Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk) Read online

  On board ship, we were debriefed and congratulated on our return from the dead, and for the destruction of our third fighter. We were the only crew that had more than one kill, and most of the other crews that had managed even a single kill had not lived through the experience.

  Early analysis of our opponents’ fighter revealed that it utilized a primary laser that was as powerful as those mounted on our destroyers. Their fighter radiated a lot of energy in the infrared band when its energy system was pushed hard, but despite being easy to target our lasers were too weak and our missiles too slow and stupid. Their technology seemed to be relatively crude, but their lasers packed approximately one thousand percent the energy of our own fighters, which more than made up for any lack of sophistication.

  If, or when, several alien fighters were able to get free of our own fighters long enough to attack a destroyer, its shields were not up to the task of bending that many laser beams away from it, and as a consequence, we lost a total of six destroyers along with the one that was so severely damaged. We started the battle with sixteen assorted destroyers and two cruisers, along with the two huge auxiliary fleet carriers and a number of fast supply ships. None of the combatants escaped unscathed, with the exception of the fast cargo transports, which held our only resupply of missiles.

  Most of the destroyers nearly shot themselves dry at one time or another during the engagement, and most of the enemy fighters that were knocked out were done so by a combination of missiles and lasers. Virtually all the kills were achieved by our destroyers and cruisers, but the overall loss ratio was severely in favor of the enemy.

  We knew that an effort was underway to attempt to offload some newer missiles out of the cargo vessels and onto the destroyers and cruisers, but that was a virtually impossible task to perform in the middle of a battle, and made even more difficult by the fact that those missiles were buried deep in the furthest recesses of the holds.

  In addition to the sorely missed destroyers, we lost over two thirds of our fighters in the effort to keep the enemy away from our fleet’s core. During the last two engagements the destroyers and cruisers had managed to swamp a few enemy fighters but if the enemy had not had to break off, the destroyers would have fired their magazines dry within another few minutes. The temporary lull in the running battle had allowed the cargo ships to come alongside and quickly resupply the destroyers. They also helped to temporarily repair some of the battle damage. The transports had a limited supply of more modern missiles and those were being pulled out of their cavernous holds and transferred to the escorts and carriers.

  Chapter 2

  Now, in a remote corner of a huge hold, we finally stared up at the object of our search, a craft that had served earth forces for many years, many years ago. We had both heard and read about it but never actually seen one. It was an attack ship that had been used to land troops on contested planet surfaces. It could carry up to ten heavily armored troops and was capable of sustaining a great deal of damage while getting them down safely.

  The Hawk series of assault craft had been in service for nearly a century before being finally retired. The ship I was looking up at was one of the last to be in active service. Its presence on our fleet carrier was a mystery to us, but we had no fighter to fly, and lots of spare time. On our own initiative we had gone through cargo manifests, looking for something we could do to help and noticed that there were four of these attack craft being transported to, presumably, a mothball fleet.

  We looked with interest up at its deep black curving surfaces. According to the manifest, it had been in reserve service up until three months ago, so we were working on the assumption that it was flyable.

  Our research had revealed that it had nearly thirty centimeters of an ablative hull material that could shrug off numerous direct hits from powerful ground based lasers without passing the energy through to anything important, such as for example, the crew. That same armor served to make the craft extremely hard to see with radar and it radiated almost nothing in the infrared band. For these reasons the Hawk had enjoyed a very long service life and gone through numerous updates and improvements.

  It had been over twenty years since the conclusion of the last serious conflict, and there existed no known use for it in the present or foreseeable future, which facts led to its retirement from active service life, along with the vast majority of the larger fleet combat ships.

  I had noted with surprise that the Hawk had been nearly as expensive to build as a present day destroyer, due entirely to that exotic hull. It was only when the Hawk entered atmosphere and heated up that ground based lasers and missiles were able to lock onto it, if only fleetingly. It required multiple heavy laser hits to do any damage to it, and even then it was usually able to land its cargo, ten heavily armored infantrymen, each of whom possessed a very large capacity to destroy.

  I climbed up a landing strut and keyed an entry switch. A thick hatch hissed open, reminding me strongly of a bank vault, and we crawled up into the main compartment, looking around with interest. The interior of the crew compartment was a maze of heavy harnesses. The Hawk could either drop infantrymen from altitude where their suits would protect them during free fall and break them to a soft landing, or land them on the surface.

  We walked through the narrow aisle where the ‘passengers’ were housed and opened the cockpit hatch, finding, again, that it was armored. Inside, we found four crew stations, one for the pilot, one for the navigator who could also operate the defensive shields, one for the offensive systems ‘gunner’ and the fourth for the cargo master, whose job it was to see that the infantrymen were properly loaded into the craft, and either dropped over the target or exited out the rear hatch.

  It seemed a lot of people were required to fight such a small ship, but on reflection, I decided that attempting to navigate down into an atmosphere that wanted to burn it up, along with enemy missiles, fighters and energy weapons which were also trying to kill it, and doing that while safeguarding it’s payload of ten infantrymen might just have been more work than two crew were up to.

  The ship had one relatively large fusion bottle that powered all its systems. It was a standard power source that had changed little over the last century, save for getting progressively smaller, more powerful and reliable.

  I tapped a command on the pilot’s console, waited a few seconds for the readout and said, “Elian, she’s received all her upgrades, save for the most recent, and has current air frame certification. It has Rev. 10 defensive systems that are only one generation behind our own Dash 6, and we could update it fairly easily. It looks to me that it would be hard as hell for the enemy to locate this thing, much less kill it but what could we do with it? Its laser is no more powerful than the Dash 6, so we’d practically have to ram them in order to get a kill, and it’s too slow to even accomplish that.”

  Elian was looking at the crew compartment and asked, somewhat distractedly, “Robert, what is the one thing these bastards have in spades that our fighters don’t?” I looked at him with a grimace and said, “They have about ten times the power output our lasers do. Why?”

  Elian said, still looking at the crew compartment, “There’s all that room in the crew compartment, and the manifest indicated that there is a shipment of magnetic fusion bottles that have no known use at the moment since we don’t seem to be able to deliver them to wherever, and they are right here in this very hold. Why couldn’t we install two or three of them in the crew compartment and use the additional power to upgrade the lasers? It would have, unless I’m mistaken, enough power to go head to head with their fighters, would be even harder to locate than our Dash Six, and even if they could find us, we could survive a direct hit. Oh, it'd be a lot quicker too. I’d be willing to bet we could even stuff a jump drive in it. This thing could be just what the doctor ordered.”

  I said, “And just how could we do all that? We’d need an entire crew to do the work, we’d have to somehow fabricate supports for those f
usion bottles you want to put in it, and then we’d have to integrate them and their power into the ship’s systems and even then we don’t know if the ship could even handle it. Damn, I wish I’d thought of it!”

  We briefly discussed Elian’s idea, looking for reasons why it wouldn’t work. Finding nothing obvious, we jumped down into the crew compartment and lowered ourselves down to the deck. We walked quickly toward the distant personnel hatch to the hold, talking excitedly as we walked.

  Chapter 3

  Elian and I had been together for nearly a year and were extremely close friends as well as a very good team. Both of us were able to think outside of the box, a factor that had frequently gotten us into trouble, as well as back out of it. Usually.

  We could think on our feet and were not afraid to try something new. Our youth was partly to blame for this eagerness to find a different way to do something, but it didn’t explain everything: we were good individually, or at least Elian was, but as a team we were very good. We knew this because we were still alive, while many of our crewmates, men and women we had admired and looked up to, were not.

  We commed our flight lead and asked for a few minutes of his time. He met us on a half-empty flight deck, where he had been working with two maintenance crews to get a damaged fighter back on flight status. It had taken a hit that had sheared off nearly the entire missile rack and damaged its flight systems. The only thing that had saved the ship and its crew was the fact that its energy systems hadn’t been damaged.

  We saluted and I said, “Sir, Elian has an idea that we want to fly by you.” Lt. Cdr. Kenner nodded his head distractedly and I continued, “Sir, we found an entire hold of Hawk 7g’s, that old attack bird? Well, Elian thinks that we could stuff its crew compartment with three additional fusion bottles and upgrade the lasers. The thing would be tough as nails to destroy, would be far more difficult to find than our Dash 6, it would have a laser as strong as their fighters and it could take a direct hit without damage.”

  Lt. Cdr. Kenner looked at us distractedly, his thoughts still on the possibly futile effort to get one more fighter back up, but had listened enough to say flatly, “You two are nuts. That thing has to be at least sixty years old and probably can’t even collect dust any more. We don’t have the resources to rebuild a ship that hasn't been flight worthy in decades, and we sure don’t have the personnel to do what you want.”

  Elian jumped in, “Sir, it has been routinely upgraded, its certifications are current and we have the extra fusion bottles in the same hold. We just need one maintenance crew to modify that ship. It if works, we’d have something that could not only go head to head with their fighters, but could possibly sneak into range of their own fleet. We think this’ll work, sir, and if it doesn’t, we haven’t lost anything trying.”

  Lt. Cdr. Kenner stopped looking at the frantic maintenance crew and fixed his attention on Elian, “You say its certificates are current? You’re sure? I’ve seen video of that ship making a contested landing and it was dammed hard to kill – they should have called it the Cockroach. If you’re certain about this, write up a proposal. I want a complete list of everything you’ll need in order to make that thing work, including personnel, and I want it five minutes ago. Dismissed.”

  He turned around and began shouting probably unnecessary orders at a mechanic who was buried up to his waist in an electronics bay. We walked quickly away and went to our quarters.

  We accessed the flight records of the four Hawks and chose the one with the fewest hours on its flight systems, and began compiling a list of all the hardware and software needed in order to convert the attack bird into an attack bird that could survive against their fighters. We spent three hours, arguing animatedly as we worked on the proposal, and then went down to maintenance to talk to a master chief, a balding but impressively muscled man named Kana. Elian held out his pad and said, “Chief, please look over this list and tell me if we’re missing anything.”

  Chief Kana looked down at the pad and then back up at us. Without reaching out his hand he asked, “And just what are you two up to, sir?” The ‘sir’ was added almost as an afterthought: We were Lt. JG’s, a rank that may not have been the bottom rung of the ladder, but from our position, you could see it quite easily.

  I explained, “We’ve found four old Hawk 7g’s in a cargo hold, all in excellent condition and flight worthy. We want to modify one by adding three fusion bottles - there’s space in the crew compartment for them - and upgrade the laser barrels and G shields. We figure it wouldn’t take more than two days at most to do the work and we’d have a ship that could successfully go up against those fighters of theirs.”

  Chief Kana looked skeptically at us but finally accepted the download from Elian’ pad. He scanned the information quickly on his beat up reader and began to smile. He looked back up and said, “I worked on those ships when I was a corporal. They’ve got to be sixty years old if they’re a day, but they sure were beautiful. Are you sure about this? You’ve actually seen the Hawks?” We both nodded and the chief returned his attention to his reader.

  He finished and looked back up at us and asked caustically, “And, sirs, just how did you plan on getting all that power tied into the ship systems? You don’t have enough Zerohm cabling specified for the job, and you also don’t have all the right chips listed to update its flight, nav and weapons systems. Give me five minutes with this and I’ll see if I can fix it?”

  Extremely relieved to hear the last sentence, I nodded and the chief disappeared into the depths of his shop.

  We stood silently for nearly fifteen minutes before the chief reappeared. He said, “I’ve located all the parts you’ve specified, as well as a couple you didn’t but should have, and I’ve signed off on my end. I’d suggest, sirs, that you see Commander Midori. He’s up on flight deck Four right now, so you should hurry. He's the one with the authority to fast track this, not Kenner. Oh, by the way, I’d like to work on this project, if you don’t mind?”

  I nodded assent and turned for the hatch, already running through my mind how I planned to present the proposal. We hurried through an almost endless series of hatches forward and up.

  Chapter 4

  As soon as they exited the compartment the chief accessed the ships personnel records and pulled up their restricted personnel files. He wasn’t supposed to be able to do that, but his mama hadn’t raised a fool. He studied it for several minutes before smiling to himself.

  He had been hard on the two officers when he read their proposal, but he had been secretly astonished that two JG’s, not far removed from the Academy, could have even thought up the idea, much less produce a proposal that was audacious yet possible. Most surprising of all, they had listed nearly all the parts and components the modifications required.

  Elian and I reached the correct flight deck and stepped through the personnel hatch of the massive air lock into an incredibly noisy scene. Four fighters had just returned and their crews were congregated around the Commander, talking agitatedly and waving their hands in the manner all fighter pilots had used since time immemorial to illustrate their maneuvers. Even from a distance their fatigue was visible.

  Maintenance crews had jumped on the fighters as soon as they docked and were hurriedly hooking up cables and hoses. One had obviously gotten too close to a laser; it had an ugly scar just behind the pilot’s canopy that had burned through the thin ablative material down to the actual skin, which was buckled. If that laser had struck just one hundred centimeters lower, the ship would not have returned. Considering that most lasers were fired from many thousands of kilometers distance, that crew was very lucky.

  We waited impatiently for a chance to talk to our superior and had to almost run when he turned to leave. We caught up to him and I said, “Sir, if I might have a moment of your time?” Commander Midori, a compact example of the typical fighter pilot, turned and looked askance at us. He nodded his head and asked, “Aren’t you two the ones that got your third fighter?�
�� I said, “Yes sir.” The commander reached out his hand and said, “Good shooting. I’m glad you were rescued. I’ve only got a minute, I’m late for a meeting as it is, so...?”

  I said, “Sir, we think we’ve found a way to handle their fighters. There are four old Hawk 7g’s in a cargo hold that are all currently certified and flight worthy, and we think we can modify them with some extra fusion bottles stuffed in the crew compartment. That would give them enough power to punch a hole through the enemy fighters, and they’d make excellent scouts as well.”

  Commander Midori stopped in his tracks – he’d continued to walk as I talked to him – and gave us his full attention. Elian held out his pad and added, “Sir, this is the proposal. We’ve run it by our service chief and he’s signed off on it, and in fact he wants to work on it. It would only take one maintenance crew about forty eight hours to complete the work.” Commander Midori downloaded the data into his own pad and then looked back up, “Your chief, what’s his name?” I said, “Master Chief Kana, sir.”