Battlespace (20 page)

“There's no indication that they can outmaneuver us, though,”
Talon One
, Captain Ivor Matthews, reported. “Thank the Buddha for small blessings!”

Despite the evidence portrayed by generations of Hollywood war movies, science fiction epics, and entertainment
e
-feeds, combat in space had little in common with combat in a planetary atmosphere. In atmosphere, fighters could use wings and control surfaces to perform banks, turns, loops, barrel rolls, scissors maneuvers and the like to outfly an enemy. In space, Sir Isaac Newton was god; an object—or fighter—once set in motion continued to remain in motion until acted upon by an outside force. Alexander's Starhawk could fire maneuvering thrusters to give its course a new vector component—to port or starboard, “up” or “down,” for instance—but those were far too weak to make any major change to his original velocity and heading.

Unless he flipped end-for-end and decelerated with his main drive—or found a convenient planet to provide him with a free gravitational assist and course change, he essentially possessed all the maneuverability of a bullet.

But it was a bullet with teeth. The point of having a human in the cockpit of a space fighter was not to drop onto the enemy's six with a brilliantly executed loop or scissors, but to direct the weapons systems.

In his noumenal mind's eye, the enemy spacecraft—or whatever they were—stretched across his field of view, still invisibly distant, but magnified to visibility by his Starhawk's optics.

He checked his range and vector data, flickering numbers and symbols in the corner of his visual field. The targets were a bit under one hundred thousand klicks distant…moving toward him at four kps. The Earth fleet was moving toward them at about two klicks per second, and his Starhawk's launch and subsequent boost phase had added another kilometer per second to that.

Simple math. The two squadrons—the Redtails and the alien craft launched from the stargate—were closing with one another at seven kilometers per second. Without new changes in course or speed, the two groups would pass through one another in three hours, fifty-eight minutes.

But they would be within firing range in perhaps another forty to fifty minutes.

And so now came the hard part…the waiting….

Combat Command Center
UFR/USS
Chapultepec
2245 hours, Shipboard time

“I really do hate the waiting,” General Dominick said.

“Can't rush the laws of physics, sir,” Ramsey observed.

“
We
can't,” Dominick growled. “We don't know yet about
them
.”

“They haven't pulled anything magical yet, General,” Ricia Anderson told him. “Except for that reactionless acceleration after they launched. And that was only momentary. They may have the same power limitations we do.”

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
. So ran the aphorism first voiced by a popular science writer two centuries earlier. Everything in this confrontation depended on how advanced the alien weapons, drive, and power systems were, how much more powerful or more effective they might be as compared to those used by the MIEU battle group. The opposition had shown several bits of superior technology already, antimatter beam weapons and some kind of magnetic drive, but nothing that truly put them in the category of
magic
.

Not yet, anyway. It was always possible that they were hiding their true capabilities. They would be as ignorant of human technology as the humans were of theirs.

“The nearest alien craft are now within effective range of
Daring
and
Courageous
,” Admiral Harris reported. “General Dominick, should we commence long-range fire?”

Dominick hesitated. So far, the battle group was on FIFO rules of engagement: fire if fired on. “Let's hold for a bit longer,” he said. “We'll let 5-MAS get closer.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Harris replied. He didn't sound happy. “With your permission, I want to rein in the frigates. I don't want them too far ahead of the support fire from the
New Chicago
.”

“Maneuver the fleet as you think best, Admiral.” The reply was a snap.

For the past forty-five minutes, the fighters had been hurtling toward the oncoming hostile fleet at two kilometers per second relative to the rest of the fleet. Half an hour ago they'd passed the two frigates
Daring
and
Courageous
, which were now a couple of thousand kilometers ahead of the rest of the MIEU and now were some three thousand kilometers ahead of them.

At this point, the enemy spacecraft were eighty thousand kilometers from the
Chapultepec
and
Ranger
, seventy-five thousand kilometers from the Marine fighters, a range that continued to close at seven kilometers per second.

Ramsey focused on the noumenal graphic of the fleet. Harris was creating multiple layers of defense—the fighters out in front, the two light frigates next, then the larger battle cruiser
New Chicago
, and finally the
Ranger
, the
Chapultepec
, and the three transports. It allowed him to probe the alien force while retaining a flexible in-depth defense.

At least, that was the idea. With both the alien capabilities and intent unknown, how could any plan cover all eventualities?

No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy
, ran the old military adage.

The two frigates, moving mushroom-caps forward, fired
their forward thrusters, decelerating sharply. Harris was having them slow to keep them from getting too far ahead of the main body of the battle group.

And an instant later, the largest of the oncoming alien craft opened fire.

A burst of white noise momentarily scrambled the noumenal graphics, as a powerful electromagnetic burst caused a temporary dropout of data from the surviving Argus probes. The positron beam was clearly aimed directly at the
Courageous
. There was a flash, an expanding cloud of vapor and debris…but the frigate appeared to be only damaged.

Ramsey wished he could better see what exactly was going on. Another alien craft fired, and then both
Daring
and
Courageous
opened up with both lasers and railguns.

And after that, the battle became too fast and confusing for merely human minds to follow….

SF/A-2 Starhawk
Talon Three
75,000 kilometers from
Sirius Stargate
2246 hours Shipboard time

“What the hell was that?”
Alexander yelled. For an instant, his electronic feeds had been overwhelmed by a burst of white noise and data dropout, a kind of explosion inside his skull that was not painful but which had certainly been disconcerting.

“We're being shot at!” Gauthier yelled back. “Is everyone okay?”

Call signs appeared in ragged sequence in a corner of Alexander's noumenal display. The burst—a powerfully focused positron beam, it looked like—had passed through the widely dispersed fighter formation but hit no one.

Gauthier was on the command channel. “Ranger Control, Ranger Control, this is
Talon
! We are under fire! Request free-fire order! Repeat, request free-fire!”

“
Talon,
Ranger Control! Weapons are free. I repeat, weapons are free.”

“Roger that, Control. Okay, Redtails, you heard the lady. Commence jigging, and bring CCN online.”

“Jigging” was virtually the only combat maneuver the fighters could use in this sort of combat—using lateral thrusters to randomly jitter back and forth along different axes while maintaining their original overall heading. The fighters were still eighty thousand kilometers from the approaching alien vessels. That translated to a .26-second time delay between what the enemy gunners saw and where the fighters actually happened to be at that instant. Even if the enemy opened fire with a laser beam, the total time lag was over half a second and particle beams propagated at considerably less than the speed of light, making for an even greater time delay. At this range, it was impossible to pinpoint exactly where a target actually might be and what its vector was…especially a target as small as a Starhawk fighter.

Of course, the speed-of-light time delay would dwindle the closer the two groups came to one another and that advantage would swiftly vanish. Worse, the fighters' supplies of R-M were limited. There was only so much jigging they could manage before they didn't have enough reaction mass to slow them down, turn around, and get them headed back toward the
Ranger
for pickup.

“The hostiles are still pretty far off, skip,” Alexander said. “I don't think Sissy will get a lock at this range.”

Sissy was CCN, the Combat Control Network, an expert-system AI partially resident in each craft, which meant that it existed only when the fighters were linked with one another through a laser communication web. Sissy was very smart but of sharply limited purview, able to identify and track
multiple targets and coordinate multiple weapons systems and platforms.

“We do what we can. Try to pile on with the big boys.”

Starhawk fighters could be loaded out with a variety of weapons modules, depending on their assigned mission. For operations outside of the atmosphere, lasers were the preferred weapon, since they didn't require R-M and didn't slow the fighters' forward velocity when fired, as did missiles or plasma weapons. The power of the lasers were limited by the size of the fighters' fusion power plants, but still packed a considerable thermal punch. Using CCN, the individual members of a fighter squadron could combine their total laser output with one another and with the laser and particle beam fire of their larger fleet consorts astern, acting as what, in military terminology, was known as a
force multiplier
.

Alexander watched as his implant painted a scattering of moving green icons across his mind's eye, highlighting the symbols marking both the nearest and the largest of the enemy spacecraft. One, designated
Sirius Two
, suddenly flashed, struck by the animated graphic of a particle beam fired by the
Daring
.

“Let's get in the fight, boys and girls,” Gauthier said. “Targeting
Sirius Two
.”

Alexander focused his attention on the graphic for
Sirius Two,
the largest of the objects arrayed before them. Its magnified image showed a jet-black, misshapen brick with an odd geometry of angles and smoothed organic forms. Sissy estimated its mass at a hefty twelve thousand tons, over half that of one of the MIEU battle group's frigate gunships.

He increased magnification on the targeting image. The plasma bolt from the
Daring
had struck the enemy vessel on what passed as its bow, creating a thin, expanding cloud of debris. Sissy selected a group targeting point aft, clear of the debris cloud which might deflect or scatter incoming laser fire. His mental command to fire was accepted by Sissy, along
with the commands from each of the other aviators in the squadron.

Laser beams were invisible to the human eye when fired in the vacuum of space, but Sissy showed them as threads of sparkling green light converging on a single point. Intolerably white brilliance erupted at the target and metallic vapor puffed into space.

“Got the bastard!” Lieutenant Oakes, in
Talon Twelve,
exulted. “We holed him!”

“They're not jinking,” Zipper observed.

“Their fire isn't being coordinated either,” Gauthier added. “That may give us the tactical advantage.”

For the next several seconds Alexander was extremely busy—unmoving in his acceleration couch, but in his mind zooming in, locking on, directing his fighter to fire. Three times, Sissy coordinated the fighters' joint laser barrage against specific points on the same enemy vessel. The fact that the hostile craft was not jinking meant that lasers aimed at the target—or, rather, where the target would be half a second hence—hit.

On the other hand, if the target had been jinking, it would have moved clear of the expanding spheres of metallic vapor and debris that accompanied each hit. Those clouds kept moving with the spacecraft in accordance with Newton's Laws, and they tended to reflect and scatter incoming laser light. That meant that attempts to lock on to damaged areas and keep pounding at them until the concentrated fire punched through the armor were doomed to failure.

Alexander wondered if the effect was deliberate—a form of protective anti-laser armor created on the spot.

He couldn't give the idea much thought, however. Things were happening too quickly around him. Four of the hostile craft fired in unison. Again, Alexander's skull exploded in a hissing blast of white noise. One beam caught
Talon Twelve
squarely on the bow, and the Starhawk
exploded in a ragged burst of very hard radiation. Another hit one of the empty fighter R-M tanks with a similar display of pyrotechnics.

The other two beams converged on the
Courageous
two thousand kilometers astern. The crippled gunship, tumbling at the center of a growing spiral of glittering debris, vanished in a sudden flash of brilliance momentarily rivaling the far more distant double glare of Sirius A and B.

The fighters began spreading their fire, aiming at undamaged hostiles. Two targets were holed in rapid succession and appeared to be dead.

By this time, railgun projectiles fired by the gunships moments before were beginning to reach their distant targets. The range was extreme for inert, half-kilogram rounds magnetically accelerated down the frigate's spinal mounts, but at least one struck a medium-sized hostile craft massing five thousand tons and crumpled it like cardboard.
New Chicago
's heavy plasma gun batteries came into play as well, and hostile craft began exploding one after another.