SAW 1: Stars at War (10 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Battle Fortress
Epsilon Decimus

Flag Bridge

T
he fighter
wings engaged. This much proved true. Prion saw the human tallies on her monitors…the
twisting intermeshing dots. 3648 dead human fighter pilots and
counting...3681... 3739... More dead every second.

She glanced at Commodore Brigum and already knew he was
thinking.
"I told you so".

Then, she glanced back ahead of her at the main holomap
display.

The overall situation: the fighters from both sides have
engaged, but the battleships were far from reaching laser range of each other.

The lead snake battleship still remained two million
kilometers away. Capital-ship laser range being 100,000 kilometers, Prion
easily calculated that it would take an hour before it was reached, providing
both battleship forces continued accelerating towards each other.

The ‘fighter war’ may very well be determined long before
that.

Everything depended on how her 20,000 remaining fighters
fared. If they lost, her missiles would be toast. If they won, she'd have
‘missile’ supremacy over the enemy…meaning her missiles could go anywhere they
wanted, which included being positioned right behind the enemy starship fleet
when it engaged her battleships.

If her fighters lost, the enemy would gain missile
supremacy, a very bad state of affairs.

Seconds ticked by…Prion waited. "How many enemy
fighters have we killed, commodore?"

"About..." Brigum paused, "4700 fighters and
counting...4750."

Prion felt a measure of relief. It wasn't too bad. At least
her fighters weren't being destroyed by the overwhelming enemy numbers. By kill
rate, they were killing more than they lost. Furthermore, this didn't count the
dogfighting, as most of the engagement losses came from initial head-to-head
high-speed encounters before both combatants had their velocities reduced to
dogfighting speeds.

One thing she’d become certain of…if the kill rate to loss
rate remained unchanged, she would marginally lose the fighter war, because the
kill-to-loss ratio wasn't high enough, considering the snakes started with
32,000 and hers began with 24,000.

Everything depended on how well her fighters did in a
closed-in dogfight.

Gamma Wing

Mark Four Space Fighter Call Sign  ‘Zeta-1’

Wing Commander's Cockpit

Battle! Battle! Battle! Everything exploded around her!

Right and left, bottom to top, enemy fighters zoomed past!
Invisible laser beams crossed space in every direction, most coming from misses
that happened further away. It looked like a gigantic bee's swarm, with two
colonies of very violent bees attacking one another.

This was the nit-and-grit. This is why she’d signed up. No
one with a sane mind would do such a thing. Fear became obsolete. Tactics,
instincts, and lightning fast decisions dominated her adrenaline filled brain.
"Go! Go! Zeta-2, you got one on your tail!" yelled Bobbi over the
squadron net.

"I see 'em, I'm jinking!"

"Zeta-1, look behind you!" said Zeta-4.

That's me!
Bobbi glared at her display and saw an
enemy fighter chasing her.

The bogey behind her fired.

A laser beam crossed space next to her left, and another one
crossed her right, but it was unfair—the snakes carried three laser mounts
instead of two—and the center laser beam smashed into her shields, lighting up
her surroundings with blue-green splash scatter.

She gazed at her shield gauge.

Shields 0%.

Fuck.

Bobbi immediately turned her rotatable laser turrets at the
bogey behind her. The advantage of laser armaments was she could fire anywhere
in a 360 degree arc. It just took time for the laser mounts to adjust. She
‘dived’ her twenty-five meter long fighter upwards in hopes of presenting a
faster moving target. Then, just like she predicted, when the bogey shot at her
new position, she dove downwards, making the enemy beams miss. Now, with her
turrets positioned, she fired.

Her laser beams slashed into the bogey's forward shields,
splattering blue ions in every direction.

Inside her cockpit, she tapped the firing button.

Two more laser beams dove into the bogey's forward hull,
penetrating the shields. A bright light flashed from the bogey's round hull,
and it separated into pieces.

A dead bogey.

Bobbi just realized the snake fighters did have weaker
shield technology. That, or her laser mounts were stronger, or the bogey's
shields were already been fired upon, or both.

"Zeta-1, you there?"

"I'm here," Bobbi answered.

"We got new fighters incoming, wing leader!"

Bullshit! More enemy fighters?
She already had bogeys
around her, beside her, swarming her. She couldn't take even more! "Where?
I don't see 'em."

"Zoom your map out!"

Bobbi did just that. In her cockpit, she readjusted her 2d
map display to 20,000 kilometers wide, then 40,000 kilometers. She cursed. A
new enemy wing...numbering an additional 1200 snake fighters, headed for her
dogfighting grounds.

The enemy commander really wanted to jam her grounds...What
was so important about her location?

"What do we do, wing leader?" asked Zeta-4.

"We can't do anything! If we run, we lose even more
because our fighters loose agility!"

"But—we're gonna die."

"We're not going to die!"
We're not going to
die, right? Admiral Prion wouldn't let us be overwhelmed like that, would she?
She'll definitely reinforce us with something.

Bobbi zoomed the map out to 90,000 kilometers wide, and saw
no human reinforcements. 170,000 kilometers—nothing.

Desperation.

Bobbi looked at her wing's tallies. Gamma wing: 1109 kills,
630 losses. Numbers to make any wing commander proud. Then she looked at the
allied wing who’d joined with them earlier. Delta wing's tallies: 591 kills,
288 losses. Not bad.

Total combatants within 10,000 kilometers? 1720 enemy
fighters. 710 human fighters. Within 40,000 kilometers? 2920 enemy fighters.
710 human fighters.

Even with her wing's kill rate, they were being mowed down
through sheer numerical disadvantage. With the survivor counts as it is, there
might be a chance for her wing to survive if and only if human dogfighting
skills could prevail, but not if the enemy added an additional 1200 fresh
fighters to the dogfight. There would be no chance.

They would all die. Bobbi didn't even have a bit of hope.
The only good thing she would be taking enemy fighters away from other
positions on the map, so other human wings would have it easier...

She glanced at the map, again.
1200 extra enemy fighters.
Damn. They already there.

Bobbi sat in that silent cockpit. Her heart pumped.

You know what?
No matter how bad the odds, she was a
wing commander, and she would die as one. "Here they come! Get ready,
Gamma Wing!" she urged with an enthusiasm she didn't feel. "Aim your
sand canisters at their missiles and fire!"

She waited for the missiles to come, but none came.

The enemy newcomers were well within missile separation
range!

What's going on? If they had missiles, they would have
shot them long ago.

"Alright guys, I guess the newbies don't have missiles.
Get ready for laser contact."Bobbi twisted and dodged and fired like the
demon she was. As 1200 extra bogeys came in, they added to the enemy's laser
fire. Already, she saw her Wing numbers drop, as many of her fighters were
caught off guard, unable to handle new fire while dogfighting with preexisting
enemies.

Then, just as the 1200 extra throttled through her
dogfighting swarm, they left through the other side. Bobbi wasn't surprised by
this. They’d come in at extremely fast velocities. What did surprise her was
that after they zoomed through her ranks, they failed to decelerate. Instead,
they continued accelerating away in the opposite direction.

Bobbi blinked.
Where were they going?

Abruptly, she realized it. Those 1200 extra bogeys aimed to
destroy the missiles her wing was meant to protect, far off in the distance.

Feeling relieved she wasn't going to die, but at the same
time she felt saddened she couldn't protect her objective, which was to keep
those missiles alive, Bobbi continued dogfighting her best, because there was
nothing she could do. She couldn't suddenly disengage and go after those 1200
bogeys. That would leave her squadron vulnerable and kill everyone, herself
included. Besides, she didn't have the velocity to take down those 1200 before
they got outside of laser range...

Mobile Battle Fortress
Epsilon Decimus

Flag Bridge

"They're aiming for my missiles," Prion observed.
"Commodore Brigum, can you do something about it? Do you have any fighter
wings in reserve?"

"Let's see...” Brigum paused, "No, I don't have
anything left. All my wings are engaged."

"Ahh...that's a problem." She stared at the big
holomap in front of her. Her three admirals sat behind her around a
sophisticated table wired with interfaces, keypads, monitors, and three-D
projectors.

The good thing is there wasn't too many groups of isolated
snake fighter wings scavenging around. Their numbers weren't high enough to
kill all her missiles, but she would lose some. The other good thing…since the
enemy divided up its fighter fleet, humans fighters no longer faced the task of
fighting all the snake fighters at once…A stable strategy. If the snake commander
believed he couldn't win the fighter war, then it was better to divide up his
fighters to take out some of Prion's missiles while he still could. But did the
snake commander really think that way? Did he really believe he would lose the
fighter war? "Commodore Brigum, what are the fighter kill-to-loss
tallies?"

"Our fighters performed well," said Brigum,
"Now that we are engaged in primarily dogfights throughout the
battlefield. 9200 enemy kills, 5400 losses."

Almost 2 to 1! The status quo proved human dogfighting
skills were superior!

Inexplicably even to her, Prion felt overjoyed! It was one
thing to lose the same amount of battleships in a proto-stellar asteroid field,
but it was another to know you had the upper hand, when it came to fighter squadron
tactics and technology.

If things went according to plan, she would soon gain
missile supremacy, although with a loss to some of her missile fleets because
of enemy fighters splitting up to snipe her missiles.

Prion glanced back at the big holomap. Yes, soon she would
be ready for the main battleship battle that was to come—wait—something looked
wrong! She winced, staring at the enemy battleship units. She shoved her torso
forward, trying to get a better look, because she couldn't believe what was happening!

The holomap showed—the enemy battleship fleet decreasing
their velocity. They were decelerating!

Why would they do that?

Surely, they couldn't be running away, were they?
Because, there is no way they could decelerate, and then re-accelerate in the other
direction fast enough to avoid a fleet battle.

Then, she realized it.

They weren't avoiding a battle.

They were decelerating, so they could increase the length of
the battleship laser war. Instead of constantly crisscrossing with her with
opposing velocities, they wanted a full-blown elongated laser battle. They
wanted a close-in dogfight with battleships!

Normally, battleship battles would have two fleets
crisscross, then decelerate in the opposite direction and then crisscross
again, with periods of peace followed by intermittent war, but if one of the
fleets decelerated early, there would be continuous battle until one of the
fleets got completely destroyed.

Prion suddenly realized if she continued on her present
course, she would go into a no-holds-barred all out battleship war, where she
wouldn't even be able to pull out if she started losing, because laser range
was 100,000 kilometers and any retreat would only be impossible, if both fleets
had null relative velocity.

Normally, retreat is always possible if they kept
interweaving, because one fleet could always decide they had enough and
accelerate off the battlefield instead of coming back.

"Does everyone see that?" said Prion to her
admirals. "They want a continuous battle. Do we fight, knowing that we
can't retreat?"

Commodore Brigum rubbed his nose. "I don't like how
enthusiastic the enemy is about getting into an elongated battleship slugging
match. It sounds like they know they can win. Why else would they do it?"

"But how can they win?" Rear Admiral Gilbert
interjected. "I saw the replay of their battleships in combat in that
asteroid field. A little flanking and it's easy to destroy a snake."

"But now, we no longer have a movement advantage since
our smaller ships are no longer inside an asteroid field," Brigum noted.
"Also, the weapon ranges are now 100,000 kilometers since there are no
asteroids blocking the way. That will impact how well you can flank, too."

"But you haven't inputted the missile factor,"
Gilbert urged. "We will soon have missile superiority as well as fighter
superiority. Our fighters can take out their missiles."

Prion scratched her head. "Mmm...it
does seem like a golden opportunity. We will have missile and fighter
superiority. That's something we've always hoped for and now we have it."

“The enemy knows this,” Brigum continued. "But once we
go in, we cannot disengage, nor can the enemy. The enemy knows this as well. He
knows he won't have fighter and missile superiority. So, why is the enemy so
sure of winning and willing to bet everything on it?"