Vango Markis floated between Conquest and the mothership core like a gnat next to two watermelons. His fighter wing’s task was done for the moment, the Marines lodged inside the enemy’s skin. Every Scourge sensor, every weapon the StormCrows could find had been burned away, and now AI-controlled grabships rearmed and refueled his fighters in place.
Nervously he drummed his fingers on the armrest of his seat – or he seemed to, as his body was actually cocooned tight within a crash couch aboard Conquest.
When the idea of remoting the StormCrows had first been proposed, he’d strenuously objected. Fighter pilots should be inside their birds, not just controlling them from a distance, but the admiral had overruled him. For this mission, the fighters would stay within a few thousand klicks of the two ships, so the control signal delay was negligible. This setup also meant no pilot casualties, and if the dreadnought was forced to withdraw without recovering the Crows...well, Vango liked living as much as the next man.
Refueling completed with minutes to spare, Vango brought his wing around behind Conquest. Unlike a carrier, the dreadnought was armored like a super-battleship; its fighters were auxiliaries, not its main offensive weapons. The big ship would intentionally be the focus of the first, relatively small enemy swarm, buying time for the Marines to do their jobs. Vango’s wing of ninety-six, each strapped with twelve add-on multi-missile pods, would hopefully finish the extermination.
Vango sent his VR viewpoint forward to take a look at the oncoming ships, the remnants of the group that had run into the Meme blowtorches. From half a million in number, now only about twenty thousand Scourges remained, and many of those were clearly damaged. Running the numbers and expected kill ratios, the fighter pilot smiled, satisfied. This one would be easy.
The other swarm, with its half-million ships...that made him nervous.
Conquest opened up with her awesome primary particle beams, deliberately spread cones of accelerated neutrons that slaughtered swaths of enemy fighters and gunships, incinerating them like blowtorches ignite paper flowers. In response, the dwindling swarm spread out further.
Overall enemy count dropped below nineteen thousand before they entered secondary range. Now hundreds of Conquest’s standard dual-purpose lasers, powerful enough to damage capital ships but nimble enough to target small craft, began nailing Scourges one shot at a time. They didn’t always hit, as the swarming craft dodged frantically, but the closing range made losses inevitable.
In the swarm’s place humans might have pulled back or tried some tactic such as moving to put the mothership core between the swarm and its tormenter, but these must have been ordered to return directly to defend the core, so they flew straight into Conquest’s cone of death.
Eighteen thousand, then seventeen, then sixteen, and the swarm closed in on Conquest. As it reached minimum range, the dreadnought’s forward add-on point defense lasers woke up to a target-rich environment. Over five thousand of the weapons, small in ship terms but large enough to knock down a fighter, began flailing at their enemies. Not particularly accurate, still so many shots were bound to hit something and the count fell to twelve, then ten thousand.
Five seconds from Arrow missile range, Vango dialed up his time sense by a factor of twenty. The hundred subjective seconds seemed to drag, but they allowed him to mark targets for his weapons just as the other pilots did. When the closest enemies crossed into range, he said, “All wing elements, Fox One.” He waited a moment, then called, “Fox Two,” and continued reciting numbers up to twelve.
Every order launched a bundled pod of a dozen Arrows, putting one hundred forty-four weapons into play for each of the ninety-six fighters. Thus, over fourteen thousand seeking fighter-killers now rocketed toward the faltering swarm.
Vango said, “Follow them in, boys and girls. Remember, you’re not really in your Crows, so crank up your time senses, shut down your interlocks, and we’ll tally the kills up at the bar.” Heeding his own advice, he slotted his Crow in tight behind his own missile cluster and began taking laser shots at anything that no one had marked.
For this mission, the flight deck crews had hastily installed auxiliary power generators into the empty cockpits, so Vango enjoyed a fifty percent faster regeneration rate on his centerline weapon. It still seemed slow, but was an improvement. He felt a slight lag, a stickiness in all of his actions from time it took for signals to make it from the chips in his head to the Crow and back.
As the universe around him slowed to a crawl, Vango watched as the Arrow salvo met what was left of the swarm. About half the missiles perished to enemy point defense fire, but the other seven thousand hammered home, spearing an equal number of fighters and gunships. Vango’s threat count dropped below three thousand, and then he was among them.
Three quick laser blasts knocked down three enemy fighters, and then he was out of main power. His wing weapons continued to pump out shots, but they did not have the punch to do more than inflict scattered damage on the heavy chitin sheathing of the swarm’s ships...and Crows began to go offline by ones and twos, then by tens. Within thirty seconds of realtime, all ninety-six EarthFleet fighters had winked out.
The VR cocoon shut down the link, dumping Vango’s mind back into his body with a sickening lurch. “No!” was his first strangled cry before reason took over. If he’d had his way and flown his own fighter, he’d be dead by now. Sure, he’d have played it differently and not driven in among the Scourges, but still...it was one thing to run the numbers, quite another to face thirty to one odds.
Turns out the kill ratios don’t take suicidal behavior into account, Vango thought as he blinked in the dim light of his coffin. Then the lid popped open and a pretty biomed tech looked down at him from above. “You good, sir?” she asked brightly, handing him a drug cocktail. “Drink this.”
“Ugh,” he said, sitting up and taking the cup, downing the stuff in one gulp. The disorientation and VR-craving subsided as the brain-balancer took hold. “Twenty-second century and we still can’t make medicine taste good,” he grumbled.
Climbing out, Vango handed the cup to the tech and left her standing there with a wistful look on her face. He wasn’t in the mood for pilot groupies right now, especially young ones freshly recruited into EarthFleet. Besides, there was a fight going on and he wasn’t in it, which irked him. He slapped a few backs of other glum pilots emerging from coffins on his way to the medical station. “Can you put up a COP feed on the big screen?” he asked the tech sitting there.
“Sure,” the man said, and soon ninety-six pilots stood grouped around the display.
“The point defense is finishing them off,” one of them said.
“Wasn’t so tough,” said another with false bravado.
Vango made a strangled sound and waved for attention. “Actually, we screwed the pooch, and it’s my fault,” he said. “My fault,” he repeated, so they understood he wasn’t taking them to task. “I shouldn’t have led you guys in right after the missile volley. Thirty to one odds are stupid. I’d never have done it if we were inside the birds, and I just wasted ten billion credits-worth of high-tech fighters like a rookie in a video game.”
“It wasn’t entirely stupid, sir,” came a voice from behind him. He turned to see Michelle Conquest in her fresh new lieutenant’s uniform. “I got a lot of good, close-range intel data in the twenty-seven seconds the Crows survived. We have more birds for you. Next time you’ll do better.”
“Next time.” Vango snorted, aware that his pilots had fallen silent and watched the interaction. Many of them were still uncomfortable with the avatar, ignoring the fact that the ship around them was as much the AI’s body as this android. “The only way we’ll be of any use next time is to stay at extreme range and snipe at them. We can’t face that many.”
“You’re right. You can’t.” Michelle’s mouth turned up.
“But you can?” Vango snorted in derision.
“Not at all, sir. It’s simple physics. No pilot, no AI in the world can fight at such a disadvantage.”
Vango put his palms to his face and scrubbed at his eyes. “You came all the way down here in person to tell me we suck?”
“No, sir.” Michelle shook her head and looked around at the rapt crowd of crestfallen pilots. “I came all the way down here in person to tell you to stop beating yourselves up. Good day, ladies and gentlemen.” With that, she turned and walked off.