“We will fire in volleys,” Gray told the others. “By the numbers. Group one, ready…
And from each of six Starhawk fighters, two AMSO missiles dropped and streaked into blackness, accelerating at two thousand gravities. “
The idea was hardly a new one. As Gray had mentioned, the A-7 strike package used for long-range planetary or fleet bombardment used the same concept. The twist was using AMSO defensive fire as an offensive weapon-a weapon of decidedly mass destruction.
“Group two, ready…
Twelve more AS-78 missiles slipped from Starhawk missile bays and engaged their drives, vanishing into the twisted strangeness of near-
“Group three, ready…
The missiles had been reprogrammed. They would not automatically detonate, scattering their matter- compressed lead-grain warloads a few seconds after firing. Instead, they would detonate when their onboard radars picked up the first enemy ships ten light seconds ahead. The sand clouds should still be fairly tightly packed in that distance, still carry a staggering kinetic punch.
Gray knew there’d been experiments with using sandcasters as offensive weapons. The idea had been dropped years ago, primarily because it was such a blind, area-effect, deadly weapon; fire one of the things at near-
But in this particular tactical setup…why not? The only thing in that direction was the star Alphekka. Maybe a few grains of sand or hot plasma would sizzle into that star system seventy-five years or so from now, still traveling at 99.7 percent
“Group four,
He felt his own Starhawk lurch as his missiles slid off the launch rails. “Fox Two!” he called, adding his cry to the fox calls of the others.
In the meantime, seventy-two AMSO missiles packed with sand-sized lead BBs were going to burn their way through the oncoming Turusch fleet. Their shields would stop a lot of the attack…but this was a
Handfuls of sand, turned into weapons of mass destruction.
Relativistic shotgun blasts.
Gray prayed that he hadn’t just made a cataclysmic error in judgment.
America
Marissa Allyn was shaking. It was happening
The surviving Confederation fighters were breaking away from the Turusch fleet now, individual ships spreading out in all directions. Their best efforts had worn away at the massive, inbound enemy force, but the remaining Turusch warships still outnumbered the fleet waiting for them in the Inner System,
How
The infalling salvo could well devastate the technological infrastructure throughout the Inner System, could leave the cities of both Earth and Mars in smoldering ruins.
And the handful of
“Regroup!” Captain Dixon was yelling over the tactical channel. “All fighters, regroup!”
What the hell was the point? They, all of humankind, had
On her tactical display, she saw red pinpoints, clouds of them, sweeping out from the Turusch warfleet, Toad fighters in pursuit of the fleeing Confederation fighters.
Allyn struggled to stop the shaking. Those Toads were relentlessly hunting down individual fleeing Confederation fighters, trying to sweep them from the sky. There were only twenty-three fighters left now, twenty- three out of the initial fifty-seven.
A pair of Toads was dropping onto Dixon’s six, dogging him, closing on him…
“I’ve got two on my tail!” Dixon called.
Allyn threw her Starhawk into a sharp one-eighty, as tight a turn as she could manage as the tidal forces generated by her drive singularity threatened to pull her and her ship to pieces. Then she was hurtling back the way she’d come, heading straight for the CAG and the Turusch fighter now five hundred kilometers behind him.
“Hold your vector, CAG!” she called. She didn’t want him pulling a sudden maneuver and crashing into her. She lined up on the nearest Toad and triggered a long burst from her KK cannon, sending a stream of compressed, depleted uranium slugs slamming past Dixon’s fighter and into the enemy ship. The Toad had dropped its forward shields to get a clear shot at the CAG, and the impact opened the enemy craft as if it had been unzipped.
And then her weapon ran dry, the last of her KK projectiles gone. She targeted the second Toad as she flashed past Dixon…but in the instant she fired, the Toad fired its particle beams at the CAG’s ship.
She hurtled past the Toad at a relative velocity of some hundreds of kilometers per second, too fast to see if she’d hurt it. On her display, however, Captain Dixon’s Starhawk flared up in a brilliant fireball, then faded out.
“CAG! CAG, do you copy?”
Maybe his transponder was out. Maybe…maybe…
“CAG, do you copy?” There was no reply.
And a new thought struck Allyn, struck her and shook her and left a hard, cold knot behind her breastbone. The CAG was dead…and so was Commander Jacelyn, the skipper of the Impactors and the wing’s deputy CAG.
Commander Fremont, CO of the Death Rattlers…dead.
Commander Murcheson, skipper of the Star Tigers…dead.
Commander Burnham, CO of the Nighthawks…out of control, missing, presumed dead.
Marissa Allyn was the last squadron commander left, even if she no longer had a squadron…and her rank had just put her in command of the surviving fighters.
And somehow she was going to have to bring them out of this.
AS-78 Anti-Missile Shield Ordnance, or AMSO missiles, accelerated at two thousand gravities. Normally they popped-scattering their warload of compressed, depleted uranium micropellets-a few thousand meters ahead of the firing ship, dispersing the sand in a fast-moving and expanding cloud that could refract incoming lasers, absorb particle beams, and explode or ablate missiles, creating a cheap, simple, and reasonably effective defensive shield.
They had to be used selectively and with tactical precision, of course. If the firing ship changed course, the sand cloud kept moving on the original vector, vanishing uselessly into space. And explosions and particle-beam hits tended to disperse the cloud, or transform much of it into expanding plasma, so a few incoming shots rendered it
