by Kevin Groh
They moved around and noticed that their movements felt just as light as usual, only slower. Running worked quite well because the stabilizers made it possible for them. Accordingly, you could duck very well. Carter wanted to lie down, but he kept slipping back into a standing position. New suits offered more useful possibilities. Banes demanded them to practice jumping.
He said: »An asteroid is not the same as a walk on Luna. The Earth-Moon has a fundamental gravity due to its round planetoid shape. That’s why it is round because all matter is pulled to one point. If you jump there without stabilizers, you slowly sink back to the surface. But an asteroid doesn’t have that. If you jump here without the boots, you will float on in this direction forever. So don’t be stupid if you don’t want to die out there. The stabilizers will stay on in any case!«
The HUD indicated that the boots were level G1, which meant that they were currently simulating Earth’s gravity. Banes told them that the attraction of the Earth’s moon Luna corresponded to one-sixth of Earth’s gravity. That’s what they adjusted. With G0.15 the movements were much more fun. The steps became slower because the body did not follow as fast. When they jumped, it took a while until they landed again and they also came much higher and further. Carter tried a triple somersault and even had time for a few more. Leena stood there rooted to the ground. The thought of free-floating in space had completely disturbed her and she didn’t dare to jump. Rod also found the experience very unpleasant. Since Banes looked in her direction and she had already had enough trouble with him, Carter jumped to her, grabbed her under the arms and threw her to Rod. He laughed and caught her, turned her around and threw her back to him. Leena protested loudly, but there was nothing she could do about her being misused as a ball. In spite of the embarrassing situation, her body got used to trusting the stabilizers, and she no longer cramped as she looked up. Kelly jumped up and threw herself at Leena to get her out of the boys‹ trajectory. The two landed gently and she thanked her. She hit Carter on the shoulder, but he didn’t notice much of it.
He jokingly yelled ›Ouuuuuuuuch‹ while imitating swimming movements in the air and Rod demonstrated a very long jump kick to the others. Banes seemed to understand the goofiness a little bit, but nevertheless, he reminded them to stop this nonsense. He showed them a series of tactical maneuvers and movements to repeat. Most of it was difficult due to lower gravity. A recruit from another group asked: »Major, why are these exercises necessary? The stabilizers are normally supposed to have Earth’s gravity. That wouldn’t be a change.«
Banes enlightened them: »That’s right, but the normal case is the normal case. It doesn’t always exist. Let’s say a stabilizer fails. Let’s say your HUD is not working properly or you are in a place that has a rejection, an anti-gravity. Then the strongest setting would be comparable to this. Sometimes you fight on the outer surface of a spaceship and don’t have magnetic boots. There are several stories of soldiers who were suddenly confronted with moon-like conditions. If something like this happens to you, you must at least be able to make some movements to survive.« He held up his rifle.
»If you get involved in a firefight in a place like this, there’s no cover. You can be as fast, as deadly or as persistent as you want, nobody can survive it for a long time. In such a situation, the only way not to get hit is to be on the move. And by that, I mean unpredictable movements. You turn gravity a little lower, so you hurt yourself less when you fall, and then it’s jump!«
He showed barrel rolls, somersaults, screws and other acrobatic maneuvers in the air and always shot in the same direction. »You have to learn to aim at the enemy from every angle and with every movement. That looks very impractical and not very professional, but it’s better than dying just because you’re static like a target.«
They all practiced the maneuvers first. It was important never to jump too high or too far because otherwise the enemy would recognize the trajectory and shoot you out of the air. After a while, they were able to do some basic jumps and fired in the same direction. What nobody expected was that Banes would make an exercise out of it after all. He always wanted one team to compete against another and fight an open fight. In Carter’s unit, he appointed Rod commander for that training. As soon as they and the opposing group had taken their places, they were given a short time to think of a strategy. But Rod was not strategically gifted at all, which he knew and immediately admitted. So he said: »Do you have any suggestions? I’m delegating the tactics.«
Carter had to smile because Henry already had an idea and Rod looked at him. Leena was less spontaneous, and since she hadn’t had time, not much came from her. Rod waved Henry and Gina close and when he heard their suggestion, he just grinned. The major started the exercise and while the enemy jumped around like crazy trying to fire at them, they did their best to protect Henry and Gina. The two tapped focused on their bracelets. Banes watched with suspicion. The practice bullets were slow, so they could be avoided with very little effort. Carter went in front of the others with Rod to draw the fire, and the two performed some very cool acrobatics with reduced gravity. Then Henry suddenly reported success and the opponents fell to the ground and couldn’t get up anymore. He had hacked their HUDs and set gravity to G3. This pulled the poor recruits down with triple gravity, where the others with normal gravity just passed them to shoot them down. Henry had ignored the combat exercise and defeated the system. His team won without loss and Banes was speechless. That hadn’t been the purpose of this exercise, but in fact, Commander Rod had led the group to success by using the strengths of his people. Since the rules were not violated, Banes had to declare them winners.
»You seem like an extraordinary group to me. First Nirvana and now this. Obviously you need bigger challenges.«
They didn’t like the way he said that at all. Nevertheless, that day they had once again provided a topic of conversation for the whole base. Henry just laughed: »I was about to make one boot heavy and the other light! Then they would have looked really stupid!«
But they hadn’t wanted to expose the other recruits, because something like that could happen to them very quickly as well. Fairness was important because it made them good winners. The opposing troops openly admitted their defeat and were impressed that their opponent had played them like that. The journey home was correspondingly cheerful. They talked to the other recruits and laughed together. Banes just said that he had never seen so many happy faces after an exercise and that didn’t seem to please him very much.
Advanced Techniques
The many lessons on galactic topics had not been so concentrated without reason. Just a few days after this space experience, the recruits went into space again. But this time it was something completely different. Their transporter did not head for an asteroid or planet. They flew only into the immediate surroundings of Utopia. There the warship ›Homebase‹ floated in orbit. It served as a mobile command center for the Utopia fleet and was also used as a training site for space missions. As they approached, the recruits stood spellbound at the windows and marveled at the sheer size of this colossus of a spaceship. The hangar was in the lower area. There were three of them, one at the front, one in the middle and one further back. They headed for the front landing zone and flew into the ship from below. A gate opened and they landed in a chamber. The gate closed again and the room was pumped full of breathing air to get out.
The recruits were excited when they came from the landing field into the main hangar, where hundreds of fighters and several dozen frigates were standing, maintained and armed.
In the morning Willis showed them around on the huge spaceship. Fast elevators and transport trains brought them to the different areas of the ship. In the train, they saw a large canal, which ran through the entire length of the ship. There were about thirty railway tracks, spread horizontally and vertically. In addition, there were about a hundred transport tubes, where elevator capsules or blocks of goods were shot through at high speed. White lighting reveal
ed the dimensions of the tunnel. They felt as if they were in the stomach of an unimaginably large monster. First, they looked at the engines. There was a surveillance platform for the chief technician, from where the ten engine turbines could be seen in their entirety from the inside. They were slightly staggered. Three next to each other, two above and the same again. Each of them had platforms, and floating mechs rushed around like repair drones and spare parts stores, welding, soldering or riveting something. All turbines were connected to the technician platform through a thick pipe. From there, the tube bundle led up through the ceiling together. The technician drove up with them and they entered a spacious hall in which it glowed light blue. A huge metal ball floated on a pedestal-like device, emitting bluish energy mist and vibrating permanently. Around it, there was a kind of round protective cage made of six thick metal rods firmly anchored in the walls of the room. Three rotating rings moved crosswise around the sphere.
The technician showed them blueprints: »That sphere over there is the heart of the Talon-3 engine. It’s made of a special resonant alloy. Inside is an Iom core with some other elements that react with each other. It’s like thousands of tiny orbs crashing against the inside walls of the sphere with full force, constantly chasing back and forth. This is the reason for the vibration. Whenever two of these orbs meet and collide, massive energy is released from the sphere into the feeder. It converts the whole energy and powers the turbines. You can control the process very well and even reach the speed of light. These rings keep the radiated residual energy from escaping, but with newer models, you don’t need them anymore.«
He showed them the huge energy stores that served as buffers for the energy fluctuations that sometimes occurred. Then they went to the control room in the heart of the ship. There was the weapons control room. They visited the control consoles, which were necessary for the many thousands of guns on the hull, but an engineer explained to them that they were not actually used. A VI took over the control of the weapon systems. From a single control panel, targets, priorities, and enemies were selected, which the VI then targeted simultaneously with all weapons. There was also the shield control. The comprehensive neysanic shields had been developed in such a way that their own guns could fire through it, but no projectile could penetrate from the outside. However, there were exceptional cases where they had to be shut down, and the appropriate controls were at that location. The control center was a round room on the ceiling of a large hall in which on one side stood the massive shield generator for the central part of the ship. There were three of them to cover the entire Homebase. Separated by a triple reinforced protective wall, the mighty major cannons were located on the other side of the room.
The smaller guns could aim at targets, but the large cannons consisted of four long tubes that were less mobile. In battle, they came down from the belly of the ship and were aligned 360 degrees horizontally. They fired single high-energy projectiles or a permanent beam of energy that penetrated almost everything. According to the weapons officer, these guns were fired only twice in history, and one time was a test run. Carter didn’t even want to know what damage these things could do. After they had a good look around, their last stop was the bridge. It was at the top of the ship and quite big. Several long windows allowed a view of Utopia. The captain stood or sat on an elevated platform, while the technicians had their terminals in short rows underneath. A small side room served as a hologram chamber and there was another monitor above the front window. The captain himself was not there. Since Willis had served on such a colossus for years, he explained to them how it worked.
The complex correlations were completely overwhelming. It was inconceivable how many processes had to be coordinated and run smoothly in order to move a warship or control it in battle. Willis observed benevolently the impressed curiosity of the recruits. It was a place to which great respect should be paid, for the power held by the captain of this ship was almost impossible to grasp. After running around for a while and looking at everything, they took the elevator to one of the ship’s three hundred forty-two canteens. There they ate lunch side by side with the crew members. The food was the same as on the base. The military put everyone on an equal footing. The individuality of the men and women on board was much greater than they were used to. There were technicians in dirty overalls, soldiers in normal everyday uniforms or in standard operational equipment, a few mechs and bots and some unusual individuals in higher quality equipment. Especially striking was a unit in red and black armor, which was absolutely high-tech. The weapons on their backs seemed to be modified and equipped with special upgrades. On chest or shoulder, the letters K5 were written in white. »Willis, what kind of troop is this? They look very professional.«, Rod asked.
He looked in the indicated direction and puffed amused for a moment. »They should look like this. That’s a Special Force Unit. There are several special units in the army. Snipers, aggressors, infiltrators, scouts and so on. Each of these units is proud of its status. But some soldiers have experience in all areas. They end up in the K program. This is the special training program for the Special Forces, the best. These people are ranked by skill and experience. Beginners who come directly from the academy or base start as K1. The elite with a lot of experience and especially well-developed skills will be honored to wear the K5 badge. This unit has access to the best equipment and the most advanced technologies. Better than that doesn’t happen the regular way.«
Carter followed up: »What does ›regular‹ mean? What else is there?«
Willis finished chewing his steak and said: »Well, the official way is to work your way up. Some are also transferred directly to the K5 due to special achievements. But K5 is only the best force we generally know. There is also the PSU. Precision Squad of Utopia, the Elite Special Forces. While the K5 is used for official operations, the PSU is not called. They’re already there. The PSU is specialized in particularly critical, dangerous or covert operations. These are sometimes things that are never publicly announced. Well, you can’t apply to join the PSU. You are chosen by them and every K5 would sell their soul to be allowed there. But these are hemispheres you’ll probably never reach, so don’t worry about it.«
They watched the troops secretly a few more times. These men and women were the absolute eye-catchers in the room. Their armors looked so modern and cool that Carter, as so often, wished the training would progress faster.
After lunch was over, the recruits went back to the hangar. A man who looked like a pilot showed them around. He wore a greenish jumpsuit and a round helmet with a darkened visor. Underneath was the mouthpiece hanging from a tube. It looked a bit old-fashioned because even in fighters the oxygen supply was always given without a mask.
The pilot stood on a box and said: »Welcome recruits! Today your world and your life will change. Today is the day you lose your innocence. Today ... you have your first flying lesson. Every soldier in the army must be able to pilot a fighter. It’s not about flying a combat mission, there’s additional pilot training for that. Nevertheless, you should be able to steer such a ship.«
They were all excited and shocked at the same time. The man led them to a fighter resting on a cleared square. It was the demonstration model. The pilot explained to them how the sleek spaceship was constructed by means of a projection. He talked and the hologram visually highlighted what he was saying.
»This is a standard Typhon-class fighter. It has a single turbine with a Talon-3 miniature engine, six stabilizers, and a seat. The hull is made of a reinforced alloy but is not as thick as it could be for maneuverability reasons. Onboard are normal hatto-guns, two beam cannons, a set of six homing proton missiles and four bombs. An EMP, a hatto-bomb, a barbed sticky bomb, and a proton bomb.«
Then he showed a representation from the cockpit and explained the switches and levers to them. Gina asked in a panic: »There’s no room for a second pilot? Someone, to help us in an emergency?«
Jimbo, the twins, and Leena a
lso seemed to be very afraid of piloting a fighter without any experience. Rod was worried about how he would remember all the buttons and switches so quickly.
The man laughed: »You don’t think we’ll put completely bloody beginners in a fighter without help. These things are way too expensive for that. Of course, you get support, but not from a pilot of the fleet. In landing bay C6 there are twelve fighters ready for you. Go there, put on flight overalls and sit down. See you in three hours. Have fun!«
He and Willis strolled away chatting and left the recruits alone. They stood there completely irritated and didn’t know if they should go or not.
»Is someone waiting for us now?«, Kelly asked the others. Before they could stand around any longer, a group of workers with crates came by and chased them away. The activity there was enormous. They decided to change first. Maybe Willis would wait for them afterward. In a locker room at bay C6, they found green flight overalls protecting the body against the strain. Helmets were also there, but new models in gray. Carter put it on and the padding automatically adapted to his head shape.
