Bug fought to control her breathing as she nudged her thrusters to bring her Bearcat face-on with the ever-growing Rashan fleet.
“Victory flight, this is victory actual. Hold position and prepare for burn. Keep your nose cold, maybe they’ll turn around. Archer out.”
Fat chance of that, Bug thought in silent response. This isn’t a fleet assembled on a whim.
Every time she thought that more ships couldn’t blink out of hyperspace, dozens more would appear. Twice she had to tweak her sensor display so that it wasn’t simply a sea of red.
The bulk of the human and League fleet lay seven light minutes well ward from her squadron, and Bug knew that even if they wanted to call the patrol back, those instructions were minutes away. Whatever happened next would be up to the Rashan and her squadron leader.
As if on cue, dozens of transmitters scattered around the emergence zone came to life, broadcasting a full-spectrum signal.
“Rashan forces, this is the League of Species and the Associated Republics of Terra. We wish to avoid any further conflict and are willing to make concessions for a cessation of hostilities.”
The message looped, repeating its message along with translations in a half-dozen languages.
Again and again, the message repeated, going through dozens of permutations concocted by the fleet’s best linguists. Bug didn’t know why they bothered - the Rashan had clearly shown they understood the League’s common language when they transmitted in the Meruk system - but held her breath all the same. The Rashan fleet didn’t move. She began to hope.
Her lungs burned before they received their reply. Particle beams lanced out from Rashan warships, destroying every transmitter. Bug’s stomachs sank as the transmissions went quiet.
“Victory flight, Victory Actual. That’s our cue. Noses hot, full burn, hooters on full power. Let’s make sure they know we’re here. Stick close and let the tacnet designate the targets. Engage.”
Bug shoved her throttle to full military power and grunted as she was shoved back into her seat. The inertial compensators made a high-pitch whine, turning over a hundred g’s into a little over 7, and her Bearcat rocketed toward a fleet of thousands.
Within moments, the threat board on the Bearcat lit up with warnings, responding to sensor signals from hundreds of hostile warships. The squadron’s jamming pods, attached to their Bearcats’ stubby wings did their best, but their interference was quickly burned through by capital ship sensor arrays, and warning lights turned from yellow to red as they established locks on the approaching fighters.
“Entering estimated weapons envelope, look lively Victory, go evasive. Archer out.”
Bug triggered the fighter's evasion algorithm, thrusters juking the Bearcat up and down and side to side in random intervals. At this distance, it would make her craft nearly untouchable by enemy laser fire.
The key word is nearly. And I don’t think the algorithm accounted for flying straight down the sights of a thousand ships.
The computer screamed warnings in her brain as sporadic laser and particle beam fire bracketed the squadron, increasing in volume as hundreds of Rashan vessels added their weapons to the deluge of deadly beams.
“Shit!” Bug cursed, a cartwheeling explosion lighting up her helmet screens and a green dot blinking off her tac display. “Victory two three is down.”
The Rashan fleet loomed larger and larger on Bug’s scope, and she fought the urge to turn her fighter around and burn for the Helena while mentally urging her flight computer to execute ever more aggressive evasion patterns.
“Never thought you’d play chicken with a battleship Bug?” Her wingman’s voice crackled over the ship-to-ship comm.
“Are you monitoring my vitals again Jester?”
“Mayyybeee…”
She smiled despite herself. “Watch your own, ace, or is 125 your resting heart rate?”
Bug was grateful for the distraction. She mentally called up the timer that had been started in her ship-brain interface computer the moment the last transmitter had been destroyed.
Come on…. Any minute now….
----
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
One of the idiosyncrasies of hyperspace travel is its reliance on gravity wells, which act as both the destination and origin point for all hyperdrives. For a ship to form a hyperspace tunnel, it must have a uniform gravity well directly behind its direction of travel. Conversely, to collapse the hyperspace tunnel around the ship at the end hyperspace travel, the ship must encounter a gravity well directly in front of it.
If either the origin or destination well is even slightly at an angle to the direction of travel, shear forces will tear any ship attempting hyperspace transit apart t in a fraction of a second.
Because of these realities of hyperspace travel, if you know the origination point for a ship or fleet, you know the area of a star system where it will emerge simply by drawing a straight line between the primary star of each system. The area isn’t exact - and in fact, usually encompasses an area measured in tens of millions of square kilometers - but the important point is that it is predictable.
That fact of hyperspace mechanics was why Bug’s squadron was on deep space patrol in the sector of space the Rahsan fleet emerged from. It also allowed the ARTS fleet’s Dreeden stealth corvettes to seed the entire area with 2,332 anti-ship missiles, which now floated motionless in space. Completely powered down, they weren’t undetectable, but with high-energy hyperspace emergences cluttering sensors and Rashan directional arrays pointed at a seemingly suicidal fighter squadron, they might as well have been.
A light minute behind the Rashan fleet, a small patch of space rippled for a moment like a pebble thrown in a still pond. For a moment, a lone Dreeden corvette "surfaced" from subspace, transmitted a signal, and then slipped from realspace back into a sea of subspace foam.
Then the signal reached the powered-down missiles, and over two thousand passive sensors and targeting computers booted up. Less than a second later, the missiles' tactical systems reached out to other nearby missiles, forming a network, sharing data, prioritizing and deconflicting targets. This process took longer as the missiles were spread out over tens of light seconds from one another, and it was when they were most vulnerable - putting out heat and transmissions but still static in space.
A Rashan destroyer noticed two of the missiles, having exited hyperspace less than a hundred kilometers away, broadcasted a warning, and destroyed one with their point defense lasers. By then it was too late.
The drives of 2,331 anti-ship missiles lit up and they plunged into the Rashan formation.
---
“Victory flight, launch bruisers as able.”
Bug confirmed that her anti-shipping missiles had good target locks, selected all 6, and hit the weapon release toggle on her joystick. She felt a familiar vibration as they detached from the Bearcat’s underwing hardpoints, and the fighter became several tons lighter.
“Victory one-five, Bruisers away.”
Bug’s voice joined a chorus of others in her squadron as the VS-17 Jolly Rogers added 96 more missiles to the horde that bore down on the Rashan fleet.
“Clear!” Her squadron leader’s voice cut through the comms. “Flip and burn, ladies and germs.”
She didn’t have to be told twice, cutting her engine, flipping 180, then slamming her throttle back to full.
“Let’s never do that again, Bug.”
“We’re not out of it yet, Jester.” Bug could see that the incoming fire targeting the squadron had slackened, however, as the Rashan fleet instead turned its attention to the incoming missiles.
When the squadron was initially briefed on the number of missiles seeded at the probable emergence point for the Rashan fleet, Bug thought the number was overkill. Now, with the number of Rashan ships outnumbering the missiles two to one, they seemed woefully inadequate.
---
The AIs controlling the missiles had no feelings of inadequacy. They only had a mission. Rather than going for the largest ships, they had been programmed to prioritize targets by the highest chance of a kill. Destroyers and Cruisers were targeted rather than Battleships or Dreadnaughts, which would take many times more warheads to destroy. As point-defense fire lashed out at the missiles, they shared information as to which ships put out more - and more effective - fire, then deprioritized them for easier targets.
One in twenty of the missiles didn’t carry a warhead. They peeled off from the Itano Circus of missiles to streak toward the Rashan vessels that were most effective in shooting down their brethren. Once in range, they dumped their entire power cores into brief flashes of directional jamming before burning themselves out, allowing hundreds of armed missiles to slip by.
Over half of the remaining missiles were brought down before they found their targets. That left a little under a thousand to hit their targets.
It was over in a handful of seconds. A wave of explosions rippled through the Rashan fleet, destroying scores of destroyers, cruisers, supply ships, tenders, and a handful that defied standard ARTS classification.
Sixty-one of the Jolly Rogers’ missiles impacted the lead dreadnaught of the Rashan formation milliseconds later.
---
Bug watched with a grim smile as the squadron’s anti-shipping missiles slammed into the dreadnaught. The first few did little damage, impacting harmlessly on shielding. A dozen missiles later, one of the battle screens overloaded, allowing the next missiles through. The first past the shields did nothing more than blow divots in the ship’s armor, but the following missiles adjusted their course to hit those weakened hull sections, allowing the final missiles to penetrate deep inside its structure before their fusion warheads detonated.
It was a testament to the resilience of Rashan engineering that the dreadnought wasn’t vaporized outright, and Bug experienced a moment of dread when it looked like the vessel might survive. Then the dozen 2-megaton warheads that had buried themselves in the ship detonated, and the middle of the dreadnought, from bow to stern, disappeared in a flash of light and energy. The two sides of the ship spun away as if nothing more than scraps of paper blown on an invisible wind.
“Scratch one dreadnought, Victory flight. Good work. Let’s get home to mama. Archer out.”
---