The Far Bank of the Rubicon (The Pax Imperium Wars: Volume 1) (26 page)

At the speeds traveled during interstellar combat, simple small masses became effective weapons. The energy output created by running into them at high speeds could be quite damaging. All interstellar ships, both military and civilian, were hardened at the bow and equipped with a plasma shield designed to intercept any particles of dust or small pebbles which might come across the path of the vessel. However, if a ship ran into enough of these at speed, they could easily overwhelm the plasma shield, causing it to collapse in on itself, eventually endangering the vessel. They could also simply rattle the ship to the point of causing significant damage. flak provided an essential tool in the arsenal of any space navy.

Jonas looked over at his partner. “flak?”

She forced a smile at him but didn’t answer, only nodding her head in the affirmative.

Jonas looked at the countdown clock for launch. There was still a minute and fifty-eight seconds left. He looked up again as the shaking turned from a mild annoyance to an intense roller coaster ride of shearing bolts and debris flying around the cargo bay. The shuttle in which he sat jumped up off the deck and slammed back down into it several times.

Terrified, Daxton covered her head and tried to duck down in her seat. The five-point harness she wore prevented her from doing so. “Now that’s what my daddy used to talk about when he used to talk about flak,” she said.

Jonas watched as one of the shuttles to his right got so thrashed about it landed on its side. Further forward in the bay one of the lead shuttles landed on its fuel cell. “Holy fuck!” Jonas said. “We’d all be dead if there’d been any atmosphere in here.”

He thought about keying his mike to talk with the wing commander, but decided against it. Someone else beat him to it. A panicked voice exclaimed, “Were getting shaken to pieces. We gotta go, Colonel. We gotta go now!”

Colonel Marquette’s voice boomed into the microphone. “Sigma squadron will hold until my command to launch. Stick with it, boys and girls. We’re almost through the flak. Sensors say we have a clear spot up ahead, and we’re going to get you some better cover when we launch. You will be going out hot. We have fighters inbound to your destination. You should be able to beat them, but as soon as you’re clear of this beast, light your candles and stick to the plan, or there will be trouble. Good luck, and Godspeed!”

Jonas watched as a few marines tried to abandon the shuttle now on its side. It was a mistake. One of them got nearly decapitated as a beam dropped from the ceiling onto the flight deck. Jonas looked quickly away.

A second cutting laser took a wide sweep through the sides of the docking bay, luckily passing above the shuttles.

Jonas tried not to look. For a while, he stared at his feet.

Desperate for something to do, he keyed the mike to the back of his shuttle. “One minute, thirty to go time. Hang in there, everybody.” He keyed off the mike.

Things seemed to be settling down again. The flak backed off to a steady drizzle.

Jonas noticed by the stars outside that
Constant
seemed to be rotating on its keel, perhaps taking the damage away from the now-stricken landing bay.

An eternity later, he heard the command he had been waiting for. “Sigma Squadron, light ‘em up.” The colonel’s voice sounded calm and collected. If he were bothered by the pounding
Constant
had taken, he didn’t show it.

Jonas flipped the switch, charging his fusion reactor. The airless hangar kept him from hearing it, but he could still feel the vibration of the small reactor as it started heating toward ignition.

“Sigma Squadron, go! Go! Go! We have missiles inbound! Get off the flight deck. Now!” The Colonel’s voice crackled with intensity. Out of thirty-five troop carriers, Jonas was seventh in line for launch. He watched as shuttle after shuttle in front of him escaped the bay into space and then dropped down and to the right, out of view.

He flipped on his navigation computer and, reaching the front of the queue, launched his marine shuttle craft into space. The dimly lit shuttle bay dropped away, replaced by the star-speckled blackness of the void. Jonas’ navigation computer took over, executing a roll and then a dive away from the vessel above them.

As the stars screamed by, Jonas caught his first glimpse of the damage done to the
Constant
. It was brief, and it wasn’t a comforting glimpse. Huge portions of the hull seemed warped and buckled from the heat of the nukes. In some places, he could definitely see into the vessel.

The real danger came when the navigation computer laid in the course toward the
Indiana
. Jonas had expected the path between the fleet and the vessel to be relatively clear. Instead, the path forward looked to be a maelstrom of debris, flak, and enemy fighters. Obviously the Korpis knew what the Allies had in mind.

“Well, we didn’t surprise anyone, did we?” asked Daxton.

“They had to know this was a possibility,” Jonas answered.

At the moment, the term pilot wasn’t really a fair term for Jonas’ role in the cockpit. Under most circumstances, he didn’t control the vessel in any way. That was left to the on-board AI which had reflexes much more in line with the speed of space combat than a human.

Jonas was trained to take over, if necessary, but it was rarely a recommended procedure.

Designed exclusively for spaceflight, the shuttle had no sense of proportion or aerodynamics. It was really six pods of two engines each, with an armored crew compartment crammed between them. To Jonas, it looked suspiciously like someone had strapped engines to a shipping container and slapped a window on the front.

In space, one couldn’t push against an atmosphere to generate forward momentum. In other words, you couldn’t fly. If you needed to move to your right to avoid an object, you couldn’t simply lower the flaps on your wing and turn. Without air resistance, a jet would lower its flaps and charge right into the object it wanted to avoid. If you wanted to move right, you needed to add a force which would push you right. Over time, engineers had tinkered with all sorts of designs to accomplish this feat, but most often they came back to simply adding equal-sized engines and thrusters along the three axes of the vehicle.

Inside, the ride could get quite interesting, as the computer fine-tuned the thrust and direction of different engines at speeds beyond human perception. Like almost all other aspects of space combat, delivering troops was, in reality, another example of AI chess.

The straight route to the
Indiana
was expected to be about a fifteen minute flight. However, after leaving the
Constant
behind, Jonas’ shuttle, along with the others, chose not to head directly for its target, but rather made for a large field of debris which drifted about halfway between the fleet and the
Indiana
.

For a while, Jonas didn’t worry about the AI. The AI’s chosen path avoided much of the flak which had been laid between them and their target, but as he thought about it more, he became suspicious. First, the AI was burning a whole lot of fuel as it continued to accelerate toward its target. Second, its speeds were getting quite high. It was going to take an enormous amount of thrust to slow down once they got close to the
Indiana
. By the time they got dangerously near the debris field, Jonas decided something might be amiss.

He opened his mouth to say something to Daxton, and she interrupted him while she stared at the data pad in front of her. “I’m already checking.”

She started to shake her head. “I have a seven-millisecond time lag on our sensor readings compared to the time we’re reporting to the
Constant
. I don’t think that is normal, but what do I know? Time lags were what we were taught to watch out for in training, but…”

Jonas keyed up the mike to the squadron. “I have a seven-millisecond anomaly on our sensor readings from
Constant
. Does anyone else have this?”

“Sigma B Six concurs. We have the same reading. Suggest possible intrusion into the nav computer.”

Sigma Six was piloted by Bert Peterson, another graduate from their class.

There was no response from the squad leader.

Jonas reached for the toggle switch which would disable the AI and turn the craft over to his control, and then hesitated. The AI was designed to work with the whole squad, keeping it in a tight formation which helped offer protection from the enemy. If he were wrong, he could cost others their lives by deserting the AI. Jonas put his hand back down in his lap and waited. His craft continued to accelerate, using fuel at an alarming pace.

“This is Sigma D Two to A One. Do you copy, Flight Leader?”

Silence.

Jonas sighed.

“Does anybody copy me?”

No response.

“Watch out!”

Jonas looked up to see them heading straight into the path of an oncoming piece of debris. The small particle shield in front of their ship lit up like a Christmas tree, as it impacted the first pieces of dust from the field.

Daxton shook her head. “They have to be jamming us, or maybe they hacked the com system.”

Jonas reached up and switched off the AI system, taking back control of his ship. He angled down just as he saw one of the other vessels toward the front of the formation run itself straight into a drifting piece of armor plating. The AI didn’t even attempt to turn it. The ship simply crumpled.

“AIs are Bad!” Jonas screamed into the com as he dropped down, taking what looked to be the clearest path out of the field.

“Daxton, I want you to get me a heads-up path to the
Indiana
. Let’s see if we can get some of these other transports to follow us.”

Two more of their own ships simply slammed themselves into larger pieces of debris, while Jonas started to maneuver out of the field. By that time, other shuttles seemed to be joining them. Unfortunately, without AI and com systems, good order seemed to have been completely lost. There was no longer any semblance of a formation. Rather, a ragtag bunch of ships made their way pell-mell toward the
Indiana
.

Jonas pitched his craft down and to the right, in order to avoid the burst of a flak missile in front of him. It appeared the enemy was well aware that their trap hadn’t worked as well as they might have hoped. They had back-up plans.

“I have fighters at two o’clock, low on the scope. Looks like six of them coming right for us,” Daxton shouted in his ear.

“Get the boys in back on the guns, and see if you can find any way to communicate with the other ships!” Jonas answered, as he concentrated on keeping them from running into the path of a now-drifting Allied destroyer which hadn’t fared well in the flak field.

Inadvertently, the Unity trap had given them an advantage—a great rate of speed. While the enemy fighters angled to intercept them, it took a moment for them to catch up. Jonas could feel the vibration of their railgun as it began to fire, and it wasn’t long before he saw tracer fire, heading toward his vessel. He dodged the best he could, but he couldn’t do all that much without putting them off course and burning more fuel. Despite his instincts he had to trust his gunners in the back.

Shortly thereafter, one of the fighters tried to get a clean shot at the cockpit of their ship. Jonas watched in horror as tracer rounds passed through in front and behind him. Despite all his training to fly steadily toward the target, he instinctively jerked his craft away from the fighter drifting next to him, helping his gunners get a better shot while the poly fiber shards of the former front screen floated around the cabin like missiles.

“I got it!” Daxton exclaimed from the seat next to him. “I can chat with the other copilots on the tablets. What do you want to tell them?”

“Tell them to form up on me,” Jonas answered, as he brought his ship back on course. “We need to get into formation, or these fighters are just going to pick us apart one by one. I will play the lead ship.” Just as he finished, Jonas watched the ship next to him suddenly lurch out of control, as the same fighter which had assaulted him thoroughly disassembled the cockpit and its contents. Jonas didn’t think about the fact that he might know someone in there.

“Got it!”

It took longer than Jonas would have liked, but eventually the squadron reformed.
Just in time
, he thought. They were getting in close to the
Indiana
, and the space around it seemed to be thick with enemy fighters and missiles, all competing to see who could knock out the next Allied troop carrier. Worse still, in order to drop off his marines, Jonas would have to slow down considerably, making him a vulnerable target. Jonas executed his retro-burn.

Constant
had been one of six marine troop carriers brought to the front lines for the operation. In all, six thousand troops had been scheduled to land on the
Indiana
. In theory, the Allied fleet was supposed to fold itself into a U shape around the stricken vessel. The
Constant
, along with one other marine troop carrier, and their defensive escorts, were to form the tip of one side of the U. Jonas was supposed to make a relatively high-speed hot-drop of the troops in back who were to jump out of the transport, attach themselves to the
Indiana
, and then fight their way inside. In the meantime, he and the other marine pilots were to continue to the other tip of the U where they would pick up a second wave of marines from two of the other transports, refuel, and return to do a second drop.

As he approached the
Indiana
, Jonas tried to find the drop zone near the aft section of the ship. Toward engineering, intelligence said there were several gaps in the hull which could be used to enter the vessel. Skimming low along the spine of the huge ship, Jonas couldn’t see them. What he could see was a ship which seemed relatively intact, except for the back where engineering had been. There, jagged fields of floating debris made any drop deadly. But as he looked forward, the vessel looked nearly undisturbed. Jonas had no doubt there were still a large number of people alive in there. This wasn’t going to be an easy fight. He spotted an open cargo bay, whose doors appeared to be warped and ajar. It seemed like as good a place as any to put his soldiers. He slaved his heads-up to the spot and sent the signal to the suits of his soldiers in back. Then he hit the jump button just in time to let them glide toward the cargo bay, while slowing their momentum. Hopefully, if all went well, a full eighty-five percent of them would be able to lock onto the hull, right near their target. In these kinds of operations, Marines didn’t talk about the other fifteen percent.