Star Force: Cascade (SF73) (6 page)

Lens hopped into the water beside the craft and swam a
couple of meters to get to it, then climbed up the side using a series of
handholds that were basically depressions into the rock solid goo. The
artificial gravity drive had already been powered up, so the ball-like glob
didn’t spin to the side when he climbed. Rather it compensated for his weight
and only wobbled a few inches as he leveraged his way up on top and sat down in
the bathtub-like depression.

The cockpit was made of traditional materials, as far
as Star Force was concerned, with the bulk of the craft being the amorphous
crystalline formula that the Dvapp had mastered over the course of their
development and which Lens and a team of Star Force techs had upgraded,
crudely, far beyond what the Dvapp had ever considered. Most of that upgrade
had to do with compatibility with the water, though there were some higher
level sciences involved taken from knowledge in the V’kit’no’sat database and
transferred to the Dvapp tech, for which there was no matching counterpart in
the records.

There were many shape-shifting technologies, but more
like what the Voku used. The crystalline slurry was something the V’kit’no’sat
hadn’t seen much of, and nothing on the level that the Dvapp used, so Len’s
techs didn’t have the luxury of just copying and pasting the data…they had to
figure this one out for themselves.

What they’d come up with they’d given over to the
Dvapp, who were the real miracle workers here. The crude formula Lens gave them
had been refined considerably given their experience with the technology,
enough to form the bulk of the dart that he was now sitting in. When he hit a
button on his control board the depressions in the outer hull that he’d used to
climb up with melted and disappeared. Simultaneously material from the bulk
sitting below him in the water rose up around him, eventually climbing over his
head with the wide tendrils touching and meshing together, completely sealing
him inside a bubble that kept both water, air, and light out.

Internal illumination took over, with the crystalline
structure actually glowing blue, though his control board was already lit up
enough for him to see by. He remotely deactivated the energy gate and trolled
the now covered blob out into the wide communal pool, getting several meters of
distance away from the side walls before he triggered the transformation.

When he did his cockpit bulge sank, partially
submerging as the white crystalline material stretched out into a thick, but
pointy needle giving it the ‘dart’ moniker. The thickest point was in the rear,
where the solid cockpit now sat with a bit of material behind him that tapered
down into a much shorter point for streamlining purposes.

Lens grabbed the steering wheel/joystick and moved the
dart forward, turning to the right with the straight needle-shape of the craft
bending to facilitate the turn. Even though he was moving at creeping speeds
the agility of that bend was one of the glaring reasons why this tech was
better than the rigid hulls that Star Force aquatics had used for centuries.
Bendable tech could be fashioned, and had been in the past, but nothing like
what this little baby was capable of.

His dart literally wrapped itself around the curve he
ordered it to make, then it straightened out again as he headed through the
short tunnel, triggering the doors to open and exiting through the protective
energy fields that were keeping the hangar separate from the seawater and the
wildlife outside. He kept his speeds low to avoid crushing any of them, then he
went ahead and sent out a telepathic signal to cause them to move out of his
way. They might not have been able to talk to him, but he could still
communicate with them to a degree, which ironically allowed him to live up to
the Clan name he’d chosen even before he knew psionics existed.

Trolling across the shallows ‘safe’ zone, he headed
for the sea barriers beyond where he intended to put the dart through its next
round of field tests in the open water.

6

June 1, 2890

Jartul
System (Calavari
Region)

Daka

Mark-084 jogged across the hangar and jumped up into
the open cockpit of his prototype skeet, sliding down onto the pommel and
closing the canopy with a thought. The telepathic interlink allowed him to
control the basic functions from range, but now that he was inside and placed
his hands on the control bars that option was nullified, routing his control
through his physical Ikrid. That way an outsider couldn’t telepathically
override his controls and open the canopy or power down the craft in flight, as
well as allowing him much greater control through a nexus-like interface.

Mark dived into it, submerging himself into an overall
view of the hangar rather than looking out through the holograms that now
covered the interior of his canopy. He didn’t even see them, for he was looking
through the interface as he lifted the heavily armored skeet off the ground
along with 9 others. They were all visually identical on the exterior, but
inside they had no cockpits, save for a collapsible one in case Mark needed to
fly a drone down to pick someone up, at which point the skeet would grow a
bulge to carry the person or cargo.

But that was a side point. The purpose of these skeets
was to fight remotely and use the internal space for additional equipment,
while Mark’s skeet was the reverse. It only had limited weaponry and was far
tankier
than any skeet that had been developed before. Its
flight characteristics were identical to the others, so it lacked nothing in
agility or speed, but its purpose was to house the pilot for the squadron
without visually giving away clues as to which craft he was in.

The drone skeets were also prototypes, and not in the
traditional version. Mark and others had used computer programmed escorts to
fight with before, but those were more like weapons that were pacing nearby
that could be used to do limited fighting. They were useful in a wide variety
of situations, but this new neural interface had allowed Mark to create
something more. He was no longer mentally pressing buttons within a nexus, he
was directly connected to his skeet as if it were an extension of his
body…along with the other nine as well.

He was flying them as if they were all the same craft
and his mind was suspended between them with no bias as to the one his body was
actually in. In experiments he had been able to fly and fight with up to 21
before seeing a steep performance reduction, so taking out a standard squadron
of 10 was well within his capabilities.
Sav
-enhanced
he had no trouble lifting all of them up off the deck and flying them out
through the open hangar door and into
Daka’s
thick
atmosphere, but this test wasn’t so much about what he could do, as it was
preparing a new generation of non-
Sav
pilots for what
they
could do…which meant he needed
to refine the tech and tactics prior to bringing them into the new training
program.

He had to get the bugs out, and the best way to do
that was to run live missions against computer-controlled targets. Several
ranges had been constructed on
Daka
for just this
type of thing, and though they were live fire capable he wasn’t going to be
using that function. He needed the prototypes intact so he could run them
through the gauntlet ad nausea without having to worry about replacing
components every time he made a mistake or the course got the better of him,
for he’d designed it to be challenging.

Putting pilots into aerial craft or mechs had always
been an issue, because it put them in harm’s way unlike a naval pilot who flew
his warship by remote, sitting inside a well-protected jumpship and able to
fight his battles in a way that wasn’t concerned with the survivability of the
drone. Star Force didn’t use them recklessly, but they could push combat in
directions that couldn’t be achieved with living personnel. That said, aerial
craft and mechs
had
to have pilots in
them, for drones just weren’t effective enough.

Star Force had compensated by creating safeguards like
the armored cocoon surrounding the cockpit that would allow a pilot to usually
survive a crash, losing the craft but giving the person a chance to stay alive.
Same was true of the mechs, though they always carried far more armor than
aerial craft did. While drone tech had now improved to the point where Mark
could sit inside a city and fly a drone skeet from within it he didn’t like
relying on that option. Line of sight communication issues were always in play,
limiting range, as well as the possibility of signal disruptions from
countermeasures or compromised emitters.

There was a need to have a pilot in the cockpit in the
middle of battle in a variety of situations and Mark believed that would always
be the case, though there were some where remotely flown craft were definitely
the way to go. In the cases where there needed to be a pilot the emphasis was
always on reducing the risks, and this latest improvement was going to take a
squadron of ten pilots and reduce them down to one, making it a bit of a shell
game as to which skeet to shoot at from the enemy’s perspective.

Not only that, it would mean Star Force could deploy
more aerial craft than they had pilots, much like Cora was doing with the
mechs. The difference was, Mark was the only person in the skeet, whereas a
mech star of drones was controlled by the backseat rider in a two-person
morpheus
. It was a piggyback system, but the project he was
working on was based on the idea of taking a single skeet as the craft of
choice for an advanced pilot and changing it into a squadron piloted in the
same manner, by the same person, without any reduction in efficiency or
reaction time.

That did leave a caveat, and that was that the
squadron had to stay together. A few kilometers apart didn’t matter, but send
one skeet off across hundreds of miles and you’d start to get
microlag
, which was a problem with the remote control
method from cities or warships in orbit. The adjustments that Mark and other
veteran pilots made were so precise that even the tiniest bit of delay could be
felt when mind-linked with the operating systems, and as a result would
decrease their agility, even if it was just by a hair.

Mark didn’t believe in fighting handcuffed, but with
the localized transmitters in the prototypes they would not only have no
detectable lag but also be able to ignore most types of jamming. That
technology had existed for a while, with the neural controls being what had
hung the trailblazer up when he’d pursued this project before. Now that that
was no longer an issue, it was ‘game on’ into the next phase of aerial combat.

So as Mark flew his squadron out away from the hangar
and over to the ranges he saw them and the landscape from a hive mind position.
He could see and ‘feel’ everything from each of the craft, but he could also
step back a bit and taken an omnipresent position…one that was critical when
planning out strategy and analyzing the enemy’s movements rather than just
living in the moment and trying to juke and evade the nearest enemy craft.

That was why it was important that the neural
interface not overstress the pilots. Most couldn’t handle 10 craft, and it was
Mark’s job to refine the neural interface enough that they could. Most Archons
did not have
Sav
and wouldn’t in the coming years, so
he had to get this project so smoothed out that they wouldn’t need it. His goal
was a squadron of ten, but if he could even get his midline pilots flying 3
craft at a time it would be a success…though one with reduced firepower, for
the ‘cradle’ skeet would always be underpowered due to the extra layers of
protection, and in a trio that amounted to 33% of the craft being diminished,
whereas in a full squadron that number was down to 10%.

But it wasn’t just about limiting the number of pilots
in the air and allowing a drone or two to go down in flames to achieve an
objective. It was the interplay between the skeets that most intrigued Mark.
Teamwork was essential in any dogfight, and he had gotten very good at syncing
his movements and attacks with others, but this new system went way beyond
that, in that he didn’t have to coordinate at all. He was in control of all 10
craft, so he could use them in an unlimited number of new ways that had never
been conceived of before.

The tactics had, of course, but the implementation had
not, for you didn’t have time to discuss what you wanted to do over the next
half second with your wingmen. Now Mark didn’t even have a tenth of a second
delay, for he
was
all 10 craft and
didn’t have to discuss anything with himself. Aerial combat was usually chaos
with a bit of organization thrown in, but if Mark could get this project out of
the prototype phase and into the field, Star Force’s half of that uncertainty
would virtually evaporate and they’d be able to own the enemy in a way never
seen before.

And the best way for a trailblazer, or any Archon, to
modify tech or strategy was to throw themselves into simulated combat and make
adjustments when failures happened, which is what Mark was going to continue to
do today.

He’d already been at this several weeks, so when he
lowered his squadron down to ground level and zipped them across the grassy
plains he knew to keep them below 62 meters in altitude to avoid the targeting
zone of the turrets ahead, as well as when to bring them up off the deck and
into a crisscross pattern that left the automated guns chasing targets of his
choosing as his ten skeets hopped up over terrain and back down behind it,
leapfrogging across a scattered series of hills as they approached the turrets
that he knew were designed to chase a single target until it was taken down,
for he’d developed that program to counter the rotational strategies that Star
Force preferred to keep shielded units in play.

He had to make this course hard, so he’d added in
challenges that he wasn’t sure how to beat, expecting to lose…as he had done on
every run. So far he hadn’t even made it a third of the way through the course
before the low-powered targeting beams registered enough hits on his shields to
knock a skeet out of the air, which in this case was it disconnecting from
Mark’s mind and flying off out of the challenge zone and to a waiting area.

The Achilles heel to this project was in his cradle
ship, for if it went down the rest of the squadron would revert to normal
drones operating on preprogrammed protocols or picked up by a remote
controller. If he was working with other squadrons then his drones could be
retasked
to one of those pilots, but that still left the
handful of manned skeets as the primary targets for the enemy, which was why he
needed to fight with his in a way identical to the others.

To that end he had the same mauler cannons as the
drones did, while they had a slew of additional weaponry. If he had them use it
and his craft didn’t it would be a giveaway, but the maulers were the primary
choice for most aerial combat and if he only used them there would be no
obvious tell, for the short range transmissions were being emitted from every
craft so no signal monitoring could pick up which craft he was actually in.

That was why he had his skeet going through the attack
pattern on the turrets along with the others rather than lagging back and
playing a more conservative role. He needed anonymity to protect him more than
armor and a secondary shield, and he had to get used to fighting that way in
these simulations now so it’d become second nature when he actually got out
into the field against the lizards at a later date.

As for the basic design of the skeets, those had
remained the same through all these centuries. T-shaped with spherical pods on
each prong that held anti-
grav
units. The skeet could
limp around on one if necessary, but all three were required for full
maneuvering capability. The hull was thin save for a bump around the cockpit,
with most of the weaponry lying in the crossbar up front with the sensors,
shield emitters, and other support systems situated behind the cockpit in the
tail.

Other auxiliary craft had been built for Mainline,
such as the gunships and interceptors, but the skeets had remained the backbone
of Star Force’s aerial division and would remain so, even with other factions
deciding to use different craft. The Calavari Valeries were solid, and the
other models were decent, for Mark had helped in their construction, but none
suited his style of combat more than the skeet. Its narrow profile made it hard
to target, and the T-shape meant there wasn’t much of a silhouette to shoot at
from above or below. Overall it was simply the best design he had ever come
across and Mainline and the Clans would continue using it until they found, or
created, something better.

If the other factions wanted a unique craft, so be it.
They weren’t going to let them build any junk, but Mark knew that combat could
be achieved in a variety of approaches and if they wanted to pursue different
ones then there was an advantage in that…coupled with disadvantages. Mark
wanted his skeet because it was all around solid, rather than weighted in a
single attack profile. Those singular attack profiles could be very effective
when you got to choose your battles, but when defending and not having very
many options he preferred to be piloting a craft that was nimble and could be
utilized in multiple ways…which was basically the definition of a skeet.

Some of his fellow pilots that were working with him
on this project had suggested outfitting the squadron with different ships, or
even just altered models of skeets to give him some singular attack or
defensive options but he wouldn’t have it. This project was complicated enough
as it was, and making it even more convoluted by mixing up ship designs would
put more stress on the pilot and reduce the amount of processing power he had.
Mark could pull it off, but those without
Sav
wouldn’t be able to…at least not as well as he’d hoped. Keeping all the craft
systematically identical was a way to reduce the mental load and free up some
thought for other purposes.