Frontier: Book One - The Space Cadets

by Laurence Moroney

  Aisha was finding it difficult just to focus on the space. It was huge and it seemed unreal. She could see green patches around the walls.

  “Gardens,” said Simms, catching her stare. “We don’t import all our food you know, and the plants provide carbon dioxide scrubbing.”

  Soo-Kyung was always straight to the point. “What would stop us crashing into them, or any of the buildings?”

  “Good old-fashioned nets,” said Simms. “You can’t see them from this distance, but there’s netting strong enough to stop you from crashing, even though a good crash might teach you a lesson.”

  He thumbed a control on his link, and a large hangar door opened behind him. In it were a number of small ‘Y’-shaped spacecraft, with the cockpit at the apex, and thruster engines at the peak of the ‘Y’.

  “Find a ship and get in,” said Simms. He didn’t need to ask twice, as excitedly the students took a ship each.

  Aisha got into her ship. The cockpit was cramped, with a joystick to her right and a handle that moved forwards or backwards to her left.

  Simms’ face popped up on the glass of the cockpit, and Aisha noticed the reflection of a typical heads-up display. “You’ve all played video games or used flight simulators,” he said. “And the control concepts are the same. The joystick is used to tilt your craft left and right with those directions. Forward or backwards will dive or climb. Handle on your left is for main thrusters.”

  She moved the stick, getting a feel for it, as well as the throttle handle. It looked like this might be an easy ship to fly.

  “There’s two major differences in flying here,” he said. “The first is gravity. There is no down. So learn to orient yourself on a fixed item. The sun might be up, down or sideways. The Earth is the same. You need a point of reference so you can measure your position relative to your enemy. Find one that you’re good at and stick to it. Got it?”

  “Sir, yes, Sir,” they replied.

  “The second,” he said, “is friction. When flying in the air, wind resistance slows you down. So between that and gravity, you’ll slow down and you’ll fall. In a vacuum, there’s no inertia. When you push your engines to send you forward at a speed, you’ll continue in that direction at that speed forever. So if you need to slow down, you have to spend more energy to push in the opposite direction. The same applies for turning. In air, you have elevators on your plane that change the resistance to make you turn. In space, if you want to go left, thrusters on the right of your plane will fire, thus pushing you left. What does this mean?”

  They thought about it a moment, before James, a white kid from New York spoke up. “We burn energy in different ways. Braking costs energy. Turning costs energy. So we need to ensure that we monitor our potential energy effectively.”

  “Bingo,” said Simms. “Nice work. Okay. First class. Start flying these things. The red button on the joystick fires your lasers, the green button near your thumb is your projectile weapons. Last pilot standing gets no homework for a week. Go!”

  “Wait, what,” said James, before his ship was immediately hit by fire from one of his neighbors, splattering paint all over the cockpit, and he was out of the game.

  Aisha quickly dropped her ship from the hangar, and accelerated as fast as she could away from the melee. She had chosen the far end of the cylinder as her ‘up’ position, so she tried to shift her mind into the mode that she was climbing above all the other fighters. One by one they dropped. She had burned close to a quarter of her meager supply of fuel when she cut her engines, and continued to drift.

  Projectile weapons he had said. She thumbed the stick, and felt a machine gun empty several rounds. They shot out in front of her at high speed. Being a friction free environment, they kept moving, without slowing down, and without falling.

  She could see how useful these would be, tactically. One could shoot these widely and put up a curtain that any ship coming towards her would have to go through. They’d take hits trying to get through it, perhaps enough hits to take them out of the game.

  She turned her ship around, pointing her nose back at the fracas below. Then, nudging the joystick while she held the firing trigger, she spun her ship so that the bullets shot in front of her, making a cylinder of fire. With a few more nudges of the joystick, she widened the cylinder into a cone surrounding the hangar. Any ship escaping the chaos would take hits. The question is, were they enough to drop them out of the game?

  This worked both ways, though. Ships down there could shoot bullets in her direction, too. They were all too distracted by each other, but surely one of them would have seen her escape, or, others had the same plan as her. The worst thing she could do was stand still. She checked her radar, and found an alarm that she could turn on for incoming mass. That might give her warning, but warning wasn’t enough.

  And then there were the lasers. She held the button and a lance of light lanced out from the nose of her ship. No matter how tightly she focused it, she could see that the laser still attenuated, so that at longer distances – such as the distance to the hangar – it was clear the laser would have little effect. She also noted that this wasn’t Star Wars, where laser bolts flew so slowly through the air that one could dodge them. The speed of light was the speed of light, so as soon as she pulled her trigger, she would hit the enemy almost instantaneously. It was a question of whether she was close enough that the focused energy of the laser would do enough damage to take out another ship.

  Again, she checked her scanners. There was a basic radar that bounced radio waves off other sources, with a computer filtering out what was moving and what was stationary. Instantly she noted that this had several disadvantages. First, in order to detect other ships, she was sending out radio waves, giving away her position. Second, of course, was that radio waves traveled slower than the speed of light. If her enemy was armed with lasers, they could conceivably kill her before she saw them.

  A second scanner detected heat. It did this by analyzing the light spectrum coming into the ship. Anything in the infrared band was hot, and again the computer was smart enough to filter out stationary objects. If she flew to a new position, and cut out all heat emission, or as much of it as possible, and held her ship as still as possible, she could be invisible to their scanners. It was impossible to come to a full stop without firing her thrusters heavily and generating lots of heat.

  She would have to be gentle on them, trying to keep her ship’s external temperature as low as possible. She hatched a plan to hit her thrusters gently in order to get her moving on a trajectory slowly. Any incoming bullets fired at her old position moved relatively slowly compared to lasers, so she would likely be out of their way before they reached her. Any ships using lasers would show up as red hot, so she could evade them before the laser could do too much damage. She would glide silently and pick off ships one by one.

  She figured she’d be close to invisible on their scanners, but she couldn’t fool anybody’s eyes. If they looked in the right direction at the right time they’d still see her.

  By now more than three quarters of her classmates were ‘dead’, their ships towed back to the hangar in shame. She counted the ships on her scanners, and they were all present, flying around at high speed, dog-fighting each other. Nobody else was drifting like her, trying to be invisible, and they were all so busy that none of them noticed.

  One ship, corkscrewing up and away from a pursuing fighter started getting close to her. She held her nerve, wondering if her stealth tactic was working. Sure enough, he didn’t see her and turned his ship, heading back down towards the melee below. She opened up with her lasers, lighting him up, and displaying as a ‘kill’ instantly.

  She had given away her position, so, quickly, she turned and thrusted away. Some of the surviving fighters, including Soo-Kyung’s, began to see what was happening, and flew away from where Aisha’s laser had come from.

  As they were so intent on each other, Aisha realized that she could get away quite
safely, and they didn’t have the eyeballs to seek her out. That might change when it became one-on-one.

  Soo-Kyung must have been looking, for she flew her ship about half the distance from the hangar to where Aisha had shot from. She stopped, gently rotating her ship. Aisha could almost feel her friend’s deep brown eyes searching for her.

  Another fighter saw Soo-Kyung, and she made for an easy target. It accelerated towards her, opening up with its bullets. But Soo-Kyung was too fast, and she pushed her attitude jets, spinning her ship to the side, and watching the other one overshoot. She opened up with her guns, and ‘killed’ him instantly.

  But it was clear that she was hunting Aisha now. Aisha realized that her best chance was to stick with the plan. Silently drifting, watching with her eyes as well as her heat sensors she saw Soo-Kyung slowly pick off the other fighters. She’d lure them in and kill them, or she’d wait until two of them were focused on each other, and she’d kill them both.

  Like a lioness, Aisha’s roommate slowly made her way to the top of the pecking order. Soo-Kyung was as smart as she was lethal. And she knew that Aisha had retreated to a position of safety. It was likely that she knew as much about the ship by now that Aisha did, but how could she go into stealth the way Aisha had?

  There were only three other fighters left, now. Aisha watched as Soo-Kyung lured one of them to chase her, right into the path of the third. It did her dirty work for her, and now it was just Soo-Kyung, Aisha and that third. It was piloted by a Brazilian kid that everybody called Ronaldo.

  She watched as Ronaldo turned and chased Soo-Kyung’s ship. After the earlier chase, when Soo-Kyung had lured the fighter towards Ronaldo, she had shot off as fast as she could, trying to put as much distance between her and Ronaldo as she could. On the heat sensor, her ship was a bright light.

  But there was something wrong. The ship was flying much too predictably, in a wide, fast arc around the cylinder and back towards the hangar. It was easy for Ronaldo to see her and chase her. Calculating her trajectory, he headed her off with a tight beam laser.

  Aisha flicked on her heads-up display, and Soo-Kyung’s ship was so bright with heat that it washed out the rest of the display.

  She peered through the cockpit, but both ships were too far away. What could she do? Her hand hovered over the radar button. She could send out a ping, and positively identify the ships. That would allow her to get a lock on Soo-Kyung and Ronaldo, so whichever one survived would be at her mercy.

  Something didn’t feel quite right. She looked out the window again, seeing that Ronaldo was almost in firing range. She had to act.

  Taking a deep breath, Aisha activated her radar. She instructed the computer to lock onto the results. It beeped back at her, and she quickly deactivated the radar. Ronaldo had Soo-Kyung in range and was opening up with his laser.

  He had her with a direct hit. But something was wrong. There was no kill sound on her display. She looked at it again, and--

  Boom! She was hit, hard, with both bullets and lasers, and at almost point-blank range. A clear kill; she was dead. What had happened? Craning her neck, she turned around to see Soo-Kyung’s ship only feet behind hers.

  She could see Soo-Kyung smiling, and giving her a thumbs up. Aisha sighed, not believing she could have been fooled so easily. She wasn’t even sure how she’d been fooled. Soo-Kyung’s ship moved slowly, ever so slowly toward her. The nose of her ship connected with Aisha’s just behind the cockpit, and began to push her.

  That’s how she had fooled everyone! When someone pinged with radar, she’d know where they were. But when they used the heat sensors, they were fooled by the proximity of the ships. She’d push one ship onto a path, and shut down her own ship. While her opponent chased the bait, she could zero in on it. In this case, she used Ronaldo as the bait to get Aisha to turn on her radar and give away her position.

  It was genius.

  Ronaldo was still shooting his laser at the decoy, so Soo-Kyung pushed Aisha’s ship in his direction, burning what must be the last of her fuel to get enough speed to be a burning glow on his heat scanners. When she was close to laser range, she boosted away from Aisha, effectively pushing herself slowly in the opposite direction. Ronaldo opened up with direct hits on Aisha’s ship, the bullets racketing against her hull, splattering red paint all over it.

  Then, from behind, she saw Soo-Kyung’s ship light up. Her beam hit Ronaldo’s ship, straight and true, killing it instantly.

  The lights came back on in Aisha’s ship, and she was able to regain control. Simms’ face appeared on her screen. “Nice work, Miss Kim,” he said. “And not bad, Parks and Ronaldo. The rest of you...that was a shambles! You are a disgrace to your species. Get the heck back here, now!”

  Chapter 10

  Korea

  May there be peace with you always, my dear girl. May you understand what peace is, and the difference between peace and victory. When we win a war, we like to call it declaring peace, but it isn’t, it’s just postponing future war.

  Peace only comes when we work together for a common, agreed upon goal. There’ll be a chance for you to do that in the new world. Don’t forget. Work towards this peace, and make it not just yours, but everyone’s…

  Silently, they returned to their apartment. Most of their classmates were jealous at Soo-Kyung’s prize of no homework for a week. “It’s not like homework is hard for you anyway,” grumbled Ronaldo, shaking her hand in a concession to her victory. He smiled and winked. “Just kidding,” he had said before going to join his friends.

  They entered the apartment, and Soo-Kyung kicked off her shoes and put her slippers on as always. Quietly, she sat on one of the sofas and looked out at the stars.

  “Nice work, Soo-Kyung. I’d love to know how you were so good, so quickly,” said Aisha, finally, unsettled by the silence.

  The answer surprised her. “Really? You assume a lot. I couldn’t have just learned it on the spot, like you did? I had to know something already, is that it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh come on, it’s been days now since you spoke with those boys, and I’m sure they told you all about me. You’ve been on-edge around me ever since.”

  “That’s not it, they--”

  “Am I supposed to believe you? They hacked into my records and found out all about me, and you believe them over me? I thought I was your friend.”

  Aisha was aghast. “You are my friend.”

  “But you believe them over me?”

  “There’s nothing to believe. They told me nothing.”

  “What? Then why are you--”

  Soo-Kyung stopped, and looked into Aisha’s eyes. Aisha glared back. If Soo-Kyung were to read anything it would be righteous anger. She turned away from Aisha, and sat, putting her head in her hands for a moment before looking back.

  “Sorry,” she said, quietly. “I know I’m over-sensitive about this, and it made me jump to the wrong conclusion.”

  Aisha sat down beside her and told her of the entire conversation with Patrice.

  “He was on the verge of telling me something. Something not just about this place, but about...I don’t know, everything. But I blew it. I got angry and flew off the handle.”

  “Go on.”

  “But he did tell me about open enrollment. He and Seamus and some others have their little conspiracy going on up here. They thought that the opening of the school to the general public might yield some kind of clue as to the true purpose of the school.”

  Soo-Kyung raised an eyebrow. “And?”

  “And, it turned out that there were two students that came in who are very special. You and me.”

  “What makes us special?”

  “For you, I have no idea. Seamus said he read your files and that they ‘blew his mind’, but other than that, they told me nothing. I wanted to hear it from you. Despite what you said earlier, I am your friend, and I care about you deeply.”

  Soo-Kyung smiled a little, and Aisha was
surprised at how much she meant it. “I really do,” she repeated. “And I know there’s an air of secrecy about you. That there’s something terrible that you carry alone. And you don’t have to. Not anymore.”

  Soo-Kyung opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it. It was like she was unable to find the words. Finally, she spoke. “So, has my silence been the thing that bothers you?”

  “Yes!” Aisha reached towards Soo-Kyung, and rested her hand on her shoulder. “And, no,” she said, knowing that she needed to be honest with Soo-Kyung. “There was something more.”

  “What?”

  Aisha told her about her own file. That it had been sealed and encrypted so deeply that Seamus couldn’t break it.

  “Yet he was able to break mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Curious,” Soo-Kyung said.

  “So what did he read?”

  “Probably the cover story.”

  “Cover story?” Aisha asked.

  “I’m not exactly what I appear to be.”

  “He said that nobody here is exactly who they appear to be.”

  “He is very wise,” she smiled a little. “And cute.”

  Aisha wasn’t going to let her change the subject. “Just who are you, then?”

  “According to the files, I’m one of the children that were hand-picked by the regime in my country to go through the best of training in everything. Science, technology, martial arts, languages, piloting, strategy…a list as long as your arm.”

  “According to the files?”

  “Yes. That was planted to explain how I can do the things I do, and to distract from the truth about who I am.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Kim.”

  “Yes. I know. It’s a common name in Korea.”

  “It’s also the name of the family that have controlled the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea since its founding over a hundred years ago. How else do you think I survived the nuclear war?”