Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) (5 page)

“
Not just me–everyone on my ship.”

“
Well bargained and done, Lieutenant. Let’s go hunting.” Baldwin’s link went dark and Veronica transmitted the attack plans to him. It was risky, and definitely required the flight control systems to accept forces that weren’t in the original wave.

Wait
.

Veronica punched some last-minute changes into the system, sequencing the launches and the ships so that there were three attack waves instead of only two, before hitting sim. She calculated probabilities and vector traces, and was satisfied with the results.

“Captain Baldwin, plans laid in and confirmed, Sir.”

“
Thank you, Lieutenant Gray. I’ll forward the plans to the rest of the squadron and our support craft. We’ve got about another forty million klicks to go before we’re part of the interplanetary noise.”

She unstrapped herself from her seat.
“Chief Alyse, meet me in the aft crew room. Sub-lieutenant Yeboah, you have the stick.”

Two separate
“Aye-aye, Ma’am” came in prompt reply.

Commander Jennifer “J.J.” Josephson watched the outbound traces of the corvettes and their bombers fuzz out while her fighters remained on CAP near the carrier.

“
Think Baldwin’s gonna pull something sneaky, J.J.?” came the voice of her squadron exec, Victor Avalon.

“
Baldwin’s a sneaky-ass bastard and he just got a new pilot who’s got a rep for sneakiness. I’d be shocked if our intrepid CAG didn’t.” She rolled and turned her fighter to its new course, spreading the tac net outward. “If he’s going to be sneaky, we should encourage that sneakiness–right until we cut his legs out from under him. CAG owes me a beer, and I’m thirsty.” Josephson’s grin looked like it would be at home on a shark’s face.

She pulled her flight onto a new vector and slid away from the rest of her squadron.
“Listen up, people. Baldwin’s out there and we all know he’s the second best pilot on this tub, though we might disagree on who ‘best’ is. His newbie’s going to want to make fools out of us. We don’t want to let her. So let’s keep up our watch and our professionalism, and show both of ‘em that there’s more to a strike than getting the ordnance off.”

Time ticked by while Josephson
’s CAP package wheeled about the carrier in predetermined patterns. Josephson was annoyed and bored, but it had taken an hour to go out and it would take at least a half to come back in. Counting burn time for deception maneuvers, it could be anywhere from two to six hours before she saw Blue Force again. Red Force in a game like this was being trained just as surely as was Blue. “Ma’am, sensor returns are inconclusive, but it looks like we’ve got about a third of the expected strike package inbound hot.” One of the pilots on the furthest forward fringe of the starboard side CAP transmitted his sensor data back to Josephson’s command bird.

“
Visual confirmation? A straightforward trap lure like that isn’t Baldwin’s style, and I’m positive it’s not Gray’s, either.”

“
Negative, Ma’am–but drive signatures are consistent with three corvettes and six fighters.”‘

“
Acknowledged, six-twelve. What in the blue bloody hell is Baldwin up to?” Josephson clicked through her available fighters, “Hatters, shift to oh-two and check those contacts. I want to make sure that what we see is what we get.”

A hundred thousand kilometers aft, ghosting along the edge of the spacetime distortion fringe of
Avenger
’s drives, the ships Veronica had picked as her main strike package carefully positioned themselves to pounce.

“
Think she’s going to fall for it?” asked a bomber pilot whose name Veronica had yet to learn.

“
I doubt it. I very much doubt it,” she replied. “Baldwin’s got too much of a rep as a trickster, and I came in with much the same rep. She’s
expecting
an unorthodox attack maneuver. On the other hand, she can’t just ignore an incoming strike on other vectors–my sims are showing she’ll have to divert at least a quarter of the Red Force flight wing to deal with it.”

“
Attacking from zero-zero off a cap ship’s drive plume isn’t unorthodox–it’s more ‘suicidal.’ There’s no way she won’t see us coming.”

Veronica grinned.
“That will be taken care of in about ten seconds.”

The second jaw of her trap closed exactly nine seconds later, as the second wave of fighters and drones came roaring in
from seventy degrees off the carrier’s bow. Though they couldn’t see the attack through the drive field aft of the ship, the fighters and corvettes racing in forward were very impressively simulated by Captain Baldwin, three hand-picked assistants, and a full squadron’s worth of decoys. Which meant that Josephson
should
be taking the bait, and she’d very soon have too much velocity built up in generating an intercept vector towards Baldwin to intercept the actual strike package.

Veronica counted off twenty seconds just to be sure.
“Here we go.”

The strike group broke away from the sensor distortion of the carrier
’s drive plume, building velocity from the base vector of the ship with every second.

Josephson recognized the ruse as soon as the third group emerged, but her fighters already committed to meeting Baldwin
’s. They were too far for visual confirmation, but some of Baldwin’s craft were
already
evincing the characteristic fuzzy-edged signature of a decoy drone at close range. She could send her trailing reserves to reinforce the carrier’s CAP, of course, but most of her defenders would be unable to engage the main body of the attack.

Veronica shifted course just slightly and thumbed the missile release on her joystick. Two wholly simulated Sandtrap missiles lanced out from her fighter
’s belly and simulated the act of turning two actual Wasp interceptors into simulated scrap. The planes obligingly powered down and tumbled several hundred kilometers outboard past Veronica’s attack group as the first volley of notional torpedoes launched from her bombers, and the carrier’s triple-A lit up space with a furious barrage of safely underpowered energy weapons fire.

Any fighter struck by even the lightest capital weapon was instantly tagged as dead, but the carrier
’s opening volleys were focused on million-dollar decoys and turned
them
into very expensive simulated scrap while the actual spacecraft of the attack continued toward terminal assault range.

*

As the last fighters landed from the exercise, Lieutenant Veronica Gray finished her shutdown checks and stood up, hanging her helmet on the sill of the canopy. Josephson was standing at the bottom of her boarding ladder with a tight grin on her face.

“
Lieutenant Gray, next exercise, stay away from the drive field. I have no idea how you got Baldwin to approve a move like that,” she snapped. There was an edge of grudging admiration in her voice, but only that–an
edge
.

Veronica
bit the inside of her lip and ran her fingers back through her helmet-soaked hair, leaving a trail of blonde spikes behind them. “He knew a good idea when he saw one. Besides, the enemy’s not going to hesitate to use a dirty trick like that if they can, so training our people to recognize it is a job well-done, wouldn’t you say?”

“
Lieutenant, no offense, but who’s going to have the balls to do that?”

Veronica grinned,
“Commander,
I
did, and Chief Alyse helped me on it, and that means sooner or later, someone else’s going to as well.”

“
Fair enough, and I’m probably just mad that Baldwin wiped the beer he owes me off the drink list. Bastard.” Josephson’s grin answered hers and she clapped the younger woman on the shoulder. “Let’s hit the showers, then the briefing room. You did well out there.”

*

Hair still wet from her shower, Veronica stood at impassive attention as Captain Harding apparently had decided to tear a stripe off her. It was working, and she bit the inside of her cheek as his rant continued, to keep herself focused on the facts and not the captain’s anger. The tight grey corridor seemed as though it were even tighter, and she felt as though she should crouch to avoid the pipes overhead. Or maybe that was just Captain Harding making her feel awkward.

“
Lieutenant Gray, what you did out there today was one of the most irresponsibly over-aggressive moves I’ve seen in my years in this man’s Navy. What were you thinking?”

Veronica compressed her lips into a tight line. She thought she
’d been prepared to handle professional criticism over her aggressive tactics, but she hadn’t expected the carrier’s skipper to
personally
step in. “Sir, we were outside of any danger radius at all times. The ship’s drive field posed no danger to any of my spacecraft.”

“
Lieutenant,” the captain’s voice was dangerously soft, “You were placed in command of a strike package totaling some three and a half billion dollars of aerospace craft, and you chose to play overly ambitious games with their drives–
and my own
.”

Captain Baldwin stepped into the brewing confrontation.
“Captain, the final authorization of Blue Force’s strike tactics was mine, and that included skimming the drive field as closely as she did. We
want
pilots to be audacious and to push their airframes to the limit.” He drew Harding aside, away from Veronica, and the senior officer dismissed her with a curt nod.

“
Captain Baldwin, I appreciate the dedication to the hard work of your men and women, but the ultimate safety of and authority over this vessel is mine, not yours, and we
both
have responsibility for teaching her–not just you.” Harding’s eyes were beginning to soften slightly, “I remember what it was like to be a junior pilot and want to prove myself but damn it, Baldwin, you and I both know she’s going to go back to the space warfare side of the street in a couple years, and we don’t want her treating a half-million-ton heavy cruiser like it’s a fighter.”

Baldwin stuck his chin out a few centimeters further.
“Sir,” he said, “Gray is a brand-new command pilot in my group. In the handful of days since she came on board, she’s been showing strong potential as a tactical officer. The ability to leap
while
looking–to start to act while you’re still developing a picture of what’s going on–is what separates a great commander from a merely competent one. And the discipline of the flight wing is
my
job, Captain, “He took a breath, “With due respect, sir, if we beat her over the head every time she pushes the envelope a little, we’ll end up putting her on the beach, where she’ll nurse a resentment for the Navy for the rest of her life.”

“
Thinking of Charlie Solano, are we?”

“
Yes, sir, I am. And of a certain squadron commander I didn’t listen to when I was a much younger and more impulsive man.”

“
This squadron commander was probably a smart man.”

“
He was, but he’s gotten a bit crotchety.”

Harding grunted softly.
“Touché, Captain, though that was a bit of a low blow. Whatever my other faults, I’d like to think I’ve not gotten ‘crotchety.’ Yet. I’ll go apologize to the Lieutenant.”

“
Thank you, Sir. Beers later?”

“
If you’re buying, Jack.”

“
Wouldn’t miss it.”

Chapter 5

28
th
of 1
st
Month, 343

Some days later, the crew of Corvette
Dog Two-Oh-Seven
trooped aboard her again. The days after the successful exercise had been a whirlwind of simulated re-runs, tests, close examinations and dissections of Veronica’s successful assault tactic (the verdict was that without precise knowledge of the
Lexington
class carrier’s drive systems, the attack wouldn’t have gotten into range before interception), and paperwork. So much paperwork. One of the handful of differences between the simulation they’d just done and a real attack was that
Dog Two-Oh-Seven
wasn’t considered blooded. Until she successfully completed a combat mission, she and her crew would not have a name.

A starship captain
’s apology was a rare nod–but even more important was the fact that Captain Baldwin had stepped into the proverbial line of fire to remind the Captain that the ambush had been something he himself had approved. She filed both examples away in her trove of reminders for how to conduct herself when
she
was herself the mistress and commander of a starship.

Despite its much-studied shortcomings, Veronica
’s plan had earned her a twin appointment as Tactical Officer of the Pukin’ Dogs and Assistant Tactical Officer of the entire flight wing. The former was technically more prestigious, but she treasured the latter more because ATO (Wing) was responsible for routine deployments. As such, today’s operation was more or less entirely her own plan. She and Lieutenant Commander Saitova had spent an entire day getting inside each other’s head and formulating the deployment drops. Veronica had found it an eye-opening learning experience as her native enthusiasm collided with a superior officer’s knowledge and skills. Especially when the Lieutenant Commander pointed out that her original deployment plan would have left all of the corvettes spaced far too widely apart to even have a
hope
of intercepting anything that didn’t come within a hundred thousand kilometers of them.