The Jupiter War Read online

  A survey craft slipped in low on the horizon a little later. Only when it was in sight did Zoti produce the rest of their food. They sat on a big flat orange rock and ate the glue-like bars through their helmet input slots. It tasted no better than usual but nobody cared. They were talking about gravity and its myriad delights.

  THE WEAPONS that were used in the Jupiter War were generally refinements of those that had been in use for almost a hundred years. The lack of any effective source of massive power prevented any beam weapons from being of more than marginal value. The scarcity of Transuranics also limited the number of atomic weapons drastically. In spite of these limitations, man’s ingenuity at devising ways to kill and maim provided a wide range of weaponry. Primary among the ship-to-ship weapons were missiles. Most contained not explosive, but shrapnel. Since the speed of most ships made an actual hit in the traditional sense a rarity, proximity fuses that strewed a ship’s projected path with steel balls traveling at several thousand relative miles per hour had been established as the most effective weapon.

  Shrapnel missiles more often disabled rather than destroyed an opponent, and were inversely effective to the distance they were fired at. This meant that most serious confrontations consisted of ships literally diving at each other, firing from the first moment possible in hopes of destroying the other first. Once the range had closed, explosive shells had more chance to hit and were exponentially more destructive.

  The combat effectiveness of a ship was directly proportional to the amount of ordnance it could carry and the speed with which it could spew the missiles out. The vulnerability of a ship was also similarly related to its speed and cross section combined with its ECM. Since the distances involved within the Jovian system are comparatively small, small ships could contain a high proportion of weapons to drive and life-support systems to fuel and drive. Unfortunately such ships were of only limited value in protecting the long routes from each side’s asteroid bases. In order to use these fighter-style combat ships over greater distances carriers were employed. Since a ship on a planet was incredibly vulnerable, and begged for an attack that was likely to destroy the base as well, these carriers later became even larger to enable them to serve as mobile combat bases for several months at a time.

  Propulsion at the beginning of the Jupiter War was supplied by a highly efficient form of reaction drive, for fuel methane was refined-though ironically, it was never possible to employ the methane atmosphere around Jupiter as a source of fuel. Larger ships, carriers, and freighters, were capable of housing a fusion reactor. This provided power for both the early forms of beam weapons and to refine fuel for the smaller ships. New forms of propulsion were continually experimented with, but until very late in the conflict none proved reliable.

  As the fusion technology improved under the stimulus of war, a new class of ship evolved. This was the cruiser. The cruiser was the smallest ship capable of carrying and employing a fusion generator. Approximately ten times the size of the largest fighter, the - cruiser had to make up with ECM and offensive power what it sacrificed in agility and cross section.

  On a personal level, propelling a piece of solid matter into your enemy’s body was still the most effective way to kill one another. If anything, the vulnerability of space suits made slug-throwing weapons even more appealing. Innovations were needed to enable such weapons to fire in an airless environment, but most of these had been achieved during the skirmishes on Earth’s Moon during the 2020s.

  Computers, while immense aides to navigation, proved ineffective in combat. They could supplement, but never succeeded in replacing, a human gunner for making decisions in combat. The trend of developing computers to simplify and augment, rather than replace, human operators that dominated the twenty-first century meant that war still was a matter of men facing men over the barrel of a gun, or missile tube

  BRANT EMERSON floated in the dark, attached by a tether to his fighter, Banshee III. He had been working for hours with an arc welder just aft of the command module and needed a break. His gaze followed the path his ship was on, down the gravity well to its bottom, Jupiter, thousands of kilometers away and, at his velocity, all too close.

  Behind the reflective shield of his visor, a wisp of dark brown hair was out of place and channeling sweat from his brow to the corner of one eye. His sharply chiseled features, a pleasingly odd mixture of Celt and Cherokee, scowled in irritation as he adjusted the temperature setting on his suit.’

  His helmet com crackled with static. Must be one of the crew trying to reach him suit-to-suit. Bright move. He wondered how long it would take whoever it was to remember the level of radiation out here and try ship com.

  Emerson had shipped into this war from Earth, where he had taken his military training, like the rest of his crew. Unlike them, he was a rockrat brat, born on the rickety station that miners had pieced together near Ceres. Jupiter was part of his backyard, and he was more familiar than they with its environs, one of the most notable elements of which was its magnetosphere.

  A gigantic planet-wide ocean of liquid metallic hydrogen thousands and thousands of kilometers deep gave Jupiter a magnetic field far stronger than anything else in the solar system except Sol itself. And Sol’s winds fed it continuously with a plasma of particles streaming in at over five hundred kilometers per second. The bow front, where those winds broke against the magnetosphere, was a particularly pleasant region—the magnetosheath, where solar-driven particles released their energy and drove the plasma to temperatures twenty times hotter than the sun.

  Instinctively, Emerson plotted the sunward side of Jupiter. Good. It was hours away, and he would be done long before he had to worry about the solar wind kicking up and pulsing the sheath back his direction.

  He knew he was more paranoid than his earth-born crew about exposure to various forms of radiation, but no one in his right mind went EVA in the Jovian gravity well if he could avoid it. The lecture that covered it in basic was optimistic, stressing innovations in suit-shielding. But that was mudside PR, government hype. And everyone with sense knew it. New suits might help, but things like that still came from the lowest bidder—good ol’ guvment issue. Little enough to pit against the maelstrom of Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

  Even inside the sheath it was no picnic. Not much of the solar wind broke through to the magnetosphere but it was enough, combined with junk spewed up from Io, to create radiation belts up to a million times more intense than anything near-earth orbiters had to face from the Van Allen Belts.

  On Earth there were sayings about people too stupid to come in out of the rain. In space there were similar sayings, but the rain was far more deadly. And it was always raining. Near Jupiter it was worse.

  Still, a little shower of highly charged particles wasn’t going to worry him much at this point, as long as it didn’t knock out the com or interior temperature controls on his suit. He had a job to do, his duty, and he was going to see it through.

  That had always been part of his problem. Maybe he was too competent. He was a natural pilot, and he almost always outscored everyone else on any test, any subject. They kept moving him up the ladder, putting him in charge. He never had time to make any friends along the way. He was always “new meat.” He had been alone so long. He would have given a lot for just one friend right now.

  His helmet com crackled again, reminding him of the three lives tucked safely inside beneath him: his crew, his responsibility. He looked back the way they had come, back toward the battle and their base ship, the carrier Triumphant, though he knew there was nothing to see from this distance. They could have been friends. Almost were, until that last moment.

  * * *

  “Babydoll? This is Papa.” Varick’s voice had crackled through the helmets of sixteen fighter crews making up Babydoll Wing. “The cat’s outta the bag. Time to secure and heat ’em up.”

  Emerson gave the interior of Banshee III a quic
k once-over and scanned his boards as he flipped the prelims. His copilot, Williams, was checking the secondaries. Williams, short and solid, didn’t actually look like a bulldog, but his tenacity and temperament invited the comparison. He had a take-charge attitude and the abilities to go with it. There was intelligence in those sharp blue eyes and a force of personality that lent him a stature that belied his lack of height. A top pilot in his own right and unquestioned leader of the crew, despite Emerson’s superior rank, he was Emerson’s greatest asset in battle—with the second highest kill tally in the wing—but his most devoted adversary off duty.

  It was nothing personal. Emerson knew that. He was just new and in Williams’s way. To Emerson it was a familiar scenario, the story of his life. But that was no consolation. It made his loneliness and isolation an the harder to bear, especially since at his last posting-a backwater job with a small fighter squadron escorting tankers to orbital factories near earth-he had just started to make a few friends, fit in, have someone he could talk to. But duty had called, as it always did, and taken all that away.

  He had been too efficient for his own good in defending the tankers, and when Triumphant had needed an ace pilot to fill a sensitive slot in its top fighter wing, the computers at HQ had selected him to receive the honor.

  Behind him, Thompson and Prock were at their stations manning rear armament and going through their own checks. Thompson was tall, lean, and handsome with a caustic wit and a calm self-assurance that’ some might take as arrogance. Emerson had been around him enough to know, however, that he was merely pragmatic and honest about his competence. Prock, the country boy from Oklahoma who had started out to be a Baptist minister, was no less competent but far more quiet and unassuming. Emerson hoped for a chance to get to know them better, but so far they had sided with Williams in shutting him out.

  Banshee hummed as she came up to power. There was the usual friendly banter among the crew as they anticipated the coming action, and as usual, it excluded him. They never crossed the line into actual insubordination, although they came close. That would be a win for him, in their minds, and they would not stand for that. Or maybe on some level they had developed a kind of grudging respect for him. He was never sure. But the tension was always there, every look, every verbal exchange bringing home the same message: outsider, stranger, failure. You are not welcome here.

  He had thought of transferring to another ship but there were no openings, and besides, that was the coward’s way out. Too easy. No, he would just have to keep trying, be the best pilot he knew how to be for them. They would open up eventually. Maybe the coming action would draw them all a bit closer.

  The whole wing had drifted to these coordinates the day before and lain in wait, cold as so much flotsam, for just this moment. Information wrung from a captured Fed fighter crew had led Triumphant to figure it could intersect the Fed carrier Perez to the northeast and bring the battle right over Babydoll’s head. And it had worked, in a way.

  Triumphant had caught Perez loafing and had the advantage of surprise and speed as it came in blasting, launching four wings of fighters to keep the Perez fighters bottled up inside while Triumphant slashed by and banked for another run.

  It was daring tactics, some would say desperate, to risk a carrier in close-up maneuvers with another base ship like that, but Triumphant’s commander was counting on its unexpectedness to carry the day. If it all worked according to plan, they could take out or capture Perez with all its chicks on hoard, and Babydoll could come in for mop-up detail. If not, Babydoll was the commander’s ace in the hole.

  Unfortunately, the info from the captured Feds had left out one prime detail: Perez was not traveling alone. It was in tandem with another carrier, the Bolivar. And when Triumphant let loose its fighters against the Perez, Bolivar was free to send out its fighter wings. That set up a mad scramble as Triumphant’s ships swarmed the Perez, trying to inflict as much damage as possible before Bolivar’s fighters could launch and close.

  Emerson and the rest of Babydoll Wing sat in their cold ships watching it all on screen. “Get ready, guys,” Williams called on intra-ship com. “The Feds are almost on ’em, and they’ll be splitting out to bring ’em our way any minute.”

  “Not just yet they won’t,” muttered Emerson.

  Williams gave him a look of scathing derision and glanced back to share his amusement with his buddies. All three had crewed Banshee III for a year with its former pilot, Bob Varick, before he had been moved up to fill a slot in Gravedigger as wing leader. They had been a tight clique. They didn’t see it as fair that Varick had been moved up without them, and it was insult to injury when, instead of Williams moving up to pilot Banshee as expected, Emerson had been dumped on them. He might have been a hot pilot way off in the backwater, but he was green as far as they were concerned; and his being a “nice guy” and all didn’t cut squat with them. Just his being there was a slap in their face.

  “Right, Emerson,” snarled Williams. “Are you crazy? Wouldn’t you bug out with fifty jillion Feddies fixin’ to fry your tail?”

  Emerson chose to ignore the sarcasm and looked over to Williams, guard down intentionally to convey a willingness for friendship. “Yeah, but they’re between the Perez and the Fed fighters,” he said, as if that should explain it.

  “So?” smiled Thompson.

  “So?” sighed Emerson. “So if I were commander, I’d keep our boys and girls in there a while. We’re already hurting Perez, and she doesn’t dare open a launch bay for fear we’ll throw something inside that’ll take out a bunch of fighters in a chain reaction that’d blowout a good portion of her shell. We stand to lose a few ships, but the incoming Feds will have to be real choosey on their targets ‘cause if they miss us they’re apt to hit Perez. That should give our guys the time and edge to thin out Bolivar’s flyers quite a bit before we have to disengage.”

  “Yeah,” sneered Williams, “and then our guys’d be all cut up, and Perez opens up with four fresh wings. Those are our people out there dying.” Williams shook his head. “You’re cold, man.”

  Emerson was getting fed up with their attitude. Didn’t he have a right to an opinion? Couldn’t they at least once consider something he said instead of attacking it? He didn’t figure it would do any good to antagonize them further, so he just stared at the screen and thought to himself, it’s a cold situation out there no matter what, Williams. You’d rather run now and face full, fresh complements from both carriers at the same time? Care to figure up the body count on that?

  They sat in silence, watching the scene unfold on the screen exactly as Emerson had called it. The commander on Triumphant kept his flyers in so close to Perez that its gunners had a hard time tracking them, whereas to them Perez was a wide-open target. A few were lost in the initial attack from Bolivar’s fighters, but Perez took a lot of fire from them, too, so the Feds did become more cautious and the Northern Hemisphere forces were more than able to hold their own. It was bloody. All- in all, both sides had lost nearly half their ships by the time Bolivar itself moved up and Triumphant’s fighters peeled off for home.

  With the advent of the second Fed carrier, Triumphant had scrapped its plan for a second run at Perez and had stationed itself above and past Babydoli Wing to bring the retreat right over their heads. They waited until their sister ships and the remnants of the pursuing Bolivar wings had gone over. Bolivar itself was hanging close to the damaged Perez, and Perez was spitting out fighters as fast as it could. To their credit, they kept their cool and circled Perez to form up properly before heading after the Triumphant. When they finally came it was in a square, two wings in front, two wings following close behind.

  It was about then that Varick had given the call to “heat ’em up.” And before the Feds had time to react to the sudden appearance of Babydoll’s heat signatures, the wing was headed up full throttle toward the underbellies of the Perez wings.

 
Varick was good. He had timed it right. The Feds, still a long way from Triumphant, were in tight formation and had their instruments trained dead ahead on the only action they were aware of. The confusion of dealing with the damage back at the Fed carriers must have helped out, because there was never any evidence of warning from the carriers to their fighters that they were under attack from below.

  “Babydoll on the call. Split and fire. Split and fire. Mark! Give ’em all you got!” Varick called the play like a quarterback. And Babydoll’s diamond formation split like a starburst into sub-wings, four groups of four, each headed for one of the Fed wings, each dead-on with all forward ports blazing.

  Banshee III was flying right side of its own little diamond formation, with Criptkicker, their sub-wing leader, to the fore, Bad Mac to the left, and The Valkyrie bringing up the rear. At the last possible instant, on a word from Criptkicker, they veered off into a loop that would take them back down to form up with the rest of Babydoll. As they did, the rear gunners opened up to give the Feds a parting present. The G-forces were tremendous. It was the kind of crazy, gutsy stunt that only Babydoll Wing could do really well. Emerson doubted that even Varick had been sure of this can until the last second, when he had seen that the timing was right and the tight Fed formation was going to hold for them. But it had been quick, smooth, and deadly. Their last sight of the Feds as they went into their loop had been a real reward for all their long hours of waiting: all four Fed wings engulfed in fiery chaos as damaged ships were rammed by those behind them in a devastating chain reaction.

  Then Criptkicker became a ball of flame and shrapnel. Emerson and the others avoided most of it, but a good-sized piece of Criptkicker’s shell gouged into Bad Mac.

  Emerson, now the sub-wing leader, boosted to form the head of a triangle with his remaining ships and contacted Bad Mac’s pilot, “Jackson, this is Emerson. What’s the damage?”