Veronica shifted course just slightly and thumbed the missile release on her joystick. Two wholly simulated Sandtrap missiles lanced out from her fighter’s belly and simulated the act of turning two actual Wasp interceptors into simulated scrap. The planes obligingly powered down and tumbled several hundred kilometers outboard past Veronica’s attack group as the first volley of notional torpedoes launched from her bombers, and the carrier’s triple-A lit up space with a furious barrage of safely underpowered energy weapons fire.
Any fighter struck by even the lightest capital weapon was instantly tagged as dead, but the carrier’s opening volleys were focused on million-dollar decoys and turned them into very expensive simulated scrap while the actual spacecraft of the attack continued toward terminal assault range.
*
As the last fighters landed from the exercise, Lieutenant Veronica Gray finished her shutdown checks and stood up, hanging her helmet on the sill of the canopy. Josephson was standing at the bottom of her boarding ladder with a tight grin on her face.
“Lieutenant Gray, next exercise, stay away from the drive field. I have no idea how you got Baldwin to approve a move like that,” she snapped. There was an edge of grudging admiration in her voice, but only that–an edge.
Veronica bit the inside of her lip and ran her fingers back through her helmet-soaked hair, leaving a trail of blonde spikes behind them. “He knew a good idea when he saw one. Besides, the enemy’s not going to hesitate to use a dirty trick like that if they can, so training our people to recognize it is a job well-done, wouldn’t you say?”
“Lieutenant, no offense, but who’s going to have the balls to do that?”
Veronica grinned, “Commander, I did, and Chief Alyse helped me on it, and that means sooner or later, someone else’s going to as well.”
“Fair enough, and I’m probably just mad that Baldwin wiped the beer he owes me off the drink list. Bastard.” Josephson’s grin answered hers and she clapped the younger woman on the shoulder. “Let’s hit the showers, then the briefing room. You did well out there.”
*
Hair still wet from her shower, Veronica stood at impassive attention as Captain Harding apparently had decided to tear a stripe off her. It was working, and she bit the inside of her cheek as his rant continued, to keep herself focused on the facts and not the captain’s anger. The tight grey corridor seemed as though it were even tighter, and she felt as though she should crouch to avoid the pipes overhead. Or maybe that was just Captain Harding making her feel awkward.
“Lieutenant Gray, what you did out there today was one of the most irresponsibly over-aggressive moves I’ve seen in my years in this man’s Navy. What were you thinking?”
Veronica compressed her lips into a tight line. She thought she’d been prepared to handle professional criticism over her aggressive tactics, but she hadn’t expected the carrier’s skipper to personally step in. “Sir, we were outside of any danger radius at all times. The ship’s drive field posed no danger to any of my spacecraft.”
“Lieutenant,” the captain’s voice was dangerously soft, “You were placed in command of a strike package totaling some three and a half billion dollars of aerospace craft, and you chose to play overly ambitious games with their drives–and my own.”
Captain Baldwin stepped into the brewing confrontation. “Captain, the final authorization of Blue Force’s strike tactics was mine, and that included skimming the drive field as closely as she did. We want pilots to be audacious and to push their airframes to the limit.” He drew Harding aside, away from Veronica, and the senior officer dismissed her with a curt nod.
“Captain Baldwin, I appreciate the dedication to the hard work of your men and women, but the ultimate safety of and authority over this vessel is mine, not yours, and we both have responsibility for teaching her–not just you.” Harding’s eyes were beginning to soften slightly, “I remember what it was like to be a junior pilot and want to prove myself but damn it, Baldwin, you and I both know she’s going to go back to the space warfare side of the street in a couple years, and we don’t want her treating a half-million-ton heavy cruiser like it’s a fighter.”
Baldwin stuck his chin out a few centimeters further. “Sir,” he said, “Gray is a brand-new command pilot in my group. In the handful of days since she came on board, she’s been showing strong potential as a tactical officer. The ability to leap while looking–to start to act while you’re still developing a picture of what’s going on–is what separates a great commander from a merely competent one. And the discipline of the flight wing is my job, Captain, “He took a breath, “With due respect, sir, if we beat her over the head every time she pushes the envelope a little, we’ll end up putting her on the beach, where she’ll nurse a resentment for the Navy for the rest of her life.”
“Thinking of Charlie Solano, are we?”
“Yes, sir, I am. And of a certain squadron commander I didn’t listen to when I was a much younger and more impulsive man.”
“This squadron commander was probably a smart man.”
“He was, but he’s gotten a bit crotchety.”
Harding grunted softly. “Touché, Captain, though that was a bit of a low blow. Whatever my other faults, I’d like to think I’ve not gotten ‘crotchety.’ Yet. I’ll go apologize to the Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, Sir. Beers later?”
“If you’re buying, Jack.”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
Chapter 5
28th of 1st Month, 343
Some days later, the crew of Corvette Dog Two-Oh-Seven trooped aboard her again. The days after the successful exercise had been a whirlwind of simulated re-runs, tests, close examinations and dissections of Veronica’s successful assault tactic (the verdict was that without precise knowledge of the Lexington class carrier’s drive systems, the attack wouldn’t have gotten into range before interception), and paperwork. So much paperwork. One of the handful of differences between the simulation they’d just done and a real attack was that Dog Two-Oh-Seven wasn’t considered blooded. Until she successfully completed a combat mission, she and her crew would not have a name.
A starship captain’s apology was a rare nod–but even more important was the fact that Captain Baldwin had stepped into the proverbial line of fire to remind the Captain that the ambush had been something he himself had approved. She filed both examples away in her trove of reminders for how to conduct herself when she was herself the mistress and commander of a starship.
Despite its much-studied shortcomings, Veronica’s plan had earned her a twin appointment as Tactical Officer of the Pukin’ Dogs and Assistant Tactical Officer of the entire flight wing. The former was technically more prestigious, but she treasured the latter more because ATO (Wing) was responsible for routine deployments. As such, today’s operation was more or less entirely her own plan. She and Lieutenant Commander Saitova had spent an entire day getting inside each other’s head and formulating the deployment drops. Veronica had found it an eye-opening learning experience as her native enthusiasm collided with a superior officer’s knowledge and skills. Especially when the Lieutenant Commander pointed out that her original deployment plan would have left all of the corvettes spaced far too widely apart to even have a hope of intercepting anything that didn’t come within a hundred thousand kilometers of them.
Veronica switched mental “hats” and replayed their orders in her mind. This was their first formal deployment as semi-independent craft, but it was going to be a hard one. They would spend seven days patrolling the Salmani 314 star system–an obscure, barely-visited star system with only two planets, neither of them even remotely life-bearing. Insurance statistics for the sector showed a sharp rise in pirate activity, and this was the perfect spot for a hidden base of operations. The odds were against actually finding it, but a patrol in strength stood a good chance of netting some of the more active raiders and forcing the rest to lie low for at least a few weeks. So Avenger was dropping her fu
ll corvette wing in a fast “orbit” around the system primary. Eighty corvettes amounted to one every 4.5 degrees along the ecliptic, but very few spaceships ever used approaches that were more than a few degrees above or below the ecliptic anyway. The ship would then patrol still others for a week until it was time to recover the corvettes.
The carrier started dropping the Pukin’ Dogs in a long arc. Veronica watched on her main screen as the time for her launch counted down, wrapping her fingers around the stick and throttle. Ahead and behind her, Louis Bowman and Alyssa Yeboah were strapped into the Gunnery and EW/copilot seats; underneath them in the mid-deck, Kellie Alyse and Natasha Leblanc were sitting at the Engineering and Sensor stations. Being split across two decks wasn’t the most efficient setup for giving out orders, but a corvette simply didn’t have room for everyone in one place and her crew was expected to display high levels of personal initiative. In a way, every member of a corvette crew was their own department head.
Veronica smiled as the countdown hit zero. A regular cat shot was nowhere near as punishing as the emergency-power one they’d ridden on their previous launch, and she barely felt a whisker of acceleration as the corvette’s well-tuned compensators damped out the momentum. The fighter hit space and turned to its first outbound vector, drive flaring brightly as it cleared the carrier’s inner zone. Unlike a bigger warship, a corvette didn’t have the power budget for compensators powerful enough to fully match its engines at military thrust, so maximum acceleration pinned crew members to the backs of their chairs at five gees. Her arms that felt like they weighed close to a hundred pounds as she carefully pulled the her craft through the three high-energy course changes required to fully separate from the carrier, and she found herself sighing with relief when she was finally able to throttle back to the relative crawl of “only” about four hundred gees. Within twenty seconds of launch, Avenger was boosting away at over 500g, leaving eight fighters and two dozen drones to blanket a star system.
Veronica decided that the reality of a detached flight patrol already felt very different from the romantic reputation. She was glad to have her crew members with her. “Being out here on my own, I’d go stir-crazy within a day.”
“I know, Ma’am,” replied Natasha over the fighter’s intercom, “So would I.” They had all done training on a Firefox, the eighth and ultimate model of the venerable FA8C. A three-person heavy fighter capable of being flown and fully controlled in most flight regimes by one, the Firefox was faster and more maneuverable but could haul less firepower to the fight than the Tomcat. The last heavy fighter squadron had converted to the Tomcat-class corvette a year ago–the Firefoxes were now in service primarily as trainers, which they accomplished admirably. Their cockpits could be easily reconfigured for the training role, and they were easy ships to fly--far more forgiving than bigger, heavier Tomcats.
Natasha grabbed her helmet out of midair and clipped it to the rack on the side of her seat as she settled back into her station and noted a small meteoroid. It was inside the corvette’s immediate course zone, so she tagged it as a possible navigational hazard. Lieutenant Gray would see it if one of her maneuvers brought the corvette into conflict with the movement of the ‘roid, or if one of her drones was going to come in contact with it.
Veronica checked her station chrono. 0900, ship time. It was time to turn to 270 and start a twenty-minute, 400g burn. Then she started writing the first log entry as part of the Captain’s post-launch housekeeping tasks. Everyone in the craft would be busy for the entire first burn, as they set up house for a seven-day mission. They had three probe deployments scheduled, and orders to inspect shipping traveling through the system–a report had filtered back to sector command in the last few days about smugglers moving goods–and worse–through the system under the guise of legitimate trade.
Ship’s log, 28/1/343. 1244 Avenger Time. LT Veronica Gray recording. Corvette D207 proceeding to orbital position ecliptic +3, stellar rotation 330.2 for first drone deployment. All systems nominal at this time. With that, the first of what promised to be seven days of relatively similar logs was under their belt.
Yeboah looked to Veronica. “Commander, we’ve got about fifteen minutes to catch up on our housekeeping. I’m going to grab Leblanc and take care of some points on the EVA checklist so we can get right out there when we reach the first probe drop.” At 400g, the crew would feel no acceleration at all except for that of the deck plates, so they could easily move about the cabin. The corvettes would each deploy a net of twenty-four probes in selected areas to act as a tripwire against illegal activity or enemy advances through the system.
On the flight deck, Louis Bowman nervously picked his way through the checklist. This all seemed so easy when they were doing it in exercises and dry runs, and the actual tasks were still pretty easy–the motions were second nature to him by now. But he kept biting his lip in nervous thought as he double-checked each entry in his checklist. His combat deployments since joining the squadron had been indistinguishable from any other fighter’s deployments, just with a larger crew of spacers on board. Now they were doing missions that only a corvette could do, and they wouldn’t have support from the carrier or from any fighters other than their distant squadron mates for a whole week.
Kellie’s hand squeezed Louis’ shoulder as she settled into the copilot’s seat, replacing Yeboah. “Relax, kid,” she said, “The captain won’t let anything bad happen to you or to any of us. Trust me, and trust her.” He found himself relaxing minutely at least. He flew through the rest of his checklist and managed to finish it on time.
Veronica smiled slightly at Kellie’s reassurance.
*
Alyssa Yeboah and Natasha Leblanc stood on the rim plate of the airlock as they finished their power armor startup checks. One of the many uses of the versatile Cache suit was its ability to act as a heavy EVA suit.
“Ready for your first professional spacewalk, kid?” She flexed her fingers in the metallic gauntlet, running startup programs. The HUD showed that she had a full suite of ready thrusters and two hours of air ready.
Leblanc’s eyes glowed with excitement. Being able to move free of a spaceship was one of the Service’s great privileges. She’d spacewalk-trained in boot camp, of course, but she hadn’t been in vacuum since then.
The door cycled and she gazed out on deep space. Taking a deep breath, she stepped out onto the corvette’s fuselage, walking on the skin of her home. She knew that she was technically inverted relative to the ship, but her perception didn’t see it that way.
“Okay, now disengage your mag boots and jet over to the probe over there.” The big three-ton space probe contained both passive and active sensors, and could detect a space warp of a one-hundredth gee within two AUs.
Natasha took another deep breath and clicked off her grav boots… and nearly laughed with the joy of feeling herself float free of the hull. Engaging her suit thrusters, she gently squeezed forward at a mere one m/s2, cautiously approaching the probe.
“Now, stand clear of the probe at four meters, and we’ll let its externals deploy on their own,” came Yeboah’s voice over the comm. She was approaching at 4 m/s and did a quick backflip to put her thrusters in the right path to bring her to a stop next to Natasha.
Yeboah seemed to have no problem floating next to Natasha but inverted relative to her. Suits tended to homogenize everyone’s body language but somehow Yeboah’s casual elegance came through just fine.
“Skipper, we’re ready to begin probe antenna deployment.”
“Roger that EVA-1, EVA-2, how’s your first spacewalk coming?” Veronica’s voice sounded tinny over the speaker, which annoyed Yeboah slightly. They had more than enough bandwidth for crystal-clear audio transmissions, but somehow Fleet wanted radio communications to sound… different. Like a spacewalker wouldn’t remember that the person talking to them wasn’t right next to her? She thought it was ridiculous.
Natasha swallowed a little. “Exciting, nerve-wracking
… beautiful. I can’t believe I’m out here, like this.”
“Well, you two have fun out there, but don’t forget to wipe your feet when you come back in.” Yeboah could hear the dry, arch humor in Veronica’s tone.
“Yes, Mom,” chorused the two women.
Yeboah sent a signal to the probe and it began unfolding. First the high-tech flower of its high-gain antenna, irising into position. Then came the antennae of the sensor systems, thorn-like.
“It looks like we’ve got a good deploy,” said Yeboah.
From the ship, Kellie’s voice responded, “Good sensor feeds on this end, we’re ready to send Probey the Probe on his merry way.” The small probe boosted off downrange at a mere 8 m/s2, not even a measurable percentage of its mother ship’s amazing speed, “You two want to stay outside for a bit? We’re a half-hour ahead of schedule, we’ve got the slack to do it.”
Yeboah was about to demur, but she saw the look of wonder on Natasha’s face. She remembered her own first spacewalk, and how she’d never wanted to go back in to the claustrophobic reentry capsule for descent back to Terra. It was a totally different feeling than flying about in a starship, and Leblanc would have plenty of time to come to see EVA as a hassle. Let her have the wonder.
“Let’s take advantage of that half-hour, Skip.”
Chapter 6
Unseen by any member of Avenger’s corvette wing, the freighter Arrant Knave dropped from faster than light to slower, and headed in-system. Jonah Ress found it slightly inconvenient, or more accurately just a little bit too convenient in Duke Ifrit’s favor, that Ifrit’s own repair yards had undercut by twenty percent the price estimates of every other yard on the planet. More worrisome was that he hadn’t been allowed to check the contents of his hold until just before takeoff, a stipulation which had almost convinced him to scotch the whole deal. But in the end, they didn’t really have a choice, did they?
Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) Page 4