B009NFP2OW EBOK by Douglas Ian

Author:Douglas, Ian [Douglas, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Lieutenant Ronald Dorshner

VFA-112, Death Eagles

36 Ophiuchi System

1318 hours, TFT

“Coming up on the objective,” Lieutenant Commander Meise, the squadron CO, announced. “Keep it tight. Weapons and attitude control to your AIs.”

Lieutenant Dorshner checked to make certain that his Velociraptor was now solely under the control of his AI. VFA-112 was one of the strike squadrons off the America. From his perspective, just 30 minutes had passed since he’d accelerated clear of the carrier. In the non-accelerated universe outside, 349 minutes and 40 astronomical units had slipped past. He was still moving at near-light velocity, and the sky around him was sharply compressed into the familiar colored bands of light ahead.

With everything in the electronic hands of the fighter AI, there wasn’t much left for Dorshner to do but sit and wait. Humans had their place in space fighter combat at slower speeds, carrying out maneuvers that required human creativity.

At over 99 percent of the speed of light, human reflexes simply weren’t fast enough to provide useful input.

His weapons triggered, missiles and sandcasters first. The missiles had to be released well before the closest point of passage, since they shared the fighter’s velocity, and needed to be put on a vector that would swing them into the targets at that speed. At near-c, a few hundred kilos—the mass of the missiles themselves—carried enough kinetic energy to overwhelm the detonations of their nuclear warheads.

The salvo included his entire warload of AMSOs, twelve AS-78 anti-missile-shield-ordnance-containing warheads of tightly packed, sand-grain-sized spherules of matter-compressed lead. When the warheads detonated an instant later, clouds of sand hurtled across emptiness toward the Slan targets, again at close to the speed of light. Where the enemy’s anti-missile defenses might wipe incoming missiles out of the sky, it was virtually impossible to do the same to hurtling clouds of dispersing sand. At the speed of light, even something with the mass of a BB carried tremendous explosive power.

An instant after his missiles and sandcaster rounds were away, Dorshner’s beam weapons fired—lasers, particle-cannon bursts, and fusion beams—and the weapons continued to fire as the fighter swept past the target zone, the fighter pivoting on its axis to keep the beams on target.

And then he was past. He gave a thoughtclicked order, and his fighter began decelerating, braking at fifty thousand gravities.

He still couldn’t see the Slan targets or the planet, now light seconds behind him, didn’t know how much damage, if any, he and the other members of the fighter swarm had caused.

But they were about to find out.

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