That was the true hell of the tacsit. Right now, there were sixteen gravfighters out there, plus four Nightshade close-support gunships and one last, lumbering shuttle packed with civilians and Marines. If
And even the fighters were at risk. Trapping on board a carrier under acceleration was
But the seven capital ships were vulnerable if they stayed put. They might hold the Toad fighters at bay for a time, but Koenig was willing to bet that Turusch capital ships were out there, lots of them, still undetected and burning in tight on the fighters’ wakes. If the squadron didn’t start boosting for
A gravfighter-one of the Lightnings-had burned out a Toad, but now two more Toads had dropped onto his tail. He listened to the voices of the cockpit chatter, relayed back to
“Lightning, Lightning Five! I got two on my tail!”
“Five, One! Break left, break left!”
“Copy One, breaking left!..they’re still-”
One of the green pinpoints in the tac display winked out. A tight formation of Turusch fighters were closing on the knot of Starhawks, slashing at them with beam weapons.
“Comm! Make to the
“Aye, sir.”
The
Of course, she still needed a good idea of where the target would be one second after firing-that was the single major limiting factor in space combat. But so long as the target held course and speed-or a constant rate of acceleration-for more than a second, her targeting computers gave her uncanny accuracy.
Another of the Black Lightnings vanished in a white flare of incandescence.
“Make to all fighters,” Koenig told the communications officer. “Break off and rejoin the battlegroup. Prepare for underway trap.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
He looked into the tac display again. Five fighters, a shuttle, and four gunships still coming up from the surface…and ten gravfighters of the Black Lightnings tangled in a fur ball with the Trash. Damn. They needed to get that transport aboard. The display readout showed 214 people packed on board-God! They must be sitting in one another’s laps! UC-154s were rated for about 180 at most.
He juggled with the possibility of launching another fighter squadron, then decided against it. More fighters might help the long odds against those Toads, but the rest of the Turusch fleet would be along very shortly, of that he was certain. He already stood to loose seventeen good gravfighter pilots out there. He didn’t want the number to rise to twenty-nine.
If the capital ships could hold off that swarm of incoming Toads with their point-defense weapons, maybe they could bring the fighters and the shuttle on board as well.
But it was going to be damned tight.
Allyn heard the orders come down from
But she saw a tactical opportunity.
As the fighters continued to climb up out of Eta Bootis IV’s gravity well, she saw that the enemy fighters, closing with
There was enough heat and light glaring from that scar, she thought, to mask the fighters from enemy sensors, from some of them, at least. The Starhawks might be tagged by radar-though their hull configuration was already shifting to stealth mode to hide them. And the Toad pilots wouldn’t be watching the eruptions on the planet. They would be focused on
The Choctaw shuttle and the four gunships were already angling off in another direction, racing for the distant star carrier.
“Dragonfires!” she called. “Stick close! We’re going to give those bastards one hell of a surprise!”
“Dragonfires have acknowledged, sir,” the comm officer announced.
“Then what the hell are they doing?” Koenig asked. The shuttle and its Nightshade escort was breaking for the carrier, but the five fighters were maintaining their course, straight-line from the planet’s surface into space.
“Analyses of their vector suggests they’re performing a pop-up, sir,” Hughes told him.
A pop-up-an ambush by fighters lurking within the atmosphere of a planet, then “popping up” out of the atmosphere to attack. Usually, the relative positions within a local gravity well dictated that the force farther from the planet held the gravitational advantage. Even with drive singularities, it took a lot of energy to fight up out of the bottom of a planetary well. But in some cases, surprise could outweigh the disadvantages, especially if the enemy wasn’t paying attention.
And this time, the enemy appeared to be completely focused on the carrier battlegroup. The question was whether five gravfighters could make any difference at all in a scrap against ten times their number.
“God help them,” he murmured.
Allyn cut her drive singularity as she flashed into the path of the oncoming Turusch fighter swarm, targeting the nearest Toad and cutting loose with her RFK-90 KK Gatling at a range of less than ten thousand kilometers. Her AI pivoted her ship as she moved, twisting it to keep the Gatling aligned with the enemy fighter. A stream of magnetic-ceramic-jacketed slugs of depleted uranium, each massing half a kilo, snapped out with a cyclic rate of twelve per second.
With a launch tube five meters long and an acceleration of three hundred gravities, those slugs were traveling at 175 meters per second when they left the Starhawk’s prow. The impact of that stream carried the punch of a fair-sized tactical nuke; the Toad’s shields went down as the hull opened up with a zipper effect, ripping out its guts and sending molten chunks of debris tumbling through space.
“Dragon One, scratch one!” she cried over the com link.
The other Dragonfires were scoring as well. Lieutenant Tucker was using her PBP-2 in short, controlled bursts, flipping her Starhawk this way and that, acquiring targets, locking on, firing. Collins and Spaas were tucked
