Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (1-4) Page 23

  4

  The ‘Naboo’ challenge started out completely different than anything Paul had gone through to date, with little more than a mission objective to begin with and as much time as the team needed to ready themselves. The thing of it was, they couldn’t run through it the first time until they’d designed their force deployment, all the way from tactics to individual ship designs, meaning that this new naval challenge was going to involve a lot of theoretical design work before they would even begin to get to the action.

  The basic mission was to blockade a single city on the surface sufficient to stop one ship from escaping the planet. Within the simulation that they were given access to there was simply a point on the surface and a termination ‘line’ in high orbit…everything else they had to design, making the whole exercise feel less like a challenge and more like homework, furthering Morgan’s sentiment that the trainers didn’t know what they were doing.

  The other 2s didn’t take to the simulation with much enthusiasm either, but as always they were game for more point scoring opportunities and used their first 2 hour block of ‘challenge’ time to brainstorm ways of implementing a blockade and getting used to the physics engine. When they eventually broke for lunch they left more confused than they’d entered, and equally disillusioned.

  They’d gone along with the movie guidelines and created basic ships, little more than block-like markers with weapons on them, and began to run a few simulations against the single ship preprogrammed to rise up from the city and try and break through the blockade…

  Problem was, the Star Wars version of a blockade was laughable, which was made evident when they tried to repeat the ‘tactic’ in the simulator, finding it impossible to form a ‘line’ of ships in the sky. First off, closure speeds were so fast that a ship lifting off from the surface, by the time it made orbit, would fly right by any blockade in the blink of an eye, and unless there was an accidental collision, the blockading warships were of no use at all.

  Second, there was no reason for the fleeing ship to fly up to that particular point in the sky when it had thousands of miles of orbit to choose from, meaning that even if sitting ships could stop the ‘blockade runner,’ they’d have to have a fleet numbering in the tens of thousands, if not millions, to lay a coverage net large enough to cover the orbital tracks over that section of the planet. And the idea of covering the entire planet was downright insane. Paul found himself reluctantly lowering his appreciation for George Lucas’s work as he began to see the outright ridiculous concept for what it was.

  So where did that leave them? Was this an impossible challenge that the trainers were throwing at them ignorantly…or was it something difficult, but doable in the long run? Paul took it on a leap of faith to be the later and downloaded a simple copy of the physics engine into a datapad for him to work on during his downtime, as did a few of the others, but it was Paul who was soon consumed with working out the mechanics of it all.

  Two weeks passed, with none of the teams even attempting a run, having made little or no progress in coming up with a viable strategy, until Paul finally came through with a breakthrough, staying up late that night and pounding on Jason’s door at 4:07am.

  Being a light sleeper Jason woke on the first knock and quickly pulled himself out of bed, wondering what was up. When he opened the door Paul tossed a datapad at his chest and walked in.

  “I think I’ve got something,” he said as Jason fumbled the toss but recovered quickly enough to keep the device from hitting the floor. Then he noticed that Paul was still wearing the same clothes he’d had on in the evening.

  “Have you slept yet? We’ve got that bunker assault in,” he checked the clock on the datapad, “less than four hours.”

  “I’ll manage,” Paul promised as Jason looked through the information. A few seconds later his head came up, now fully awake with adrenaline creeping into his veins.

  “Have you…”

  “38%,” Paul answered before he could finish the question, “but with us doing the piloting instead of the computer, I think it’ll give us a 50/50 chance.”

  “I’d settle for 10% right now...this is genius!”

  “I have my moments.”

  “No, I’m serious…I’m already seeing additional modifications that we can make.”

  “It does open up a lot more possibilities, especially when they get around to having us stop more than one ship.”

  Jason finally looked up from the diagrams. “Well done, Admiral,” he said, shoving the pad back into his chest. “Now go get some sleep, if you can.”

  “I doubt it,” Paul said, smiling as he left. Jason was so pumped that he doubted he could get back to sleep either.

  After the door closed, Jason sat down on his slightly heated bed and let the significance of what Paul had just designed sink in. Multiple wheels of thought began to spin as he planned out different ways they could use what Paul had just given them, knowing that this could very well be the key to taking the lead away from the 7s.

  After more than an hour of planning, Jason forced himself back into bed and tried to get what sleep he could, but his mind never fully adjusted to the task. He got back up an hour later to begin his normal morning routine, starting with a quick shave then a 10k run over on the track, then a shower and a bit of breakfast before meeting up with the rest of the 2s in one of the desert parks for their bunker assault run.

  The Black Knight showed up again and spoiled the challenge, as usual, but even that couldn’t quell the anticipation the entire team had for the afternoon session. They followed up the failed challenge with more showers, then another Dino class before spending most of their lunch break quietly refining Paul’s plans and readying themselves to make the first real attempt at the Naboo challenge.

  The first hour of their 2 hour block was spent programming as they uploaded Paul’s ship designs and tactical formations into the simulator’s mainframe, along with making a few modifications they’d mutually discussed. After that they all entered their individual simulator booths and closed the hatches behind them, cutting off any non-comlink communications, despite the fact they were barely two meters away from each other.

  Inside the booths was a simple command chair and control board, with a large display screen taking up the majority of the inner space, making it appear almost as a tiny personal theater. On the board were a variety of controls, allowing multi-tasking options for a wide variety of craft. Paul reconfigured the board, rotating a joystick down on the moveable panel until it was directly in front of him. He could have used the keys, nub controls, rollers, or any of the other interface devices, but he preferred the joystick, given that he was going to be one of the ‘hounds’ today.

  Once he had his controls set up to his liking he thumbed the ‘ready’ button and waited for the others to do likewise. A few seconds later his screen lit up with a 10 second countdown timer overlayed onto a picture of a simulated Earth. When it expired the planet seemed to shrink until it no longer filled his screen, leaving him looking down on the globe from a distance.

  Paul experimented with the controls and rotated the view of his ship, thrusting slightly to port. The screen spun slowly, with the Earth passing across in front of him until it disappeared against the star field. Paul nulled out the turn and set his ‘interceptor’ tail down to the planet.

  In the lower right corner of the display screen was a sensor display, which showed the position of three other interceptors nearby, though several thousands of kilometers apart. Paul toggled the sensor controls and expanded the view, zooming out until several other dots appeared in a familiar grid.

  He and the other three interceptors were arranged in a square, sitting in geosynchronous orbit over the target city on the surface of the planet. In the center of that square was a larger ship, full of sensors and communication equipment, which was piping out the navigational data to all of the others, allowing them to track and coordinate their efforts against the tiny ship now beginning to
rise up from the surface.

  Four other ‘control ships’ were situated in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth, staggered so that they could track all objects in orbit and have clear lines of sight between them for transmission. They were one of Paul’s brainstorms…taking the long range ‘radar’ equipment out of the other ships and using a data uplink to give the ‘hounds’ the necessary information without having to tote the extra weight in equipment, making them a bit faster.

  And the speed of the interceptors was critical, given that the blockade runner was little more than a ballistic missile, capable of achieving significant acceleration and with a massive fuel supply. Also, it wasn’t constructed as a normal ship would be, with an out and back design philosophy. It was simply a one-way device, and if it expended all fuel putting it on an outbound trajectory from Earth and could never get back, so be it. The point of the mission was to break the blockade…not what would happen thereafter.

  The ‘break away’ point was high orbit, meaning that even if an interceptor was right on the heels of the blockade runner, the mission would end if the ship hit that particular altitude, which was too far away to worry about, well past the moon. However, if the blockade runner got a significant lead, and the computer calculated that an intercept was mathematically impossible, the challenge would immediately terminate, saving hours of needless waiting or requiring the trainees to quit the scenario, which was something that they never wanted to do on principle.

  Paul had thought a long time about what Morgan had said about the trainers not really knowing what they were doing, and it’d bothered him why they had set the termination line so far away from the planet when a blockade was something up close near the surface…until he discovered the truth of the matter, something that the trainers designing the program obviously had been aware of.

  An up-close blockade was a fools’ errand, given the speeds involved, though that had been the 2s’ aim from the get go. They’d been referencing science fiction guidance in how to go about setting up a blockade and had suffered a psychological blind spot because of it. Star Wars and others, he assumed, had taken their blockade philosophy from history and used a water navy as an example. Reasonable, from a certain point of view, but totally inadequate. A space navy, as Paul was quickly realizing, was another type of beast entirely.

  For starters, ships couldn’t just float above the planet…at least not anything that Star Force had available. That meant all ships had to be in orbit, which meant lateral speeds far exceeding the rotation of the planet unless you put them in geosynchronous orbit, which was about 35,000 kilometers away, or just a little shy of a tenth of the distance to the moon. So the idea of sitting ships in space above a target city to blockade it was totally absurd.

  The 2s had attempted to bypass this fact by placing orbiting ships in sequence around the planet, so that one would be passing over or near the target city at all times, but one ship was hardly a blockade, and even if they had 10 or more, the 100+ kilometer high cone of atmosphere that sat between them and the target would allow a huge area in the lowest possible orbit for the blockade runner to evade them in.

  Missiles were the next logic step, using the low orbiting ships as launch platforms to fire at the escaping ship, but again the math didn’t work out and there was just too much area to cover, not to mention that the direction of orbit made a huge difference in missile launch. If the blockade runner took off in the opposite direction, then the latent speed of the 2s’ ships would essentially make missile closure impossible, even if the blockade runner passed within a few kilometers.

  That meant they’d have to have double the ships orbiting in opposite directions, if not multiple directions, considering that the blockade runner didn’t have to take off in a lateral trajectory. It could rise up in a polar orbit or at any other angle. It could even eschew orbit altogether and blast off straight up and through the blockade, given the engine power it possessed.

  Which was why Paul had placed four interceptors along the vertical trajectory in geosynch orbit, encouraging the blockade runner to make an orbital ascent, else they’d be waiting in the wings to chase down the ship as it passed through the middle of their widely spaced formation.

  ‘Chasing down’ was the crux of the matter, and Paul’s biggest breakthrough. While a water naval blockade might be able to sit still and physically block off escape routes, a space naval blockade had to be designed to chase down a fleeing vessel before it could get too far away from the planet, and given that insight Paul had repositioned most of their assets away from extreme low orbit and into better ambush positions.

  In fact, all but four of their ships had been placed above where the 2s had been placing their previous blockades, and those four ships were meant to corral the blockade runner into preferred zones of intercept rather than to keep the target on the planet. The four interceptors, none of which were being flown by any of the 2s, were skimming just above the atmosphere on orbital tracks that, if chosen by the blockade runner as an exit vector, would make use of the interceptors’ latent orbital speed in addition to their significant engines to make an attempt at a quick convergence as the fleeing ship hadn’t yet reached significant escape speed.

  That decent chance of early success almost guaranteed that those orbital tracks would NOT be chosen, thus Paul’s tactical formation could eliminate vast tracks of orbital space and concentrate their efforts on the more likely avenues of escape.

  Those likely avenues were being covered by missiles ships in an orbital grid 2000 kilometers in altitude on a wide range of orbital angles. The net, by necessity, covered the entire planet, else the gradual rotation of the Earth would eventually bring any focused zone out of alignment. Paul supposed he could have cheated for this particular scenario, given that there wouldn’t be time for that to occur, but he hadn’t wanted a single use tactic for this challenge alone, but a comprehensive blockade plan that they could use in others, as well as gradually modify as they gained more experience with this new aspect to their training.

  The missile ship net wasn’t ‘tight’ by any stretch of the imagination, but it did create zones that that the blockade runner needed to avoid, thus further limiting its escape angles and bringing the odds of a catch for the orbiting interceptors up another notch…or potentially making a kill if the ship chose not to avoid them.

  The interceptor grid was another 1000 kilometers higher, with each of the 25 ships on individual orbits, hoping that at least one of them would be in line with the escape route the blockade runner was choosing as it slowly rose up through the atmosphere. The further it got, the better the control ships could estimate its course, sending out continually updated projections to the 2s, all of whom were manning their own interceptors, along with the computer controlled ones.

  Paul watched from high above, knowing that it would take some time for the blockade runner to reach him even if it came straight up, which it wasn’t. It was angling into a spiraling orbital escape trajectory…one that was nearly aligned with three of the low orbiting interceptors.

  Paul keyed his comlink to one interceptor in particular. “Ivan, looks like it’s heading your way. Get your ass moving now or you won’t get close enough.”

  5

  “Will do, Admiral,” Ivan joked, using Paul’s newly bestowed nickname, as he selected a point on the projected flight path as an intercept and the computer calculated the heading and thrust necessary. He didn’t have time to finesse the math and went with his best guess, realigning his heads up display trajectory marker with the flashing icons indicating the computer’s continually updated navigational intercept tracker.

  “Here we go,” Ivan said to himself as he kicked in the four massive engines sitting aft of the pilot, fuel, and weapon pods. The solid rocket fuel engines quickly accelerated the ‘hound’ towards the blockade runner…or rather where it was supposed to be several minutes later, given that it was still in atmosphere at the moment.

  The interceptor’s fifth eng
ine, a small plasma unit similar to those used in the starships, was silent and would be used later if needed for navigation, but it was up to the primary ‘candles’ to provide the thrust necessary to run down the blockade runner, which was also burning several candles of its own, one of which dropped off as it began to leave the atmosphere, reducing its weight and increasing acceleration as the discarded stage lazily drifted into a low and unstable orbit.

  The flashing icons on his screen slid off to the right and Ivan quickly readjusted his heading to match, but found it difficult to keep them in his center marker. “Guys, what’s up? I can’t keep my heading.”

  “It’s altering course,” Jason immediately responded. “If we can’t predict exactly where it’s going, it’s going to be a lot harder to catch.”

  “Anyone with even a remote chance of intercept start getting some altitude,” Paul added, studying the situation from afar. “It can’t drastically change its course this far out, so we have some idea of where it’s heading. Put yourselves in the vicinity and hope we get lucky.”

  “Will do,” Megan said as five other orbiting dots began to reposition. The rest of the interceptors remained motionless, not responding to the blockade runner unless it came within a pre-specified distance. Two of the computer controlled ships were pursuing, along with Ivan, but the rest were already out of the game.

  “Paul, I’m going to play a hunch and reposition now,” Emily said from one of the three interceptors in formation around the geosynch point.

  “Go ahead, I’m going to hold off a while.”

  “What are you thinking?” she asked, hearing something odd in his tone.

  “I think they’ve got a trainer flying that thing, and he’s flying erratically just to screw with our computer projections.”

  “So much for a predictable first challenge,” Emily said, not really disappointed. She, like all the trainees, enjoyed a challenge, though their expectations for this one had been lowered due to recent design flubs.