Scan displays.
Flex fingers.
Wiggle toes.
Repeat.
This was his routine, the way he’d first been taught to fly multi-use transports back when Fleet gave up on fighters flown by actual pilots. Now kids flew drones from displays thousands of klicks from the battle and celebrated their kills with bowls of ice cream.
Scan. Flex. Wiggle. Repeat.
Transport missions could be long and tedious, or short and scary as hell. He had an idea this one was going to be both before it was over.
“It went to hell fast down there. I’m not sure we’re going to make it.” From the right seat, Duška’s voice over the comm was calm. They’d flown together for more than a decade, and knew each other with the intimacy of an old committed couple.
Scan.
Ghazni registered a spike in power from one of the transport’s four engines. He adjusted the fuel intake, slowly drawing a finger across a touchpad on the console between the seats.
Flex. Wiggle.
He adjusted the ship’s direction by applying slight pressure to the yoke and the left pedal. They were cutting across buffeting winds loaded with ice pellets on a course he wouldn’t chose for anything but an emergency. The planet below, Kekona-5, was the farthest from the system’s star and much of it was snow-shrouded and swept by gale-force winds, making most flights a white-knuckle affair.
Repeat.
There was no visual or physical feedback inside the cockpit so Ghazni relied on the displays to know when the ship was back on level flight.
“Two minutes out. They’re down to half strength.” Duška was the most experienced pilot in the squadron next to him, and Ghazni knew in addition to the command net she was tapped into the data feed of the unit they were trying to save. On one of her datascreens would be a list of names in green and red text, reflecting the living and dead.
They had been flying resupply, dumping off rations, ammo, and in one case a miserable-looking, and no doubt terrified, replacement soldier to various units trying to wrest the planet from the Vyps. The unit in question, a reinforced platoon, was their third stop of the day.
The report of enemy contact came across the command net while they were on the ground for their fifth stop. Ghazni and Duška shared a wry smile that said: ‘We just missed that.’ Both knew better, though. Back in the air they heard the platoon call for an emergency evac and shortly after that they were re-tasked.
Scan. Flex. Wiggle.
Ghazni was on his second campaign, third planet. It took twelve years to capture Pherios-3 and then his corps shifted to Pherios-5, adding their weight to a fight that went on another four years. After a short break to receive new equipment it was on to Kekona-5, where the battle was so new they were still resupplying from orbit.
Repeat.
The Vyps didn’t put up much of a fight when they invaded, but it sounded like that was changing. The reinforced platoon they were heading to save realized very quickly they needed to be pulled off the battlefield.
“Standing by for hot zone, contested evac.” That was Frost. She and Ruiz were the aircrew for the mission, stationed in the cargo/passenger compartment. Duška had them tied into the same comm channels she was monitoring, something few pilots did but was standard procedure on their ship. Frost told him once it was why aircrew rotations with them were prized, but to Ghazni keeping everyone in the loop made too much sense to forego.
The aircrew ensured the correct supplies were delivered and often had little time to prep the pallets for offloading through the rear combat hatch. Depending on the threat, Ghazni could land the transport, hover, or fly low and slow over the landing zone. One pass was all they could make in a battlezone.
Scan.
“One minute. One minute. Charge and test fire.”
The aircrew also manned the transport’s self-defense weapons, large chain-guns in sidepods, and Ghazni knew they’d already be standing at their operating stations. Moments later Frost reported weapons ready; in the cockpit he felt and heard nothing.
Flex.
They were still above the worst of the weather but very soon he would push the nose down, creating a cascading list of adjustments to be made to the engines and flight controls.
Wiggle.
He had done this so many times, but no two evacs were ever the same. He’d lost ships and aircrew before, too; there was always a chance of either happening again.
Repeat.
Time for him would slow to a crawl as his fingers and toes instinctively moved over the controls, doing what was needed before the thoughts could even form in his mind.
“Thirty seconds. Down to two survivors.”
He put the ship into a dive. Warning tones sounded in his headset and flashing text appeared on datascreens. He made adjustments, evaluated the impact of what he’d done, and made further tweaks.
A low-pitched warble in his left ear told him the transport was being painted by Vyp sensors.
“Firing spoofs! Fifteen seconds. One evac remaining. I say again, one survivor.” Duška controlled active and passive countermeasures, decoys and transmission arrays to confuse Vyp anti-air defenses.
“Taking ground fire.” Frost. She and Ruiz would return fire as soon as they identified targets.
Scan. Flex. Wiggle.
His motions were smooth, his hands and feet controlling the transport through a series of evasive maneuvers. Climb, dive, twist, turn.
Scan. Flex. Wiggle.
“Abort, abort, abort. No survivors.” Duška’s voice, calm and authoritative.
Without thinking he pulled the yoke back and to the side, working the pedals and increasing the thrust to send the transport into a steep, corkscrewing climb. Warning tones chimed and text flashed on his datascreens.
He brought the transport to level flight as Duška reported to flight control, far above them in an orbiting warship. Control already knew, but she was following procedures.
Scan.
The report was acknowledged and they were released to continue the resupply mission.
Flex.
Duška gave him the course to the sixth resupply drop.
Wiggle.
With a gentle nudge of the joystick, he put the transport into a slow turn.
Repeat.
Quantam
Twisting and turning, holding the quantam tightly in his hands,Tyko caught a glimpse of Henrik standing near the end line. More accurately, he saw a flash of green between the white jerseys and waving arms of the two pilots from the opposing squad guarding him. Leaning forward but careful to keep one foot on the polished composite floor as the rules required, Tyko threw the quantam with all his might through the screening arms.
The black spheroid zipped through the air toward the end of the court as three defenders yelled “Pass!” Reaching his long arms above his head, Henrik caught the quantam with both hands. Spinning around, the lanky pilot carefully threaded the quantam through one of the six-point openings in the end-board to the jubilant shouts of his teammates. There were four different-sized openings in the court-wide end-board: a large circle worth three points bracketed by two six-pointers that were half again smaller. Above the three-point hole was an opening slightly larger than the quantam itself that was worth ten points.
“Score!” Tyko pumped his fist. He glanced at the digital score/time display near the midpoint line as he jogged back to the end-line his team would now have to defend. The readout showed both squads had 54 points with a little less than two minutes to play. “Tie match, everyone. Stay alert now!”
Henrik slid over to Tyko and looked down at him with a sheepish grin. “Prob’ly should’ve gone for the tenner but I was too excited. Couldn’t move. I’m never that open near the end-line!”
“No problem. We stop them here, score on our turn and we’re on to the station championship.” Tyko smiled and punched the other pilot’s shoulder. “Remember what they taught us at Fleet indoc: DAM it.”
Ty
ko’s mind flashed back to a large auditorium at the Fleet Academy on New Earth. Row upon row of gray composite seats rising above and facing a black lectern where a rail-thin officer of about forty stood, his one eye staring intently at the cadets.
“In war there is no ‘should have.’ Strike that from your vocabulary right now, cadets! There is only what you do, and what you do after! You must decide, act, and move to the next decision point! Never look back, or you will surely die. Now, say it after me: Decide. Act. Move on.”
The thunderous shout of a thousand young voices faded from Tyko’s mind as Henrik’s smile broadened. “What’s this? You’re using an approved Fleet acronym? Good to see you’re back to conforming.”
Three months had passed since the incident in Pri-Fly, which resulted in a two-week suspension from flight operations and a series of counseling sessions. An additional week was added during the first session when Tyko asked why New Earth was at war with the Vyptellians. The support officer across the table, a lieutenant perhaps five years older than Tyko and known among the pilots as good-natured but firm, froze in his seat. After a few moments of silence the lieutenant’s eyelids narrowed and a frown creased his face. He told Tyko the question was irrelevant and when the pilot opened his mouth to ask why the counselor slammed his hand palm-first onto the table and terminated the session.
Tyko returned to his stateroom, his face flushed with anger. He paced back and forth in the small space, his mind a whirlwind of thoughts. Tyko understood and accepted his punishment for violating the rule that Pri-Fly was off-limits: rules were to be obeyed. But his anger didn’t stop him from wondering about the why of that rule. Why were the wounded who had fought the war’s early battles kept away from the pilots? Why make him sign an oath of secrecy about what he’d seen in Pri-Fly? What purpose did it serve? For that matter, why hide what the war was about?
As his mood cooled Tyko remembered something all cadets were taught early in their training: Fleet rules didn’t always make obvious sense but there was always a reason for them.
The next day he was sitting in the station library, one of the few locations permitted as part of his punishment, reading the latest news files about the war. Clearing the vid console screen, Tyko called up the archive search and typed in a query about the start of the war. His index finger hovered over the touchscreen for a moment as he pondered the words on the screen, and the implicit warning of his extended suspension. Although he was a seasoned pilot with hundreds of kills to his credit, Tyko was still a teenager, and when the flash of the anger from the day before returned he jabbed the touchscreen.
Billions of words had been written since, but there was surprisingly little to be found about the start of the sixteen-year war between the humans of New Earth and the Vyptellians. Calling up a primary school textbook he found two ponderously written lines: While Humanity’s search for a new home in the universe was undertaken with peaceful intent, the discovery of other, less-developed species at times created conflict. The unprovoked massacre by the Vyptellian race of two thousand peaceful human settlers and the destruction of a mining and scientific exploration colony on the planet Nex Altrien sparked a war between the two races that continues today.
Re-reading these lines, Tyko vaguely remembered seeing something similar during his own school days before his draft notice arrived.
Although he now knew the event that sparked the war, Tyko was surprised to find the knowledge only led to more questions. Why had the Vyptellians attacked? Were they provoked? How long had the colony been on Nex Altrien? Prior to or after the attack, had their been any high-level discussions between the races?
Additional searches revealed no answers to these new questions.
He checked star charts and saw to his great surprise Nex Altrien was not far from his base station, which hadn’t moved in the two years since Tyko reported for duty. Fleet intelligence briefs and info vids broadcast to civilians portrayed the Vyps as bloodthirsty warmongers and humans as bravely withstanding their assaults. Yet, in nearly seventeen years the aliens had not advanced into New Earth-controlled space.
Tyko shook his head, trying to comprehend it. There must have been a time, immediately after the destruction of Nex Altrien, when humanity was wide open to assault, yet the Vyps, bloodthirsty and experienced warriors, did not take advantage.
It made little sense and he returned to his stateroom with his head spinning.
Tyko soon discovered his research in the library — indeed, everything the pilots did — was logged by the squadron’s support officers. They were likely in the process of adding to his punishment for continuing to pry into the war’s origin, but he made the situation much worse by sending an e-note to his parents asking them what they remembered about the war’s earliest days. This earned him a blistering visit to his squadron commander, who told him the e-note to New Earth had been intercepted and deleted before delivery.
She finished her tirade by adding three weeks to his suspension.
The administrative tasks he was assigned while suspended were mind-numbing and being off the flight roster meant the rec hall and vid center were off limits. Chastised and anxious to return to flight status, Tyko decided to do what new cadets were advised at the academy: never call attention to yourself. For whatever reason the civilian and military authorities did not want people looking into the start of the war, and if he persisted the penalties would get harsher and harsher.
He didn’t want to contemplate what would happen if he lost flight status permanently.
In the two months after finishing his suspension Tyko worked hard to be a model pilot, following every rule to the letter. He needed several flight rotations to regain proficiency, but by the third day back he was cutting through Vyptellian formations as if he had never left. Indeed, in many ways it seemed like he hadn’t left. The swarms of enemy fighters were the same, the spectators around the flight control units were the same, and the routine of on- and off-cycles was the same.
The only difference was the squadron support officers shadowing him wherever he went.
The other pilots in his squadron barely noticed his return to the flight deck. They had barraged him with questions a month earlier, curious to know what was behind the door to Pri-Fly, but he followed orders and kept silent. His punishment was all the warning the others needed to drop the matter. Although isolation was not an official part of his suspension, the others knew enough of the military — or were quietly prompted — to avoid him during his weeks away.
So Tyko did his best to quietly fit back into the squadron. Before, he had been a peer leader but in his absence others had stepped into that role. Tyko carefully navigated this new reality, accepting his unofficial demotion while doing what he could to assist and support these new leaders. When Henrik was selected to test a new model interceptor — a choice assignment Tyko thought would probably have been his just two months earlier — he joined the others in clapping the tall boy on the back and congratulating him.
It could have been his imagination, but Tyko thought his squadron commander was carefully watching his reaction during the test model announcement just before the start of the semi-final quantam match.
The quantam court was the one place where he remained near the top of the squadron’s pecking order.
Each station housed four air wings made up of eight squadrons. As Fourth Wing champions, Tyko’s squadron needed to beat the top team from Third Wing for the chance to play in the station championship game against the winner of the First versus Second Wing match underway on the opposite side of the rec hall.
Taking the quantam from an official, Tyko nodded at Henrik before turning to face the opposing squad on the other end of the court. “Don’t worry about me,” he said to the tall boy. “I’m not only a loyal Fleet officer, but I’ve also downed ten times the Vyps you have.”
A loud buzzer from the score/time display drowned out the laughing response.
Tyko threw the quantam to the opposing squa
d. A white-clad player caught the spheroid, starting the clock, and began running forward behind a wall of her teammates. Tyko’s squad moved toward them, the pilots trying to position themselves to block the advance of their opponents. At the midpoint line the white squad began to fan out.
The girl with the quantam suddenly stopped, yelling “Hold!” The rest of her team froze in place, their chests heaving.
By the rules the girl with the quantam had five seconds to either throw it to a teammate or begin moving forward again, although she was limited to two successive movements before having to pass. Surveying the court, she zipped the spheroid to a teammate to her right. The play was on the opposite side of the court from Tyko, who joined his teammates in yelling “Pass” before moving to new blocking positions. The new holder passed the spheroid back to a teammate near the midpoint line who passed it back to the first holder.
The attacking team had ninety seconds to score or give up possession and Tyko expected the white team to use as much time as possible.
The first girl threw the quantam to a teammate across court and took off running toward the end-line. Sensing she was going for a position to score, Tyko followed her. He had the shorter route and arrived first in the green-painted rectangle beneath the scoring circles, turning to face the girl just as she stopped short of running into him. Raising a hand high she turned to find the quantam, her ponytail of brown hair swinging just short of Tyko’s nose. Her shoulders rose and fell as the girl breathed deeply from sprinting. When she looked back at him over her shoulder, Tyko studied her face and felt a sudden and not unpleasant fluttering sensation in his stomach.
Reflecting New Earth society as a whole, the Fleet’s pilot corps was comprised of males and females in nearly equal numbers. They came from a wide range of backgrounds but once they donned the uniform each was an equal part of the whole; no variance from this policy was accepted. Like Tyko, every pilot at the station entered the academy at thirteen and to mitigate against the natural force that was puberty, Fleet command placed great emphasis on developing and maintaining professional relationships between the sexes. But those running the academy were pragmatic, too. The inevitable was dealt with quietly and with discipline that was not so severe as to encourage the latent rebellious nature of human teenagers.
Green Zulu Five One: And Other Stories From the Vyptellian War Page 3
