The difference wasn’t that much—there wasn’t much that could survive hitting a zone of space three centimeters across with a ten-thousand-gravity well. Tidal forces made a mess of missiles, plasma beams, even lasers that crossed that shear zone.
A twenty percent stronger shear zone did reduce the number of hits that would get through. It brought the new-generation starfighters up to nearly the same level as the UPSF’s destroyers on their main defense.
The first enemy to run into the Lancers was going to have a rude awakening when they started to hit the fighters—almost as rude as the one the Kenmiri had suffered when they first met the UPSF’s shielded starfighters.
The initial maneuvers were tentative, the pilots testing the limits of the new craft and comparing them to what they’d seen in the simulators. A sixth starfighter—this one O’Flannagain’s, Henry noted absently—joined the exercises before they started doing anything complicated.
Once the hotshot CAG joined her pilots, the tempo of the maneuvers began to accelerate, and Henry had to nod in approval as he watched his people put the new starfighters through their paces.
“That’s funny,” Ihejirika noted.
“What is?” Henry asked.
“At low acceleration, up to about one KPS-squared, they’re harder to pick up than traditional fighters,” Ihejirika told him. “No reaction plume, combined with the usual dispersal effect of a gravity shield.
“But once they’re at one point five or above, the shield itself is putting off a lot of heat. The combination of increased power generation and space-warping effects…” The tactical officer grunted. “I don’t think they’re going to be easier to hit, not when they’re pulling three kilometers a second squared of accel, but they’re a lot easier to find.”
“Henriksson, any words on our two hangar queens?” Henry asked his engineering officer. The deck personnel were FighterDiv and technically didn’t report to Song’s engineering department, but Henriksson was the best person to ask about the deck with O’Flannagain in space.
“Looks like Lieutenant Commander Turrigan’s fighter is down for the count,” Henriksson admitted. “Chief Lin believes they can get the other bird in the air in an hour, but number four is in full emergency shutdown.
“They think there might be a flaw in the reactor casing that passed all tests short of full live power-up,” the EO concluded. “It happens; that’s why there’s fail-safes for it. Power plant safely shut down; everyone is fine. It’s just a pain.”
“Pass that on to O’Flannagain,” Henry ordered. “Her people should be focusing on getting the birds up, not giving her reports.”
“Yes, ser.”
He turned his attention back to the fighters in the empty space around his ship. The pilot in him couldn’t help but thrill at their maneuvers. The last time he’d flown in combat, his fighter had barely been able to get up to one KPS2—and that had been with him in an acceleration tank.
His people were now dancing in circles around the battlecruiser at three times that acceleration, and he knew they were strapped in at most. The Lancer had acceleration tanks and the pilots were expected to use them in combat as a safety precaution, but with the first truly reactionless drive available to humanity in play…the next generation of the GMS starfighters might not bother.
It would depend on how the Lancers worked out.
Part of that calculation, though, was how many of them turned out to be hangar queens. Henry turned back to the readiness icons. One continued to flash amber but one had turned completely red.
If one in eight Lancers failed to launch every time, well…that was going to be a very big problem for the people who wanted to replace every fighter in the UPSF with them.
Chapter Ten
The La-Tar System was both much the same as it had been when Henry had last seen it and completely different. Six months wasn’t enough time for planets and stars to change in any noticeable way or even for major new space stations to take shape.
It was enough time for regular traffic to start up. When Henry had first visited the system, the food transports intended to feed the four industrial worlds that relied on La-Tar had been stuck in a single lump in orbit.
Now, a dozen similar starships hung in low orbit, a busy stream of shuttles lifting food up from the surface—and presumably delivering the products of the industrial worlds to La-Tar’s population.
Henry had no idea how the economics of that was going to shake out in the long run. The factories on the industrial worlds had been partnerships between the Imperial government and Kenmiri corporation-esque private entities. Neither of those entities existed in the region now, but someone was presumably running the factories that were still online.
In the long run, only the warships scattered around the system in a protective pattern would remain in government control. Right now, though, food and necessary goods were probably being handled by the governments themselves.
“Looks like the Cluster managed to come up with some new warships,” Ihejirika noted. “I make it eight escorts backing up our destroyers.”
“That’s more than the Cluster had to begin with,” Henry agreed. “But my briefing said that they got the skip drives repaired on the damaged units a couple of the worlds had in orbit—plus Tano rushed four new ships out.”
Tano had been the world the UPA had first reached out to because they were the one with skip drive factories and orbital shipyards. They’d built most of the food transports the Cluster was still relying on and had now built two waves of warships.
The first wave was long gone, destroyed in the desperate defense against the original Kozun conquest of La-Tar.
“So, all of their ships are here again?” Ihejirika asked.
“Plus four from their allies, which makes it two more ships than they had last time the Kozun came,” Henry pointed out. “Plus four of our destroyers and one of our battlecruisers.”
There’d been about six days between Lioness leaving and Raven arriving, but the Kozun shouldn’t have had time to learn about that and take advantage of it—and clearly hadn’t.
“We have an incoming transmission for you, ser,” Moon told Henry. “From… Arbiter Casto Ran?”
Henry concealed a smile.
“I see our old friend didn’t manage to dodge that promotion,” he observed. “Who exactly was going to be appointed as the Cluster’s interim head of state was still in flux last I’d heard, but the odds were on Casto Ran.”
Casto Ran had been the Lord Nominated of the Skex System, a role with notable similarities to the old Roman concept of dictator. Skex had been the last system they’d recruited for the liberation of La-Tar…and Casto Ran had made a permanent alliance his price for joining.
That alliance had turned into a loose political confederation over the last six months, one that needed an interim leader. And the title of Lord Nominated came with an assassin-enforced end date.
“I’ll take it on my internal network,” Henry told Moon. He didn’t want to leave the bridge just yet, and his network could easily provide a private virtual meeting.
The Tak politician and soldier appeared in front of Henry as the bridge faded away in favor of his preferred virtual meeting space. To someone from Earth, the Chinese-style temple might clash with the Rocky Mountains behind him, but Arbiter Ran wouldn’t know that.