Semper Mars(106)

“We’re tracking ’em. Hecate Program running. HEL powering up. Full charge in thirty seconds.”

Dahlgren peered into the display. Even at full magnification, the approaching fighters were hard to see, for they were several hundred kilometers astern of Shepard. But they were also at a lower altitude and, therefore, silhouetted against the vast, sky-blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean. He set the telescope’s crosshairs on the lead fighter and touched the keypad panel, locking in.

“We have full power, Colonel.”

“Fire.”

The bulk of the large and delicate Hecate High-Energy Laser was inside the lab compartment. The beam was channeled through a special port in the station’s hull and out into space, where it struck a mirror on the end of a twenty-meter strut. That mirror, controlled by the Hecate AI Program, could be precisely adjusted to give the laser a full field of fire across nearly the entire sky. The beam itself was invisible in the empty vacuum of space, but for an instant, backscatter from the mirror illuminated half of the space platform like the rising of a second sun….

Taka One

2225 hours GMT

“Kuso!” Kurosawa snapped. “What was that?”

There’d been no sound, no shock, but abruptly a patch of violent, intolerably bright incandescence had flared on the craft’s nose, a few meters below the cockpit. Iijima hit the craft’s roll jets and added some yaw, nudging the craft clear of that deadly beam before it could more than blacken Taka One’s coat of reflective white paint.

“Laser, Commander,” Yukio replied, checking his instruments. “I read it in the half-megawatt range. We are being fired on.”

A moment later, the beam struck again, this time on the wing, clawing at the hull long enough to explode a puff of vapor into space, the jet kicking them sharply to the right. Iijima responded by rolling back, clearing the beam, and accelerating.

“Taka Two reports they are taking fire as well,” Kurosawa said after a moment. “The bastards are shifting between us. First us. Then Ozawa. They’re trying to cripple us before we can get into missile range.”

A decent tactic, Yukio thought. It could work.

For five more minutes, they played this deadly and uncomfortable game. The laser would play briefly against the Inaduma’s hull, the beam itself invisible but the effects startlingly clear. As light flared, as flecks of hull material snapped away or vanished in puffs of glowing white vapor, the pilot would fire the ship’s maneuvering jets, tossing them left or right, up or down, seeking to evade that deadly, clawing beam. For a time, they would be in the clear.

And then the beam would find them once more.

“Range to target,” Yukio said calmly. “Three-two-three kilometers, and closing.” He consulted his main display, where an intercept program was running with a rapidly shifting interplay of numbers representing relative velocities, delta-v, acceleration, time, and distance. “Time to best firing solution on this vector…three minutes, twelve seconds.”

The Inaduma carried two Hayabusa missiles mounted in internal bays, one fitted inside each thick wing. The name was a poetical form of the word for the peregrine falcon, a swift bird of prey and a deadly hunter. In aerial combat they had a range of well over 150 kilometers; in space, technically, their range was unlimited, though a firing solution involved higher or lower orbits and the complexities of orbital intercepts.

The real problem was gauging the best range at which to fire. Obviously, the Defense Intelligence report that Shepard Station was testing a powerful new space-based laser was all too accurate. Launch from too great a distance, and that laser might burn the missiles out of orbit; try to get too close, and the laser would burn the space fighter out of orbit. The program running on Yukio’s console was designed to pick the best of several bad options.

The fighter lurched again, and for a moment, the huge blue Earth seemed to tumble around the ship, alternately flooding the cockpit with turquoise light and plunging them into darkness.

“Unko!” Major Kurosawa snapped. “Stabilize us, pilot-san! Thrusters five and seven! Do it!”

Slowly, the hard roll to port slowed, then stopped. Yukio chanced a quick look forward, past the seats of pilot and commander at the blackness of space beyond. He still couldn’t actually see the American space station, not with the naked eye. It was a strange kind of warfare….

“Taka One, this is Tanegashima Control.”

The voice sounded in Yukio’s headset, but Kurosawa answered it. “Tanegashima, Taka One. Go ahead!”

“Taka One…Taka Two is no longer in communication. It appears to be tumbling on free trajectory. We must assume it has been destroyed.”