by Joe Vasicek
Aaron clenched his fists, but she ignored that as she led him back the way they’d come. He knew she was right—and he should be grateful for her help—but he was too angry to let her see that.
“So what is this drop-ship anyway? Some sort of modified cargo hauler?”
“More or less. The cargo bay’s been set up to carry soldiers instead of ore. The bay doors have been fused shut, with a thick layer of armor plating to the exterior. We’ve attached an asteroid miner drill bit to the underside over the auxiliary hatchway, so we can cut through the enemy hull and send the platoon in through the breach. Your job is to fly the thing to the enemy ship and latch on.”
A combat pilot, Aaron thought. His hands relaxed a bit, though his cheeks still burned. Flying into combat would be a lot better than wringing his hands as a forgotten adjutant on some minor starship.
“I suppose you want me to thank you,” he grumbled.
She glanced at him over her shoulder and smiled. “Eh, don’t mention it. We Deltans have to stick together, after all.”
“I guess.”
“Our unit is Fourth Platoon, assigned to the Aegis. We’re scheduled to board as soon as she gets out of drydock. In the meantime, want to get a drink in the dockside bar? We’ll be on strict rations once we embark.”
Aaron shrugged, his rage deflated. “Might as well. It’s not like I can stand in your way.”
“No,” she said, laughing. “I guess you can’t.”
Lost in Translation
The bulkheads shuddered as the Paladin-4 undocked from the Aegis under heavy fire. Aaron gripped the flight stick and throttled the sublight engines to a full burn, throwing him back against his seat. Outside the narrow cockpit window, exploding shells flashed silently as they pounded the surrounding warships. Swarms of red and green dots weaved in and out of each other on the main holoscreen display, just below the window. Aaron’s free hand flew over the controls as he calibrated the nav-computer to highlight the other drop-ships and their target, an Imperial frigate about fifty klicks out.
“Aegis, I am Paladin-4 on approach,” he said in his broken Gaian. “Following leader.”
“Copy, Paladin-4. Approach with caution, target is hot.” There was more, but he could only pick out words, not sentences. Something about drones and countermeasures.
With his trajectory locked in and velocity in the red, he cut the engines and prepared to coast. On the display, the other drop-ships did the same, maintaining a loose formation as they shot like oversized missiles at the frigate.
“ETA: 02:29,” the nav-computer read, counting down the minutes to contact with the target. The numbers to the right of the second marker flashed so quickly he couldn’t read them, but it felt as if his heart pounded even faster.
His stringy hair drifted across his eyes, and his body lifted up against the restraints. The drop-ship had no artificial gravity field, since the generators had been gutted to make more space for the marines. He didn’t envy them, packed together as tightly as the cabin would allow. The flight must have been hell for them, trapped in a dark, windowless space with twenty or thirty sweaty soldiers. As if to confirm this, the scent of vomit wafted in through the cockpit doorway. He rankled his nose but pressed on.
At the 01:56 mark, a cluster of ships began to divert from the main fray, heading on an intercept course. They showed up on the display as red points with short trajectory lines fanning out ahead of them. Aaron kept an eye on them and gripped his flight stick with a clammy hand.
“Paladin-4, I see danger on approach,” he said. “Request orders?”
The seconds ticked down. On the display, the intercepting points came closer.
“Evasive maneuvers,” the wing commander’s voice came over the intercom. Aaron didn’t have to wait to hear what else the commander had to say. He turned a hard right and banked away from the incoming craft.
The intense g-forces from the sudden maneuver pulled him hard to one side, then another. About ten seconds dropped from the clock, while his vision began to blur. He clenched his legs and held his breath, swerving again just to throw the enemy off balance. On the display, the red dots wavered as if unsure which way to go.
A new series of flashes out the forward window briefly illuminated the interior of the cockpit with brilliant light. Aaron squinted and covered his eyes. On the auxiliary control panel above his head, several indicators began to blink in alarm. Countermeasure flares—but why would the enemy fire those first?
As if in response, a loud explosion sounded against the hull. It reverberated through the bulkheads, setting off a whole new set of alarms. It sounded as if they’d been struck by a small asteroid—or projectile fire. Aaron yelped and nosed down, barely avoiding another volley. Paladin-2 was not so lucky. The display showed her explode and break up into a rapidly expanding debris field about two klicks off their bow.
A loud beeping sound added to the growing number of alarms. It took a second for Aaron to recognize it from general training. That sound meant the enemy targeting systems were painting them. He dropped a countermeasure flare of his own and nosed up, burning his engines to get around the debris field made by Paladin-2. Another alarm sounded, this one indicating an incoming missile. Fortunately, it stopped shortly after the countermeasure flare went off.
The clock on the main display now read 01:02. The incoming enemy craft fired another projectile volley, only seconds before flyby. Aaron took a chance and dove into the debris field. The bulkheads shook as the armor took a beating, but none of the debris broke through to damage the hull. Meanwhile, the enemy took a wide berth around him, easily enabling him to dodge their fire.
“Autolasers,” he heard someone say over the radio chatter, and realized he’d forgotten to activate his. He swore under his breath—those lasers could have taken out a fair amount of the projectile fire they’d already absorbed. He reached up to switch the system on, only to see a long list of flashing red words on the auxiliary display.
Shit. That list was from damage control—and it was all in Gaian. He had no idea which systems were gone and which ones were still working.
The clock read 00:43 now. They were less than twenty klicks from the target ship. Paladin-1 and Paladin-3 were still holding steady on approach, but Paladin-6 was veering off as if it had lost control and Paladin-5 and Paladin-7 were under heavy fire in the rear. That wasn’t good—if they lost more than half of their troops en route to the target, they could all be killed or captured once they tried to board. Cold sweat began to form on the back of Aaron’s neck, but he ignored it and pressed on.
“Plasma!” a voice shouted over the intercom. “Raise magnetic shields!” Aaron raised his just as half a dozen plasma bolts started arcing from the target ship. The shields did a fair job of deflecting them, but he zigzagged back and forth just in case. The whirr-pop of the autolasers sounded through the hull, and red flashes of light filled the starfield like a Betan worship service. It was intense. Things were heating up fast, and it was all he could do to keep the men depending on him alive.
Somehow, he got through the enemy fire without taking any more significant damage. The alarms still flashed and buzzed in his ear, but none of that mattered anymore—all that mattered was latching onto the target ship’s hull and cutting through. The taste of vomit filled his mouth, but he choked it down and brought up a schematic of the enemy ship on the secondary display. The bridge and control centers—that was what they needed to take first. If he could drop the troops off on that part of the ship, they had a good chance of making it out alive.
He spun the ship around and throttled the engines for the approach burn. In the next few moments, several things happened at once. A whole series of cascading alarms went off across the overhead indicator panel. At the same time, an explosion sounded in the rear half of the ship, louder than anything before. Aaron jerked the flight stick hard to the right, but the controls were unresponsive—the ship kept turning as if he’d put it into a spin. The soldiers in the
cabin started screaming, and a blast of hot air hit the back of his neck.
He didn’t have time to turn around and see what had happened. The hull breached explosively less than a split second later, and he was sucked out of the cockpit into the rapidly expanding debris field that only moments ago had been Paladin-4. The icy black coldness of the vacuum of space burned his skin and insides as the oxygen was sucked from his lungs, while the dying bodies of the soldiers kicked and floundered all around him. He tried to gasp for breath, but the silence of space descended upon him like a shroud of death. His last thought as a piece of the hull spun to strike him was that he should have brought his autolasers online sooner.
* * * * *
Aaron sat up violently and gasped for breath as the simulation jacked him out of the dream monitor. Hands reached across his chest and held him back as his convulsions slowly stopped.
“Simulator,” someone said, followed by a bunch of other things that he didn’t understand. He coughed and reached back to touch the neural jacks in the back of his neck. They were still warm.
What went wrong back there? It seemed as if something had exploded as he brought the ship around for the final approach. The screams of the soldiers still rang in his ears, and the warmth around his neural implants reminded him eerily of the flames that had lanced across the back of his head. Who programmed a training simulation to be that realistic? What the hell were they thinking?
He eased himself down from the reclining chair and stood on unsteady legs as he slowly regained his bearings. A young female technician stood anxiously by him as he recovered, but the other two returned to monitoring the rest of the room. About a dozen other pilots lay back on the ergonomic seats, their faces covered by the large, helmet-like dream monitors. They were all hooked up to a central core like a small holding tank that sat in the center of the room. Wires ran along the floor, taped haphazardly in place and running every which way. All in all, the simulation room was a mess.
Aaron walked over to the far side of the room, where a small crowd had gathered around an array of more than a dozen display screens. Each one showed the viewpoint of a different pilot, with a scrolling label he couldn’t read along the top. Periodically, the screens would briefly flash to a 2D rendered map of the war zone, with an indicator showing the location of the particular ship. Five of the screens were blank, with “Killed in Action” in bold red letters. As Aaron watched, a sixth feed blanked out, and another trainee coughed violently as he came back to consciousness.
At least I wasn’t the only one to fail, Aaron tried to console himself. The realization gave him little comfort, though. Of the seven drop-ships, only three had made it to the target frigate. That left only three platoons of lightly armed Outworlder marines to fight an entire complement of Imperial shock troops. From what little he could tell, Commander Ajax was trying to redirect other drop-ships from the battle group to switch targets and head for the frigate, but it would take precious time for them to get there. If this were real life, the Imperials would almost certainly mow down the first wave of marines in time to be ready for the next one.
He glanced around the room and saw Mara leaning up against the far wall with her arms folded. She waved at him, and he walked over to talk with her.
“What happened back there?” he asked.
“It looked like you had a mild reactor breach that went critical when you made a hard engine burn on approach,” she answered. “That explosion that killed our ship? It wasn’t enemy fire.”
Aaron swore. “A reactor breach? Are you serious?”
“That’s what it looked like. It’s hard to tell from here, of course, but I’m sure you’ll get a chance to review it in detail later.”
“But I totally could have prevented the whole thing by flushing the coolant system and pulsing the engines. It wouldn’t have slowed us down as fast, but it would have saved the reactor—and the whole damn ship, too.”
Mara cocked her head and raised an eyebrow. “You sound pretty confident about that. Are you sure it would work?”
“Well, no, but it would have kept the reactor from overheating, and that’s what made it go critical. She held just fine through the rest of the battle, and even if she died in the approach maneuver, the pulsing alone would have prevented her from exploding the way she did.”
“You’re quite a pilot,” she said approvingly. “I think my father would have liked you.”
Aaron frowned. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing at all,” she said, looking away. From the way her expression fell, Aaron realized he’d said something stupid.
Fortunately, two other members of the platoon walked over just then, cutting the conversation short before it became a fight. The first one, a massively strong kid with stubbly blond hair and arms as thick as hull plating, Aaron recognized as Hektor, the platoon’s heavy weapons specialist. The other, a smaller guy with a bald head and a black chin beard, was someone he hadn’t met yet.
Hektor gave him a boyish grin and waved, as if Aaron’s not being able to speak Gaian meant that he was deaf as well. Any other time, Aaron wouldn’t have really cared, but after the disastrous training session, the gesture made him groan and roll his eyes.
Mara ignored that and greeted them both. They spoke with each other for a few moments before letting him in on the conversation.
“Aaron, you know Hektor right?”
“Of course.” He turned to Hektor. “Hello, how are you?” he asked in his broken Gaian.
“Ah!” said Hektor. The intonation of his voice rose and fell as if hearing Aaron speak was the most amazing thing to happen all dayshift. He punched him good-naturedly in the arm, leaving a sore spot and almost knocking him back. Aaron tried very hard not to wince.
“You are new to star cluster, no?” the other soldier said in a heavy accent.
“Yeah,” Aaron admitted. “Who are you?”
The kid with the black chin beard bowed. “My name is Jason Thetana.”
Aaron perked up at once. Jason spoke a blend of languages that sounded surprisingly familiar. He realized it was the creole he was most familiar with, from his home sector.
“Are you from the Oriana Cluster?”
Jason grinned. “Yes, of course, from Theta star. You have good ear.”
Theta Oriana was one of the closest stars to Aaron and Mara’s home system, and had a language and culture that was not too different from theirs. Where Deltans were always close-knit and friendly with each other, though, Thetan society was much more fractious. Growing up, Aaron had heard crazy stories about Thetan blood feuds and vendettas, some of them stretching across the entire star cluster. Like most Deltan star wanderers, he’d always done his best to steer clear of them, even at faraway ports.
“Jason is the platoon’s cybernetics expert,” Mara explained. “He’s our best hacker—in fact, he’s the one of the main programmers for the training simulation.”
“You bastard!” Aaron exclaimed without thinking. To his relief, Jason threw back his head and laughed.
“Ah, you like? Is good work, no?”
Hektor tapped Aaron’s chest and pointed at the screens. Half of them were down now, but even so, he grinned and made a thumbs-up sign, nodding for effect. Aaron frowned.
“What’s he saying?”
Mara conferred with him for a moment, then turned back to Aaron. “He says you did a good job back there.”
“Good, good,” Hektor said in Gaian, grinning like an idiot. He made the thumbs up sign again and shook it for effect.
“What is he talking about? I got shot down—if that had been real, we’d all be dead.”
“They always make the training tougher than real life,” Mara said. “You did pretty good, all things considered. Our last pilot was the guy flying Paladin-2. He’s always the first to get shot down.”
“Good,” Hektor repeated. He didn’t stop until Aaron nodded and made the thumbs-up sign back to him.
“You are g
ood pilot,” said Jason, slapping him on the back. “You fly us good.”
“You’re all wrong,” Aaron muttered. The noise of the room was making him dizzy, and all this extra attention from his platoon mates wasn’t helping much, even if they were a lot more upbeat about it than him.
“Don’t worry—in a real battle, we’d never drop further than twenty klicks from an enemy target,” Mara told him. “We drop at fifty klicks in training just to keep us on our toes. You did pretty well out there, especially for your first run-through.”
“But Mara, I couldn’t even read the damage control readouts. If I hadn’t spent the last two dayshifts studying up on all the controls, I wouldn’t have been able to fly her.”
“Even more impressive,” said Jason.
“But—guys! What are you talking about? I just got you all killed!”
Mara put a hand on his arm. “Easy there, hotshot. It was just a simulation. And you did fine—really, you did. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”
“Good, good,” Hektor said, starting all over with the thumbs-up thing. Aaron groaned.
“How am I supposed to do this if I can’t even read the controls on my own ship? We leave in just ten dayshifts! I’m not ready.”
“No one is,” Mara said under her breath. She looked at him, and for the first time Aaron saw a hint of fear, tinged with desperation. In that moment, it was as if she’d taken off her mask—a mask of bravado that everyone else in the room was still wearing. It lasted only a moment, though, leaving Aaron to wonder if he hadn’t just imagined it.
“Listen,” said Jason. “You want to learn language fast? You want to pick it up no time?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Aaron. The intensity in Jason’s eyes unnerved him—not to mention the fact that he was a Thetan. He took a deep breath and did his best to swallow his uneasiness.
“Listen,” Jason repeated. “You want learn, I can help. Have good program, in dream monitor will teach you.”
