“Hey,” the Texan said, “it’s supposed to be embarrassing. Helps create a sense of shared misery.”
“So what’s yours then?” Adelina demanded.
“HotDog.”
“And that’s embarrassing?”
“Wait till you hear the story,” he grinned. “Not from me of course. My daddy taught me to watch my p’s and q’s in front of a lady.”
“Ohhh,” Luna slapped her hands together. “I’ve got it! Remember that boy you liked in your junior year at high school?”
Mom with a crush? Gabriella almost laughed. She understood her mom was more than just her mom but she’d heard almost nothing about her life outside of motherhood. She leaned forward along with half the squadron, eager to hear the name.
Adelina’s eyes looked like they were trying to shoot lasers. “Not another word you treacherous little bit…”
“Stalker!” Luna exclaimed, just in time.
The whole squadron was cheering. The ones close to her were slapping a hand on her armored shoulder, congratulating her. She looked at her daughter, mortified.
“The one who got away?” Gabriella asked, giggling. “Like, from your basement?”
Adelina shook her head but she was starting to smile.
“We’ve all been there, Stalker,” HotDog assured her. “You work hard, try to live right and then, one time, you burn your name into someone’s lawn in gasoline letters and suddenly you’re a stalker!” He used his fingers to put quotes around the last word.
“Yeah,” Skidmark commiserated. “It’s like that guy I’ve been seeing lately, back on Earth. I mean I’d been seeing a lot of him before I came out here.” She shook her head. “Not that he knew…”
“Alright.” Adelina held up her hands. “I’m Stalker. Let’s move on!”
“What’s my name?” Gabriella asked eagerly. Please, let it be something badass!
“Oh, I already had yours figured out, kiddo!” Luna grinned at her sister before looking back at Gabriella.
“You’re gonna be Rascal!”
“Oh, what the hells? I sound like a friggin’ raccoon!”
“Yeah,” Adelina said, grinning. “It’s totally adorable, which no teenager wants to be. If I have to live with Stalker, you can be the trash-panda.”
“Alright!” Luna clapped her hands together. “Strap in, everybody!”
“Milady?” Kinn, known in the squadron as ‘Porkay’, waved to her from a nearby fighter.
She gave an upward nod, acknowledging her flight-engineer, the guy who’d keep small problems from turning into big ones while in flight. “Looks like you can stop calling me that, Porkay.”
“It didn’t sound like you much liked your new call-sign,” he observed.
“Yeah but…” She sighed, watching her aunt jog over to her machine. “I guess I’m Rascal,” she said resignedly. She headed for her own bird.
“You’d prefer that to being called ‘milady’?”
“If it’s a choice between ‘milady’ and Rascal, then I suppose I do prefer the call-sign.” She held up her hand, a hair’s-breadth of space between thumb and forefinger. “By about this much.”
They moved toward their fighter. “You should be able to make it yours, though; really own it.” Kinn said. “That’s what Pounce said when she gave me mine.”
Gabriella climbed up into the cockpit, sliding into the seat. She frowned up at him as he double-checked her restraints. “You ask her a lot of questions or something?”
He looked down at her in surprise, one hand still holding onto her harness. “Yeah! She tell you?”
“You know what your call-sign means?” she asked him.
He shook his head but he looked curious.
“In Spanish, ‘why’ is ‘por que’. I think she’s expressing her weird sense of humor. You mind if I pronounce it slightly different?”
“How?” He looked over his shoulder as a deep thrumming noise heralded the engines on HotDog’s fighter warping into life. The scatter of gravel on the roadbed beneath was rattling in sympathy with its pre-pitch field waves.
“Gonna call you Porky.”
He squinted at her. “As in possessing the qualities of pork?”
“No, as in the cartoon character. Somebody so cute you just know he’s hiding some devious plot. Seems better than just ‘why?’.”
“Sure.” He gave her harness a tug and then clambered past her cockpit to the open hatch at the rear.
She heard the hatch flow shut at the same time her cockpit canopy began assembling itself over her.
“I’m tied off,” Kinn told her over the intercom.
“Gotcha, Porky.” She stabbed at an orange button and the control surfaces started growing into her suit. She wriggled, trying not to laugh as the new plates appeared inside her armor.
The command holo appeared and she initiated her engines. The deep, gut tingling rumble was a serious rush. She could feel the power coursing through the fighter as the pitch drives spooled up to full charge.
The other fighters around her were lifting off the ground as their drives reached full FE and could then focus their effects with enough accuracy to avoid dragging along a chunk of pavement with them.
She felt the power in her small craft, felt it in her own bones. She was one with her fighter. No wonder Luna loves this kind of stuff, she thought. She could feel that her power levels had stabilized, ready for lift-off; she flexed her legs.
She lifted off and hovered among the rest of the flock, turning to see her mother coming up next to her. It was so easy to forget she was strapped into a cockpit.
Not that she was trying all that hard to remember.
“Ghost Squadron, Squadron Leader,” Luna’s voice crackled in Gabriella’s ear. “Trail formation till we’re outside. Form up on me.”
Gabriella activated the Acknowledged icon and waited for her formation’s turn. She would be the middle call-sign in a three fighter formation. She looked left, watching HotDog’s fighter until it lifted off.
She flexed her legs harder, pushing her hands forward and she raced up behind her flight leader.
“Rascal, this is HotDog. Watch your spacing,” he warned over the flight-net. “Any closer and you’ll get a whiff of my FEO’s aftershave, over.”
“Hotdog, this is Rascal. Roger, nobody needs that, over.” Hotdog’s flight-engineer smelled like somebody crashed a tanker of sugar into a vinegar factory.
She eased back and set her follow algorithm to the new distance. The long string of fighters hammered their way through the air of the gigantic farming district by brute force.
Their engines made little noise at full power but the sound of air being shouldered aside was loud enough to have muted any conventional engines back on Earth. The sound transmitted through the vehicle, the vibration reaching in through her suit.
They’d already covered more than a hundred kilometers on their angled climb and they still couldn’t see the ceiling. Gabriella ran a quick check on her systems, even though Porky was pretty much doing that constantly.
Her aunt kept billing these sessions as ‘outings’ but she was pretty serious about ensuring her family was trained for battle. The leading families of the empire and the republic were a varied bunch but the ones that got taken seriously were the ones that had the best military forces.
The best military forces tended to be led by nobles that shared their risks. It was partly a function of morale. Most units fought better when they knew the lord sending them into battle was fighting alongside them.
It was also because nobles that fought beside their forces tended to be the sort who understood what they were doing. Luna wanted the next two people in line for the fief trained, so here Gabriella was, starting to question if it was even worth her time to go home again.
How could she go back to Cali and enroll in some university as if it even mattered? Could she sit in some freshman Physics course when she already understood how a path drive could move the Universe past a shi
p?
Was there even any sense in it?
They came up on the tunnel leading out the spinward side of the farming district she lived in. The squadron streamed into the hole and she wondered if she was the only one reminding herself of the fifteen-kilometer diameter as she roared toward the seemingly tiny opening.
The walls raced past all around her and then they rolled to dive down a vertical tunnel at a junction that had to be more than thirty kilometers in diameter. The brightly lit rim of light in the far distance marked the star-lit inner end of the tunnel.
The white dwarf would have been visible had the transit paths been built straight along the station’s radius but then travelers would have a star in their faces while trying to avoid collisions with tunnel walls.
They emerged into the central space of the station, the shuddering of atmospheric turbulence fading quickly to relative silence as they left the air behind. She looked over at the formation indicator just as the chime sounded, followed by the diagram changing from trail to vee.
She adjusted her follow algo, sliding to starboard while Nutcracker slipped over to port. They formed a vee behind Hotdog while he moved into the flight’s assigned position in the overall squadron formation.
They headed for their current search area. The premise had been that the agricultural areas were the most likely centers of any remaining populations. There was a more or less regular network of entry tunnels and the second anti-spinward branch in each tended to lead to an agro zone.
The squadron broke into five pairs of two flights each. Hotdog had the lead for his two flights and he led the way down toward one of their assigned tunnels.
They burst into an agro zone and spread out to fly low over the terrain. Gabriella noticed more than the usual jungle areas here, though the trees looked very different. They were shorter and tended to be mostly canopy with bare trunks beneath their coppery orange leaves.
Maybe the fields themselves break down and turn to jungle? Gabriella wondered. She couldn’t figure out if that proof of the ancient’s fallibility was comforting or frightening.
“Hotdog – Saltlick. I’m seeing banners down here. Fabric banners. Don’t think something like that would last hundreds of thousands of years, not if they’re exposed to weather.”
Gabriella glanced at the terrain mapping to see where Saltlick was seeing banners. That was why she almost ploughed into a pyramid in a large clearing.
“Shit!” she gasped, pulling up short in less distance than you’d need for a tennis court. Her fighter’s forward sponsons swung up, splaying out to keep her nose up and back from the structure.
The air she’d been pushing didn’t have pitch drives to slow it down so it kept going. There was a small group of humanoids on the top of the pyramid, one of them tied to a hump of stone so that his chest arched up toward the sky.
The blast of air hammered them down on their asses, all except for the one who was tied to the rock. It took her a moment to realize the string of bodies trailing down the steps of the pyramid hadn’t been knocked down by her arrival. The smears of blood along the descending stone channels told a much darker story.
“Hotdog – Rascal. I’ve got a crude pyramid here and a pack of fanatics sacrificing people.”
“Sacrificing?” Hotdog blurted. “Say again?”
“They’ve got someone strapped to a stone on the top. There are at least five dead bodies sliding down the front.”
She checked right and left. “I’ve got a town down here. Looks pretty primitive.” She looked back to the front, seeing that the people she’d knocked down were swaying now, waving their arms over their heads and chanting.
One of them, the one in the biggest headdress, moved to stand behind the victim on the stone. He pulled out a dagger with his lower right hand and Gabriella’s blood ran cold. “Wait one.”
She pushed forward, her sudden approach startling the creature with the knife. It backed away, lowering its knife as she put her fighter into hover mode, just in front of the top platform of the pyramid, and opened her canopy.
“Rascal!” Hotdog shouted. “What the hells? Do not get out of that cockpit!”
Maybe it was the feeling of power, flying around with enough weaponry to kill a cruiser. Maybe it was the sidearm attached to her armor.
Maybe the recent high-school grad was just sick of seeing people get bullied.
The muffled curse and the click-whine of a sidearm told her that Porky was getting ready to cover her idiocy.
She slid down her port sponson to the stone surface and drew her pistol. “Let him go!” she shouted over the hum and whine of her engines. The power-levels were at the bottom edge of flight-equilibrium.
They weren’t pulling up stones from the front stairs but there was a slight anomaly in the field-generation at low power. It was creating small voids in the air which appeared and collapsed intermittently, sounding like linen being ripped inside a bass-drum.
Hotdog descended to a point twenty feet away, angled in from the right where he could obliterate anyone who might get too close to her.
“Understand, Rascal, you’re putting those people in danger right now. If any one of them even twitches in your direction, I have to kill the whole lot.” His voice held an angry edge.
None of the people moved. They stood staring at Hotdog’s menacing fighter and she cursed, using her left hand to pull out a knife. She slit the victim’s bonds, sheathed her knife and pulled him off the stone.
The young hominid, two-armed unlike his captors and clad only in a white loin-cloth, gazed up at her in shock. I suppose if you were just about to be sacrificed there’s not a lot of room left for anything else but shock, she realized.
Going to have to force him to move. “C’mon,” she urged in a language he wouldn’t understand but the urgency of her tone had to count for something.
She put a hand under his arm and got him on his feet. She pushed him toward the fighter, glancing over her shoulder to make sure nobody was thinking about putting her on that stone as a substitute.
“Up!” she commanded, waving her hand up the trail of steps sunken into the starboard sponson. She patted a hand in the first step and tapped his foot with hers.
Sighing, she pushed him toward the sponson. His hands went out, bracing himself against the nanite surface.
She took another look behind herself and then slapped her hand on the first two steps, tapping his feet each time with her toe.
He finally started climbing.
She took one more look before mounting the steps herself. She looked up but then glanced away quickly. Hope that loincloth covers all, she thought, but I’m not inclined to find out.
She reached the cockpit and shoved the young male out of the way of her chair. Porkay pushed him down to a seated position, frowning at him since he couldn’t frown at the second in line of succession. She reconnected and closed up her canopy.
“We’re leaving,” Hotdog ordered. “No argument.”
A chime signaled a follow algo for her fighter being activated. She sighed, knowing she could override it but Hotdog would be even more angry than he was now.
They raced back to the tunnel system, shouldering the air aside in the Texan’s anger-fueled haste. It gave her time to think, especially now that her passenger had seen out the canopy as they flew.
Being trussed up for sacrifice and then dragged off in a magical flying machine was too much for him. He was unconscious, lying between her seat and the port consoles.
She’d ignored orders from her flight leader. That was hardly commendable but what was she supposed to do?
They were about to kill him. It didn’t get any simpler than that.
They emerged back into the central void of the station and Hotdog called in to Luna, requesting a secure channel where they could talk without anyone, especially Gabriella, listening in.
It didn’t take a lot of conversation. Within five minutes, Luna was recalling the squadron.
Within
twenty minutes, they were all sitting on the road by her house, fuselages ticking and creaking as they dissipated the heat.
Only Luna, Hotdog, Adelina and Gabriella had dismounted for the chewing out.
“Don’t even try to pretend you didn’t hear Hotdog telling you to stay in your bird!” Luna’s face was inches from Gabriella’s. Her voice contained a fury that threatened to break her composure entirely. “You deliberately disobeyed an order. That’s how you get people killed!”
It was the first time she’d ever been talked to like that by her aunt and it hurt. Luna must have realized the same thing.
“This is your squadron leader talking to you,” she told her, “not your aunt.” She gestured angrily for HotDog to take over the conversation.
She’s probably shaken at the risk I took… as my aunt, Gabriella thought but she had the good sense to keep her mouth shut.
“You saved that guy in your cockpit,” Hotdog said, “but you nearly got the others on the top of that pyramid killed. One dumb move from one of them and I’d have turned them all to burger-meat.”
She’d been mulling that aspect over during the return flight and she opted not to keep her mouth shut any longer. “Those bastards? They were there to sacrifice their victims. I wouldn’t lose much sleep…”
“There was one of them dressed just like your new friend up there,” he pointed up to her cockpit. “Probably their next victim and you would have forced me to kill him. These birds aren’t exactly sniper platforms, kiddo.”
The ‘kiddo’ stung and so did his point. She’d let herself focus on the guy tied to the rock and didn’t look, really look, at what else was going on.
“We don’t even know why they were killing those guys,” Luna added. “If they were murderers or traitors, then we’re the criminals now.”
“If they were just trying to ensure a good harvest,” Adelina spoke up, “then she did the right thing.”
Gabriella was a riot of emotions. Grateful to her mom for speaking up but ashamed that she’d put her in that position in the first place.
“True,” Luna agreed softly, putting a hand on her sister’s shoulder. “We’ll know more after we can talk to him.”
Ragnarok: Colonization, intrigue and betrayal. Page 16
