Starfighter Down

by M. G. Herron

  The whole conversation annoyed him. He was doing his best. He knew Lieutenant Park was the only boy in a family of six. He knew Lieutenant Yorra had lost her parents in a raid during the Kryl War. He knew their birthdays, home planets, religions. He had made all the requisite inquiries. He wanted to fit in, but they had been on missions for the past six months, and though they hadn’t seen much action yet, they would soon. In his mind, this was the time to get serious about training. He’d be damned if his career ended early because he made an amateurish mistake. It had happened to better pilots than him.

  “We’re not out here evacuating a rim world colony to make pals. We’re here to kill Kryl.” And to take vengeance against the xeno scum who stole my homeworld, he added silently.

  Osprey stepped in front of him and forced him to stop walking. She reached out and gripped his shoulder, squaring herself up. She hesitated a moment before saying, “You're not a refugee anymore. All I’m saying is, you don't have to do this alone.”

  He stiffened against her touch but didn’t jerk away. He didn’t like to talk about his past with anyone, not even Osprey. “It’s not about that. I just want to be ready when the time comes.”

  She dropped her hands. He pushed past her and picked up the pace. Several more turns through the halls of the destroyer led him to the library and the computers that could transmit data back to the settler’s moon. It was the only place on the ship with a secure ansible connection, which he needed to transfer credits to his mom’s bank account back home.

  And the place was jam-packed with people.

  “Oh, Earth,” he muttered, scanning for an opening.

  “How about the colonel over there?” Osprey said. “Looks like he’s getting up to leave.”

  A hungover balding man in his mid-fifties with a colonel’s sunburst on his shoulder pushed up from his seat at a console in the far corner of the room. Elya made his way through the crowded library, past the rows of immersion holodecks until he reached a relatively private row of functional monitors with screens much larger than the tab in his pocket. He let a servant bot sanitize the workstation, impatient at the delay, then groaned when he tried to log on.

  There was a queue for ansible access, too.

  A lanky man with sloped shoulders sitting two seats down, who Elya recognized as a line cook, chuckled and said, “Me too, man. Imperial technology!”

  He stewed in silence while he waited, studying the crowded library. More people than usual filled the place, but with fifty thousand personnel stationed on the Paladin of Abniss, there was no such thing as quiet in here. Everyone came to the library to get their news, talk to their families, check their mail, and more. Most people seemed to be in good spirits. Perhaps, like him, they were pleased they’d been sent out here to the galaxy’s edge to evacuate a colony because it meant a chance to see action. After a twelve-year stalemate in the war against the Kryl, most soldiers—especially Sabre pilots—were itching for a fight.

  When his turn finally came, he logged on to his bank account, put half the money in savings, set aside some for spending, and sent the remainder home to his mom. It wasn’t much, but the money assuaged a little of his guilt at leaving them in a place with little chance for employment and ration cards that barely put food on the table.

  He tabbed over to a news aggregator and checked if there was any word from the system where his family was located. After scouring the feeds for a while, he blew out his breath. No news was good news.

  Stretching, he relinquished the seat to the next person in line and headed for the exit. Thankfully, Osprey was nowhere to be found, and no one else took it upon themselves to yank his chain about his social ineptitude.

  Hedgebot beeped. Elya reached up and touched the sensor on the tip of the bot’s nose. “What’s that, bud? You want to fly another sim? Great idea. Let’s swing by the mess for a bite to eat and a charge, and then we can get back to work.”

  He pushed away thoughts of Osprey’s advice, of his mom, of the hellhole his family couldn’t escape. His only job was to train. Get better. Be ready.

  It was only a matter of time.

  Two

  Casey scrolled through the library terminal, opening files at random and hoping she might get lucky. You’d think that with access to centuries’ worth of leadership content, at least one book or holovid would be able to reveal the key to getting through to that idiot, so intent on staying walled off from anyone and anything except a training sim. But no such luck.

  The next time she looked up, the terminal Nevers had been using was occupied by someone else. Casey logged out and hurried to the doorway in time to see him turn down the next corridor and out of sight. That damnably cute little robot of his pulsed blue and scurried along the curved wall after him, as if it moved on an invisible leash. She’d never seen a bot more devoted, and while usually this fact made Nevers seem endearing, today it made him seem like an aloof jerk.

  She fumed at his stubbornness the whole walk back to the rec. When Lt. Colonel Walcott first told her she’d made flight lead, the news had filled her with pride and excitement. She knew it was a big responsibility, but it was also her first step on the leadership path—the path she’d been groomed her whole life to take. She just never realized the most difficult part of the job would be dealing with other people. Casey was usually great with people.

  What am I missing? she wondered.

  The portal to the rec where the rest of her flight was killing time irised open as she approached, belching out a cloud of acrid tabac smoke. She caught a whiff of ganja mixed into the scent and knew that Lieutenant Innovesh Park must have been digging into his stash again. Cannabis was sold in most base exchanges, right alongside the loose tabac and cigars. Casey felt a hankering to light up a smoke of her own right now but resisted the urge while she hunted Park out of the crowd. True to form he was puffing on a rolly as he slouched in a chair at a card table in the corner.

  He bent the hexagonal cards in a fan toward himself and gazed around the table, then pushed all his chips into the pot. He flipped a card over, tapped a symbol on the table, and the hologram of a saber-toothed tiger sauntered forward and ripped out the guts of a dragon guarding Lieutenant Olara Yorra’s position.

  “Oh, no fair, Naab!” Yorra said, throwing down her cards. “I had you cornered.”

  Park shrugged, a boyish grin lighting his brown eyes. He was descended from the colonists of Taj Su and shared the canted eyes, sharp cheekbones, and short, stocky frame common on his planet. A jokester at heart, Naab was a head shorter than most women on the ship, but broad in the chest and handsome. And he always had a big smile for a pretty girl.

  Spotting Casey, Park turned that smile on her and waved. She wove through the crowd. As she reached the table and stood over him, she plucked the rolly from his mouth and took a big drag. “See you've been having fun.” She exhaled the sweet smoke. A hint of mango and cannabis coated her tongue.

  “Told him we were still technically on call, but this flyboy didn't listen.”

  “Does he ever?”

  Always the jokester, Naab had earned his call sign when he went streaking through the mess hall and ended up getting locked outside on a cold winter morning, naked as a baby. Hence, Naab. She always suspected Fancypants was the one who locked him out, but Nevers refused to admit it.

  “What’s the big deal? Tiny dose of stim and I’m right as rain.” He tapped the port on the back of his neck. Casey felt her own tingle. All starfighter pilots had them installed when they joined, and most days she forgot it was there.

  Casey shrugged and collapsed into the free chair. She may have been flight lead, but she wasn’t the squadron commander. They were still on call, but as long as they weren't flying, Casey wasn’t about to police their consumption. If the Fleet didn’t want pilots smoking ganja, they shouldn’t sell it in the exchange. Besides, Casey had tested it herself and Park was right. Even if you were half drunk and stoned out of your gourd, those stim chemicals sobered
you right up.

  Park eyeballed Casey as he reshuffled the deck of cards and dealt them out between himself and Yorra. “Where’ve you been, Raptor?”

  She scratched at an imperfection in the table.

  “You were checking in on Nevers, weren’t you?” Gears sat up straighter, catching a card as it came sliding across the table. “Yeah, I can see it in your face.”

  Casey crossed her arms and frowned. Olara Yorra wasn’t the most experienced pilot in their flight, but she was whip smart and always scored top marks on written exams. She had jet black hair, big green eyes, enviably smooth skin, and saw more than she let on. Casey had long ago learned to listen when Yorra spoke.

  “Why are you always after him like that?” Naab asked.

  “Because, I need him to know we’ve got each other’s backs.”

  “’Course he knows.” Yorra stuck her tongue in her cheek and cocked her head as she reordered the cards in her hand. “I think it just bothers you that he’s happy spending time alone. What was he doing? Running sims?”

  Casey huffed air out through her nose and nodded reluctantly.

  “He’s always training,” Park took back the rolly Casey had commandeered, inhaling one more time and then carefully stamping it out and storing the joint in his jacket for later. “Kid doesn't know how to relax.”

  She let her arms fall to her side and slouched lower in her chair. She signaled to one of the servobots. It rolled over, and she tapped an order into the tab mounted into its round head. It spit out a glass of ginger beer; sipping, she enjoyed the slight bite and the bubbles on her tongue. “It’s more than that,” Casey insisted. “He barely spends any rec time with us.”

  “Hah!” Gears barked a laugh. “Don't you think we spend enough time together, Raptor? We train together, we sleep in the same room, we spend hours running drills. We practically live in each other’s heads. He probably just needs a break.”

  She frowned. That idea was foreign to her. Being around her friends on her off hours was revivifying. She took energy from a gathering like this, where they were sitting with each other playing cards and shooting the breeze. It never even occurred to her that somebody could enjoy spending time alone, running extra sims by himself. How was that fun?

  But then, Nevers had always been internally motivated. Even when they were in pilot training together, he only sought help when he needed a second in the cockpit. Casey, on the other hand, had picked out individual people who excelled in one thing—navigation, or the physics of flying in zero grav—and leaned on each of them from the get-go, absorbing their knowledge like a sponge. Nevers had been content to figure things out on his own. Oh sure, he helped her when she asked. His specialty was the mechanics of the Sabre and working with the astrobots. (He had modified Hedgebot to be his personal astrobot, after all, and never relied on a bot machinist when he could do the repairs himself.)

  Casey’s rumination was interrupted when every screen and tab in the place began to flash midnight blue and crimson. A klaxon alarm followed on a half-second delay, echoing through the rec and reverberating in her chest.

  “All starfighters,” said a voice over the intercom, “report to battle stations. Repeat, all starfighters report to battle stations immediately.”

  Three

  Admiral Kira Miyaru gazed through the main window of the bridge, over the fleet of Mammoth-class longhaulers and the lush forest moon in the distance. All around her, the crew worked, monitoring systems on dozens of bright holoscreens, relaying updates on the status of the evacuation and watching surrounding space in all directions for any sign of Kryl. Everything was going according to plan—which was exactly what had her worried. Even with a whole wing of starfighters on patrol, two dozen civilian transports were a lot for one destroyer and a handful of support craft to protect. And that wasn’t accounting for what was happening on the ground.

  Robichar was one of a dozen expansion colonies authorized since the end of the Kryl War. Irritatingly, the feeling among the Colonization Board continued to be that Solaran space was secure enough to continue approving new charters, even after verified reports of a rogue Kryl hive had precipitated the prudent evacuation of this one. For the past year, the civilian population had been reporting Kryl attacks with alarming frequency. The sudden movement of the hive had finally forced the Board to pull out of Robichar.

  “Despite this minor setback, we have a moral imperative to expand,” the chairman of the Colonization Board had declared the last time Kira stood before the balding bureaucrat. Not even the Empire’s most advanced AI programs had been able to fix male pattern baldness, and for some reason this insight brought her joy while his words raked at her nerves. “If the Solaran Empire isn’t growing, it’s dying. The Emperor refuses to give the Kryl the satisfaction.”

  The Emperor, indeed, she thought bitterly. The Emperor and his harem were no doubt sequestered in his pleasure palace orbiting Ariadne, blissfully unaware of the Kryl’s latest movements, as he had been for the past decade. Kira would be shocked to learn he was even aware of the so-called “moral imperative” espoused by the flunkies operating in his absence.

  So here she was, following orders to evacuate Robichar with minimal support. Kira had requested additional firepower—an extra destroyer or five, and several heavy cruisers—but her requests were denied.

  Fools.

  With an effort of will forged in the fire of twelve years of calculated patience, Kira forced her fury back down. She ran her fingers through the carefully cropped mohawk that was her preferred hairstyle—a style that had faded from jet black to silver around the time of her last promotion. She was here to do a job, and no amount of bellyaching over Imperial policy would save the people of Robichar from being ravaged by a Kryl hive.

  Only soldiers could do that. Her soldiers.

  The sphere of Robichar was mottled green and brown, kissed by wispy clouds and dotted with a round ocean that took up a third of the moon’s surface. As the Paladin of Abniss orbited the moon, the moon in turn danced around a gas giant, the fifth rock from the sun of this system.

  “Admiral, the shuttles have reached escape velocity.” The resonant voice seemed to come from every speaker, from the room itself. The voice belonged to the ship—or rather, to Harmony, a branch of the artificial intelligence program that piloted every starship in the Solaran Defense Forces. The program was installed in the neural network of the ship itself, and controlled by a nanochip embedded in Kira’s neck, right above her spinal port. Technically, no one else needed to see Harmony or hear her voice, but since Kira preferred to have a face to talk to—and not look like a lunatic talking to herself on the bridge, in full view of her officers—a pattern of vibrant bluish nodes and purple clusters arranged themselves into a face-like shape floating next to the command couch.

  “Show me,” she ordered.

  “Visual on shuttles in three, two…”

  As Harmony counted down, the main viewscreen, configured to show relevant space outside the ship, refocused. A group of ten transport shuttles appeared on a backdrop of cloud-streaked forest. Engines burned red as they followed a vector toward the group of two dozen Mammoth longhaulers. At a capacity of a hundred thousand persons each, the Mammoths could hold 2.4 million people—enough to fit the entire population of Robichar with plenty of room to spare.

  “Any sign of the Kryl?”

  “No, Admiral,” Harmony said. “The Overmind is still working her way through the asteroid field.”

  “And if she changes her mind, how long would it take her to reach us?”

  Harmony’s face moved aside and a series of calculations scrolled across the holoscreen without displacing the multi-window readout from the stealth tracking beacons. Though no one objected, Kira could tell by over-the-shoulder glances and stiff postures that referring to the Overmind as a "she" made the rest of her crew uncomfortable. Good.

  It had been over a decade since any Solaran Defense Forces engaged a Kryl hive directly. Her people
needed to understand who their enemy really was—not merely the thousands of Kryl spawn and their venomous talons, but the consciousness that controlled them. This knowledge was imperative to winning any battle they found themselves in.

  “If the hive continues its normal feeding patterns,” Harmony said, “there is an eighty-three percent probability they will arrive in-system twenty-eight hours from now.”

  A galactic standard day, or close enough. And the Kryl prediction models, though vastly improved since the days of the Kryl War, had been wrong before. “Thank you, Harmony.”

  Kira stepped off the small pedestal holding the command couch and clasped her hands behind her back. She wanted to pace, but forced herself to stand with her shoulders back and locked. The group docked with the Mammoth fleet and began to unload passengers. Another hundred thousand people to safety, she thought.

  By her estimation, it would take another twelve hours to evacuate the rest of the population. So why, when all signs pointed to a successful operation, did she still feel so high strung?

  The bridge door irised open and a tall, balding man in his fifties strode into the room. She recognized the sound of Colonel Volk’s measured steps before she saw him; her executive officer usually projected an air of quiet competence, but today he was suffering. Sweat at his temples made his waxen skin glisten under the glare of the holoscreens at his duty station. Despite his hangover, Volk was fifteen minutes early for his shift.

  “Morning, Colonel.”

  “Good morning, sir.” Volk winced slightly at the sound of his own voice.

  “Up late?”

  “No later than usual, sir. You know I never sleep well during an operation.” His attention flickered over the tactical displays, surreptitiously confirming the status of the evacuation, the capacity of the Mammoth fleet, the location of the Kryl hive and a hundred other details.