by Ryk Brown
“Yes, sir,” Vladimir replied smartly, straightening his posture.
Deliza resisted the urge to run from the bottom of the boarding ramp, instead choosing an energetic stroll across the deck, grinning from ear to ear.
“Deliza,” Admiral Dumar greeted, reaching out to embrace the young woman. “It is so good to see you once again. I only wish it were under more pleasant circumstances.”
“Thank you, Admiral,” Deliza replied. “Captain Scott,” she said, turning to greet Nathan with a polite embrace.
“A pleasure to see you again, Deliza. I am so sorry about your family. If there is anything I can do for you, please, do not hesitate to ask.”
Deliza smiled. “Thank you, Captain, but you may regret that offer someday.” She turned to Vladimir next, wrapping her arms around him with even more affection than the others. “Vlad!” she exclaimed.
Vladimir hesitated for a moment, panic and confusion in his eyes, his hands flailing as he was unsure what to do. He glanced at the Admiral, who had one eyebrow raised, and flashed a look that begged the admiral’s forgiveness as he resigned himself to her embrace. “It is wonderful to see you, Deliza,” he said as they parted and she stepped back. “You look wonderful,” he continued nervously. “This is just wonderful. What a wonderful ship you have…”
“I apologize that we cannot stay and visit,” Nathan said, rescuing his fumbling chief engineer, “but we must catch a shuttle back to the Aurora as we have an enormous amount of work to do.”
“Yes,” Vladimir agreed readily. “An enormous amount of work.”
“Admiral, Deliza,” Nathan said, pushing Vladimir toward the exit.
“Gentlemen.”
“Bye,” Deliza said.
Admiral Dumar sighed. “He is right, you do look wonderful.”
“Thank you.”
“Where is Mister Hiller? I half expected him to be escorting you arm in arm.”
“Abby sent word ahead, didn’t she?” Deliza pouted.
“Not at all,” Dumar insisted. “Your father noticed your affection for one another months ago.”
“Really?” Deliza said, surprised. “Yanni is checking on the data cores. He does so quite often, actually. We were told that they would have to be loaded onto one of your shuttles. Apparently the Mirai is a bit too large for the landing pad at the Data Ark.”
“Yes, I am aware.”
“He insists on escorting the cores all the way back to the Ark.”
“I can certainly understand his devotion to his task. It is an admirable quality. Would you like me to show you to your quarters?”
“Am I staying here on the Karuzara?” she asked.
“I just assumed so,” the admiral replied. “Of course, you may stay wherever you wish.”
“No, here will be fine, I’m sure. Besides, I was hoping to convince you to let me do a little experiment,” she explained as she took his arm and they headed for the exit.
“What kind of experiment?”
“To put it bluntly, I’d like to fix your Falcons,” Deliza told him as they walked across the deck and approached the main exit.
“You wish to work as a flight mechanic?”
“No, I want to fix them, as in improve them.”
“I wasn’t aware there was anything wrong with them,” the admiral said as they entered the corridor.
“They are wonderful old spacecraft, to be sure, but they were ill-conceived to begin with, on top of which you’re not using them effectively.”
“I thought we were using them quite effectively,” Dumar argued.
“Then why have you lost so many of them?” she asked.
“Deliza, this is a war, you know.”
“Half your losses were in the atmosphere, Admiral. That’s because the 402s were never meant for atmospheric combat. They’re too big and they have terrible aerodynamic properties. Quite frankly, they’re just not that maneuverable in the atmosphere.”
“Ensign Hayes seems to have no trouble maneuvering his Falcon in the atmosphere.”
“Only because he is using the brute force of her engines and her lift fans to compensate—at the cost of tremendous amounts of propellant, I might add. You see, Admiral, the 402s were built as deep space interceptors. The only reason they even have atmospheric capabilities is because the Paleans couldn’t afford to build spaceships big enough for the 402s to operate from. And the only reason they have lift fans are because Palee is rocky and has very little flat land, and their aerodynamics are terrible.”
“Then what is it you propose, Deliza?”
“A major overhaul,” she said, stopping in the middle of the corridor. “Pull out the lift fans and remove her atmospheric drives. She needs neither, if you stop using her in the atmosphere and keep her in space where she belongs.”
“And what if the ship from which they operate is unavailable? Where will they land? You know, until recently, we were operating them from the airbase at Porto Santo.”
“They would still be able to jump in near the airfield and land, but on conventional runways—preferably long ones, considering the amount of airspeed they need just to keep from falling out of the sky.”
“Something tells me you’ve had this argument with someone before… Someone my age, perhaps?”
Deliza rolled her eyes. “He would never listen to me, either.”
“I am listening, Deliza.”
“Think of how much additional space you would have! You’d be dropping nearly half of her dry weight as well. Think of all the additional weapons she could carry. You could combine the weapons bays into one huge bay into which any number of specialized payload pods could be used. You’d have all that space where the atmospheric engines were. You could install more reactors, bigger plasma cannons… More plasma cannons. You could make additional room behind the flight deck for a cabin of sorts. My father used to complain about long patrols during which you’d both be stuck in your seats, urinating in relief tubes and eating meal bars. That cockpit is so wide, we could probably even change it to a traditional side-by-side configuration. Admiral, the possibilities are endless.”
Her voice had turned to pleading and personnel walking by were starting to stare as they passed.
“Deliza…”
“I spent years working on my father’s 402. I know everything about that ship. I’ve even got preliminary designs and everything. If you’d just take a look at them…”
“I’ll take a look at them.”
“When?”
“I…”
“How about now? Over lunch? I’m hungry, are you?”
“Fine, we’ll have lunch and I’ll look over your designs,” the admiral relented.
“Great!” She exclaimed, hugging him.
“Very well. We’ll go to my quarters and I’ll have the cook send something over,” he promised as they started walking again.
“I have some ideas on how to improve the EDF Eagle fighters as well,” Deliza told him.
“One ship at a time, young lady.”
* * *
“This is unbelievable,” Josh exclaimed as he peered out the window at the Swiss Alps below. “I thought we had seen most of what this planet had to offer as far as views were concerned, but…damn!”
“Awfully impressive, I have to admit,” Loki agreed.
“And before the Jung invasion, you had never traveled outside of your home country?” Kata asked Yanni, as they both peered over the shoulders of Josh and Loki to see out the forward windows of the shuttle.
“No, never.” Yanni leaned to his right, looking out the side window as they flew over Mettelhorn.
“Must have been quite a shock for you,” Kata commented.
“Yes. They did not even tell me where they were
planning to take the cores. They just told me to stay with them, wherever they went, to take care of them.” Yanni turned to face Kata, glancing at the camera in the center passageway. “So I did.”
“What was it like, the first time you were in space? How did you feel when you first saw your planet from orbit?”
“I didn’t,” he replied as he turned to look out the window again. “I was in the back, with the cores. There were no windows. I could look forward and see the sky through the cockpit windows, and then space, and the orbital assembly platform, but that was all. I spent the next three-and-a-half months in the back half of the Celestia, mostly cooped up in a separate, secured area, being guarded by several overzealous, EDF marines. No windows, not even a view screen to look outside.”
“I thought all the view screens could connect to external cameras?”
“The Celestia was not completely built,” Yanni explained. “She could fly and she had life support, but not much more than that. The aft section didn’t even have a pressurized connection to the front half of the ship at the time. Half the crew was stuck up front, and the other half in the back.”
“And then the Aurora found you.”
“Yes. Not long after Captain Scott sent the cores and myself back to Takara, for safe keeping. That was ten months ago.”
“Then I’ll bet you’re looking forward to getting home again?”
“Yes.” Yanni looked down for a moment, smiling.
“What is it?” Kata asked, noticing the look of amusement on his face.
“It’s silly, really.” He looked at her. “I had a little dog, Inga, in my apartment in Grindelwald.”
“That’s a city?” Kata asked.
“More like a village,” Yanni corrected. “Well, maybe a city, I suppose. There were a lot of people, but it still felt like a village to me. It was mostly people who worked at the Data Ark.”
“And that was built inside a mountain?”
“Yes, Mattenberg. It was a short ride to work, maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, by shuttle.”
“You speak of it fondly,” Kata observed.
Yanni smiled again. “It was a good job, a good life. I had friends. There was skiing. On the weekends, I could go to Interlaken, sometimes even Bern or Zurich, if I wanted to visit the big cities. In summer, we would visit the lakes and relax on the water.” He looked out the window again. “Yes, I do miss it. I miss Inga.”
Josh glanced at Loki, a concerned look on his face.
Loki turned half around in his seat, straining to look Yanni in the eye. “Uh, Mister Hiller, they did warn you… I mean, they told you that the Jung bombed the hell out of Earth on their way out, right?”
“Yes. It is obvious, even from this altitude. I can see the devastation myself. It is terrible.”
“Yeah, but, they specifically targeted the Data Ark,” Loki added.
“Surely they sealed it up after I left?” Yanni asked.
“Yes, they did. To make the Jung think that the cores were still inside. In fact, the Jung were never able to breach the facility. They even tried tunneling in from other directions.”
“That would never work,” Yanni insisted. “It took the original builders of the Ark years to dig into the mountain, and they were at least as advanced as the Jung are now, perhaps more so.”
“Yeah, I know, but…”
“We’re coming up on Mattenberg now,” Josh warned.
“Just…” Loki sighed, realizing it was too late.
Yanni looked confused for a moment.
“Mattenberg passing to starboard,” Josh reported. “Starting our final descent.”
Yanni turned to his right to look out at the mountains below. “That’s not Mattenberg…” His voice trailed off as his expression turned crestfallen. His face moved closer to the window, his hands touching the glass to steady himself. “Oh my God,” he whispered.
Below him was a scarred, misshapen mountain range, its peaks no longer pointed and majestic. Instead, they were now smoothed over, their tips gone, rounded, as if someone had struck them with a gigantic hammer and smashed their tips away, then polished them clean.
The mountains passed under them and slid aft, out of Yanni’s sightline.
“I’m gonna spiral us down,” Josh muttered as he started a wide right turn on his way down to the Ark facility’s landing pad.
Yanni continued staring out the window at the scorched landscape below. The entire northwest side of the mountain range, the one that had provided him with such spectacular views on his way to work each day, was now barren. The surface had been blasted clean, leaving nothing but dirt, rock, and the occasional blackened stump of trees that refused to let go of their roots. Gone were the farm houses, the fences, the barns. Gone were the ski-lifts, trails, and forests. The only sign of civilization he could see was the road that led up to the entrance to the Data Ark, as it had recently been restored.
The shuttle continued its turning descent, bringing what had once been the town of Grindelwald into view. It too was desolate and barren. Cement slabs with the remnants of chimneys here and there. Rubble-strewn roads littered with the rusting shells of half destroyed vehicles, most of them on their sides or completely turned over. Everything was scorched as if a massive wave of fire had simply swept through the entire valley, destroying everything in its path.
“I don’t understand,” Yanni said in nearly inaudible tones. He turned to look at Kata, tears streaming down his face. “Why would they do this? If they knew they couldn’t get in… Why?”
Kata felt herself tearing up as well as she exchanged glances with her porta-cam operator, Karahl, hunched down in the center passageway holding the porta-cam.
“They probably did it out of spite,” Loki said in a sympathetic tone, “just like they did to the rest of Earth. No logic to their targeting, really. They just wanted to punish everyone for forcing them out.”
Yanni could no longer look outside. Instead, he slid slowly down the side wall and sat on the deck behind Loki’s seat, his arms wrapped around his drawn up knees, face down in his arms, sobbing.
Josh and Loki said nothing, staring at their instruments as they continued their descent.
Kata Mun was also silent as she signaled to Karahl to turn off the camera.
They completed their descent in silence, with only the sounds of the shuttle’s engines, Loki’s voice speaking with Ark Control, and Yanni’s muffled sobs.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Captain Roselle looked out the shuttle’s cockpit windows as they approached the Jar-Benakh. “Holy shit,” he muttered. “Scott really tore her up, didn’t he? Where the fuck are we supposed to land?”
“We’re still going in via one of the breach boxes near command and control, sir,” the copilot explained. “They’re working on clearing the opening to one of the shuttle bays, but it’s tough going. Their hulls don’t have the grappling points for our crawlers, so they have to use mag-lock feet… Makes for slow going.”
“Then we need to get some more fucking crawlers, don’t we,” Roselle complained. “You got that?” he asked his executive officer next to him.
“I got it, Captain,” Commander Ellison replied. “A lot more fucking crawlers, by the looks of it.”
“Damn straight. And remind me to exchange a few angry words with the Aurora’s T.O… What’s his name? Dela-v-a-hole, or something?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Boy needs to work on his aim.”
“We’re turning to final now, sir,” the copilot announced. “You and the commander should take your seats and buckle-in. It’s a bit of a pain to dock with a breach box, and it can get a bit bouncy. We don’t want either of you bouncing around and hitting your heads on something.”
“Very well,” the captain agreed. He had just come from a
six-day stay in the hospital that had been five days more than he felt he needed, and six days longer than he’d liked. The last thing he wanted was to return to that disease infested hellhole.
“We’ve got our work cut out for us, Gil,” Commander Ellison said as they moved aft.
“Yeah, but at least we’ve got a ship,” Roselle replied, “and a big bitch at that.” He sat down and fastened his restraints. “Just imagine how much Jung ass we could whup once we get her working and get a jump drive in her. Makes the Aurora look like a fishing boat, doesn’t it?” he added with a wink.
“Yes, sir, it sure as hell does.”
Roselle nodded. “Exactly the way it should be. It was hard enough jumping around in that little pea shooter of a scout ship, while Scott was in command of all that firepower. Christ, I would’ve had a stroke if I’d had to watch him play captain with no ship of my own to command.”
“Come on, Gil, don’t you think you’re being a little hard on the kid?” Commander Ellison suggested.
“Someone’s got to. Goddamn admiral loves that kid, thinks he walks on water.”
“Dumar’s a good leader, Gil. You know it.”
“I got no qualms with his quals, Marty, but you gotta admit, he’s a little blind when it comes to Scott’s lack thereof.”
“The kid has done well without much guidance at all, Gill.”
“I’m not arguing that, Marty, but the stakes are higher now…much higher. He’s not fighting spoiled rich boys in fancy uniforms who likely never took live fire before. He’s taking on seasoned combat veterans. Ruthless sons-of-bitches who enjoy killing. Hell of a difference.”
“Perhaps, but I still think he’s doing okay, and will continue to do okay. I think you waste too much time worrying about it.”
“Yeah, well, you’re probably right about that one. Hell, we can’t do anything about it anyway, right? But we can do something about this girl, and we will.”
