Valor's Cost

by Kal Spriggs

  Kyle opened the hatch and he and I pulled ourselves into the compartment. There was a desk and several chairs, all of them anchored “down.” There were a bunch of printed papers, pens, datapads, and other things floating in the office as well.

  Two women were drifting near the far wall, “...that busybody Thomas had to tear down the condenser, so here we are stuck in zero-g.”

  “I heard the CS say he was headed up to yell at the Station Commander. This is dumb. Four hours of zero-g? What are we supposed to do?” I recognized the acronym “CS” as Commander Squadron, but I was irritated at the two women gossiping and ignoring our presence. Complaining about another officer in front of subordinates, especially one just trying to do his job, was unprofessional.

  “Cadet Armstrong and Cadet Regan, reporting, ma’am,” I said, noticing the Lieutenant’s bars on her flight suit. I recognized her from the file my grandmother had given me: Lieutenant Koga. She’d had moderately good flight rating but she’d received a letter of reprimand for public intoxication. She’d run up a lot of debt as well.

  She waved lazily at me, “Our two little ducks.” She smirked at me, “Quack Quack.”

  The other woman snorted with laughter, “Quack, quack,” she giggled. She too wore a flight suit, she was a Warrant Officer, I saw, with over twenty years of piloting hatched out on the sleeve of her flight suit. Warrant Officer Omar. She’d requested Summit Station, which put her on the list of suspects. Other than that, though, she’d been marked down twice for insubordinate attitudes and she’d been grounded for two years after a collision with another craft during thruster-powered maneuvers.

  “I suppose we need to show you two to the Squadron Commander,” Lieutenant Koga sighed. “Come on, this way,” she waved at me to follow and then led me through a side door. We kept going down the corridor until she stopped us outside the room on the end. “Boss, the two cadets are here.”

  “About time, send them in!” A brusque voice snapped.

  Lieutenant Koga pushed the hatch open and moved out of the way. I moved into the office, followed by Kyle. “Sir,” I braced as well as I could in zero-g, “Cadet Second Class Armstrong and Cadet Second Class Regan, reporting for duty.” I snapped out a salute.

  “Your transport showed up four hours ago, where have to two been?” Commander Arton demanded.

  “Sir, we were helping Lieutenant Thomas with--”

  “You work for me, not the station,” he interrupted Kyle. “If they needed your help with something, they should have gone through me.” He was as tall or taller than Mackenzie, with a long, horse-like face and a big chin. “They're always trying to poach my people to deal with station maters, well we're short-handed, too.”

  He sighed, “Timeliness is a key method of showing your superiors that you're hard-working, cadets. The first thing you should have done was come and report to me.” Commander Arton looked between us, “So already, you're getting off on the wrong foot. Now, I've reviewed your personnel records, you both have your provisional flight licenses, correct?”

  “Yes, sir,” We both said at the same time.

  “Good. Like I said, we're short-handed on both support personnel and pilots. I'm down five pilots right now, two on leave, three haven't been backfilled. That means instead of having fifteen pilots for my twelve fighter craft, I have ten pilots. So I'm putting both of you in birds, as of tomorrow.”

  “Sir,” I protested, “Our provisional pilots licenses are only authorized to fly under direct supervision--”

  “You'll be under my supervision,” Commander Arton growled. “And strike two, cadet. If your Commander gives you a task, you say 'yes sir' and you execute, you don't talk back. I know the regulations, I also know that twelve birds in the sky is a whole lot better than ten.”

  “Yes, sir,” I snapped back.

  His eyes narrowed and he glared at me. “Look, cadet, I don't care whose granddaughter you are, especially since word is that she's a few months from retiring. Even if I did care, I have a mission to do, and out here at Summit Station, that mission is a whole lot more difficult when I'm short on pilots. Our patrols are four fighter squads, they're eight hour shifts. If I have ten pilots on duty, then two of my pilots are doing two eight hour patrols a day. All my pilots are tired and tired pilots have accidents. So you two, even as untrained and new as you are, are going to take the load of my other pilots until my people get back from leave.”

  “When is that, sir?” Kyle asked.

  “Montez's mother passed, so she'll probably be out for another two weeks. Hitamar probably will drop his resignation packet while he's on leave, so we'll see.” Commander Arton hiked a thumb over his shoulder, “Headquarters isn't big on sending us more pilots. The long patrol hours burns them out and the perimeter stations have the lowest retention rates in the Militia.” He gave an ugly smile, his big horse-like teeth jutting out, “Summit Station has the lowest of all the perimeter stations. We have the longest patrol routes, the lowest staffing, and we're dead last in priority for everything from parts and equipment to replacement personnel. I don't know who you irritated to get assigned here, but I'll warn you now, your next five months aren't going to be fun.”

  I didn't know what to say to that.

  “All hands, stand by for warp field initiation,” a voice announced over the intercom.

  “Finally” Commander Arton growled. I grabbed onto the nearest hand-hold. A moment later, gravity returned, with a suddenness that caused objects to drop out of the air.. Down the hall, in the ready room, I heard cursing as papers and equipment fell to the deck.

  I landed on my feet, as did Kyle. Commander Arton dropped to his chair, as if this were a regular occurrence.

  “Since you two are new, I want you two hours before your patrol shift at the simulators. I'll run you both through some basic maneuvers and then we'll get you familiar with your birds. The Mark Threes are a bit less refined than some other craft you may have trained with. The sensor sets take some time to get used to, so I'll transfer you both the info on your datapads.” He paused. “You can ping mine now, so I can send you the data.”

  I pinged him with my implant, as did Kyle. Commander Arton paused, tapping at his datapad, “You're both implanted?”

  “Yes, sir,” we responded in unison.

  “I'd heard they made that mandatory, I was hoping that was just a rumor,” he sighed. “Fine, I've transferred you the data. You'll be on my patrol flight in just under six hours. I want you at the simulators two hours prior to that for a shakedown.”

  “Sir, we haven't had any downtime,” Kyle noted, “Aren't pilots supposed to have eight hours of downtime prior to a mission?”

  “That's why you should have reported to me on arrival, instead of doing errands for Lieutenant Thomas. Dismissed,” Commander Arton waved. Then he turned his attention back to his datapad.

  I had the feeling it was going to be a long five months.

  ***

  Chapter 17: I No Longer Wonder Why They Don't Send Cadets Out Here

  Commander Arton had us in the simulators flying paired with him and Lieutenant Koga. One of the people they were short on was their XO, the squadron hadn't had one for almost a year. The file the Admiral had given me had shown that Lieutenant Koga filled that role, but I didn't see how, not when she flew in the Commander's squad on patrols. Normally the XO either didn't fly at all or flew opposite the Commander, so that someone was in charge at all times.

  The maneuvers they put us through were pretty simple. Undocking, docking, and flying in formation. We spent a few extra minutes with scanning with the Mark Three Firebolt's older sensor set. They didn't have us run through any attack runs. When I asked about that, Lieutenant Koga just laughed so hard that she lost control of her Firebolt.

  “We're not a line unit,” Arton told me, his voice icy. “Our job isn't to run attacks, it's to identify threats and report them.”

  “What if Summit Station comes under attack?” I asked.

  “They
've got some defenses and we'll provide additional support,” he answered. “But the station isn't a threat to anyone. Our task, if we identify a threat, is to pass it along.”

  My jaw set as I considered that. A warning passed via radio or tight-beam laser would take three hours to reach Century Station. An enemy with an FTL drive could be there within eight seconds.

  Lieutenant Koga made snide comments about our proficiency. When we undocked without issue, she complained we were too slow. She complained about our spacing in formation. She chewed me out for engaging my warp envelope a few seconds later than the minimum safe distance and then when Kyle brought his up, she yelled at him for bringing his drive up too close to mine.

  Through it all, Commander Arton didn’t say a word. Then, once we’d formed up to Lieutenant Koga’s snapped orders and Commander Arton’s calm, quiet patience, we’d split up to our separate patrol routes. Kyle went with Commander Arton and I went with Lieutenant Koga.

  As we began the patrol, I was already irritated and my excitement at flying had been drastically undercut. After the first hour of listening to Koga’s chatter, I went from being on edge to hating every second of the flight.

  My previous flights had been two to three hours at most. After hour three, I was sick of being in the cockpit. After hour four, we’d flown one complete circuit of our patrol route. With sensors active, we scanned for any suspicious objects. Drive fields would be visible to the station. A warp field used so much energy that it simply wasn’t possible to hide it. Various sensors throughout the star system would pick up a ship in slower-than-light warp. But a ship could emerge from FTL Warp at the edge of a star system and, if it immediately cut its drives, it could use thrusters to coast into the inner system. Scanning for objects like that, we looked for things that were out of the ordinary: uncharted stellar bodies or ones changing direction or showing more heat than they should have. That was how the two smuggling vessels had slipped into the system, they’d emerged high above the plane and then coasted down past Summit Station and its patrolling Firebolts.

  There was also the chance of a ship in FTL Warp coming through the system. Ships in strategic warp didn’t display the same massive energy signature, in part because they were out of phase with the rest of the universe. Since the warp fields around ships moving faster than light tended to do really wonky things with normal particles, it just wasn’t safe for a ship in strategic drive to be in phase with the normal universe. While sensors could still pick up the electromagnetic “wake” of ships as they passed, there was no way to have prior warning.

  A ship traveling at strategic warp couldn’t be intercepted, but it could be tracked and followed. Of course, warp fighters didn’t have strategic warp drives, or even normal warp drives, so the best that our Firebolts could manage was to report what we saw. Any ship moving faster than light that we detected would arrive before any warning we could send, which made me wonder at the wisdom of having us out here.

  At hour four, we linked up with Commander Arton and Kyle, and swapped wingmen. I wasn’t sure if it was to break up the monotony or if he just knew that anyone partnered up with Lieutenant Koga would need a break or they’d kill her.

  “Any questions, cadet?” Commander Arton asked as we went into the fifth hour of patrol. At this point I’d split off part of my attention to my implant and had begun reviewing the files the Admiral had given me, yet again.

  “Sir, why the patrols?” I asked in frustration. “We can’t give warning in time to matter if a ship comes through here in FTL. If a ship is going through here cold and quiet, we can’t possibly cover enough area to pick them up.”

  “It’s a bit of what they used to call security theater,” Arton replied. “We’re out here so that we reassure the people back home that they’re protected.”

  “But this... it doesn’t help,” I protested. “A ship with a strategic drive, they could at least follow and engage when the other ship dropped out... the best we can do is send warning that will show up after the fight has already begun.”

  “There’s that aspect too,” Commander Arton agreed, “but don’t forget the most likely possibility: an invader or attacker emerges from strategic warp somewhere up here. They pause to calibrate their sensors and plot a course to their target. That’s where having us here provides an advantage.”

  I understood that. Plotting a faster-than-light warp course inside a star system was difficult in the speeds involved. Emerging from FTL warp released a small but still powerful burst of electromagnetic radiation and it also tended to create some pretty severe localized gravitational anomalies. In atmosphere, the combination could create some pretty extreme effects. That was what had created the massive dust storm on Century prior to the attack on Black Mesa Outpost. Most people wanted to avoid that sort of thing, especially since the burst from the drive was the equivalent of a nuclear bomb as far as ionizing radiation.

  The Guard classified emergence from strategic warp in atmosphere or low orbit of an inhabited planet as use of a weapon of mass destruction. The last time someone had done that to a heavily populated world had been thirty years earlier, though pirates often did so against more scarcely populated planets all the time as a means of avoiding detection.

  “But it doesn’t take long to calibrate and plot a short jump,” I protested.

  “There’s also the spool-down time,” Arton noted. “Don’t forget, bigger ships have significantly longer times for their drives to bleed off sufficient energy for them to safely restart strategic drive.”

  That was something I hadn’t really considered. The exotic matter that ships used to generate warp fields tended to create exotic particles inside the drive fields from the phasing process as part of traveling faster than the speed of light. When the drive shut down, those exotic particles built up to dangerous levels in the drive generators and they had to “bleed” it out, letting the exotic particles decay to safe levels. Since most of those exotic particles were useful for their physics-bending properties, too many of them could have rather profound and dangerous effects when the drive field went up again.

  For a pirate corvette or frigate, that would only be ten or fifteen minutes. For a larger ship, like a cruiser or battlecruiser, that could be as long as an hour or more. A capital ship, something like a battleship, command carrier, or even a dreadnought, might take two or even three hours. Bigger ships would be easier for us to detect and locate, too.

  It would take almost an hour for a transmission from Summit Station to reach Century. Suddenly our position made a lot more sense.

  “Thanks, sir,” I suddenly felt a lot better about our presence out here. It wasn’t pointless. We couldn’t do much with a smaller vessel like a frigate, but at least with a capital ship, we could provide sufficient warning for some response to be made.

  It also put a question in my mind about the fact that the pirates had chosen to attack through this area. Had they done so because they knew that the station had little chance to pass on warning in time even if they managed to detect them? I might be out here on a wild-goose chase. I had no doubt that the Admiral understood the strategic issues with the station.

  “Why only the one station, sir?” I asked after a moment.

  “What’s that?” Commander Arton responded, sounding distracted. For a second, over the net, I’d almost thought I heard music when he replied. No, he wouldn’t be listening to music... would he?

  “Why just Summit Station up here?” I asked. “There sixteen perimeter stations around the outer system on the elliptic plane. There’s three more opposite us under the plane, why just the one up here?”

  “Look at the historic threats,” he answered. It wasn’t much of an answer, but I started digging into it on my implant.

  I saw right away that the answer was a little complex. Century’s star tilted at a slight angle to the other stars nearby. That angle lay so that the “bottom” of the system pointed to the galactic “West” and the top pointed “East.” What that m
eant was that the bottom was better able to detect and prevent ships coming from the west... which was where traditional threats lay: nearby Dalite and the alien Culmor Empire. The direct line from the Galactic “North” would approach from the elliptic plane. There were stations along that perimeter that should detect ships from Guard Space, which included the pirate haven of Vagyr. The same went for the South, but there wasn’t much of anything past Century.

  Attackers could plot courses that took them looping around to attack from on top, but they shouldn’t have to do that. The Culmor Empire had the forces to obliterate our entire Militia in a matter of minutes, if they’d cared to focus on us. Dalite, while far, far less powerful, still had an elderly battleship and a squadron of cruisers along with twenty or more destroyers and frigates. That was a big enough fleet that they could take on our Planetary Militia, if they were willing to take the losses.

  A surprise attack would bypass the Reserve Militia and might be able to take the planet’s orbitals before they could mobilize. That’s what they’d tried during the Three Day War. But they’d still face a large ground campaign and, in theory, Guard Fleet should intervene.

  So getting warning of inbound ships from the East and North had been a priority. Now, though, there wasn’t much in position to detect ships from the East. The systems East of Century weren’t traditionally threats. There was the Mason-Corvale system, where two rival colonies had been locked in their own feud for generations. There was Erewhon, where they’d built up their defense forces to a ridiculous degree. Those were the most populous systems... until traveling almost a hundred light years to where Drakkus lay, just south of the Crableg Nebula.

  The Drakkus Empire had a larger fleet than any other system in the Periphery. Their fleet rivaled the Preserve and the Harmony Protectorate. They’d just conquered Oberon and Tenure a few years ago... and I suspected they had subverted Charterer Beckman. They might have been the ones behind Commander Scarpitti and the smugglers who’d tried to killed me. I had no idea what their interest was in my small, isolated homeworld... but I did know that we weren’t aligned well to defend against them.