strongly blue-shifted from ahead, red-shifted from astern.
To counter this, ships traveling in formation sometimes assumed the rosette pattern while maintaining laser taclinks, allowing them to use wide-baseline interferometry to pick up and process weak or garbled signals. In effect, Green Squadron was now a single antenna over ten thousand kilometers across-the largest separation between any two of the twenty-four fighters in the formation.
He knew that when
If that transmission came,
Do
Gray intended to do exactly that.
They were losing.
The enemy was becoming quicker, more adept, was learning how to anticipate the quick-pass maneuvers of the fighters and lay down heavy fields of fire-particle beams, clouds of kinetic impactors, gravitic missiles, blossoming thermonuclear warheads. During the past two hours, thirteen Confederation fighters had been destroyed and five incapacitated, their systems down as they hurtled on blind and unpowered trajectories into darkness.
The fighters were also having to route more and more of their power to their drives. The enemy had been accelerating now at about five hundred gravities for two hours, fifteen minutes, and were now traveling at 40,500 kps, after having crossed just over one AU. With their higher accelerations, the fighters could match that speed easily enough, but every kilometer per second per second applied toward matching the enemy’s course toward the Inner System made that much less power available for maneuvering.
Lieutenant Theod Young’s War Eagle tumbled helplessly out of control, impacting against the shields of a Turusch behemoth, a small and heavily armed powered planetoid.
A window opened in his mind, and Gray felt the inrushing cascade of raw data.
The antenna rosette maneuver had worked, plucking the speed-blasted signal from space as it passed the hurtling formation of Starhawks. The fighter AIs, working together across the laser taclink, had processed and enhanced the data, transforming it into something intelligible.
They wouldn’t know about it for hours, yet, on the
Perhaps most important of all, thanks to Commander Allyn, he now had precise coordinates for the Turusch fleet. As minute followed objective minute, he saw more and more Turusch warships being plotted on Allyn’s tactical display, saw them accelerating, ponderously, toward the Inner System.
Green Squadron had been traveling outbound on a heading toward 15 hours right ascension, declination minus 10 degrees, in the northern reaches of the constellation Libra, the “Point Libra” designated as a nav point for ships trying to intercept the alien fleet. Allyn had intercepted the Turusch ships at a different nav point, however… Right Ascension 15 hours, 34 minutes; Declination plus 26 degrees, 43 minutes.
This second point was located some 37 degrees across the sky from Point Libra-meaning that Green Squadron was 37 degrees off the proper heading. This was what Gray had been waiting for…an
He wondered if there was any significance in that. His onboard sky charts listed Alphekka as an A0V/G5V double star seventy-two light years from Sol. The system was only about 300 million years old, though, and thick with proto-planetary dust and gas-too young for a planetary system to have fully formed.
Perhaps it was only coincidence that a bright, relatively nearby star lay close to that point. But possibly not….
“Green Squadron, all ships,” he called. “Set your nav beacons for Right Ascension fifteen hours, thirty-four minutes; Declination plus twenty-six degrees, forty-three minutes. On my mark, execute a thirty-seven-degree course change to the new heading. In three…two…one…
Still moving at close to light speed, the fighters threw out drive singularities, putting a steep gradient into space ahead, their straight-line courses bending through curved space and onto the new heading. Gray was holding his breath, waiting as fighter after fighter called in, acknowledging completion of the maneuver. At these speeds, the
Fortunately, the pilots might be green, but the AIs handling the details of the maneuver were, if not experienced,
All of the stars of the surrounding sky were crowded by the effects of relativistic travel into a narrow band of light now, some 30 degrees off his bow. The stars of Corona Borealis were among them, of course, but quite unrecognizable in the photic distortion. Gray told the AI to transmit the course change to Earth. They would learn of it shortly after they got the signal from Allyn’s fighters.
“AI,” he said. “I need a theoretical plot. Take the positions, course, and velocities of all of the Turusch ships in Allyn’s transmission, and work up an extended targeting estimate.”
“That estimate will, necessarily, be inaccurate,” the ship’s AI told him. “The enemy will be changing acceleration, if nothing else, while fighting Allyn’s wing.”
“Best guess,” he told the system. “We’re not God.”
“This will take several minutes.”
“Fast as you can.” Several minutes subjective could be an hour objective, and they didn’t have much more time than that.
Sooner than he’d feared, the AI announced, “Calculations complete.”
“Transmit it to the other ships in the squadron,” Gray said, “as targeting data.”
“Which weapons?” the AI asked.
“Something that will make a mark at ten or fifteen AUs,” Gray replied. “AMSOs.”
They were going to throw sand at the oncoming Turusch ships.
