“Is it true, sir?” The chief looked at Bill. “You and the Lady Luna flew combat missions burning flammable liquids for thrust?”
Hennessy chuckled, still looking at his new carrier’s hangar. “That’s right, Chief.”
“And you had to keep your... buoyancy in mind the whole time?”
“Well, we had to not fly straight into the ground, if that’s what you mean.”
The chief shook his head in wonder. “In the empire, it’s every captain’s worst nightmare, having to fight with his back against a gravity well. You guys do that at the bottom of a gravity well, riding an exploding trail of… mithmelantineII…” He used the imperial word for kerosene. “And how long does that fuel last?”
“Combat radius was about five hundred miles…” He grinned at the chief. “Assuming you plan to land afterward.”
To the chief, who originally came from the empire, battles ranged over hundreds of thousands of miles in the black of space. Five hundred miles went by in the blink of an eye in a corvette.
“No wonder you guys wanted smaller ships you could control without having to give orders to crew-members. I bet you use the controls more by instinct than anything.”
“If you aren’t quick as thought,” Hennessy told him, “you’ll be a greasy spot.”
“No doubt, sir,” the chief said. “No doubt.”
They stood there in silence for a while, watching the crews prep for the first mass-launch test. Half of the ship’s fighter pilots were younger looking Humans from the republic but there were also thirty two veteran fighter jocks from Earth.
“I’d expected your retired pilots to be older,” the chief admitted. “These guys look young.”
“Not many of us stay in the business for more than a couple of decades,” Hennessy told him. “No inertial dampening, so all those high-G maneuvers take a toll on the body.
“I have to admit, I was surprised at how many retired pilots we were able to recruit. I suppose all those years at sea had a lot to do with it.”
“Sir?”
“Hard on family life. More than a few retirees living in bachelor apartments trying not to go crazy. Give them a chance to get back in the game, without all the physical strains…” He nodded down the length of the hangar.
“I’d better get to my own bird.” He started walking.
He was the captain of the Kuphar, which was now converted into a carrier. Technically, he should be staying on the ship but it was pretty much there to support the fighter complement.
That was a job for the XO, as far as Bill Thruster Hennessy was concerned. He’d been excited when Luna first started tinkering with the controls on her own corvette. The idea of space-fighters was clearly the next logical step.
He hadn’t expected to miss his chance to fly one himself but he’d been made captain of one of the first carriers. It was a freighter when he arrived at Ragnarok but he’d started regrowing the ship as soon as the settlers were on the planet and his cargo holds were emptied.
He approached his own fighter. Didn’t come all the way out here to watch others have all the fun. He ducked under the fuselage, which was roughly twice the size of a Super-Hornet.
He almost reached up to trail a hand along the underside but caught himself just before he would have disturbed the carbon nano-tubules that gave the craft its stealthy nature. “Gotta come up with a way for us to get aboard without having to touch the outside,” he told his crew-chief.
“Aye, sir,” the Englishman confirmed.
Hennessy boarded his fighter and squirmed his way into the control seat. He smiled. Some joker had stuck a small flower to his headrest.
He’d kept the flower behind his ear the night of the party, only taking it out when he went to bed. Somehow, it would have felt like he was betraying that little girl’s gesture if he’d removed it.
It was a source of amusement on the Kuphar which he saw as a good thing. Luckily, he already had a call-sign, otherwise they’d be calling him Flowerchild.
“Pre-launch,” he commanded.
He couldn't help but shiver when the nanites in his suit crawled against his skin to create the control surfaces. It took only a few seconds but he giggled when the pressure-contacts grew in the soles of his boots.
A chime assured him that he was now ready to exert control over his ship. He checked the status board. His squadron was ready for launch.
He smiled. One of the benefits of being both the captain and a squadron leader was that he could pick a new call-sign. The one he’d always wanted.
He activated his connection to the unit-net, listening as the chatter between his pilots trailed off. They’d noticed his icon going live.
Unlike the rest of them, his own icon had no call-sign next to it. He activated it and the chuckles were all from the Earth pilots and mostly just the North Americans, at that.
“Gambler Squadron, this is Wild Bill. Standby for launch.” He linked in the bridge channel. “Orbital Control, Gamblers ready for launch, over.”
His pilots were still strangers. Those from the republic were inclined to stick together, much like their comrades from Earth. The squadron’s name and its symbol of aces and eights would get the non-Earthers curious.
Questions would be asked; stories would be exchanged.
For now, though, it was time to put them through their paces. Wild Bill was no exception. He might have been an experienced fighter pilot but he had little experience at fighting in the black.
“Gamblers, Orbital Control. Squadron clear to launch, over.”
“Control, roger. Out to you. Gamblers, on my mark…” he activated the launch sequence timer.
It hit zero and twelve fighters ejected from their cradles, spitting out both sides of the ship simultaneously.
The current force doctrine still treated the ‘fighters’ as more like small ships. They were stealthy, each carried a pair of Bau’s missiles and had what roughly equated to a thirty-millimeter Gatling gun.
They were viewed by Eth as a scouting platform that could also deliver a deadly stealth-strike using missiles. No messy hairballs anticipated.
It was all fresh steaming horseshit, of course. If a large force showed up, there was no guarantee that missiles alone would do the job. There was every chance they’d find themselves turning and burning in the middle of an enemy formation.
And that’s exactly what they spent the next hour doing.
His republic pilots were better at stalking an enemy ship but, once they were spotted, their tendency was to race in, guns blazing. The Earthers were mostly spotted a lot sooner but their survival rate was still better.
The Earth pilots maneuvered like they were one with their ships. Their counterparts were still adjusting to the lack of a traditional bridge hierarchy and it made them slow.
As they started picking up their game, their ‘wild’ comrades were still leaving them behind as they explored the insanely erratic maneuvers they could pull. There were no G’s to hold them back anymore.
Hennessy finally called it quits and ordered his squadron back to the Kuphar. He slid his ship into the same launch-bay and it came to rest in the stowage position.
He felt the control surfaces disappear inside his armor and he got out of his chair, grimacing at the strain in his muscles.
He may not have been suffering the brutal strain of high-G maneuvering but all of the twitching and flexing needed to control his ship had added up.
“Still not a patch on the stress of flying a Thunderbolt,” he told himself as he eased around the seat and stepped onto the boarding stair that had just built itself from a section of the hull.
He took a moment, standing with his feet on the steps, to stretch, feeling for the muscles that would be giving him the most trouble. His calf muscles were definitely going to need some time to get used to this new way of flying and his shoulders had a lot of tension as well.
Manageable, he decided. He exited the craft, ducking until he was clear.
“How’d she handle, sir?” the crew-chief asked.
“Gorgeous, Blackwood! Absolutely gorgeous! We got us a sweet little bird!”
“Shame we can’t put the insignia on her anywhere.” Blackwood clearly didn’t feel too much shame though; his grin was ear to ear.
“Wouldn’t do for us to slap paint all over our nice stealth coating,” Hennessy agreed. He looked down the row at his pilots.
It was pretty much what he’d expected. The guys who’d flown real fighters were making a show of how little the physical strains of the practice session had affected them. The guys from the republic, noticing the difference, quickly tried to do the same.
He took it as a good sign. “Shower-hour,” he shouted. “I want you all in the ready-room in one hour.”
Another squadron leader would be running drills for the next hour. The third was off in the outer system as security picket, probably surprised at how boring space-fighters could be.
He wanted to debrief his people and then get them fed and rested. He only had three squadrons to work with and he had to balance training with operational readiness.
You never knew what was out there.
He went to his quarters and stepped out of the armor. He was tempted to just drop on the bed for a moment but he’d never live it down if he dozed off and missed running the debrief.
He tossed his under-armor suit into the laundry-chute, chuckling at his conversation with the indignant PO running the laundry room.
He couldn’t really fault him for assuming it was one of the pilots. Hennessy could think of half a dozen ‘phantom-shitter’ incidents, off the top of his head, and they’d all had pilots as the prime suspects.
It had stopped happening after a few days, though. Bill had pointed out how that might indicate a colonist not understanding what the chute in their cabin was for.
A pilot would likely still be doing it.
He stepped into his shower. “Standard,” he ordered and the water started falling. He turned to let the jet of water work on the muscles at his neck and shoulders.
He woke with a start when he inhaled water up a nostril, just in time to get dressed.
By the River of Babilim
Babilim Station
“I don’t think it was like this when the builders lived here.” Gabriella tossed a bundle of vines off the balcony and a machine that had been following their activity since they’d arrived let out a subtle warbling noise.
A larger collector unit appeared and the vines were gathered. “I haven’t seen any deadfall around here,” she explained to her mother. “The fields are pristine, even though most of the produce ends up composted by the collector units. The wild growth comes up to the barricade but it doesn’t set a single cell over a certain limit. I think some park areas just ran wild because there was no staff to direct the machines.”
“You rock, Jeeves!” she shouted down to the robot, which seemed to consider itself their personal assistant.
“Shut up, baby, I know it,” the small orb insisted. It floated off to inspect the rear of the house they’d moved into.
The damned thing had scared the hell out of them when they’d first met it. The house they’d chosen was in one of the millions of natural areas, this one less than three hundred kilometers from the main base. Several others were living out here in the heavy masonry houses that were spread throughout the dense jungle areas between the fields.
There was a clear boundary between inside and outside. The jungle growth encroached as far as the pavers surrounding the house and there they stopped. The path out to the main road was also perfectly maintained, waiting for the first footsteps in more than a hundred thousand years.
Inside needed work, though. Some kind of ornamental indoor plant had grown wild and then died out, probably unable to reproduce on its own. There were a lot of dead vines to pull out before the place could be put in order. A lot of work, maybe, but they both loved the place too much to settle for some other home which, let’s face it, would have its own problems after all the time it had sat idle.
Clearly, the automated army working outside was not allowed to change anything inside the house.
On their first day, Gabriella had been trying to pull down a wall of vines from the vaulted stone ceiling. She’d finally remembered how, even though her armor’s bionetic muscles could make her feel lighter, the suit was actually pretty heavy.
She’d put it on and returned to the main room, grabbing the tangle of long-dead plant material and giving it a mighty heave. The vines ripped loose so easily, they might have been a veil of facial tissue. She fell on her butt with a squawk, covered in a net of vines.
She threw them off, muttering a few curses under her breath, the sort she figured her mom could ignore if she’d overheard. She froze.
A collection of lights in the dark room she’d just made accessible flickered to life. The constellation was dominated by two large red slits that looked like eyes. They began moving, in concert, clearly all attached to the same object.
And came toward her.
“Don’t mulch me!” she’d squealed, scrambling backwards on her backside, helmet snapping shut in reaction to her heightened adrenaline levels.
The lights passed out of the shadows, revealing themselves to be attached to a floating orb. It was roughly the size of a Human head and it was covered in a thick layer of dust.
The thing must have noticed the dust at the same time as Gabriella. A hum emitted from the orb and the dust vibrated off to drift down in a ghostly trail as it moved toward the pile of vines.
It halted and turned up at a gasp from the upper gallery. Adelina was there, leaning over the railing, mouth hanging open in shock.
The thing’s eyes turned blue and it resumed its progress across the room, stopping above the pile of vines. “Kiss my ass, vines!” it said.
It shook the last of the dust off onto the vines, then it turned and – Gabriella was certain of this – floated off in a huff.
“Huh!” Gabriella had looked up from the floor, wondering if her mother had been listening when she fell. “Wonder where it learned that…”
“Oh, I know where.” Adelina’d glared down.
Jeeves, as they’d come to call it, was a pretty helpful, if somewhat foul-mouthed, assistant. In the week since they’d met the small bot, they’d come to rely on it.
Gabriella watched from the front balcony as the last of the detritus from the house was collected under Jeeves’ watchful… eye? Her mother headed downstairs.
Aside from the slightly unnerving automated equipment, you could almost forget you were in a station around a star. She knew there was a ceiling above them but it was simply too far away to see with the naked eye.
There was an entire weather system up there. It was probably managed by the eternal machinery but there were clouds and they dropped rain on crops that nobody had needed for thousands of years.
“Anybody home?”
Gabriella leaned off the end of the balcony to see farther down the path that tunneled its way through the jungle to the main road. “Luna!” She waved.
Luna rounded the last corner. “Hey, cutie. Your mom home too?”
“She’s downstairs somewhere.”
“Thought we could do a girls’ day out.” Luna jabbed a thumb back over her shoulder. “Got the squadron cooling their heels out on the road and two spares,” she said, ending with a questioning tone.
“You know how I feel about flying,” Adelina said, coming out of the house. She gave her sister a hug.
“You’ll feel different with a little more practice,” Luna insisted. “You were having fun by the end of our last ride. You just need to let your muscles connect with the training we put in that stubborn noggin of yours.”
Gabriella missed half of the exchange because she was already racing to her room. She scrambled into her underarmor suit and stepped into her footplates. By the time her mother was starting to frame her reluctant acceptance, she was al
ready skidding to a halt next to them, fully suited except for her helmet.
She nearly squealed with delight when they reached the road to find, as promised, a row of Luna’s new fighters parked on the dusty cobbles. She’d enjoyed the unstructured time flying along with her aunt and mother but it was way cooler to go up as part of a formation. They’d done a few patrols already.
The pilots were gathered in the shade of one of the closer ships, engaged in the typical swaggering nonchalance one might expect.
They came to attention, though, when they noticed their squadron leader had returned. Gabriella thought she could tell the difference between the Earthers and the republics by the way they stood.
Some were more rigid and they’d come to attention far more rapidly. She wondered if it was an Earth tradition her aunt had brought with her.
“Stand easy,” Luna said, after returning their salute. “You guys all know these two. They’re gonna come with us on another patrol of the inner surface around this region.”
“What are we expecting to find, anyway?” one of them asked. “You think there are still ancients living here or something?”
“Could be,” Luna admitted, “but I doubt it.” She waved at the path she’d just emerged from. “There had to be a lot of other races living here, though. The houses out here are all pretty close to Human-sized. There could be Billions of aliens living here, even if they didn’t build the place.
“Either way, I want to know if there’s anybody living near here. I don’t want some local war washing over us because I was too lazy to go looking.
“Remember, we’re going to be dipping in and out of atmo, so I don’t want anybody scaring the natives with sonic booms.”
“Yeah,” a voice drawled at the back with a Texas accent, “we’ll just reassure them with a formation of killer machines!”
“Now you’re with the program!” Luna said with a grin.
She turned to Adelina and Gabriella. “We need call-signs for you two!”
“I know that look!” Adelina insisted, holding up a hand. “Don’t you dare!”
Ragnarok: Colonization, intrigue and betrayal. Page 15
