Alaska stood on her foremost main gun turret, surrounded by displays of teal-green light. So far, everything was going just as Arizona had said. The human orbital craft had stayed on its expected course, and it would soon reach a point where she would have a clear line of fire. She had been getting strange readings that could have indicated something was moving toward her position over the continent, but couldn't find anything distinctive. Nothing had come up when she subjected the data to her anti-stealth algorithms, and she couldn't get a return on her radar systems, so she figured it was probably nothing.
The Mental Model itself took the shape of a young woman in her mid to late teens of medium height. She had pale skin, bright blue eyes, and long green hair which cascaded down nearly reaching her waist, and wore a simple pale dress, a garment which was almost normal compared to the clothing choices of certain other Metal Models.
She saw a small light appear on her displays, indicating an incoming communication on the Concept Comm system. She raised her hand and pressed it to her ear, initiating a voice-only connection, which was more appropriate than full VR in what could very quickly turn into a warzone.
"Alaska, are you in place?" It was Arizona, the Flagship of the Eastern Pacific Fleet.
"Yup, I'm ready, Arizona." Alaska said, as she broke through a particularly large swell, applying a small amount of engine power to keep station.
"Good." The Flagship said. "I'm reading several large concentrations of energy signatures along the coast. The humans may try something to protect their craft. If they're sending something by orbital, it has to be important to them."
"Oh, by the way," Alaska said, sending her sensor data to the Flagship. "I getting some strange readings. It could be something moving supersonic, but the profile is all wrong, and I can't see anything."
Arizona paused for a moment as she reviewed the data Alaska had sent. "I'm sure it's nothing," she said "but if not, just kill it."
"Well, alright then." Alaska said. "I've got it."
Ars hugged the ground as he flew toward the coast, as so far as that was possible when moving at nearly three times the speed of sound.
Doing that in a conventional aircraft, of course, could have been something of a problem. One concern would have been maneuvering to stay within a safe distance of the ground without crashing into it, or popping up and ruining his concealment, which could cost him the element of surprise. Given that he still had the Cascades and Sierra Nevada Ranges between himself and the ocean, popping up probably wouldn't ruin the mission, but plowing into Mount St. Helens with the force of a cargo train at full speed probably would.
In any case, the flight to the coast had been programmed in advance, so until he approached the coast, there was very little for him to do. There were deviations from the terrain the program was based on, of course, but with his experience and the neural interface, correcting for those was child's play.
In addition, the sonic boom produced by a craft the size of Ragnarok moving at such a speed would be immense, sufficient to cause damage to even well-built structures. However, Ragnarok possessed a system unlike any possessed by every other aircraft on the planet.
The Maxwell-Tesseract Field.
The Maxwell-Tesseract Field was an electromagnetic field projected into the fourth dimension, then refracted back into the normal three in a form that could interact with real matter. Maybe. Truth be told, Ars didn't really understand much of it beyond that it involved electromagnetism and squared cubes. According to Raphael, the Phoenix Chief of Engineering and the man who had developed the system, no one, himself included, really understood it.
One thing that had been made clear, however, was that the Maxwell-Tesseract Field was not a reskinned human Klein Field. The Klein Field operated on gravitic principals, while the Maxwell Field lay firmly in the realm of electromagnetism. Beyond that, however, there were critical operational differences.
The Klein Field operated by storing the energy of incoming attacks, then venting it slowly over time. While the theory stated that it was a simple matter to overload the field and hard crash the generators, then attack the hull of the ship directly while it attempted to vent the accumulated energy and reactivate the shield. In practice, however, things were almost universally more difficult. The massive capacity of the Klein Bottle the field used to store the energy, particularly on larger ships, made it practically impossible to deliver sufficient energy with the comparatively antiquated weapons humanity had at its disposal before the Fog vessel destroyed the opposing human forces.
On the other hand, the Tesseract Field operated more like projectable wall surrounding the craft. It helped reduce the damage from incoming attacks, but was much easier to penetrate than a Klein Field. The type of incoming attack mattered a lot more to a Maxwell Field; a Klein Field, which blocked everything with about the same efficiency. The Maxwell-Tesseract Field blocked attacks that relied on raw energy, such as the lasers that were the bane of modern aircraft, more effectively than it did kinetic weapons or explosions.
However, the Maxwell Field had other uses. Currently, he was projecting his Field around and ahead of his aircraft, creating a zone of normal pressure around it, somehow regulating the buildup of pressure and on the leading edge of the field. Raphael had likened the process to plasma supercavitation, but employing the Maxwell-Tesseract Field to form the bubble rather than an envelope of ionized gas.
All this had the net effect of greatly reducing the both the drag and the sonic boom produced by the Eladrin which, given its size and speed, would have been significant.
Ars began to angle south slightly as He reached the mountains. They passed him in a blur, miles vanishing behind him at an absurd pace. He was already out of secure transmission range of the Phoenix Base, but as he flew, he occasionally passed a laser transmitter. The unmanned transmitters were physically connected to a secure tactical network, allowing him to stay at least partially connected.
Ars watched as he approached the ridge line of the mountains. He would cross in ten seconds. Once he did, he would lose the cover and, more importantly, concealment the range currently granted him. He would become visible to every Fog radar array for more the two hundred miles.
He took a deep breath, then accelerated.
Ragnarok burst over the ridgeline like an avenging angel, the flare of superheated air from his plasma engine looking for all the world like a second sunrise behind him.
Alarms flashed across the displays surround the Mental Model of the Alaska. The simulacrum staggered as immense streams of data flowed into her from the Fog Joint Tactical Network.
"W-what... what is this?" She muttered, begin to process the information. She had just detected a massive airborne radar contact moving at incredible speed, a fairly small but intense heat source, and the n-waves of a supersonic object... all headed straight toward her.
"I... I'm a battleship of the Fog!" She said, voice shaking, trying to reassure herself. This new craft was impressive for a product of human engineering, but it was a human craft all the same. Its power curve was insane for something of its size, but still not nearly enough to saturate the Klein Bottle of a ship of her size.
She began to prepare herself for combat, and also to intercept the SSTO. There was a patrol boat in the path of the new human vehicle, and it would have to overcome that before it could even attempt to interfere with the interception mission.
Ars left the mountains, gaining altitude as he did so, and began to prepare himself for battle. A Fog patrol boat was stationed a few miles offshore; it would become his first target. The Eladrin had an impressive arsenal. As he approached, he readied his forward-facing weapons: three Hypervelocity Missile Launchers, or HVMs, and five 88mm aperture magnetic flux propulsion plasma weapon systems, or Starlight Rifles for short.
With a though and a flick of his finger, Ars brought the targeting sights for the HVM launchers onto the Fog boat. It lacked a Klein Field, and its armor was almost laughably thin. Ars pressed the firing stud.
A massive electrical charge was drawn into each of the HVM launchers. In a fraction of a second, the powerful railgun lining the missile tube launches the projectile forward, while simultaneously imparting the immense charge necessary to power its onboard engine.
The missiles lanced out of their launchers at more than twice the velocity of the Eladrin, lit off their onboard motors, and began to accelerate. Technically, they were guided weapons, but given their speed, meaningful course correction was functionally impossible.
That didn't matter. The weapons streaked down towards their target, exceeding ten times the speed of sound. In fact, the immense velocity of their passage was sufficient to literally ionize the air around them into plasma as they passed. Relatively cool plasma, as such things went, but still absurdly hot.
However, the designers of the weapon had expected this occurrence, and accounted for it in their final design. Still, they had not included any sort of design feature intended to discourage this effect. They had not, however, put considerable effort into encouraging it.
Each HVM was equipped with a primitive Maxwell-Tesseract Field projector. It was nowhere near the complexity, power, or cost of those installed on the Eladrin, but, for the brief time before it burned out its motor and expended the energy endowed in it on launch, potent all the same. The projected field forced the plasma produced by the speed of the missile to flow around the body of the projectile, but not touch it. This created an effect on the weapon which, like a supercavitating torpedo, allowed the HVM to escape much of the drag it should have experienced, making the hypersonic weapon practical.
Atmospheric plasma supercavitation.
The Hypervelocity missiles streaked toward the Fog patrol boat, instantly penetrating the point defense grid which, not even fully online, had next to no chance of stopping them.
One HVM struck the vessel in the superstructure, and the other two hit amidships, about halfway between the hull and the waterline. The energy of the collision liquidized everything on impact, but the iridium-osmium penetrator head of the HVM held together better than the nanomaterial armor of the Fog vessel. The jets of molten metal bored through the armor and feathered out into the compartments of the ship, burning and shredding everything in their path.
As Ars watched his missiles impact, an anti-air laser mounted on the Fog ship targeted Ragnarok and fired, sending a brief but incredibly powerful beam of coherent light with enough power to potentially melt a lesser aircraft slamming into the human fighter.
"Enemy laserfire detected." The Eladrin computer intoned. "Enemy laser impact. Field integrity unchanged."
"Commerce evasive maneuvers!" Ars commanded, bringing the Starlight rifles online. "Prioritize maintaining fields of fire."
As his aircraft began to jink erratically under computer control, Ars aimed his Starlight rifles. He drew a bead on the Fog ship and commanded his weapons to fire. The powerful magnetic fields in his plasma cannons rippled, sending the jet of ionized gas, far hotter than that which built up around a Hypervelocity Missile, shooting towards the maneuvering Fog patrol vessel.
The plasma shots crossed the space separating the combatants like a bolt of lightning. One of the shots went wide, striking the ocean and sending up a plume of steam, but the other four struck the fog ship, explosively melting and ablating material off the deck and hull where they struck.
A few seconds later, the Starlight Rifles fired again.
Just after he launched the second volley, dozens of threat indicators appeared on Ars' display. The enemy ship had finally gained a hard lock on him, and appeared to be firing everything it had. A swarm of small, swift interceptor missiles launched from several launchers on the deck of the Fog vessel, while a smaller number of larger, slower hybrid projectiles rose from Vertical Launch Cells on the deck of the ship.
Ars put his craft into a sharp right angle turn and activated his third main weapons system. The Eladrin was covered in dozens of small to medium rapid-firing railguns which provided it with close range fire power and formed the backbone of its point-defense system.
The missiles changed course to follow Ars and, as they closed, the railguns opened up. In a few frantic moments the hail of steel they threw destroyed most of the interceptor missiles. The larger missiles continued through the ruins of their destroyed brethren, all but three of them meeting the same fate.
A warning flashed across Ars' displays. Detonation Imminent.
As soon as Ars saw the message, the enemy missiles detonated. The Eladrin, and by extension, Ars, rocked violently as the shock waves struck the craft.
"Field integrity strong and recovering." The flight computer said. "Hull damage minimal. No loss of combat capabilities."
Ars brought the Eladrin back around and resumed his assault on the Fog patrol boat. Its movement had slowed somewhat, but the flight computer informed him that hadn't suffered significant loss of combat capability or hull integrity.
Time to try something new. Ars opened the targeting sight for his HVM launchers and aligned the crosshairs on the Fog ship. A laser slashed across his craft. His need for precision precluded significant evasive maneuvering, and, for the time being, his Tesseract Field was more than enough protection.
He lowered the crosshairs on the Fog torpedo boat to just above the waterline, squeezed off a shot, then rolled to the side to get clear of a larger laser turret currently rotating toward him. His maneuver worked; the computer registered a beam corona just under a hundred feet to his right.
The HVMs closed with the enemy ship, once again effortlessly penetrating its point defense. One of the missiles struck the hull of the ship just above the waterline, and another had been aimed too low and slammed into the ocean, ripping itself apart against the water before it could reach its target.
The third missile, however, entered the water at a shallow angle only a few feet short of the Fog ship. Its plasma shell vaporized the water just before it could touch it and, engine flaring, it struck the hull of the Fog vessel at full speed. It shredded the internal compartmentalization just as effectively as before, but this time a tide of seawater rushed in behind it
Ars gave no respite. Before he received damage assessments from the missile strikes, he brought his plasma guns to bear on the now-stricken ship and opened fire. Bolts of energy hotter than the surface of the sun hammered into the hull of the vessel, which was beginning to list. Ars went in for the kill.
He turned into a shallow dive toward the Fog vessel, reducing his speed. As he did so, the Maxwell-Tesseract Field surrounding his craft fluxed and reshaped, allowing a large turret assembly mounted on the belly of the Eladrin to rotate out of its minimum profile 'travel configuration'.
Ars grinned as the weapons on the turret, a heavy 120mm Starlight Cannon, with two side mounted 88mm plasma rifles, powered up. The smaller weapons fired first, their energy bolts struck point defense gun emplacements, empty, but bizarrely operational WWII quad-gun emplacements, and vaporized them. Instants later, the heavy plasma round struck. While its diameter wasn't that much larger than the smaller weapons, it used even hotter plasma than the smaller guns, and more of it was packed into the same amount of space. Combined with the surprisingly large volume increase over the smaller weapons, it was rated as nearly four times as powerful.
The 120mm plasma blast impacted one of the main turrets, ending its efforts to swat Ars from the sky.
As Ars leveled out only slightly higher than the tallest mast on the ship, he dropped to subsonic speed.
"Initiate railgun anti-surface fire." He commanded, focusing on controlling his approach, "Prioritize targeting thermal signatures and damage profiles consistent with plasma and HVM fire."
The railguns began to speak just after he did. Normally, they would have had next to no effect on an armored target, but the patrol boat had been severely damaged, and the selected targets already had their armor compromised.
Just as Ars finished his pass, secondary explosions began to wrack the enemy ship. He pulled up and accelerated as a congratulatory message flashed across his display, a small window next to it showing the floundering enemy vessel.
"...Wow." Melissa said, gesturing wildly at her station, "Look at Ars' neural activity readings! They're... how is he not dead?"
The readings were indeed impressive. Ars' neural activity was elevated far beyond his normal level, vastly exceeding the projections for neural activity during the admittedly demanding activity of Eladrin piloting.
"You have a point." Kalar muttered from the Surgeon station, "But even from the limited neural mapping I was able to do, Ars is an exceptional child. Combine that with the fact that we have next to no Eladrin interface data, and, until now, absolutely no combat data, I think it's too soon to start calling anything an anomaly."
"Sir, the Eladrin pilot is moving to engage the next target," the telemetry tech shouted, "however, he's beyond the horizon of our tight beam laser communication arrays."
"Green light it." Commander Marcus said. "Use Morse Code pulses in the Over-the-Horizon Radar."
"On it." CAPCOM said.
Ars sighted the second Fog Patrol Vessel in his flight path. They were weak, as such things went, but many had been built as anti-aircraft platforms, a role which translated well to intercepting orbital vehicles.
He came in low, working to prevent the Fog craft from gaining a lock on him for as long as possible. As he detected the ship's fire control radar starting to lock on to him, he popped up and began to charge his HVM launchers.
"Laser buildup detected in target." The flight computer said.
Ars fired his HVMs. The hypersonic projectiles shot through the point defense zone of the enemy ship and impacted, gutting the vessel.
The Fog boat started glowing, twisting jags of light reaching out from the vessel as secondary explosions detonated across the surface. Ars' gravitational detectors screamed. An instant later, it exploded, the shockwave visible as it rushed across the water. Ars' eyes widened and he grabbed his controls as tightly as he could. Moments later, the Eladrin began to shake as the shock front reached it.
That was odd, Ars though, examining the data from the explosion, I must have hit its main power facilities.
Ars took a deep breath as he stabilized his flight path, then opened his threat map. According to his latest information, a destroyer, the former USS Nicholas, was the next largest threat to the SSTO launch.
This one will have Wave Force Armor he thought, looking at the schematics of the ship, but beyond that, it's just a bigger version of those other two. I think I can take it.
He banked, setting a straight course toward his chosen target. The destroyer he had set his sights on displaced nearly as much as the two ships he had destroyed before combined, with a thicker hull and a Klein Field to boot.
A larger ship... if the reports are correct, it'll probably have better radar, and more missiles are a given. He frowned. Time to try something new.
Ars pulled up, rapidly gaining height.
"Computer, optimize accelerometers and graviton traps for Klein Field saturation measurement and put it onscreen." Ars said, opening the ammo counts for his remaining weapons. The Starlight Rifles had practically limitless ammunition, and the supply of the metal slivers which fed the railguns was rarely a significant concern. He still had well over two dozen HVMs remaining, and he hadn't fired any of his conventional missiles.
He sat silently for a moment.
Several proximity alarms went off. The destroyer was entering combat range.
The 'mind' that controlled a Fog Fleet Destroyer was a simple thing. Maintain combat effectiveness, obey the Flagship, and destroy the enemy. Given its rather limited experience, enemy was synonymous with human. It understood, accepted and obeyed the order not to attack the humans until they attempted to break the blockade, but it could not comprehend the order. The logic had been explained several times, but it was entirely based around events in the 'future', things that would somehow occur in nonexistent processor cycles.
This grated on it. How could something exist without existing? However, that was no longer relevant now. The humans had come to the sea, in violation of the blockade. True, it had been rather difficult to decisively declare this craft to be human; it had demonstrated capabilities far beyond what the Flagship had told it to expect. However, it had come from the land and was not of the Fog, so it had to be human.
The Fog destroyer activated its fire control radars and locked them onto the enemy craft. It was maneuvering enough to make it difficult to target it with its lasers, but a missile attack wouldn't pose a problem.
It generated a firing solution and launched every missile it had at the maneuvering human aircraft. Conservation of ammunition required an understanding of the concept of a future, not one of its strong points.
Ars' eyes widened as he saw the incoming missile barrage. More than forty large missiles, and nearly twice as many smaller interceptors.
"Rail guns to Point Defense!" He shouted, keying commands to begin his own missile launch. He had known that this ship packed more missiles, but there was a difference between knowing that and seeing it projected around him. "Deploy decoys and commence evasive maneuvers."
Immediately, Ars made a sharp, turn, putting him perpendicular to the incoming missiles. Maneuvering jets across the surface of the Eladrin flared spinning the craft faster than any unprotected human could possibly survive.
He hated to be so repetitive in a combat situation, but it worked for the Horatii triplets, after all. In addition, the maneuver also allowed him to bring more of his point defense railguns to bear on the missiles as they approached.
The maneuver spread out the missiles by speed and acceleration as they approached and, by not flying directly into them, gave Ars' railguns more time to intercept them.
The small interceptor missiles, the first to reach him, began to explode as soon as they reached the edge of Ars' point defense sphere. The wave of missiles very nearly reached him, but the accuracy of his point defense guns increased as the sprint missiles closed, and successfully destroyed all of the incoming weapons before they could achieve the contact detonation they required.
The large hybrid missiles came in hot on the heels of their smaller brethren. They had had time to build up more momentum, and were much smarter, capable of performing limited evasive maneuvers. Around half of the swarm of forty was lured off course by one of his decoys, leaving more than enough to kill him.
Five of the missiles were destroyed as they enter his point defense sphere, torn to shreds by streams of high velocity precision engineered steel spikes the size of railroad nails. As the missiles were destroyed, his graviton traps screamed.
"Corrosive Warheads. Great," Ars muttered, looking at the warning. If one of those detonated in contact with the hull it... would be bad.
As his guns waxed three more missiles, Ars put his nose up and began to accelerate, launching another decoy along his previous path of flight. Four missiles bought it, remaining on course to follow the decoy. Eight left.
"Come on come come one," The missiles were change course to pursue him. Could they maneuver and accelerate hard enough to keep up with the-
"Yes!" The missiles overshot. Slightly, but enough. As they began to turn back toward him, Ars spun his craft along its vertical axis and brought its ventral railguns to bear. They opened fire.
Allright, then, Ars thought, as the last remaining missile disintegrated. I think it's my turn. He activated his missile systems. Four rotary launchers, two on each flank of the Eladrin, began to spin, and each one began firing AGM-185 Air-to-ship missiles at a rate of just under one per second. The missiles locked onto the gravity signature of the Fog ship, lit their engines, and rocketed towards it.
Naturally, they moved much slower than the Hypervelocity Missiles, but there were a lot more of them. The point defense grid of the Fog ship swatted many of them, but more got through, detonating against its Klein Field.
The AGM-185 missiles had been developed as a complement to the Eladrin project. It carried much less rocket fuel than a weapon of a similar size, but it used a propellant which possessed a somewhat higher energy density that was commonly available. Given that it designed to be fired down from a craft that moved faster than most missiles, the designers had decided that this was an acceptable trade-off.
In exchange, they had packed the thing with explosives. Against even a destroyer's Klein field, the blast was insignificant, but when dozens of then detonated nearly simultaneously, they added up.
Ars watched as the calculated Klein Bottle saturation rose. Twelve... fifteen percent. That'll have to work. He activated his Starlight Rifles and opened fire.
The bolts of ionized gas struck the Klein Field of the ship, causing a rather unimpressive degree of saturation. That, however, wasn't the point. The Starlight Rifle was among the first weapons developed by humanity for the sole purpose of fighting the Fleet of Fog.
As each bolt struck, it began to be neutralized by the field layered over the ship. However, the immense energy of the blast was not to be deterred so easily. A small portion of the most energetic plasma, as the blast was neutralized, emerged from the center of the bolt as the outer layers were stripped away and continued through the barrier, superheating the air around it and, as it approached, the Wave Force Armor of the Hull. This ablated a thin layer of the armor producing an explosive force which, combined with the heat, damaged the Armor at the point struck beyond functionality.
Ars watched with satisfaction as the saturation percentage of the enemy's Klein Bottle rose to twenty-two percent. Better yet, several bright red spots were appearing on a holographic projection of the enemy ship under the saturation readout, displaying irregularities in the Klein Field caused by the Starlight Rifle impacts. His lips split into a vicious, predatory grin as he fired a second volley of plasma shots, then a third.
The Fog destroyer retaliated, saturating the sky around Ragnarok with energy beams, most of it wasted. The few that did connect were glancing hits, merely sweeping across the Eladrin rather than lingering long enough to cause meaningful harm. Ars haloed the three largest weak points in the Klein Field and fired his HVMs.
One missile was off target slightly and struck the Klein Field slightly outside the target area, saturating the bottle slightly but having no major effect. Another struck on target. It was deflected, but Ars noted a significantly larger increase in saturation.
The third missile, however, struck the weaken area of the shield, slowed slightly, and kept going. The missile struck the hull forward of the superstructure and penetrated, shredding itself as it cut into the interior spaces of the ship.
Ars watched as a plume of smoke rose from the site of the impact. The smoke was blown back over the superstructure of the vessel by the ship's formidable speed which, Ars noted with some satisfaction, had dropped below a hundred knots. He did nothing for a moment and simply few a straight course, exempting computer-controlled evasion maneuvers, while allowing the computer to analyze the Fog ship's loss of point defense and anti-air capabilities. Once this task was complete, he steered his craft into a wide, banking turn to continue his attack.
Raphael, along with the rest of the Phoenix engineering staff, watched the ongoing battle with baited breath. Their eyes were glued to massive screen that covered most of one wall of the massive central cavern of the engineering department, a space generally used as a hanger and, at present, a makeshift theater.
The Eladrin closed with the enemy ship, making extensive use of the hole in its point defense and hammering it with plasma fire. Raphael's fingers dug into his palms as the saturation of the enemy's Klein Bottle climbed under the hail of fire. Eighty... eighty-eight... ninety-five... come on come on come on.
Another volley of HVMs streaked toward the enemy ship. One was blocked by the Klein field, but the next two impacted unopposed. Then-
"WE HAVE BARRIER COLLAPSE!" Someone shouted.
"YES! TAKE THAT! MELTA SPAM ALL THE WAY!" The chief engineer shouted, jumping pointing at the massive screen.
"WOO HOO."
The general freak-out currently occurring in the Engineering Department was, from a rational point of view, completely reasonable. The men and women there were witnessing the culmination of, in many cases, over a decade of labor. More importantly, they were finally starting to see it pay off. As the staff watched the Eladrin pump plasma fire and HVMs into the stricken enemy of humanity, they became ecstatic.
Slowly, as the outcome became clear, the engineering staff began to calm down.
"Okay, people," Raphael said, clapping his hands together, "We did a great job on the Eladrin, but we are professionals, and we have important things to do." He gave the room a moment to quiet down. "Now, the betting pool is open! Sextuple or nothing on your victory bets, the new line on tonnage sunk is fifty-five hundred..."
The AI controlling the Nicholas was beginning to become concerned. Its Klein Field had been overloaded and collapsed, and it had sustained severe hull damage, including several breaches and, more concerningly, the destruction of large areas of its Wave Force Armor. Until the damage was repaired, a process which could take days, raising a new barrier would be extremely difficult and result in a Field a fraction of its normal strength.
After several seconds of calculations, the AI reached a decision. It had to retreat. It began to come around, just as the enemy aircraft turned for another attack run. Moments later, it detected weapons separation. It quickly registered incoming fire from the enemy's hypersonic weapons. That wasn't a significant concern; it could easily-
One of the missiles struck a severely damaged patch of armor on the stern of the ship, penetrated, and eviscerated the starboard gravity engine. Not only did this cause the obvious loss of propulsion power, but the resulting secondary explosion tore a large hole in the hull around the engine housing and, much more importantly, compromised the containment on one of the ship's main Thanatonium power modules.
As feedback from the destroyed module and engine began to wrack the rest of the power plant, the rest of the modules began to destabilize. An automatic response system kicked in and ejected the nineteen remaining modules from the ship. This disconnected them from the power grid and stabilized them, but came with the notable disadvantage of ejecting the modules.
Water began to pour into the ship, which now lacked even the power to use its pump systems to slow its sinking. As the prow of the ship began to rise out of the water, something that could be called a thought flashed through the Union Core of the ship. Especially given its origins, it was deep and profound, a brilliant commentary on the nature of everything. Translated to something an organic intelligence could understand, this proto-though went something like this.
Well, shit.
"YES!" Ars shouted, watching the kill confirmation from the Fog destroyer appear. "WHO'S NEXT?"
Ars figured he had enough ammunition remaining to continue the engagement. He opened his map of the battlespace to look for another target. What Ars did next would, viewed in coldly reasonable hindsight, could not be considered the pinnacle of tactical genius. In fact, an excellent argument could be made that it was close to the exact opposite. However, Ars was drunk on victory, and in the heights of his first real combat adrenaline rush.
The battlecruiser Alaska had engaged the SSTO with its lasers at extreme range, so far to no avail. As made a slight adjustment and set a heading directly toward the Capital Ship.
So, this isn't just some drone, it's one of the bastards responsible for the state of this world. This ship could be one of the ones that was at Second Midway, Ars though, looking over the statistics of the targeted ship. This ship could have been one of the ones that killed my father.
The plasma engine of the Eladrin flared to its maximum safe level, responding to the desire of its pilot. Ars leaned forward in his seat against the acceleration, teeth bared and eyes fixed on the icon representing the Alaska.
"What the hell is that idiot doing?" Melissa shouted, practically jumping out of her seat in the CIC and turning towards the commander, jabbing a finger at her screen. "He's attacking a Battlecruiser! Does he even have the authority to do that?"
"Ars' orders were to engage the Fleet of Fog and interfere with their attempts to intercept the SSTO." The commander said, "Besides, Ars is currently outside the range of our ground based communications gear. We can't contact him." Marcus shrugged, "Under these circumstance, he has free rein to determine how best to carry out his orders. As it happens, I agree with his interpretation. I suppose we could recall him, but we'd have to sacrifice a satellite to do so, and we both know how hard those are to replace."
"But... how can you be so nonchalant about it? Do you really think Ars has a chance of winning, or even surviving? Losing the Eladrin would be much worse than losing a satellite."
"Winning? No, the Eladrin lacks the firepower necessary to take down a Fog Capital Ship." The corners of his lips twitched upwards. "For now, anyway. Survival, however, is a completely different matter. Assuming he doesn't attack recklessly, I would say that he as an excellent chance of occupying this battlecruiser's full attention for the duration of the intercept window. "
"I... but... fine." Melissa slid back down into her seat.
"As it happens, I agree." Kalar said. The Medical Officer was lying back in his chair at the Surgeon's station, which he had somehow gotten to recline, with his feet up on his desk. As absurd as it seemed, without a direct, live data feed on the pilot's vitals, there was little the Flight Surgeon could do other than watch the battle and send the ground crew the occasional message about what ailments the pilot might land with. "That brat lost me a lot of money, but I don't think any of us expected him to perform this well. From what I've seen, though, I don't have any reason to doubt him.
Alaska frowned as her latest volley of lasers failed to contact the human orbital craft. She still had plenty of time to intercept the vehicle, but this particular SSTO was proving much harder to intercept than most other similar spacecraft.
At that moment, a message indicating the destruction of the Nicholas appeared on her display. Moments later, her long range radar array informed her of large airborne contact approaching her at insane speed. Almost immediately, her IFF informed her that this target was the hostile that had sunk the Nicholas, along with two patrol boats.
Alaska raised a hand and, with a gesture like brushing frost off a window, opened a farseeing.
A disk about four feet in diameter outlined in light appeared next to, showing the approaching aircraft with incredible detail. It was a sleek thing; its basic shape looked something like a winged spearhead. On closer inspection, however, there were some rather odd details. The craft had more protuberances than most other human aircraft she had seen, including several that looked like folded up appendages. It lacked a visible canopy, but was an order of magnitude larger than any of the human drones she had seen. The skin of the craft was jet black, but it was marbled by geometric patterns of deep blue lines which seemed to glow slightly.
In any case, Alaska could hardly afford having it interfere with her efforts to intercept the SSTO; she had to destroy it. She raised her hand, and nearly a hundred missile hatches along the eight hundred foot length of the ship opened. She waved it forward and the missiles launched, sending a swarm of death toward the distant aircraft.
Ars watched the wave of missiles approaching the Eladrin. They were still miles away, but closing at an insane pace.
"Computer, bring the Starlight Rifles to maximum rate of fire, minimum energy output and bolt coherency to maintain lethality on target at range. Commence fire at maximum engagement range."
As Ars began targeting the missiles he switched to manual control, allowing the computer the focus its full resources on the task of generating the requested firing solutions. The Alaska had opened fire on him with its lasers, but they were poorly targeted and severely underpowered, much of their energy and focus having been lost traveling through dozens of miles of atmosphere to reach him.
Still, however, there were a disturbingly large number of them and, according to the reading Ars was getting off the beam coronas, had much more energy behind them than those from the destroyer.
When the missiles closed to within ten miles of the Eladrin, two things happened. First, the Fog Battlecruiser ceased its laserfire. Given the relative positions of the combatants, continuing would have required it to shoot through its own missile formation and risk destroying them.
Second, the plasma guns on the Eladrin opened fire on the incoming missiles. The first few shots were practically useless, but as the range dropped, the accuracy increased dramatically, and the Starlight guns destroyed five of the missiles before they came within five miles.
The missiles continued to close. As watched as the Starlight Rifles obliterated another ten missiles, keeping an eye on their heat levels, which were hovering on the edge of 'safe' for combat operations. He switched his point defense to his railguns.
Power was redirected. As the railguns began to fire, it became clear they'd be overwhelmed. At that moment, Ars had one of the best terrible ideas of his life. He redlined his plasma drive, sending Ragnarok rocketing into the center of the oncoming missile formation.
He had just enough time start recovering from the sudden acceleration when the first missile detonated. He rocked in his seat as, one after another, the missiles detonated around the Eladrin, the blast waves and clouds of shrapnel sapping the integrity of its Maxwell-Tesseract Field.
As it happened, the tactic was not quite as stupid as it first appeared. The missiles were moving extremely quickly, which greatly limited their maneuverability. Therefore, only the missiles near the center of the formation were able to maneuver close enough to cause meaningful damage.
I may actually live through this, Ars though. His Maxwell Field readings seemed to support this, until the first corrosive warhead detonated. The black sphere of destruction began to expand. The moment it touched the hull of his aircraft, he was done. The Eladrin lacked the mass and volume to survive such an attack, and even a glancing hit could destroy the aerodynamics of the craft and send him to his death.
The orb of the Corrosive detonation expanded toward his craft. The bizarre gravatic rift grew until it came within about a foot of the skin of the Eladrin, where it stopped. Alarms blared inside the cockpit as an impression of the Eladrin was cut into detonation.
Then the Corrosive distortion flashed, emitting a shower of exotic radiation which momentarily blinded Ars' sensors, and vanished.
Ars surveyed his displays as they came back online, mildly shocked that he wasn't dead. Somehow, his Maxwell-Tesseract Field had stopped the Corrosive attack, but at a cost; everywhere the enemy gravity weapon had touched, the Tesseract Field had been frayed to almost nothing.
The Mental Model of the Alaska was concerned. Not only had this strange human vehicle destroyed three Fog escort vessels, it had survived contact with a Corrosive weapon. That should have been impossible. It possessed no Wave Force Armor, she was certain of that. Even if it had, nothing of that size could project a Klein Bottle powerful enough to absorb a Corrosive Warhead.
As she began charging her secondary and tertiary photon cannons to resume firing on the enemy aircraft, she detected weapon separation. Three small projectiles, moving twice as fast as the incoming enemy and accelerating.
She jump, letting out a small eep. Frantically, she commanded every charged tertiary gun with a line of sight to open fire on the projectiles. The secondary guns joined in a second later, filling the air with burning streams of light.
The fan of fire emanating from the eight hundred foot ship widened as the missiles closed. Moments before impact, a beam from a secondary turret sliced through one of the projectiles, ripping it to pieces. The Two surviving missiles impacted a moment later, vaporizing as they struck the Klein Field layered over the ship.
Alaska flinched at the impacts. They had caused only a fraction of a percentage of field saturation, but it was a big fraction, far more than any two human weapons of that size had any business causing.
She began to give the command to resume fire, but before she could complete it, the target did something. Suddenly, there were five identical contacts on her scopes, moving in a complex formation, weaving inside each other's course like a swarm of deranged insects.
They drew together for a moment, then three more missiles shot out of the cluster toward her. Decoys! She realized, but how do I find the real one...? She considered for a moment, then reactivated her farseeing.
The effigy began frantically searching the sky, waving her hand that anchored the farseeing around as she tried to align it with the human aircraft.
Ars fired his maneuvering thrusters, things truly out of place on an atmospheric craft, pushing Ragnarok several yards downward just as an enemy laser split the air he had just occupied.
He smiled as the beam cut out, rolling his Eladrin to the side to avoid another pair of incoming beams. His plan was working perfectly. The Fog ship had completely ceased attacking the SSTO. Further, the decoy drones also seemed to be completely successful, drawing away significant portions of the laser fire directed at him.
A beam punched through the weakened section of his defensive field, vaporizing a small channel into his armor before he ducked out of its path. He launched another volley of HVMs, and the incoming defensive fire slacked as the enemy attempted to intercept the missiles.
Ars cut in toward the Battlecruiser, closing to within the range of his Starlight Rifles. He sighted them on the ship and fired. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to drawn his drones alongside him before firing.
All of the plasma bolts struck their designated targets. This time, however, against the Klein Field of a full Capital Ship, they failed to burn through the field nearly as well as they had against the destroyer.
The Fog vessel responded, finally emptying boxes of interceptor missiles at him. He called his decoys in close, ordering the drones to form a shield between him and the ship as his own point defense weapons began firing.
The sprint missiles lived up to their name, closing insanely quickly. Ars lost two of his drones the second the swarm hit, including the one he had stationed over the breach in his Field.
A missile darted in, jinked down towards the breach, and detonated.
Hull integrity intact. Ars spun his craft, exposing its undamaged underside to the onslaught. His maneuver caused a slight lapse in his point defense, allowing several of the missiles to close.
The missiles shot in, bracket the Eladrin, and exploded. As the detonations rocked his craft and obliterated his remaining drones, Ars found himself laughing. This was it. This was what he had been born for.
The barrage of missiles died off, leaving the Eladrin intact. Ars rolled back to level and resumed firing, orbiting the enemy craft as he did so.
Afterwards, he couldn't really have said how long he had continued his attack. The Fog ship fired more interceptor missiles at him, but it fired each box as he moved into its firing arc, not saving them for another barrage like the first and, for the most part, his evasive maneuvering kept him ahead of the Fog lasers. He occasionally spun the Eladrin to line up a shot with his HVM launchers but, for the most part, settled for distracting the ship.
Eventually, the SSTO crossed through the intercept window, dropping below the western horizon. A message indicating this appeared on the display inside the cockpit of the Eladrin.
Ars broke off of his current half-finished orbit of the battlecruiser and made for home.
Commander Marcus, Melissa, and Kalar, three of the most influential personalities in the Phoenix organization, waited on the platform overlooking the Hanger Ars had been instructed to land in.
"I" Melissa shook her head, "I can't believe that just happened."
"This really is one for the history books." Kalar agreed.
"We've been working towards this for years." The commander said, not taking his eyes off the timer mounted on the far wall indicating the returning Eladrin's ETA. His voice lowered. "I just hope no one thinks this is even close to over, or that any more of our battles will be this easy."
The sound of machinery filled the chamber as the elevator to the surface began to descend. The chamber exploded into motion as the various ground crew teams scrambled to ensure they were ready for the arrival of the war machine.
The sound of the elevator drew closer. Abruptly, a massive platform dropped from the ceiling. A slight breeze followed it into the chamber and washed across those assembled.
Then the Eladrin came into sight, crouched atop the platform on its bizarre leg-things. Its black skin was covered in scorch marks, and several large chunks appeared to have been burned or cut out of its armor.
The three officers hurried, nearly at a run, down from the platform, onto and across the hangar floor. It was incredibly busy, but the mere presence of the commander seemed to split the crowd without any discernible action.
Raphael, the Engineering chief, was overseeing operations around the landed Eladrin. He turned to face the group as they approached. Behind him, a group of ground crewmen were wrangling what appeared to be fire hoses, using them to spray down the Eladrin.
"Commander," He said, nodding to Marcus. "We were spraying the bird down with an anti-rad agent. Standard procedure for anything exposed to a corrosive warhead."
It took only a few minutes to finish decontaminating Ragnarok. As the crewmen manning the houses stood down, a massive crane shaped like a flat, inverted 'u' moved into position, straddling the Eladrin. Raphael entered several commands into a control panel on one leg of the crane. As he did so, a robotic arm descended from the center of the crane's crossbar, bringing something that looked vaguely like an unholy hybrid of a buzzsaw, a can opener, and a bar code reader to bear on the cockpit hatch.
Raphael entered several more commands, and the machine descended into position over cockpit hatch on the Eladrin and went to work. It quickly cut through the spot welds that had formed on the outer armored hatch. The machine withdrew, and the pilot's seat began to rise out of the craft.
Melissa rushed forward, grabbing onto a ladder hanging down from a gantry being lowered into position next to the cockpit. She reached the top as it settled into position, moments before the pilot seat cleared the craft.
The neural interface needles retracted from the pilot, and Ars slumped to the side. Melissa caught him before he fell out of his seat.
"How'd I do?" Ars muttered, then passed out.
"So, he'll live?"
"Yea, he's fine." Kalar said. "Neural link overload. As inexperienced as he is, there really isn't any way to avoid it."
Commander Marcus nodded. "Excellent. I wish I could stay to monitor his recovery, but," he sighed, "I have to go."
Kalar raised an eyebrow. "Where?"
"St. Louis." He said closing his eyes and tilting his head back. "Politics."
Commander Marcus stepped up to the podium. A human sinking a Fog warship was a major occurrence, and the destruction of three, including one with a Klein Field, without using thermonuclear weapons, in fifteen minutes was nothing short of incredible.
President Constantine had called a joint session of Congress to review the events. The assembly moved with uncharacteristic speed, and both houses had assembled within hours. While there was far more to be done at Phoenix HQ than he was comfortable leaving, but he had to move quickly to gain the maximum benefit from the recent victory.
The Legislators were arrayed before him in a massive half-circle. The New Congress Chamber was laid out much like the old one in Washington, albeit on a much larger scale to accommodate a workstation for each of the six hundred and twenty five House Representatives and one hundred and forty-four Senators.
"Ladies and gentlemen of Congress. Today, my organization has won an unprecedented victory over the Fleet of Fog. The weapon we used to accomplish this victory has, by necessity, been kept classified until very recently."
He made a sign to one of his aides, instructing him to send the data file on the Eladrin to the assembled Congressmen. He gave them a minute to read through it, listening to the low murmur that echoed through the massive chamber.
"We refer to this weapons platform as the Eladrin." Marcus continued. "It is fundamentally different from every other combat aircraft on Earth. It employs advanced weapons Phoenix has developed, granting them a combat platform with the survivability needed to use them effectively. Save perhaps the I-401, Eladrin Sigma 12 is the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of humanity." Marcus paused for a moment, took a breath, and continued.
"We have four additional Eladrin units currently mothballed in various stages of the manufacturing process, with optimal pilots already selected, and if we had the funding, could have them combat ready in a matter of weeks. The estimated average cost for full activation would be just under five billion."
"Five billion for another four of these things," a representative mused, "Sounds like a pretty good bargain to-"
"The estimated figure was a unit cost, not a total, sir." Marcus corrected.
"Why do we need to spend anything on this project?" One of the Massachusetts Senators asked, not looking up from her desk."
"It could be because we're at war." Marcus said, "And the Eladrin project is the only thing that has been empirically proven to offer a substantial chance of victory."
"What do you mean, we're at war?" The Senator demanded, "The Fog haven't taken any hostile actions against us for more than a decade. You want us to go looking-"
Marcus raised an eyebrow. "Not at war? No hostile actions? I think murdering seventy five million Americans would be more than enough Casus Belli to ignore a little seventeen year... lull. I propose that Phoenix is granted the needed funding to bring the remaining Eladrin units to full active status, and that its ongoing budget is, at minimum, doubled."
"Why," another representative demanded, standing up, "are you using children as pilots?"
"It is a mechanical necessity of the control system." Marcus responded, the practiced line rolling off his tongue. "At present, the interface system we use cannot effectively interface with the nervous system of an adult. The specifics are both extremely complex and highly classified, but in essence, a normal human lacks certain synapses needed for interface, and an adult is incapable of developing them."
He coughed, then continued. "Also, out pilots are in their mid-teens, on the edge of childhood. Indeed, for most of human history, they would be considered full legal adults. Furthermore, our selection system endeavored to find pilot candidates with the mental and emotional stability needed to tolerate the demands we must place on them." And I certainly hope they were successful.
"Commander, I have a question," David Baker, one of the Texas Senators said. He was an influential man, and a grizzled veteran of both the East Asian War and several of the major Middle East campaigns. "How effective would you consider this Eladrin system to be against modern combat aircraft?"
"Think of what an F-32 Hyperion could do to World War II prop-driven fighters." Marcus said. "It would be like that."
"And you want to put that level of killing power in the hands of children?"
"And you want to gamble everything on Japan's Vibration Torpedo?"
Senator Baker clasped his hands and looked down for a moment. "You have my vote."
"Thank you, sir." Marcus said. That was one vote, but he still had a long way to go. "Now, any further questions?"
As he spoke, the display tastefully concealed in the podium which indicated which Representatives wished to speak lit up like a crème brûlée. This he thought, keeping his face neutral, is going to be a long day.
"So," Alexander said, stirring a stick of Caffeine powder into his cocoa, "How do you think it went?"
"Given that you watched the whole thing," Marcus replied, scooping a generous portion of ice chunks into his cup, "I would imagine that know exactly how it went."
"I know what happened but, given that you never tell anyone anything, I don't know if you accomplished anything." Alexander took a sip of his coca and leaned back in his seat, then continued, "You were aiming to channel money somewhere else, and your rather impressive appeal to funding was in fact a miserable failure."
"Well, I got most of what I wanted." Marcus said, "Which was the money, mostly. I also was aiming for some more operational privileges, but that was a secondary objective at most. I don't suppose you could give me nuclear release permission, could you?"
"You're not that good a friend, Marcus," the President muttered.
Marcus shrugged. "Worth a try. On the topic of nukes, how are your war preparations going?"
"As well as could be expected, given the... scale."
"Now what could such a mysterious comment possibly mean?"
"Because you've been any different over the past decade."
"Heh. Fair point, I suppose." Marcus chuckled for a moment, then his face straightened abruptly and raised his glass. "Too absent companions."
"And future victories."