Fire Ant Page 9

  Girl, have you no shame? Beth thought as she turned back to her display to check the readings.

  Beth had already decided that her bunkmate didn’t have a trace of shame DNA in her body. There wasn’t a mean bone in her body, either. The woman just enjoyed living life to its fullest.

  “Hello, Rose,” Beth said, addressing her AI. “Wake.”

  “Hello, Beth. I’m ready.”

  An operational Wasp’s AI was an amazing construct. Ever since the CyberWar almost 200 years ago, AIs had been tightly controlled and limited in their capabilities. The “AI” on her Hummingbird didn’t really deserve the term, being little more than a voice-interfaced computer, programmed for a specific decision tree. That was why she’d had to null hers at SG-4021.

  Rose was far more capable, but still with limited capabilities. She was not sentient, the IT-types assured her, but sometimes, it was difficult to keep that in mind. She sounded like another person for all practical purposes.

  With Rose online, she gave Frye another thumbs-up. She was ready to go. In another 14 minutes, she would be launched.

  Fourteen minutes came and went with Beth sitting there. At 20 minutes, the XO, who was not flying today, started going on a screaming rampage, joined by the command master chief. Beth could hear the muffled words inside Tala, but she didn’t bother to open her external mic.

  “Someone’s going to get reamed,” Mercy passed on an S2S circuit.

  “Get off the net, Mercy.”

  “Don’t get your panties in a twist. We’re still in the hangar. It’s not like anyone else is trying to reach us.”

  “For all we know, the master chief is listening in to see if we’re chatting.”

  “No, Beth, she isn’t. Can’t you hear her? I’ve got to admit, she’s got an impressive vocabulary.”

  “Coming from a gutter mouth like you, that’s saying something,” Beth said.

  “Takes one to know one.”

  “All hands, launch now set for zero-nine-forty-two,” another voice came over the squadron net.

  Beth checked the time: a little over seventeen minutes. She settled in to wait.

  Forty-three minutes later, the first Wasp launched. It took another nine minutes for Fox Flight’s turn. Frye and the other three plane captains stood to the side and saluted as the four Wasps launched.

  Holovids and games showed fighters travelling at breakneck speeds in tight formations, almost touching each other. That made for impressive visuals, but it did not reflect reality, particularly in open space. As soon as they launched, the four ships spread out, hundreds of kilometers apart from each other as they aligned to pass through the gate. This would be the chokepoint. This was where an enemy could hit them while they were bunched up. All 44 Wasps would pass through the gate as tightly as possible, then immediately disperse into a more defensible formation. Fox Flight would be almost a megaklick from the main force.

  For the gate passage, the choreography was turned over to the Naval Controller’s AI. Beth sat back while the AI positioned her, bringing her up to speed and on a course that would get her to the gate at the correct time. When all 44 Wasps were ready, the Naval AI started the process, every fighter converging on the gate like a deck of cards being riffled.

  Beth watched, a passenger as Tala shot through the gate, then a passenger no longer as she immediately took control, pulling the fighter at close to the maximum Gs to move into position. On her display, the traces of each fighter spread out. The first fighters through the gate were the screening force. The attack force came in last, the 24 ships more tightly bunched as they adjusted course to the anomaly. Beth wished she was with them. She wanted action, not simply to watch events unfold.

  Fox Flight had reached its position—now the four pilots had to keep in relative position as the assault force headed into the system. Somewhere ahead, the enemy waited, and the CO wanted to make sure the Stingers stung first.

  After the rush of the gate, things quieted down for the next two hours. Her Hummingbird would have taken a good three days to make it into the system, but she was now in a Wasp. Space was huge, however, so even with Wasps, it would take at least three hours for the attack element to reach the source of the anomaly.

  “Alpha-four, we’ve got a reading coming from X-ray-two-two, Yankee-zero-six, Zulu-one-four,” Golf-4 passed.

  Beth swung around to look, as if she could see over the two megaklicks between Golf and Fox Flights. Golf was flanking the attack force on the opposite side of Fox.

  “Rose, how long would it take for us to reach Golf Flight?”

  “Approximately two minutes, seventeen seconds.”

  That doesn’t seem right. They’re only a couple megaklicks away.

  She was about to ask the AI to recalculate before she realized where she’d gone wrong. It would take less if they were already closing, but both flights were slowly separating. A Wasp was highly maneuverable, but at these speeds, it would still take time to come about and change direction.

  A moment later, the attack force changed direction, abandoning the original anomaly, and headed to meet the threat. The anomaly could have been a plant or even a natural transmission—now that the enemy had been located, there wasn’t a reason to proceed to it.

  “OK, Fox Flight, looks like we have rear guard, but keep alert,” the lieutenant passed.

  “Shit, just our luck,” Mercy passed on the S2S. “All this way and no invitation to the dance.”

  Beth ignored her, instead trying to observe what was happening. Six of the eleven flight teams were maneuvering to envelop the enemy force, building up speed as they closed. The enemy force looked trapped, but it was forming into a Tomiko Defense, which could cause problems cracking it.

  “Swordfish, are you getting what I am?” LTJG Bendick asked the lieutenant on the flight net.

  With 44 fighters, the pilots used the official call signs to avoid confusion. Within each four-plane flight, however, they used each other’s personal call signs. LT Hadley was “Swordfish,” LTJG Bendick was “Warthog,” Mercy was “Red Devil,” and Beth sported her new callsign, “Ant.” She wasn’t overly happy with it, but no one got to choose their callsign. It was still early enough that it could be changed based on her performance, for good or bad, but she could only hope.

  “Rose, slave me to him,” Beth ordered, pulling up her own scans. In the top right corner of her helmet display, several more anomalies suddenly appeared. “Most likely probabilities?”

  “Nothing over 20%. Do you want me to hear them?”

  “No, but as soon as one reaches 33%, let me know.”

  “Fox Flight, orient to x-ray-one, yankee-three-one, zulu-two-five. Full dispersion,” Swordfish ordered.

  Beth kept running scans, trying to pierce whatever was wrinkling the fabric of space. Anti-surveillance measures were in constant flux, but not many ships could spoof the Navy for long as the AIs acted and counteracted to break through the fog.

  Except those aren’t run-of-the-mill ships out there, if that’s them.

  “Now 35% and climbing that those ships are—” Rose started before being cut off by Lieutenant Hadley.

  “They’re moving too fast. It’s them. Prepare for attack, tetrahedron, Ant following. Execute.”

  The tetrahedron formation was three fighters forward in a triangle, one following at what would be the apex of a pyramid. That maximized firepower to the front but allowed the reserve (Beth in this case) to give support to any of the other three.

  Within seconds, as the two forces closed, it became obvious that a total of five enemies faced them, all travelling .2C faster than Fox Flight. They had been building up speed, under heavy cloaking, before they were picked up, which gave them a big advantage.

  “We’ve got help coming,” the lieutenant passed. “We just need to keep the bad guys engaged until then. Ready torp salvo on second bogey. Fire in five.”

  At this range, the torpedoes would probably not be particularly effective, but it could work
to disperse the enemy formation. And by focusing on one of them, they could get lucky, taking one of them out.

  The enemy had torpedoes, too, and launching them at their craft’s higher speed would make them more effective. Beth, hanging 30 kiloklicks behind the lead three, counted down, hoping her wingmen would get theirs off first.

  She longed to fire as well, but those weren’t her orders. She knew the lieutenant was letting her get her feet wet on this mission, but what better way than to get into the thick of things?

  The salvo of three torpedoes took off, accelerating at the max 70G. The enemy force didn’t react but kept advancing. At any minute, Beth expected them to fire back.

  “Ant, keep them busy. Engage with your laser.”

  “Roger that,” Beth said.

  A Wasp configured for ship-to-ship had four weapons systems. The L-40 was a laser, the P-13 a hadron coil-particle beam, the M-51 or 57 torpedo, and the G-21 railgun for close-in fighting.

  The laser had almost infinite range and flew at near c speed. It was susceptible to shielding, and the Wasp’s laser did not have nearly the power of those on capital ships.

  The hadron was a devastating weapon, with the particles building up speed in a kilometer-length cyclotron under the fighter before being shot out. Its weakness was the radiation the process created, the power it required, and its relatively shorter range due to electrostatic bloom.

  The torpedoes were the weapon of choice for most engagements. They had a fire-and-forget guidance system that would hone in on the target. One hit would destroy or heavily damage any ship known to man. They were relatively slow, however, and had a somewhat limited range before they lost their maneuverability.

  The railgun fired small depleted uranium pellets at hypervelocity speeds that would punch through just about anything. They traveled along a straight line and so could be dodged, so their effective range was limited to a couple hundred klicks, which was spitting distance when considering space combat. In close-combat, such as around a planet or even in atmosphere, the weapon was deadly.

  “Engage second target,” Beth ordered Rose, using her eye to highlight the blip on her helmet display. “Full power and lock.”

  The blip’s color switched to the red of an active target, and an instant later, a beam of white shot across her display, enhanced for her to follow it. It struck the advancing fighter a moment later, but the enemy kept advancing.

  The modern combat laser could cut through almost anything if given enough time. The target could gain time by either shunting most of the beam aside or breaking contact.

  Immediately, two of the enemy fired torpedoes, locked on Tala. Beth’s heart jumped to her throat as adrenaline spiked.

  “Give me time to impact!”

  “At current closing, twenty-three seconds.”

  “Damn!”

  Her flight’s torps would arrive first, but that wouldn’t affect the two that were bearing down on her.

  “Swordfish, I’ve got two fish on me.”

  “You’ve got time. Keep up the fire for another ten seconds.”

  “Roger.”

  Beth gulped as she watched the distance close, almost hoping that the torps would break off to one of the others, then feeling guilty that the thought had crossed her mind. Her display lit up as the other four opposing fighters employed their hadron beams to take out the three Fox Flight torpedoes, which was why they’d waited. It was a calculated risk. A particle beam could destroy any torpedo, but even in the “vacuum” of space, there was dust and micro-particles, and combined with the bloom, a beam weapon lost power with range. Using a hadron beam to knock out an incoming torpedo was a bet that you’d destroy it before it reached you

  She couldn’t worry about that, though. She had her own game of chicken going, and with seven seconds left, she won that game. Her target swung off and commenced a break maneuver. If Beth could keep locked, her laser would probably get close to breaking through, but that would result in her getting taken out by the enemy torp. She immediately broke as well, spitting out decoys as she ran.

  The limit of her compensators, without getting G-Shot, was 53G, and Beth pushed that as she took Tala into a series of maneuvers designed to both break the torpedo lock and keep her in position to support the other two.

  One of the torpedoes immediately lost lock, honing in on a decoy. The second one, however, stayed on her ass as she pushed Tala to her limits. The enemy torp was running much faster than she was. If she just bolted, she’d take it up the stern. Beth had one advantage: because she was slower, she had greater maneuverability.

  She swung Tala hard over, pulling max Gs. The torp immediately gave chase, closing in to 26.3 klicks on the intercept—ass-puckering close—before the torp shot past, struggling to turn tight enough to hit her.

  “You’ve got two bogeys on your six,” Warthog told Mercy.

  Beth had been so wrapped up in her own fight to survive that she’d lost the picture. She pulled out her display to see that Swordfish was dead, along with one of the enemy fighters.

  Shit! Don’t dwell on it—focus!

  She saw the two on Mercy’s tail, but one was closing with Warthog, and a fourth, Beth’s original target, was rejoining the fight.

  “I can’t shake the fuckers,” Mercy shouted over the net as she tried to reverse course and come back to a front aspect.

  “I’m coming in,” Warthog said, swooping down from the Z-axis.

  Trying to escape the enemy torp had taken Beth out of the fight. She kept into her turn to rejoin the other two while she tried to process what she should do next.

  “Give me some torpedo firing solutions,” she yelled into her helmet.

  A moment later, she had four. None gave a high probability of success.

  If I can just cut the distance a bit, I can get an aft aspect.

  “Red Devil, can you drag it left two, up five, and out three?” Beth asked.

  “I’m kinda busy, if you haven’t noticed,” Mercy said, the tension evident in her voice.

  “If you can, then I can support you,” Beth passed.

  I hope.

  “That’s a ne—” Warthog started before he was cut off. His blip flashed white, then dulled to gray.

  “Fuck, it’s just you and me now, sister,” Mercy said. “And my shields are taking a pounding.”

  “Just a little bit longer, and I can fire a torp up their butts.”

  “Hell, Beth, if you say so. Just hurry up. They’re about to burn through.”

  Beth brought Tala from under the battle plane. If this was an old wet-water navy battle, Mercy was a destroyer with two cruisers on her, while Tala was a submarine, maneuvering to fire a salvo of torpedoes at the cruisers. She just had to get into range.

  She checked the position of the other two fighters. Her original target was looping back to get into the fight, and the one that had just taken out Bendick was angling on a converging course with Mercy. None of them seemed to be paying any attention to her.

  Your mistake, suckas!

  She had Rose continually calculating firing solutions, waiting for the right moment. When the probability of a hit reached 30%, she almost went for it, but she wanted the element of surprise, and a missed shot would remind them that she was a threat. She had to take out the two on Mercy for them to have a chance with the remaining two.

  They really should be paying attention to me . . .

  A flashing white light on her display took her attention away from the firing solutions. She glanced at it.

  Mother of God! The torpedo!

  The torpedo she’d dodged had come around, and with Beth’s change of course, she’d become a sitting duck. Rose was a highly developed AI, but by keeping her “consciousness” on continual firing solutions, that had left legacy displays for all other functions—such as incoming threats.

  She fired her two torpedoes and tried to “dive under” the incoming torp, but she knew she was out of time. The enemy torpedo hit, and Tala went dark.<
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  Chapter 10

  “I thought you were supposed to be God’s gift to the Navy,” Warrant Officer Two Taurus Nicolescu said as Beth and Mercy headed for the ready room. “Pretty piss-poor performance, if you ask me.”

  Taurus—who’d unsurprisingly been given the callsign “Bull”—was one of the squadron’s three warrant officers, former enlisted pilots who’d been first class petty officers and had put in three years as single-seat pilots. The idea of enlisted-to-warrant pilots went back a long way, at least as far as the old American Army. The concept had been resurrected as a compromise between the old guard, who still thought all fighter and attack pilots should be commissioned officers, and the new who’d pushed for the change.

  Technically, Beth was a “probationary” pilot. She wouldn’t shuck off the probationary status until, and if, she became a warrant officer.

  Which wasn’t a sure thing after her performance in the exercise.

  “And you are, Bull? God’s gift?” Mercy said, grabbing Beth by the arm and pulling her past the man.

  “Watch it, Hamlin,” Nicolescu said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. You’re the high and mighty O, while me and Beth here are just dumb enlisted peons.”

  “Jeez, Mercy! Be careful,” Beth whispered as they got out earshot.

  Normal naval etiquette was somewhat lax in fighter squadrons, far more so than in a ship, or, God help it, in the Marines. Among the pilots themselves, it was even more casual, but she thought Mercy was pushing the limits, and she didn’t want her friend to get into trouble.

  “He can eat me. ‘Bull’ is appropriate for him; he flies like the proverbial bull in a china shop. The asshole’s got no touch.”

  Beth didn’t know enough about the man to comment. He’d been one of about a dozen or so who seemed to resent her presence. Most of her squadron mates had seemed to be either welcoming or neutral, but that dozen went out of their way to exclude her.