Starcorp 1: Escape from Sol

“This is General Gruenberg speaking. The enemy has showed us its strength, and its weakness. Their technology is superior to ours, but their numbers are too few. We can defeat them. The only thing we need to win this fight is the fortitude to do it. If you commit to this engagement with everything you’ve got, we will win. You must hold your formation. You must move forward. This fighter screen that the enemy is deploying and the warship behind it cannot endure the weight of our numbers for long. I promise you, if you put their resolve to the test they will break. Think of your families. Think of your friends. Think of the billions of people on Earth that have died and suffered—that will die and suffer because of the spacers. Earth is counting on you. Hold your formation for them.”

Gruenberg transmitted this message to all within the armada. But it was primarily meant for the three-thousand space fighters that were thrusting away from him and toward the basestar that was hiding in the darkness in front of them. Gruenberg held back a group of five-hundred spacefighters from this engagement. They were positioned around the spacefighter that he and his VIP passengers were installed in. It was his belief that the weight of numbers of these three-thousand spacefighters would be sufficient to draw out every mow that the basestar had. And he had little doubt that the basestar’s fighter screen would be too small to deal with the bulk of his armada and the battle tactic they were employing for this engagement.

Nearly seven hours had passed from the beginning of the first engagement. From the start to the end of that action nearly two hours transpired. This gave Sawyer less than five hours to rest up for this new assault that was coming towards them. As it was in the first fight, his person was in distress. The experience of the first fight did little to dampen his anxiety and the newly added pressure of command did much to enhance it.

Shortly before the alert that sent all fighter pilots to their mows, Sawyer was promoted to the rank of Commander. In addition to this, he was given command of the formation that was going out to meet the fast approaching UFP Spacefighters. This appointment was all the more daunting in his mind because of the size of the task before them. Unlike the previous engagement, Orion’s entire complement of mows, two-hundred and sixty-seven spacefighters, were sent forward to do battle. This was prompted by the size of the force coming towards them and the formation that they had chosen.

Sawyer had no idea why he was chosen to lead the entire formation or why none of the veteran pilots were not given this task. The appointment was given to him at the last moment and accepting the commission was easier than refusing it. Entertaining thoughts of turning down this command was nearly as painful as it would have been to vocalize it. He was too ashamed of this thinking to confess it to another. When offered the commission, he gave a nod and a yes sir and then set off for his mow and his first command.

When it came to doing the job of guiding this force into battle Sawyer believed himself to be as competent as any among the gamers. From his experience in the video games, there was little involved beyond dictating when the battle was to commence, where their efforts were to be focused and when to disengage with the enemy. His greatest fear was that his efforts would end in disaster. This too was something that he learned from the games. He knew that it was possible to lose this fight. The force they were facing was as great as any that he had seen in the games and greater than most. A bad end was an event that he did not want to be personally responsible for.

“Commander Beck, rally your forces. Talk to them. Ready them for battle.”

The sound of Commander Noonan’s voice blared through speakers in Sawyer’s head gear. He could discern from its tenor that his intention was admonishment and not encouragement. Sawyer had said nothing since he gave the command for all to thrust forward five minutes earlier. He could think of nothing more to say after that. He knew that Noonan wanted him to motivate the other pilots to do their bests. But at this moment, he was struggling with the task of motivating himself for the battle to come.

In front of Sawyer was a force of three thousand UFP spacefighters grouped into a tight formation. The width and height of this formation produced a front that was one-twentieth the size of their previous formation. The depth of this formation was one-hundred times greater. It was a fortress of fighters. The purpose of this formation was to mass their fire as much as they could. For Sawyer and the other gamers this was plain to see. They had experienced it on many occasions within the video games. Sawyer had no doubt that all knew what to expect and what they had to do to prevail.

“Commander Beck,” Commander Noonan roared into Sawyer’s ears. “You must attack. You must disperse the enemy formation.”

These words were for Sawyer’s hearing alone. The command capsule aboard the Orion invariably limited their communications to the various commanders in the field. Their god’s eye view from a remote location provided them with the ideal location from which they could orchestrate the course of the battle. But it was the task of the commanders in the field to lead the forces into the fray. Sawyer surmised from this communication that it was time for him to do just that.

“Okay everyone,” Sawyer called out after he initiated his com-link. “You know what we have to do here. This formation is weakest at the front. “I’ll take the first wing in from high at the center. Cheung, you bring your wing in from the left low and Galvani, you attack from the right low. Concentrate fire on the front and center of this formation. Push in for kills. We have to scatter them. We have to get inside and break them up. If we don’t, then we’re just wasting our time here.”

Sawyer paused to give time for the last part of his message to resonate within the thinking of his second and third wing commanders. At the end of this time, he gave the order to attack. Each wing, a total of two-hundred and sixty-seven mows, charged in on the UFP formation from three separate directions. Each wing marked out its sector on a computer three-dimensional grid of the battlespace. Resembling three swarms of flying insects they swarmed towards the centermost point of the front end of the enemy formation.

“Two-hundred and sixty-seven,” Major Everett read off his personal monitor. “I think that’s all they have, General.”

“I’m sure of it,” Gruenberg concurred with a knowing look. “We’ve got them.”

The large monitor at the front of the capsule displayed a computer-generated animation of the battle that was formulating before them. This god’s eye view showed three small swarms of starcorp spacefighters angling towards the front and center of the UFP Armada. A dozen smaller screens along the perimeter displayed optical images of the surrounding space. All within the capsule studied the large monitor. The two forces displayed there looked to be colliding off a half inch thick invisible wall. The starcorp spacefighters blended into one large mass and roiled about on their side of this wall. The front end of the UFP Armada was visibly blunted by this wall, but the formation held. Both sides continued to fall forward with little decline in their speed for the encounter. The only portion of this battle that could be seen optically were the slugs at the moment of their self-destruction. They intermittently lit up and died out, appearing like thousands of pinpoints of twinkling lights.

“It’s working,” Wilkinson asserted with an inflection of astonishment.

The others in the capsule offered no challenge to this in either word or gesture. All eyes remained focused on the progressing battle. At the start of the engagement, starcorp mows looked to be winking off the monitor approximately every sixty seconds. Less than five minutes into the fray that rate increased to three every sixty seconds. The UFP spacefighters looked to be faring far worse in numbers. By this time, a minimum of five of their number was winking off the screen every fifteen seconds. Despite this the formation held and the armada looked none the worse for these losses.

“They’re beaten,” Gruenberg declared with a hint of finality.

A faint expression of delight appeared on Eckhart’s face in reaction to this report. Daring not to look away from the monitor, his eyes greedily followed the progression of the battle. He did not want to miss a second of this action. All the others within the capsule followed his lead and watched in silence for another four minutes.

“Is that it?” Eckhart blurted out in reaction to what he was seeing on the monitor. “Did we beat them?”

Gruenberg had no answer for this query. His attention held onto the large monitor with even greater intensity.

Sawyer led a less than vigorous charge on the front end of the UFP Armada formation. When his mow came within lethal range of the armada he used his thrusters to halt his advance. The sight of so many UFP spacefighters produced a sensation of hopelessness in him. He suspected that thirty or more UFP spacefighters could be targeting him when he got close enough to the perimeter of their formation. And this they did at nearly the same instant he and his command began firing on them. The difference between the two barrages was that the slugs from the starcorps came out like a drizzle, and the UFP’s barrage came out like a storm. Instinctively, Sawyer maintained as much distance as he felt he needed to give him a reasonable chance of evading the shower of projectiles. The other mows did the same without instruction from him.

Sawyer said nothing for the two minutes that followed his order to attack. He was too preoccupied with dodging the rain of slugs coming towards him while trying to target the vessels that propelled them. The three-dimensional display inside his capsule was filled with targets and projectiles. The assault on his mow was ten times worse than it had been in the previous battle, and the weight of this had him filled with terror. This was true to the point that he gave little notice to other members of his command that moved about along the edges of his display.

“Too many! It’s too many!”

Sawyer noted this report from one of his pilots with a look of surprise. His alarm was engendered by the fact that the pilot was breaking protocol by transmitting to the entire command. This was significant to him because it was his job to hold the others to the rules of engagement. Despite this, he said nothing in response to this report. He contented himself with the hope that the pilot would say no more and continued with the business of trying to stay alive.

The avatar of the pilot that spoke those words was not immediately visible to Sawyer. He knew from the direction of the sound that the pilot was at his eight o’clock low. At his earliest convenience, he spun about to see who it was, but the name and the avatar of this pilot had discontinued to flicker by then. An instant later he turned back into the fight and it was then that a new report came in from a second pilot.

“I’m hit! I’m hit!”

Sawyer noted the flicker of his avatar an instant behind hearing his transmission. The name, Lt. Landry appeared in his cockpit display at that same instant. His location was at his three o’clock and ten degrees high. He barely had time to register this report when more open transmissions began to come in.

“This is crazy!”

“We can’t do this!”

“Oh God, I’m hit… I’m hit again! I’m…”

“We can’t stay here!”

“He’s losing control,” Noonan reported with a sharp look towards Joshua. “This is why we should have sent experienced security force officer out there.”

Joshua gave no notice to Noonan’s assertion. His attention was fixed on the monitors in front of him. The progression of the battle had him engrossed and concerned at the same time. Despite Noonan’s objections, he saw the battle progressing better than he expected. Before the start of the engagement, he believed that there was a better than even chance that his fighter forces would be overwhelmed within the first minute. This belief was based on the hundreds of hours he spent studying simulator battles. He knew that the formation of the UFP Armada was the strongest configuration they could assume. And he feared that the gamers would break ranks under the stress of an actual battle.

Joshua knew that it would be difficult in the extreme for his fighters to prevail in this fight, but not impossible. He had seen them do this several dozen times in the games. He also knew that the difference between this event and the video game was significant and likely to prove to be too much for his gamers to overcome. This time, their lives were on the line.

“It’s too late for that now,” Joshua grumbled as he followed the evolution of the battle.

It was Joshua’s continued belief that the success or failure of their task was dependent on the gamers. He had seen enough of the capabilities of the security force volunteers to know that there was no chance of them breaking up this enemy formation.

“Sawyer, it’s too many! You’re going to get us all killed!”

The panic in the mow pilot’s voice came through the receiver with unblemished clarity. Sawyer gave no thought to identifying the speaker. He was the sixth pilot to break with protocol and transmit his message out in the open. But he was the first to ignore his rank as their Commander and speak directly to him using his given name.

Sawyer was experiencing a growing panic because of his rapidly dwindling control over his command. The sensation had gone unnoticed by him up until this moment. Previously this feeling was being drowned out by his fear. Sawyer did not want to die, and he certainly did not want to die here, now, and like this. But the awareness that he was not doing his job began to push hard into his awareness.

For the first time since the engagement began, Sawyer was giving serious thought to what he should do. His mind wandered to the question, what would Commander Doherty do? His thoughts searched for the correct words, the appropriate bravado, to project to the pilots under his command. This effort, momentarily, compromised his ability to dodge incoming slugs. A volley of seven projectiles came into his awareness at the last moment. He managed to evade them with the assist of a little luck and with an audible “whoa! The effort spurred him into a decision. He will do things his way.

“Okay guys, we know what we have to do. If we’re not doing that, then we’re dying for nothing. We’re gamers! And we’re the best! We didn’t come here to lose. So, let’s do this!”

“I’m with you, Sawyer,” Oscar’s voice yelled into the open communication link an instant behind. “Let’s go Jonah on this whale!”

A second later CC’s voice could be heard yelling in her agreement across the open communication link. A dozen more mow pilots echoed her acknowledgment across the next two seconds. After hearing this Sawyer took a deep breath and commenced to drive his mow towards the center of the UFP formation, ducking and dodging slugs and blazing away with his own rail gun as he thrust forward. Immediately behind him was his entire command. All thoughts of staying within the restrictions of communication protocols were gone. This was all but encouraged by Sawyer.

“They’re going in,” Joshua reported with a sigh of relief.

This was the action that Joshua wanted. He knew that his fighters would have to get inside of this formation if they were to have any chance of breaking it up. Noonan was surprised as well, but neither he nor Joshua were convinced that this would end well. Fifteen seconds into this penetration Noonan’s trepidation took on a new intensity.

“They’re starting to babble!”

Joshua understood exactly what Noonan meant by the word babble. It was a subject of concern several times during the period of training for the gamers. Noonan had warned Joshua that the gamers had a bad habit of talking at random across the communication channel that was assigned to the wing commander. It was this proclivity, more than any other, which sold Joshua on the idea of putting a security force veteran pilot in command of the wings.

“Commander Beck! Commander Beck! You have too…!”

Noonan cut off his call to Sawyer when Joshua barked out a loud “stop!”

Noonan was shocked to see Joshua preventing him from trying to correct this situation. He took a moment to process this, and then he commenced to argue his reasoning on the subject.

“We have to do something. Those kids are about to lose this fight.”

“This is their fight,” Joshua countered, unconvincingly. “Let them do it their way.”

“I hope you’re right about this,” Noonan responded with a sigh and a shake of his head.

Throughout this exchange, Joshua held his gaze to the large monitor. The outcome of the battle was still very much undecided. The mows looked as if they were submerged within the enemy formation. The flicker of red continued to indicate that they were inflicting far more casualties than they were incurring. But Joshua knew that this exchange did not work in their favor. They had to break apart their formation, and they had to do it soon.

The weight of fire at the center of the UFP formation pried apart an opening just like it had done countless times before in Sawyer’s games. More than three dozen UFP spacefighters, which were positioned in that vicinity, were either destroyed or chased off to make room for the attacking mows. It took less than thirty seconds for Sawyer to lead his entire command into the core of the UFP formation, losing only two along the way.

Suddenly Sawyer had no time to think about what he should or should not be doing. This was something that he did not want to be doing anyway. Everything was instinctive. Everything was familiar. Mentally he was in his game pod once again, and this is where he knew his mind needed to be. He charged into the UFP formation, dodging a hailstorm of crisscrossing fire, with the same reckless abandon he employed in the games. Shortly, he and his entire command were surrounded by enemy fighters and their slugs were raining in on them from all directions. But this too was familiar and had its own disadvantages and advantages.

The rain of slugs pouring in on Sawyer and his command were all programmed to self-destruct shortly after they passed their intended targets. In the past, this meant that the detonation of these nuclear warheads always occurred behind them. In this situation, they were detonating all around them. The vacuum of space severely limited the effects of these detonations. There was no air to heat up or produce a blast wave. The hull of most spaceships had to be within two miles of the blast to become damaged by the thermal energy they released. The capsule inside had to be less than five hundred yards away at the moment of detonation to be compromised by the heat. Because of this limitation warhead detonations invariably did little physical damage. What they did do of consequence was produce a powerful discharge of radiation. For a brief three to five seconds, this intense burst of radiation created a two-hundred-mile-wide disruption in any sensor field that enveloped it.

In the previous engagement, these radiation bursts had no effect on the course of the battle. All these detonations occurred behind the combatants. In this situation, they were detonating all around the starcorp mows and producing a smoke screen of sorts. This had the disadvantage of making it easier for them to get hit by a stray slug. And it had the advantage of making it harder for them to get hit by an aimed slug. It also made it easier for the mows to destroy UFP fighters. This radiation screen provided them with the means to move in close to their adversaries without being seen until the last moment. The targeting and firing speed of the mows gave the advantage to them when they appeared from behind these screens. The UFP spacefighters were no match in these quick draw encounters. An average a mow pilot could take out half a dozen spacefighters in one of these exchanges. And there was nothing average about these mow pilots.

Despite the advantages, the mow pilots enjoyed in this situation it was known to them that they were trapped inside a kill box. They also knew that shredding the enemy formation from the inside out was their only escape from this container. Even in the games, they were loathed to employ this tactic for any reason other than as a final recourse. It was generally accepted by mow pilots that working from the inside out was a high-risk high-reward gamble.

“I need help on my one-clock low, low!”

“Incoming! Eight o’clock high!”

“Incoming! Incoming! Eleven, twelve bottom!”

“They’re bunching up on my three!”

“Trouble coming ten o’clock high!”

“They’re pushing in on my seven low!”

“Incoming, from the top!”

“Can someone break up this group on my five, high, high?”

Contrary to the training the gamers were given on communication procedure, the command wide channel was awash with chatter from a dozen different mow pilots every five seconds. Sawyer made no attempt to curtail this. What messages he did send out during this time, effectively, encouraged it. And this was not without some design on his part.

The grid system that the RG01 Space Force employed had been, from the beginning, a poor fit for the gamers. Commander Noonan’s virtual three-dimensional grid over the battle space enabled everything within it to have an assigned address. This was best utilized when instructions came down the chain of command one level at a time. This enabled the basestar to direct segments of fighter force to a specific area or task. A system for addressing communications to a specific mow or group of mows was built into their communication network. Commanding officers were the only persons permitted to address their communique to everyone under their command, and this they did via a channel assigned to them. This method was set up to prevent a flood of talk from drowning out the messages he sent.

The Gamers were accustomed to their own method communicating and mapping targets in the battlespace. Their system had evolved from two years of trial and error in the games and became a fixed discipline among all gamers. Each player simply called out across the command wide communication channel what they wanted someone else to know. They employed only the basics of the grid. The clock face use to indicate directions from their locations. Up, down, top and bottom was used to indicate elevation. Twelve o’clock was always straight forward, and six o’clock was always straight back. Top was straight up, and bottom was straight down. Between the two, in descending order, was one o’clock top, one o’clock high-high, one o’clock high, one o’clock, one o’clock low, one o’clock low-low, and one o’clock bottom. Each mow pilot decided on the relevance of a message to them by locating the mow that was transmitting it and the location of the threat that was spoken of. Finding the speaker was simply a matter of following the sound to the icon that was flickering when the message came in. The computer in their mows resounded all incoming transmissions from behind the source icon and gave graduated volume to the ones that were closer.

For non-gamers, this system seemed chaotic, and they believed it supported out of control behavior. It allowed for a lot of talk to occur simultaneously. Commander Noonan labeled it gamer’s babble. He concluded that this method of operation was too haphazard and dismissed it. He ruled that the military system was far more conducive to orchestrated attacks. For the gamers this babble was familiar, comfortable and intuitive. It enabled them to do less thinking and more reacting. For Sawyer, it was what he knew best. It relieved him of the task of trying to direct the entire battle or enact instructions from Noonan. Encouraged by the silence from the Orion, Sawyer added his voice to the gamers babble and led his command into the fray.

In the chaos of the battle, Sawyer lost himself inside the game. Reaction time was everything. Enemy spacefighters and projectiles were everywhere. Blind spots were the norm. Open space was the exception. Sawyer had all he could do keeping himself alive. Slugs, infrequently, streaked by at half a dozen yards distant. On rare occasions, they came within inches. Alarms repeatedly blared inside his cockpit from all directions, sometimes simultaneously. It was the fiercest space battle that he had ever been in, outside or inside of the game. He was constantly spinning about in reaction to alerts and messages. He destroyed enemy spacefighters on the order of ten every thirty seconds. He had every reason to believe that he would soon be hit by an incoming slug. Ten minutes into the battle this belief eased off a little. Fifteen minutes in it eased off a lot.

From their position in the interior of the UFP formation Sawyer had neither the time nor the inclination to note the overall effect of his command’s attack. Activating a god’s eye view would have distracted him away from the immediate danger all about him. It was not until the weight of nearby enemy forces began to thin that he became aware that the UFP formation was losing its cohesion.

Like a cloud of smoke disturbed by a minute squirt of air, the UFP formation stretched and pushed back from the collection of mows within their midst. The lessening of volleys coming from the UFP spacefighters was the first impression to alert Sawyer to a change in the progression of the battle. This event decreased the quantity of radiation screens around them, and this, in turn, exposed more space and more targets for the mows to go after.

“Expand and pursue! Expand and pursue!” Sawyer yelled into the command wide communication channel.

No sooner had he given this command did he begin to hear it echoed by more than a dozen other mow pilots. Suddenly the enemy was far more assailable than they had been at any other time during this engagement. It was a snowball effect, and it was the exact event that the mow pilots wanted. In such disarray, the UFP spacefighters were easy targets. Without their numerical advantage working for them, they were exponentially more vulnerable to the mow’s superior speed and technology. Sawyer’s kill ratio went up to twelve every thirty seconds, and then fifteen, and then eighteen, all in the time span of two minutes. Within a short amount of time, the battle transformed into a killing rampage. The UFP formation was non-existent.

The battle had been raging for more than seven minutes when its progression appeared to undergo a drastic change. General Gruenberg’s attention to the large monitor visibly intensified. He leaned forward to better scrutinize the event that was unfolding before his eyes. The, seemingly invisible wall between the two forces was no longer there. His own forces enveloped the starcorp fighters over the time span of half a dozen seconds.

“What just happened?” Eckhart questioned with an inflection of excitement. “Is that it? Is it over?”

Gruenberg did not give an immediate response to the inquiries. He continued to study the monitor for several more seconds. No one else in the capsule dared to interpret this event on his behalf. Infuriated by the silence, Eckhart made a repeated challenged for an explanation of what was happening.

“I don’t know,” Gruenberg reported with a hint of bewilderment.

What Gruenberg was seeing confused him at this moment. He expected to see a sudden and drastic increase in the attrition of enemy fighters followed by a complete withdrawal of the remainder. But it was the opposite of this that he was witnessing. The attrition of his forces went on a rapid rise, and the enemy fighters were inserting themselves, on mass, into the midst of their ranks. The digital animation of this resembled a large cloud absorbing a smaller one. Inside this nebulous display a storm appeared to be brewing. The number of green blinks within the cloud grew by a quarter every ten seconds. It did this to the point that it began to look like repetitive discharges of green lightening inside a cloud.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Eckhart demanded. “This is your plan. What’s happening?”

Gruenberg was more than a little unnerved by Eckhart’s inquiry. It was the tenor of his voice that provoked this reaction and the fact that he had no immediate answer for the question. There was no explanation he could give for what was happening or where this event was going. He was still counting on the rate of attrition to work to his advantage. But he had no idea how this new enemy tactic would play out and he admitted as much in his repeated response.

“I don’t know!”

Despite his displeasure with Gruenberg’s reply, Eckhart had no place to go from there on the subject and contented himself to wait out the battle. Along with the others in the capsule, he began to watch in silence as the engagement continued to evolve. It took little more than five minutes for the trend of the battle to become obvious. It took another twenty minutes for this trend to play out to its fruition. At the end of this time, Gruenberg looked to Major Everett and gave him a softly spoken order.

“Recall all spacefighters.”

“They did it,” Noonan acknowledged after a long ten minutes of silence.

The sight of the UFP spacefighters scattered across an area space that was thirty times wider than its original formation had all within the Orion Command Capsule dumbfounded with surprise. The battle was forty-seven minutes old when Noonan ordered all mows to return to the Orion.