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danger of flying blind. At least in the dust cloud the Seppy vehicles would be
blind too. They hoped. "We could use a couple Hellstorms in here!" Demonchild
wished for a couple nukes they didn't have.
"DeathRay, we got Stingers and Gnats out the ass over here!" came another one
of the Gods of War over the net.
Jack had little time to go DTM and track his pilots to see how many were
falling. It was all he could do to keep himself conscious and from being shot
down and not necessarily in that order.
Jack, we need to keep them off the AEMs.
Maybe we can steer them away. Hold on.
"Guns guns guns! Fox three!" he shouted as another Seppy Stinger armored
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transfigurable fighter jumped from the deck in bot-mode unloading a salvo of
mecha-to-mecha homers out of his torso batteries at him. Jack zigged left and
then rolled over, winding in and out between the missile ion trails almost
sending him into an uncontrollable all-axis spin. Fortunately, the maneuver
was enough for him to avoid being blown to hell and gone. Going to DEG to burn
the missiles swarming all around him, Jack grunted hard and rocked the HOTAS
back and then sideways, and the tough little Ares fighter shook violently from
the nearby exploding missiles.
"Fox three!" he cried, letting loose a mecha-to-mecha missile that twisted
through the fiery debris trails, hitting the Stinger mecha dead center of the
pilot cabin. The enemy mecha exploded into a spinning orange and white
fireball. Jack had to just grit his teeth and fly through.
"Where do you think you're going! Fox three!" Fish said. "That's another
toasted Gomer."
"Yeah well, don't get cocky, there're plenty more where that one came from!
Shit!" Jack flipped his bird a complete one hundred and eighty degrees without
changing his flight path direction and grimaced at the pain from the massive
g-loading. "Fox three!" He fired a missile, taking out the mecha that had
taken position on Fish's six.
"Thanks, sir," Fish said sheepishly.
"Warboys, Warboys! DeathRay! Copy?"
"Warboys, here! Go DeathRay."
"We're gonna try to turn these bastards off of you if we can. But we're taking
a pounding, so you might want to hunker down in case it doesn't work," Jack
told the Army tank driver.
"Negative, DeathRay, that is a negative. If you can do anything to steer them,
bring 'em on to us!"
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"They have you waaay outnumbered, Colonel!" Jack warned Warboys.
"You let us worry about that. Besides, I got me some friends."
"Roger that." Jack's sensors only showed the AEMs, but four AEMs against a
bunch of mecha couldn't be much advantage. Warboys must be cooking up
something and the Killers were nearby, somewhere.
"XO! We're rapidly losing pilots!" Captain Jefferson's DTM lists of his crew
were blinking out fast.
Since the invisible Seppy ships had entered the mix, the battle had turned in
the wrong direction
seriously in the wrong direction.
"Aye sir! We need to pull the Ares fighters in, I think. They can't fight like
this," Colonel Checkov replied.
"Can't pull them in now! Tell them to get out of the engagement zone at max
velocity on any safe vector! And get me every gun with eyeball tracking
capability we've got on the exterior decks," the CO
ordered.
"Aye sir!"
Sir!
Yes, Timmy?
The
Yeltsin has taken heavy damage from one of the ghost ships. It is venting and
on fire! The
Thatcher
has taken heavy damage and the
Washington has lost its SIF generators! The
Lincoln, Reagan, Kolmogorov, Ames, Crippen
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, and the
Blair are completely out of commission and reporting no propulsion or weapons
capabilities.
Shit.
The CO scrolled up the
Madira
's health monitor to the foreground in his mindview. The battle still raging
in the mindview sphere around his head.
"CO! Word from Engineering is that the SIFs are holding but the coolant
systems for the DEGs are battered to hell. We're going to lose the forward
starboard DEGs soon!" the XO alerted the CO.
Although the CO had health monitoring menus on the ship in front of him, it
was the XO's job to get firsthand reports from the sailors keeping the systems
running.
"XO, the guns must fire! Structural integrity will do us no good if we are
sitting ducks and not returning volleys."
"Aye sir!"
"Helmsman Marks! R equal to four kilometers, theta equal to ten degrees, and
phi set to one hundred degrees at maximum normal speed! Pitch, yaw, and roll
to maximize port DEG targeting angles!" the
CO ordered.
"Aye sir!"
"Fireman's Apprentice King! Lock that shit down right now!" Hull Technician
Petty Officer Third Class
Joe Buckley alerted the young enlisted man to the overheating flow valve on
the starboard side main directed energy gun coolant system. The
three-dimensional DTM
view of the ship's flow systems in both of their heads showed overheating
systems in red and nominal ones in green. There was a look-up table ranging
from green to red of different levels of status for the flow equipment. Some
of the systems flowed liquid waste products while others flowed superheated
liquid metals. The valve on the forward DEG coolant loop would have to be
locked out and the flow
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rerouted or it could go critical and start a serious fire on the below deck of
the weapon system.
"The software to the valve shows it locked HT3, but the flow meters are still
reading seventeen megapascals on the flow pressure. The only flow valve down
stream is from the SIF generator loop on the forward decks. Do I divert the
flow?" Fireman's Apprentice Jimmy King had never seen the
Madira
hammered so hard. He had been on board for only a few weeks and the previous
day's mission had been his first combat. Oh, there had been pilots going and
coming from the supercarrier going into battle, but this was the first time
the
Madira itself had been in the mix of a full-scale naval battle and taking on
anything worse than a few SAMs.
"No! Jimmy, if the SIFs go out on that end we'll have a standard coolant pipe
with over seventeen megapascals of pressure in it. The instant that SIF went
down, the pipe would be a bomb of exploding superheated liquid toxic metals!"
Buckley scratched his head in thought for a brief second. The
Madira
lurched downward suddenly and a little faster than the inertial control system
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could compensate for, leaving Buckley with the brief feeling that his stomach
was somewhere on the deck above him.
"We've got to do something, boss. The pressure in that loop is rising and the
main gun is just getting hotter!" the fireman's apprentice replied. "Shit!" He
grabbed the sides of his station to keep his balance as the ship continued to
jerk randomly.
"No, the cats on all ends are at minimal use now that the fighters are out.
Switch over the catapult coolant flow loops to the main gun coolant loops.
Maybe that'll take some of the pressure off that stuck valve. The goddamned
thing is probably seized open. That happened to us last year at Triton. That
was ugly." Buckley grabbed at an icon for the cat coolant reservoir to read
the internal temperature of the coolant bladder. Although the cats weren't
going presently, they had just taken a hell of a thermal load to launch more
than four full squadrons of fighters, mecha, and drop tanks in the last few
minutes. The reservoir was above midway on the look-up table, reading yellow [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]