War of Alien Aggression 1 Hardway by A.D. Bloom

Author:A.D. Bloom
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

SCS Arbitrage opened her bay, and the six QF-111 Dingoes took to space as a pack. Nobody had seen autonomous, exo-atmospheric combat drones fly since the War of the Americas. There were plenty in the Staas Engineering and war museums, but even Ram had never seen them in action.

In the last war mankind fought with itself in space, the drones' main job had been intercepting missiles and torpedoes. They were a Staas Company product and since the war ended so unexpectedly, Staas still had thousands of them in mothballed inventory. Ram should have guessed Harry Cozen would have some flying off Arbitrage.

The drones had no pilots, of course. An inertial negation system that could throw enough artificial gees around to compensate for the violent maneuvers and keep the pilot alive during combat required a reactor the size of a frigate's. Remote command and control systems couldn't be employed because they always got hacked, cracked, or jammed if your enemy was operating at the same level you were. So they made the Dingoes autonomous, closed input systems and gave them Artificial Intelligences.

Since artificial intelligence modeled on the human brain always went insane, the AI they gave the Dingoes was modeled on a dog's brain. The actual synaptic pattern came from a sheep herding dog named Dot, but 'Dingo' was a more marketable name for the Australian aerospace company selling them. Staas Company's marketing division insisted on called it the QF-111 Dingo.

The pack of six crossed the 500 meters between Arbitrage and Hardway slowly, almost drifting the whole way to Bay 2. They were small, only seven meters long with a curved hull barely big enough to hold a reactor module and ammunition. Massive maneuvering jets protruded on four sides to vector thrust in 12 directions and spin them 'round - pitch, roll, and yaw. Without a pilot, they were capable of 80-gee maneuvers. 140mm autocannon lanced out from the fronts of each of their hulls. Their flat, aft ends were packed with engines. The Dingoes were all teeth and legs.

Ram watched them from outside the launch bays as he floated in the vacuum with Chief Lee and his crew of redsuits. The Dingoes flew down Hardway's length in echelon before they turned and reverse burned in front of the bay to bleed off their speed. They flew in backwards, and once they were all in place, they set down on three, improbably small legs that extended from the underside of each curved hull.

Ram flew in after them before Chief Lee began to cycle the bay doors closed.

Lee floated in front of the gape-mouthed, 140mm cannon barrels with a Dingo towering over him. "Do we do anything to them?" he asked. He and his redsuits had never worked on them before. Nobody on Hardway had. "I mean... they'll read our IFF signals right? They know who the friendlies are, don't they? We don't have to input anything to tell them, do we?"

"I'll get you manuals as soon as I can, but Cozen said we just open the bay doors and let them loose when the time comes.

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