"Silent Fireworks"

As soon as we cleared McHenry’s launch bay, my gun whined to full charge and the computer started tagging targets. My canopy highlighted twelve tiny, moving points of light against the crowded starfield - Collective battlecruisers, according to the readouts. The comm bud in my ear crackled with orders barked between the ships of our task force, but I heard this only as background noise - I knew that I’d receive targets from Livingston as soon as we were in range.

Then the stars winked out in front of me: the canopy was hiding them, to reduce the number of things wheeling around in my view. Supposedly, this was to cut down on disorientation. I cracked my knuckles expectantly, and gripped the gun controls.

Behind us, McHenry fired a salvo. I would not have known for several seconds if it were not for the comm chatter and the displays - not until the swarm of rockets passed my gunship. There was no sound, only a hundred flashes of strobing orange chemical-booster fire, quickly dwindling toward the enemy. I swiveled my gun to point backward, and watched for a moment as the ship’s ten-centimeter railguns fired. You couldn’t see them doing much of anything but oscillating, but I imagined the glorious racket that echoed inside the ship, the deafening hum of the accelerators, the hiss of coolant, and the metallic pounding of the loaders. The metal slugs, though fired after the rockets, would be the first armament to reach the enemy - unless the Collective’s computers predicted the fire pattern and the ships maneuvered out of danger. My console sprouted a number of narrow red cones - enemy railgun fire patterns, as predicted by McHenry’s sensors. Going into one of those usually meant death.

“Look sharp boys, Cutters inbound!” Livingston tagged the enemy line in the computer, and I swiveled my gun to face them. Kamarov, in the other turret, was probably doing the same. Livingston had tagged the first squad as our responsibility. As I looked, more cutter squads were tagged by the other gunships. The range ticker next to the enemy group counted down, and I waited, thumbs on my triggers, for them to come into range. More orange flashes arced past my canopy as McHenry fired another salvo of rockets, but I didn’t let this distract me.

Just before the range indicator went green, I depressed both triggers. I knew that a gunship’s light railguns had no real range limit, but that shots fired from too far wouldn’t require any amount of skill to dodge. The capacitors’ whine switched to a modulated hum punctuaded by rhythmic thuds, and the whole gunship vibrated. Kamarov fired a second after I did, his shots tracing an arc tight on one side of the cutters where mine tried to pierce the formation’s heart. It was a common trick - my shots would make the formation break, and he was trying to catch some of them as they evaded.

Sure enough, the group split. There was a white flash, and Kamarov whooped into the comm - the trick had worked. I tried to line up another burst of fire, but Livingston chose that moment to throw the gunship into a wild maneuver, circling back toward McHenry.

I took a quick glance at the console. dozens of cubic kilometers of vacuum around us buzzed with the maneuvers and weapons fire of a hundred gunships and four times our number in enemy cutters.

Behind the Cutters, a cloud of larger, slower Sweepers was advancing toward the dogfight, but they would not be a factor for almost two minutes - plenty of time to deal with the lighter craft. Beyond them, the enemy’s battlecruisers were avoiding fire but not advancing or retreating. McHenry and the rest of the task force were doing the same thing, behind our line.

The computer had picked out all the cutters in the squad, most of which had changed course and angled toward us. Little more than rockets with pilots and weaponized plasma torches, Cutters were agile and quick but had to get in very close to score hits. They were devastatingly effective, cheap, and numerous - just like everything else the Collective built. I lined up the leader, then pulled my aim off to one side before firing. As soon as I fired, he dodged - almost right into the shot. I smiled, though I’d missed. The best cutter pilots were almost impossible to hit, and could cooperatively shred gunships easily, but this set was twitchy, probably green. Easy kills. We just had to avoid making mistakes.

As if to confirm my observation, Kamarov whooped, signalling another kill. I lined up the shot again, this time starting wide. As the burst was firing, I pulled the gun into line with the lead cutter. This time, I got him. His compatriots swerved wide to avoid the shrapnel cloud.

Livingston swore into the comm, and again the gunship twisted around in space. Had I been able to see the stars, their twisting and shifting might have been nauseating. “Nine, watch your fire arcs. You just about got us.”

The offending gunner offered a quick apology, and the incident was forgotten. The chances of friendly fire in this battle were high - the furball was just too crowded. Trying not to think about it, I turned the gun towards the next Cutter -

Too late. Livingston hit the thrusters just as the Cutter flashed by, and its plasma torch bit into empty space only a few dozen meters from my canopy. “Mason!” Livingston snapped at me. “Pay attention.” Had that been a more experienced Cutter pilot, the gunship probably would have been cut in two, and three of us would be dead.

“Sorry.” I spun the gun around, and fired at the Cutter’s retreating engine flare. I wasn’t really expecting to land a hit, but the small craft’s boosters flashed and went dark. Just to be sure, I used my next salvo to finish him off. Kamarov whooped again, though I didn’t see his kill.

Somewhere on the other side of the battle, a reactor flared into critical and went nova. I didn’t bother checking which side had just lost a ship - for a gunship crew, the far side of the battle might as well be the far side of the galaxy.

I whirled my gun again, lining up a lone Cutter. My ears throbbed with the gun’s hum and shuddering, and the other pilot weaved - right into Kamarov’s spread. The original eight were now down to two - and they were retreating. I glanced again at the console. The Cutter wave had taken the usual eight to ten percent toll on the gunship cloud, but an inordinately large number - over half - of their number had died to accomplish this. As I watched, they regrouped with the tougher, slower Sweepers. They’d be back, escorting their big brothers, but we had a moment of respite.

“Mason, you’re slow today. My kill count is in no danger.” Kamarov referred our running kill count competition. He was only a few dozen more kills ahead of me, but this battle was helping his lead.

“Yeah. Enjoy it while you can.” I shot back.

“Cut the chatter.” Livingston chided us, then went back to talking into his comm. Having little else to do, I listened in. “...Requesting suppressive fire support at the following coordinates - ” He punched a button, and the computer digitized the coordinates intended and spat them over the channel, a sound not unlike the grinding of heavy machinery sped up to triple speed. “Repeat, requesting suppressive fire support at the supplied coordinates. If we get it, we should be able to break through...”

At these words, my thudding heartbeat picked up the pace, courtesy of a fresh surge of adrenaline. Did Livingston really think we might break through? I’d been in a dozen battles over the last nine months, some larger than this and some smaller, but never had I seen a significant number of Confederate gunships break through the enemy line. I’d seen Collective craft break our line though, at Regency. The rout at Regency was well-known. Usually, the light craft pounded each other mercilessly in between while their big brothers slugged it from a distance, and the loser was the side to retreat first. It was exceedingly rare for fleet commanders to so badly mismanage their position that their capital ships were being strafed by unopposed - after all, strike craft like gunships and Cutters are cheap, and losing hundreds is still better than losing one cruiser. Defending one’s home ship was always more important to us gunship crews than blowing up the other guy’s. Even so, all gunships carried a special package, just in case a breakthrough happened. We hadn’t yet had a chance to use ours.

A glance at the console told me Livingston was right. The Sweepers were still a ways off, and surrounded by the remaining Cutters - and though they outnumbered us overall, there was a thin spot in their cloud of ships, and that thin spot was dead ahead.

Someone on McHenry replied on the comm, something curt, brief. Livingston did not spout a string of profanity. That had to mean that McHenry’s light guns were going to give us a volley. I swiveled my gun to the forward position, and imagined Livingston in the cockpit, fingers drumming on the thruster controls, waiting for the shots to come.

The only thing that told me that McHenry had fired a massive cloud of metal right past us was the instruments - that, and Livingston’s unnecessary shout for us to “hang on.” Even with the dampers, the sudden burst of speed pushed me back into my chair - without them, all three of us would be nothing but bloody goo in the back of the gunship. The range between us and the enemy closed rapidly - and they saw us coming. Cutters and sweepers alike cut wide in all directions, probably trying to get out of the red cone that McHenry had put on their console displays.

Most weren’t fast enough. McHenry’s light guns could fire the same size projectiles my gun could, only more of them, and faster. The sky in front of the gunship flashed five, six, seven times, each marking the death of a Sweeper and its crew of five. The lesser flashes designating the deaths of Cutters were too numerous to count.

Eight other gunships were right behind us as Livingston ran us right for the new gap in the enemy line. I knew the remaining ships would close it fast, and started lining up the nearest surviving Sweeper.

Then one of the red cones on the display swiveled to encompass the gap. Livingston swore again, and cut a hard turn. The enemy had turned railguns of their own on the growing problem, and it was suicide to fly in the red cones. “So close.”

Abstractedly, I noticed that one of our gunships didn’t make it out of danger in time. Shredded by railgun fire, its fuel tank made a brief orange-yellow fireball before it ran out of oxygen.

I sighed, disappointed, and let loose a salvo at the Sweeper I’d lined up. I scored hits, but the tough ship shrugged them off.

But we caught a break.

There was a sudden nova flash from the enemy line, and the red cone faded off the screen. The battlecruiser covering the gap had been destroyed before the gap could close.

“Though the breach!” Livingston practically screamed into the comm. “Everybody through!” I took another shot at the Sweeper, just before Livingston hit the thrusters again. I didn’t find out if that shot had scored. Five seconds of hard acceleration later, we punched through - and behind us, ten other gunships had followed. The comms echoed with cheers and the chatter of the remaining gunships coordinating to reposition to cover our section of the furball.

The cheers only lasted until space around us filled with moving red cones. The enemy ships were firing wildly, hoping to pick us off before we got in close. It was a tense minute as Livingston weaved us closer to the nearest battlecruiser, a long, flattened craft studded with protruding weapon towers, but we survived. Two of the gunships didn’t.

We ran along the ship’s long axis for a brief moment, both turrets firing indiscriminately and pointlessly at anything we thought looked fragile, as Livingston armed our breakthrough package. The other gunships flew interference, keeping three squads of reserve Cutters at bay until we had delivered our payload. The battlecruiser’s light guns were firing too, but they were deigned to support light craft from a distance, and were no threat at this range. I doubted the Collective captain knew what was about to happen to his ship - if he did, there’d be more panic in the efforts to stop us. I suspected he thought all we had to hit him with was the railguns, which if true would make us little more than a nuisance. Cutters, of course, had no special weapon to combat capital ships - their plasma torches were just as effective against armored battleships as they were gunships. Our railguns weren’t.

“All gunships, I’m gonna pull the pin. Get clear, head for the next target.” Livingston warned. All eight remaining gunships acknowledged, hard-burning away from us toward the next battlecruiser. The remaining Cutters arced in. I scattered some with my railgun, but the swarm was too spread out for me to really slow them down.

Just as the Cutters were closing in, Livingston flipped the gunship’s nose at a sharp angle and boosted us away from the battlecruiser, giving us as much speed as possible before he flipped what I imagined to be a big red switch on his controls. There was a high-pitched whine, then a bass thud, and everything in the gunship went dark. The stars outside my canopy came back. I smiled, knowing that the EMP had done just that to the pursuing Cutters, and hopefully to the battlecruiser we were moving away from. The gunship and cutters would be able to drift until they could restart - but the larger ship would be shredded by McHenry and the other Confederate ships.

“We get it?” I shouted over my shoulder down the connecting passage. Comms were inoperable, of course.

“Think so.” Livingston shouted back.

I loosened my harness, tossed away my headset, and twisted around in my chair to look back toward the battlecruiser. I could see only a blocky chunk of black, where the stars were obscured. There were no running lights, no engine trails, and no rocket flares. The battlecruiser was powerless, drifting. “We got it all right. Kamarov, ready for the good part?” I felt accomplished, even though the credit belonged to Livingston. I reflected that it was too bad that the pilot’s canopy was up front, and he wouldn’t get to see his handiwork.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Mason.” Kamarov shouted back.

It was just then that the black chunk of missing stars sprouted a tight cluster of bright orange lights, fires that quickly winked out. Fires in space never last long, just until the oxygen feeding them is vented or consumed. Based on the timing, one of the Confederate ships had started firing its railguns just as we’d popped our EMP.

None of us spoke. Dozens of railgun hits lit the ship’s sides before the slower rockets caught up. The Collective ship took hits from the first salvo all along its length, explosions burrowing deeper into its unprotected skin, but it didn’t explode into a reactor flare - one needed to have a working reactor for that. I was grateful, as we were close enough for such a flare to bake us with gamma rays.

The flashes, devoid of all sound, reminded me of the fireworks show I’d seen when I was a child: with distant fireworks, there were flashes, but they were so far off that the sound took several seconds to reach you. I found myself expecting the booms of fireworks to rumble past my ears at any moment. At the realization, I smiled. I’d be waiting forever in vain to hear the triumphant booms and crackles of this show. Still, it wasn’t without its own grim beauty.

Finally, one of the shots hit the battlecruiser’s magazine, or something equally explosive. The fireball lasted only tenths of a second, but it was enough to melt metal and tear the ship in half. Silhouetted in the red glow of cooling metal, I saw clouds of black specks sucked out of both halves, and into space, and I wondered fleetingly how many people were just killed. I immediately pushed the thought aside. It’s not that I thought nothing of the lives lost in war, but I knew that given the opportunity, the men and women who’d just died would do the same to us, to McHenry’s crew, gleefully. Regency had taught us to give no quarter, for we would receive none.

“Livingston?”

“Yeah, Kamarov?”

“Does that mean Mason and I have to beat your score now?”

All three of us laughed in the darkness.