Free No Way to Start a War (TCOTU, Book 2) (This Corner of the Universe) by Britt Ringel Page A

twenty seconds.  When used in concert with the top
launch/recovery deck, Eagle could launch her entire fighter wing of sixty
craft in ten minutes.
    The
whine of tightening gravity tethers filled Ensign Gables’ cockpit.  “Angel
Twenty-nine, cleared for launch,” the catapult officer announced through her
headset.
    After
a final check of her Pup’s systems including one last, hopeful look at her
inertial compensator display, Gables replied, “Ready.”
    The
F-3 was well into space by the time the sound waves from the shriek of the tethers
reached the catapult officer’s position.  The only sounds audible to Gables were
C-flight’s chatter over her headset and the soft beep of her fighter’s
navigation computer cueing her to the squadron’s rendezvous point.  Although
she had only been spaceborne for a few seconds, her flight leader, Lieutenant
Walker, was already harassing her to form up with the rest of the ten-ship
flight.  Aviate, navigate, communicate , she told herself.  Blocking out the
voice of her flight commander, she scanned her fighter’s instruments.  Engine
good, avionics good, nav systems good.
    “Angel
Twenty-nine, this is Angel Lead, form up at Point Alpha soonest.  Acknowledge,”
Walker repeated in a coarse tone.  Considering the performance from the fighter
wings in general, he had the right to be in a foul mood.  The transfer of the fighters
from the auxiliaries to the carriers had been a complete catastrophe.  The
crash by the SEW-5 was merely icing on the cake.  In Flight Training, Gables
had watched an Avocet pilot kill himself upon approach to the school’s
converted freighter used to simulate a carrier.  In total, her Flight Training
Class 95-05 lost six Avocet pilots during the combat landing instruction phase
of the training.  The prevailing theory was the SEW-5 did not like to land.  And
now we’ve already lost one Avocet and we haven’t even been in combat ,
Gables thought bitterly.
    “Acknowledged,
Lead,” Gables finally answered after she had tapped her flight control stick
lightly.  Her Pup raced toward the rest of her flight at the blistering speed
of .3 c .  Still slower than old Anelace , she considered.  Well,
what do you expect, Ana had six drives and this bus only has one.  I’m still
faster than any Black Space ship I’ll ever encounter.   Although given
enough time and propulsion any ship could accelerate to the speeds her Pup was
capable of, due to the Hoss-Boland effect, maintaining structural integrity
became increasingly more difficult at higher speeds.  The power requirements to
maintain a ship’s inertial compensators became progressively prohibitive past
.2 c . Ships the size of frigates or larger could not simultaneously
supply the power demanded to accelerate themselves to ultra-high speeds and
keep their inertial compensators from failing.
    Gables
fired bow thrusters to reduce speed to .25 c and the Pup settled into
formation as the squadron waited for the final F-3, Angel-30, to rendezvous.  In
total, Eagle had generated fifty-two of her sixty fighters for Exercise
Focus Lens.  The remaining eight had either aborted their launch or returned to
the carrier after signaling “dud engine.”  In this exercise, the mission of Eagle’s two fighter squadrons, VF-25 and -26, was to play the role of the “Red Force” aggressors. 
They had launched one hour early and were to fly outside the task group’s
sensor range.  Once the exercise officially started, the Red Force fighters
would attack the carriers with their virtual ASM-C missiles.  After their
missile attack, they would then intercept any “Blue Force” fighters and engage
them.  The pilots were nervous even though they would not launch missiles or fire
laser bursts.  There were still real dangers to the exercise.  The flight
commanders had estimated the sortie would last over three hours.  That gave Eagle’s entire fighter wing less than one hour to safely land before