Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

Chapter Thirteen

26 September 2404

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System

2015 hours, TFT

“Captain Buchanan?” Koenig said. “Bring those fighters aboard!”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Under savage, close assault by the Confederation Starhawks, supported by the deadly and accurate batteries on the Spirit of Confederation, the Kinkaid, and the other vessels of the shrunken battlegroup, the Turusch fighters, what was left of them, had broken off the attack. America, after swinging behind the planet, had aligned with distant Sol but not yet begun accelerating.

The Choctaw shuttle and its Nightshade escorts were rendezvousing with the America now, gliding in from astern, aligning their approach vector with the opening at the aft end of the rotating Number Two docking bay. At the last possible moment, they gave a final, brief burst of acceleration before killing their drive singularities and drifting dead-stick into the swinging maw of the docking bay, entering a tangleweb field that slowed them abruptly for the final fifty meters of their approach.

“CIC, PriFly,” sounded in Koenig’s head. “The shuttle is aboard.”

“Thank you, PriFly. I saw.”

He had a screen at his CIC station set as a repeater off of PriFly’s main board. He’d watched the Choctaw enter the gaping opening, could see the gunships coming in through the entrance now, in staggered formation to match the docking bay’s rotation, one after the other. Nightshades were essentially large, two-man fighters, but slower and less maneuverable than Starhawks or War Eagles, with a maximum acceleration of only twelve Gs. That made them good for chewing up ground targets and serving as close-support for the infantry, but not of much use in a gravfighter fur ball.

Koenig turned his attention to the fighters-four from VFA-44 and eight from VFA-51. They were eighty thousand kilometers astern of the America now, but catching up fast.

“Admiral?” Buchanan’s voice said in his head. “Permission to begin accelerating the America.”

“Granted,” Koenig told him. The slow movers were safely on board now. The fighters easily had the acceleration necessary to match velocities with a capital ship. The sooner the last seven capital ships of the battlegroup were pushing c, the better. Koenig still expected Turusch warships to be coming in on the tails of those fighters; they could appear on feeds from the more remote battlespace drones at any moment.

On the tactical display, the ships of the battlegroup began moving faster, as data readouts showed the vector change. The fighters were already going all out, the distance between them and America dwindling rapidly.

Come on, he thought, the words fierce. Get your butts in here….

Dragon One

Eta Boötis IV

2020 hours, TFT

“Okay, chicks,” Allyn said. “Final correction is coming up. Lose the dust balls.”

At her command, each pilot switched off his or her forward singularity and decelerated, sending the atom-sized collections of dust and debris hurtling into the void. The maneuver was vital; those submicroscopic specks could wreak untold havoc with America’s internal spaces if they struck the carrier.

They hadn’t been in flight for long, and the dust masses were so minute they likely would have caused no damage. On the other hand, they were traveling slowly enough that the specks might not pass all the way through the carrier. They could become imbedded in her hull, where they would continue to feed and grow.

There were horror stories still told in the service from the earliest days of gravitic engineering, of ships infested with neutron-sized black holes, of ships and their crews dying slowly.

One by one, the fighters dropped into staggered approach vectors.

“Howie!” she called. “What’s your sit?”

“Doing okay, Skipper.” He sounded scared. Medical telemetry showed his heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure all significantly elevated. “VG is out. So are half my thrusters and some of my sensors. AI off-line. It’s gonna be a dead catch.”

“Stay with us,” she told him. “We’re almost home.”

Spaas’s Starhawk was badly mangled, still flying, but only just. That Toad particle beam had grazed his starboard side, killing both his variable geometry controls, his “VG,” and it had knocked out half of his control thrusters and some critical instrumentation, including his onboard computer. “Dead catch” meant he was going to hit the tangleweb as a dead chunk of metal, with no way of fine-tuning the last second of the approach.

His setup for trap would have to be bang-on perfect.

If America wasn’t in the middle of getting the hell out of Dodge, the likeliest scenario would have been to have Spaas match course and velocity with the carrier, then punch out, allowing SAR tugs from the America to come out and pick him up and recover the inert fighter. But they didn’t have the luxury of time now, and having the America maintain a steady velocity on a constant course for more than a few minutes would invite a barrage of hivel KK rounds that could reduce the carrier to half-molten fragments in seconds.

So they had to do it the hard way-with Spaas landing his crippled Starhawk on America’s rotating deck.

Howard Spaas wasn’t the best Starhawk driver Allyn had ever known, but he was good. He could be arrogant and elitist at times-he made a game of picking on the nuggets, the new pilots in the squadron-and he’d been written up more than once for disciplinary problems.

But he was part of the Dragonfire’s tight-knit family, and she didn’t want to lose him.

“Dragon One, Dragon Three.” That was Collins.

Here it comes. “Go ahead, Three.”

“Request permission to ride Dragon Two in.”

Collins wanted to make the trap side-by-side with Spaas. With her ship coming in just off Spaas’s forward quarter, he could check his alignment and vector by eye, and not have to rely so much on possibly malfunctioning sensors. Experienced pilots sometimes rode in with nuggets, or with other pilots experiencing instrumentation or thruster problems.

“Negative, Two.” Allyn switched to a private channel, so Spaas wouldn’t hear. “Damn it, Collie-dog, I don’t want to lose both of you if this goes bad.”

“Acknowledged.” Collins’ voice was tight, the word bitten off and hard.

Allyn switched back to the squadron channel. “Final turn, people. Let’s do it by the book.”

The America was still invisibly distant, some eight thousand kilometers up ahead. Their dustcatchers jettisoned, the fighters used brief applications of their singularities to align themselves precisely with the ship, then switched them off. The carrier was traveling directly away from them at ten kilometers per second, accelerating at fifty gravities, which increased its velocity by half a kilometer per second every second. The fighters were coming in faster, but slowing; by the time they were a hundred kilometers off America’s tail, they would be moving just three hundred meters per second faster than the carrier.

“VFA-44, you are cleared for trap. Landing Bay Two.”

“Dragon One. Copy.”

“Switch to AI approach,” she said.

“Confirmed,” her computer said. “AI in control of final approach.”

When everything was working right, the computer network between fighter and carrier did a much better job of nudging the ship into the aft opening of a rotating landing bay.

The AI triggered a five hundred grav singularity aft, braking her sharply, just as the America appeared ahead, rapidly swelling in apparent size. The singularity snapped off when she was moving just three hundred meters per second relative to the America.

The carrier looked so damned tiny, a hard-edged toy almost lost among stars and empty night.

And then the carrier’s aft end swelled to fill half the sky and she was into her trap.

Moments before, the carrier had switched off her own grav drive, simplifying the complex ballet balancing velocity and distance. Though conventions like up and down and above and below didn’t exist in free fall, the fighter’s attitude on final suggested that she was skimming in just beneath the vessel’s huge, aft quantum tap power module, the dark, silver-gray metal of the hull blurring past just above her head. Ahead, Landing Bay Two slowly swung in from the right.

The carrier’s hab modules were stacked around America’s spine, like layers in a cake, bent into a disk nestled in behind the mushroom-cap shield. The modules were in constant rotation, creating a steady out-is-down artificial gravity. A rotation of 2.11 turns per minute created the feeling of half a G at the outer rim, one hundred meters from the ship’s spine. A point on the outside rim was moving at twenty-two meters per second, or nearly fifty miles per hour.

The carrier could stop the module rotation, but that created chaos on board, as every crew member, every tool or coffee cup or personal item not fastened down drifted away, weightless. And there was an easier solution.

The landing bay was at the bottom of the stack, closest to the ship’s spine. The rotation of 2.11 turns per minute with a radius of just thirty meters created an apparent gravity of just.15 G-a shade less than the surface gravity of Earth’s moon-but it meant that the turning landing bay was moving at less than seven meters per second.

At the last instant, the AI fired the fighter’s starboard-side thrusters, giving Allyn’s Starhawk a sideways kick to its vector of seven meters per second. For just an instant, the broad landing bay opening appeared to freeze motionless ahead…and then Allyn flashed past the lines of acquisition lights and into the opening.

Where gravitational acceleration or deceleration acted uniformly on both fighter and pilot, making maneuvers feel like free fall, this was altogether different. The tangleweb field invisibly enmeshed the incoming fighter and dragged it down from a relative 300 meters per second to a relative velocity of zero in the space of three hundred fifty meters.

The Starhawk came to rest, and Allyn sagged back against her seat, her vision slowly swimming back to normal after the brutal seven-G decel. Magnetic grapnels unfolded from the overhead, moving her forward and out of the way of the next incoming Starhawk, thirty seconds behind her. They moved her to one of a dozen deck hatches covered over by the liquid-looking black of an atmospheric nanoseal, lowering her smoothly through the clinging seal and into the air and light of the fighter recovery deck. The grapnels deposited her atop an elevator column and released; the column began sinking into the deck, lowering her to the fifty-meter radius level. As she descended, the hab’s spin gravity steadily rose from fifteen hundredths of a G to a more respectable one-quarter gravity.

By the time the elevator column sank into the deck and the cockpit of her fighter melted open around her, Tucker had already trapped and was beginning her descent to the recovery deck, while Collins was in the last ten seconds of her approach.

And Spaas was inbound on final, thirty seconds behind her.

Allyn climbed out of the cockpit and down to the deck, her knees unsteady after seven Gs. “Welcome home, Commander!” a crew chief told her. She nodded and walked aft, unsealing her bubble helmet and tucking it beneath her arm.

An enormous repeater viewall filled much of the aft bulkhead of the recovery deck, large enough to be seen from any part of the cavernous compartment. It showed a camera view looking aft from inside the landing bay, the wide entrance curving upward slightly in a gentle smile, the aft end of the carrier extending back into space from overhead, the stars beyond gently swinging in a slow circle around the carrier’s vanishing point as the hab module continued to rotate. Numbers at the top left of the screen, in green, showed Collins’ approach velocity-282 mps. A second number counted down the seconds to trap: six…five…four…

And then Collins’ gravfighter was there, appearing out of the night as if by magic, hurtling through the landing deck’s maw and slowing abruptly as it entered the compartment’s tangleweb field. The fighter vanished off the side of the screen almost immediately, but a green light winked on above the viewall, signaling a successful trap.

Thirty seconds more to Spaas’ arrival.

She could hear the voice of America’s LSO-AI, a machine intelligence tasked with coordinating incoming fighters with the moving landing deck. LSO was an ancient term going back to the era of seaborne aircraft carriers four centuries before-an acronym for landing signals officer. The job was no longer held by humans; machines were far faster and more precise. Since the LSO-AI was actually handling the incoming gravfighter’s controls, the voice was for the benefit of human observers.

“Vector left…vector left…stabilize…vector left…”

The “vector left” was the LSO attempting to fire the fighter’s starboard thrusters, to match its incoming vector with the seven-meter-per-second rotation of the landing bay. The numerals on the screen were red, showing an approach velocity of 348 mps, too fast, too fast, as the countdown dwindled from seven…to six…

“Gravfighter outside safe approach parameters,” the LSO announced, the voice cold and unemotional. The green light above the opening flashed red.

Allyn’s heart was pounding. Oh, God, no…

“Abort,” the LSO voice continued, impassive, “abort…abort…”

Spaas’ Starhawk appeared, but too far to the left, much too far to the left, and coming in too fast. His ship was dead; he couldn’t abort, couldn’t fire a ventral singularity to warp his course into a vector that would miss the rotating landing bay and the underside of America’s huge cap beyond.

The incoming fighter almost made it….

Spaas’ gravfighter clipped the trailing edge of the entranceway. Sparks erupted, and then the Starhawk’s starboard side disintegrated in peeling, fragmenting metal. The port side flipped into an out-of-control tumble, vanishing off the right side of the screen. The light above the bay flashed red.

Allyn could feel the ship crews around her sag as Spaas died-no one could have survived such a crash. They sagged, they turned away. She heard someone nearby mutter, “Shit…”

Allyn said nothing. Gripping her helmet tightly, she turned away and started walking toward the recovery deck elevators.

She had a report to file, a debriefing to endure.

She felt exhausted and bruised, and every step dragged at her like death.

Squadron Ready Room

TC/USNA CVS America

Outbound, Eta Boötis System

2022 hours, TFT

Gray stared at the ready room repeater screen, unable to tear his eyes away. It was one thing when a squadron mate bought it in a clean, silent flash of light out in space, quite another when you watched them zorch in for a trap and miss the sweet spot by a matter of scant meters.

He didn’t like Spaas. In fact, he’d detested the guy-an arrogant bully, a womanizer, as much the elitist hypocrite as his partner, Collins.

He’d still been family.

Numb, Gray ran through the members of the Dragonfires, startled to realize that where twelve had launched from the America out in the local Kuiper Belt early yesterday morning, only four, counting himself, were left. Sixty-six percent casualties was devastating for any military unit; when the unit was as small as a squadron to begin with, with members practically living in one another’s pockets, the sense of family was keener still…even when you couldn’t stand the bastards.

He wondered if the Dragonfires would be disbanded, the survivors sent as replacements to other squadrons.

The hell with it, He found he didn’t care right now one way or another, didn’t care about anything.

But an audio alarm caught his attention, and he switched the display screen to tactical.

God. That was all they needed now. The Turusch battle-fleet was emerging from behind Eta Boötis, swinging past the planet and accelerating toward the retreating carrier battlegroup. The rest of the Black Lightnings were still trapping in Bays One and Three, and it would be several more minutes before America could resume acceleration.

Things were about to get damned tight.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Outbound, Eta Boötis System

2023 hours, TFT

“Lead elements of the enemy fleet now at eighty-two thousand kilometers, Admiral,” Hughes reported, her voice as matter-of-fact, as coldly professional as any AI’s.

“How long until the last of the fighters gets aboard?” Koenig demanded.

“Two more coming in at Bay One, three at Bay Two. Make it one minute twenty.”

Koening considered this. Over a minute until the America could accelerate. How close would the enemy fleet get?

Given their known acceleration capabilities, it looked like the battlegroup would be able to escape…just. The enemy might pursue them out of the system, but a running stern chase was pretty futile, especially when the fleeing vessels would be jigging and changing acceleration routes from moment to moment in order to throw off the enemy’s targeting computers.

“Comm! Make to Spirit of Confederation,” he said. “Have them lay down a barrage astern. See if they can discourage those Trash jokers.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The view of the stars projected on the CIC viewalls darkened, returned, darkened again.

“Enemy has opened fire, Admiral,” Hughes pointed out. “KK projectiles and particle beams.”

“Right. Any damage?”

“Shields are holding, Admiral.” A pause. “Cruiser Montreal reports damage to targeting sensors and primary fire control.”

In the tactical display, the green icon representing the Spirit of Confederation was slowly turning, rotating ninety degrees until she was traveling sideways, her port broadside facing the enemy.

As on board the America, Confederation’s primary weapon ran along much of her kilometer-length and pierced her broad shield cap forward, a large-bore railgun that could accelerate one-ton kinetic-kill rounds to speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second. That was not her only weapon, however. Like an eighteenth-century ship of the line, she possessed an impressive broadside, turret-mounted weapons that could fire in every direction except directly forward, where they were effectively blocked by the shield cap. By rotating ninety degrees along her line of flight, the Spirit of Confederation brought about two thirds of her broadside weapons to bear. With the enemy now just half a light second astern, the battleship began hammering away, pouring immense volumes of fire into the narrow corridor just ahead of the Turusch vessels.

Koenig turned his attention back to the last of the fighters still coming aboard.

“Come on, people,” he murmured, half aloud. “Come on!…”

Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn

Enforcer Radiant Severing

2023 hours, TFT

Tactician Emphatic Blossom watched the combat display, an emotion roughly equivalent to human anger beating behind its optical organs. A tentacle tip coiled and uncoiled reflexively, nervously. If it didn’t know better, if it had not felt the reassurance and calm emanating from the Mind Below, it would have had to assume that the Sh’daar didn’t trust it, didn’t trust the Turusch.

Abyssal whirlwinds! Emphatic Blossom at Dawn was a trained and experienced master tactician! It knew combat, knew how to lead an enemy into a trap, knew how to spring an ambush, knew how to hammer at the foe until nothing in the kill zone was left alive! The Sh’daar Seed’s orders of the past g’nyuu’m simply made no tactical sense whatsoever.

The Turusch fleet had been badly mangled by the enemy fighter attack, true…and there’d been a very real possibility that the Radiant Severing itself would be destroyed. That, however, was a part of combat, a part of war. Emphatic Blossom and every Turusch warrior on board the Severing was ready to sacrifice its life if that sacrifice would bring a decisive victory.

But no! The Seed had ordered, had demanded that the Turusch battle fleet abandon its prey, break orbit and withdraw toward deep space. And Emphatic Blossom had obeyed…as it must. The orders were from its own Mind Below, as inescapable, as relentless as Blossom’s own decisions.

And so the Turusch battle fleet had withdrawn, accelerating close to the speed of light, fleeing the battle.

And then the Sh’daar Seed had spoken again, giving new, and contradictory, orders. The Turusch fleet would turn around and return to the embattled planet, would launch fighters to go in ahead of the fleet and cause as much damage as possible, with the main body of the fleet arriving soon after.

Projectiles and particle beams would be fired into the region, timed to arrive just before the fighters appeared. And every enemy outpost on the target world would be deliberately obliterated, targeted by high-velocity masses aimed with mathematical precision at the locations of the alien surface outposts.

And that didn’t make sense to the Turusch tactician either. The Turusch had spent twelves of g’nyuu’m bombarding the principle enemy base and two others…but the intent had been to capture the humans, not kill them. Why change the point of the battle now?

The Sh’daar Seed, of course, knew what it was doing. Emphatic Blossom had to believe that, or its very existence, its role as master tactician, its very understanding of the cosmos all would be called into question.

But Blossom could not guess what their purpose was now, nor could it understand its role in the battle in these circumstances. As Radiant Severing and the other Turusch ships decelerated into the volume of space surrounding the target planet, sensors showed that the enemy fleet had already withdrawn, as Emphatic Blossom had more than half expected. On the planetary surface, seething, yellow seas of molten rock steamed beneath continent-sized hurricanes where the alien colonies had been.

An entire world rendered lifeless, useless to anyone. Why?…

Radiant Severing shuddered, the rock hull ringing with an impact against the defensive shields. One of the two largest of the enemy vessels had positioned itself at the rear of the human fleet, and was bombarding the Turusch battle fleet as it retreated.

“Threat!” Blossom’s Mind Above could be unpleasantly predictable. “Kill!”

“We can destroy that human vessel,” the Mind Here added. “We should…remind the humans of the risk they take in defying the Seed.”

The Mind Below seemed to consider this, weighing the options with a computer’s calculating efficiency. “Agreed. But do not pursue the enemy. The survivors should take the report of their defeat back to their homeworld.”

“Deploy all fighter fists!” The Mind Here commanded, its emotion as raw and as primitive as that of Mind Above. “Concentrate the full offensive fire of all vessels on that target!

Some thirty capital ships of the Turusch fleet adjusted their positions, then began firing at the distant enemy. Particle beams, fusion bolts, high-energy lasers, and kinetic-kill projectiles sleeted through emptiness.

And they began to find their target.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Outbound, Eta Boötis System

2025 hours, TFT

“The Spirit of Confederation reports she is taking very heavy fire, Admiral,” Hughes told him. “Damage to aft shields, damage to primary broadside weapons, damage to two of the three hab modules. Fire control is down.”

Koenig was watching the Confederation’s struggle on a secondary tactical display, which was relaying the camera view from a battle drone pacing the retreating ships. Straight-edged patches of blackness kept popping on and off along the battleship’s length, responding to incoming fire. One set of aft shields was flickering on and off alarmingly, threatening complete failure. Several sections of her long, thin hull had been wrecked by energies leaking through the shields. The damage was severe, but she continued to fire back.

White light pulsed, dazzlingly bright, as an incoming Turusch missile detonated in a sand cloud a hundred kilometers away.

“Comm,” Koenig ordered. “Patch me through to the Confederation’s CO.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

A moment later, the image of Captain Paul Radniak appeared within the holodisplay field beside Koenig’s workstation. His face was worn, his uniform disheveled. Smoke wreathed through the image, which kept flickering on and off with sharp bursts of static as the battleship’s shields rose and fell, and as electromagnetic pulses from particle-beam hits and detonating nukes interfered with the signal.

“Yes, Admiral?”

“You’ve done what you can, Paul,” Koenig told him. “It looks like the bastards aren’t going to follow us.”

Radniak’s eyes flicked away as he checked a readout outside the range of the holo’s pick-up. “It looks like they’re sending fighters after us, Admiral.”

“Fighters we can handle. I recommend you ass-end it out of there.”

The Spirit of Confederation was taking a hellacious pounding. Koenig was suggesting that Radniak rotate his ship another ninety degrees, so that the vessel’s stern was pointing in the direction she was moving, and her broad, water-filled forward shield cap was pointed at the enemy. By “ass-ending it out of there,” Radniak would be able to protect his ship from further incoming fire as the Confederation continued to accelerate out-system. Without the water shield, the crew might be subjected to dangerous doses of radiation as the Confederation approached c, but that was preferable to losing the entire vessel when her quantum power tap lost balance and detonated.

Radniak’s image shuddered, winked off, then came back up, rippling with static. “I think you’re right, Ad-” And Radniak was gone.

In the drone-relayed image nearby, white eruptions of light ate their way up the Spirit of Confederation’s spine, ripping out massive chunks of debris. One of her hab modules detached and flung itself outward, tumbling end over end as centripetal force sent it hurtling into space. The aft end appeared to be crumpling, folding in on itself. The black holes in the power center were loose, devouring the ship’s aft quarter in multi-ton bites.

The final explosion sent large chunks spraying along the ship’s direction of travel. The largest was the shield cap, tumbling end over end, leaving glittering and intertwining trails of ice crystals from a dozen ruptures in its wake. The intolerably brilliant core of the final explosion faded slowly in a flare of cooling plasma.

“Make to the other ships in our detachment,” Koenig said quietly. “Go to maximum acceleration.”

Two thousand officers and crew, plus God alone knew how many Marines and Mufrid refugees-gone.

God help them, he thought. God help us all….