Flight of the Outcast

by Brad Strickland

  "Right," the flight sergeant's voice boomed. "Your solos today are to Grayhorn Mountain, then to the Bight of Westfall, and then back here. Only five hundred kilometers. You have two hours, so keep your speed reasonable. This is not a race. Make sure you register with the detectors at Grayhorn and the Bight. Lay in your courses."

  Thinking Grayhorn did nothing. Asteria smiled to herself. This must be one of the little tricks they liked to pull on first-timers. But she had prepared. She thought Latitude 30.102, Longitude 1.348, and before her she saw a map of the island shimmering in midair. She willed the ship to calculate the most direct flight path to the coordinates she had given it—to Grayhorn, then to the Bight, seventy-five odd kilometers to the south, and then a direct route back to the hangar. It was, she saw, a total of 147.812 kilometers. Close enough to the FS's estimate of one-fifty.

  From there, she calculated the speeds, the turns required, and the time involved. Gave herself half an hour buffer. Before she knew it, she heard the FS say, "Trainer One, clear. Go! Trainer Two, clear. Go!"

  Right down the line. When the DS called for Trainer Seven, she had already engaged the grav drive. At the go command, the ship sprang five meters into the air, swiveled, and shot down the length of the hangar, through the arched exit, and soared in a high climbing starboard curve. For the first time in months, Asteria felt like laughing. She could see everything! The ship rolled so the landscape of the campus shot by below her. Behind her, the blue sky went up forever. She could hear, very faintly, ship-to-ship chatter now that seven ships were airborne. No, eight—there was Dai's voice: "Where are you?"

  "Ten klicks south of you already. I can see you, barely."

  "Got you now. Wanna race?"

  "No way I'm slowing! Catch me if you can!"

  "Cut the chatter," said the voice of Command. "Remember we can hear you. Communicate only when necessary."

  "Aye," said Dai and Asteria in unison.

  Away from the campus the unbroken canopy of island jungle flashed past two kilometers below, a deep green tinged with blue. Flickers of discharge sheeted around the ship, pale violets and reds. Asteria couldn't hear it, but she knew the ship was shrieking, as if it felt the joy of flight just as she did.

  Then the vision feed failed.

  "Dai!"

  "Malfunction?"

  "No viz," she said. "Command? I've—"

  "Don't," Dai said quickly. "It's a test. The ships are programmed to do that. I've lost some rear stabilizer control. The turns are gonna be wide."

  Give me virtual plotting, Asteria thought. Instantly, she saw the world in a kind of sketch: the scarlet horizon line ringed her, moving green dots showed her the trainers ahead of her and behind her. Her speed had faltered with the surprise, and Dai had closed to within five kilometers of her. Superimpose map. Now in yellow she saw the physical features of the course: a river wound through the jungle below. In the far distance, Grayhorn showed up as an inverted yellow V. She adjusted course and speed and headed for it flat-out.

  "What's your hurry?" asked Dai.

  "I've decided it is a race after all," Asteria told him.

  "Watch your communications," Command warned again, but the voice sounded faintly amused.

  She passed Trainer Six.

  "What are you doing?" the cadet pilot asked.

  She didn't bother to respond. Now her altitude readout was behaving weirdly. It indicated she was within ten meters of the jungle canopy, though she knew she had maintained a twokilometer altitude and that number had to be wrong.

  Time zipped by as she fought with blindness. She caught up with Trainer Five, and then without warning, visual came back. She saw the ancient bare black rock of Grayhorn's conical volcano and, beyond that, the silver glint of the sea. Now she was abreast of Trainer Four, Broyden. "Who's that?" he asked. "I'm reporting you for violating approach distances!"

  She checked the readout. She was more than the required kilometer away from him, so she ignored the threat. Now Grayhorn loomed before her, and she was calculating turn vectors. She whipped the trainer around in so tight an arc that she felt the G forces build up even though the grav drive was supposed to muffle them. She was aware of a ping from the transceiver on Grayhorn, and she downloaded a pulse to it, verifying her arrival—but already the mountain lay behind her, and she was streaking for the seacoast and the Bight, an enormous round crater now filled with water, former home to an ancient volcano that must have rivaled Grayhorn.

  Ahead of her, Trainer Three looked as if it were in trouble. Instead of level flight, it rolled, turning over and over. As she caught up to it, she transmitted advice: "Don't fight it. Bank to port and ascend at ten meters per second. That'll straighten it out."

  No response, so she could only hope the struggling cadet had registered what she had sent. The waters of the Bight lay ahead now, turquoise, streaked with white waves. A ping, and she downloaded the proof of her passing, took a hard climbing bank, and set course for the campus and the hangar.

  "Elapsed time?" she asked.

  The ship told her that she had been in flight for fiftyseven minutes and forty-one seconds. Incredible. It had felt like ten minutes.

  And it also felt…hot. Great, now the enviros were malfunctioning. She took a suit temp reading and found it was up to thirty-four, nearly body temperature. Sweat could interfere with the suit's transpiration, leaving her short of oxygen. She wondered if she had pushed the ship too hard. Or was it another test of how she would react? Best not to obsess over it. There was Trainer Two, not far ahead. She overtook and passed it. Now Kayser was out there somewhere…there! She urged the trainer to a higher speed.

  "Who's that?" Kayser asked in an annoyed voice.

  "My name is Aster," she told him. "You don't seem to have the brains to remember it."

  "You're not supposed to be racing!"

  "Who said I was? I just like the feeling of speed." Asteria waited for Command to reprimand her, but evidently, whoever was monitoring the transmissions didn't feel called upon to scold.

  Kayser's trainer shot forward, accelerating at close to its top limit. Asteria grinned and let her own vessel go, pushing it to full speed. "Move over, Kayser. I'm coming through."

  "That's a demerit!" he snapped. "You can't call me that!"

  She chose not to answer. They had to turn now—their speed was taking them off course. Though they were moving at the same rate, Asteria had the inside of the turn, unless Kayser had the courage to strain the trainer past its design tolerances. That meant she could pass him. Keeping to the razor edge of thrust failure, Asteria kept the craft in a tight turn. She came abreast of Kayser's craft. She was pulling ahead—

  Power supply at 5 percent, the ship told her sternly. Instantly, she consulted the datafeeds. She wouldn't make it, not at this speed. Ten kilometers short of the hangar the ship would take over and land itself. How many demerits would that cost her?

  Unless—

  Unless it was another test, a trick. Doing a quick calculation in her head, she thought she should have more power than that—25 percent at least. Should she slow?

  Warning: Power supply at 4 percent. Ship override in two minutes.

  She could slow to half speed and make it. Or she could chance it and—

  "I'm out of power!" Kayser's panicky voice sliced through her thoughts. "The ship's taking me down!"

  She couldn't see him. She was too far ahead. But if he was out of power, her ship might be out too—

  She reduced thrust to half speed. She would come in with seconds to spare now. Already, she could see the campus in the distance. She calculated her incoming trajectory and made a course adjustment to use the absolute minimum of power. She was over the main entrance of the campus now at only five hundred meters altitude. People were staring up. There was the hangar—

  A black blur screamed past her. "Sorry, Disaster—"

  Asteria's blood ran cold at his snickering. Kayser had slowed and was already entering the hangar. She guided her t
rainer in ten seconds after him. She slipped into the correct berth and released the hatch. The flight sergeant was waiting, his face purple.

  "What did I tell you?" he demanded.

  "I kept to within tolerances," Asteria told him, climbing out.

  "Stand still." He released the sleek helmet and helped her lift it off. "Breathe!"

  She gasped air and felt woozy. At the far end of the trainer dock, two helpers had removed Kayser's helmet. He came swaggering toward them. "Sergeant," he said, "I want to report this cadet. She improperly addressed me by my family name."

  The sergeant glared at him. "If I give her a demerit, my lord, you must have two. We could hear your transmissions. You deliberately violated your orders when you engaged in a race with Trainer Seven. You transmitted false data to her craft."

  Kayser's face turned scarlet. "I didn't do—"

  "Please!" The sergeant leaned close, and in a furious, low voice, he said, "You didn't do anything? I was listening, my lord! You overrode the data stream in Trainer Seven to make it look as though it was out of power. And you sent a false distress communication. Both are against the rules. Now—do you want to press your charge?"

  "No, let it go," Kayser snapped and stalked past Asteria. The doorway swallowed him.

  A moment later, Trainer Two swooped in and berthed. Hot on its tail was Trainer Three. Asteria reported to the tech who had suited her, and he removed the pressure suit in the same efficient fashion. "If you get short of breath, use this," he said, handing her a respirator no longer than her little finger. "It's triox. You may have to use it to adjust to breathing on your own the first few times you suit up. All right, get into your uniform and then report to Sigma Two for debriefing."

  Four other girls had been on the training flight, and the last of them, an Aristo named Gaila, came in as Asteria finished dressing. "Mastral will have your skin," she warned in passing. "Remember you're a Commoner." Her mouth curled in what might have been a smile. "Even if you do know how to fly."

  By the time the class had assembled in the debriefing hall, Kayser had told everyone about beating Asteria in their impulsive race. Asteria clenched her teeth. So much for their truce. She didn't like the way Kayser's cronies grinned at her, but what did she expect?

  The flight coordinator came in, ran through the list of cadets, and explained what they had done right and had done wrong. Some had been slow to react to deliberate complications; others had made errors in navigation—one, a hapless Aristo named Mikkels, had come back half an hour late after making a bad turn, not realizing the obvious—that his nav system was giving him false data.

  Still, everyone scraped through with grades of 2.5 or better. Dai's was a very respectable 3.0. Asteria's was 3.4—"You reacted well to the onboard emergencies," the coordinator observed dryly. "Almost well enough to rack up a perfect 4.0. But you exceeded the speed requirements in returning."

  Her face felt hot when Kayser received a score of 3.7. "You received a 3.4 for your navigation and reaction to emergency situations," the flight coordinator said. "And we decided to give you a 10 percent bonus for having won an informal race."

  Kayser flashed Asteria a triumphant leer.

  Dai whispered, "Don't react."

  As the class broke up, Kayser and his shadow Broyden strutted past. Asteria said, "Congratulations on winning the high score… my Lord Mastral."

  He stared coldly at her. "That's not funny, Disaster." To Broyden, he said, "I don't think she'll be at the Academy much longer. Too gullible."

  Only after the two had left the hangar did Asteria realize she had balled her hands into fists.

  "Let them laugh," Dai told her. "You can show him up at the end of term in the War Games. Hey, want to go into Haven this weekbreak?"

  "No." Alone of all the students who had earned the average of 2.5, Asteria had never left the campus for the monthly half-day excursion to the coastal town.

  "Come on," Dai said. "Get some real food for a change. Swim in the sea."

  "I don't have any money," Aster said.

  "I thought they were supposed to give you an allowance from your father's estate."

  "Oh, they will. Eventually. The Bourse don't do anything quickly."

  "Then I'll treat."

  "No, thanks. I just don't want to, all right?" She hesitated when Dai dropped behind. "What's wrong?"

  Dai was huffing and puffing for air. She turned and saw that his complexion had taken on a faint green tinge. He tried to smile. It looked like a grin of pain. He gasped, "Uh—are you going to use your triox?"

  "Turned it in already," she said.

  "Oh."

  "Come on," she told him. "You're just readjusting to the air, that's all. Using two triox would be a rules violation."

  "Right." But he gave her an odd look, and he sounded far from convinced that she was sincere about "rules."

  ten

  W ar Games.

  Asteria had heard of them almost as soon as she set foot on Academy soil. They happened every year, toward the end of spring term. For sixteen days, classes were suspended, students dropped all talk about ways to violate rules without being caught, and the instructors became intensely interested in advising their favorite cadets on how to conduct themselves.

  The first-year cadets were also first in the War Games schedule. The four hundred top-ranked cadet pilots were divided up into sixteen teams for the competition. On the first day, by an arbitrary selection process, each team was paired with an enemy team. The eight winners went on to a second pairing on the second day; on the third day, the surviving four were paired; and on the last day, the surviving two teams faced each other for the top honor of the class.

  The teams alternated between playing the roles of attacker or defender in each round. Defenders would be given a specific task—prevent the enemy ships from knocking out a communications center, for example, represented by a beacon that could be silenced if an attacking ship could hit a target with a laser beam. The attackers had to devise the strategy and tactics necessary to achieve their objective.

  And of course the flight coordinators would be sure to throw in challenging accidents and mishaps. Asteria and Dai both made the cut, though they were not assigned to the same team, somewhat to Asteria's disappointment. She was in Team Gold, he in Team Red. The Golds, led by an Aristo girl named Helene Kaccia (merely the daughter of a baron, and so no one had to call her "my lady"), had informally decided to rename themselves the Bolts, and they adopted a stylized jagged spear of lightning as their symbol. Dai was the leader of the Reds, and Asteria wasn't surprised (and admittedly, she was amused) to hear that he had decided to call his team the Fabulous Flying Freaks. Their symbol was a brick.

  "Why a brick?" she'd asked him.

  Dai shrugged. "Why not?"

  Kayser was the commander of the Silver team—he had renamed them the Daggers—and Asteria suspected that he must have used his Aristo influence, because Broyden and Gull, his two buddies, were also on his team.

  Helene was on edge about the contest. "We may not win," she said, "but please, please, please, let's make it to the third round at least. You're all good—but make sure you're at least that much better than the other teams. If we get to round three, no one's going to make fun of us."

  The first day was not very challenging at all. The Bolts were paired against the Sabers, with the Bolts attacking, the Sabers defending. They flew trainers almost identical to the one Asteria had first flown—only these were equipped with mock weapons, chiefly laser cannons. They fired harmless light, but any ship hit by the blast would register the probable damage and relay the score to flight control.

  Their turn came early in the morning. Already Asteria had seen Dai, who triumphantly announced that the Freaks had soundly trounced the Team Green. Charged with defending a section of airspace, the Freaks had engaged the Green ships in close aerial combat, losing nine ships to imaginary damage but downing or seriously damaging all twenty-five of the enemy.

  As
teria suited up for the briefing. Helene told them they were protecting a troop transport, represented by a huge, slow skimmer. They had to see it safely across two hundred kilometers of airspace to win. She divided the pilots up, with some taking positions below the skimmer, some to either side, and some above. To Asteria, Helene said, "I want you to fly rear guard. Hang back, be inconspicuous, and charge in if anyone gets in trouble."

  "Aye," Asteria replied.

  Helene gave her a wan smile. "You've got good moves, Locke. Not all Aristos think you're a disaster."

  "Thank you, group leader," Asteria said flatly.

  They took off, assumed positions around the lumbering skimmer, and Helene gave the order to arm their weapons. Everyone reported in, Asteria last as the rear guard—and before Asteria knew it, they were gaining altitude as they left the Academy behind.