“There are currently twenty-five unassigned Cores aboard the ship. They will not be assigned a Zodiac here unless a Core is terminated. There are only ten Zodiac Fighters on the Zeus. There are presently two hundred Beta pilots as the Zeus is at full battle readiness. Information on Cores would not benefit their self-piloted vessels,” 47 replied.
“You saying people don’t need to know about Cores because they probably won’t see or have a Core? But you just said knowledgeable contact meaning you guys are planted all over? We’re not supposed to know you’re there? Who came up with that theory of bullshit?”
“The Creators.”
Damion blew out a long breath and rubbed his eyes. He knew 47 would have an equally frustrating answer to all of his questions. Well no one had ordered him, yet, to keep his mouth shut. Still it was best to follow the lead of the veteran Alphas since he was new.
“Do you need assistance with anything?” 47 inquired, standing up.
“No. Stay in your pod until it’s time to get up.”
“As you order, Fighter Hawk.” There was another small pause, as if 47 was really trying to make sure that Damion wasn’t angry with him or that his actions hadn’t caused a rift between them. “I apologize again for making you feel in distress. Are there any more questions you have for me at this time?”
“Tons. But I need to attempt to sleep because I must be focused tomorrow.” Damion let out a long sigh before closing his eyes.
“Affirmative, Fighter Hawk. I will wake you at 0600.” 47 walked back to the capsule. The cord still plugged into the back of his hand retracted as he got closer.
“Right. Stay there,” Damion muttered, shifting as he tried to get comfortable with his odd, and inconvenient, hard-on. “No more… electrical stimulation.”
“Again, I apologize. I did not mean to make you uncomfortable,” 47 said, slipping into the capsule. “Hence why I was attempting to bond with you while you were resting. I promise you, I did it so that I can perform and protect you more efficiently.”
“We’ll see after our flight tomorrow.”
“Affirmative, Fighter Hawk.” 47 activated the capsule. He let out a soft gasp as the input jacks snapped into his ports, and Damion saw 47 shudder as he settled into the cold, metal-lined coffin. The only padding inside the capsule was under 47’s hips and behind his shoulders. “Good rest.”
“Good dreams,” Damion grumbled before he fell back to sleep.
Chapter Three
Wednesday March 23, 454 MC
0701 GMT
Damion
DAMION WALKED into the docking bay, but on the upper level that held the Alphas’ Zodiac ships instead of the lower where his Beta C-19 vessel was now empty and awaiting a new pilot. Despite what the Core stated, Damion only felt slightly better from 47’s promises not to kill him and his inability to lie. Damion would be on his toes during their flight. He didn’t want to be the fourth victim. He already felt off being on the Alpha level, as if he were doing something he would get in trouble for… but then he looked at his new spacecraft.
His.
Damion flexed his hands and hoped the fit inside that magnificent ship wasn’t too tight. He was much taller than the average pilot, but he had learned to adjust in his C-19 Beta fighter. However, that didn’t mean it had been comfortable.
Last night Damion had tried to get up-to-date with his new starship model, learning all he could from the manuals. The Zodiac-class ship Ares was one of the more recent designs, modified to the fullest with the latest technology. Although only built about five or six years earlier, within that time span it had constantly been updated. Just like the Command ship Zeus, the hull was midnight black and sleek to better hide within the depths of space. The engine output was clean due to the synthesized Red Ore. The hull was lined with a material manufactured from the crystal byproduct of the amalgamate of Red Ore fuel. This made the Zeus blend into the background, making it harder to find on long-distance radar. This was all possible due to the many forms of Martian Red Ore.
Faintly birdlike wings arched out and back from the main body. A window in the front of the ship went almost halfway along the side, and a seat could be seen inside the view window. Immediately below the window sat a track that the main gun ran along so that the Fighter inside could turn his seat and control the gun for a full 180 degrees.
The hatch into the Ares was on the top of the ship. A metal roll-up ladder leading up to the entrance draped down the side. Damion had to drop down into the ship instead of going in from the side like the Beta models. Corporation engineers had changed that feature on the newer models since too many ships had blown apart because of damage to the door, resulting in the vacuum of space pulling the pilot out of the craft. In battle the spacecraft had a higher chance of receiving direct hits on the sides than directly above.
“Is the Ares to your liking?” 47 asked softly from behind Damion.
“Yes.” Damion nodded, continuing to marvel at the Zodiac, admiring all its curves as he practically drooled on himself. “I want to fly her. Now.”
“The Ares is ready for immediate takeoff whenever you wish to board. As I have said, it has been modified for your exact specifications, abilities, and physical needs,” 47 said as he returned from the flight preparedness station.
“I need clearance. They haven’t said I can take her out yet.” Damion rubbed his gloved hands together. Even if it was just a sim—a simulated attack in open space with computer drones—it would allow him to open the Ares up and get a feel for the ship before a real battle. The ammunition used wouldn’t cause any true damage to the Ares or the drones. Sims were also a necessity to keep pilots on their toes between long periods of real battle. Now he would do his first sim as an Alpha, and no matter what, this Zodiac was his, and hopefully 47 wouldn’t kill him.
47 tilted his head and then moved toward the Ares. “I will get you clearance.” He climbed up the ladder like an agile cat and dropped into the ship before Damion realized what he was doing. Damion climbed to the top of the ladder and peered down. He was curious how 47 fit into the spacecraft.
Inside, as he slid into his padded seat, 47 ignored the faint bloodstains that remained from the scrub team on the inner hull, but Damion saw them clearly from his perch. The leather-covered throne had a pattern of holes that lined up precisely with his ports. Putting his identification code into the panel embedded in the throne’s arm, he leaned back as the reclining seat turned slowly until it faced the rear of the ship. The way it sat meant that 47 and Damion would be back-to-back while flying. The seat clicked into place, and 47 pressed in another sequence of numbers. As soon as his hand gripped the end of the armrest, he gasped as the jacks on the chair slipped into his body. His eyes remained open but flicked back and forth, viewing something only he could see.
“Where did you…?” Damion looked down at the empty platform before suddenly hearing the announcement that he was cleared to start his sims. “47?”
The only answer he received was the sound of the Zodiac powering up.
“What are—? Never mind.” Damion shook his head in minor frustration before dropping into the top hatch. As the ladder automatically retracted, he slipped into his seat and pulled the helmet off the console that would recognize his presence. After putting his helmet on, he extended his legs until his feet slipped into a comfortable crevice, his eyebrows rising in surprise. “My legs actually fit.”
“I informed you. The Ares was modified for your exact needs.” The voice was 47’s, but it didn’t come from the wide-eyed man in the chair—it came from all around them, out of the ship’s comm system. 47’s lips never moved.
“What the hell is that?” Damion turned his entire body to be able to look behind him at the reclining 47. “You doing that?”
“There is no other Core connected with the Ares,” 47’s voice replied as if that answered everything.
“This is my first time flying with a Core, remember?” Damion shook his head and put his hand
s on the controls.
“But not your last. When connected with the Ares, I can control its guidance system and speak to you through the comm. I have access to all of the ship’s controls, save the weapons system, to monitor their levels as well as take over if something happens to you. Do you have any questions that I might help you understand better?”
“If you do all that shit, what am I supposed to do?” Damion frowned, wondering why he spent two years in flight school if a computerized machine was going to do his job.
“Do what you do best. Fight. Cores can show you where the enemy is, but we cannot fight them. We can warn you of dangers, but we cannot protect you against them except by giving you the knowledge you need to defeat them. We can tell you the best route to fly, but we do not have the instinct that you do to maneuver the ship in the most efficient and safe way. Cores are the informers while the Fighters are the saviors. Fighters are the ones who protect the Command ships, such as the Zeus and Hera, the colonies, and the planets. Cores are merely tools to help the Fighters accomplish their goals.” 47’s voice was dispassionate, not even wavering when he called himself a tool. “Fighters have the emotions to render the correct judgments, evaluate a situation, and make decisions. If the Zodiacs were given completely to the Cores, we would kill everything we viewed as an enemy.
“An experiment called the Core Incentive was done thirty-three years ago, to try to eliminate the loss of human life by leaving Alpha Fighters and pilots out of the battle equation,” he continued. “The incident was masked by the Corporation, which controls all the media in the colonies, and the truth became a guarded secret only shared with Cores. When a raider ship escaped into an open colony hangar bay, the Cores destroyed the whole colony, deciding it was the most efficient way to dispose of the enemy. Millions died before the Creators could deactivate the Cores. That is what Fighters are for.”
“All right, then,” Damion muttered under his breath, looking at the opening hangar-bay doors. As the metal parted, he could see the protective shielding that kept the bay pressurized and gravitized. The shield shimmered in an almost imperceptible silver grid that separated the bay from space. “I guess we should start running the simulation.”
“Simulation download begun. Simulation start time in twenty seconds. Nineteen… eighteen….” 47 counted down, and Damion’s weapons systems powered up with a flicker of blue and red lights over the flat-panel screen in front of him.
Damion eased the Ares out of the hangar, quickly realizing that the controls were more responsive than he was accustomed to. If he wasn’t careful, he could spin them out of control with too much thrust. When 47 finished counting, small drone spacecraft began appearing on Damion’s screen as they flowed from over the top of the Zeus and toward them.
Damion swerved the Zodiac left and decided that he would try to dip down below the drones first, hoping he could get an advantage over their superior numbers by surprising them.
“There are fifteen drones within the immediate vicinity and fifteen more out of view. All have full shield capabilities. They are limited in speed but have 25 percent more agility than Zodiacs,” 47 reported. “All systems are at maximum levels and working at 100 percent.”
“Thirty?” Damion exclaimed sharply in disbelief. “I thought this was supposed to be an easy gods-be-damned sim!”
Damion rolled them to the right and saw three of the drones pursuing him, so he increased their speed and raced toward the small craft above and in front of them.
“It is my belief that they are testing you beyond the other Alpha Fighters because you are the one I chose. They are wondering what you have over the other Alphas,” 47 stated as they performed a perfect 360-degree rotation. “The drones’ weapon systems are powering up. Six seconds until they fire.”
“Then let’s start firing first,” Damion said through clenched teeth, rolling the Ares and targeting the two drones in front of him before banking left past the third. “How close are they behind us?”
“They are approaching at ten kilometers per second and will be within optimal targeting range in sixty seconds. They are closer than the five approaching the bow of the Ares.” 47’s gaze flicked back and forth even faster in his supine body as he kept track of every enemy. “May I suggest a full flip movement, dispatch the enemies toward the stern, return to current position, and do the same to the enemies aft in under five seconds?”
“Five?” Damion let out a bark of laughter as he turned the aircraft around within a second. “You really do have high expectations!”
At least it was only a sim, but Damion didn’t want to die even a fake death. It wasn’t about pride. It was the fact that if he could die in practice, he could die during the real fight, and Damion had never had a death wish.
“My expectations, as you call them, are merely based on your logged skills and reaction times,” 47 said as Damion destroyed the three drones previously behind them.
Damion tensed to invert the ship again, and 47 silently asked the computer to boost the thrusters so that they flipped faster.
Damion was edgy and wired by the time they had dispatched the first ten drones and there were still twenty more to go. Fuck. “I need to put some distance between us so we can try and lose them.”
“Would you like me to activate booster fire?” 47 asked, helping maneuver the ship into a spin to avoid the stun fire from the drones.
If they were hit, the stun fire would impact the Ares’s hull and be noted by outside sensors to alert 47 that he and Damion had been “destroyed” after frequent direct hits or to simulate certain system losses.
“Yes, I’m going to bank right and use the Zeus to buy us some distance.” Damion turned the Ares and began swerving around the much larger ship. The Zeus was massive, and it took more than a few seconds to navigate around the multiple lighted decks. Around a thousand people, having no idea what was happening, were only meters away from them.
“Activating sub boosters now.” As soon as 47 ended the last word, the ship put on speed, pressing Damion back against his seat as they shot off. “Sub booster shut down in five seconds.”
“Fuck!” Damion wasn’t used to the speed that this craft held, and had to struggle to keep the Ares straight. “They following?”
“Affirmative, but at a much slower speed. However, there is a new, unauthorized opponent that has entered the battle area,” 47 informed him. “It is the Hephaestus, Fighter Arkin’s Zodiac.”
“Son of a bitch. Why would Command let him out now?” Damion suspected the Commander might want 47 dead, but this was going a bit too far. “All right, we need to sweep out the drones quickly. If they want to play dirty, let’s see if we can steer some of these stupid drones to run into his ship.”
“Unofficial authorization was given. The drones were not reprogrammed to attack the Hephaestus. Only the Ares.” The Core reported his findings unemotionally. “May I suggest the Cube technique to get rid of the drones?”
The Cube technique was well known to any pilot, but only a very few could pull it off. It involved very precise piloting skills that not many pilots, including Alphas, had the skill or the reaction time for. If performed correctly, the drones would not only run into the Hephaestus, but also each other. Damion had run it once in flight school, impressing a lot of people but also ending up with an earful from his sergeant. There was some crazy shit that looked good or remarkable but didn’t always work. Although Damion was a brand-new Alpha and the maneuver was difficult even for the Elite, he knew he could do it.
“You better be as good as you say you are, then,” Damion said through clenched teeth. He had better be as good as 47 thought he was too if this was going to work. “All right, let’s go under first, then swing left.”
“As you order.”
47 took control of the sub boosters; he activated them in short bursts, one at a time to correlate with Damion’s control on their maneuvers and weapons. The first three drones crashed into the Zeus when they dove under. As they
banked left, Damion shot straight down to avoid the two drones approaching them from opposite directions, causing them to crash into each other.
“Nine drones remaining. Hephaestus approaching from above the Zeus.”
“Fuck,” Damion cursed, banking hard up and back to flip and spin the spaceship completely around again toward the drones. “In about three seconds, I need some more speed.”
“If I may make a suggestion, fly away from the Zeus and let the Hephaestus follow you.”
The Core would generally use the sub boosters for tight maneuvering and short bursts of speed. Using the main boosters could make them fly faster, but it was hard on their bodies and the hull integrity if used for too long. But Damion had to trust 47 would activate them long enough for Damion to complete what he needed. “Firing main boosters.”
“Why do I want him to follow me?” Damion wasn’t against hearing suggestions since he was running out of ideas.
“Currently, he is at full capacity while you are at approximately 50 percent stamina. We have already been fighting, while he and his Core have not. The best course of action is to dispose of the Hephaestus quickly. While we would still achieve victory, our chance of doing so with limited damage drops the longer we wait,” 47 stated. “And I wish to perform an analysis of a modification that I have not yet been able to test.”
“Oh, well, don’t want to stop your research there, 47. Shit, I hate using a number for you.” Damion was babbling, but he was also trying to circle about and make sure he had the Hephaestus on his tail without getting said tail blown off.
“Bank starboard,” 47 instructed as he gauged the distance. “The Hephaestus is powering its weapons. Their ammunition is superior to the drones.”
Damion didn’t question; he just reacted. He suddenly realized that he had to trust 47 if they were going to make it out of this situation alive. Space streaked by outside the window.
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