Battlespace by Ian Douglas

Author:Ian Douglas
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-12-31T11:00:00+00:00

SF/A-2 Starhawk Talon Three

On approach to UFR/USS Ranger

1635 hours, Shipboard time

His Starhawk was down to one, maybe two more squirts of go-juice.

This, Alexander thought to himself, was the other worst moment of aerospace carrier ops… the trap. Acceleration at launch was carried out with reaction mass stored in the launch tanks, which were discarded after they were empty. But after decelerating at the far end of a mission run, then accelerating once again to get headed back to the fleet, aerospace fighter pilots usually had precious little reaction mass left for the final slowdown, and often came in with R-M tanks dry. Starhawks, especially, had a rep as “nuclear kites.” Their maneuvering system—and the sweet way they responded to the jacked-in pilot’s thoughts—made it way too easy to burn up your R-M and find yourself adrift, waiting for a rescue tug to come out and tow you back in, kitelike, on the end of a long tether. What that meant now, at the end of the mission, was coming in dead-stick, as they’d said in the bad old days of manual-controlled aircraft, needing to put all of your trust in the men and the AIs controlling the carrier’s magfield.

The same powerful magnetic field that had launched him, directed along the Ranger’s spine and through superconducting field projector drones astern, would now be used to slow him down enough that he could drift gently into the trap bay.

The hard part was trusting the guy at the other end to get it right. They were Navy, after all, not Marines…

“Talon Three, we read you eighty-three kilometers out, inbound at one-point-one kps. You are three-five mps high, seven mps to port. Please correct your drift and reduce forward speed to point seven five kps.”

He checked his own readouts and agreed. Ranger was still no more than a bright star forward. “Copy, PriFly. Correcting.” He thought-clicked the control and fired a burst first from a port maneuvering thruster, eliminating his slight left drift. He then fired his dorsal thruster once… twice. His upward drift—“upward” as described by the artificial horizon declared by Ranger’s PriFly—ceased… almost. But then warnings flashed in his noumenal vision. That final maneuvering burst emptied his R-M tank.

“Talon Three, we read you still with one zero mps high and your inbound at point four kps high. Please correct.”

“PriFly, check your instruments. My tanks are bone dry. What you see is what you get.”

“Ah, copy that, Three.”

“You’d better, Navy. Get ready to catch me.”

“Sit back and relax, Marine. We’ve gotcha.”

He hoped so. He’d elected to correct his drift first, since that made it harder for Ranger’s trap crew to grab him, but he was still coming in too hot. It was going to be rough… The Starhawk drifted past the outermost FPDs, and felt a sudden sharp tug toward the front of his craft as deceleration hit him. He watched his velocity readout in his noumenal display, the numbers flickering down in meters per second, felt the pressure of deceleration increase until his harness dug painfully at his shoulders, chest, and belly.

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