Solfleet: The Call of Duty (11 page)

The thrill
of high-G launch came exactly two seconds later, giving the LSO just enough
time to duck under the wings to avoid being decapitated. Three seconds after
that, O’Donnell found himself in open space once more, which as far as he was
concerned was exactly where he belonged...and was where the rest of his
squadron had already maneuvered into assault formation and was arching wide
left to come around and approach the enemy from their left forequarter. Their
sister squadron, O’Donnell knew, would come in from the right at virtually the
same time and go low, while his own squadron would go high.

He and his
wingman broke hard left almost as one and moved into their positions quickly—for
a pair of fighter jockeys who hadn’t flown together for very long, they’d sure
learned to anticipate each other well—as did the other pair who’d launched with
them.

“
All
right, boys and girls, heat ‘em up,
” the squadron commander ordered. “
Weapons
free. You know the drill. Stay with your wingman. Concentrate fire on weapons
and drive systems as much as possible. And remember, they recently altered
their tactics, so you can expect to see enemy fighters in the air at any time.
And whatever you do, stay out of the
Victory
’s firing solution and watch
out for the one-eighteenth! Major Landau and I don’t want any more losses in
either squadron. Least of all, stupid ones.
”

O’Donnell
opened the feed ports to his plane’s twin 32mm pulse cannons and energized the
ammunition, then powered up the missile launch systems and set countermeasures
to deploy automatically if the enemy got a lock and fired on him.

“
Incoming
ordnance twelve o’clock level!
” another pilot warned.

O’Donnell
looked up from his instruments just in time to see a missile heading straight
toward him from dead ahead. He cut the throttle and threw the stick forward and
hard left as the surge of adrenaline flooded through his system, breaking low
left and rolling right under his wingman, then quickly throttled up to full and
rocketed away like one of his own missiles.

“
Jesus
Christ, Spinner!
” his wingman shouted. “
Warn me next time! You damn near
cut me in half!
”

Spinner. O’Donnell
still didn’t care much for his call sign. All through flight school he’d hoped
to be tagged with something flashy like ‘Firehawk’ or ‘Viper’. Something that
sounded strong and dangerous. Something to be feared. But by the time he began starfighter
training he’d already logged over two hundred hours in atmospheric fighters,
and he’d developed a tendency to roll out every time he had to pull a hard
maneuver. His wingman in training had tagged him with ‘Spinner’ after seeing
him do it just twice, and the name had stuck.

“Sorry,
Caesar,” he responded to his Roman-born colleague as he caught his breath. “Didn’t
have time to talk first.”

“
All
right, cut the chatter, boys,
” the squadron commander ordered. “
We’ve
got a job to do, so let’s do it. Spinner, get your ass back in formation, on
the double.
”

“Be there in
five seconds, Major, but someone better shoot that thing down. It’s heading
right for the ship.”

“
That’s
what the follow-on team is for, Lieutenant?
”

O’Donnell
huffed, annoyed with himself. “Way to go, O’Donnell,” he mumbled. “Try concentrating
on your own damn job.”

Use of a
follow-on team was an unofficial tactic that the CAG had instituted soon after
they arrived on station in the Rosha’Kana system. Rather than join their fellow
pilots in combat, a single pair of interceptors stayed back to defend the
carrier against any hard ordinance that might slip past the rest of the
squadron. The assignment rotated with each mission, so everyone got a turn—O’Donnell
and his wingman were of course last in line. The tactic had proven quite
effective and had literally saved the ship on at least three occasions—a fact
the major had already reminded him of once before.

“
Splash
two missiles,
” one of this mission’s follow-on pilots reported a few
seconds later. “
Now quit lettin’ ‘em, through. We’re tryin’ to get some
sleep back here.
”

“
All
right, boys and girls! Here we go!
”

Like they
had so many times before over the last several days, the pilots of the
starcarrier
Victory
’s 116th and 117th Tactical Interceptor Squadrons, with
the single exception of the 117th’s pretty little Asian ‘Sunshine’, who no
longer had a plane to fly—she’d spend the duration of this battle at the CAG’s
side, watching and learning—swooped in and took full advantage of the Veshtonn battlecruiser’s
single biggest design flaw. Its lack of effective close-in defenses. They
swarmed the enemy vessel like dozens of angry killer bees, mercilessly stinging
every vital and vulnerable section they could target with their 32mm rapid-fire
pulse cannons, shield neutralizing proton beams, and even a few armor-piercing
hellfire cluster-rockets.

“
Enemy
vessel’s fighter bay doors are opening!
” someone warned as O’Donnell and
Caesar soared sternward over the battlecruiser’s dorsal superstructure. “
We
overshot! Won’t get a clear shot in time to stop the launch!
”

“This is
Star Hawk thirty-seven,” O’Donnell eagerly responded as he and Caesar passed
head-to-head between the caller and his wingman. “We’ll be in position in five
seconds.”

They passed
beyond the vessel’s main engine baffles, then quickly spun their planes a
hundred eighty degrees lateral to face their stern and hit the afterburners.
Thank God for G-suits, O’Donnell thought as his plane’s rapidly slowing inertia
pressed him deeper into his seat. Otherwise, he had no doubt he would have
blacked out. He had to be pulling close to nine G’s!

He flipped
the selector switch from pulse cannons to rockets, and his targeting computer
immediately started beeping as its reticals tracked toward the target he’d
chosen—the left half of the enemy’s fighter deck. Caesar would take care of the
right side. Then, just as the last of the excessive G’s eased and he started
closing on the enemy, the targeting computer stopped beeping and started emitting
a steady tone. “I have target lock,” he advised his wingman.

“
Hellfire
enema coming right up,
” Caesar replied. “
FIRE!
”

“Firing!” O’Donnell
confirmed. He jerked the trigger twice in rapid succession and launched his
first pair of hellfire cluster rockets.

“
Firing!
”
his wingman echoed.

Just as the
first group of enemy fighters lifted off their deck and launched into space,
all four rockets shed their outer shells and dispersed their payloads—twenty
glowing, white-hot, hypersonic, dart-like armor-piercing high explosive missiles
each, each one on its own slightly different trajectory. The eighty
mini-missile shower of death rained down on the enemy barely a second later.
Many of them tore into their fighters as if they were made of cheap tin and
blew them all straight to hell in a chain of nearly simultaneous bright green
explosions that stretched back into their launch bay. Those missiles with no
fighter in their path rained down on the launch deck itself and had much the
same effect, until one massive orange-yellow blast erupted so brightly that the
Star Hawks’ canopies instantly blacked out for a few seconds. At least one of
the missiles must have found its way into below-decks refueling tanks, O’Donnell
concluded.

When the
explosion cleared and the debris field dispersed—O’Donnell had half expected something
to hit him—the enemy’s launch bay and all of its fighters had been annihilated.

“
Wuhooooo!
”
O’Donnell shouted ecstatically. “Splash everything! Launch bay and all enemy
fighters destroyed!”

“
All
right, Star Hawks! Let’s blow this devil straight back to hell!
”

“Come on,
Caesar! Let’s finish this thing off and go have a drink!”

Caesar didn’t
answer.

“Caesar?”
Nothing. “Star Hawk thirty-eight, this is thirty-seven, come in,” he called,
growing concerned. “Caesar, do you copy?”

“
Go find
him, Spinner,
” the major ordered. “
The rest of us will finish this.
”

“Copy that,
sir.”

O’Donnell
reversed thrust and turned his plane away from the burning enemy vessel, then
stopped. Ahead of him, Caesar’s wrecked plane tumbled end over end, growing
smaller as it drifted farther away. “Aw shit, Caesar.”

“
Go after
him, Spinner. His comm could be down. He might still be alive.
”

“Copy that,
sir. I’m on it.”

* * *

The older
and more experienced combat veterans among the bridge crew knew better than to
celebrate their apparent victory too early. So, too, should the younger among
them have known, considering all they’d been through over the last few weeks.
Nevertheless, their exuberant shouts of victory filled the bridge, but only for
a few short seconds.

“Enemy
vessel closing on a collision course, Commander!” Lieutenant Irons hollered
over the noise, putting an immediate damper on the elation. “Velocity
increasing steadily.”

“They mean
to ram us,” Rawlins knew instantly, stating the obvious. He also knew from over
a dozen years of experience that that could mean only one thing. They had
indeed beaten this enemy, and this enemy knew it. For the Veshtonn, ramming was
the tactic of absolute last resort.

“Helm, take evasive
action. Miss Irons, what’s the status of their defense shields?”

“All
readings indicate they’re down, sir,” she reported almost before he finished
asking, having already anticipated his inquiry and scanned the approaching
vessel for everything she could think of.

“Good. It’s
about damn time we caught a break. Arm plasma torpedoes, Lieutenant. I want a
full spread...”

“We’ve
already expended our torpedoes, sir,” she reminded him.

“Proton
cannons then!” Rawlins shouted. “Prepare to carve that thing into scrap metal,
Lieutenant!” He slapped the comm-panel. “CAG, X-O. Recall the interceptors.
Wide approach. We’ll be firing cannons!”

“
Affirm,
X-O.
”

Rawlins
counted down five seconds in his head to allow the CAG time to relay the order,
then gave the word. “All cannons, fire!”

Like
energized blades of searing blue-white death, three beams of concentrated
protons lashed out from the
Victory
’s port side cannons, crossed the
rapidly shrinking gulf between the warring vessels, and tore into the enemy’s
weakened, unprotected hull with an angry vengeance. Dozens of small
yellow-green explosions with a few larger orange-red ones mixed in flared up
all over the alien vessel but faded quickly into oblivion as the pockets of
atmosphere or fuels that fed them bled off into space. Then, suddenly, several
much larger and more violent blasts erupted amidships, and large sections of
the dying vessel started breaking off and tumbling away in random directions.

“Blow, you
son-of-a-bitch,” Rawlins cajoled as if speaking the words might actually make
it happen. And then, almost immediately after he said it, as if out of blind
obedience to the victor, what was left of the burning, slowly tumbling out of
control Veshtonn battlecruiser’s main superstructure did exactly that.

Everyone cheered
as the massive multicolored fireball engulfed the expanding field of wreckage
in a blast so bright that the viewscreen automatically dimmed, then completely
blacked out so as not to burn out altogether. But when it lit up again a few
seconds later, Commander Rawlins saw immediately that their problems were far
from over.

“Oh hell!”
he intoned as he watched the huge, still burning section of the enemy vessel’s
main hull tumble end over end, coming right at them. “Emergency evasive, Mister
LaRocca!” he barked. “Push those thrusters past the red line if you have to!”
Then he slapped his hand down on the all-call button and shouted, “All hands,
brace for impact!”

* * *

The first
thing O’Donnell saw when he maneuvered alongside Caesar’s slowly tumbling wrecked
plane and slowed to match its velocity was his wingman drumming his fingers
impatiently on the inside of his
intact
canopy. The sight actually made
him chuckle for a second or two, but his sense of relief at not having lost his
friend far outweighed whatever humor he saw in the situation. Dented and
disfigured, deeply scarred and partially burned black, Caesar’s reinforced
cockpit had nevertheless done exactly what it had been designed to do. It had
survived the collision with whatever had mangled the rest of the plane and had
saved the pilot’s life. And for that, for keeping his friend alive, O’Donnell
was grateful. Though probably not as grateful as Caesar was, he mused.

The second
thing he saw—realized without seeing, actually, since he couldn’t see his
friend’s face very well through his helmet’s face shield—was that Caesar was
talking.

O’Donnell
glanced at his instruments, saw that he wasn’t picking up Caesar’s carrier wave,
then looked back out at Caesar and tapped his fingers to the side of his helmet
to let him know that he wasn’t coming across. In response, Caesar motioned as
if to check the time on his watch, then threw his hands in the air.
‘About
time you got here.
’ O’Donnell grinned, then rested his head against his
praying hands for a moment. Caesar gave him the finger with both hands, and he laughed.

Then Caesar
did something else with his instruments—tried another comm channel maybe, or
tried to slow his pitch with the thrusters, or whatever—and a brief shower of
sparks suddenly exploded in front of him, like fireworks bursting in the night
sky on the fourth of July. Flames began to flicker and rise from his panel, and
his cockpit began to fill with smoke. He slapped frantically at the flames, but
they would not be denied there life. If something else happened and that cockpit
suddenly filled with pure oxygen...