Fire Ant

by Jonathan P. Brazee

  THE NAVY OF MANKIND: WASP SQUADRON

  BOOK 1

  FIRE ANT

  Colonel Jonathan P. Brazee

  USMC (Ret)

  Copyright © 2018 Jonathan Brazee

  A Semper Fi Press Book

  Copyright © 2018 Jonathan Brazee

  ISBN-10: 1-945743-19-0

  ISBN-13: 978-1-945743-19-1 (Semper Fi Press)

  Printed in the United States of America

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Acknowledgements:

  I want to thank all those who took the time to offer advice as I wrote this book. A special thanks goes my editor, Abbyedits, real Navy air warriors, CAPT Andrés “Drew” Brugal, USN, (Ret) and CAPT Timothy "Spike" Prendergast, USN (Ret.) for keeping helping me with “air-speak” and culture, and to my beta readers James Caplan and Kelly O’Donnell for their valuable input.

  Cover by Jude Beers

  DEDICATION

  Airman 1st Class Elizabeth Jacobson, United States Air Force

  Born 26 March 1984

  KIA 28 Sept 2005. Basra, Iraq

  and

  First Lieutenant Albert H Westendorf, US Army Air Corps

  Flew 55 missions as a B-25 Bombardier/ Navigator

  Awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross

  1921-2000

  PART 1

  Chapter 1

  No bonus on this run, Beth told herself as she read the analysis.

  Pilot Two Floribeth Salinas O’Shea Dalisay, Hamdani Exploration Corps, ran through her Hummingbird’s diagnostics one more time, hoping that she’d missed something, but no. Another dry well.

  Beth had been on long run of dry wells since her last hit: sixteen missions, sixteen times without a bonus. With her expenses, all conveniently taken out of her pay by Hamdani Brothers, that left scant little to send home to her family. She needed a bonus.

  There was no use wasting time hanging in the barren system. The data she’d collected had been uploaded to corps headquarters, so her work here was done.

  She shifted her body in her harness. In zero-G, she didn’t have bedsores per se, but she did have contact spots, irritation from where her harness and even her flight suit rubbed her. Her piss tube, which was hypo-allergenic and guaranteed not to irritate, felt like sandpaper. Her finger hovered over her console for a moment as she considered returning to the station. She’d been out for over 62 Standard days—1,494 hours, in fact—and that was a long time to be stuck in her Hummingbird, relying on drugs, nanos, and the devil the Hummingbird pilots called the “stretcher” to keep her muscles from atrophying. Her body cried to get out of her suit, to feel gravity, to walk, to stand naked in a shower as water jets scrubbed off the stink and itch of deep space. She needed the taste of a cold Coke to wash out the days of the food paste they called slime.

  Can’t make anything going back, she told herself. Maybe the next one’s it.

  With a heavy heart, she pressed the “Next Mission” button, waiting for HQ’s response. Anagolay would be running her calculations, determining what system among the vast reaches of the galaxy, would offer the best probability of providing the raw materials that HB needed to fuel its factories. Even better than that, which system provided the best chance at an Alpha world, a planet that could host human life. This was the proverbial golden ring for the pilots of the Exploration Corps. Finding one would set up Beth for life. She could return to New Cebu and open up her own store. With her family’s future secure, she could think about finding a husband and starting her own family, raising kids who would never have to leave New Cebu in order to make a living.

  Light years away, Ana’s circuits did their thing, and the AI sent out a response: SG-4021. The designation meant nothing to her. It was simply one more star system among the 100 billion in the galaxy. All the low-hanging fruit had long been plucked, systems where scans had indicated planets that could support life with minor or no terraforming required. Systems with easily harvested heavy metals had already been explored. Now, 400-plus years since the Grand Expansion, corporations, from the big zaibatsus such as Hamdani Brothers to small indies searched the black for other jewels to be exploited. Only a tiny fraction of the galaxy’s systems had been explored, so no one knew what treasures were out there, waiting to be found.

  By accepting the orders, Beth had just locked herself in the Lily for another 12 days at a minimum. The thought almost overwhelmed her, and she could swear her piss tube shifted, rubbing her raw.

  She could have refused. The OPW Union, which was relatively powerless in most ways, had still managed to get some regulations enacted for deep-space pilots. Commercial pilots, those working for corporations, could only be required to conduct two missions before returning to their bases. Two missions, however, would barely pay for expenses for most pilots. Beth wasn’t a pilot for charity—her family needed the support. So, this would be Beth’s fifth mission on this run.

  The trip to SG-4021 would take place in two steps. First, she had to accelerate to a minimum of .54 of the speed of light before entering the gate. The transport back to Nexus Prime would take no sidereal time at all, and only a few moments to reach the next gate to take her to her destination. Then it would be the long deceleration process into the system proper where her scanners could analyze it.

  The math was too complicated for a human brain to grasp, and Beth didn’t even try. She trusted Ana’s vast computing power and her little Hummingbird’s ability to make the transit. Fly-by-night indies often got lost between systems, never to be heard from again, but not HB pilots. All of the pilots resented the zaibatsu’s roughshod manner, but it was still one of the most competent. The HB Explorer Corps hadn’t lost a Hummingbird in over nine years, which was one of the reasons Beth had accepted the contract with them. She had to endure the long, lonely trips in deep space, but she was not particularly brave. As a child and teen, she’d never been bit by the wanderlust bug. She was supporting her extended family, like most Off-Planet Workers, and that required her to survive the work.

  New Cebu was a relatively poor world, with the wealth highly concentrated among the planet’s Golden Tribe. The masses were dirt poor, but they were the planet’s most valuable resource. They became the beasts of burden for all the jobs that the GT’s wouldn’t sully their precious skin with.

  Beth stretched her legs as the Lily’s navigation system inputted the instructions. They didn’t stretch far. Beth stood 4’6” in her bare feet (137 cm in Universal Standard) and weighed 72 pounds soaking wet (32.6 kgs). She’d always been the smallest girl in her class, but her size had plucked her out of housekeeping at the Montclair Resort on Bally’s World to become a pilot in the HB Explorer Corps. She’d received bonuses on three of her first seven missions, earning more than she could have made throughout her 15-year housekeeping contract.

  The money might be her primary motivation, but over time, Beth realized she liked being a pilot. Despite the long hours in her cramped cockpit, despite the lack of real food, of tubes to take care of her bodily waste, despite the loneliness, she felt at home in space. She liked flying her Hummingbird, of being the first human to enter solar systems. She might long to get out of her little ship at the moment, and she was frustrated by her string of dry wells, but she was glad she wasn’t cleaning toilets for rich folks anymore. Beth might s
till be an OPW, but she’d lucked into one of the best jobs someone from her background could have.

  Her console command light turned green. She could still refuse the mission without penalty. Every pilot thought that canceling a mission after accepting it would have dire consequences. The pilots might have named Ana after the old Filipino goddess of lost travelers, but the AI belonged to HB, and she was programmed to better the bottom line. It would not be beyond HB to punish those who canceled missions with systems that had a lower probability of earning the pilot a bonus.

  She didn’t hesitate. She pushed the command, then flipped down her entertainment screen. Bobo had sent her the link to a two-hundred-year-old feline opera series, and she’d been saving it so she could binge watch it.

  She had the time for that now.

  ***************

  Beth ran through the checklist. If something were off, lights would be flashing red, but company policy was company policy, and HB loved checklists. She quickly scanned as she watched the timer count down until the Lily would enter the gate she’d left three days before. This might be the last time it was ever used. There hadn’t been enough in the FR-30072 system to warrant another mission, but the law was the law, and not even the most powerful corporations would fight this. Once set, a gate remained in place, its coordinates logged. Anyone could use it, and unless HB registered a claim, anyone could make do with the system as they would.

  There was a vibrant gleaning industry in space exploration. Smaller companies, some being one-man tramps, constantly scanned the data bases, looking for something missed by the larger corporations, or more likely, systems that were not cost-effective for the big boys, but in which a small, low-cost operation could salvage a few BCs.

  There was nothing in the last system that would even pique the interest in the gleaners, though. Beth was pretty sure that she was the first and last person to ever travel there.

  The green status light started to flash amber, and Beth tensed. She couldn’t help it. She’d been through 87 gates in her short 22 years, yet she still had to fight the nervousness that welled up each time before the jump. The gates themselves were essentially foolproof—it was the calculations to enter the gate where a mistake—a fatal mistake—could occur. A vessel could theoretically come apart if it hit the gate off-line, but a more likely accident would be to be sent off to who-knows-where.

  Beth would just as soon not experience either one.

  The readout reached ten seconds, and time seemed to crawl for her as the seconds ticked off. At three, she gripped the handles alongside her hips and stared ahead at the outside display. Some of her fellow pilots closed their eyes, but Beth wanted to see what was coming—which was a little foolish, because unlike just about every holovid made, there was nothing to see. No stars pulling into lines, no flashing colors. One moment she was in one part of the galaxy, the next she was somewhere else.

  The Lily passed through the gate and was immediately picked up by Ana on the other side. Within heartbeats, Ana reprogrammed her navigator, took control, and shunted her towards an outbound gate. Still travelling at slightly over the minimum required .64C, it only took her a few seconds to reach her new gate and make the crossing to SG-4021.

  Beth would always swear that she could feel a tiny tug as she passed through a gate. Most science-types would scoff at her. It was true that in a very real sense, her body was stretched across the galaxy, her nose lightyears from her butt, but as the saying went, it happened too quickly for her body to realize it was dead and cease functioning.

  She took a deep breath, happy to have survived yet again, one of the millions of crossings that would happen today, all without incident. She gave a quick look at her displays. The ship’s AI had taken readings the instant the Lily had entered the outer system, categorizing stars to confirm her position. This was high-level math, taking into account the ship’s supposed position and how long the light from distant stars would take to reach the target system, then comparing that with known star signatures. It was a matter of bracketing, taking a reading, adjusting, and bracketing again until a confirmation was achieved. Despite the computing power of the ship’s AI, it took five seconds to confirm that she had reached SG-4021.

  The first order of business was, as always, to launch the return gate. Without it, she’d be stuck in the system forever. Even at maximum speed, she didn’t have enough food or O2 to make it back to civilization. The Lily might eventually make it, centuries or millenniums from now, but she would be a desiccated mummy, far beyond caring.

  The AI immediately shifted its scanners to start analyzing the system. A Hummingbird was designed to explore the galaxy, but its scanners were limited. More powerful scanners could easily be put onboard, but the corporate bean-counters stressed weight over anything else. It took more powerful—read expensive—engines to get heavier craft up to gate speeds, so every ounce possible was stripped from the exploration scouts. That was why each pilot was in the smallest 2% of humanity. That was why Beth had no real food on the voyage, subsisting on the densely caloric “slime,” paste designed to keep a person alive and not much else. That was why the only physical item Beth had been allowed to carry with her was her small silver cross.

  The big ships, be they military or corporate, were powered by the terribly expensive FC engines, but those were limited by economies of scale. Smaller craft, such as Beth’s Hummingbird, had to make due with the older tech Bradstone engines, and their ability to push craft to gate speeds was a geometric function.

  What’s that?

  The Lily’s scanners weren’t that effective this far out, but they weren’t useless. They were picking up something, something very interesting. The fourth planet from the primary was well within the Goldilocks zone. Her heart jumped

  Don’t get excited, Floribeth Salinas, she told herself.

  There were thousands of planets discovered that fell within the temperature range that supported Earth-type life. Of those, a grand total of 132 had been discovered that either could support human life as is or with minimal terraforming.

  Still, the prospect was exciting. There was more to analyze as she shot towards the system’s center. An asteroid belt showed promise of valuable metals, and a small inner-planet probably had fissionables, but her attention remained locked on Planet 4 as the Lily slowed down. She’d pass by the asteroid belt close enough to confirm the amount and ease of extraction of the metals, but she’d set a course to enter an orbit about the planet so her scanners could make a detailed analysis.

  Beth had already sent a confirmation of arrival to HQ, but she hesitated to send anything more yet. Call her superstitious, but she didn’t want to jinx herself. Once she knew something for sure, she’d report.

  Beth had never been overly superstitious growing up, but five years as a pilot had changed that. The bulk of HB’s pilot corps was Filipino, but there were Brazukas, Ukies, Canucks, EnBee’s, Canos, Thais, and others, all OPWs, who plied the black for the GTs, and no matter which planet they were from, pilots became superstitious. Her cousin Bobo said it was because deep space was just too vast for the human mind to comprehend, and superstition was merely a way to try and control the uncontrollable.

  Beth raised her cross and kissed it.

  ***************

  Over the next 26 hours, as the Lily passed the outermost planet’s orbit and entered the system proper, Beth was focused on her displays. Even this far out, she could tell that the mineral potential in the asteroid belt was significant, more than bonus-worthy. Her dry streak was over, and she’d have a tidy sum to send home. She wanted more, though, and she hoped the beautiful planet four out from the primary would provide that. She already knew it was in the Goldilocks zone, she already knew it had an atmosphere that contained at least some O2. She already knew that the gravity was 1.12 Earth Standard. Those were all well and good, but she had to get the Lily in orbit for a more detailed analysis. There were too many possibilities that could render the planet a bust.
>
  Still, Beth spent much of the time daydreaming how she would spend her bonus. She considered, then rejected half-a-dozen ventures. If she was smart about this, she could not only live comfortably for the rest of her life, but live well.

  She catnapped a few times, drifting off to sleep, but the excitement was too much of a stimulant. There was nothing she could do to affect the outcome, but she was afraid of falling asleep, then waking up to find out she’d been dreaming. She had to speed things up, or she was going to go crazy.

  On her current trajectory, the Lily would reach SG-4021-4 and slip into orbit in another 32 hours, 13 minutes. The ship was a fairly simple craft, all things considering. Beth had to bleed off her speed, or she’d simply shoot right past the planet, hence the somewhat circuitous route into the system. There was another way, though, that could be taken when the conditions were right. Beth could use the gravity of one of the system’s gas giants to slow the ship down—if they were in the correct position relative to each other. As luck would have it, that might be the case.

  Beth queried her AI, and the numbers looked good. She could nudge the Lily in front of SG-4021-8, gaining a little velocity, but bleeding off more by turning the ship away, letting the planet’s gravity act as a drag. This would take some tricky maneuvering—she didn’t want to use the planet for the more common gravity assist trajectory, the slingshot which would increase her speed. She’d have to rely on “icing” the Lily, swinging its aft end around at full power to push the ship into the right trajectory. She ran the preliminary calculations, and she had a 23-minute window remaining to initiate the change of course.