so deadly.
It did look like most of the lasers and all of the sensors were scoured from the surface. Every piece of clamshell armor had been blown clear, leaving naked firing ports, twisted weapons, and hectares of wreckage.
Vango transmitted, “Alpha Squadron, I see a few hundred hypers out there trying to reattack. You are cleared hot to engage by singles. I say again, take your best shots, and we can tally up kills in the bar.” This was the time for the aggressive, competitive spirit – just a turkey shoot against targets that didn’t return fire. That made him wonder if the Meme had ever considered such a thing. Putting a laser on a hyper would complicate things enormously for fighter pilots.
Probably not worth the time and materials, he thought. Meme are all about efficiency.
Fifteen minutes later he lined up Lark for recovery through the small craft bays. Once the magnetic grapples had him, he dropped out of link and relaxed inside the cocoon, feeling the comedown of being ejected into the real world. Even now, the system pumped him full of drugs to balance his brain chemistry against the powerful addictive pull of VR space, but those could only blunt, never completely overcome, its siren song.
Mission debrief and a few beers would help, and now that Dannie had dumped him – what, decades ago, he thought with an emotional wince – maybe that cute civilian cyber-tech would join him for a drink and more.