“Cyril, go!” Reilly said and began to run down the hall toward the bridge. They reached the hatch. Drake’s back was to them off to the left of the hatch. She smiled at Cyril. “Drop it, Drake! Drop it now!”
He turned, smiling, gun pointed at her. “Oh, I don’t think so, Reilly. You are going to lower yours, right now.”
A cold chill ran down Reilly’s back. She peered inside the hatch, to the right, and lowered her weapon. “Shit!”
“Captain!” Jazdie screamed, sobbing, as a man held an arm around her neck, his pistol pointed at her head.
“Jazdie, no!” Cyril yelled, pointing his gun at Drake. “Let her go, right now, or I’ll drop you where you stand!”
The man pushed the muzzle of his pistol harder into Jazdie’s temple, causing her to scream.
Cyril sighed, blinked slowly, and lowered his gun. “God. Dammit!”
“Don’t be hard on her, Reilly. She took out two of my men. Nicely played, too. That’s twice in one day you’ve nearly foiled my plans! Are you going all creative on us now? Where was that when we were sleeping—”
“Shut up, you fucking—”
“Oh, come off it, Reilly. You’re no better than the rest of us, so cut the bullshit.” He walked over to Jazdie and squeezed her chin in his huge hand. “We’re all reasonable, consenting adults here, aren’t we, little girl?”
“Boss, there was three of ‘em,” one of his men said.
Drake glared at Reilly as his men searched her and Cyril and bound their hands behind them. “Hey, you! Motherfucker down the hall,” he yelled through the hatch. “Get your ass up here or you’ll never see Reilly alive again!”
Reilly heard Locke’s swearing echo down the hall. When he finally hobbled up to the hatch, Drake dragged him in. “My, my, such language!” and bound Locke’s hands.
“All of you, get over there,” Drake said, motioning them to the front of the bridge past the helm station. “Stay on the floor or I’ll put you in the airlock for safe keeping.”
Reilly, Jazdie, Locke, and Cyril were roughly thrown to the floor of their own bridge. Reilly was a mass of barely-controlled rage.
“I’m sorry, captain,” Jazdie whispered.
Reilly looked her in the eyes, a blank expression on her face. “You did good, girl.”
Jazdie smiled and blushed a bit and looked away.
“Here it is, captain,” one of the men said from the other side of the bridge. Drake walked over to him. The other man grunted while lifting up what looked like a space suit, at first glance, but Drake realized what it was after taking a closer look. “Perfect. But that looks pretty advanced for old Seerva tech, don’t it?”
“Beats me, boss. Mitch might know what it is.”
“Fine. Take it down to cargo. We’ll secure salvage first, then get you all patched up,” he said to his wounded man while another hauled off the man Cyril had killed with the headshot.
“I lost two good men today, Reilly. For what, your cargo? Oh, I’m taking the ores and gear from your hold. But this,” he said, holding up the robot, “is what they really died for. Do you have any idea what this is?”
Reilly turned away, struggling against the wrist binders that were cutting into her skin.
“I’ll tell you. It’s old Seerva tech, been floating around out here for more’n a decade. It’s worth a small fortune to the right buyer. You all could have shared this with us instead of bleeding and losing it outright.”
Jazdie leaped to her feet and launched a kick squarely into the robot’s torso, which caused Drake to fall with the robot landing heavily on top of him, making a crack sound as it hit him in the nose. Jazdie then got two good kicks to his ribs before he grabbed her leg and another man knocked her down.
Cyril stood and was about to rush the nearest man when the man turned his gun onto Cyril, motioning him to sit back down.
“No, Jazdie! Stop!” Reilly yelled.
“Shit, that hurt!” Drake said, rubbing his lower back as one of his men helped him up. Blood dripped from his broken nose. He pulled a tissue out of a pocket and put it to his nose. “Dammit, girl! Your skull is as hard as this thing’s,” he said and kissed her hard. Jazdie screamed and spit at him and he laughed.
“Know what, Reilly? I was just going to let you go, call it even—your cargo for my men, and chalk their deaths up to hazards of the job. But this little firecracker needs to be taught a lesson first.”
“Jones, take this thing down to the hold, and have Mitch take a look at it as soon as he’s done patching you up.”
“Right away, cap’n,” the man said, hauling the robot noisily through the airlock into the other ship.
Drake yanked Jazdie to her feet and began hauling her toward the rear bridge exit.
“No!” Cyril yelled. “Please! I’ll do anything, just don’t hurt her.” He yanked violently against the hand restraints, drawing blood.
“Oh, I’m not going to hurt her,” he said, dragging her into the hall and out of sight.
“Oh, no,” Reilly moaned. “I should have just kept her with me.”
“Should’ve let me go,” Locke said and regretted it at once.
Reilly glared at him but said nothing.
Drake dragged the girl into the galley and threw her face first onto the nearest table. She screamed, bucked her head backward, tried to claw with her bound hands, tried to kick backward, but it was no good. He unzipped her blue jumpsuit and yanked it down, and—holding her down—he cut the wristbands off and pulled the jumpsuit down to her ankles.
He looked around the room, near the ceiling, and found what he was looking for. He aimed his pistol and fired, destroying the monitor camera.
As if just realizing what was happening, Jazdie stopped fighting. “Oh—god—no—please. . . . I’m sorry for kicking you! I’m sorry about your nose! Oh—please—just—”
He yanked her panties down roughly.
She was startled by the sudden violation . . . and gasped. Not too long ago this would have traumatized her; but now, instead, it just pissed her off.
She tried kicking backward but he had her pinned. Like he’d done this before.
“You . . . mother . . . fucking . . . rat . . . bastard. I’m gonna . . . tear your . . . balls off and . . . stuff-them. . . .”
Chapter 15
Wing Commander
Marjorie recalled the first time she had seen a jet launched from the deck of an aircraft carrier. It had been one of the old steam catapults but no less impressive, able to pull a 15-ton fighter to 160 miles per hour in two seconds flat.
There was no need for a space fighter craft to achieve lift, but it was still essential to get out of the Lexington as fast as possible on a scramble. Fighters were launched from small bays adjacent to the hangar deck with magnetic boost—six bays at port, six at starboard. The large hangar occupied several decks amidships, where fighters were refueled, repaired, and armed between sorties.
Despite the ship’s capacity, they had only four, and no spare engines or other major components. Pilots really had to be careful as they couldn’t afford to lose a single one even due to a minor mishap. Unfortunately, that meant reduced flight hours and every pilot needed those hours to master the flight dynamics of the new design. There was only so much you could learn in sim.
Marjorie snapped her helmet’s clamp shut as the canopy slid closed overhead. She punched a green button on the left-hand console to sync the craft with her suit. The suits were not pressurized but the nanomaterial would keep her alive for up to six hours in vacuum—according to the white coats. Being exposed to vacuum was unlikely, though. If she had to punch out, the whole cockpit would go with her and keep her alive. If her plane—she still couldn’t shake the old word—was so badly damaged that the cockpit was a wreck, her body would probably be in bad shape anyway so it wouldn’t matter.
You just don’t want to survive in that condition—like a sailor missing limbs, floating in the ocean, fast food for a shark. Better off dead.
Marjorie recalled an old sailor’s story once, about World War II sailors in the drink after abandoning ship. They saw the sharks coming, saw their fellow seamen, one after the other, scream and go under, saw the water turn red. There was one old master chief who had his service pistol. The men—boys, really—begged him, as the sharks took their fellow sailors, one by one, and drew nearer. He’d refused, but handed over the 1911—seven in the clip, one in the chamber.
Each sailor helped the man next to him pull the trigger. It was abject terror and misery; true hell on Earth.
One of them screamed and went under before it was his turn, causing the others to do it quicker. Every time the gun went off, it was followed by screaming and crying. Even when merciful, pointing a gun at a man’s head and pulling the trigger took more guts than you’d believe. Even when men were having their legs yanked off five yards away, with the threat directly underfoot, pulling that trigger was still terrifying.
One of the sailors almost dropped the gun, so horrified was he as blood gushed from the head of his fellow seaman. The master chief had survived while hundreds had not, and had lived with the horror of what he’d done for decades before sharing the story. Had it been merciful, giving those young men his gun?
But, odds were better for a pilot ejecting in space than in an atmosphere. In the vacuum, you had to worry about your suit and air supply more than anything else.
She hit a red button on the right-hand console to power up. There was no pre-flight check at this stage—that was done on the hangar floor by the crew. The craft did a better job checking itself out than any eyeball check could do anyway. Some pilots insisted out of habit but that was purely psychological. If there was something catastrophically wrong, the onboard computers would know it long before the pilot.
Marjorie looked around. The helmet masked the cockpit’s walls, giving her a full view of her surroundings, which at the moment was a gray metal box. The outer hatch was already opening, revealing the stark starfield beyond. The launch bay was only twice as long as the SF-100 Wasp. The Wasp was unlike any aircraft Marjorie had flown. The fuselage was an exercise in practical suprematism, looking like nothing more elaborate than a long, narrow, carbon-gray box.
That had been Marjorie’s first impression of a Wasp. No wings, no windows, no canopy—or even the bump of a canopy—and no landing gear, just sleds. When air friction is not a factor, the familiar aircraft designs are irrelevant. Beautiful air-cutting edges and smooth surfaces replaced with offensively utilitarian cuboid shapes.
In other words, the SF-100 was ugly as hell.
“Ah, dammit,” she said.
“Problems, sir?” her wingman asked.
“Uh, not functionally, Wolf. Just not right, sitting here. This heap is a crate with an engine.”
“Roger that.”
“My preference toward preserving my own life aside, I don’t feel any compulsion about keeping this ugly heap in one piece.”
“Stow it, Rox,” came the familiar voice of the XO.
“Sir! Didn’t know you were piped into the wing channel.”
“Rox, that wasn’t the wing channel,” the XO said.
“My apologies, sir,” Marjorie said.
“Copy that, Rox. Carry on.”
Marjorie laughed at the recollection—the first time she had laid eyes on a Wasp, she had said, “So where’s this new fighter?” Sitting on the deck in front of her was some functional part of the ship, she’d assumed—or a long, narrow metal crate with odd attachments. It was all boxes to her mind’s eye—dark gray boxes stacked on the deck. Were it not for the engine in the rear. . . .
She walked around it, looking at it from the front and rear. Frowning at Captain Long, she’d said, “It has a vaguely familiar shape, like a fighter wrapped in crates.”
Long had laughed, “I almost refused to allow them on board. But, you’ll be sold after your first test flight.”
“That thing,” Marjorie had said with a look of horror on her face, “can’t possibly fly!”
“Take her out, see what she can do,” he’d said. An hour later, she just smiled and nodded, looking very satisfied—wearing a scandalous expression that only a fellow pilot would truly appreciate.
The cockpit was located at the center of mass so the pilot was always centered during pivot maneuvers—a bit aft of the physical center of the fuselage, in front of the bulky engine. The pilot’s control stick (located on the right-hand console) caused control jets to squirt air from several locations around the craft, giving the pilot full maneuverability in two dimensions—while the third dimension was a result of forward thrust.
The two dimensions were easiest to visualize by thinking of the nose moving left, right, up, and down. In addition, the pilot could apply maneuvering jets in such a way that would shift the entire craft up, down, left, or right—or trigger a twisting maneuver, putting the craft into a spin on its spinal axis.
It was nothing like flying a plane. None of those skills transferred.
Marjorie and her pilots had all gone through space flight training in sims and had practiced with maneuverable cockpits in zero gee before going through a crash course in prototype fighters. It was absolutely different from flying an aircraft, and it seemed to her that anyone could pilot a Wasp since skills did not transfer from air to space. But, here they were and it was a new frontier. The last great revolution of flight had been prop to jet a century ago, which was quite a change, but the physics of flight had remained the same. Well, mostly the same—VTOL-capable aircraft like the F-35 were tricky.
Not so in space with maneuvering jets rather than ailerons and wings. Another jarring adjustment was the fact that a space fighter was not under continuous thrust to stay in the air. One blip of thrust causes a spacecraft to move, and it will continue moving in the same direction forever.
“Are we good to go?” she asked the ship.
The SF-100 Wasp answered instantly, saying, “All systems ready.” The voice was a precise dialect of modern Anglo. And, thank God it’s not cheery, Marjorie thought to herself. The last thing she wanted to put up with in a dogfight was a chipper idiot for a computer.
She leaned back and said, “Launch!”
It wasn’t nearly as spine-crushing as a catapult launch but there were still a couple gees to contend with. She twisted the stick in her right hand in a curl motion that caused the Wasp to rotate horizontally without banking. Still heading outward from the Lexington, she smiled when the ship came into view from the left. Having a three-sixty view through the augmented reality helmet meant she could look anywhere around herself and even zoom in on a target.
“That explains the nonexistent cockpit!” This thing feels absolutely alien, she thought to herself. She hadn’t logged enough hours yet to feel like she belonged in the cockpit, like she’d earned the right to push it to its limits. You had to respect the machine before it would give you its best.
After centering on the Lexington, she gave the control stick one blip with a right twist to stop the rotation. It wasn’t perfect; the ship kept rotating to the right, ever so slowly. Precise maneuvering was impossible without assistance. To move precisely toward a target, she would lock on to a waypoint and tell the ship to match trajectory. It didn’t matter which direction the ship was facing, it would pivot and rotate until facing that target and micro-adjust until heading directly toward it with little to no variance. Similarly, there was no stopping in space.
A pilot could maneuver to a near-still position relative to some other object, such as the Lexington. But, that object was probably moving as well. In space, the closest a fighter pilot could get to feeling motionless was on deck inside the Lexington, never out in a small fighter.
Like standing on the ground on Earth, even though Earth rotates on its axis and orbits the sun. A good pilot can sense their orientation and relative movement better than the average person. Ironically, despite being locked inside a metal crate, pilots were prone to agoraphobia with the expose
d universe arrayed around them. Fortunately, there were screens inside the cockpit in case the helmet failed.
The second starboard Wasp launched and angled toward her. “Wolf, on me,” she said.
“Affirmative.”
Marjorie watched as Lieutenant Akecheta Whitewolf, callsign “Wolf”, angled his Wasp in her direction. She rotated to a target waypoint ahead of the Lexington and hit the thrust, quickly leaving the cruiser behind, with Wolf keeping pace at her wing. If you could call it a wing, she thought.
“Hex, Bowman, report in,” Marjorie said, noting that the other two Wasps had launched from the port side of the Lexington.
“On the way,” said Lieutenant Cristina Ramos, callsign “Hex”. She was a nervous perfectionist. Despite her thin build and soft voice, she could stare down a drill sergeant. She had thin black hair that she wore straight in the back, adding to her severe, statuesque posture. Younger male spacers swore her eyes glowed red in the dark.
“You don’t waste any time, boss,” Bowman said as he and Hex came up from the rear.
“Cut the chatter, Bowman,” Marjorie said, a bit too bitingly.
“Crap jettisoned,” he said. Lieutenant Jeff Black, callsign “Bowman”, was a sharp shooter and sharp talker who always had to get in the last word. She’d heard rumors about Bowman—the usual machismo bullshit about his girls back on Earth. All hearsay.
“Form up, arrow formation,” Rox said.
Hex closed the gap quickly and formed up on Rox’s port side, with Bowman at her wing to the left.
“Good,” Marjorie said. “Good control there, Hex. Remember, we’re setting precedents out here, making up the rules as we go along. I know we’ve been over this many times, but it bears repeating because none of us have the muscle memory yet, so we have to think and that’s slow!
The Legacy of Earth (Mandate Book 2) Page 15