Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

acceleration before killing their drive singularities and drifting dead-stick into the swinging maw of the docking bay, entering a tangleweb field that slowed them abruptly for the final fifty meters of their approach.

“CIC, PriFly,” sounded in Koenig’s head. “The shuttle is aboard.”

“Thank you, PriFly. I saw.”

He had a screen at his CIC station set as a repeater off of PriFly’s main board. He’d watched the Choctaw enter the gaping opening, could see the gunships coming in through the entrance now, in staggered formation to match the docking bay’s rotation, one after the other. Nightshades were essentially large, two-man fighters, but slower and less maneuverable than Starhawks or War Eagles, with a maximum acceleration of only twelve Gs. That made them good for chewing up ground targets and serving as close-support for the infantry, but not of much use in a gravfighter fur ball.

Koenig turned his attention to the fighters-four from VFA-44 and eight from VFA-51. They were eighty thousand kilometers astern of the America now, but catching up fast.

“Admiral?” Buchanan’s voice said in his head. “Permission to begin accelerating the America.”

“Granted,” Koenig told him. The slow movers were safely on board now. The fighters easily had the acceleration necessary to match velocities with a capital ship. The sooner the last seven capital ships of the battlegroup were pushing c, the better. Koenig still expected Turusch warships to be coming in on the tails of those fighters; they could appear on feeds from the more remote battlespace drones at any moment.

On the tactical display, the ships of the battlegroup began moving faster, as data readouts showed the vector change. The fighters were already going all out, the distance between them and America dwindling rapidly.

Come on, he thought, the words fierce. Get your butts in here….

Dragon One

Eta Bootis IV

2020 hours, TFT

“Okay, chicks,” Allyn said. “Final correction is coming up. Lose the dust balls.”

At her command, each pilot switched off his or her forward singularity and decelerated, sending the atom- sized collections of dust and debris hurtling into the void. The maneuver was vital; those submicroscopic specks could wreak untold havoc with America’s internal spaces if they struck the carrier.

They hadn’t been in flight for long, and the dust masses were so minute they likely would have caused no damage. On the other hand, they were traveling slowly enough that the specks might not pass all the way through the carrier. They could become imbedded in her hull, where they would continue to feed and grow.

There were horror stories still told in the service from the earliest days of gravitic engineering, of ships infested with neutron-sized black holes, of ships and their crews dying slowly.

One by one, the fighters dropped into staggered approach vectors.

“Howie!” she called. “What’s your sit?”

“Doing okay, Skipper.” He sounded scared. Medical telemetry showed his heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure all significantly elevated. “VG is out. So are half my thrusters and some of my sensors. AI off-line. It’s gonna be a dead catch.”

“Stay with us,” she told him. “We’re almost home.”

Spaas’s Starhawk was badly mangled, still flying, but only just. That Toad particle beam had grazed his starboard side, killing both his variable geometry controls, his “VG,” and it had knocked out half of his control thrusters and some critical instrumentation, including his onboard computer. “Dead catch” meant he was going to hit the tangleweb as a dead chunk of metal, with no way of fine-tuning the last second of the approach.

His setup for trap would have to be bang-on perfect.

If America wasn’t in the middle of getting the hell out of Dodge, the likeliest scenario would have been to have Spaas match course and velocity with the carrier, then punch out, allowing SAR tugs from the America to come out and pick him up and recover the inert fighter. But they didn’t have the luxury of time now, and having the America maintain a steady velocity on a constant course for more than a few minutes would invite a barrage of hivel KK rounds that could reduce the carrier to half-molten fragments in seconds.

So they had to do it the hard way-with Spaas landing his crippled Starhawk on America’s rotating deck.

Howard Spaas wasn’t the best Starhawk driver Allyn had ever known, but he was good. He could be arrogant and elitist at times-he made a game of picking on the nuggets, the new pilots in the squadron-and he’d been written up more than once for disciplinary problems.

But he was part of the Dragonfire’s tight-knit family, and she didn’t want to lose him.

“Dragon One, Dragon Three.” That was Collins.

Here it comes. “Go ahead, Three.”

“Request permission to ride Dragon Two in.”

Collins wanted to make the trap side-by-side with Spaas. With her ship coming in just off Spaas’s forward quarter, he could check his alignment and vector by eye, and not have to rely so much on possibly malfunctioning sensors. Experienced pilots sometimes rode in with nuggets, or with other pilots experiencing instrumentation or thruster problems.

“Negative, Two.” Allyn switched to a private channel, so Spaas wouldn’t hear. “Damn it, Collie-dog, I don’t want to lose both of you if this goes bad.”

“Acknowledged.” Collins’ voice was tight, the word bitten off and hard.

Allyn switched back to the squadron channel. “Final turn, people. Let’s do it by the book.”

The America was still invisibly distant, some eight thousand kilometers up ahead. Their dustcatchers jettisoned, the fighters used brief applications of their singularities to align themselves precisely with the ship, then switched them off. The carrier was traveling directly away from them at ten kilometers per second, accelerating at fifty gravities, which increased its velocity by half a kilometer per second every second. The fighters were coming in faster, but slowing; by the time they were a hundred kilometers off America’s tail, they would be moving just three hundred meters per second faster than the carrier.

“VFA-44, you are cleared for trap. Landing Bay Two.”

“Dragon One. Copy.”

“Switch to AI approach,” she said.

“Confirmed,” her computer said. “AI in control of final approach.”

When everything was working right, the computer network between fighter and carrier did a much better job of nudging the ship into the aft opening of a rotating landing bay.

The AI triggered a five hundred grav singularity aft, braking her sharply, just as the America appeared ahead, rapidly swelling in apparent size. The singularity snapped off when she was moving just three hundred meters per second relative to the America.

The carrier looked so damned tiny, a hard-edged toy almost lost among stars and empty night.

And then the carrier’s aft end swelled to fill half the sky and she was into her trap.

Moments before, the carrier had switched off her own grav drive, simplifying the complex ballet balancing velocity and distance. Though conventions like up and down and above and below didn’t exist in free fall, the fighter’s attitude on final suggested that she was skimming in just beneath the vessel’s huge, aft quantum tap power module, the dark, silver-gray metal of the hull blurring past just above her head. Ahead, Landing Bay Two slowly swung in from the right.

The carrier’s hab modules were stacked around America’s spine, like layers in a cake, bent into a disk nestled in behind the mushroom-cap shield. The modules were in constant rotation, creating a steady out-is-down artificial gravity. A rotation of 2.11 turns per minute created the feeling of half a G at the outer