Warpath

by Randolph Lalonde

  “How long will the recovery be?” Jake asked, feeling his suit adjusting for his unsteady stance.

  “You’ll improve over the next three days or so. No jogging for at least five, Captain,” Ensign Levine said. “I’m clearing you for some fitness meds so you can keep your physique up.”

  An alert came up on Jake’s command and control unit. They had just arrived in normal space. “Thanks, Ensign,” he said, putting his hand on the slender hospitality bot.

  “No problem, just do those balancing exercises whenever you can. I’ll watch your progress. The nanites I put in your head should start helping you gradually balance out. You’ll see a real difference sometime tomorrow.”

  “No way to speed this up?” Jake said as he fought the sensation that he was about to fall down again. His suit forced him to stand straight.

  “Sure, there’s a cybernetic assembly I could have built in your head. An army of nanobots would go in there and replace all the pertinent bits with cybernetic versions that we could calibrate in about an hour. I’d rather not, though,” Ensign Levine said. “And if I’d rather not, you’d better not.”

  “I’ll take your word for it and stick with what I’ve got,” Jake replied.

  “Now, off to the bridge with you. I have every confidence that you’ll make it. Just don’t fight your suit, it knows which way is up.”

  He found walking out of the infirmary, down the hall and into a lift was almost as bad as his first attempts at walking. His legs were cooperating, it just seemed that nothing else – the deck, the walls, the other crewmembers in the hallway – were. It seemed as though the deck was moving under foot, and he grasped the thin hospitality droid’s head for dear life as the muscles in his suit did their best to keep him upright.

  Frost met him in the hall and put himself under one of his arms. “Are you all right, Captain?” he asked quietly.

  “Just had a tiny tumour removed and it’s going to take me a bit to find my balance, a few days, maybe,” Jake said. “Have to get to the bridge.”

  “Into the lift,” Frost said as they made the transition from corridor to small box fit for five people.

  Jake got a notification that he had just gotten a shot of anti-nausea medication, and was thankful he didn’t have to deal with the embarrassing alternative. “Wow, if I knew this was what I had to look forward to as a cure, I think I would have waited.”

  “Our new medical master doesn’t do much waiting around,” Frost said in agreement. “He sees there’s a cure, gets you fixed and moves you on. Normally, my kind of medic.”

  “Same here, but,” Jake jerked and fought for balance as he suddenly felt as though the floor of the lift tilted violently. With the help of his suit, Frost and the bot under his other hand, he recovered.

  “Floor’s perfectly stable,” Frost said. “Was this what it was like when you were in recovery?”

  “It was a lot worse,” Jake said. “And Levine said this would only last a few days if I do the exercises.” The trio left the lift, and everyone who saw them in the corridor stopped and stood against the wall until they passed. “What do you think of the ship, Chief?” Jake asked.

  “Loving it so far, Captain. My gunnery team hates me just enough. I got those bastards out of bed an hour early this morning for extra cleaning duty. There’s something satisfying about seeing racks of thirty-two soldiers jump out of their bunks and stand to when you hit the action alarm.”

  “You’re an evil man,” Jake said. “I didn’t hear guns firing at oh six-thirty this morning though.”

  “Ah, we practiced loading, clearing, aiming, but not firing,” Frost said. “I don’t need to torture the rest of the ship to get my gunnery boys and girls into shape.”

  “Glad to hear it, how are they doing?” Jake said, jerking again as he felt the floor tilt forward and back.

  “Getting into shape,” Frost replied. “They’re not as quick or clean as I like, but they’ll get the guns firing on time. They’ll be fit by the time we get automation installed, and ready to take over if that automation fails.”

  They reached the bridge and Jake saw that there were only seven paces at most between the hatch and his chair. “Going to take this on my own,” he said to Frost quietly.

  “Aye, easy lad,” he said as he let Jake go.

  Jake tried to relax and let his suit do all the work, then let go of the hospitality droid. “Go on back to medical,” he told it.

  “Yes, Sir,” Marion the hospitality droid replied.

  Jake caught himself jerking to compensate for a deck that seemed to be tilting, and tried to relax. The door and deck straightened for a moment and he forced himself to walk forward. The suit kept him upright for the most part, and he sat in his chair hard.

  “Are you all right?” Stephanie asked from above him in the Flight Operations Centre.

  “Now that I’m sitting?” Jake asked with a snicker. “Much better.”

  Chapter 41

  Samurai Squadron

  “it is good to have women in the Wing,” Hottie said as he leaned against the back wall of the Samurai Squadron Briefing Room, eying Sticky appreciatively from behind. She was leaning over the mission table, a gridded white surface with holographic projectors built in, trying to fix it. “I just love the way a vacsuit stretches and clings when it’s worn by the right curves, and she has the nicest aft section in the fleet.”

  “You’re grounded for three days,” Minh-Chu said, putting his hand on Hottie’s shoulder as he came through the door.

  “Seriously? For admiring the view?” he replied.

  “There are places where you can talk like that if you want, but it’s not on this ship,” Minh-Chu said.

  “What? We’re just waiting on you, and only these guys heard me.”

  “You remember how you got that call sign, Hottie?” Minh-Chu said, taking no care to keep his voice down. The entire Samurai Squadron, all twenty one were there, and they knew something was going on at the rear of the briefing room. “Let’s take a look at that footage.”

  “What? No!” Hottie said.

  It took Minh-Chu only seconds to recall the footage in question, then send it to the working holographic table in the middle of the Briefing room. An image of Hottie with his vacsuit reshaped so he had fake exaggerated womanly curves appeared. He was in the Pilot’s Den aboard the Triton, sitting down seductively and pretending the table in front of him was a control panel. “Oh, Captain, would you like me to change course?” he said in a breathy, overly sexed manner. “You know, training is so easy, they all pay so much attention to me.”

  The spectacle was made worse for Hottie, who was cringing at the sight of himself pantomiming Ashley in an oversexed way, the gathered pilots of Samurai Squadron weren’t whistling and catcalling at the hologram, they were doing it in his direction. Minh-Chu shut the playback down and turned to Hottie. “Quiet,” Minh-Chu said. He didn’t have to say it loudly or forcefully for his pilots to calm down. “So, that’s how you got your call sign, and I get that you had twelve shots of Hakri Slider in you when you put on your show, but now I’ve got you leering and commenting at one of our own, while you’re sober. There are three big reasons why we don’t do that here. First, you make people feel like objects, like they’re only a stack of parts. Second, you risk making a whole part of this fighter wing uncomfortable. Third, there’s a no fraternization rule for each department, do you know why that is? It’s because we’re all brothers and sisters in here. You may not like some of these pilots, they may not like you, but because we’re brothers and sisters, we get each others backs, we are a family. I just caught you staring at one of your sisters, and what you said would definitely get spread around. If I get the feeling that someone in this squadron will have a second thought about saving your ass out there because of something you said in here, I will have to remove you. If Slick doesn’t want you on the Triton, then you’ll have to pull duty somewhere where it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of you until we get ba
ck to Tamber and we can dump you off. That’s where you’re headed if you ruin the confidence this squadron has in you.”

  “You should have heard what he said before you came in,” said Fury, an older female pilot who Minh-Chu just drew into the Squadron from the Triton. “It’s on Crewcast, I’m sure.”

  “Do you have time to come to Captain’s Mast tomorrow, Fury?” Minh-Chu asked. “So we can address this pilot’s problem the right way?”

  “I have watch, then mandatory rest for the rest of the day,” Fury replied. “Just tell me when to be there.”

  “C’mon,” Hottie said. “For looking and a bit of appreciation?”

  “If you make her uncomfortable, you make us all uncomfortable. Besides, that’s no way to treat your sister,” Minh-Chu said mildly. “Communications is giving a course on fraternization and appropriate dating aboard, you’re going to be there.”

  “Grounded and a class? That’s overkill,” Hottie said.

  “Those aren’t even your punishments. I’m just grounding you because it’ll make everyone feel better, the class is so you can learn a thing or two. Your punishment will be decided in front of the Captain, our Communications Officer of rank and me at Captain’s Mast.”

  “So, I can’t even compliment someone?” Hottie said.

  Minh-Chu sighed. “Quick demonstration before we get to the briefing,” he announced. “Sticky, can you pay a respectful compliment to Fury?”

  Sticky, a petite young woman with large dark hair, turned to Fury and smiled. “You look great today, I wish I could do that with my hair,” Sticky said.

  “See, that’s not as colourful as what you were saying,” Minh-Chu said. “But you can pay someone that compliment anywhere, and no one will feel uncomfortable about it. Now, grab a seat and be quiet while everyone who will be launching when we reach normal space discusses our mission.”

  The whole room shifted focus as they took their seats. A third of the room was occupied by comfortable seats made for long mission analysis and briefing sessions, the middle had the two holographic tables, and the rest of the room was still unused.

  It was refreshing to see a full sized squadron, with twenty-one pilots including himself, in a proper squad room. He hadn’t had as much time to know them as he would have liked, but he could tell most of them either had a good professional attitude, or looked up to him. He hoped he’d get as lucky with the other squadron, the Marauders. “We will return to normal space tomorrow at sixteen hundred hours. At that time Samurai Squadron will launch.”

  Minh-Chu brought up a tactical display showing the mess they were going to head into. Hundreds of thousands of massive shards of ice were strewn between patches of gaseous clouds and other particles. “The mystery in this section of the Iron Head nebula, called the Death Cap, is where this ice rich asteroid field came from. The shape of the ice suggests that it comes from something shattering, but no one on record has proven what that was. The best guess is that the original object that this ice belt originates from was approximately two hundred times the size of earth, and it suffered a collision with another body travelling at incredible speeds, a body that was mostly ice as well. The belt is relatively calm, drifting through nebular matter in the same direction we’ll be travelling.”

  “Relative to what?” asked Flex, a pilot transferred from Haven Shore who earned her name because of her bodybuilder’s physique. “Sorry sir, but are you saying it’s calm relative to a blender, or to a lake on a calm day?”

  “Ah, this will help,” Minh-Chu said as he brought up another projection. A close-up hologram of slowly churning ice shards and debris appeared, the components of which were lazily travelling against a backdrop of white and brown nebular matter. “The light is from a cluster of stars half a light year away, but as you can see from this recording taken four years ago, the ice belt is calm. This image is time lapsed, we’re looking at it sped up forty-times, so most of it should look stationary when you’re out there. There are billions of objects though, so none of you will be riding alone. Gunships will have a scanning officer, and a systems officer as well as a pilot. Uriels will have a pilot and a sensor intercept officer. I’m not going to have any of us smashed on our first time out. Questions?”

  “I’m seeing iron and some other minerals as minor components in the chemical analysis,” Jinx said. “Can we expect sensor issues?”

  “Only at long range,” Minh-Chu said. “That brings me to the mission objectives. Our first objective will be to safely extend the range of the Revenge’s sensors. If we encounter any resistance from Order of Eden or their allies, and we can take them out without causing great risk to each other or the Revenge, we are to do so. If you encounter something you can’t slag in five seconds or less, then we are to attempt to take it on as a squadron. We are not to let any target we can take care of near the Revenge. Heavily armoured ships out of our class are the exception, and we’ll be told when to regroup. The good news is that most of the asteroids are so big that our weapons won’t stir things up.”

  “So the Revenge is going through this?” Carnie, a pilot with intentionally knotted, long blonde hair asked. He was one of Minh-Chu’s favourite new pilots, and was named Carnie because he was found at a carnival when he was a baby and raised by the travellers who found him.

  “That’s right, and we don’t get to know where the Triton is. They will be cloaked. We move through this field, and save a couple days travel going around it,” Minh-Chu answered.

  “Sorry, Sir,” Sticky said. “But I have to ask; Why don’t we use our new dimension drive and skip right through this?”

  “We’ve recently learned that the dimension drive doesn’t completely remove us from our home dimension. We’re in a shadow of our dimension, where solid objects with sufficient mass could still get in our way. At least, that’s how it was explained to me. That is why we always emerge in our home dimension, because we never stray too far from it, we just skim along the top for a while, then nature gets its way and forces us back out, closing the door behind.”

  Minh-Chu looked at the twenty pilots in front of him. He had their complete attention. “Now, we have old intelligence that tells us that there are patrols in the Death Cap section of the Iron Head Nebula, real Order of Eden patrols with support. Our intelligence shows that they pass in these three areas, and we have to go here.”

  Minh-Chu said, pointing to a space in the middle of the opposite end of the ice field, an area two million kilometres to the left, and another four million kilometres above. The last point he indicated, their destination, was between the middle patrol and the one to the left of it. “Those patrols passed through those areas every seven and a half hours, give or take a few minutes. As far as we know, they use fast corvette class Regent Galactic built ships that report to a larger central battle group somewhere behind them.”

  “Oh, good,” Hot Chow said. “So if Regent Galactic built them, then they’re low on sleep and all beat up because of their mattresses. Man, I could feel the springs on those things.” Minh-Chu didn’t know exactly why the pilot was called Hot Chow, but he guessed it may be because of his thick middle.

  “Right,” Minh-Chu said. “If we run into any patrol craft, we have to make sure they go missing, and don’t have a chance to report. Be ready to go after propulsion and main power systems, wipe out emitters if you can’t get a good shot at those. If we meet anything worse, we are to wait for orders. If we are being jammed, and cannot get orders from the Revenge, then one of you will be sent to laser link range in order to update them on our situation while the rest of us leads the enemy away from the Revenge.”

  “So, this is real war action,” said Jinx. “We’re in it for real.”

  “Absolutely,” Minh-Chu said. “And I expect you to be the best you can be, because you’re my wingman for this trip,” he said, pointing to Jinx. “The rest of this run is pretty simple if there are no surprises. The objective is to get a good scan of the area, finish escorting the Revenge through
this mess. We join the Revenge and Triton in wormhole transit to the next point.”

  “Why not use the D-Drive again?” asked Hot Chow.

  “It saved us five days time travelling here, but since there is no way to curve a course with a dimension drive, a wormhole makes more sense for these complicated, short term jumps. If we don’t meet any resistance after that first jump, then we’re in for a shift. Six short jumps in one eight hour period and two passages through light particulate clouds. That is, if plans don’t change.” There were a few groans and rolled eyes. “Hey, it’s time we work for a living, so let’s start prepping,” Minh-Chu said. “We start sims in ten minutes.”

  Chapter 42

  Death Cap

  The first full day of dimension drive travel came to a close, and Jake could feel the entire ship breathe a sigh of relief as they emerged into normal space. Captain Valent was sitting much more firmly in his seat, recovering from having the tumour removed was on track with Ensign Levine’s predictions. There had been less than twenty breaks in regulations while they were in transit, and all of them minor. The most common complaint about the new rules was how long it took to read them, but almost everyone was reading the summarized version, so the rules were getting around.

  “Position?” Jake asked.

  “Confirming,” replied Ensign Ramone replied from where she sat beside Ashley at the navigation station. “We are nine thousand kilometres from the Triton, on their port side. We’ve arrived in the section of the Iron Head Nebula that is called the Death Cap, exactly where we predicted we’d emerge. The asteroid field is dead ahead.”

  “I have several emergency transponder signals and distress calls coming through,” Liara said. “It’ll take us a moment to find out how old they are.”

  “Kadri, start scanning,” Jake said.

  “The Triton has signalled that all systems are nominal,” Agameg said. “They are cloaking and beginning to move on. Their course is logged into our tactical system.”