Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles 7: Renegades (12 page)

The lieutenant shook his head. “There is simply no way to tell sir. The communication arrays in all GCP ships automatically acknowledge the receipt of any transmission but these ships don’t follow our protocols.”

Ken looked back at Cat. She nodded and he swiveled his chair back to face the forward view screen.

“Helm ahead zero point one five. Weapons station, forward shields to maximum. Bring beam emitters up to full power. Charge the railguns.”

“Aye Captain”

“They’re breaking into two groups. The smaller group is vectoring towards Orbital One the others are heading directly for us,” Ben yelled from the First Officer’s station.

Cat toggled her internal comms and signaled High Orbital One. “Commander Dickerson, It looks like you are going to have some company. Is your little surprise online yet?”

JD’s response was immediate over the comms. “Affirmative Admiral. We got the last of the power conduits tied in about twenty minutes ago.”

“That was cutting it a little close Commander.”

“Yes Admiral but that’s what makes life exciting!”

Cat smiled. “You remember that ancient Chinese curse?”

“May you live in interesting times?”

“Well Commander, I suspect things are about to get interesting.”

Chapter 14: When Good Men Fall…

Commander Andrew Martinescu tapped the launch buttons on his CAG control board for the Gold and Blue wings. He was going to hold Red and Green in reserve. Immediately the two groups of Scorpion-class attack fighters shot out from their linear accelerator launch bays.

The Gold wing was under the command of Lieutenant Commander “Jax” Jackson while the Blue wing commander was Lieutenant Commander “Madi” Madison. Jax and Madi were two of his most experienced pilots. CAM, as his team had taken to calling him, was especially interested in watching Jax’s wing. One of his pilots was new to his Scorpion.

Admiral Kimbridge had decided that their little merry band of misfits needed a fully trained Marine Assault Contingent. By fully trained, Cat meant that every MAC should be able to use whatever weapons systems were on hand to get their mission done.

The
Yorktown
taskforce was operating on its own and so that meant they had to do more with less. As a result, the Admiral had granted a field promotion to Staff Sergeant Anthony Stone. He was now a Marine Lieutenant in charge of the
Yorktown’s
MAC. As a result he was putting his recent AI enhanced Scorpion fighter training
to the test
as a temporary member of Gold wing.

“Gold wing leader… this is the CAG. Take good care of our newest recruit. The Admiral likes him and I would hate to have to tell her you got her favorite marine killed.”

A moment later Jax responded. “No worries CAG. Marines don’t die, they just go to hell and regroup!”

***

Newly promoted Lieutenant Anthony Grant Stone sat in the acceleration couch of his Scorpion. Things had happened fast. He thought to himself, ‘
The paint on the side of the this ship must still be wet
’. His call sign
Rubble Maker
had been recently emblazoned on the side of the small but deadly craft. Truth be known, it seemed odd to be sitting in a fighter. As a marine he liked a fight as much as the next guy but this was something different.

Up until a few days ago he had been a grunt. A staff sergeant. Something the Admiral had seen in and amidst the alien tech on DE1 had changed his life. The admiral had adapted an idea from what she had seen and he was the first fruits of that idea.

Specially designed nanites had been injected into his body and made their way to his cerebral cortex. There, they interfaced with his brain in such a way that they could facilitate rapid experience-based learning. With the
Yorktown
AI’s help he had accumulated, what the egg heads estimated was, two years of flight training in just a couple of days. He had access to muscle memory that was implanted rather than developed naturally. Sadly this did not mean his muscles were actually toned to their new role. That was something that would take real hours in a real ship. What that would mean for the mission he was about to fly was anybody’s guess. The true test of his enhanced training would come in the form of trial by fire… just the way he liked it.

His fighter was one massive weapons system. He could feel the power coursing around him. It was exhilarating. The entire aft compartment thrummed with energy. It was filled with a powerful super capacitor and matched 16 Tera joule fusion charging plant. Together they could boost the fighter to almost 0.1c from a complete standstill. Thanks to the hyperfield acceleration launch tubes he would be operating at speeds that were several orders of magnitude faster. Without his ship’s AI he couldn’t begin to cope with the speed this ship was capable of.

His onboard weapons systems gave the Scorpion quite a sting. He had access to two wing-mounted plasma turrets that could engage multiple simultaneous targets. In addition, the
Rubble Maker
carried twenty kinetic impact weapons called KIMs, a cloaked tactical nuke and four
Sandys.
These last were useful for minefield emplacements. The nanites contained in them could quickly disassemble anything unfortunate enough to wander into their midst that did not transmit a proper ‘friend’ identifier signal.

He signaled his AI to open a channel to his Wing Leader. “Commander, this is
Rubble Maker
. My board is green. I’m ‘a go’ for ruining somebody’s day.”

“Well then
Rubble Maker
, welcome to the debutant ball! The party will start as soon as the CAG signals a ‘go for launch’… which he just did. OK LADIES, Party Time. Break left as soon as you clear the tubes. Form up on me. LAUNCH! LAUNCH! LAUNCH!”

Stone felt himself pushed back hard in the seat. Given the strength of the inertial dampeners, he was impressed. From his perspective he went from a relative standstill to 10% the speed of light instantaneously. He knew the tubes could launch the Scorpion fighters even faster but the fact was they didn’t need to. Even at 0.1 c the time in the engagement window was prohibitively short. Fortunately, Scorpions could trick the laws of local space time by instantly shifting relative momentum. As a result he could change direction drastically without any loss for velocity.

The effect on the battlefield was stunning. Scorpions flitted about like humming birds around a flower. They could approach a target at mind-blowing speeds and effectively stop on a dime. In actuality, they never stopped. Their specialized hyperfield emitters changed the direction of their momentum such that they bounced a few meters left then right several thousand times a second when they were in hover mode.

In the simulators they could pop over a target, drop a load of missiles and pop out before the adversary could react. Unfortunately for Lieutenant Stone, simulators rarely got the little details right and in battle it was the little details that killed you.

He broke to the left as he was instructed by Jax who was his CO and, for this mission, his designated wingman. His fighter was called the
Betty Boop
.

Jax signaled him on their private channel. “OK Lieutenant lets go kick some alien butt. I’m going to head over to that guy in the lead. I’ll approach from the right, you come in from the left. Fire your beam weapons at half power. They are a good bit stronger than normal GCP fare. We don’t want to give away our strengths any sooner than we have to. Once you’ve fired, bank up and I’ll bank down.”

“And if they don’t do the job?” Stone asked.

“Then we come around again and up the yield on our plasma guns to 75%.”

“Sounds like a plan… if other guy cooperates.”

Stone heard the sound of the other man laughing over their shared comm-link.

“Just remember battles are always a democracy,” Jax said, “Our opponents get a vote. Let’s just hope the Admiral has stuffed that ballot box.”

***

F1 saw two groups of enemy fighters belching out of the belly of the
GCP Yorktown
. His combat analysis computer was confused. The flight profiles of the enemy’s ships did not match anything his sources said the GCP should have. Admiral Kimbridge was a renowned innovator when it came to integrating and adapting technology to her needs. He wondered just what he was running into.

The ships moved at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light. Even more amazing they seemed to be able to maneuver without regard to the G-forces that must be felt by their pilots. Either they had found a way to overcome those G-forces or the ships were remotely piloted drones. He knew from experience that drone aircraft often over promised and undelivered… and so he was leaning towards piloted aircraft that handled like drones.

“Computer, forward shields to maximum. Engage auto-targeting of approaching aircraft. Fire at will.”

Immediately his ship’s kinetic energy weapon began to spew out a continuous stream of depleted uranium pellets traveling at near relativistic speeds. They travelled so fast that as they encountered minute particles of dust in the vacuum of space they flash ionized those particles. The result was a light show rivaling that of any plasma beam weapon.

He could see the kinetic rounds tracing a path towards the enemy ships but before they could intersect his enemy would jog in a different direction. Their maneuverability made them almost impossible to hit at range. Fortunately as they closed the distance the GCP fighters had less time to react.

F1 was counting on this simple fact of physics to even the odds as the battle proceeded. He was in for another surprise. As his weapon finally managed to score a hit, the impossible happened. The alien fighter’s shields flared and the rounds he was firing at the ship reversed direction and took out F1’s gun. The force of the impact of his own rounds impacting with the very weapon that fired them tore a meter long gash in his ship and set his vessel spinning out of control. It took him thirty precious seconds to counter the spin and bring his fighter back into the engagement. By this time the enemy was out of range and his weapons choices had been reduced to a laser turret and a handful of nuclear missiles.   

As he watched the battle unfold he saw several of his wing taken out by their own railguns. He toggled his comms and signaled his wing. Several others broke off and were in active retreat.

“Alpha group, stow your kinetics! They have shields that can reflect our rounds straight back at us. Go to lasers and plasma beams. Try to gang up on your targets. Ram them if you need to. All of you get back in the fight. I’ll personally kill any one of you I even
think
has acted cowardly. Flight Leader out!”

He turned his ship towards the
GCP Yorktown
. He knew that ship to be Admiral Kimbridge’s flagship. As he raced towards the
Yorktown
at maximum speed he fired every missile he had and followed up with a full barrage from his beam weapons. His hope was that the beam weapons, traveling at relativistic and near-relativistic speeds would weaken the big ship’s shield enough for his nuclear payloads to do some serious damage.

In the days before the Great Disruption, when the laws that governed hyperfield dynamics changed, his people’s ships had mastered hyperfield shielding. Such shields could reverse momentum and effectively cloak a ship. The Creators had solved the fundamental problems with creating hyperfields in this post-Great Disruption universe but they seemed to lack the nuanced control that the Yorktown taskforce was demonstrating. This had him perplexed as the numerous moles they had within the GCP had given no indication that these technologies had been recovered… and yet here was the proof.

Before his missiles were within a hundred kilometers of the Yorktown two of the enemies fighters intercepted and destroyed them. They then turned to engage him directly. They flitted about like insects on a lake. Their rate of acceleration and deceleration defied explanation. As fast as he fired his lasers they would jip and jog out of the way.

Meanwhile his ship took hit after hit. At first his shields held easily but it seemed their weapons only got more powerful over time. If he were a suspicious sort –and he was –he would think they were playing with him. Soon his critical failure alert system began to flag his shields. He red-lined his reactor to feed more energy into the system. It helped but not enough.

When his shield harmonics started fluctuating beyond his ability to compensate, he attempted to break off the engagement. His adversaries had other ideas. One, who zipped in close enough to wave and whose call sign was Rubble Maker, attempted to take out his engines with a surgical strike. He decided enough was enough. He might not survive this battle but he was damn well going to take someone with him.

He was going to take a play out of his enemy’s playbook. Normally his acceleration and maneuverability where limited by his ship’s inertial dampeners to control the stresses on his body. He was going to remove that constraint.  He programmed his ship’s computer to go to overload acceleration directly at his tormentor the moment he reappeared within fifty yards. At that rate of acceleration he would be rendered unconscious but it would hardly matter. The enemy would be dead and so would he.

***

Lieutenant Anthony Grant Stone was ‘in the moment.’  In his mind’s eye he could hear the words of a legendary boxer by the name of Cassius Clay saying ‘
float like a butterfly sting like a bee
.’ Commander Jax had designated their current target as the one they would try to capture for Admiral Kimbridge. Some sixth sense the commander had seemed to indicate this was a flight commander and thus represented a more valuable prize should they be able to capture him.

He maneuvered his scorpion in and took a point blank potshot at his target’s primary thrusters. Before his adversary could react, he reversed momentum and flew out of engagement range.  Because of the limited duration of his attacks, his plasma beam was not penetrating the enemy’s shield but he could see them begin to fluctuate after each attack. Jax was doing his part by engaging from a different direction. One or two more stings and their target’s engines would be disabled.

***

Cat watched the battle unfold from the bridge of the
Yorktown
. Two groups of enemy fighters had emerged from the hyperfield vortex that had formed several light minutes away thanks to her thought to place hyperfield resonators around the Hupenstanii home world. The time that trick bought them was time that the
Yorktown
taskforce put to good use.