The Cavalry

Posted on Thu 20th Dec, 2018 @ 12:45pm by

449 words; about a 2 minute read

Mission: Oblivion
Location: Deep Space
Timeline: MD 18, 0945

The "Galaxy Famous Fightin' Aardvarks" of fighter squadron one-one-four were the designated ready response squadron. They'd been in the squadron green room, attending to administrivia, when the call came in. Within ten minutes, all sixteen of the squadron's F-34 "Black Lightning" fighters, along with four EW-9 electronic warfare birds from the "Sneaky Petes" squadron were in space and heading out on the last known bearing to USS Falcon.

Before long, the senior EW officer spoke on coms. "Confirmed energy weapon fire, bearing zero-one-three mark zero-two-four relative. Feeding new course and speed suggestion."

Major Cassidy glanced at the suggestion and tapped accept. "Execute course change in three... two... one." As one, the twenty highly specialized spacecraft changed to the new heading and accelerated. "Keep the formation tight, and get stuck in," Cassidy instructed her squadron. "Remember we're knife fighters, not fencers. Hit and run."

"Ve haf this, skip," Captain Ivanova said. "Ve haf trained all the trainink; nau ve fight the fight."

Cassidy took a deep breath, then answered, "weapons free. Aardvarks: Hey Ant!"

An echo of "Hey Ant!" rippled across the squadron, and then they arrived. USS Falcon, a border patrol frigate, was under assault by half a dozen gunboats and corvettes -- "uglies," in fighter jock parlance, mismatched ships with dubious repair and maintenance. The squadron split into wing pairs, their warp engines stutter-stopping across the sphere of engagement, bouncing in and out of warp like a stone skipping across the still water of normal space. Gravitic sheer torpedoes lanced out from the fighters, guided to target angles carefully chosen by the EW birds for maximum effect.

The lead hostile corvette took three of the torpedoes. As they detonated, the corvette's own grav-plates malfunctioned, the graviton streams folding in on themselves in instant and short-lived singularities. The resulting Schwartzchild radiation sleeted through the ship, instantly killing all biological life within a kilometer even as the bulkheads imploded under the pressure of gravity waves. As the containment fields in the antimatter bottle failed, the implosion turned to an explosion and the remnants of the corvette, now ionized plasma, flew out in all directions.

The remaining uglies scattered wildly at the explosion. Their sensors hadn't detected the arrival of the fighters, foxed by the little craft's stealth features and the EW birds' active interference. Two more hostiles exploded, and the remainder went to warp, fleeing the sphere of debris.

"Permission to pursue?" one of the pilots asked.

"Negative," Cassidy answered. "Fall in around Falcon and escort back to the nest." She smiled as the com channel closed. In their first engagement, everything had gone perfectly. Science, drill, and work had paid off handsomely -- and Starfleet lives had been saved.

 

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