Empty Space

by Alan Black

  He said, “Yes, sir. It looks to be so far past nowhere you can’t even see nowhere from there.”

  The lieutenant laughed. “Sounds about right. Did your orders give you transport arrangements or does the navy expect you to walk?”

  “Well, I think they would prefer I walk, but my orders say I’m to catch a ride on … well, sir, your ship.” He held up the dataport reader. It clearly said he was to get transport on the Gambion.

  “That’s not as surprising as it sounds. The Republic Navy has more ships than you and I could count in our lifetime, but we cover a lot of space and there are relatively few ships in any port at any given time, especially on one of the regional capital worlds like this one. That’s one reason it takes so long to get reassigned from one ship to the next, even a third line old defensive bird like the Gambion. She’s a ship only a few trips short of decommissioning and disposal. I’ve been waiting for a ship with a posting in my specialty at my rank for almost six weeks now! Any ship would do in these times. You?”

  York realized this officer might not know who he was, most likely being in space during his crash and burn graduation. He’d dropped off the newsfeeds once the budger riots had been quelled by the Home Guard and pushed from the public interest by some starlet admitting she was a transsexual and had been hooked on drugs since her operation. He slowly counted the months.

  “Eleven months, sir.”

  “Eleven? Great googa booga, boy. Who did you piss off?”

  York smiled, “Pretty much everybody, sir. I’m Ensign Junior Grade York August Sixteen and I—”

  “You’re the budger who had the audacity to graduate top of your class at the Yards,” the lieutenant interrupted with a laugh. “I should’ve known by the fact your uniform isn’t showing class ranking. Yeah, I flashed your QR code before I spoke, but I didn’t make the connection until just now.”

  York stiffened when the man called him a budger, however the man grinned, taking the sting out of the slur.

  “I’m Harp Brown. Good to meet you, York.” The man seemed genuinely pleased, so York accepted it and smiled back. “Sadie is going to be tickled pink that I met you. She’s a big fan of yours.”

  York was startled. “A big—”

  “Big fan, yeah. Say, the Gambion isn’t scheduled to leave dry dock until tomorrow. If you don’t have any other plans, can Sadie and I buy you dinner?”

  York had more than enough money to buy his own dinner. He had stashed almost eleven month’s pay. His room didn’t cost anything, his uniforms were free, and officers didn’t pay for meals in the officer’s mess. “Sir, if you’re sure, I’d be glad to accompany you, but it should be my treat.”

  “Nonsense. Sadie and I plan on spending our last night dining at one of her family’s restaurants. It won’t cost either of us a dime.”

  “Are you sure I will be welcome? I mean, it being family and all?” He really wanted to ask whether a government charity case would be accepted, yet the man was being so pleasant he didn’t dare ask.

  “Hell, yes … oh, because you’re a budger?” The man laughed. “Sadie and her whole family used to be on the charity roles. I can see the shocked look. Crap on a duck, boy, I married a budger and used all the cash in my trust fund to help her family start the best chain of barbeque restaurants on the planet. Hellfire, they would be richer than my family ever was if they didn’t put all of their profits back into the slums to help other budgers get a leg up. Get used to it, Ensign Sixteen, the whole universe isn’t against you, it just feels like it sometimes.”

  SIX

  Even though York was technically a passenger on the Gambion, he was pleased the Captain ordered him to take part in flight simulations with his assigned pilots. He was sure the Captain let him do it to keep him from being underfoot with nothing to do on the long voyage and to give his pilots something or someone to shoot at. He knew he would never get to pilot the Fast Attack Craft through open space, still the sims were so much like games he wasted hours in the mods, twisting, turning and tanking over for the ship’s real FAC pilots.

  After a good day of playing games, he would shower in the bachelor officer’s quarters, get cleaned up and read for an hour or so before supper. He still couldn’t finish any book with a redheaded heroine. The redheaded BuPers admin tech ruined the whole fantasy genre for him. That was wrong. It seemed two out of every three such books had a redheaded heroine. Luckily, he found something called spy thrillers living up to their genre’s name. They were usually filled with voluptuous blondes or leggy brunettes with redheads as rare as hair on a baby’s butt or, if they were in the book at all, they were the evil mastermind’s girlfriend.

  Supper was often at the Browns. Harp and Sadie enjoyed hosting dinners, parties, and get-togethers. Their cabin almost become a Gambion fixture and an unofficial restaurant. The Brown’s invited York every day and he abused the invitation with rash abandon. He’d become the Brown’s assistant grill chef, running the smoker and blending their special barbeque sauce. He often put on a clean apron and helped Sadie serve burnt ends and riblets to the other officers and their families. He could put cook and waiter on his resume if the navy ever booted him out.

  There was only one drawback to his complete enjoyment on the Gambion, Blade Balderano. He was also on the Gambion. Due to the delay in York’s assignment, Balderano was on his second cruise with the ship and promoted to senior grade ensign. While Blade’s first cruise had been short, it’d been long enough to grant Balderano veteran status. This trip looked to be longer than his first cruise just to get to Em.T. The man continued his long-standing practice of never missing an opportunity to criticize or sabotage York.

  Before he could relax at the Browns today, he had a sim to fly. He hit the random placement generator and was pleased to see the main computer assigned him as the wingman for the red forces commander. Red forces were the bad guys, the enemy, the adversary trying desperately to destroy the Gambion’s Fast Attack Craft and reach the main ship to blow it into pieces.

  “Red Commander to flight deck. Left aileron stabilizer shows frozen. Down checked.”

  “Red three, down check.” “Red six, down check.” “Red five, down check.” “Red …”

  York thought of laughing, but there wasn’t any humor in the situation. The computer sims regularly down checked FACs for equipment failure. It happened with increasing regularity for whichever side York was assigned to fly. The computer was supposed to generate the teams randomly, in spite of this, many times it left his team shorthanded. Today looked like another game of ‘kill the budger’. Due to theoretically random computer shuffling, suddenly he was outnumbered by ten to one. The computer down checked all of the red squadron except him and all of blue squadron was ready to fly.

  He smiled. Losing another engagement was all right with him. Since he’d come aboard, he’d earned the highest kill rate among the pilots. He was also killed more often and his squadron lost more engagements than any other team. He secretly liked the ‘kill the budger’ sims. Knowing he wasn’t going to win or even survive let him jump into the fray with wild abandon, killing as many as he could before dying in simulated flaming glory. Suicide runs had their own special attraction.

  Ten to one odds wouldn’t give him the opportunity to even lob a few missiles at the carrier spacecraft. He would be dogmeat long before he could get into range. Or maybe not. York didn’t think what he planned was cheating. Everyone knew the standard procedure for carriers was to hang back from a dogfight, turning to present their heavy bow shields toward any incoming hostile craft, even a lone attacking FAC. Without any other capital ships of the line in the sim, the simulated carrier wouldn’t attempt to jink or maneuver.

  With a wicked grin, York waited for the simulation to start. As the attacking red force, he would blink into existence a hundred thousand kilometers from the carrier sitting still in empty space. The blue forces would launch from the carrier decks and form up to meet the assaulting force. He hit the accelerator on
the yoke with his thumb at the first blip of the starfield on the screen before him, mashing it to maximum speed. He would get a big boost of immediate acceleration as he didn’t have a squadron to form up on or a strategy to formulate and share with other FAC jockeys. He could blast forward, going balls to the wall from the first green light. With his other thumb, he released all ten anti-ship missiles, making sure they were set to the lowest possible speed. He would outrace his missiles by a factor of seven to one. He sent a message to the missiles to kill their engines and coast once they reached minimum speed.

  Slow missiles were easy for the blue forces to spot and deflect, but spotting tiny missiles without any engine signatures would be next to impossible, especially when no one expected a lone FAC to fire his missiles from extreme range. However, this was a FAC squadron against FAC squadron exercise. The blue forces had to kill him and his missiles while protecting the capital ship. He was sure this wouldn’t work in a real engagement because the capital ship would take a hand in the engagement, but it should work in a limited sim. While his FAC raced forward to engage the blue forces, he wondered what good a limited simulation did. Shouldn’t they be practicing for engagements they would likely encounter? Of course, in a real engagement, any capital ship could destroy a single FAC from a mere hundred thousand kilometers before his first missile left its tube.

  York was rapidly approaching the blue forces. They appeared as tiny blue dots on his HUD though he couldn’t see them. They were still forming up, certainly not expecting him to come in under full throttle at ten to one odds. Flicking off the artificial gravity and the inertial dampeners, he yanked the yoke into what pilots of all eras would recognize as an inverted immelmann, coming at the blue forces from underneath as they formed up in a line along the bow of the carrier. At top speed, the maneuver would’ve turned him into post-human paste if he had left the inertial dampeners setting to Earth standard.

  York didn’t throttle back to take aim at any blue FAC. Instead, he fired the mass driver auto cannon, blasting a solid stream, leaving it to chance whether he hit anything or not. Racing forward and reaching the end of his run along their formation he flipped the yoke causing his FAC to spin and tumble. He punched out every ECM bomb and chaff bundle his FAC carried. He quickly lost orientation. Even without gravity, his inner ear complained so violently that he lost his lunch. He smiled knowing the vomit wasn’t simulated any more than his lunch had been. Nevertheless, he was still alive, none of the blue forces had hit him with any return fire. His HUD showed three defending FACs were down, two by his haphazard fire and one by its own squadron’s friendly fire.

  He didn’t know who was in command of the blue forces, yet their commander was likely to get a severe talking to for forming his squadron up where crossfire would kill friendlies. To hope his first pass killed the blue squadron’s commander was wishful thinking. It would be nice because no matter how quickly the FAC computers could switch command, the human brain seemed to have difficulty making such rapid command transitions.

  York was hoping for every advantage he could find. He didn’t know who he’d already taken out. His first pass was so unexpected, it appeared he had the opportunity to make another run. His HUD showed a pair of mass driver streams creeping toward him, seeking to catch him in their crosshairs. He grunted in amazement, no matter what the experts said about marksmanship, give a shooter a relatively unlimited supply of ammunition and he will blast away, dragging his stream of bullets onto the target rather than putting the target into the crosshairs before pulling the trigger.

  He grinned, James Bond used a semi-automatic pistol, never a machine gun. York was no James Bond. No matter how many times he read those books, martinis still made him gag and he couldn’t get a pretty woman to even look at him, much less fall into bed within a few pages of meeting her. Conversely, York could shoot.

  Using the computer, he reoriented himself toward the blue forces. Their single line formation wasn’t smooth and precise anymore. They had scattered, more from drifting and slight thruster pushes than using their FAC’s main engines to gain speed. York laughed as he quoted his favorite military commander, “Screw you”.

  Still moving at top speed, he pointed his FAC along their ragged line and raced forward spitting mass driver bullets at every target he could find. He flipped the bomb release and dumped the four space mines his FAC carried, he also released six planetary anti-personnel cluster bombs, four starbright skylighters and all of the FACs thirty-two message pods, each blurting ‘Screw you, too.’

  He was out of chaff and ECM bombs, so he spun the throttle. Instead of jinking at a constant speed, he maintained a constant line of flight along the blue squadron’s formation, ignoring the fact that he might collide with any one of them at any time, especially the three dead FACs now drifting helplessly across the battlefield. Spinning the throttle caused his FAC to go from top speed to half speed, to quarter speed, back to top speed, down to a full stop and then race forward again. The stuttered speed completely disoriented York and he hoped it would disorient the blue team as well.

  He was clear again. The computer said he had hit another ship, whether he’d killed it by mass driver fire or if it ran into a mine was unclear. The blue squadron had lost its formation as they dodged the barrage of garbage York had thrown at them. Most of what he threw at them wouldn’t damage a FAC. A planetary anti-personnel cluster bomb could only hurt a FAC if the pilot opened his hatch, pulled it into the pilot’s cabin, and hit its firing pin directly with a hammer, but unless a pilot was completely non-human and knew what had been shot at him, he would duck out of the way. A starbright was only used for night fighting on a planetary surface during close combat support of ground pounders. It would light up the sky like a nighttime sun. It would only bother a FAC jockey if he was looking directly at it without his visual filters set on high. And a message pod, well … those would just piss someone off, making noise over the comm-channels.

  What was clear was someone managed to plant a ship killer missile on his FAC’s spine just as he started another immelmann. It broke his FAC into tiny pieces, breaking his simulated body into even smaller component pieces. He was done. He glanced at the read out as the sim continued. He had taken out four before they killed him. Four to one was an exchange he could live with … so to speak. From his point of view, it wouldn’t be a fair exchange in a real battle, in spite of this, it ratcheted his kill score up another notch.

  Normally, when all opposing forces were dead, the sim was over, yet this one kept running. He smiled almost sensing the frustration of the remaining blue squadron pilots. They were still active, but there was nothing left to shoot at. He wondered if the squadron’s commander was scrambling for a copy of the engagement orders to see if there were secondary objectives on his plate he might have overlooked. York could imagine the blue squadron pilot’s confusion, anger, and frustration when one of York’s ten missiles, fired prior to the engagement, finally coasted into range, locked onto his ship, and with a final burst of speed, slammed into his ship.

  Five blue FACs exploded in simulated military glory. Conventional wisdom said using a missile on such a small target was a waste, like swatting a fly with a nuclear bomb. York didn’t care. He was already dead and the missiles would have been useless if they had died with him. The five remaining missiles, whether smarter than their brethren or just luckier, didn’t lock onto any of the FACs or the raging explosions around them. They spotted, targeted, and locked onto the carrier.

  A carrier is so heavily armored it can shrug off a dozen such missiles with minimal damage to a few external thrusters or hull sensors. Carriers are massive with their engines and command centers buried deep in their middles with layers of subhulls, decks, and bulkheads between them and the vacuum of empty space. Engines didn’t require huge rocket or thruster ports as they simply moved ships from one place to another without old school propulsion systems, trading locations by riding gravity waves.

  The only soft spot the m
issiles could find on the carrier was available because blue squadron had been too lazy to close the flight deck hatches with their massive armored barriers. The missiles had enough onboard computer intelligence to see an open door. Blue squadron had even left the lights on, giving those five missiles a beacon to follow. Each missile blasted deeper and deeper into the simulated carrier. They couldn’t go deep enough to seriously damage the carrier. One FAC couldn’t carry enough munitions to destroy such a huge ship.

  York actually laughed aloud as he realized the sole remaining blue FAC wouldn’t be able to land on its own deck at the end of the sim. He would have to go to another flight deck hatch and ask to be let in. Even simulated, a special docking was an inconvenience. York took it as a dead man’s victory. He may not have survived the encounter, but he managed to take out nine to his lone one and still inflict damage on the carrier. Red squadron lost this engagement and he died, but the victory was still his.

  He whistled to himself as the sim popped off, releasing him to climb out. To take such enjoyment over a minor and unreal victory was decidedly unprofessional. He’d been prodded for years, told he was a useless budger and a waste of taxpayer money, told he should go back to the slums he came from, told he didn’t deserve to be an officer taking the slot from some family member who was born to it. He was tired of it, yet knew he didn’t dare respond in kind or even report the harassment.

  There were a few people on this spaceship who’d accepted him. On the other hand, the vast majority of the officers on this ship, and he assumed, all of the other ships in the Republic Navy, were dead set against his kind. He’d read the reports stating that due to their poor diets when they were younger, budgers didn’t have a sense of spacial analysis, they didn’t have the natural sense of logical rational thought, and they couldn’t hear certain frequencies the upper class could easily discern.