Moderator: NecronLord
Damn it.Batman wrote:And how do you get 60 fighters out of six squadrons when the one squadron they actually bothered to launch is rather explicitly the traditional 12?
Got my times tables fucked up. Thanks for catching that, Bats. 
Assuming the misc squadrons are the same strength at any rate (though they should have the room for that). If we follow the real world carrier analogy through, even back when the USN could afford proper air wings the EW/AEW/COD 'squadrons' usually consisted of 3-5 birds each.StarSword wrote:Damn it.Batman wrote:And how do you get 60 fighters out of six squadrons when the one squadron they actually bothered to launch is rather explicitly the traditional 12?
So that makes 72 fighters, 72 miscellaneous aux ships.
That would be sensible mission plan, even if extra fighters only took out 2 - 3 additional Turusch ships and damaged few more it would still be highly successful attack.Had it been up to Koenig, he would have launched all six fighter squadrons from the Eta Boötis Kuiper Belt, and trusted the destroyer screen to keep the carrier safe.
StarSword wrote:Something else I noticed this morning (I was a little too sleepy to catch it last night) is that we can correlate the America's small craft complement pretty closely to the loadout of current USN carriers.
Actually, no. Just taking the two USN classes currently in service, a Nimitz-class CVN is 333 meters long, and a Gerald R. Ford-class is 337 meters. America's only three times longer than that, and she's a long, narrow stick apart from the shield cap.Sky Captain wrote:It feels far too small for such huge ship. America is probably 20 - 30 times more massive than real world carriers, yet it can hold roughly the same number of similarly sized fighters and support craft. If that holds true for other ships as well then in Star Carrier series warships are mostly power plants, engines and armor while devoting only tiny fraction of their mass to weaponry.
The Trash take a potshot at Gray's crash site. I think he pissed them off.He'd heard and felt a savage boom behind him some minutes before -- probably the Tushies dropping something nasty on the wreckage of his fighter or the abandoned acceleration couch, so he kept moving, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and a possible area of Turusch interest. Moments before, he'd waded out of the shallow water, stumbling ashore on a beach covered by what looked like stubby, blunt-ended tentacles.
The thickness of the vegetation around him was surprising, though it had taken him a moment to realize that it was vegetation. In fact, he still wasn't sure. The stuff was moving. Each tentacle was perhaps ten to fifteen centimeters long and as thick as his wrist; the tips were open, the weaving shapes hollow, and they appeared to be filled with small holes, like sponges. Though overall they were orange in color, each, in fact, shaded from deep red at the base to bright yellow at the rim of the opening. Their movements were slow and rhythmic, ripples spreadig out from his feet with each step and traveling eight or ten meters in all directions, and quivering in response to the rain. He would have assumed they were animals, except for the fact that they were firmly rooted in the ground.
Ok, so not pure water, but aqueous sulfuric acid. We don't know the concentration but I think that adjusts the firepower number from earlier downward.The sea he'd just emerged from was water, but with a high percentage of sulfuric acid; the rain, he noted, was almost pure sulfuric acid -- H2SO4 -- and it steamed as it splashed across the vegetation. The external temperature was up to 53 degrees Celsius, and climbing rapidly as the local morning grew more advanced.
Gray's e-suit was composed of a finely woven carbon composite that, in theory, at least, would resist anything the local atmosphere could throw at him, including strong acids and high temperatures. He wondered, though, if any material substance could stand up to this kind of acidity for very long. There were, he noticed, quite a few rock outcroppings thrusting above the orange vegetation, all of them soft and rounded, as though smoothed by geological ages of acid rain. Some of the larger outcrops had holes eaten clear through them, and they stood above the quivering orange ground like alien gateways.
<snip>
What the hell was a chemoorganoheterotroph, anyway?
A ripple of motion caught his attention out of the corner of his eye, something dark, quick, and low to the ground. He turned ... but saw nothing beyond the writhing of those damned orange plants.
The place, he decided, was starting to get on his nerves, and now his imagination was playing tricks on him...
Clarification on the Starhawk's abilities. The SG-92 is capable of fighting in atmo, but wasn't really designed for it and it shows. Fortunately the Trash are even worse.Commander Marissa Allyn brought her gravfighter into a steep climb as kinetic-kill projectiles, heated white-hot by atmospheric friction, stabbed down out of the sky and struck the sea in white bursts of vapor. Her ship vibrated alarmingly with the maneuver. Despite the advanced polymorphic hull, able to drastically reconfigure its shape according to mission or aerodynamic requirements from moment to moment, the SG-92 Starhawk had not been designed with atmospheric flight in mind. You could maneuver the thing with gravs, or you could use the change of airfoil shape and ailerons to maneuver against the airflow, but it was tough to do both.
Turusch fighters relied solely on gravitics for flight, whether in space or in atmosphere; those ugly, potato-shaped lumps were just about as aerodynamic as bricks.
Hang on, I thought she fired her last missile at that C&C ship at the end of the last chapter.Blinking, she told her AI to stop down the intensity of the light and kept hauling her Starhawk up and over in a hard, tight loop. The Toads tried to match her climb but were carrying too much velocity. She could see their hulls glow white-hot as they tried dumping excess speed. "Target lock!" she called. "Fox One!"
But that was her last Krait. "This is Blue One!" she called. "I'm dry on VG-10s! Three on my tail! Switching to beams and guns!"
Effects of direct hits by 8 KT nuke and pee-beep against Toads. And yes, that's the same Spaas that Gray mentioned punching out back in chapter one.Blue Five -- Lieutenant Spaas -- dropped out of empty sky, trying to get on one of the Toads' six, the sweet spot directly behind its tail. The Turusch fighter broke left and Spaas followed, trying to get a clear shot.
Allyn's missile twisted around, then arrowed almost straight down, striking the lead Toad and detonating with a savage, eight-kiloton blast that sent a visible shock wave racing out through the air. The outer skin of the Turusch spacecraft peeled away from the tiny, sudden sun ... and then the entire craft disintegrated in a spray of metallic shreds and tatters as the fireball swelled and engulfed them.
The last Toad boomed through the fireball. Allyn completed her loop, rolling out at the top and entering a vertical dive. Her IHD slid a targeting reticule across the Toad, which was coming up at her from below, head-on. She triggered her particle beam an instant before the enemy could fire, sending a blue-white lance of energy stabbing into and through the Toad's hull. The fighter came apart in glowing fragments; a half second later she plunged through the debris cloud, feeling the tick and rattle of fragments impacting across her fuselage.
"Scratch two Tangos!" Allyn yelled, adrenaline surging through her. Damn, she never felt this alive, save when she was turning and burning in combat. She hated that about herself.
"And scratch one!" Spaas added, as another nuclear sun blossomed in the fire-ravaged sky over Haris.
Taking potshots at the Tush ground forces was in the mission parameters, albeit secondary to shooting up the fleet. Squadron is now down to seven effectives.The squadron actually had two mission elements -- crippling the Turusch fleet as completely as possible before the Confederation carrier task force arrived, and takig some of the pressure off of the Marines. Of the two, the first, arguably, was the most important ... at least that was what they'd told her in the mission briefing.
Even so, the mission was pointless if the Marine perimeter collapsed before the America arrived. The Turusch were doing their best to keep the Dragonfires away from Red-Mike, and the volume of fire directed against the Marines appeared to be growing more intense.
Fifteen kilometers away, a nuclear fireball consumed Blue Twelve.
Even with an exoskeleton to help you move, 1.8 gravities is 1.8 gravities.Gray had to rest.
The spider strapped to his back continued responding perfectly to his movements, adding its considerable strength to his own as he staggered across the alien landscape. The planet's gravity continued dragging at him, however, until his heart was pounding so hard inside his chest he began to fear the possibility of a heart attack.
Theoretically, the med circuitry woven into his e-suit was supposed to monitor his health, and would inform him if he was in any real danger of hurting himself, but he wasn't sure he trusted that technology yet. He stopped and leaned against a smoothly sculpted rock outcropping, breathing hard.
The monster he couldn't quite see earlier turns out to be more like a flatworm. These are probably the chemoorganoheterotrophs spoken of by the infodump about Ate a Boot. And they need to go away because Confederation scientists say they don't exist.They looked like shadows, each leaf shaped and paper thin, gray in color, each the size of his hand or a little bigger. They flitted across the orange vegetation as though gliding over it, traveling a meter or two before vanishing again among the weaving tendrils.
Again, Gray wished he'd understood -- or paid more attention to -- the briefings on the biology of Eta Boötis IV. Even if he'd ignored the canned downloads, Commander Allyn had gone over it lightly in the permission [sic] briefing. What he best remembered, however, was her stressing that the star Eta Boötis was only 2.7 billion years old ... far too young to have planets with anything more highly evolved than primitive bacteria. Gray was no xenobiologist, but those ... those things slipping and gliding over the orange plants, or whatever they were, looked a hell of a lot more advanced than any bacteria he'd ever heard about.
Were they dangerous? He couldn't tell, but it did appear that more and more of them were visible from moment to moment, as though they were following him.
Or might they be some sort of Turusch or Sh'daar biological weapon? Not much was known about their technology, or about whether or not they might utilize organic weapons or sensor probes.
Soil vitrification around the Marine base due to the sustained bombardment. Enemy starship is identified as a cruiser, and Keith lost count again. That's eight effectives when we had seven before. (Ok, actually, this time it's possible one of the fighters I counted as out of action at the end of chapter four was merely disabled, and repaired itself as Gray demonstrated earlier, but it's more fun to pick on the author.Commander Marissa Allyn brought her gravfighter into a flat, high-speed trajectory, hurtling low above the surface. The orange ground cover gave way in a flash of speed-blurred motion to bare rock. The surface for fifty kilometers around the Marine perimeter was charred black, or, in places, transformed into vast patches of fused glass. Over the past weeks, since the Turusch had brought the Marine base under attack, hundreds of nuclear warheads had detonated against the Marine shields, along with thousands of charged particle beams. The equivalent of miniature suns had burned against that landscape, charring it, in places turning sand to molten glass.
She checked the tactical display for the entire squadron. Three of her pilots were still in space, tangling with Turusch fighters and a Romeo-class cruiser in low orbit. Four were in-atmosphere with her, forming up with her as she arrowed low across fire-scorched desert toward the Marine defenses.
)More detail on Trash armored vehicles like the one Gray salted (tee-hee) earlier."Watch out for slugs," the voice told her. "If you can drop some salt on them on the way in, we'd appreciate it."
"Copy, Red-Mike. Five loads of salt on the way."
Ahead, the Marine perimeter screen rose above the horizon, a pale, scarcely visible dome-shaped field highlighted by the sparkle and flash of incoming particle beams and lasers. According to her tactical display, the perimeter was still under attack by Turusch ground crawlers -- fifty-meter behemoths code-named "slugs" by Confederation intelligence. Each was similar in appearance to a Toad fighter, but squashed, with a flat bottom that seemed to conform to the ground as it crawled over it. Turrets and blisters on the upper surface housed weapons emplacements, which were keeping up a steady fire on the Marine position. There were a dozen enemy crawlers out there, scattered across the burnt area on all sides of the Marine base.
A Romeo-class cruiser has to break off from targeting the ground to deal with a couple Starhawks.One Turusch ship, the Romeo-class cruiser, was almost directly overhead, three hundred kilometers out from the planet. It had been slamming the Marine perimeter with particle beams, but now appeared to be occupied by an attack from two of the Dragonfire fighters.
The five gravfighters all were out of Krait missiles by now, but they still had plenty of KK rounds, as well as power for their particle beam weapons. KK rounds -- the letters stood for "kinetic kill" -- were lumps of partially compressed matter, each the size of a little finger massing four hundred grams, steel jacketed to give the magnetic fields something to which they could grab hold. Hurled down a gravfighter's central railgun at twenty kps, they released the energy of a fair-sized bomb on impact; the weapon could cycle seven hundred rounds per minute, or nearly twelve per second.
She had to slow sharply, though, to see the targets. Swinging left slightly, she watched the red diamond of the targeting cursor slide over the icon marking a Turusch slug at the very limits of visibility and triggered her cannon. Rapid-fire rounds howled from her craft, as her gravs kicked in to compensate for the savage recoil of that barrage. Ahead, rounds slammed into the Turusch crawler, sending up immense plumes of dust and dirt, then a fireball erupting, then immediately snuffing out in the oxygen-poor atmosphere.
The explosion an instant later flared white almost directly in front of her. She punched through the fireball, the shock wave jolting her fighter. Dropping her right wing, she jinked back to the right, targeting a second crawler, with a third five kilometers further off, on the bleak and fire-scourged horizon. Again, a stream of compressed matter shrieked from her high-velocity railgun.
High-energy particle beams probed and snapped past her head. The mobile fortresses were swinging their weapons to engage this new threat coming out of the north.
Eww. Close-up look at the critters from earlier.Gray felt something slap against the back of his left leg. He looked down, startled, and saw one of the dark gray leaf shapes clinging to his calf. He reached down and tore it off; it peeled away from his e-suit with a ripping sensation, like it had been clinging to him with suckers, and as he held it up, it twisted and writhed in his grasp. The underside of the creature was covered with tiny tube feet, like a starfish of Earth's oceans, with a central opening like a sucker, ringed by rough-surfaced bony plates.
Uh-oh. They think he's food. He probably isn't, given biochemistry, but the critters are too stupid to know that: He smells like organic compounds, therefore food.Three more of the things hit him in rapid succession, two on his lower right leg, one on his left hip. He could feel the rasp of those ventral plates, grinding against the carbon nanoweave of his suit.
Revulsion turned to gibbering panic. The atmosphere was toxic, and would kill him in minutes if his suit was breached. He ripped the creatures off and hurled them away. One, he saw, landed on its back three meters away, twisted over until it was upright, and immediately started gliding toward him again.
Gray heads for the hills, while meanwhile, the rest of the survivors of VF-44 take shelter. General Gorman's perspective, 1445 hours.He started running.
His spider pumped and throbbed with his movements, giving him better speed than he could have managed on Earth, to say nothing of the Harisian high-grav environment. He stumbled, but he kept running, his boots splashing through shallow ponds and mudflats and the sea of soft-bodies, orange vegetation that weaved and twisted in front of him; and the shadow-creatures followed, hundreds of them now.
He was screaming as he ran.
Information on shield technology. Instead of being the "absorb and re-radiate" variety like we have in SW or ST, they reflect and disperse incoming attacks (in a manner that basically turns physical attacks inside-out). Also, they can be dropped or erected in sections rather than being a one-piece bubble shield. Defeating a theatre shield is as much a matter of seismic effects on its surroundings as it is one of brute force.The gravfighters of VF-44 had completed three wide sweeps all the way around the Marine perimeter, smashing Turusch slugs and ground positions and even small groups of enemy soldiers wherever they could find them. Up in space, three hundred kilometers overhead, more fighters were slamming missiles against the defensive screens of a large Tush cruiser. For the first time in weeks, the Marine perimeter was not under direct fire, and the terrain surrounding the base was free of enemy forces.
He watched the main tactical display with its glowing icons marking the defensive dome and five incoming fighters. At a prearranged instant, one segment of the defensive screen wavered and vanished.
Energy screens and shields were three-dimensional projections of spacial distortion, an effect based on the projection of gravitational distortion used in space drives. Shields reflected incoming traffic, while screens absorbed and stored the released energy.
While screens were useful in relatively low-energy combat zones, they could be overloaded by nukes, and they weren't good at stopping solid projectiles like missiles or high-energy KK rounds. With shields, incoming beams, missiles, and radiation were twisted through 180 degrees by the sharp and extremely tight curvature of space. Warheads and incoming projectiles were vaporized when they folded back into themselves, beams redirected outward in a spray of defocused energy. Warheads detonating just outside the area of warped space had both radiation and shock wave redirected outward.
As the ground around the outside of the perimeter became molten, however, some heat began leaking through at the shield's base faster than heat-sink dissipaters could cool the ground. When the projectors laid out on the ground along the perimeter began sinking into patches of liquid rock, they failed. The enemy's strategy in a bombardment like the one hammering Mike-Red was to overload the dissipaters and destroy the projectors.
The Marines were using shields and screens in an attempt to stay ahead of the bombardment, with banks of portable dissipater units running nonstop in the ongoing fight to keep the ground solid.
Cruiser takes a potshot at the base while the shield is partially dropped but they get it back up just in time.He brushed past the civilian for a closer look at the 3-D display. One of the energy-shield facets -- number three -- winked of just ahead of the oncoming formation of fliers. The Starhawks glided across the perimeter, and the shield came up again behind them, flickered uncertainly, then stabilized. An instant later, a particle beam stabbed down from space. The Romeo had spotted the momentary breach and tried to take advantage of it with a snap shot, but the beam struck the shield and scattered harmlessly outward.
Further explanation of what I said two quotes ago about seismic effects. If you can't burn 'em out, making the ground crumble under their feet is just as good.One reason the beachhead had been set up on a rocky ridgetop was that molten rock tended to flow downhill, not up into the perimeter and the shield projectors. Repeated shocks against the lower slopes of the ridge, however, were threatening to undermine the perimeter. Gorman had already given orders to set out two replacement projectors, for number five and number six, placing them back a hundred meters as the ground sagged and crumbled beneath the originals.
As much as he appreciates the break the Dragonfires gave him, Gorman knows it's only a temporary break until the rest of the fleet arrives. Remember, we started with at least 58 Trash ships and only really have confirmed kills on six (five from the near-c strike, plus one "Bravo-Bravo" during the furball)."How long do we have?" Gorman asked.
"Hard to estimate, General. An hour. Maybe two. Depends on how soon they resume the bombardment."
Of course. Everything depended on the enemy. That was the hell of it. Gorman hated being trapped like this, stuck in a hole, forced to react to the enemy's initiative, unable even to shoot back, since to do so the Marines had to drop one of the shields, which would mean a torrent of Turusch fire and warheads pouring through the gap.
The respite the Navy zorchies had bought the defenders was the first breather they'd had in weeks, but it wouldn't be long before more Tushie ground units moved into the area and took the perimeter under fire ... or until more capital ships moved overhead and started pounding the beachhead again with nukes and HE-beams.
Gorman loses it with the civilian leader of Ate a Boot and has him kicked out of the command post."I still don't see why you're letting those fighters come inside the shields," Hamid said. "They can't do any good in here."
"In case you weren't paying attention, Mister Hamid," Gorman said, choosing his words carefully, "those pilots have been giving the Turusch one hell of a fight. They're out of missiles, and either out of or running damned thin on other expendables. They need to touch down and get their craft serviced. I imagine the pilots need servicing as well."
"Perhaps they should land in shifts, then ..."
"Mr. Hamid, I've had just about enough of your second-guessing and carping. Get off my quarterdeck!"
"I remind you, General, that I am in command of this colony!"
"And I am in charge of the Marine Expeditionary Force. Bradley!"
"Sir!"
"Please escort this civilian off of Marine property. If he shows his face around here again, he is to be placed under guard and confined to his quarters."
"Aye, aye, General!"
"General Gorman!" Hamid said, his face reddening. "I must protest!"
"Protest all you damned well please," Gorman replied, shrugging, "just as soon as we get back to Earth!"
"Your anti-Islamic stance has been noted, General! Sheer antitheophilia! This will all go onto my report to my government!"
And here we get the first clues to a key background detail of the setting that I alluded to way back in my introduction. After Islamic terrorists nuked several major cities and set off World War III, the Confederation that arose from the ashes enacted a law severely restricting certain religious practices, especially proselytizing and conversion by threat or force. The so-called "White Covenant" classifies those as violations of basic human rights. And as you can imagine, this didn't go over very well, and a lot of people chose to get the fuck offworld instead.Hamid, clearly, was furiously angry, and there would be repercussions later. If there was a later. Gorman was willing to face the political fallout if they could just hang on long enough to get his people off this toxic hellhole.
Gorman watched the civilian go, scowling. That crack about his being antitheophilic had been just plain nasty.
But, of course, the colonists on Haris were Refusers -- the descendants of Muslims who'd refused to sign the Covenant of the Dignity of Humankind or accept the enforced rewrite of their Holy Qu'ran. Gorman, too, was a refuser -- at least in spirit. His church had accepted the Covenant, but man of its members had not.
Maybe. However that also implies any other warship also have only small fraction of volume devoted to weapons.Batman wrote:Judging by that picture the stem is roughly 1000x100m which is (not counting what presumably are the habitat rings) at best 15-20 times the volume of a modern day CVN, and the modern day CVN doesn't have to worry about
a) breathable air. It has to worry about getting it to all it's compartments to be sure, but it doesn't have to store it because there's an effectively infinite amount available outside.
b) Gravity. CVNs get that for free. I very much suspect the mechanics needed for rotational gravity take up space and mass.
c) Modern day CVNs need neither radiation shielding (outside reactor compartments) nor volume set aside for shield generators. Since the Star Carrier universe apparently does have shields one seriously hopes carriers have them.
d) Modern day USN carriers are rarely far away from available resupply/reinforcements WRT the air wing. In this setting even when in-system the carrier won't know what happened to it's attack force for hours which means calling for reinforcements is moderately pointless because by the time they arrive you've either won or died, so the carrier is likely equipped to function on its own for a lot longer than a modern day carrier. Which is going to take mass/volume.
And that's just off the top of my head.
Yeah. Whenever I see acceleration figures like that, I can't help but think there shouldn't be any inhabitable planets anywhere. It's too easy to just one-shot them. Just one angry pilot and *BAM!* Earth, population: 0Sky Captain wrote:Maybe. However that also implies any other warship also have only small fraction of volume devoted to weapons.
Thought a bit about other aspects arising from gravitic propulsion and one thing that came to mind relativistic planet killers are easy. Just strap the same engine used on fighters to large kinetic warhead and slam it into a planet at near c speed.
Allow me to point you to Red Thunder by John Varley. Terrorist accelerates a starship to relativistic speeds and runs it into the North Atlantic. The big joke being, we never find out what they were actually terroristing* about because they fucked up their timing: Only message they got off was, "Death to the --"Darmalus wrote:Yeah. Whenever I see acceleration figures like that, I can't help but think there shouldn't be any inhabitable planets anywhere. It's too easy to just one-shot them. Just one angry pilot and *BAM!* Earth, population: 0Sky Captain wrote:Maybe. However that also implies any other warship also have only small fraction of volume devoted to weapons.
Thought a bit about other aspects arising from gravitic propulsion and one thing that came to mind relativistic planet killers are easy. Just strap the same engine used on fighters to large kinetic warhead and slam it into a planet at near c speed.
Oh, I agree that that is the rational stance to take. My counter argument is that there are enough irrational and determined people in a society where this technology is widely available that you will steadily have your worlds glassed even in peace time. Exchanging your life and a space U-Haul for a few million/billion "bad guys" can be pretty alluring.Batman wrote:I think the commonly accepted single word description is terrorizing though 'committing a terrorist *insert noun* is used more commonly. And what's the point of announcing what you're killing everybody on the planet about given, well, you're killing everybody on the planet so there's nobody left to think 'maybe we should rethink our approach on that issue'?
And the very fact that this here planet is still reasonably inhabitable I take as an indicator that we have at least tentatively begun to grasp the idea that rendering real estate permanently useless because 'if we can't have/keep it, nobody ever will again, forever' may be a suboptimal approach. Sure, you can fractional c KK the planet from a gazillion miles out. Kinda counterproductive if you intended to actually colonize (or even just stripmine) it though.
Of course a lot depends on the setting. If habitable/useful planets are a dime a dozen glassing them rather than risking the Other Side getting them becomes a lot more feasible but at least in this setting, at least so far and given the fact that the planet under siege is moderately useless for colonization yet was colonized anyway indicates to me that for whatever reason, it is worth the effort of taking/keeping rather than just BDZing it.
I think there's maybe one Earthlike planet described in the whole series (Osiris, orbiting 70 Ophiuchi), and the Sh'daar designation for us indicates that out of 50 million or so intelligent (not even necessarily technology-using) species they've encountered, humans are only the 20,000th or so that even have a carbon/oxygen/water metabolism. So yeah, it's not easy to find planets that humans can survive on without help.Batman wrote:Of course a lot depends on the setting. If habitable/useful planets are a dime a dozen glassing them rather than risking the Other Side getting them becomes a lot more feasible but at least in this setting, at least so far and given the fact that the planet under siege is moderately useless for colonization yet was colonized anyway indicates to me that for whatever reason, it is worth the effort of taking/keeping rather than just BDZing it.
Sleep is important, as we all know, so Confederation brain implants can be used to make you sleep if you need it.Rear Admiral Koenig walked through the hatch onto the Combat Information Center deck. He'd spent the last six hours trying to sleep, but not even the various electronic soporifics available through the ship's medical resources had helped. He'd finally dozed off with a trickle charge to his sleep center, but he felt far from rested now.
The CBG is now only 27 minutes from target. Also, the logical consequences of Alcubierre Drive: No way to see what you're heading into, and how to compensate for that.The battlegroup was now deep inside the Eta Boötean solar system, closing on Haris. He checked his internal time readout: twenty-seven minutes, fifteen seconds more.
And then they would know.
Traveling now at just over the speed of light, each ship of the battlegroup now effectively was locked up in its own tight little universe. They couldn't see out, couldn't see the starbow as they'd approached c, couldn't even see the light of the local sun growing more brilliant ahead.
<snip>
"I know, Admiral. I've brought America to general quarters. We have all five squadrons set to launch as soon as we bleed down to Drift, one on CAP, four on strike. The keel weapon is charged and ready to fire. Battlespace drones are prepped and programmed, ready for launch."
"Very good."
Cut off from all contact with the other ships of the battle group, Koenig had to assume the other ship captains were following the oplan, bringing their crew to quarters and preparing for the coming battle. For the past several months, the battlegroup had been training, shuttling between Sol's Kuiper Belt and Mars. Practicing the maneuvers necessary to break out of Alcubierre Drive in the best possible formations, allowing for both flexibility and strength in combat.
Ok, this is interesting. Wonder what Koenig lied about?At least that damned Senate liaison had finally taken the hint and was staying out of CIC. That was one particular aggravation he didn't need at the moment.
Koenig had already lied to the Senate Military Directorate about one key aspect of this operation, and he wasn't eager to face Quintanilla's questions.
That particular problem could wait its turn.
Among Gray's various augs is the ability to see in the dark. He's entered the no-man's land left by the Trash bombardment.Daylight had come and gone with astonishing swiftness, and it was dark now. The optics implanted in Gray's eyes allowed him to see by infrared, but he wasn't used to working in an environment where you saw things by the heat they radiated, smeared and fuzzy and out of focus.
He was exhausted. He'd been running, it seemed, for hours before the weaving tendrils underfoot had thinned out and he'd entered a scorched-bare and rocky desert. Scattered patches of surviving tendrils on the ground glowed with radiant heat, their movements an eerie shifting difficult for the eye to follow. Here, too, patches of bare rock glowed yellow-hot under infrared; he suspected that he might have entered the barren kill zone surrounding the Marine base, where the ground cover had been burned of by the ongoing bombardment by Turusch heavy weapons.
So Gray's suit is more specifically made of nanotubes, not just carbon fiber.What the hell had those things been? His e-suit was still intact, but he'd had the distinct impression that those things had been scraping away at the outer carbon nanotube weave of the garment. That material was incredibly tough, but Gray wasn't about to trust the integrity of his environmental suit with those things swarming over it, not when a single tear could leave him gasping in high-pressure poison.
The 25th century version of being trapped behind enemy lines. He can't survive indefinitely without support, but since the Turusch have already demonstrated they're not shy about trying to sink the lifeboats, as it were, it's not exactly safe to send up a flare.The only way he was going to get through the Marine shield would be if they send a SAR -- a Search and Rescue mission -- out to get him. He had no way to get through the tightly folded space of the shield ... and though his e-suit would protect him well enough from the radiation, it wouldn't let him weather a nearby burst from a nuclear warhead, or a bolt of charged particles searing down from low orbit.
On the other hand, the moment he started transmitting, he was likely to attract attention from Turusch battlespace probes, or even from enemy spacecraft in orbit.
Shit. Damned if he did, damned if he didn't.
Gray decides to risk sending up a flare, based on, the fleet will be here any minute.If he didn't start transmitting, he would die out here or the Turusch would get him, sooner or later. At least if he was broadcasting on the emergency band, there was a chance the Marines would get to him first. Closing his eyes, he focused his thoughts on three discreet mental code groups, then clicked "transmit" on his IHD. The signal was coded, designed to attract the attention of human equipment and to look like noise to the enemy ... but no one counted on the Turusch not being able to recognize the signal as artificial, at least.
The fleet ought to be overhead within another few minutes. That, more than anything else, had decided him on whether or not to trigger the distress beacon. If the Turusch were still up there, they shortly would be too busy to notice a single pilot on the ground.
Good Lord, those sand dollars are determined. They must really like the taste of carbon nanotubes. Meanwhile, Gray can basically fire his laser carbine from the hip because its optics interface with his in-head display.He caught movement, a flash of short infrared sliding across his peripheral vision. Whirling and dropping flat on the ground, he stared into the darkness. Had a Turusch probe, or even a ground patrol, found him already?
There it was again ... another flash of movement. With a miserable sinking feeling at the pit of his stomach, he realized he was seeing a mass of those leaf-shaped gliders, hundreds of them radiating in the infrared and moving straight towards him in the night.
Gray jerked his laser carbine off his shoulder. The weapon had no stock and, in any case, his helmet would keep him from aiming it by eye. A touch to a pressure plate, however, switched on a targeting reticule in his IHD, a small red circle marking what the weapon's muzzle was pointed at. A second touch brought up the power, and a reedy tone in his earphone told him the weapon was ready to fire.
Gray panics and lays into the sand dollars with his carbine. The sand dollars are individually too stupid to realize their prey is incinerating them, and there's too many for him to fry.He moved the weapon awkwardly until the targeting reticule was centered on the central mass of the creatures, then fired. Infrared vision picked up the flash of the beam as it heated air molecules along its path, though it was invisible at optical wavelengths. The glowing mob of organisms shifted and parted, momentarily becoming two smaller masses with a hot spot between them ... but they kept moving forward, merging and blending until they were a single mass once more.
He fired again ... and then again.
"I'm not on the fucking menu!" he screamed, and then he was triggering burst after burst of laser fire, the shots becoming wilder and wilder as the gliders started flowing up the sides of the outcrop ...
The other half of the "using starships as planet killers" equation we were talking about earlier: warp field-on-matter interactions cause Bad Things(tm) to ensue, which is pretty standard stuff for spacetime-manipulating drives in general.But calculating precisely where a starship would emerge from the bubble of the Alcubierre Drive always entailed far more guesswork than navigators or ship captains generally cared to think about. There was even a chance -- an infinitesimally small one -- that one of the battlegroup's ships would slam into the planet while still moving faster than light. The ship, itself, of course, cocooned in its bubble of spacetime, wouldn't be involved in the collision directly. Only the leading edge of warped space enclosing it would actually intersect with the planet. But that intersection could disrupt the planetary crust, and the ship would be dumped into the middle of the chaos that ensued.
The ship would almost certainly be destroyed, and the disruption to the planet's crust might finish off the Marines where the Turusch bombardment had failed.
Koenig wondered if the Turusch had ever used the Alcubierre Effect to destroy planets ... and if the battlegroup would find Eta Boötis IV still intact when they broke out of warp.
What an Alcubierre Drive emergence actually looks like. Things have so far gone exactly as planned. Also a description of the tactical display.Light, twisted into a circular rainbow by spacetime shear effect, exploded as the field evaporated. America's true velocity relative to the space around it was only a few meters per second, and as the spacetime bubble opened, her effective velocity dropped from just over c to almost nothing in a literal flash of tortured photons. To an observer outside, space seemed to open, a circular starbow unfolded from within, and the ship emerged with stately grace into normal space.
From inside the ship, the stars, for just an instant, assumed the characteristic starbow encircling the vessel forward, then shifted back into more familiar patterns.
Eta Boötis glowed hot and yellow orange almost directly ahead, with its fourth planet a slender, silver-yellow crescent bowed away from the star just beside the glare. A readout on his virtual display showed they'd emerged 38,000 kilometers out from the planet's night side -- bang on-target. On the tactical display above the pit, red points of light began winking on in rapid-fire succession, starting close to the green-lit globe marking the planet and extending farther and farther out as America's sensor suites picked up EM returns and emissions from other ships near the planet. The ship's AI identified the signals as quickly as they came in, then plotted positions and vectors on the display.
Disabled targets are marked in yellow, and how to launch fighters faster than a single pair of launch tubes can handle.Other lights were coming on now -- yellow ones, indicating unidentified targets. Most of those would be disabled ships -- hulks, critically damaged vessels, or even large chunks of debris. The Dragonfires, Koenig noted, had made a definite impression on the Turusch; there could be no doubt about that.
And even as he watched, the first pair of blue fighters emerged from America's twin launch tubes at nearly 170 meters per second. The first pair was followed by a second, and then a third. VFA-49, the Star TIgers, began arrowing into the heart of the Turusch fleet.
At the same time, other fighters were emerging from the drop tubes circling America's spine. As the carrier rotated on its axis, creating spin gravity for her crew, centripetal force flung the fighters of VFA-42, the Nighthawks, clear of the shadow of America's forward shield and into space with a relatively sedate velocity of five meters per second.
So, thirteen capital kills, eight likely mission-kills, and damage to several other ships. Twelve Starhawks reduced the odds against the CBG from 2:1 to 1.3:1. But note that Koenig is very impressed the attack worked that well: I wouldn't be inclined to depend on that as the usual result of sending one squadron against an entire fleet."We're counting thirty-four active Turusch capital ships," Commander Craig told him. "Eight more appear to be heavily damaged, but still have active power sources." She hesitated. "Lots of fighters ... but we're not picking up any friendlies."
"Very well," Koenig said. "Captain Buchanan? You may accelerate and engage as soon as all of our fighters are clear."
"Aye, aye, sir."
If the initial numbers were to be believed, the Dragonfires had destroyed at least thirteen Turusch warships, and damaged eight more, a very respectable showing for just twelve gravfighters. Data tags alongside the slowly drifting red icons in the display showed that several of the remaining enemy vessels were damaged as well.
That gave the America battlegroup a decent chance against the survivors of the Turusch fleet, chances better than even, at any rate. A lot would depend on how prepared the enemy was for the Confederation fleet's arrival.
The Dragonfires are rearmed and are heading back out."All Blue Omegas are in position and ready for boost," Commander Allyn said. "We'll take our count from you."
"Copy that, Blue One," the voice of a Marine in MEF HQ Operations Control replied. "The shield is coming down in five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... mark!"
The five gravfighters were already airborne, configured for atmospheric flight and floating vertical, their noses aimed at the night sky just south of the zenith. As the shield section flicked off, the fighters began accelerating, a slight ripple preceding them as their artificial singularities winked into place. Within seconds, they were shrieking skyward. A thick cloud of vapor engulfed each as it lanced toward heaven, stretching out behind and forming a cone shape as the Starhawks went supersonic, then vanishing as they went hypersonic seconds later. Behind and below, the Marine shields switched back on and the base lights vanished.
Gray's still intact enough that his emergency signal is working, but there's no time to go after him."Hey Skipper?" Tucker, Blue Eight, called. "I'm getting an EDS here. AI says it's Prim!"
Allyn glanced at her virtual com suite display, saw the wink of a contact light, with bearing and range. So Prim had survived! Or, at least, the emergency distress beacon built into his e-suit was still functioning, which wasn't necessarily the same thing.
"Got it," she said, patching the signal back down to MED HQ.
"Shouldn't I go back down and try to find him?"
Katie Tucker was Prim's wing. Of course she wanted to cover her partner. "Negative, Tuck," she replied. "The Marines'll take care of him." If they can, she added to herself, but she didn't speak the thought aloud.
The Dragonfires weren't sleeping off the first furball for the whole nine hours. Contrary to what Hamid thought, Gorman did have them sortieing against the Trash in pairs to keep them honest. Now the aliens turn to engage the CBG, letting the Dragonfires pounce on them from behind.The five surviving Blue Omega fighters had pulled several two-ship patrols in the time since they'd arrived at Mike-Red, aimed mostly at keeping the Turusch at a respectful distance. The bombardment of the Marine perimeter had all but stopped. With Blue Omega's arrival, the enemy had known that the battlegroup would be on the way, and they'd obviously been preparing for its arival, the Marines on-planet now a far lower priority than the approaching Confederation fleet.
The overall tactical situation offered the handful of Starhawks on the surface of Eta Boötis IV a rare opportunity. With the America battlegroup emerging from metaspace off the planet's dark side, the Turusch fleet was swinging about and accelerating to meet it ... and in the process turning their backs on Allyn and the remnants of her squadron.
In and among the fight description we see another function of shipboard AI. They can take momentary control to help evade hits. Also, they're fighting the Toads at such close range that they're being pelted with bits of the other guy."Okay, children," Allyn told the others. "Let's put them where they count!"
"Surprise, you freaking Tush bastards!" Lieutenant Tucker called over the tac channel. "Omega Eight, target lock! And Fox One!"
Allyn was already targeting a Sierra-class cruiser, eight thousand kilometers ahead. "Omega One! Target lock! Fox One!"
The Krait slid off the rail and through the momentary puckered opening in the Starhawk's smoothly shifting surface and vanished into the distance. Seconds later, it detonated against the Sierra's screens with a swelling, nuclear fireball ... but Allyn was already breaking right and high, targeting another enemy vessel.
Then the Tush fighters were closing on them from three directions, swinging around and back to engage the sudden pop-up strike from the planet's surface. The five Confederation fighters went into the merge accelerating hard, engaging the fighters with particle beams and KK cannon, saving the heavy-hitting Kraits for capital ship targets.
For the next several seconds, the combat was a confused blur of fast-moving ships, black space, and fireballs. Twice, Allyn's Starhawk AI intervened to throw the ship one way or the other to avoid hurtling pieces of white-hot debris. She saw her CPG beam spear through an oncoming Toad just ahead, and then the sky lit up with an eye-searing explosion, pelting her outer hull with high-velocity bits of shrapnel. Warning tones sounded in her ear as gravitic missiles locked on and accelerated toward her. Sand canisters thumped into the void, blocking the enemy thrusts.
Wait, hold up. Da fuq? 1.15 TeV, as in 1.15 teraelectronvolts, as in 1.843 x 10^-7 J, as in roughly the kinetic energy of a mosquito (thanks, Wolfram Alpha)."Main spinal mount!" Captain Buchanan called from the bridge, "Fire!"
On the tactical display, a beam of white light snapped out from the icon of the America, connecting the carrier momentarily with an Alpha-class Turusch line battleship -- a small asteroid ten times the length of the carrier and bristling with weapon mounts. Its pitted outer surface was pocked and splotched in places by white-hot craters where Confederation weapons had already and repeatedly struck home.
Screens and displays within CIC showed the unfolding fleet action from dozens of different perspectives, the scenes relayed to the battleroup flag by sensor drones scattered across the battlespace. America's spinal mount PBP fired a proton beam invisible to the eye or to drone cameras, but it impacted the Turusch shields at energies of up to 1.15 TeV.
See why I'm ignoring the 1.15 TeV number, because it's absurd. You'd do more damage to them with thrown gravel, and it took a pair of 10 KT blasts to penetrate that destroyer's shields a couple chapters ago.Most of that kinetic energy was splashed aside by bent-space shields or electromagnetic screens, but enough leaked through to melt shield projectors set into the asteroid warship's surface.
And when enough shield projectors were knocked out, the target became vulnerable ...
Koenig basically takes a backseat to his flag captain and the shipboard AI.At this point, Koenig's role was more that of observer than of military commander. He could suggest strategy and coordination with the other ships of the battlegroup, but Buchanan was captain of the America, the one fighting the ship.
In fact, he thought with a touch of bemusement, the engagement already had become far too big, too fast, and too spread out for any human mind to grasp it, much less control what was happening. America's AI was running tracking and targeting, firing the weapons, maintaining screens and shields.
Nuts. I tried to calculate that but I think I'm doing my math wrong. I came out with a terminal velocity of 3131.453 m/s after a 1 km acceleration from 0 m/s. But assuming a 2 kilo ferrous slug (because the Mass Effect gunnery chief is funny) gave me 9.8 MJ, way less than the Starhawk guns.All twenty-six of the other Confederation ships in the battlegroup had emerged from Alcubierre Drive and were accelerating now, swiftly building up to combat velocities. The railgun cruiser Kinkaid had fallen into position one hundred kilometers abeam of the America, and was joining her considerable firepower to that of America's main gun. The Kinky pounded at the asteroid warship, now just eighteen thousand kilometers ahead, with kinetic-kill slugs accelerated at five hundred gravities down its kilometer-long superconductor rail.
Ok, I guess I'm more used to mass drivers that lean on velocity rather than mass for their KE. We'll go with your 1.2 metric tons number, which gives 5.886 GJ. That seems more reasonable.Batman wrote:Nope. 9.8 MJ it is (and I get an MV of 3132.09 mps for 500 gees and 1000 m?) What do you expect out of a projectile roughly twice the mass of a 40mm AAA round?
Real world battleships as of WW2 had 8-9 main guns, in turrets, on a platform a fraction the size and mass of that cruiser-and they lobbed around shells weighing up to 1.2 tons. Barring evidence to the contrary I think it's not excessive to assume a kilometre-long cruiser using a fixed spinal mount can use something in that weight class or beyond.
At the very least he doesn't seem to calculate out the numbers he throws. Given kiloton-yield nukes are considered fighter weapons, I'd expect something at least closer to that half-a-megaton number I estimated for the capship particle beam a couple chapters ago.Batman wrote:The problem is 3 and change kps isn't anything to write home about. That's about 4 times a modern assault rifle's muzzle velocity. The Valendamned real world US Navy managed 2.4 kps.
And they didn't need a kilometre-long ship either.
At least going from the sample base so far, the author just doesn't seem to be all that good at math.
Several things revealed here:Emphatic Blossom at Dawn, like all of the Turusch, was of three minds.
Literally. The Mind Above, as the Turusch thought of it, was the more primitive, the more atavistic, the original consciousness set that had arisen on the Turusch homeworld perhaps three million of their orbital periods in the past. The Mind Here was thought of as a cascade of higher-level consciousness from the Mind Above, more refined, sharper, faster, and more concerned with the song of intellect.
And the Mind Below was more recent still, an artifact of both Turusch and Sh'daar technology, a merging of Minds Here into a single, more-or-less unified instrumentality.
For Emphatic Blossom, the Mind Above, a shrill demand almost beyond reason, screamed, "Kill!" The Mind Here, analyzing the data coming through the artificial awareness of the Enforcer Radiant Severing, echoed the demand to kill, modifying it with sensory data and intelligence flowing through its linkages with the ship. "Kill," yes, but with an awareness that the Turusch fleet was now caught between two separate and rapidly closing tentacles of enemy force, that the fleet was caught in a crossfire that seriously hampered its maneuverability and limited its tactical options. There was a distinct possibility of gaining an important advantage if the enemy carrier vessel could be crippled or destroyed.
But the Mind Below carried a different message entirely.
"There are strategic considerations that take precedence beyond the tactical," Blossom's Mind Below was saying. "The Sh'daar Seed requires that we withdraw."
"Threat!" cried the Mind Above. "Kill!"
"The prime orders have not yet been fulfilled," replied the Mind Here. "Enemy ground forces remain on the objective world, as do the nonmilitary components. These should be eliminated before we withdraw."
"The ground forces will soon be withdrawn. This is the judgment of the Sh'daar Seed. The prime orders will be fulfilled."
"Threat!" cried the Mind Above. "Kill!"
"But we can yet inflict severe damage on the enemy," the Mind Here insisted. "Our sensors have identified no fewer than twelve major vessels in the alien fleet massing greater than twenty-eight thousand g'ri, including their fighter carrier. Destruction of those vessels would seriously weaken the enemy's ability to mount a counteroffensive against Turusch fleet elements and bases within the sector."
"And the Sh'daar Seed, as ever, circulates plans within plans. When the enemy reaches the Bright One, all of the enemy ships shall be destroyed, and their homeworld left defenseless."
"Threat!" cried the Mind Above. "Kill!"
The Turusch tactician considered the matter further, then agreed, Mind Below and Mind Here slipping into harmony. It had to, since the Sh'daar Seed's suggestions took precedence even over the judgment of a tactician.
Still, it would be extremely difficult for the Turusch fleet to extricate itself without suffering further significant damage. The enemy carrier and several other vessels were concentrating their fire on the Radiant Severing, and other vessels of the fleet were being pounded by enemy fighters.
Emphatic Blossom at Dawn could not directly refuse the Seed's suggestion -- such a choice was literally and physically impossible -- but it did have a great deal of latitude in how it carried out the Seed's suggestions.
America carries a mix of current and outdated fighters. To continue the USN analogy, if the Starhawk is an F-35C, the War Eagle is probably an F/A-18 or F-14.The last of the fighters -- SG-92 Starhawks and the older SG-55 War Eagles -- were away, VFA-36, the Death Rattlers, flying Combat Air Patrol around the America, the rest lancing at high-G into the Turusch battle fleet. Kiloton nuclear pulses flashed in the distance as warheads blossomed with white fury, reduced to twinkling pinpoints by the distance.
Can't shoot through the shields, and now we learn you can't talk through them, either. Fire at a command vessel enough and the ship not only can't return fire, but it's basically the temporary equivalent of a mission-kill: even if you don't do any actual damage, the ship can't do its job.Koenig watched the battle developing. The enemy had more ships than the Confederation battlegroup, and a slight technological lead in such areas as gravitics, shields, and beam weaponry, but they'd been bloodied by the fighter strike earlier and were acting in an uncontrolled, almost sluggish manner.
The large vessel ahead -- an asteroid, it appeared, partially hollowed out, given massive gravitic drives and mounted with weapons -- was probably the enemy command ship. With more and more of the battlegroup's weaponry concentrating on that one giant ship, it was possible that they were having trouble coordinating their fleet.
Gravitic shields blocked radio waves and lasercom beams. Typically, ships coordinated with one another in combat by flickering one section of their shields off and on while transmitting tightly packaged comm bursts precisely timed with the shield openings. Pile on enough firepower to keep the enemy's shields up, and you kept him from communicating with other ships as well.
That is the most bass-ackwards exercise in ass-covering I've ever heard of. Apparently the bean counters don't think taking your carrier into the fight is a good idea, despite the fact they're meant for it, so they tell you to leave it well behind the front lines. And then reality comes in and says, "Great, now you're a sitting duck and you can't direct your fleet, dumbass." So the upper brass are forced to give Koenig an order they know he'll elect to ignore because it is a stupid-ass order, and intentionally write a loophole into it so nobody gets yelled at.Koenig looked around, momentarily expecting Quintanilla to be there watching, criticizing. The operational orders issued by the Senate military directorate while the battlefleet was still gathering off Mars -- several hundred megabytes' worth of detailed instructions -- had been very explicit. Koenig was not to risk the star carrier America. She was one of only six ships of her class, and the Military Directorate wanted to minimize the chances of her being lost or badly damaged. Those orders had directed Koenig, if the situation warranted it, to take the America no closer than fifty AUs to Eta Boötis IV, and to direct the battle from there. At all costs, the America was to avoid direct ship-to-ship combat.
Sheer nonsense, of course, the appraisal of armchair admirals and politicians considering the possible course of an engagement from the comfort and security of their offices and conference rooms thirty-seven light years away. You could not direct a battle from four hundred light minutes away, not when the situation was over six and a half hours old before your orders crawled back to the fleet. Even worse, Koenig would actually have had to split his small fleet to ensure that America had combat support. If the Turusch detected America, caught her traveling aloe, they could launch a long-range fighter strike or send a small detachment of warships to attack the lurking carrier.
Unsupported, the carrier wouldn't have a chance in ten of survival.
And so Koenig had deliberately violated his orders. The phrase "if the tactical situation warranted" was his loophole, his way out. So far as Koenig was concerned, the tactical situation did not warrant either splitting his fleet or trying to run the show from over six light hours away. The phrase was, in fact, a cover-your-ass clause for the politicians; if America and her battlefleet were destroyed or suffered serious damage, the admirals and the Directorate senators could shrug and say, "Well, it wasn't our fault. Koenig disobeyed orders."
The Farragut lost with all hands, the CBG's first major casualty that we've heard about. Three missiles was a kill.Three hundred kilometers ahead, the escort Farragut had changed course, moving across America's path to shield the carrier from oncoming missile volleys. Two Turusch missiles struck the escort's shields, the twin, silent flashes minute but dazzling on the CIC display screens.
But Confederation fire was hammering home among the Turusch ships as well. The Kinkaid continued to slam high-velocity kinetic-kill projectiles into the suspected enemy command-control ship. America was cycling her spinal mount weapon as quickly as possible -- firing about once each fifteen seconds -- targeting the same Turusch asteroid ship. If they could just keep up the pressure, if they could keep the enemy command ship's shields up...
"Farragut reports heavy damage," Hughes reported. "She's falling out of the fight."
Koenig turned in his seat to check one of the monitors relaying visuals from a battlespace drone out ahead of the carrier. Farragut was a missile escort, small and fast with a bundle of twenty-four mamba launch tubes tunneling through the center of her forward shield cap, massing 2200 tons and carrying a crew of 190 men and 15 officers. The ugly litle missile boats were designed to dash in close, loose a swarm of high-yield smart missiles in the merge with the enemy formation, and accelerate clear under high-G boost. On the display, the Farragut was barely making way, her drive fields dead; he could actually see her on the screen, which meant her gravitic shields were down or intermittent only, and a portion of her aft drive structure was a tangled mass of wreckage, glowing white-hot and trailing a stream of half-molten debris like streaming sparks in the night. Another missile struck the craft, the flash lighting up the display, a dazzling, single pulse of light, and as the glare faded, the Farragut reappeared, her drive section gone, the forward stem and shield cap tumbling end-over-end. Radiation scanners aboard the drone were pegging the readouts in CIC off the scale.
There was no sign of escape pods evacuating the hulk. Two hundred five men and women ...
The missile boat's skipper, Maria Hernandez, had been America's Operations officer until she'd been promoted to captain and given command of the Farragut.
She'd also been a friend.
Explanation of Confederation nomenclature for enemy ships."Have all fighters concentrate on target..." He paused to read the code group off the tac display. "Target Charlie-Papa-One." Charlie because it was the probable enemy command ship, Papa for a planetoid converted into a warship, and One because it was the most massive vessel so far spotted within the enemy fleet.
Koenig speculates on whether or not the Trash are a keystone army and taking out the Radiant Severing will send the rest into retreat. Also, they keep a special measurement of how many transmissions are interrupted by the shields.Silent detonations continued to pulse and strobe throughout the Turusch fleet, but more and more were concentrating on the enemy command vessel. So damned little was known about Turusch combat psychology, even after the disasters at Arcturus Station and Everdawn. If the carrier group could decapitate the enemy by taking out that Charlie-Papa ... would that be enough to send the rest of them running?
White light filled heaven outside America's shields, and the combat display broke up momentarily in static. "What's our Trapper?"
"Transmission percentage at sixty-one percent, Admiral."
As the Confederation fleet attempted to interfere with the enemy command vessel's ability to transmit orders to other Turusch vessels, the Turusch were attempting to do the same, blasting away at America's shields to force them to stay up, blocking radio and lasercom signals to the other battlegroup ships. Transmission percentage -- "Trapper" -- was a measure of the clarity of ship-to-ship communications during combat. The harder the enemy hammered at America's shields, the harder it would be to transmit orders to the rest of the battlegroup, or receive tactical updates and requests. Sixty-one percent was actually pretty good. It meant America's shields were open and signals were getting through almost two thirds of the time.
Um. Not entirely sure what the point of using active camouflage is when you have your spotlights turned on.SAR Red-Delta
90 km south of Red-Mike HQ
Eta Boötis IV
0015 hours, TFT
"There! To the left!"
"God be praised! I see him."
The UT-84 battlefield hopper, a stubby, blunt-nosed tri-wing, canted sharply to port and descended. Its outer hull nanoflage shifted to reflect the murky night, the utility craft's gravs howling as they bit through the thick atmosphere. Powerful spotlights stabbed down through the gloom, centering on a lone figure struggling atop a low rock outcropping. The guy appeared to be nearly smothered beneath a shifting, oozing mass of darkness.
So, the sand dollar-things that think Trevor Gray goes good with barbecue sauce are locally called shadow swarmers. Also, a little more setting insight in that the jarheads think the Islamic Mufrids are a bunch of weirdos. More on that later."We call them shadow swarmers. His e-suit should protect him, God willing, if they've not been swarming him for too long.
Lieutenant Charles Ostend gave his passenger a sidelong glance, then shook his head. God willing? Muhammad Baqr was okay as collies went, but he shared the religious passion of all of the other Mufrids. The God-shouting fundy colonists on this miserable rock were utterly beyond his comprehension with their conviction that everything, including their very survival, depended solely on God's will.
O2 is poisonous to Ate a Bootean life. Which makes sense: We've got anaerobic bacteria and so forth here on Earth that gets killed by oxygen. Also, the Marines still use Navy corpsmen."Okay," Ostend said, uncertain. "How do we get to him?"
"We pull him inside," Baqr told him. "The local life forms cannot tolerate high concentrations of oxygen."
"Hey, Doc!" he called over the craft's intercom. "We've got him in sight! But there's a bit of a complication!"
"Doc" was a Navy corpsman, HMC Anthony McMillan, riding on the hopper's cargo deck aft.
Ok, that's just plain ... damn ... weird. Like a Venus' flytrap with legs, or something, except it eats rocks."What are those swarmer things trying doing to him, anyway?" Ostend asked.
"Trying to eat him, of course," Baqr said with a shrug. "Or, rather, trying to eat his e-suit. They must have become sensitized to the carbon in his e-suit."
"They eat carbon?"
Baqr gave him a mild look. "So do you and I. The life on Eta Boötis is carbon-based, as is the life on Earth. And carbon-based life requires sources of carbon for growth and metabolism. Most of the mobile life forms here get the carbon from carbonaceous mineral deposits -- they are lithovores. The sessile forms get it from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- lithoautotrophs."
"So, just like plants and animals on Earth."
"Only by very rough analogy. The mobile forms, the swarmers, are more like Earth's plants, actually, getting what they need from the soil. Very active plants. They can be so here, with the abundance of energy available on this world."
Mohammed Baqr, Ostend knew, was a xenobiologist, one of the senior scientists in the Mufrid colony on Haris, so he must know what he was talking about. It sounded crazy, though -- plants moving and swarming like hungry piranhas.
So Gray was right to run for his life, in other words."Can they get through his suit?"
"Eventually. Swarmers possess grinding plates within their ventral orifices, very hard, like organic diamond. The carbon nanoweave fiber of our e-suits is extremely tough, but eventually the grinding will wear through, yes. We've lost several of our people to the swarms."
So ... colony organism that communicates with other members by ultrasound?"Technically, the individual swarmers all are part of a single organism. It ... disperses itself across hundreds of square kilometers in order to locate widely scattered deposits of accessible minerals. When one ... leaf finds a source of easily ingested carbon, we believe it communicates with the others through low-frequency sound waves transmitted through this dense atmosphere. And they begin to swarm. More and more of them, drawn from farther and farther away."
"So we're dealing with walking, meat-eating trees," Ostend said.
"Ah ... no. The swarmers are not plants, really."
"Then they're animals that act like plants ... except they eat meat and move?"
"They are neither plants nor animals," Baqr said, a touch of exasperation edging his voice, "not in the sense you mean."
How to repressurize an airlock when the outside is a wet Venus instead of hard vacuum."How's the patient?" he called over the comm net.
"Alive, Lieutenant," was McMillan's response. "But that's about all. Cargo deck hatch is closed and sealed."
"Here's some fresh air, then," Ostend said, passing his hand through a virtual control. "Don't try breathing it yet, though." Pure nitrogen began flowing into the pressure-tight cargo deck, forcing out the native atmosphere -- nitrogen because the higher oxygen content of a terrestrial atmosphere might react unpleasantly with the methane and other compounds in the Haris gas mix. He brought the cargo deck pressure up to two and a half atmospheres, then began bleeding off the overpressure and adjusting the gas mix to Earth standard.
Eh, I just liked the turn of phrase there. It reminded me of a line in X-Wing: Rogue Squadron's opening (where Corran, Nawara, and a couple of others are doing a training sim) where Corran Horn plans to do the sim by-the-book, then remarks he's trying to turn the book into a short story.She knew she was rewriting the book on gravfighter tactics. The question was whether she'd be around later to autograph copies.
The Dragonfires are aiming for the Radiant Severing, as ordered. I think I misinterpreted this the first time I read it: I thought the Radiant Severing was the 10 km Alpha-class battleship that America and Kinkaid were shooting at at the end of the last chapter, but apparently not.She was angling toward one Turusch ship in particular, a gigantic target identifiable only by its enormous mass. The thing was almost certainly a PC -- a planetoid converted to a command ship, with a mass registering in the billions of tons and a shield signature five kilometers long. Allyn couldn't see the ship itself. It was still a long way off, almost two thousand kilometers, and its shields were so hard-driven by Confederation fire right now that they were almost constantly up, rendering the flying mountain all but invisible. As she neared it, though, she could see the strobing pulse and flash of Confederation warheads detonating against those shields, a steady, flickering, coruscating volley as incoming beams, nuclear warheads, and KK projectiles were twisted back by the Turusch gravitic shields in raw sprays of radiation.
The Trash hiding behind their shields means they can't use their point-defense weapons, giving the Dragonfires an opening.Gravfighter tactical doctrine focused on combat at mid- to long range. Fighters approaching an enemy warship closer than about fifty kilometers were easy targets for point-defense beam weapons, high-velocity KK autocannon and railguns, even sandcasters. But Allyn thought she saw an opportunity here, an opportunity made possible by the fact that the Turusch command control vessel had its shields full up. There would be no point-defense weapons so long as that was true.
The old target-the-shield generators trick.A Starhawk's weaponry could not penetrate those shields ... but there would be shield projectors along the vessel's surface, a grid of wave guides and projectors that threw up the fields of sharply warped space. There were points, carefully screened and camouflaged, where those wave guides were exposed to space. Each would have multiple backups and overlapping defensive fields, but if the Dragonfires could smash through even one line of wave guides, one section, at least, of the enemy ship's gravitic shields would fail.
Effective guns range for a Starhawk.Fifty kilometers ... forty ... thirty ...
"Enemy vessel is within effective range of particle beams and Gatling weaponry," her AI announced.
"Incoming mail," indeed...Particle beams, invisible in the vacuum of space, sparked and flared against the Turusch ship's primary shields. All five Dragonfires were firing now, their AIs coordinating the attack to hammer at one slender join between two shield-plane segments. Incoming mail -- fire from the Confederation battlegroup -- continued to hammer at the asteroid ship's shields, a glaring cascade of raw energy.
The RFK-90 and pee-beep have enough recoil to provide a noticeable counter-push against the singularity drive at low accelerations. Which makes sense: The GAU-8 Avenger on an A-10 Warthog provides more thrust than one of its engines, and I've already shown that the RFK-90 carries two orders of magnitude greater energy per round than the GAU-8.Ten kilometers. The black target and the flaring impacts together filled space ahead. The mass of both Gatling KK projectiles and the protons in her particle beam carried considerable thrust, and she felt the jolt of deceleration. No problem. She wanted to decelerate to give her weapons the maximum possible hang time above the target. A corrective boost ... and then she switched off the forward-projected singularity to give her weapons a clear field of fire.
Allyn's hitting the wave guides from barely a klick away. Also, more information on the linkup between human pilot and shipboard AI, which we now also know uses quantum computing.She moved her hands through the virtual control field, and the SG-92 braked, then pivoted sharply, its nose swinging to align with the swift-growing mass of the Turusch asteroid command vessel. Moving sideways now, continuing to pivot to keep the enemy ship directly off the fighter's nose and continuing to fire, the Starhawk slid past the Turusch monster's shields scarcely a kilometer away, passing the target with a relative velocity of less than two meters per second.
The close passage was far too fast-moving for merely human reflexes. Allyn's fighter AI controlled the target acquisition, lock, and firing, but she was riding the software through her internal link, providing a measure of human control behind the lightning-swift reflexes of the AI computer. Through that link, she could feel the flow of quantum-based fuzzy logic, the sparkle of equations and angle-of-attack, the bright clarity of computer-enhanced sensory input.
Several things:For a brief instant, the asteroid filled her forward field of view, a vast, dark blur rendered almost invisible by its tightly closed gravitic shielding. Her AI continued, with superhuman speed, to focus on a single, thread-thin line of a target. Gatling projectiles slammed across the enemy's shields to either side ... and then, with startling suddenness, the shield collapsed, revealing a backup shield just beyond. The AI shifted aim slightly and began hammering at a second, reserve wave guide ... and then at a third when the second shield collapsed as well.
How many reserves were there? Something the size of an asteroid could carry a lot of layered wave guides, with only the outer two functioning at any given instant. So little was known about Turusch combat doctrine and the engineering details of their warships. All the Dragonfires could do was continue to hammer at any targets that presented themselves to the fast-shifting perspective of the passing fighters.
The actual close passage lasted perhaps two and a half seconds; it felt like much longer. Subjective time slowed for a pilot linked in with her tactical computer in a way that had nothing to do with the time dilation of relativistic travel, and everything to do with the sheer volume of information flooding through her neural pathways.
Her Starhawk had just passed the Turusch ship, was traveling tail-forward now as its nose continued to pivot on the enemy, when a final wave guide vaporized and a last-rank gravitic shield failed.
"Soft target!" she yelled over the comm link, as she triggered the last two of her Krait missiles. For the briefest of instants, she could see a gray and powdery landscape pocked by immense craters, the towers of communications and sensor arrays, the dull-silver domes of weapons turrets and gun positions.
Blue Five was too close to the enemy shields.
"Blue Five!" she yelled over her comm. "Change vector!"
Then white light engulfed her forward sensory inputs, filling her universe with raw, star-hot fury. The blast wave -- a shell of hot plasma racing out from the surface of the Turusch asteroid ship at tens of kilometers per second -- struck her vessel hard, smashing her to one side and putting her into a helplessly out-of-control tumble.
More blast waves followed, a succession of them as the other Dragonfires hammered at the opening with nuke-tipped missiles, and then as incoming warheads from the fleet found the suddenly revealed weakness.
But Allyn had lost consciousness with the first savage impact.
Not quite. As was demonstrated with the Trash destroyer that took damage from two missile hits with full shields, and the Farragut losing power to shields and engines after taking two direct shield hits (that we saw), there's still some noticeable energy leakage through the shields even when they're up.Sky Captain wrote:So essentially while shields themselwes can't be taken down even with massed fire
Yes.there are tiny "cracks" where the individual shield segments intersect that can be detected and exploited from very close range to reach surface mounted shield generators.
I can think of one explanation. Their formation indeed leaves something to desired, but that might be unavoidable: Alcubierre Drive tends to spread the fleet apart. Before they went back into Alcubierre to reach Haris, they had previously spent over an hour gathering the fleet back together after the previous hop and not everyone was even linked in yet. At this point they've been out of Alcubierre for about 20 minutes and actively fighting for a goodly portion of that time. Factor in that formation standoff range appears to be considerable, and Farragut may indeed have been the only ship within reach.Batman wrote:And why in Valen's name are they using the spacegoing equivalent of a PT boat for missile defense? At least at this point the humans don't seem to be so desperate that they'll sacrifice whatever they have left to save the carrier, and if Farragut was all that was in position to play missile defense, their formation leaves something to be desired.
Yeah, I looked that up. It's about a quarter the mass of an Arleigh Burke-class DDG.Also 2200 tons is nothing much by modern day Navy standards...
That was an interstellar trip involving serious (well for the setting) FTL speeds, with the attached potential fleet dispersal problems. We're talking about an insystem hop at marginally above c-yes, the ships still can't see where they're going, but since they're going a considerably shorter distance at a considerably lower speed they aught to have a far higher likelihood of the ships ending up where the fleet deployment plan intended for them to end up, and that should have been possible to be sorted out far faster.StarSword wrote:I can think of one explanation. Their formation indeed leaves something to desired, but that might be unavoidable: Alcubierre Drive tends to spread the fleet apart. Before they went back into Alcubierre to reach Haris, they had previously spent over an hour gathering the fleet back together after the previous hop and not everyone was even linked in yet. At this point they've been out of Alcubierre for about 20 minutes and actively fighting for a goodly portion of that time. Factor in that formation standoff range appears to be considerable, and Farragut may indeed have been the only ship within reach.Batman wrote:And why in Valen's name are they using the spacegoing equivalent of a PT boat for missile defense? At least at this point the humans don't seem to be so desperate that they'll sacrifice whatever they have left to save the carrier, and if Farragut was all that was in position to play missile defense, their formation leaves something to be desired.
Trash are physiologically sensitive to vibrations.Tactician Blossom felt the rumble of successive nuclear strikes pulsing against the rock shell of the Radiant Severing. Turusch physiology was extremely sensitive to both air- and ground-borne vibrations and the shudders were painful -- the equivalent of blasting a shrill noise into a human's ear.
The Trash equivalent of a CIC is buried at the core of the asteroid and there's too much nickel-iron in the way to blast through it (meaning that the "pulverize a planet" line regarding the armament of the battleship Spirit of Confederation was probably meant as hyperbole). But the Confeds can still disable the Severing and leave her for dead.In point of fact, the Radiant Severing's command centers were buried deep within the mass of nickel-iron that formed the huge vessel's body. The enemy fleet could pound them for g'nyuu'm on end and not reach the ship's deepest recesses.
But the shields would begin to fall one after another now, as each failure uncovered another line of shield wave guides exposed on the planet's surface. Eventually, all surface structures would be reduced to radioactive debris; the Severing would be blind and deaf with its sensor arrays vaporized, helpless with its weapons destroyed, trapped immobile with its drive projectors inoperative.
Koenig guessed right with his decap attack. The Trash command ship is vulnerable and they don't want to risk it, so they're pulling out. But they'll soon be back, and in greater numbers."Kill!" its higher self screamed, but the middle self overrode the instinct-laden surge of raw emotion.
"Swing to a new heading," it ordered the Severing's helm control, adding a string of coordinates. "Accelerate to deepest reach. Pass orders for the rest of the fleet to fall back and cover."
"The enemy may pursue," Blossom's tactical coordinator, its second-in-command, told it. "Our power reserves are low, the damage to our shields severe."
"They will not pursue," Blossom replied, the statement arriving jointly from both its low and middle minds. "The enemy is focused on protecting, perhaps recovering its colony on the planet surface. When we return with reinforcements, we will find the enemy long gone."
Blossom is of the opinion his fleet is still intact enough to retreat in some semblance of order: Despite his being unable to tell them to GTFO, he believes they'll fall in as the Severing retreats.But if the enemy force was still more or less intact, so too was the Turusch battlefleet. The Radiant Severing was not in contact with the other ships. One of the shields had collapsed. The nuclear fury unleashed within the next few seconds against the planetoid's surface had vaporized lasercom projectors and radio antennae. But as the command vessel withdrew, the other Turusch ships would fall back to protect it.
"Accelerating," the tactical coordinator announced.
Blossom's higher self writhed in an agony of angry frustration.
Heckuva way to wake up. Medical robot and some kind of antigrav gurney.His eyes opened and he looked up into a metallic nightmare. A robot had emerged from a cabinet in the wall and was hovering above him, all metal and plastic and huge, cold lenses for eyes. The remaining panic induced by the local fauna transferred itself to something more immediate -- the looming presence of the medical robot. He screamed, tried to lash out against the thing, but his hands were trapped.
"Whoa. Take it easy there, zorchie," a voice said."
Blinking, he tried to focus on his surroundings. He was in a small, metal-walled compartment, floating above some sort of grav bed.
Gray was ten minutes from suit breach when they got to him, and more future slang."Shadow swarmers. The SAR crew said if they'd been ten minutes later, they'd have breached your suit."
Gray allowed himself a long, shuddering breath. Safe ...
"Thank you," he said.
"Hey, don't mention it, zorchie." The man grinned. "You people have been up there saving our sorry asses. It's the least we could do in return!"
The fact that the man had called him zorchie -- Marine slang for a gravfighter pilot -- suggested that he was an officer. An enlisted Marine, Gray thought, would never have called a naval officer zorchie to his face.
Holograms good enough to pass for the real thing."We know," the man said, as Gray tried to sit up again and, this time, succeeded. "We downloaded your ID when you came in. I'm General Gorman. Welcome aboard."
And the man was gone. He didn't leave; his image flickered and winked out, and Gray realized that the base CO had just paid him a visit via holo projection.
"Does your general always holo-down to chitchat with Navy pilots in sick bay?" Gray asked, looking around.
The man at the console turned and grinned at him. "Not usually, sir. But we've all been praying so damned hard to the God of Battles to send us some help, maybe the old man just wanted to come down in person -- or in holo, anyway -- to see if you were for real."
Orlando's underwater and there's an arcology there now. Gray dislikes and doesn't really get modern tech and got nicknamed "Primitive" because of it. And he used to be married.Gray touched palms with Richards, and the circuitry imbedded in the other man's hand lit up Gray's in-head display. According to the data cascade, HM1 Richards was a Navy hospital corpsman assigned to the FMF, 1[sup]st[/sup] Marine Expeditionary Force, as part of the attached medical unit. Interesting. He'd been born and raised in the Orlando Arcology, which meant he was from the Periphery back home. As always, Gray waited for the reaction -- the faint frown, the loss of interest -- as the other person saw his personal data.
For once, there was no visible negative reaction. "So you're from the Periph!" Richards said, brightening. "Manhattan?"
"What's left of it. You're from Orlando, I see."
"Yup. High above millions of hectares of prime seabottom real estate. Your handle, 'Prim.' What's that?"
Gray made a face. "Short for Primitive."
"Don't like machines, huh?"
Gray glanced back at the sealed cabinet. "No."
"You'll get used to it. That was just Medro."
"Medro?"
"Medical robot. He doesn't talk much, but he's great at taking vitals."
"So long as he doesn't indulge in taking vital organs."
Richards laughed, then got a faraway look in his eyes for a moment. "You're married? We can let your partner know you're okay."
"No," Gray said. The memory burned, and he turned his head away. "Old, old data."
"You need to update your ID, then."
"Yeah. I suppose."
If he could ever figure out how. He'd received the neural-net implants in his brain while he'd been in officer-recruit training, at the same time they'd grown the circuitry in the palms of his hands. Tam had been alive then, still, when he'd filled out the data that would be stored in his personal RAM, to be exchanged with others with the touching of the circuitry in the palms of their hands. He'd never figured out, though, how to change stored data -- something the other men and women on board the America seemed to have known from childhood.
And he was too proud -- and angry -- to ask.
Manhattan is in ruins, and Gray has a very low opinion of his fellow Navy officers. The Marines are a lot less formal."Yeah, yeah, whatever." Ostend waved aside the distinction. He slapped Gray on the shoulder. "The important thing, zorchie, is that you're okay. Right?"
"Yeah..."
Gray wasn't sure he liked the man's casual familiarity. Within the curious discrepancy among ranks that had evolved out of the long history of Earth's various military services, a Navy lieutenant outranked a Marine lieutenant. Gray was actually the equivalent of a Marine captain, one grade above a Marine lieutenant. Richards should have been calling him sir.
On the other hand, Gray had never cared much for the stuffy, pseudo-aristocratic demeanor of the fraternity of naval officers -- one of the oldest of the old-boy networks. It was that fraternity -- and sorority -- that had closed ranks against the poor kid from the Manhattan Ruins and made his life hell for the past three years. Officers and gentlemen was the phrase they used, but it included conceited clots like Lieutenant Howie Spaas and arrogant hypocrites like Lieutenant Jen Collins. So far as Gray was concerned, they could all go to hell, with their "sirs" and "ma'ams" and formal military etiquette and protocol.
Ostend's informality, Gray decided, made him uncomfortable because it was so out of place, so unexpected. It certainly was better than the usual formality.
As unexpected as General Gorman's holographic visit a few moments before.
Because he got shot down and nearly eaten, the jarheads' doc wants to make sure Gray's mentally okay to fly again. Interesting that they trust an AI to do a psychological analysis. Most likely speaks to the strength of AI they have in the setting."So ... can I go yet?" Gray asked the corpsman. "I kind of want to find out what's happening with my unit, you know?"
"Mmm .. not just yet, sir. We have you scheduled for a psych set."
"Psych." His eyes narrowed. "I'm not crazy, damn it."
"No, but you've been through a severe emotional trauma. Dr. Wilkinson wants to put you through a stress series ... and he wants to link you in with Old Liss."
"Old Liss? What the hell is an 'Old Liss'?"
"Psy-Cee BA. Psychiatric computer, for battlefield applications. We call her Liss for Lisa, the first of her kind."
"A computer? I don't want ..."
"I'm afraid what you want, Lieutenant, isn't a very high priority right now. Don't worry, though. It won't hurt a bit."
But Gray had had run-ins with psych computers before.
And he was not at all eager to do it again.
The Trash ran for the hills but the fleet's keeping their collective eyes peeled for a sudden reversal or somebody lying doggo in the wreckage.Although the news hadn't yet reached all of the Marines and naval personnel on the surface of the planet, the Battle of Eta Boötis IV was, in fact, over.
Or, to be precise, the active part of the battle was over. The Turusch fleet, what was left of it, was under high acceleration, already close to light speed and still grav-boosting into the void. The Confederation carrier group had entered planetary orbit, with fighter patrols orbiting in shells farther and farther out, ready in case the enemy tried to pull a reverse and launch a surprise counterstrike. There was also the possibility that not all of the Turusch warships had in fact left. A lurker or two might remain, powered down and apparently dead, waiting for an opportunity to draw easy blood.
Description of a SAR tug. They're small enough for a singularity drive but have almost double the mass of the late Farragut. Or maybe that's how much mass they can haul. They can make 2000 Gs delta-v.SAR Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra boosted at a modest two thousand gravities, her forward singularity capturing the light of the system's white dwarf just ahead and twisting it into billowing sheets and streamers of radiance. The ship was a four-thousand-ton converted tug, an ugly beetle shape with outsized grapplers trailing astern, like the legs and antennae of some highly improbable insect.
Basic physics: fighter drives die, it goes ballistic on whatever course it had when the drives died. The SAR tug is basically a repurposed flying construction crane.In space, though, the problem became a lot more complex. Countless things could go wrong with a gravfighter, through equipment failure or through enemy action, but the usual outcome saw the fighter with power off and drive singularities down, tumbling helplessly through space with the same vector it had been on when its systems shut down. If the pilot survived whatever had caused the situation failure in the first place, he or she was in for a long and uncomfortable ride ... and an ultimately fatal one if somebody couldn't come get them.
SAR Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra was an old in-orbit work-boat, originally a UTW-90 Brandt-class space-dock tug used for maneuvering large pieces of hull into position. Converted with the addition of singularity projectors fore and aft, it now had the acceleration necessary for locating a tumbling fighter, grappling with it, and bringing it back to the carrier or a repair/service vessel or facility. At the helm was Lieutenant Commander Jessica LeMay.
Okay, based on the 22 ton number we got for the Starhawk's mass back in chapter one and the "nearly five to one" number here, I'm filing four thousand tons as the maximum tow mass. So, in other words, it could pull the Farragut but is outmassed by it.The white dwarf orbited Eta Boötis A at a distance of 1.4 astronomical units, with a period of about one and a third years. Eta Boötis IV was more than twice that distance out; the dwarf companion never came closer to Haris than one and a half AU. Apparently that wasn't close enough to seriously disturb its orbit.
But LeMay had spotted a disabled gravfighter tumbling clear of battlespace at high velocity, moving along a vector that would take it quite close to Eta Boötis B, close enough that the dwarf's gravitational pull would snag it within the next hour and pull it down. Radiation from the dwarf, however, was interfering with her optics, making the approach difficult.
At radar wavelengths, she still had a sharp return. Focusing on radar, she locked onto the target and followed. Slowly, LeMay's tug closed with the disabled fighter, using the utility vehicle's powerful singularity to match velocity, then flipping end-for-end to bring its array of mechanical grapplers around to face the target. Using small thrusters, the ungainly vessel nudged closer, arms unfolding, then closing over the Starhawk.
The fighter's tumble slammed it against a grapple, threatening to put LeMay into a spin as well, but she jockeyed the maneuvering thrusters with an expert touch, countering the rotational energy and slowing the other vessel's roll. Another touch on the thrusters, and pitch and yaw were corrected as well; the tug outmassed the fighter nearly five to one, and so could absorb some of the kinetic energy of the tumble without falling out of control.
10k G's seems to be near the upper limit of the SAR boat's accel, at least when trying to haul a Starhawk.With the prow of her vessel now aimed away from the dwarf and back toward distant Eta Boötis IV, she switched on the singularity projector, holding her breath as she did so because on a one-way work-boat like this one, there were no backups. The drive kicked in, however, and with a shuddering groan heard by conduction through the hull as the Starhawk's mass stressed the grappling arms, she began decelerating at ten thousand gravities.
I skipped over the part that explained this but "PriFly" is shorthand for America's Primary Flight Control. Starhawks are equipped to act like on-demand paramedics, but it requires the electricity to still work. America can operate the fighter's med systems remotely. And Allyn got knocked clear of the battlespace and out cold by riding those nukes earlier.It would take fifteen minutes at this acceleration to make it back to the fleet.
Meanwhile, she engaged another grapple, an arm that unfolded, then extended a meter-long sliver, like a bright needle.
The needle was sheathed in programmed nanoceramic identical to the active nano that made up the Starhawk's outer hull. As the needle touched the hull, it merged, passing smoothly through the gravfighter's outer shell with seamless precision and without releasing internal atmosphere to the vacuum of space. Guided by the tug's AI, which had an expert knowledge of a Starhawk's internal layout, the probe slipped in deeper until it emerged within the pilot's cockpit. Threads laced out, searching ... connecting ... joining. Several merged with the pilot's e-suit, linking in with the medical and lfie support monitoring functions. Energy flowed through power connectors, as banks of lights switched on.
"Okay, PriFly," LeMay said. "Pilot is alive but unconscious. Life support was down but has been reinstated. I'm transmitting telemetry from the Starhawk to sick bay now."
"Blue-Sierra," a new voice said in LeMay's head, "this is America sick bay comm center. We have your telemetry. We're taking over teleoperational control of the patient."
"Copy, sick bay."
Each gravfighter possessed an onboard suite of medical support systems and robotics, but when the Starhawk's power had been knocked out, the med systems had gone down as well. At this moment, on board the crippled fighter, medical robots would be probing the pilot, checking for injury, begin to take steps to stabilize his or her condition.
Idly, LeMay checked the pilot's id, coming through now on her own display. Well, well. Commander Marissa Allyn -- CO of the Dragonfires. And it looked like she was going to be okay.
Koenig is specifically an O-8, rear admiral upper half. The CBG is down to about half-strength after the fight, discounting the troopships. And, as one might expect, the population of Ate a Boot is far too large to evacuate everyone, even if they weren't at multiple points all over the planet.The Marine general faded into solidity on the CIC deck, a few meters in front of Koenig's couch. Koenig rose to greet him. The gesture was unnecessary. A Marine major general was exactly equivalent to a Navy rear admiral, and neither had precedence of rank. But formal protocol required a polite reception of even a holographic transmission, and, besides that, Koenig wanted to acknowledge the heroism of the Marines' stand here over the past weeks.
"Admiral Koenig?" the image said. "I'm Eunan Gorman."
"Welcome aboard, General," Koenig replied.
"And welcome to Ate a Boot. I've been briefed. Sounds like you went through a meat grinder up there.
"Four ships destroyed, General, seven seriously damaged. But the battlegroup is intact and ready for action if the Tush come back. We can begin the evacuation at once."
"How many transports do you have? What capacity?"
"Eight troopships, General. Converted Conestoga-class. Enough for your Marines, General. Not for the colony."
"We have just under five thousand Marines here, Admiral. We're willing to double up to get the civilians out."
Koenig sighed. He'd been dreading this. "How many civilians?"
"Approximately fifteen thousand here inside this perimeter, General. Another twenty, maybe twenty-two thousand at three other settlements on the planet."
"I'm afraid they'll have to take their chances, General. We have enough room for your people ... maybe a few thousand locals if we really pack them in. But not all of them."
Passenger capacity of the fleet if they hot bunk as much as possible."Hang on ... okay. The Conestogas are rated at eight hundred men each. That gives us a surplus of fourteen hundred, more or less. If we ditch all your heavy equipment --"
"That was already a given, Admiral."
"If we ditch the heavy equipment and your Marines don't mind being real friendly, we can pack in another four or five thousand people. We can also double up on the other ships as well ... pack civilians into crew's quarters, mattresses in passageways, on the mess decks, inside pressurized cargo bays ... call it another thousand ... maybe two."
Trash have no problem killing civvies indiscriminately."You know what will happen if the Turusch return, once we're gone."
"No, General, I don't. And I doubt that anyone else in the Confederation knows either. The Turusch and their Sh'daar overlords are very much unknown quantities."
"They killed the researchers at Arcturus. So far as we know, they murdered every last one."
"Again, General, we don't know, not for sure."
But Gorman was almost certainly right. The last transmission from Arcturus last year had been ... chaos. Heavily armored Turusch soldiery breaking into the domes, burning down the civilian technicians and scientists...
Thinking ahead to the typical response of people knowing not everyone's getting out alive: panic, shoving matches, riots, the usual."The first shuttles will be down in thirty minutes, General. Uh ... how about security?"
There was a good chance that there would be panic, once the Marines started leaving and the civilians saw that they were being left behind.
"We'll take care of that," Gorman snapped. "Gorman out."
