Valor's Cost

by Kal Spriggs

  “After due deliberation,” Cadet Commander Flynn stated, reading from an archaic sheet of paper, “and with full consideration of the facts, recordings, and sworn statements, this Investigatory Honor Board finds that there is no grounds for further investigation into this matter.”

  I realized that I’d forgotten to breath and took a whooping breath.

  “However,” Flynn went on, “we do have an official statement that we will send to the Regimental Commander for review and possible addition to the Academy Regulations.” My eyes went wide at that and I couldn’t help darting a look at where the Superintendent sat in the shadows.

  “As representatives of the Regiment of Cadets, we feel that any advantage given to us by birth, experience, or augmentation of some kind is merely another tool to be used in our career and education,” he read. “Furthermore, we feel that to be given such advantages and then ordered not to use them as being unfair is in itself an unrealistic expectation. It’s like telling someone who is tall that they should haunch over or someone who is smart to pretend to be stupid. As a Regiment, we believe that it is unethical to give advantages to students and then to demand that they not use them, be they neural, physical, or psychological.”

  I realized that I had stopped breathing. I didn't dare look over at where Rear Admiral Fischer sat. The room had gone totally silent. No one could help but understand who that last part had been aimed at. It was as much of a slap in the face as any cadet could give to a commissioned officer, much less the one who ran the entire school. I could agree with the sentiment, but I worried that they didn't understand the full impact of what they were suggesting. For that matter, I didn't know if Rear Admiral Fischer could do anything about it.

  “That concludes the findings of this board, Cadet Armstrong, you are dismissed.”

  ***

  Chapter 13: I Put Everything Into Perspective

  Life and classes went on. We moved from the simulators in our flight certifications and into live training. I showed up to the first scheduled session at Bunker Three, where me and eleven others from my section waited. Lieutenant Commander Darling was there and he followed us as we went through our preflight checklists.

  There were other officers there, too. A dozen flight instructors on loan from their units for these classes in particular. Each of them paired up with us, I got a tall, lanky officer who, as he stepped forward to shake my hand, I blinked at him in surprise.

  “Hello, Cadet Second Class Armstrong,” Lieutenant Mackenzie grinned at me. “I’ll be your flight instructor for this training flight.”

  “Yes, sir!” I replied, barely able to get the words out. After the difficulties I’d faced over the past few months, the realization that I’d have a decent person for my instructor left me feeling almost light-headed. Mackenzie had been my Senior Cadet Drill Instructor during my Academy Prep Course and and my Company Commander during my Plebe year. He’d graduated first in his class and after he’d left, I’d realized that Sand Dragon wasn’t quite the same without him.

  “Looks like you got the thumbs up on your preflight, go ahead and mount up,” Mackenzie nodded at me. I followed his instructions, climbing into front seat of the Mark Four-T Firebolt. Mark Four-T’s were the same as a normal Firebolt in almost every way, except the cockpits were far more cramped because they had to fit two seats instead of one. I found the front seat almost claustrophobic. I didn’t know how Lieutenant Mackenzie managed to squeeze in the back seat, which was even smaller. I did hear a lot of groaning and muttering in the process.

  I went through the onboard preflight checks and then booted up the Firebolt’s systems. We were in the launch cradle, so about half the systems were in standby mode until we actually launched. “Systems good to go,” I said.

  “Call it in,” Lieutenant Mackenzie drawled. “Our callsign is Training Flight Three.”

  “Control,” I queued up the comm system, “This is Training Flight Three, all systems green, ready to launch.”

  “Roger, Biohazard, a cheerful voice replied, “stand by, we’re troubleshooting another bird.”

  Mackenzie snorted in the seat behind me. If I remembered right, he’d made sure the whole school knew the story behind that nickname... all unofficially of course.

  I waited, trapped in the cockpit, grateful that I’d used the bathroom. Seconds ticked away. I wanted to fidget, to bring up a feed on my implant and see what I could find out about the delay. But I could sense Mackenzie sitting behind me, watching me. I didn’t want to look nervous, so I sat there, tense, waiting.

  “The wait eats at you, huh?” Mackenzie asked, his words calm.

  “Sir?” I asked. I didn’t know if he meant me in particular, if I’d shown some outward sign of nervousness.

  “It’s like that moment before a grav-shell race, counting it down. Only worse, because you don’t know when,” he answered. “Relax, Biohazard, you’ll do fine.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. I had the highest Academy ranking as far as crashes, even though I hadn’t been the pilot on one of those. I’d been shot down twice, sabotaged twice. Three times in skimmers and once in a grav-shell. I’d looked the whole craft over very thoroughly this time, for both maintenance and sabotage risks.

  “I hear you’re no longer on the grav-shell team?” Mackenzie asked.

  “No, sir,” I answered, jerked back out of my worries. “Sorry, I just... well, things have been pretty busy.”

  “So I’ve heard,” he replied. “Sorry to hear about your family, Biohazard, that’s rough.”

  I didn’t know how to reply to that, so I just sat there, feeling nervous and trying not to think, not to feel. I hated waiting, there was just too much time to think.

  Finally, a voice came over the comm, “Training Flight, this is Control, standby to launch in sequence at thirty second intervals, take all launch directions from Control.”

  Data fed into my Firebolt and I pulled that from my implant. This was one area where I felt at ease in connecting with the systems through my neural interface. I was faster, more capable... and this was a “real life” thing instead of “just” classes.

  I was third to launch and I had just over a minute and a half. I watched the countdown timer tick down for the two Firebolts ahead of me. All my worries, all my fears melted away with those seconds. There was a roar behind me as the first trainer went up. Thirty seconds later, the next one went. Thirty seconds.

  My heart began to thud in my chest. I’d been to space before in training. This was different only in the sense that I was behind the stick. I’d even done suborbital launches in a skimmer. I was going to be fine.

  “Ten seconds, nine, eight...”

  I thought about my family, thought about how much my brother had wanted this, about how and why I’d volunteered for the Academy. Time seemed to slow and I watched the counter drop with glacial speed. This was the beginning of the end, I’d worked hard at this for almost three and a half years. I was about to launch in a warp-drive fighter.

  “Three, two, one...”

  The world lit up in fire and flame. The rocket assist pushed me back in my seat as the launch cradle flung me back in my seat. The small craft’s systems went live as I blasted clear on the launch rails and drove upwards faster than a bullet fired from a gun and gaining speed.

  I had a pre-determined flight path and I followed the line as I flew. I controlled my ascent through my implant, tweaking the control faces of the Firebolt as the craft broke the sound barrier, thrusters firing at full as we passed into the upper atmosphere. The rocking and shaking eased and then stopped entirely as we cleared the upper atmosphere. I powered back my thrusters a bit as the Firebolt cleared the outermost boundaries of the atmosphere.

  “Nice, Biohazard,” I could hear my former Company Commander’s smile in his voice. “We’re approaching the minimum safe altitude to engage your drive, but what’s your flight plan show?”

  I didn’t have to look at it, but I did anyway, “Engage a
t one thousand kilometers apogee,” I answered. “That’s the standard safety window, right?”

  “Yeah, it gets us clear of the ionosphere,” he replied.

  The exotic matter that helped to create and shape the warp-drives could have wonky effects on magnetic fields, but they'd have even worse effects upon the ionized gases in Century's ionosphere. The warp-envelope on a Firebolt was relatively small, so it shouldn’t open much of a gap in the magnetosphere for any solar radiation to penetrate to the planet’s surface, and we'd be clear of the magnetosphere within seconds of initiating the warp drive anyway. Most of Century, especially here near the mid latitudes, was empty, almost lifeless, desert.

  “On a combat launch, you’ll go at minimum safe altitude, but any kind of training flight, you do the standard safety distance, which is larger with bigger ships,” he said. “The destroyer I served on my first year out, we had a standard safety window of four thousand kilometers due to the size of our drive.”

  I pulled up the chronometer on my implant. It had taken us almost ten minutes to reach three hundred kilometers altitude. The projected course said it would take almost thirty minutes to go to the standard safety distance. That is a very long time with enemy ships inbound.

  I hadn’t realized I’d spoken aloud until he answered my thought, “Yes, yes it is. Which is why we have Summit Station with an active unit on standby, plus Century Station with its docked ships and the station’s weapon systems.” Mackenzie answered my thought. “Plus, the periphery stations out at the system’s edge. In theory, those forces should be able to keep any enemies busy long enough for us to launch.”

  That didn’t sit right with me. A ship, for that matter, an entire fleet, could emerge from FTL warp in orbit over a planet with next to no warning. The outer system stations might pick up the ships as they passed, but they wouldn’t have time do to much more than launch their own fighters and corvettes and possibly to get one of their ships with FTL drive to try and intercept. That would only be possible if an enemy fleet passed within sensor range of one of those platforms

  Most of the time, ships tried to emerge well away from inhabited planets, especially given the risk of drive errors and the effects of a warp-drive on a planet. A shorter jaunt in faster than light warp would be more precise, and most times someone launched an attack against a planet, they’d emerge in the outer system, locate enemy forces, and then wait for their faster than light drive to stabilize. Once they did that, they could pounce accurately on a target of their choice.

  But forces like Drakkus and the Guard had launched long-distance attacks where they emerged around a target planet. An attack like that could strike without warning, and once a ship or ships controlled the orbit of a planet... Once they get the high ground, there’s no fighting them, not in space.

  Maneuvering on thrusters like this, my Firebolt would be nothing more than a target to any warship. Engaging a ship this close to the planet with antimatter bombs onboard a Firebolt would probably do more damage to the planet than any pilot could stomach. If an enemy warship was in orbit and without another ship to force it out, there was nothing to be done.

  I pushed those thoughts aside as we came up on the transition point. I’d already plotted the course and all I had to do was activate the drive. I could sense Mackenzie watching my every move. My hand trembled a bit as I reached out, physically engaging the warp envelope as a pilot for the first time in my life.

  I’d half expected a profound change, some kind of vast thrum or noise or maybe even cheering to erupt. Instead, the warp envelope materialized around the Firebolt, blurring the stars outside my canopy into a distorted pattern of light. The canopy darkened, blocking out that light even as it and the radiation shielding on the Firebolt blocked the extreme radiation generated by light waves and particles hitting the edges of the field.

  The Firebolt came up to full acceleration and I went through the simple maneuvers that Control had ordered. They were simple, mostly just a short-distance loop around Century’s moons and then back towards the planet, keeping on the course forwarded by Control. There wasn’t much to it, and as I finished the last course change, I lined up on my reentry course and deactivated my drive as I reached the safe distance.

  The canopy went transparent once more and now, below me, lay my homeworld.

  I had seen it from space, before. Yet there was something different about seeing it now. Maybe it was that I’d been under the controls, maybe it was that I’d gone tens of thousands of kilometers and that I knew the distance, I’d plotted every meter of that course. Maybe it was just that something inside me had changed since the last time I’d seen my dry, dusty homeworld from space.

  It was brown and rather desolate, with ridges of black rock jutting from different areas. The sun-bleached equator was like a belly-band. I could see dust storms, some small, some huge, circling those desolate wastes. My decent circled towards the night side and I watched as the glow of cities and towns swept past.

  “Pretty, isn’t she?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied. I’d almost forgotten he was there.

  “Always seems a little sweeter when you come back from a flight,” he said softly.

  I couldn’t argue with the sentiment. Century was a dry, arid, and barren planet. Water was a scarcity and the intense heat could be like a hammer. But it was home.

  Alerts on my implant notified me that I had to begin preparing for reentry. The Firebolt was a sleek, tear-drop-shaped craft, designed to fill the maximum dimensions of its warp envelope with centimeters to spare. While it could “fall” through the atmosphere well enough, reentry and landing could be tricky, especially with the relatively weak thrusters and the relatively small quantities of fuel it had to burn.

  I made course corrections, lining the fighter up on the descent path. Now there wasn’t much to do, just watch the stars and the planet as they flashed past. It was surprisingly peaceful, especially with weightlessness and the lack of acceleration. The cockpit still squeezed me, holding me in place, but now it felt almost like a friendly hug. I closed my eyes and just drifted for a long while.

  “I hear you’ve been causing a bit of a stir,” Lieutenant Mackenzie interrupted my serenity. For a moment, I kind of wanted to kill him.

  “Oh?” I asked as neutrally as I could manage. I didn’t know what he’d heard. The Honor Board, what had happened with my family...

  “The official complaint you lodged against Commander Siebert,” he answered. “Caused quite a few ripples through the Century Planetary Militia Officer Corps. She’s considered one of the hot-shots, one of the Active Component’s top pilots and commanders, and one of the best in the simulator.”

  “I don’t know about her skill,” I hedged. I didn’t want to sound like I was criticizing an officer.

  “The Reserve Militia has a somewhat lower opinion of her and the tactics she pushes,” Mackenzie said, off-handed. “Particularly because more than ninety percent of Century’s fighter pilots come from the Reserve. So we’d be the ones who’d take the brunt of casualties from her ‘tactics.’”

  I hadn’t really thought about the repercussions on a bigger scale than me. Still, I wasn’t sure what to say about any of that. Commander Siebert had come after me, so I’d gone after her, using the regulations as a weapon. It had worked, but I still felt uncertain about it all.

  “The audio recorder is off, by the way, I saw it needed a reset, so it’s rebooting,” Mackenzie noted. “Which is why I’ll say that I’m proud of you standing up to her. The recording, your implant recording, is sealed as part of the investigation, but some of the other cadets in your section got a good chunk of what she said on their implants. Those recordings have circulated out to the Militia as a whole. It took a lot of courage to stand up to her like that, I’d imagine.”

  I didn’t feel like that had been particularly brave. Mostly I’d been angry.

  “Anyway, I just wanted you to know that your name is being brought up, there’s
a few people who are impressed with what you’re doing,” he said. “And, there it is, audio recording is back up, hopefully the reset fixed the glitch.”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling like I needed to say something at least. The Firebolt continued its descent, starting to skip across the upper atmosphere. Reentry turned everything else into a blur. There was the roar of atmosphere screaming across the hull, the Firebolt shaking as I used the friction with the air to cut speed. I watched my reentry profile, tweaking the alignment of the fighter as I dropped deeper and deeper into the atmosphere. As we dropped to sub-sonic speeds, I brought up the thrusters, bringing it in towards the Academy’s landing field.

  Maneuvering with the warp field had been far faster and at far higher velocities, but maneuvering on thrusters was so much more raw and real. Balancing the fighter on a column of flame, tweaking it as I dropped, slowly, almost gently, to the landing pad was a rush. I hadn’t felt as much pure fun, as much joy as that in months. Launching had been powerful and incredible, landing was simply a thing of beauty, a sensation that I was finally in charge of my life.

  I did my post-flight checks and then popped the canopy. I hoped out, jumping onto the ladder that had extended and sliding down in one smooth motion. The Chief Flight Instructor, Lieutenant Commander Darling stood a few meters away and I saluted him sharply. “Sir, Cadet Second Class Armstrong, reporting!”

  He returned my salute, “Good first flight, Cadet. Control saw no issues with your flight, other than the audio recorder going out for a couple minutes due to some kind of software glitch.” He looked over my shoulder. “And how did Cadet Armstrong perform?” Lieutenant Commander Darling raised an eyebrow at Lieutenant Mackenzie as he came down the ladder behind me.

  “She did just fine, no issues, good fuel efficiency, overall, pass with no issues,” Mackenzie drawled. The flight exams were all pass or fail, with nothing in between.

  “Alright,” Darling nodded, checking me off the list. “You’re done for the day, Armstrong. You ready for your next flight, Lieutenant?”