I'd love to say it took a lot of convincing to get me on board with the concept of running essentially a black op into a sovereign planet. I'd also love to say I wasn't chomping at the bit. I can't say either of those things. A man whom I had the utmost respect for was offering me a devil's deal, and I wasn't strong enough to turn it down.
Chapter 7
Legionnaires all have the same basic level of training. Our original design was based on classic shipboard combat with an expeditionary mindset so we could head down to planets and conduct ground combat as needed. Sea based infantry became our historical examples for modern operations. Depending on aptitude, we go on to more specialized areas. My official designation was demolitions, but all that really meant is I knew how to tear things apart, usually with lots of explosives. It also meant I had spent quite a lot of time looking at structures ranging from mud huts to dams figuring out their various strengths and weaknesses. I'm not the best, but I'm very good.
I don’t want to give the impression I’m arrogant about my skills. I’m not. However, I am confident. I’ve got a lot of proverbial gun time under my belt and I know what I’m doing when it comes to my specialty. I also know what the limits of those skills are. I’ve popped smoke before when I wasn’t good enough or when I knew there were better folks more suited for the task. Nothing wrong with calling in help or asking for a second opinion. Too much pride will get you killed, and I like my skin.
The General and I started with my baseline micro level knowledge and bumped it up to the macro. Rather than looking at bridges and buildings, we went global with towns and cities. He pushed me harder mentally than I had ever been before. A completely different experience from being part of a larger class. Unfortunately, without others, any lulls or breathers were removed from the training process. I felt like I was going from simple math to rocket science in less than a month. In big classes, it’s only possible to learn as fast as the slowest person. By reducing the number of people, it speeds up the rate at which information can be mastered. The focused one-on-one training accelerated my learning to migraine inducing levels. Pain is an excellent motivator though because it makes you remember. The General wasn’t trying to cause harm but he had priorities.
On top of that, my workouts with Robert went from twice a week to twice a day. He had been holding back on me, and I was starting to feel the increased regiment by workout number three. If not for the nanites I would have been constantly bruised and bloodied. Even with them, it took a couple of weeks to get past the soreness of the new enhanced workout routine. I think he was pushing them to the upper limits while the General did the same to my mind.
Once the General was satisfied I had my head wrapped around global logistics to a passable level, he shipped me off to the DLF training facility near Tycho Crater. The DLF or Defense of Luna Force was the police on Luna. Not as though one was needed, not like on most planets. Looneys do not call for help preferring to take care of things themselves. The DLF dealt with the possibility of someone thinking invasion was a good idea. Anybody thinking so was in for a bad time. Looneys had no problem hunkering down, venting a dome, and then picking off anyone stupid enough to try one by one until they ran out of air, water, or food.
But the DLF was a sort of a first and last line of defense. They maintained the defensive arrays and were able to go head to head in land-based combat if they ever had to. Their mission was different, but the training was directly comparable to the Legion. No one really attacked the moon, though, so most of the DLF’s time was spent as something more akin to beat cops. They were part of the community and maintained a sort of brand awareness. The best kind of policing is being visible. The vast majority of criminals fall under the stupid or lazy category. By having the DLF cops seen, Luna avoided a megatonne of problems. Additionally, when everyone and their cousin was invested in the well-being of the domes, most issues don’t happen. Not to say Luna didn’t have its own share of turmoil, but Looneys took a direct view of handling it.
Most of their members were militia, reserve types. Luna has a two-year mandatory service requirement. It didn’t have to be military as service could be done in almost any sector, and many folks knocked it out doing janitorial before they reached their majority at eighteen. Looneys viewed Citizenship as coming with obligations, including a payback for education, training, and just breathing. People like the General had completed theirs through the Diplomatic Corps. It turned out Lysha was a qualified ship mechanic and others opted for the DLF, mainly because they offer genemod.
Genemod or genetic modification is where the scientists tweak the DNA sequences a bit. It gives us humans a few advantages. The big one people are familiar with is gravity acclimation. The human body adapted to grow in Terra’s gravity, what most people refer to as normal grav. That’s 9.81 m/s², but someone spending their entire life in 1.62 m/s², like the moon, and they aren't really fit to travel anywhere else.
With the right kind of genemod and intensive training, a person ends up insanely strong, fast, and able to travel anywhere without having to worry about it. This is something Terrans take for granted, but Looneys have to think about. Folks like the General didn’t need same types of acclimation, so visiting anywhere with more gravity than Luna became a huge issue. Lysha had gone through some of it during her payback because mechanics need to have a good amount of physical strength even in low-g. But Luna treated the process as an investment as a strong Citizenry is a strong Nation. For others gravity isn’t really a big deal most of the time. Tech helps and all, but something as simple as wanting to go on vacation becomes infinitely more complex for folks from low-g worlds.
On top of acclimation are immunities. Some humans have a predisposition towards specific disease and sickness. We mapped the genome almost two centuries back, and although we don't know what causes every sickness, or how to cure it, every generation we get a little closer. When someone knows there’s a potential ticking time bomb somewhere in their future, why not trade a couple of years when they’re young to get rid of the possibility in the future?
The DLF was a great resource because of not only location but also access to several tools, beneficial to our mission. General Campbell needed me on Terra and the simplest way to do that actually was have me fly down solo. But I had absolutely zero training. Legion farms combat pilot school out to the Mariners based off Titan, but the DLF also had a moderate sized flight school, which was why I was at Tycho Station.
When I got there, I met by the crustiest Sergeant Major I had ever seen. I'm not sure what crypt the DLF pulled him out of, but he had to be pushing two-fifty. He could have given Schmiddy a decent run for who was going to expire first. He spotted the abundance of stripes on my arm and grabbed my arm like we had been buddies since basic. Hell of a thing, as Schmiddy would say. There’s some sort of kinship that develops when you start pinning them on. Like wearing your resume on your chest. The Legion doesn’t have Sergeants Major, which from our view is more of a billet than a rank. They’re the guys commanders go to for advice about the men and morale. I don’t have the right kind of personality to fill that role being good with individuals, not groups. I’m more of a technical expert, which is why I wear the gold mastery insignia of my branch on my collar. It made us peers in grade if not equals in position. As he walked me around the base, I found out he was a pensioner from a century back. Served on the original Ozzie, the sister-ship to my own Europe.
After he retired, and eventually settled back on Luna he decided to turn his skills to training. The kind of training that kept young bucks like me alive in the far reaches of space. Book knowledge is amazing but comes from scientists and writers. The kind of training this old soldier gave was hard-won and contained a full century of actual experience. As time goes by human kind becomes more and more reliant on tech, the old timers like him and me, to a much lesser degree, keep the new guys grounded in non-tech solutions. DLF was a good fit for him keeping him engaged, active, and all that expertise wasn't lost
.
Since the main mission of DLF is to keep things from getting bad, he loaded me up on what he called “a little light reading.” I'm not sure if he was joking or not, but it looked like every book DLF had on reconnaissance and undercover work. He then turned me loose and said flight school would start the following day. He seemed less worried about that since the ship's onboard computer should be able to handle most of the heavy lifting. I needed to be able to look the part, and talk my way through approach and landing.
I had been hooked up with a stateroom so I hunkered down and started plugging away at the books until I felt like I couldn't fit any more in my head and crashed. When I was much younger I was a horrible student, but I have always loved to read. I’ve had to learn how to study in the Legion to stay proficient. Dealing with explosives gave me exactly the push I needed to refine my education standards. My survival on Terra was no less important to this mission so I had the incentive I needed to keep pushing.
The next day, we went through probably the most boring morning of my adult life. I don’t even get bored, but if I had a spoon on me, I would have scooped one of my own eyes out, to get a slight reprieve from it. I can’t blame my instructor, because just I didn't have the background, and he was trying to figure out how to make a comparable model for someone well past his learning prime. Despite looking half my chronological age, at least by Terran standards, I was essentially an old man trapped in a young body. That made picking up new concepts a hell of a lot harder than back when I was a kid.
A product of a living in space is we forget the outer wrapping doesn’t necessarily match our insides. It gets even weirder when you add in deep-sleep. For a guy like me, I looked about twenty-five but had about forty-two years of awake time, and fifty linear. The General was triple that, but only looked fiftyish in Terran terms, and someone like Schmiddy or my new Sergeant Major buddy looked like the walking dead. For Thomas Knox, all he saw was a young buck needing training and approached the issue like he would every other wannabe pilot.
My instructor, was a Mariner who was originally from Ganymede, but wanderlust and the stars made him join the Space Mariners’ Guild as soon as he could legally thumb on. Unlike the Legion, the Mariners’ Guild didn’t really have a retirement program. They just worked folks until their pilots quit. I’d personally never heard of anyone doing that, though. The guys who ended up as Mariners had a different kind of outlook on life centered on exploration and travel. Thom was no different. He was back on Luna as part of a training tour as a mid-career breather waiting to get back out to the stars.
He’d been back on Luna for about a year and a half and had been itching to leave for about twelve months. He had a cool steady confidence of someone who was very good at his job, unfortunately, because he knew it so well and had spent years around others in the same career he spoke in a hodgepodge of trade-speak and jargon, mostly flying right over my head, forcing me to stop him every couple of minutes. Each question I asked would spiral into several additional questions to the point where I felt safer not asking questions at all. It was hard to avoid that urge because I knew the mentality was not only lazy but also dangerous.
He was pounding regulation, theory, and standard control layouts into me. Once we got to the last part, things started to click a little, since almost everything from hoppers to angrav sloops used almost the same setup. I'd used hoppers back in Alaska when I was a kid, and I loved watching them race, so I went from death by vid to wide awake almost instantly. Thom saw my level of engagement jump and asked if I wanted to try my hand in the simulator. Hell yes, I would!
“We're going to start you off on something small. We'll use a light shuttle. A little ten-seater. Lots of maneuverability and wide open space. It will give you a feel for the controls. Since we're in a sim, I'll let you crash, but co-chair if you have any questions.” He plopped down beside me and I watched how he moved. If I was going to pretend how to be a pilot, I needed to mirror the little things too.
He fired up the system, and for practice walked through a launch sequence, as though we were leaving a satellite, then turned the controls over to me. I have to admit there was a bit of an adrenaline rush. The grav system tied directly into the sim, so as soon as we pretend launched, I felt the loss of gravity, and lifted out of my seat. Then a shift as we accelerated. Like I said, it’s the little things. I quickly buckled my restraints, as Thom laughed, and pointed to the grav controls “keep her at point one five standard grav, which is comfortable for most folks, and bump the decel damps to ninety-three cabin, 100 all others. You'll want to feel the boat moving in here, but we don't want fluids flying back there.” I did as instructed, adding the advice to my mental checklist.
“Sorry about that, but the best way to learn is to feel the drop firsthand. You tend not to forget after that. The guy who taught me, Grimes, dropped us off a cliff at four gees to drive the lesson home. I figured you didn't need as much a push” He smiled. I told him I appreciated it, and he pointed me towards a nearby moon on the display telling me to make my way there.
After a few minutes “Not bad, you have a bit of a knack. You sure you don't have any training?” I told him nothing larger than a hopper back home, back when I was a kid. “Hmm... let me try something here, you keep us going towards that moon. All right?” That was when the real fun began.
For the next hour, his hands were a blur on his panel, as I did everything in my power to keep us pointed in the same direction. I was sweating bullets by the time he said: “I give up.” Huh? I gave him a look inviting him to tell me what he meant. “Someone’s been screwing with your head. Probably a long time ago. Your sense of spatial geography is too good.” He paused the sim a second and pulled up a display showing how I did. A lot of green on the board, and only a few orange. “These should have killed us both. And nothing on this screen should be above yellow past here.”
I knew I had extensive dataware, but I had always assumed it was only math based. Bad assumption apparently. I told Thom about my first liner trip, and he laughed. “Yah, I've heard of them doing them doing that before.” He hesitated for a moment then said. “That pineapple on your collar is for ordnance right?” I nodded, not correcting him about the bursting bomb insignia. “The Legion probably did it to give you an edge with that. This is a side effect. Doesn't take with everyone, and the Guild doesn't like mixing too much ware because of our own conditioning. The human mind is fragile, and you can only bend it so much. Causes issues if not done right or you’re under too long. But, now we know what we're working with, let's have some fun with some bigger boats.” Why did I not like it when people in authority used the word fun?
We kept going until we got to ships so big the sim didn't have the computing power to deal with us. About that time Pembroke, the Sergeant Major who greeted me originally came to end our fun for the day. Rather than getting more solo lessons, he had me auditing classes with his guys. It was a welcome break from the entire one-on-one time, which had started to stress my abilities. It’s a sad state of affairs when a completely new skill set is the least stressful only because of the shared experience. His included everything from video surveillance to computer usage. As we weren't exactly sure what I was going to need, but we figured more knowledge was going to be better and tried to get me as solid a core as possible.
Over the next month, this routine repeated at a near constant pace, until I eventually graduated from sims to real shuttles, and eventually larger ships, and Pembroke had me doing light training runs back in Luna City. Nothing significant, but feet wet level type things. Get as much practice in as possible. One of the most interesting things was having me try and spot some of his undercover agents and trainees if I could. With that exercise, I was most surprised by the false positives or people I thought were potentials than those who I completely missed.
I started dividing my time between the two locations, and we started fleshing out the actual plan since we had a real grasp of what I was capable of and what I was co
mfortable with. It also gave me a chance to spend some more quality time with Lysha, sorely lacking since I had started my training over at Tycho.
On one such occasion, she dragged me into the bowels of Luna, far deeper than I knew even existed. Eventually, we ended up in the largest hangar I have ever seen. I think the Rope, the Ozzie, and the Compass could have docked inside and there would have been room to spare. A multi-level affair, filled with hundreds of ships of all sizes, but three stood out in particular. They were on the main launch pad and looked ready for takeoff. The smallest was an executive yacht, which I assumed was Lysha's. The next larger parked beside it was an old Liberty class, heavily modified, and updated. I'd guess in the fifty-tonne range. Light and agile. The last boat was hard to make out but looked to be over two-hundred meters long, and in the hundred kilotonne range. I was very familiar with the body design having served on the Gerdes, but this looked older and had the wrong coloring being a deep royal. If I didn't know better she was a Valor-class hospital ship. I pointed her out to Lysha.
“You've got a good eye, that's Heart. We're going to see him.” I gave her a questioning look when she said him since we usually refer to ships as women. Having one called him struck me as odd. She caught my expression and smiled. “You'll see.” As we got closer, I realized the ship was indeed a Valor-class, but not one of the second or third generations, like the Gerdes, but one of the first generations. When she said Heart, I had assumed the name was short for something else like Heart of the Sea or The Dragon’s Heart, but this was the Heart. One of the original four ships of the class.
The hanger was huge, even with slide-walks, but we eventually made our way to the Heart. Lysha palmed us through the portal and out of habit; I requested permission to come aboard. “Granted, Lieutenant Gadsden. You are always welcome aboard.” A distinctly male voice. I looked to Lysha.
Ships of Valor 1: Persona Non Grata Page 5