Stars Fell on Trieste

by M. Alan Marr

  “None available.”

  “Divert to the closest ship?” Harrison says.

  “No one in range.”

  “Head to the nearest Crown outpost,” Jen suggests.

  “Sorry, nearest outpost has been overrun by Yeti.”

  Matt rolls his eyes. “You guys are so dumb. The answer is right in front of us.”

  “What, the nebula?” Jen says.

  Dev smiles. “And what’s a nebula made of?”

  “Rocks,” Jen says.

  “Some. But there’s also plenty of gasses out there. We’re going to fly into the nebula, search out the oxygen, and replenish our tanks.”

  “Well, that’s not hard,” Jen says with her characteristic snark.

  Dev keys a sequence into his onboard computer, causing the detection systems in the Midshipmen’s trainers to fail and go dark.

  Steve looks at his panel. “Hey . . . I’ve got a problem here.”

  “Me too,” Harrison says.

  “Oh no!” Dev says with sarcasm. “Your detection systems just failed, and you’re running out of air, what do you do? What do you do?”

  “Send out a mayday,” Harrison says, while repeatedly trying to get his detection grid working.

  “Sorry, Harr, you’re a hundred parsecs away from the Crown right now, and you’re in deep shit. What do you do?”

  “Update our wills?” Jen jokes.

  “Cut the shit, guys,” Chaz warns. “This is a training op.”

  “Sorry, Commander . . . ”

  “Okay,” Dev says, seriously. “Those are the conditions you’re faced with. But we’ve got a great big nebula there packed full of gasses. Break formation, go inside, take up a position where you think you should be, and report on station.” Dev adds, “Do NOT open your intake vents. And no chatter—this isn’t a group exercise. Commander Chaz already knows the answer to this, so he is exempted.”

  The training ships break formation and scatter into the nebula. Chaz joins Dev’s wing and maintains position outside the cloud. Dev reactivates the ship-to-ship link with Chaz. Together, they watch the Midshipmen take four different courses through the nebula.

  Inside the nebula field, each Midshipman looks around at the colorful gas clouds and parks their ships in a spot they think is correct. Matt takes a position in a light blue area; Jen in a brown-orange region; Harrison in a cloudy red area; Steve parks himself in a dark blue cloud. They all report in.

  “Very well,” Dev says, “let’s see who’s read the material.” He looks at the panel. “Midshipman Jen, you’re in the middle of a cloud of cinnabar.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “Cinnabar is mercury sulfide,” Dev replies, then adds, “It’s a little toxic.”

  “Oh.”

  “Steve, argon. Harrison, neon and iodine.”

  “Let me guess,” Jen says, “the win goes to Matt, the Midshipman with the brain.”

  Dev smiles. “Midshipman Matt has found a lovely cloud of oxygen.”

  A very halfhearted round of applause is heard over the comm line.

  Dev chuckles at their lack of enthusiasm, and restores the detection systems to all ships. “Okay, guys, and Chaz, rendezvous at Matt’s position and configure your particle separators for manual O2 intake. For future reference, you want to look for light blue parts of nebulas to find concentrations of oxygen. That’s your best option, but not your only option. The system can separate O2 from any oxygenated compound, but pure oxygen is always your best bet, just in case any other molecules get past the scrubbers. Once you are configured, verify compositional analysis with the computer, open your intake vents, and replenish your tanks.”

  One by one, the training ships speed over to Matt’s position. Configurations are checked and set, and the trainers begin sucking in gas from the oxygen cloud. The intake compressors are pretty quick, and the pilots watch their stored O2 levels climb.

  Training maneuver complete, Dev shifts gears. “Chevron formation. Take up a course two points to port and follow me toward that thick red part of the nebula.”

  “The red zone is for loading and unloading,” Matt says.

  “Ha-ha-ha.” Steve laughs. “I love that movie.”

  “Good,” Dev says, seeing that everyone is in formation. “Now, disengage your throttle linkage for free flight, and go into low idle.”

  Tertian ships utilize a throttle setting that links forward and reverse thrusters, so that when one powers back in space, the ship decelerates. Free flight uncouples that linkage and allows the ship to coast at idle power. As each pilot pulls up on their throttles, they disengage the braking system. They pull the throttles back to idle, then further back into low idle. At low idle, the ship’s power systems reduce considerably, creating a whisper-like mode of operation that conserves the most energy. The pilots immediately notice a feeling of variable gravity.

  “At low idle your systems are functioning at minimal power. You’ll feel the ambient conditions more as your inertial stabilizers power down.” Dev checks their course and nods. “Okay, everyone, we’re on course, spacing is good. Hands off the controls.”

  The group’s response: “What?”

  “You heard me,” Dev says. “Unless your collision alarm sounds, I don’t want a single hand on the controls. I want you to see this. Go with the flow.” Dev puts his own engines in low idle and lets go of the controls.

  Reluctantly, the pilots let go of all their controls and just sit back and enjoy the ride. The ships, now drifting like bits of space-borne flotsam, amble through the nebula following a curvature of the thickening part of the cloud riding the local gravitational currents that shape and form the colorful nebula. The ships track along the eddies, each exhibiting the gentlest of rollovers and pitchovers as the currents carry the ships along. There is a surreal sort of tranquility, an almost transcendence as pilot and ship become almost component parts of the nebula. Everyone looks up and around and marvels at the gentle sounds of frozen particles against the canopy glass. Even Dev, with his vast experience, feels totally relaxed.

  “Remember,” Dev says, “everything in space is moving, whether it’s from orbital influence, gravity waves, or the very expansion of the universe itself.”

  The red cloud begins to thin. The pilots feel a slight shift in gravity, and the ships emerge on the other side to an almost ethereal view of the cosmos. They all look out upon a far away, vast, lonely arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Speechless. Everyone is speechless. This is a sight none of them has ever seen, or could have ever dreamed of seeing. This is the cosmos at its most incredible.

  “Wow,” Harrison mutters.

  “Behold, my friends,” Dev says, “Oceanus Corinae.”

  “Ocean of Corina,” Matt whispers to himself.

  “What is it?” Jen marvels while gazing up at the view.

  “The other side of the galaxy,” Dev replies. “You call it the Milky Way. We know it as the Corinae Galaxy.”

  “Looks so close,” Steve says.

  “It does, only it’s not,” Dev tells him. “Our scientists are working on a propulsion system that will take us out that far, but it’s still several years away.”

  “What’s out there?”

  “We don’t know,” Dev says. “But based on the places we’ve visited, there’s no reason to doubt there are other cultures out there.”

  “What’s beyond Corinae?” Matt says

  “After that, it’s Andromedae.”

  “Andromedae? The Andromeda galaxy?”

  “The very same.”

  A few more minutes of sightseeing is enjoyed by everyone. Then it’s back to work.

  “Okay, guys, time to go back,” Dev says. “Power up to flight idle, recouple your throttles, and form on Jen. Midshipman Spangler, take us home. You’ll be lead point on reentry and approach to the astroport.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The pilots all power up their systems and ready their ships into flight mode.

  “Okay,
boys, follow moi.” Jen jams her throttles open and pulls up abruptly and banks toward the nebula.

  Chaz watches her arc overhead. “Someone’s in a hurry.”

  “I have to pee,” she says.

  “You have a relief system in your ship,” Dev replies.

  “Oh, like I’m going to pee with all you guys watching me. Pass, sir.”

  ***

  The next week is a whirlwind of flying for everyone. Live flight after live flight. Sometimes solo, sometimes with instructors. A flight to the Fleet Gunnery Range outside of Penthar gives the Oasis candidates the first opportunity to fire live rounds of ammunition on real targets. Now certified to carry and use their sidearms, the Oasis candidates always fly armed, though in the simulation bays their sidearms are bright orange-colored dummy-guns that fire simulated energy rounds. They are painted bright orange so there is no mistaking them for real weapons.

  The Oasis candidates can fly, and they can shoot. All exceding the norms of the Training Command, to the delight—and sometimes surprise—of their instructors. Their flying scores top of the list of all candidates, impressing even their peers, many of whom had, and perhaps may still have, lingering doubts.

  Flight after flight, training session after training session, the Oasis group ticks off each item on their training dockets. Nights are spent in deep study. Frivolity has been all but abandoned.

  Dev spends many an evening alone while Chaz is in study sessions with the other flight candidates.

  Just like their final exam in the Boeing 767, the day arrives where each candidate is standing inside a simulation bay waiting to take their final flight test. In each simulator the same scenario unfolds: an instructor none of them have worked with before enters. Training dockets are presented, and then the examination begins with general knowledge, followed by a comprehensive preflight of the advanced trainer, both inside and out. The next few hours involve numerous departures and arrivals, on two engines and on one. Along the way, the evaluation instructors offer very little in terms of how the test is going. Orbital malfunctions followed by a gliding approach to a dead stick landing is the last item on the list. This is, by far, the most difficult maneuver of the entire check ride, because there is no single solution to the problem. Success of this maneuver is completely reliant on the individual pilot’s skill, aptitude, and most of all, personal judgment.

  A quietly surreal scene unfolds in each of the simulation bays, representative of the various end-game solutions. But each instructor climbs out of their candidate’s power-failed ship after the dead stick landing. One candidate makes it to a ditching in the mangrove-like wetlands, with the instructor walking through knee-high water toward the exit. Another makes it to a civilian astroport in the Western Inhabitance. One ends up in a farmer’s field. One in a vast desert. One ends in a miles-long skid across a frozen glacial plain. And another comes to rest along the banks of a long, quiet river. It isn’t important who ended up where, but that they successfully landed without injury.

  The instructors do not comment, but simply order the candidates to report to the airfield in one hour for the next part of the exam: the actual flight.

  The Oasis pilots are experienced enough to know they probably wouldn’t be proceeding to the next phase of the exam had they screwed up the simulator evaluation.

  The live flight seems like a non-event given the beating they all took in the simulators. But each candidate makes what seems to be a routine flight from Trieste to one of several possible ‘local’ destinations at speeds assigned by the instructors. Steve flies to Penthar. Harrison flies to Dué. Jen to the Sexton asteroid belt. Matt flies to Ichi and then out to Bellerophon. Chaz flies to the nebula and beyond. All flights have one or more simulated systems failures, ranging from faulty engines, requiring a single-engine approach; to navigation failures, requiring stellar navigation to fix their position; to failing atmospherics requiring a speedy flight to a usable atmosphere. Each candidate deals with their assigned problem and manages to safely return to Trieste.

  Landing at Port Admiralty, the group of advanced trainers all touch down within minutes of each other. Chaz is the last to land. In all cases, the instructors leave the candidates to their postflight duties. In short order the Oasis pilots are all waiting on the ramp alone.

  “Now what?” Chaz says to Steve.

  “They didn’t say.”

  “Anyone have any glaring problems?”

  There is a chorus of ‘no sirs.’

  “Did anyone’s instructor say anything as far as what we’re supposed to do now?”

  Another round of nos. Chaz is about to call Dev to ask what they should do, but a large vehicle the size of a city bus arrives to collect them. Leftenant Bross emerges from the bus and quickly ushers the group inside where fresh semi-formal uniforms await. Bross issues orders, per Commander Dev, that they are to quickly change and report for debriefing at the Fleet Combat Center, not the Training Command, the FCC.

  Bross leads Chaz and the rest of the group into a grand outer offices near the Fleet Combat Center. The officers in the outer office stand as the group enters, but specifically because of Lieutenant Commander Chaz’s presence.

  Bross knocks on the grand wooden doors to the Flight Admiral’s private inner office. The Admiral’s aide-de-camp opens the door, then reports, “Oasis flight candidates, Admiral.”

  Chaz and the Oasis Flight Midshipman are shown into the office. They switch into pure professional-mode upon seeing Dev standing next to the Flight Admiral. Dev offers a discreet glance to Chaz and slight lean of his head, indicating he should stand next to him. Four aides stand silently at parade rest against the wall. The Lead Instructor approaches and salutes. “Admiral, Commander, Oasis Flight Midshipmen present.”

  The Admiral returns the salute. “Stand easy, Leftenant.”

  “Aye, sir.” The Lead Instructor steps back, turns smartly, and waits.

  The Admiral looks at Dev. “I would like to meet your Midshipmen, sir.”

  Dev addresses the pilots. “Yes, sir! Oasis Flight Midshipmen, my honor to present Flight Admiral of the Crown, Rek Davette.” Dev takes deliberate steps down to the far end of the lineup with the Admiral. Matt stands extra straight up.

  “Admiral, may I present Flight Midshipman Matthew Thompson.”

  “Midshipman Thompson.”

  “Admiral.”

  Moving down the line. “Admiral, may I present Flight Midshipman Jennifer Spangler.”

  “Midshipman Spangler.”

  “Admiral, sir.”

  Dev squints at her slightly, then smiles ever so slightly and moves down the line. “Admiral, may I present Flight Midshipman Harrison Franklin.”

  “Midshipman Franklin.”

  “Admiral.”

  “Admiral, finally, may I present Flight Midshipman Steve Fitzgerald.”

  “Midshipman Fitzgerald.”

  “Admiral, sir.”

  The Admiral takes a few steps with Dev and then turns. “Well, Commander, it would seem your new squadron is making excellent progress.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I understand they even managed to fly themselves to Bellerophon and back, unsupervised.”

  “They did indeed, sir.”

  “Am I to understand they have all successfully passed their flight examinations today?”

  “They have, Admiral.”

  “And what is next on their docket?”

  “Training in the Class I TransAt Fighter, Admiral.”

  “Impressive. That being the case, Commander Dev, I find your Flight Midshipmen are out of uniform, sir.”

  Jen looks down at her uniform, then glances at the others.

  The Admiral nods to Dev.

  Dev calls out, “Attention to orders.”

  The civilian Oasis pilots are unsure what that means.

  Chaz takes the initiative and calls, “TEN-HUT!”

  They know what that means.

  The Admiral addresses the group. “Aviators o
f the Crown are some of the most revered and admired officers in our service. We all protect those in our charge, but it is our aviators that lead headfirst into battle. Aviators of the Crown are most often first on scene, most often in unknown circumstances, with only seconds to evaluate their surroundings and engage in combat. It is for that reason, all aviators are commissioned officers. To be a commissioned officer of the Crown means you are charged with the safety of all those around you. You carry the weight of the worlds on your shoulders.

  “I am, of course, the Flight Admiral. But I once stood where you are now; where Commander Dev once stood, in this very office. I envy each of you the adventure before you. Sadly, despite my lofty title, I no longer have the luxury of climbing into a Crown fighter and charging the enemy myself. We all watched your first solo flights. I’m certain you would agree that day was like no other. Your examinations today represent the culmination of all that you have learned thus far. Scarcely one month ago you were on Earth. Today, you stand here in the heart of the Crown and have accomplished a great feat. Remember that feeling when you learned Earth was hardly alone. Remember that feeling you had on your first solo, how, for those few hours, it was just you and the cosmos. And remember this day, for your flight test is not just an examination; it marks a very significant and cherished moment for all Officer Initiates of the Crown.” The Admiral turns to Dev. “Commander Dev, have you any reason the Midshipmen before me should not move forward, sir?”

  “None, Admiral. They have my complete confidence, sir.”

  The Admiral nods, then turns to the Midshipmen. “And do you, Oasis Flight Midshipmen, hereby affirm and commit to the four Pillars of Service, Excellence, Integrity, Altruism, and Honor, and accept responsibility for the protection of all Human territories?”

  “What say you all?” Dev commands.

  “I do, sir,” is the chorus.

  “Very well.” The Admiral turns to Dev. “Having fulfilled their initial flight academics, and based on the recommendations of their instructors, and commanding officers, and finally, pursuant to established tradition and protocol, I hereby commission each of your Flight Midshipmen to the rank of Ensign of the Crown.”

  Bross motions to the four aides, who swiftly remove the Midshipman shoulder boards and replace them with new ones emblazoned with an embroidered star and a single silver bar signifying the rank of Ensign. Dev walks down the line with Bross, who is now carrying a small wooden box. Dev stops at Ensign Steve and fixes a set of silver wings on his uniform, takes a step back, and salutes. The process is repeated for each Ensign.