by Aer-ki Jyr
“Confirmed,” the voice answered back after a short delay.
Paul used the virtual controls on the touch screen before him and triggered a short burst from the aft thrusters, but the ship’s diagnostics didn’t respond, nor did the image of the vessel from the docking cameras for a full six seconds, then the tiny puffs of ionized gas appeared and the telemetry readings began to register the inch by inch creep of the ship out of the construction slip.
Paul watched the angle to make sure the ship wasn’t listing as he gave it another two bursts, then a tiny corrective thrust to starboard. After that he confirmed the vector was good and waited for the first Star Force warship to drift away into free space.
“Nicely handled,” the voice came back. “Didn’t even scratch the paint.”
“No point in dinging up either one on the first run,” Paul answered as he prepped the main plasma engines while giving the ship another couple thruster puffs to increase the distance from the clandestine military shipyard, located in high orbit twice the distance of the Moon away from Earth and their prying eyes. Save for pointing a telescope at their precise position, there was no way for any ship or probe to happen by their location on accident or by design, since the construction of the station had been kept quiet and out of sight, thanks to the loneliness of the venue, with Earth only a small, bright dot in the starry backdrop, leaving the shipyard essentially floating in a sea of nothingness with no nearby planetoid to visually fix a sense of up or down.
The remoteness of location was also the reason for the signal lag, both for the voice transmission and the remote control link that was enabling Paul to fly the warship on its maiden test run from back in Atlantis.
“Activating course beacons,” the yard master said a moment before a series of dots appeared on Paul’s navigational screen. He had the computer tag the first and plot a course, then he triggered a rotation of the yacht-sized warship to ‘face’ in that direction before he gently activated the main engines and began moving towards the destination marker.
In truth the cutter had no bow or stern, given that it was a rectangular block twice as wide as it was tall with eight engine vents at the corners. Paul had designed it that way to maximize maneuverability, so the ship could just as easily fly backwards or sideways at full thrust. The mechanics of the plasma engine were held in the center of the H-shaped assembly with the thrust carried out to the directional vents, protecting the engine in the center of mass as well as giving the ship multiple ‘engines’ to lose during combat and still keep flying, since only one of the vent-pods was necessary for basic flight.
Also encased in the armor-plated H-assembly were four separate comm systems and three redundant computers, all of which were hardened against EMP attack. The thruster assembly was a separate unit also contained in the ‘H’ along with the navigational sensors, fuel tanks, and primary fuel cells.
The secondary fuel cells that powered the weapons systems were located in the modular blocks that fit into the two gaps in the ‘H’ and interfaced directly with the ship’s computers, interlinking with their own fire control systems and sensors. Currently the cutter held a laser module in ‘front’ and a missile mod in ‘back’ that contained both offensive missiles and the anti-missile ‘intercepts,’ 18 and 30 in count respectively.
The laser assembly had a single medium weapon focused along the axis of the ship with a rotating cupola on the front that gave it a 170 degree firing arc. In addition, two smaller anti-missile laser nodes appeared on the upper and lower sides of the mod, giving the warship some measure of defense once the intercepts were used up, though power for the defensive lasers had to be diverted from the main weapon, given that the fuel cells couldn’t provide enough power for both to function simultaneously.
That was the in and the out of the ship. It had no living quarters. No bridge. No airlock. No gravity section or cargo hold. It was simply a remote controlled, expendable ship that could be flown by a pilot safely located in a distant station, ship, or surface facility, with the signal lag the only concern, aside from the enemy finding a way to block all communications entirely…in which case the ship would carry out its last targeting orders on its own, then await signal reacquisition.
The comm systems had been designed with multiple devices in the hopes that one type of jamming wouldn’t affect them all, including laser communication panels located around the center of the ‘H’ that could receive input from a nearby ship that was impossible to block save for physically imposing an object to intercept the comm laser.
Paul had never expected the ships to be flown from Earth during combat, but since this was just a test run and no one was going to be jamming communications he had saved himself the inconvenience of traveling out to the shipyard and arranged for a remote linkup, figuring the six second round trip signal lag was more than worth the tradeoff.
It did, however, mean that he had to fly as if he was playing a game of chess…preplanning each of his moves as he flew the ship out to and around the first navigational beacon, decelerating on arrival and heading off towards the second marker while avoiding a collision with the small floating device with a single tiny blinking green light visually marking its presence on the back side where the sunlight couldn’t be seen reflecting off its dark gray plates.
Paul watched the object and its twins carefully on the warship’s camera displays and sensor board. At close range the beacons stood out easily, but get a few kilometers away and the flashing light was all that was distinguishable against the bright stars. Even the massive shipyard looked like it was about to be swallowed up by the galactic spectacle as the cutter reached the apogee of its lazy loop around the improvised course, though on the sensor board it and the beacons were all that registered, making them plain as day as far as the computer was concerned.
On the way back to the station a special targeting buoy had been set up, which Paul targeted on the move with the main laser, tagging the sensor-located target and ordering the ship to attack, since the signal lag prevented any meaningful manual firing.
The low power test shot hit and absorbed into the target, which sent a return signal detailing the amount of energy received and where it had hit on the twenty meter wide sphere…which was far left and almost a miss.
Paul slowed the ship to a crawl and fired off two more test shots, then rotated the giant block up on its side and tested the defensive lasers, firing off a barrage of tiny shots that peppered the target like a machine gun. Satisfied, he flipped the ship over and tested the opposite battery in a similar manner.
“Are you getting this?” Paul asked as he watched the data streaming across the tabletop.
“Receiving and recording.”
“Readying missiles,” Paul said as another idea struck him. “If you don’t mind, use the station’s sensors and see if you can pick up the missile at this range.”
“Give me a moment,” the yard master said, making the necessary preparations.
“No rush,” Paul answered, waiting patiently as he sipped a bottle of sugar-rich fluid that he usually had on hand when working long hours in the information and design center.
“How’s it going?” Sara asked, walking up behind him.
“No problems yet,” he said, rubbing his eyes. He’d been working on three different design projects the past five hours, with Atlantis time now just passing 10:00 pm with most of the adepts already headed to bed, needing a good 8 hours of sleep before they started their morning training sessions at 5 or 6 am, depending on their individual preferences and schedules.
“How’s the lag?”
“Annoying, but workable.”
“We’re ready here,” the yard master answered back.
“Firing on target,” Paul noted for his sake, targeting the sphere and firing one missile towards it at a distance of two kilometers. The tiny tube puffed up and out of the ‘back’ end of the ship, then lit up like a firecracker and zipped forward towards the target. A few seconds later it hit…wi
th nothing happening.
“Our sensors did pick up the missile and registered a successful hit.”
“Thank you,” Paul said, adding that mental data point.
“Not much of a bang,” Sara commented.
“Didn’t want one,” Paul said, zooming in one of the cameras on the distant target, showing a crater on the surface of the sphere where the missile had imbedded itself in the apparently soft surface. “The target is designed to collect the missile in a gel layer. It damages the sensor panels on the surface, but it’s preferable to creating a halo of debris that we’d never be able to completely clean up.”
“Good idea,” she admitted. “Though I doubt it’d be much trouble way out there.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen the damage reports from the Lunar runs?”
Sara frowned. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, they’ve been picking up a lot of micro-debris impacts when they’re traveling in a perpendicular direction to orbit out and back from the moon. Nothing that their armor plates can’t handle, but they’re having to refurbish them more often than planned because of the higher speed impacts when cutting across the orbital tracks.”
“So we don’t want to make a mess out here that we might run into on the way to Mars or Venus?”
“That, and some of it could float in towards the planet and cause trouble elsewhere,” Paul explained. “Davis is planning to create permanent sweeper teams to hunt down and collect rogue debris, given how much junk is already out there and how careless the corporate competition is. They’re lucky they haven’t lost a ship yet, but I figure it’s just a matter of time since they don’t carry any heavy plating.”
“Speaking of which, where are we with the rescue ships?”
“Four weeks till the prototype launches. Liam’s going up to oversee the shakedown drills.”
“Really? How long’s that going to take?”
“About a week,” Paul said, ordering the cutter to vector off back towards the shipyard.
“Where’s he going to train?”
“There are some basic facilities in the station they’re working out of, but he’ll lose a day easy when he takes command of the ship. He doesn’t trust the civilian pilots to figure out the mechanics on their own, so he wants to be there to make sure they get it right the first time out.”
“Ouch,” Sara said, knowing how that much downtime was going to affect him.
“Yet another reason why we need a functioning command ship,” Paul noted.
“How close are we to that?”
“Twenty years,” the yard master answered sarcastically, still live linked into their conversation.
“Don’t listen to him,” Paul said, waving off the comment. “He’s overly pessimistic.”
“I prefer realistic,” he argued. “We don’t have the technology necessary to create something of that size within the mission parameters you outlined.”
“Yet,” Paul insisted.
“Which is why I say 20 years…minimum.”
“Ten,” Paul answered confidently.
“Not a chance,” the yard master insisted. “We don’t even have a slip half that big.”
Paul looked over at Sara. “We have this type of conversation a lot. I say yes, he says no, then I have to teach him how to do it. You’d think by now that he’d learn to have a little faith.”
“Easy for you to say. You just design them. I’m the one that has to build the damn things.”
Sara laughed. “I’ll leave you two at it then…but for the record my money’s on Paul.”
“You always back each other up,” he complained. “Ease her back, will ya? Don’t want you ramming the yard.”
“I’m on a deceleration track that misses the station by a good three kilometers,” Paul said dismissively. “I want to test the engines out on a hard break before I bring her back to dock.”
“Just remember the signal lag…and this isn’t a video game. We’ve got living people out on this station, so be careful, please.”
“Don’t worry, I’m on top of it. The plasma exhaust won’t even kiss the station.”
9
November 17, 2047
Jenkins stood in what had once been one of the adepts’ training chambers, now repurposed for the selective use of the 12 men the trainer was looking over from behind as they viewed secure footage snippets of Vermaire in various combat challenges dominating the trailblazers and other trainees. He kept silent and let the men watch, with their attention immediately caught and kept for more than an hour before the video finally ended with a still frame of the Black Knight lingering on the wall screen.
“Who is he?” one of the martial arts specialist volunteers asked.
“Don’t you mean ‘what is he?’” another one asked. “He’s huge, but faster than should be possible for his size. If I had to guess I’d say he was either a machine or this was movie special effects cut scenes.”
“He’s real, I can assure you,” Jenkins said dispassionately. “He’s a trainer, like myself, and the model for what you’re supposed to become. Personally I have my doubts. I don’t think any of you are up to this, but if you can even become half as effective as him, you’ll be an asset to Star Force. I wanted you all to see what is possible before we begin, because what I’m going to ask of you is going to be nothing short of day-round training without break for months to come…and that’s just the easy part.”
“Save the bluster for the civies,” a former SAS commando told Jenkins, “some of us have been through worse training than you can imagine. What I want to know is who he was fighting against? They’re rather good.”
A jujitsu world champion turned his head and eyed the soldier. “Good? They were getting pulverized.”
“I wasn’t referring to the outcome, but to their skills and tactics. They were obviously fighting at a disadvantage of size, armor, and no effective weapons. Those paint pellet guns are fine for target practice, and the man was doing a decent job of pretending they were live rounds, but it was hardly a real fight.”
Jenkins held up a hand to forestall any more comments. “What you just saw was not choreographed in any way. The paintball ammunition used was laced with an energy that stuns on physical contact. The black armor he wore offered him some protection, but with enough successive hits he could have been brought down…and was, temporarily a few times. We didn’t include those instances because they weren’t highlights, but I can assure you the weapons were indeed effective.”
“Poppycock,” the commando declared.
“Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is,” a voice quoted from behind them in the darkened room. “You have to see it for yourself.”
Jenkins reached over to the wall and brought the lights back up to full illumination as the twelve men turned around to look at Jason in his red striped, white casual uniform identical to Jenkins’ save for the extra coloration.
“025,” the trainer said with a nod of respect.
“Jenkins,” he acknowledged, though his eye line remained on the men.
“Hey, he’s one of them,” an Army Ranger pointed out, recognizing his face from the video.
“He’s also your CO,” Jenkins added.
The four former military personnel straightened on reflex, but the others seemed unphased.
“You twelve have been selected for an experiment to copy him,” Jason said, pointing to the image of Vermaire on the screen. “But it is unlikely that you will ever meet him. He spends most of his time training, growing stronger and faster with each passing year. Even we haven’t been able to match his skills yet.”
“Who are you, exactly?” a former SWAT team leader asked.
“He’s an Archon,” Jenkins answered. “They’re Star Force’s Generals.”
“Generals?” a martial arts/stuntman asked. “Are you building a security force or an army?”
Jason glanced at the trainer. “How far along are we?”
“Not far.”
“You are here,” Jason began, walking in amongst the group, “because of your prerequisite hand to hand combat experience. It should offer a solid foundation for the beginning of your training, but do not mistake your abilities for anything other than the skills of a child. We have set the bar very high compared to the world’s standards, but in truth the world sucks, so you’ve got a lot of catching up to do just to pass the minimum standards.”
Jason looked around at them, each in turn, judging their reactions. “But like I said, telling you isn’t enough. You have to see it for yourself,” he said, walking past two of the men, brushing shoulders to take a straight line out of the group towards a large sparring ring. “You’ve been together for more than two weeks now, so tell me, who’s the best?”
The SWAT member answered for the group when the others just exchanged glances. “There are some differing opinions on that.”
“Jenkins?”
“I’d say the most confident is Marshal.”
The mixed martial arts Champion smiled cockily. “Nice to have a fan.”
“Marshal it is,” Jason said, waving him forward. “Your objective is simple. Knock me out of the ring.”
“My pleasure,” he said, eyes gleaming with the opportunity to show off his skills as he stepped into the large, 20 meter wide ring.
Jason stood in the center casually. “Begin.”
“Any rules?” Marshal asked, starting to hop about in a circle around his opponent.
“Standard Star Force sparring rules…no permanent or serious injuries. Nothing that’s going to take away training time the next day.”
“Rough and tumble, but nothing broken. Alright,” Marshal said, twitching in preparation. “You ready?”
“Yes,” Jason said, standing still as the man circled around behind him.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Marshal said, jumping forward and punching the back of Jason’s right shoulder.
His shoulder collapsed under the blow, then suddenly Marshal found his arm being grabbed and yanked forward as Jason spun about unbelievably fast, backhand grabbing the man’s wrist and stretching out his arm, pulling him off balance as he rotated around and grabbed the man’s neck from behind and, using both points of leverage, threw him forward onto the ground, using most of his own momentum from the punch to do so.