chapter i

48238.751

Groshnik System

“Control, this is Defiant One. My squad is ready for deployment, over.”

Control, the callsign for Starfighter Operations Control (Fifth Fleet), responded quickly. “Defiant One, this is Control. You are cleared for immediate departure. Be advised, you’re a little late to the party, and the guests started dancing without you.”

“Gorb,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“Hey,” Control said, “there’s no need for profanity!”

I snickered. “Whatever you say, Control. See you on the other side.”

The voice laughed, and said, “Safe skies.”

I switched my comm board to the squadron frequency. “Defiant Squad, this is One. Five seconds to deployment.” I heard several clicks, my squadron announcing readiness, and the cockpit window in front of me displayed a five, and then a four. I reached up and gripped the handle hanging down in front of me when a three appeared. Takeoffs were always jarring. Two…one…

There was a high-pitched electronic squeal and then a loud banging noise, and my starfighter was ejected from the carrier. I reached down and gripped my control wheel, kicked in the throttle, and moved away from the exit door on the carrier.

I watched the rest of my squadron be fired from the carrier, looking at the sensor picture from Palamecia. The drill today was a little different than normal, since we were the attackers today, and not the defenders. On our side were two carriers, Palamecia and Valiant, plus four destroyers, six cruisers, fourteen frigates, and their complements of fighters. The opposing force appeared to be the fleet of Ionian Ascendancy vessels that Intelligence had been looking for over the last week. It was composed of one carrier, five destroyers, a cruiser, and six frigates, plus their fighters. In total, they had seven capital ships to our twenty-six, and seven hundred fighters to our nine hundred forty-eight.

The battle had been underway for no more than twenty minutes before we’d been given clearance to exit Palamecia. Our jobs today were different than normal, and our usual mandate of defense overridden by a special mission.

“Defiant One, this is Control. Your target is loitering toward the back of the formation. We’re going to try and clear a path for you, but there will most likely be resistance.”

I rolled my eyes. “Copy, Control. Just give me a vector.”

A few minutes later, we were engaging DFIA fighters. As a squadron approached, I deployed my teams. “Five, take your team left and engage from the flank. Nine, take your team down relative and engage from below. I’ll go up and away and try to get them off-balance.”

“Five complying, One.” The four fighter formation to my left broke away and started their maneuver.

“Nine copies, One.” The four fighter formation to my right broke down and away, trying to get enough distance to make the difference.

I switched my comm board over to Flight, and spoke. “Okay, Two, stay tight on me. Three, take Four and swing off to the right a little. I don’t want you in the line of fire unless necessary.”

“Copy, One.”

I threw all discretionary power into thrust and tried to put some distance between my fighter and the rest of the squadron. A moment later, the sensor readout showed the enemy fighters were all moving in the general direction of my flight, which was the standard response, about 110 degrees off my starboard stern. As they started to approach weapons range, I turned my head toward them until my targeting reticle highlighted the first fighter in the formation, and said, “Lock.” The reticle went from solid yellow to blinking yellow, and I looked forward again. On the bottom right of my visor was an arrow pointing to the right that read 113.7, and an arrow on the bottom left of my visor that said 246.3. I decided that a hard swerve to the left was better than a shorter turn to the right. Then the arrows started blinking, indicating the enemy fighters were within weapons range.

I hit my mic and said, “Defiants, engage!” I turned hard, looping around 248.9 degrees to a heading of 119.6 by 241.8. After I held course for a moment, my targeting reticle went from blinking yellow to solid red, and I opened fire.

Less than a second later, the laser fire struck the enemy fighter just port of his main fuel tank, which exploded immediately after impact. I juked my fighter up, relative to my second target, and the reticle followed my eyes to the second fighter. “Lock,” I repeated, and the reticle went from yellow to red, blinking on and off. I fired anyway, and missed with seven salvos. This fighter was jinking and juking, dodging every shot.

“Two, break off and flank him.”

“Copy, One,” Two said as he moved away. I continued firing on him as I entered his weapon threshold, and missed every time. I switched to missiles, knowing that I could only afford to lose two or less, and waited for the computer to get a lock, but before that could happen, he was firing on me with his lasers.

Then I got a solid green circle, and fired. To my surprise, the fighter banked to the left, his wingman right on his tail, passing my line of fire again, and tried to evade. I turned to my right and followed his path.

The enemy and his wingman then did something I’d only heard about. They set themselves in a formation so close, the sensor screen in front of me only read one vehicle. This tactic had been used a few times in the last year to confuse the sensor package in the missiles we used. You get close enough to merge, then bank hard in opposite directions. For some reason, that confused the missile so badly it would explode, convinced it had missed.

I reached down and hit a button on my weapon console, and the missile exploded. As I looked back up, I saw one of the fighters break hard to the left, and the other make an about-face and bring his weapons to bear on me.

I immediately threw my control wheel to right, putting my fighter in a continuous starboard barrel roll. This made my profile almost impossible for the enemy’s targeting computer to lock on to. As he began firing, I dove underneath my opponent’s field of fire. I then switched to lasers, placed my targeting reticle on his cockpit, said, “Lock,” and opened up.

Despite the constant spin on multiple axes, my targeting system had no problem with locking onto the enemy fighter. The targeting system was designed with this exact situation in mind. Small cameras in my visor kept track of where my eyes were pointing relative to space around me. When I said “lock,” the targeting computer knew to lock onto the object currently being targeted regardless of where my eyes went until the lock order was rescinded, or the object was destroyed. The laser cannons on either side of the cockpit could move independently within a 45° arc, except where that path crosses with the cockpit. This allowed me to continue my spin and still fire with a high degree of accuracy.

The explosion was magnificent, but was not without a small cost. My shields were decreased by one third after being pelted with fragments. Had I been in nearly any other fighter, would have been a huge problem. Fortunately, when this class of fighter was beginning its first production run, the scientists and engineers working for the United Republic Space Force had just created an extra-fast shield recharging device that allowed for shields to be replenished faster than ever before, and was standard equipment on the 22-class starfighter. Only a few hundred kilometers separated my starfighter and the one recently destroyed when my shield was back at full strength.

Of course, there was also the mental fatigue that came along with killing another living being. The death throes of the Ionian I killed were still reverberating throughout my stomach. I pushed the thought aside, and checked my tactical computer. There was a large furball developing that involved the other two flights of my squadron.

            I looked around for threats nearby, and saw Two fire on and destroy the last fighter. Finding nothing else, I held down the TRANSMIT button on my yoke, and said, “Defiant One to Flight, let’s go back up our team. One eighty-two by thirty-seven.” Without waiting for acknowledgment, I turned my starfighter around.

As I completed my turn, I caught sight of the small plaque mounted on the side of the cockpit. It had been welded in place by the design team responsible for creating this particular fighter, of which I had been a part. My last assignment before being given my current squadron had been to lead the design team designing the next generation starfighter, and this was the prototype we created. Her wings were shaped like the letter V, with a transparent ball of larinarum alloy as the cockpit. The ball could be used as an extravehicular capsule if the pilot was forced to eject, or, if the ball was punctured or shattered, could be exited from the back. She sported 4 laser turrets, 2 torpedo launchers, and a shield unlike anything else in the fleet. She was also made of an advanced alloy that was light, strong, and sensor-absorbing. Its engine output was surrounded by a heat and energy shroud, which concealed its emissions from all passive and most active sensors. My squadron was the only one so far that had been outfitted with this experimental craft, but after their recent performances, that was going to change.

            My son, Loran, was being tailed by two Ionian Dread-class fighters. These fighters were something to be both feared and pitied. They had decent shields, decent armaments, better-than-decent speed and maneuverability, and less-than-decent armor. That was the feared part. However, despite being piloted by some of the best pilots the Ionians could train and field, a pilot in the ninetieth percentile of pilots flying for the Destruction Fleet of the Ionian Ascendancy was about as good as a pilot in the fiftieth percentile of the United Republic Space Force. Whether trained by sub-par trainers, or just a general lack of skill, the fact was they were inferior. And to top it all off, none of their fighters had ejection devices. They were disposable fighters, which generally made the pilots feel like disposable personnel. There is no telling how much effect that has on a being’s piloting abilities.

            What they lacked in abilities they made up for in bulk. United Republic Intelligence estimates consistently conclude that the Ionians have a starfighter corps that numbers in millions. United Republic Space Force pilots number in the low hundreds of thousands.

URSF pilots call the Dread-class fighters “bugs” because of their insectoid appearance. They had a cockpit shaped like a soft-angled 3-D triangle, with a body that extended out of the back, and two sets of wings that came out of the sides and the top at an angle. They were similar in appearance to a dragonfly from my home planet.

Loran’s fighter was juking, spinning, and doing everything it could to baffle the targeting systems of the bugs following him. I ordered the secondary element of my flight to break off and help the other two members of my son’s Flight. Coming in at an angle, I lined up the forward fighter of the pair and said, “Lock.” The yellow circle on my cockpit screen turned red, and I began to fire. The fighter in the rear of the pair took notice and began evasive maneuvers. The other one, however, was not as perceptive. I blasted him out of the sky, so fast the other didn’t quite have time to get clear of the debris field. He slammed into the remnants of his partner, and the secondary explosion overwhelmed his shields, tearing him to pieces.

“One, this is Five. Excellent work, Commander!”

I rolled my eyes. Colonel Lassister, designated Defiant Five, was my second-in-command. Not my first choice, he took turns being a conniving prick and a sycophant. I switched my comm board from Flight to Squad. “Save the chatter for debrief, Five. Defiant Squad, come around to twelve by thirty-one. Our target is the destroyer, tagged as the Tyrant’s Perch. On hearing the command ‘Execute Tyrant’s Bane,’ One Flight will mark primary target as shield generator on the aft tower. Two Flight, mark primary target as power station on the ventral spine. Three Flight, give them something to shoot at. And remember, we have been tasked with capturing this ship, not destroying it. Acknowledge.”

            “Five confirms power station ventral spine, Leader.” Colonel Lassister, in charge of Two Flight, sounded a little too eager. Most likely because of the visions of promotion dancing before his eyes.

            “Nine confirms dodging practice, Leader.” My son, Loran, in command of Three Flight, sounded just as eager, but I knew it was for an entirely different reason.

            I flicked my comm switch from Squad to Fleet. “Control, this is Defiant Leader. Request permission to begin Operation ‘Tyrant’s Bane.’”

            Starfighter Operations Control, or simply Control, is run by my good friend Vice Admiral Conan Conation. I fully expected to hear his voice, but instead I heard, “Defiant Lead, this is Grand Admiral Eradicator. You are cleared for the spec op. Stout hearts. Control out.”

            I had to clear my throat. In all of my time serving under Grand Admiral Eradicator, I had never heard that voice coming from Starfighter Operations. The Admiral’s place had always been fighting the ship from the bridge, or leading the fleet from the Combat Operations Center aboard Palamecia. Either my spec op was more important than I thought, or the Grand Admiral anticipated major problems. “Uh, thank you, Admiral. Acknowledged.” Now a little shaken, I switched back to the squadron frequency, clearing my throat again as I did.  “Defiants, this is Lead. Execute Tyrant’s Bane.” I flipped my comm switch from Squad to Flight. “Flight, break by pairs. Two, on me.”

            Captain Domini Matrizz, Defiant Three, came over the comm. “Copy. Four, on me.”

            His wingmate, Lieutenant Janeel Dreamer, responded with a comm click, as did my wingmate, Lieutenant Colonel Rain Liberator.

            The Ionian Destroyer Tyrant’s Perch was, like most other destroyers belonging to the Ionians, a Slavetaker-class Fleet Destroyer. This particular class of destroyer, and this particular destroyer, was one of the better designed and built of the ships in the DFIA. It had 150 laser cannons, 45 ion cannons, 20 torpedo tubes, carried four squadrons of fighters, and two squadrons of bombers. It was shaped much like a bullet that had been smashed on one side, cylindrical with a flattened bottom, a rounded front, and a tower in the back. Its hangar was located in the dorsal bow section, and its reactor was in the ventral aft area, right along the ventral spine. Its dorsal shield projectors were located on the tower, at the very top of the square-cross structure.

            The only problem was the tower sported twenty of the laser cannons, eight of the ion cannons, and four of the tubes.

            On the plus side, the gunners aboard most DIFA ships were about as good at their jobs as the pilots. As Three Flight cut across the front of the destroyer, the gunners did their best to blow the fighters attacking their ship out of the sky. There were two tactics for this situation that seriously compromised the sensor functionality of the gunners. The first was to beef up the Identify Friend/Foe transponder and turn on sensor decoys. The result was the four fighters of Three Flight appearing on the sensor scopes of the Tyrant’s Perch as an entire squadron of 22’s, and there was no real way to tell which of the 12 signatures were real and which were fake. The second was the stealth functions activated by the rest of the fighters in my squad. We were all but invisible to the Perch’s sensors. Even Palamecia’s sensor teams had a hard time seeing us with our stealth functions fully enabled, and they were considerably better-trained and better-equipped.

            The reason that my fighters were still considered “experimental” was because they were slightly more expensive than was the norm, and the money-pinching bureaucrats in charge of procurement for Starfighter Operations thought that my fighter was too expensive for mass production. Of course, having the ear of a Grand Admiral in charge of an entire sector can help your cause, and mass production was scheduled to begin within a couple of weeks, with the first stage of mass deployment scheduled for six months later.

            Three Flight began taking serious enough fire to be dangerous just as my flight entered our weapons threshold. My targeting computer began searching for the correct location of the dorsal shield projectors, and a moment later, my targeting computer began beeping repeatedly, faster and faster, until it was a pure tone.

            “Lead has tone, transmitting solution. Fire one.” I keyed for my targeting solution to be transmitted directly to the computers of my flight, and fired a missile. Two, Three, and Four fired one missile each. I waited for three seconds, and fired another. My first missile struck slightly ahead of the remaining three, weakening the shields slightly. The remaining three struck almost simultaneously, overloading the ten-by-ten-by-ten-meter shield that surrounded the shield projector. The only horrible design flaw of this class of destroyers was the separate shield for the shield projectors. My last missile struck true, destroying the shield projector completely.

            “Five, the shields are down. You are clear to run at the power core. Nine, begin your run on the power core as well. One Flight, on me. Our turn to be decoys. Remember to keep your distance from me.” I turned around, hit my burners, and jacked the power to my IFF.

            Suddenly, we were being fired at by all 215 weapons emplacements. Not what most would call fun, but I found it stimulating, to say the least. I had to keep dodging laser blasts and missiles, while at the same time keeping track of my squadron, and waiting for the inevitable twinge of danger…

I had a few seconds warning. I felt a sudden stirring in my chest, a sense of danger so specific I could tell exactly what would happen.

United Republic Intelligence had several penetration agents inside the DFIA Command, and elsewhere. Four of these agents had recently sent back intelligence on the Tyrant’s Perch, information from which this operation had been formulated. She had recently undergone her routine refitting, and had been outfitted with the prototype of a new weapons system. This weapons system was designed to seek out specific DNA strands belonging to specific people and destroy them. This would give them the ability to assassinate anyone that had the sad misfortune of both losing DNA to the wrong people, and angering the wrong people. From our spies we learned two very important things. We learned that their initial test was to be attempted on me. Second, we learned that the Ionians had put just about all of their eggs in one basket: their only prototype, a complete set of blueprints, and most of the officers involved in this project were onboard the Perch. A couple of agents had given their lives for this information, and I would not dishonor their sacrifice.

I swung my fighter to port and hit the burners, shutting off all nonessential systems. As I did, my comm board lit up with warnings. The only one I heard was from Admiral Conation in Control, as my comm board was hard-wired to switch to the Fleet frequency when a transmission originates from Starfighter Control.

“Defiant Lead, evade. Several tiny projectiles have been fired by the Perch, and are traveling at approximately 50,000 kilometers per second. Will keep you updated.”

I didn’t bother responding to this, as I was trying to coax as much speed out of my fighter as I could. The projectiles were moving about 30% faster than I had ever had this fighter go. Builder’s trials put my top speed at 32,500 km/s. My current speed, with everything turned off except for sensors, engines, inertial dampeners, communications, and weapons, was at roughly 35,500 km/s. This was exceptionally dangerous, as I had been told that anything over 34,000 was, in theory, enough to tear the main ball from the rest of my starfighter.

Control came on again, this time in the voice of Eradicator. “Defiant Flight One, break off from Defiant Leader, and escort Major Trabaney’s boarding ships. Flights Two and Three, fly cover for the boarding ships now approaching the Perch.”

I could feel the anger radiating off of my entire squadron, but I knew that Eradicator would not pull all protection off of me without having some kind of tactic.

With Eradicator taking away my squadmates, I now only had one option. I closed my eyes, stretching out with my mind. I found the projectiles, all eighteen of them. It was taking all my concentration just to find them, and now I was going to have to find the fuse and squeeze.

I felt Two stretch out and give me his strength. With his added awareness and perspective, I found the fuse for the first projectile and experimented with setting it off, and was happy to find it only took a simple squeeze. The first one disintegrated in a very anticlimactic way.

The second and third were a little easier, but I was running out of time. I had approximately thirty seconds at my current speed before impact, and it had taken me fifteen seconds to kill the first three projectiles.

Then my miracle came. “Defiant Lead, this is Control. Turn to course one-eight-seven by seven. We will position ourselves directly between your fighter and the projectiles.”

As I turned, I was shocked to find the Palamecia directly in front of me. When I last saw her position, she was over two hundred million kilometers sunward of our position. She would have had to perform a microjump to get to her current position, a dangerous thing to do within the confines of a star system with the variable gravity and semi-charted stellar bodies of the Groshnik system, and with all of her fighters and support craft spread out around the system.

“Copy, Control. Many thanks.”

We would have to time this just right, and hope that the projectiles did not have good onboard evasion and countermeasure capabilities. Palamecia had put me on an intercept course that would take me just past her, and give her only a few seconds to position herself between my fighter and the projectiles. This was a gutsy call, one that only Grand Admiral Eradicator would be comfortable making.

As I passed the bow of Big Pal, her laser and ion batteries started tracking and firing on the projectiles. With nothing to do but watch, I redoubled my efforts to track the projectiles with my mind. I felt several of them wink out of existence, but they began to evade Palamecia’s barrage and the ship herself. I joined in the effort, setting off the fuses of the ones I felt were the hardest to hit. Then I no longer felt the projectiles with my mind.

“Defiant Leader, this is Eradicator. The projectiles have been neutralized. You will cease evasive measures and return to your squadron. Good job, Commander.”

I heaved a sigh of relief. “Copy, Admiral, and many thanks. Defiant Leader out.” I came about, juiced my engines, and shot toward the Perch.

***

Thirty minutes later, the Tyrant’s Perch was under the control of Major Trabaney’s commandos. We had to fight off some persistent attacks on the Perch by the remaining Ionian ships in the system, but we got her out safe.

Shortly thereafter, the Ionians began withdrawing. We followed them, harassing them while the fighters were loaded and even disabling another destroyer, until they jumped to FTL and out of our reach.

“All forces, this is Eradicator. Stand down from combat. Good job, everyone. Eradicator out.”

Moments later, new orders scrolled down my main screen. They wanted my squadron to escort Palamecia until all ships had docked.

“Control, Defiant Leader. Confirm stand down and escort duty, over.”

“Defiant Lead, this is Control. Confirmed. They are headed on what appears to be an outbound vector towards Maray. Standard docking assignments after loading, over.”

            “Thank you, Control. Defiant Lead out.” Then I switched over to the squadron frequency. “Squad, we have been ordered to do the usual. Maintain radio silence until docking. Tremendous job today, squad. We may have saved a lot of lives, including my own.”

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Next Chapter: Chapter 2