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Void Hounds: Adamant
Chapter 1
Wing Commander Farina loved to fly, it was why she got out of her bunk every morning and the sole reason she'd become a Void Hound. The stars called to her, always just out of reach but so near she could almost touch them. Every time she looked upon them she wished she could just accelerate forever, feel the G-forces caress her bones and let her know she was alive. Which why standing still in her cockpit was so frustrating.
Through the infinite dark of space they cruised, Victor fighters, an entire Wing's worth. Small one-man craft, flattened ovals braced by three Propulsor fins. The front was a clear Permaglass canopy, with the pilot strapped in standing and below their feet a pair of quick-firing Pulsars hung. The fastest vessels ever built by man, their gravitional drives could reach one-quarter lightspeed when pressed. Agile, sleek and responsive, but right now they were drifting on inertia, their course ballistic only.
Farina longed to grab the steering yokes and awaken her Victor, but refrained. As Wing Commander she had to lead by example, making sure her fellow pilots followed suit. Still she was aware if they weren't here she might be tempted to throw caution to the wind, an urge held back only by the firm hand of duty. She was not out here to indulge her passion for speed, but to complete a specific mission, one vital to the war effort.
Across known space war raged, worlds fell to rapacious invaders and the embattled defenders of freedom collapsed on all fronts. The Settlers Guild had sent their Jackal warriors forth to lay waste all opposition and six months of undisputed victory had they enjoyed, with but one exception. The Entente Worlds had retained one base, Londonium, last of the Core planets yet free, a bastion that stood inviolate against all the Jackals could throw at them. Now after six months they were ready to strike back, the Void Hounds had been unleashed.
A pulse in the neural-shunt that bound her brainstem into the Victor's control interfaces. Her passive sensors had been pinged, triggered by an active sensor sweep from the dark. Too soon, she grimaced, they should have several minutes more. Perhaps it was merely a routine sweep, she pondered but that was foolish, space was vast and easy to disappear into, unless one did something stupid like broadcast with comms or active sensors. Someone trying to hide wouldn't dare announce their presence so, unless they had seen something that startled them.
"Scoundrel-leader to Wing, we've been spotted, power up and engage Propulsors!" she cried. Instantly the Victors came alive, power surging through their systems. Propulsors engaged, sensors awoke, Nav-shields flickered into being and Pulsars glowed with potential. Farina felt it all through her neural-shunt, the link making her fighter a part of her. She felt the craft as an extension of her body, its drives her legs, its weapons her fists and its sensors her eyes.
The target lay ahead, far beyond the range of a human eyeball, not that there was light enough this far into deep space to see anyway. Her neural-shunt painted an image into her visual cortex, Guilder cargo barges, a dozen of them, hanging over a lonely asteroid. They were using it as a navigational marker, their simple computers limited to the cheapest possible components and requiring fixed waypoints to calibrate. Good for Farina, if they had been sailing through the vast emptiness of space no one would ever have found them.
The comms came alive as pilot Clais stated, "Reading a dozen transports, right where the spysats said they would be."
"Three minutes to contact," Farina muttered, "I'd hoped to get closer, but they can't get away."
"I can't see any escorts," pilot Wesker mused.
"They will have escorts, be sure of that," Farina growled.
"But..."
"The Jackal's Geno-corp aren't idiots!" Farina snapped, "I'll worry about the Hellrazors, you just focus on putting that Shrike where it belongs."
Silence fell as forty Victors streaked towards their targets, less than a lightminute away. The Jackals must surely be panicking, seeing deadly Victors bearing down on them. The Yokohama star system was supposed to be secure, a vital transfer point for their invasion fleets, they had not expected Entente fighters to appear from nowhere. But that did not mean they were unprepared.
"Targets breaking formation," pilot Haruki reported, "Reading five corvettes and two frigates."
"Attack or escort variants?" Farina pressed.
"Unknown."
"Damn it, put those fancy Illuminist implants to use and..."
"Wait, fighters are launching, reading twelve Hellrazors taking up position."
Farina gritted her teeth, "Escort carriers, looks like this is going to be a real fight. Scoundrel Wing break up as planned, odds adopt intercept duty, clear a path for the evens, our mission is to get those bombs into enemy hulls. Bombers target the corvettes if you have to, but our real objective is the barges. Every ship we take out here is one less resupply for the invaders. Stay sharp, don't expect this to be as easy as the sims and watch out for each other. On my first mark bombers will break to match velocity with target, second mark for the interceptors... mark... mark!"
Farina reached out to grasp the control yokes and her Victor slammed backwards. G-dampers fought to cancel inertial pressures but universal constants were not so easily denied and some slipped past. It would be easier to engage at one-quarter lightspeed, but also impossible. No weapon system devised by man could pinpoint an object moving so fast, so space combatants first had to match velocity if they wanted to fight. Yet another reason battles in open space did not happen, only around celestial phenomenon could fights take place at all.
Half the Victors pulled away but the Jackals saw the moment to pounce. Hellrazor fighters jumped towards them, the five-clawed fighters chopping space with the gravitic backwash of their Propulsors. Their hulls were longer than a Victor's and their Pulsars braced the cockpit to either side. Their thin Propulsors gave them an aquatic appearance, like a squid on the hunt.
"Break!" Farina yelled as she jerked her yokes about in a random evasion. The stars became a blur as her fighter tumbled away, narrowly avoiding being reduced to atoms by an incoming Pulsar shot. Farina's flightsuit squeezed her lower body to force blood into her brain as her hands jerked the other way and righted herself. The neural-shunt told her that a Hellrazor was twisting about, trying to get onto another Victor's six, sticking to its rear as Pulsars blazed. It was a rookie mistake, this Jackal was fixated on his kill, unaware of the target he made.
"He's on me!" pilot Mendoza hollered.
"Fly evasive!" Farina snapped, "I'm incoming!"
"I can't get clear!"
"Hold your nerve rookie, Scoundrels don't panic!"
Farina was pressed into the rear of her cockpit as the Victor surged after them. The pair were jinking across the void, but Farina was a combat ace and corrected with instinctive ease. There was no time to target so elusive a dot but she didn't consciously have to, her neural-shunt calculated vectors faster than thought and her Pulsars blazed before she knew it. A flash of light and the Hellrazor came apart, Propulsor fins torn from the expanding fireball as Farina whisked past.
"Scratch one squiddie!" Farina hollered as she pivoted in space and tore off.
"You... you saved me," Mendoza gasped as she fell in behind the commander.
"Get your damned head in the game and get off my arse!" Farina snapped, "Formation flying is suicide in combat, rookie or not you should know that!"
She matched deeds to words, twisting randomly over and diving into the fray. The three-dimensional aspect of space was a crazed morass of swirling dots, but she read it with an expert eye. The Victors had the edge in numbers but were green as hell, few among them having seen a real fight. The surviving veterans were aces to a man, but couldn't be everywhere. Comm chatter rang, "Squiddie closing. I see him, I see... They got Jake oh my gods Jakes' gone he's... Bastards, I got him, scratch! Corvettes closing. Get clear, don't let their Pulsar Grids target you! Argh! Frig I said get clear!"
Farina gritted her teeth as lifesigns winked out, new pilots swatted from the void one by one. They were too green, they shouldn't be flying into a fight, but the Entente had no choice but to use what they had. There was nothing to be done save press the attack and she did so with full gusto. Into the fray she plunged, randomly weaving to and fro. A Hellrazor blew apart before she even knew he was there, but another Victor was lost as a corvette blasted him with a hull-mounted Pulsar grids. The flak was intense but she pressed on, seeking the few remaining Jackal pilots. A glint in the eye and her Pulsars fired, blowing a Jackal to atoms then the sky was clear of fighters.
Farina bellowed, "Hellrazors are gone, interceptors break off and fall back, we can't beat their shields. Bombers, its down to you."
"Copy Scoundrel-leader," Clais called with crisp precision, "We've got multi-megaton gifts for all!"
Farina pulled away as the second wave closed in. Twenty Victors, their bellies swollen with the bulk of Mark II Shrike missiles. Farina's puny Pulsars would make no impact on a military-grade shield, but those warheads would. She curved about the edges of the combat zone, watching as the corvettes directed their ire towards the incoming fighters. Pulsar girds streaked the void with plasma, but the Victors were agile indeed and weaved a path through the flak. Targeting computers struggled to predict their motions but no machine could compete with the randomness of human thought, the exact reason pilots hadn't been replaced with drones. The Victors evaded with aplomb, almost unscathed, losing only one of their number to a stray burst.
Farina focused her attention as a trio of Victors let fly with cries of "Shrike away!" Compact missiles shot off, streaking towards the corvettes. Mark II Shrikes, far less bulky and heavy than the godsawful Mark I, but retaining their most precious aspect. Wormhole generators, triggering as they crossed the fifty-metre mark. In an instant the missiles disappeared, skipping across sixteen-dimensional space to reappear inside their target's shield envelopes.
"Ship-kills!" Clais roared as three corvettes vanished, consumed by five-megaton blasts apiece. Farina's eyes watered as the infinite dark was lit up, but the fight wasn't over. The remaining Victors shot past the wallowing survivors, heading straight for the panicking cargo barges. They were breaking up, some headed up or down, left or right, and all accelerating as hard as they could, trying to use the three-dimensional vastness of space as cover.
"They're getting away!" Weskar cried.
"The hell they are," Farina snapped.
"But we can't hit them all!"
"Yes we can, no cargo barge outruns a Victor. Watch Clais and see how it's done!"
The Victors split up, sixteen of them flying apart like seeds scattered into the wind. The cargo barges geared up their drives but their Propulsors were as cheap as the rest of their builds, barely able to achieve one-tenth lightspeed on a good day, and accelerating so slow they would never reach it anyway. Victors fell upon them before they had a chance to get away and the cries rang, "Shrikes away!"
Nuclear detonations lit the vastness of space once more, five-megaton blasts tearing hulls to pieces. Farina's grinned as Jackals died, swatted from the universe with casual disdain. Shrikes had put paid to bigger and tougher ships than these, and though the Mark II's were only a tenth the power of their predecessors they were more than enough to destroy these flimsy cargo barges. Hundreds of Jackals died, millions of tonnes of supplies were wiped out, leaving their invasion armies that much weaker. Farina looked upon the slowly spreading atoms as they ebbed like cooling coal dust and smiled, she'd had worse days.
"All targets destroyed," Clais reported with a veteran's chill deportment.
"Ha! Let's finish the rest off!" Mendoza cried.
"Belay that, form up on me, we're done here."
"But there's some corvettes and frigates left," Weskar protested.
"Irrelevant, the mission was to hit the convoy, we've done that, now we get out alive. Follow me to the rendezvous with Swiftsure."
The surviving Victors turned their rears to the cooling ashes, accelerating hard. The remaining Jackal escorts wallowed in dismay, unable to match the acceleration curves. They'd fought for all they were worth but had been no match for the wonder weapon that was the Shrike missile. Fighters, long held obsolete jokes in an age of big-gun starships, were now the deadliest killers in space, making their home Battlecarrier the queen bitch of the stars.
The Victors formed up as they streaked for the edge of senor range and Haruki crowed, "I got a kill, I tagged a squiddie!"
"Good for you, I got three," Farina grunted.
"Three?!" Mendoza gulped, "What's that make you, a triple-ace?"
"Passed triple a while back, lost count after that," Farina snorted, "Now stow the chatter and act like Godsdamned professionals. It's four lighthours to Yokohama prime, let's pray Captain Harrison has already won his fight by the time we get there."