by SF Edwards
“Was that really necessary?” Blazer asked, doing his best to control his anger as the chief gathered up the remains of the cables from the deck.
“I needed to test you. I wanted to see what your discharge level was.”
“You could have fried me.”
“No, you only think I could,” Chief Flind replied before he flashed a sign to the commander and his canopy snapped shut.
Blazer tried to come up with some reply but the chief motioned him to turn around. He did so and jumped back, Tadeh Qudas’ fighter was gone, replaced by a Galactic Federation Phantom 4 Heavy Fighter. Blazer stared at the blocky fighter with its massive wing-mounted plasma engines, the long ventral fins disappearing into the deck. What the Sheol? Blazer couldn’t believe his eyes before it morphed into an oversized Galactic Federation Alley Cat Light Fighter--the outspaced engines melting away into an ovoid wing with large weapons packs and fuselage melting into a slimmer, more aerodynamic form. “How?” he stammered.
“One of the major improvements to the Splicer 5000 over the previous model was the ability to add a sensor masking suite to it. It’s remarkably effective and beyond the holographic projections it also alters the fighter’s sensor signature. Unfortunately, it is extremely power intensive.”
“So that’s why it needs an external start!”
“That and because the internal starter is replaced by the Sensor Masking System’s main control module and those holographic projectors are a bitch on power. That heuristic computer definitely helps.”
“Are all Splicer 5000s able to use the system?”
“Only Special Operations’ units have the full system installed, but the basic wiring is all there. It requires some depot level work to install though. The system also allows the fighter to adjust its performance parameters to match the craft it’s mimicking. You won’t see them out in the field much and even if you did, you wouldn’t likely know it. You mostly see a fighter equipped like this at the academies to serve as aggressor fighters.”
Tadeh Qudas taxied away towards the launch tubes and Blazer had an idea. “Hold on. The Alley Cat has a quicker roll rate than a Splicer 5000. Only just, but it’s there. Can the system push a fighter beyond its normal specs?” Blazer asked.
“That’s right but you run the risk of burning out your systems in the process and that wouldn’t be right.”
Blazer nodded and looked back down at his hands. The black soot from the skin that had burned wiped off easily on his pant legs. “I didn’t realize I could carry that load. I mean there was the one time. But my grandfather, the admiral, used to tell me about how my father would do stuff like that. Sometimes he would even use himself as a power conduit to shut power away from overloading systems.”
The chief nodded. “Most energy gatherers never even try to do what you just did. They don’t want to run the risk.”
“I understand that,” Blazer replied, remembering the last time he had really pushed himself. Guilt roiled his gut when he realized that he’d contemplated doing just that again on the lower deck. “What do you need me to do for you now, sir?”
The chief looked across the deck at a squadron of Splicer 5000s. “The seniors are getting ready to go out this cycle. Tadeh Qudas will be there to make sure that they won’t do anything foolish again. He’s engaging them in mock combat so they’ll need to be armed.”
Blazer looked up at the chief and nodded. “Of course, sir. Training rounds?”
“Yes but the loader is on the opposite side of the deck.”
Blazer looked over and saw the loader and missile racks up against the reverse horizon. He prepared to head off when the chief stopped him again.
“Oh, Vaughnt! The loader’s damaged and you won’t have time to repair it before the sortie. You’ll have to load by hand.”
Blazer groaned at that. In the lower gravity, this close to centerline, loading by hand wasn’t difficult. It was just time-consuming. The loader checked each round automatically, and would ensure proper alignment in the launch rack. Doing the same thing without it took twice as long.
“Yes, sir. I’ll get right on it,” Blazer replied and scurried off across the deck.
UCSBA-13, Chief Flind’s Office
A hect later, Blazer stormed into Chief Flind’s office. His hands were grimy and covered with tiny cuts. Loading the missiles by hand had proved more difficult than he’d thought. Once finished he’d repaired the loader. He glared across at the chief as he sat at his desk
“One lousy fragging bolt. I could have replaced that in five cents and been done with loading those fighters up half a hect sooner.” Blazer was too furious for words. Then to find the chief just there sitting nonchalant in his mess of an office made him even more so.
The chief showed no emotion as he sat back up in his seat and held out his hand. It contained a bolt. The missing bolt!
“You mean a bolt like this?” he asked.
Blazer’s eyes widened like twin moons coming into phase. “You can’t be serious.”
The chief tossed the bolt to him in response. “Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t be!”
Blazer caught the bolt. “Where, when, did you remove this?”
The chief smiled a wicked grin at him. “Would I ever intentionally damage any of my equipment?”
Blazer tried to think of some smart response but thought better of it as he rolled the bolt around in his hand, unable to believe that even the chief could be that vindictive. “No, sir.”
“Not unless I meant to teach some punk a lesson.”
Rage filled Blazer again as he looked up from the bolt. “You did do it,” he growled back at him.
The chief was on his feet in an instant. The scales along his back stood up. “Never growl at me boy!” The force of his roaring voice shoved Blazer backwards. “Some of my species have a long memory of what your kind tastes like and it was passed down through the generations.”
Blazer pulled himself back up from the doorway and apologized. “I’m sorry sir.”
Chief Flind looked down at the bolt still in Blazer’s hand. “Little bits of debris like that can cause serious damage to a fighter. It is the responsibility of everyone who walks these decks to clean them. Imagine if that little bit of metal had got sucked up by a magnetic scoop or had plugged an intake vent, nicked a cooling line or jammed an exhaust port. That would ruin somebody’s cycle right quick now, wouldn’t it?”
Blazer nodded.
“I didn’t remove that bolt, I found it.”
“But you knew it was from the loader.”
“Of course I did. I needed to see what your reaction would be.”
Blazer fumbled the bolt into a pocket of his tool vest. “Well now I know. Sir, if there’s nothing else, I’ve only a couple of hects until lights out and I have a major test next cycle. If I might be released early…”
“Sit,” the chief commented, pointing to a chair.
I do not need a lecture right now, but how will react if I ask to leave again?
“Sit,” the chief insisted.
Blazer did as instructed and plopped down into the flimsy chair parked in front of the chief’s desk. The chief walked around and sat on his desk in front of him. The rickety old table that looked built largely from scrap creaked under his weight.
“Tell me something, Vaughnt.”
Blazer looked up at him, a questioning look on his face.
“Why?” asked the chief.
Blazer’s face twisted in confusion.
“Why are you here?”
“I’m here to serve my punishment for wrecking my trainer.”
The chief shook his head. “No. Why are you here?”
“You mean the academy, well…”
“No. Why are you here?” Chief Flind all but roared pointing to the deck at Blazer’s feet.
Blazer had no idea what the chief meant and was too tired to care.
“I have never had a cadet on punishment duty as dedicated to it as you.”
>
What does he mean by that?
Chief Flind let out a long sigh, rubbing his real eye before he proceeded. “Let me see if I can make this more clear. Most cadets just come in here and do their duty as half-assed as they can, then slink out of here just as quickly. They hope I won’t see them. I catch them, of course, but they go off and do their studies, their homework, and won’t miss their sleep,” the chief continued by pointing to the bags under Blazer’s eyes.
That’s right, I’m spending what, another two to three hects every cycle up after lights out studying and catching up?
“But you, when you’re done with a task you come back and ask for more so of course I give you more.”
I must be more tired than I thought. Is he giving me permission to slack off and ditch my duties? That can’t be it.
“This dawn you finally got the point. You went straight to your trainer and got back to work on it. You got a lot of work done on it. You damn near got that wing off before I found you. Do you think you could have if I hadn’t?”
Blazer thought about it a moment. With the trainer up on jacks, if I had followed the procedures, I might have had the wing off before class with time to spare. “Yes, sir.”
“There’s something else about you I don’t get. Up until this little ploy you’ve never complained about any detail I’ve assigned you. Every other cadet I’ve ever had here on punishment has complained, moaned and said how unfair the work was. They yelled about how they were going to be officers not techs and that they should be supervising the technicians and not acting like one. You don’t.”
Blazer shot the chief a confused look. “Of course not. I’m not an officer yet. Even if I were, I would be like you. I’d work alongside my techs making sure that all the work was done correctly. I wouldn’t just be administering the duty.”
“Would you delegate that task?”
“Maybe. I mean, I would delegate duties as needed of course but I wouldn’t just be in the office assigning work and filling our requisitions. I would be out there. I’m using this opportunity to my advantage.” Blazer threw a thumb over his shoulder.
The chief’s office sat across the deck from the alcove where Blazer’s trainer waited for him to remove the wing.
“Most cadets are never going to know the ins and outs of their craft the way I do. They’ll do like I did before by coming here to fly the craft, return it and maybe fill out a maintenance gripe if they need to. I now know where power cables, fuel lines, control signals, and ion channels are routed. I can see from handling the fuel bladders how the center of gravity changes as I burn fuel and how that affects my roll and turn rates. Knowing the theory is one thing and grasping what it looks like in a diagram only takes you so far. After having torn the machine apart, I know so much more about my craft,” Blazer admitted.
“I know enough now that if I were to run into trouble I wouldn’t just order repair microbots out,” he continued. “I could direct them where to go or tell them how to reroute.
“I know that the wingtip thrusters receive power from a separate junction. Before, I assumed that the junction was right there in the sensor pod, instead of way up the wing like it is,” Blazer finished.
The chief nodded, impressed. “The automatics are usually able to handle that pretty well on their own.”
“Usually is right. But I know from my time as a buoy boy that automatic system malfunctions do happen and after tearing into that engine...” Blazer threw up his hands. “I never imagined all those components were in there. I’ve never worked on anything so complex. It’s amazing! I know now to adjust the plasma turbine to get more thrust out of it without increasing fuel usage only by increasing energy output. I never knew how the retro thrust exhausts work. Now I do. I think I might even be able to adjust them in flight better. I’ve seen the structure and know what it can really handle and though it’s cost me what little freedom I had it’ll be worth it in the end.”
The chief nodded. “Well, cadet, two hects until lights out. And like you said you have a big test next cycle. You’re released. I just need you do something for me first.”
Blazer sighed. I hope this doesn’t take too long. The chief reached behind him on his desk and picked up a few scraps of papers. It was real wood pulp paper, not nano-sheet, and he handed the pages to Blazer.
That was when Blazer took his first real look around the room. Paper lay everywhere. Stacks of it covered Chief Flind’s desk. His shelves, actual wood nailed into the metal wall, were stacked with paper. Even what Blazer assumed was a standard smartboard was in fact an old chalkboard with chalk scribbling on it with a tray of various colored chalks underneath. The chief is beyond old school.
Blazer turned back to the papers and asked, “What are these?”
“Just some ideas about how to modify a Splicer 1000 for improved performance. Most wouldn’t be right.”
Blazer looked at the top sheet and what he saw there encouraged him to leaf through the rest in wide-eyed wonder. There were modifications to every part of the trainer: engines, maneuvering, shields, sensors, weapons, everything. It’s an almost holistic approach. He’s integrating the systems together, sharing workloads amongst multiple computers and power centers. It’s almost like the integration on the old Splicer-4000. That integration had made it the most advanced fighter at the time but made upgrades almost impossible. The chief overcame that by integrating the systems yet keeping them separate and isolated to prevent a cascade failure.
“It’s like you married the Splicer 4000s’ integrated system architecture into a Splicer 1000 by tying them through the central core but retaining…”
“Wouldn’t be right,” the chief repeated.
“Sir?”
“That was what I was going for but it wouldn’t be right. If it worked, a Splicer 1000 so modified would have performance well beyond that of any other Splicer 1000. Given that we use these as trainers it would render it ineffective. They need to be uniform,” the chief informed him.
After all the work Blazer had done by gutting his trainer and working on the others, he could see how to make the changes to upgrade his trainer. He wrestled with that thought for a long moment and considered the implications. With his trainer in its current condition, it opened the perfect opportunity to him. “Sir, how would you like me to dispose of these?” Blazer asked.
“Whatever manner you feel is best. You know there is a trainer out there right now that would be ripe to take those mods. It would be difficult to get authorization and doing so without authorization borders on illegal. Going through proper channels would take a few tridecs. I can’t circumvent the rules but someone who didn’t know them…” the chief responded.
Blazer smiled inwardly. You sly old lizard, it was the offer of a lifetime. “I understand sir. I will see to the proper disposal of these notes.”
“Good. Wouldn’t want them falling into the wrong hands. That wouldn’t be right.”
Blazer stood and snapped off a quick salute that the chief returned before Blazer headed for the door.
“Oh, and one last thing, Vaughnt. Remember that once that trainer of yours is back up and running others will fly it too.”
“I won’t forget that, sir. I won’t let the others down either. I’ll get her back up to spec,” Blazer replied as he hurried out the door.
UCSB DATE: 1000.261
Star System: Classified, UCSBA-13, Command Center
Deep under the command building of the academy lay the Primary Command Center. Within, banks of monitors and projected holographic displays relayed information pertinent to every aspect of the facility. Sensor data from throughout the system flowed into this room from a network of surveillance satellites. Technicians, ever on the watch, monitored cadets and any traffic that entered the system. Only a few areas went unmonitored like the mass shadow of Optimus Teg or the other planets and gas giants. Those areas were relatively small and no ship could reach them without detection.
Part of Gokhead’s in
telligence analysis class had him sitting at one of monitor stations once a decle. This cycle he studied the sensors at the jump point when an unusual fluctuation with a flash of energy lit up his screen. Was that a transmission beam into hyperspace? He called to his supervisor, “Sir, can you take a look at this?”
The officer on duty, Misa Ijochi, came over and looked at the screen as Gokhead replayed the data. Her face scrunched up when she looked at the fluctuation and energy flash. After a moment, she straightened and shook her head. “No. We had that comet come through last decle. It left a lot of debris in its trail as it passed by and occasionally we get fluctuations that look like that. Basically a larger than normal chunk had enough speed to breach the event horizon and was absorbed. There’s your flash right there.”
Gokhead was not convinced. “What about that energy signature? It looked like a transmission.”
“Well,” Misa called up a log on the jump buoy, “see, that the buoy is coming due for servicing.”
“And?”
“They signal the Mapper’s Guild whenever they are in need of servicing.”
Gokhead had to think about that for a moment. I’ve never seen buoys close to their servicing date before, but Blazer, Arion, Deniv, and Bichard served in the Mapper’s Guild. I’ll ask them later. “Are you sure, ma’am? Is there some way that we can query the buoy to find out for certain?”
“You won’t see much without the Mappers Guild’s encryption keys. But let’s see.” She tapped a few keys on the display. “Yes. See there. The buoy was queried and returned the signal. It then sent another signal. See nothing odd.”
“Can we tell where the signals originated from or were sent?”
“No. Not without the encryptions keys.”
“Should we let the Mapper’s Guild know?”
