Страница 4 из 64
She selected one of the six targets, and locked it into her targeting computer. Behind the black reflective mask of her flight helmet visor, her lips wer drawn back in a wild rictus that she thought was a smile. Kill them!
* * * *
Space combat tended to be a drawn-out affair of maneuver and countermaneuver, punctuated by brief periods of fire-shrieking fury and fear. Lasers, PPCs, and long-ranged missiles can deliver damage across respectable ranges, but target acquisition and targeting technologies were no longer able to cope with the ranges and velocities involved. Extensive weapon firing caused ships already heated by maneuver to overheat faster than the heat pumps could handle. Expert pilots had learned to wait until they were within a few thousand kilometers to open fire, trading the slim chance of multiple, long-ranged hits for the certainty of hits at close range during rapid passes.
Red Flight and Dagger Squadron interpenetrated, then-respective velocities on opposite vectors adding to a passing velocity of over 500 kps. At such speeds, human reactions dragged too slowly to select targets or to plot vectors. Under computer control, four Sparrowhawksconcentrated their fire on one Thrush.Armor on the broad, oval disk of the fighter's wing flared white where invisible beams of coherent light scored successive hits, wreathing the Thrushin a mist of rapidly condensing droplets of molten alloy. Return fire scored hull armor and left molten slashes across fuselage and wing.
Valasquez flipped his fighter end for end and slammed his thrust control forward. Savage deceleration bucked and sang through his stubby ship, but he continued to fire at the Liao ships now receding against the green and orange disk of the Folly's sun. Another hit!
He'd had only a fractional instant's glimpse of his enemy before they'd passed out of visual range, but that view had confirmed his computer's ID of five, tight-grouped TR-7s. A combat readout flickered across one of his computer screens. At least two of the Liao ships were hurt enough to degrade their performance. He identified those two to his squadron as optimum targets, then cut in a short burst of overthrust that hammered him against his seat. For an agonizing moment, Valasquez thought the Liao TR-7s were going to ignore Red Squadron and race them for the atmosphere of Stein's Folly, but the traceries on his HUD proved otherwise. All five ships were decelerating as savagely as he was, using their maneuvering thrusters to swing them around and bring them into line for another pass. He noted that four had paired off in wingman formation, but that the fifth was alone.
Valasquez gave a long, hooting rebel yell as he lined up all four of his little ship's lasers on the lead Thrush,and triggered a rapid burst of invisible bolts of light that stitched across the target's nose and wing.
* * * *
Uchita's battlelust had grown as her instruments described to her the opening rounds of the battle. There was no indication that she had been detected. She watched one of the Sparrowhawkfighters open fire on Captain Chen's Thrush.Gently she eased her stick forward, letting her fingers caress the target acquisition controls under her unfeeling right hand. Her vector had already been set as her target accelerated, she dropped into line behind him, so close she could see his drive flare as a brilliant, diamond-sharp beacon star through the soft illumination of her HUD.
Fire! Fire!
* * * *
Alarms screeched in Valasquez's helmet speakers as his instrument display lit up with red trouble lights. He was hit!
"Red Leader, this is Red Five. Y'got one on your tail!"
"I see him, Red Five! I've got some damage here..." Damage control reports flashed across a screen. Uh oh...his starboard control surfaces were really fouled. It was a good thing he wouldn't need those until he hit atmosphere again. He'd worry about that later. His threat indicator flashed purple.
"The bogie's closing, Red Leader! Break left! Break left!"
His hand played across thruster controls. The maneuverable little Sparrowhawkflipped end-over and decelerated sharply as he swung onto a new vector. Warnings shrieked at him, and he cut them off. A combat spacecraft's most serious problem was heat build-up—heat from engines, from laser fire, from enemy hits. Each maneuver he made was making the temperature problem worse, but there was no way to shed waste heat now.
Where was the bogie? There! He fired, a snap shot without a lock, but he was certain he'd scored at least one hit. Red Five was closing on the bogie now, angling for a shot A momentary brilliance flaring about the target showed Red Five had hit Good!
Then there were more Liao fighters, two of them in tight wing formation. "Red Five, watch yourself, starboard quarter high!" His own heat overload warning lights were flashing balefully in time to a raucous buzz in his helmet phones, but he slapped the override again and triggered invisible fire from all four lasers.
"Red Leader, this is Five!" Dugan's voice was high-pitched, the youngster's battlepitch distorting his words. "The bogie's flipped again! Watch your..." At that moment Red Five exploded in white light, the silent burst punctuated by the shriek of static in Valasquez's helmet phones.
The laser fire shredded his tail stabilizer and pocked craters in the armor over his engines. He fired his thrusters to flip an undamaged flank of his Sparrowhawkinto the attacker's line of fire. Sluggish! She wasn't reacting fast enough! Metal vapor exploded into space.
He tracked a target, firing paired medium and light lasers with grim determination. His target began tumbling, its disk shape shredded and hacked by repeated bits, its thrusters silenced. Valasquez's course and speed were close enough to that of the target that he was able to fire volley after volley into the wreckage. Finally, he was rewarded by a flash that consumed the crippled Thrushin a dazzling gout of light. A kill! But his computer marked that kill as the Liao flight's leader, not the mystery ship that had attacked him from behind.
He switched to wide scan, searching. Where was that other one? Whoever he was, that pilot was damn good. Valasquez had already watched the guy perform maneuvers that should have blasted him into unconsciousness. Was it a man piloting that ship, or some incredibly efficient fighting machine? He fired again—damn! Miss! The battle was becoming a one-on-one duel with this unknown Liao pilot Hit! Hit again! Then a rapid-fire sequence of laser hits scored his port wing, punching through delicate control surfaces and blasting his port Exostar light laser into tattered, twisted wreckage. Warnings keened. Override! Target! Fire! Another hit!
"Red Leader! Red Leader! This is Red Three! Watch your vector, Red Leader!"
Vector? Valasquez checked, blinked, checked again. The battle had carried him toward Stein's Folly. So intent had he been on the grim killing efficiency of the Liao pilot that he'd ignored the dazzling, swollen, cloud-girded sphere of the planet behind him.
"Copy, Red Three." He did some fast calculations, chose a new vector, kicked in his drive...but nothing happened. For a moment, he kept cold panic at bay by resetting his controls and punching the throttle controls again. Still nothing. The intolerable heat overload had shut down his drive. Malfunction lights winked and flickered at him. His ship jolted as another trio of laser bursts stitched into his wounded Sparrowhawkshull.
He palmed thruster controls. Where was the bogie? There! Following him down! He fired his twin Martells. His surviving Exostar was winking a malfunction light at him. Thrushand Sparrowhawktraded fire as the pair of them drifted into the thin upper reaches of the Folly's atmosphere. Desperately, Valasquez used his surviving thrusters to boot his Sparrowhawkover into a nose-high, nose-forward approach. Landing his shot-up bird was going to be tricky. Atmosphere dragged at him, making his ship buck and shudder as he fought to control a sudden, irresistible starboard yaw with savage twists of his control stick. The control surfaces weren't responding, weren't...