Warpath

by Randolph Lalonde

  Chapter 48

  Ronin or Samurai?

  There was a scratch on Minh-Chu Buu’s helmet that would never come out. It was a near miss. Shrapnel from the inside of his gunship would have done him critical harm if it struck just twenty centimetres lower. He was more fortunate than his crew. He watched Sticky and Maid get pulled out of his gunship and dragged off to medical. When the medical technician gave him the thumbs up for both his crewmembers, indicating that they’d be all right after some attention in the infirmary, Minh-Chu just leaned against the damaged port side of his ship.

  He could not stop himself from reviewing the events of the last hour in his head. He was in a gunship, armed with heavy fighter turrets, missile pods, and heavy munitions. He was one of the most protected members of his squadron, and it was his responsibility to not only use his tools effectively, but to make sure his squadron was where they had to be, when they had to be there. He couldn’t get past the fact that it was his responsibility to make sure that his wingmen weren’t ordered into unnecessarily unsafe situations. No matter how he considered the very real scenario in his head, he couldn’t come to any conclusion other than that he’d underestimated their enemy then led Jinx and his co-pilot to their deaths.

  Minh-Chu took several steps away from his gunship and looked at it. There were holes straight through the ship’s armour surrounded by dents and scorch marks. They didn’t have to use the main hatch to pull his two crewmembers out of the shuttle, the break in the starboard armour was larger. He stared at it until his vision blurred and he was seeing nothing but blurred colour. Jinx followed his orders without question straight into a trap. Revenant was a good pilot, no, he was a great fighter pilot. Minh-Chu should have treated that differently, he should have called half the wing down on him, given him nowhere to run, no place to hide.

  Instead he took the job of killing the loudest mouth the enemy had himself for no logical reason. He was running a gunship, and should have assisted the more agile Uriels, not pretended he was still flying a starfighter. Every gunship in the field had more assists than he did.

  “Sir?” asked an Ensign in a heavy yellow vacsuit. The extra layers of armour and synthetic muscle didn’t match the face behind the visor. It was like seeing a bodybuilder with the head of slim fifteen-year old girl. “Are you all right? You’ve been standing here awhile,” she said quietly.

  “I’m fine, sorry,” Minh-Chu looked back at his fighter for a moment. “Guess you have to drag this wreck off for repairs.”

  “Yes, Sir,” the Ensign said. “And we’re coming out of wormhole transit in a few minutes. Your squadron will be returning to the Revenge, escorting three personnel shuttles.”

  Minh-Chu glanced at his command and control unit, finding that there was an update from the Flight Operations Centre telling him the same thing. It was several minutes old. “Heading back into another wormhole after that. Thank you, Ensign, carry on,” Minh-Chu said softly. Everyone who could contest his next decision would be busy on the bridge. He waited until he was inside the lift and behind closed doors before he accessed the Officer’s controls on his arm unit. “Am I sure?” he asked himself. The lift moved up one level and stopped.

  Carnie loped into the elevator car. The man was a full head taller than Minh-Chu, and the knotted strands of blonde hair made him recognizable from almost any distance. At least, that’s what everyone assumed.

  Carnie looked at the command and rank display screen on Minh-Chu’s control unit and shook his head. “Yeah, you’re not gonna do that,” he said. “I need you, man. My mates in this wing, the ones on duty and the ones who are coming on line when the other hangars are done need you to get us through this shit storm.”

  “I’ve been here before,” Minh-Chu said, not thinking about the words coming out of his mouth, not filtering for once. “I’ve never been trained to handle this rank, Wing Commander. I didn’t go through Officer training like our Captain, like the Admiral. I got a month of Officer Prep, nothing compared to their year, and some of them got even more,” he said sourly. “I can barely make the right decisions for myself, what business do I have taking your life in my hands. I can come up with a strategy in a briefing room, but I lose focus out there.”

  “Man, you look at my training logs,” Carnie said. “Sixty three hours of watching your combat playbacks and counting. Not including the ones I watched over, and over. I watch your dashboard too, what you’re doing, what you’re telling everyone else to do and when. That’s me watching your greatest hits, in simulation and in real combat. I’ve been flying since I was nine, but I’ve never learned as much about tactics, running a ship, systems management, or shooting as I have in the last few weeks. Yeah, maybe you made your duel with Revenant personal, a mistake you warned us about in those training recordings, but it happens once in every pilot’s career if they see enough action. Until I joined your outfit every fight was personal. Defending our convoy wasn’t my job, it was my duty, like some kinda higher purpose. I was fighting assholes off so they wouldn’t steal our kids, kill our families, take our shit and leave the survivors stranded. That’s personal, and we lost focus all the time. We were a bunch of idiot hotheads. I didn’t know it then, but I do now. If we had just one guy that was half the leader you are up there with us, we wouldn’t lose people in almost every fight. Our convoy would have been untouchable, no one would even bother messing with us carnies after a while.”

  “Some of us have grown as much as we can as leaders,” Minh-Chu said. “I’ll stick with the wing, but I won’t lead.”

  Carnie mashed the STOP button on the elevator. “Hell, no. You’re not putting this burden down. I might not know you as well as the Officers on this ship, but I see a leader when you’re in that briefing room, a role model. I didn’t have a dad growing up, the repair droids on my ship took care of me as much as anyone did. The guy I dreamt about, the one who would swoop in and adopt me, the one I made up in my head sounded a lot like you do. He wouldn’t leave his wing to deal with these Order pricks on their own. He wouldn’t walk away from his kids.”

  Minh-Chu looked at Carnie and realized how very young he really was. His height, his scraggly hair and sure step were deceiving. In truth, the man was only eighteen, too young for a stop shot. “I don’t know what to say, I led someone into a trap today and didn’t see it coming. I wasn’t in the right place for most of that fight.”

  “Not from where I was sitting,” Carnie said. “You did lead us through that, and you took the most dangerous targets on, like that antimatter missile. I don’t think there’s one of us who would have thought of detonating it on purpose so it caught the tails of those Order fighters, and if anyone did think of it, I don’t think they’d have the guts. Except for maybe Hot Chow, but he was out of the fight. Oh, and you saved his ass too. What’s this, man, why am I not getting through to you here? This is just a gut check. What would you tell one of us if we had a bad mission?”

  Minh-Chu couldn’t help but admit that the young pilot was right, and deactivated the interface that would allow him to demote himself. “Thank you, Carnie. You’ve saved Slick from doing double duty, commanding the Triton’s and the Revenge’s fighter wings.”

  “Buy me a drink sometime, Angry Grape if you can find it,” Carnie said. “Besides, did you think about who Slick would eventually put in charge of this outfit?”

  “You’d be close to the lead, your stats are better than almost everyone here.” Minh-Chu suddenly realized that he was standing next to a solution to another problem. “I’m putting you in for Squadron Leader along with Sticky. I have to take another look into the third spot, but you two are going to start taking command level qualifiers tomorrow if we stay in transit.”

  “I don’t know if I’m ready,” Carnie said.

  Minh-Chu pressed the STOP button on the elevator so it would continue moving to the command deck. “That’s what the qualifiers are for. Oh, and start memorizing regulations, they’ll be part of the command qualifier.”


  “Yes, Sir,” Carnie said with a little smirk. “Holy shit,” he muttered to himself.

  “Oh, and stow the language,” Minh-Chu said. “That’s not how Officers sound.”

  “Yeah, I’ll work on it.”

  The lift doors opened and Minh-Chu turned towards Carnie, shaking his hand. “Thank you, and good luck. Remember, this isn’t a reward, this is an opportunity to do more for everyone in your wing and on your ship.”

  “Thank you, Ronin,” he replied.

  “You’d better pass those quals,” Minh-Chu said as he walked out of the elevator car into the relatively narrow concourse. “I’m not going to run this wing alone, you know what they say.”

  “Misery loves company?” Carnie replied as the doors started to close.

  “True, but I was thinking; ‘when this job drives me crazy, I’m going to take you with me.’”

  “No one says that!” Carnie shouted after him.

  Chapter 49

  Creature Comforts

  Minh-Chu joined Stephanie on the Flight Operations Deck above the main bridge to help as the Samurai Squadron and a few personnel shuttles made their way to them from the Triton. Jake enjoyed seeing him on the bridge, upper or lower half, it didn’t matter. As commander of their fighter wing, he would be spending more and more time there.

  It was a strange experience seeing Minh-Chu and Stephanie work together though. Minh-Chu had only been there a moment before Jake realized how all the people who survived his previous lives were coming together in his new one.

  Jake hadn’t seen Stephanie laugh since he woke up, not even during the welcoming party on the Solar Forge, but Minh-Chu had the magic combination to crack her stern expression. Her mood was so improved that she was leisurely rocking from toe to heel as she oversaw landing operations from the command podium above the bridge. “All craft are aboard and secure, Sir,” she said to him through the intercom.

  “Thank you, Stephanie, good work,” Jake replied. The counter said it took them only nine minutes to recover Samurai Squadron and three personnel shuttles, two of which weren’t planned.

  “The Triton is forming the wormhole that will take us to waypoint three,” Kadri announced.

  “Helm,” Jake addressed. “Careful entry, please. Don’t get too close to the Triton.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Ashley replied.

  The bridge was half empty of familiar faces. Finn, Agameg, and Frost had left their subordinate officers at their posts while they made inspections, supervised damage control and made plans to rebuild based on the supplies they had on hand. The Revenge was crossing the threshold into the wormhole behind the Triton when Jake received a surprising report.

  Agameg and Finn had found a way for a component inside the dimension drive to safely project shield barriers without requiring an emitter directly behind the protected area. It was so simple, and they were able to use a small piece of software written aboard the Triton to enable it immediately. Jake looked the procedure over and checked for risks.

  The part of the dimension drive that created the funnel through outer-dimension space was the key, and in normal space it could create powerful barriers that stopped objects and high energy from getting in, while letting anything they liked leave from the inside of the field. The system that opened dimensional rifts would not be used at all, so Jake opened a channel to Finn. “You can implement this right now?” he asked.

  “Absolutely. It’ll give us time to repair and replace the forward emitters and increase the rest of our shield defensive capability by…” Finn replied trailing off.

  “Approximately three hundred percent,” Agameg finished for him.

  “I know, I was just double checking that number,” Finn said. “It seems high, even though we’re going to have to feed those systems about thirty seven percent of our generated power to do it.”

  “How long will it take to calibrate the system?” Jake asked.

  “First, Agameg is right, we get a minimum of two hundred and fifty percent boost in our shield intensity, and a maximum of three hundred thirty five percent. I know, that sounds huge, and it is, but we can’t open a dimensional rift while we’re doing this. So, if we want to jump we have to shut down our enhanced shields, then wait a little over a minute for the capacitors to recharge before we open a rift.”

  “I think we can live with that, considering we can barely shield the nose of the ship without it,” Jake said. “Now, calibration?”

  “I’m almost finished,” Agameg said. “I only had to feed the shape of the ship into the computer, add a few metres in all directions, allow for a pocket of space around our launch bays, and now it is complete.”

  “Good work, you two work three times as fast together,” Jake said.

  “The new program came from the Triton, actually,” Finn said. “Ayan and the artificial intelligence there finished putting it together while she was on her way here. We’d never have been able to do it without her code.”

  “It was easier than it looks,” Ayan said as she stepped onto the bridge. She had a hard, meter long case slung over her shoulder in addition to her personal carry bag. An Ensign at the rear of the bridge took them from her. “You can put that in the Captain’s quarters,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Welcome aboard,” Jake said.

  “Thank you,” Ayan said, walking to him. She stopped beside his command chair, resting her hand on the back of his neck and leaning against it. “The information you got from Lorander is going to make using the technology in the dimension drive a lot more possible. I’ve been reading through it non-stop since I boarded the Triton, and there are absolutely no mysteries about the systems in the dimension drive. Lorander started studying the prototype aboard the Fallen Star as soon as Shozo approached them. Now we have all their work on the technology.”

  “So, you’re happy with what I was able to get out of them?” Jake asked.

  “Jealous, to be honest,” Ayan said. “All I ever got were kind words and philosophy lessons, which were invaluable, if I’m being honest. They made seeing you in a stasis tube much easier during those six weeks. I don’t know what they saw in you that convinced them that we should have an instruction manual to improve every technology we already have the keys to.”

  “Pardon, Captain,” Liara said; addressing Ayan. “Did you say every kind of technology?”

  Jake couldn’t help but recognize that, not only was the entire bridge listening to his and Ayan’s conversation, but they were glancing at her and smiling a little as well. Were they just happy to see her? Was it the spectacle of seeing him and Ayan together that keep them glancing?

  “There are interactive documents dedicated to teaching us to move forward with everything from agriculture to weaponry. The weaponry portion of the database is thinnest, but I don’t think they saw a need to tell us how to weaponize technology, it’s something we’re already a little too good at. Have you had much time to look through the information package?” she asked Jake.

  “Honestly? Not really,” he replied. “Running the ship and trying to keep my balance has kept me busy.”

  Ayan cocked her head, concerned and curious.

  “It seems all that extra muscle growth in the tank had a side effect. At least, that’s my theory. Our medical technician found a small tumour, it was causing problems with my inner ear. It’s gone now, but it’s going to take a little time for me to find my equilibrium again.”

  “So, that’s what’s wrong!” Ashley exclaimed from the helm. “Sorry, eavesdropping. It’s just, I didn’t know why you needed help walking around awhile ago, a few of us were worried.”

  “It’s all right, Ash,” Jake said. “I’ll be steady on my feet again in a couple days.”

  “Okay, whew,” Ashley said. “Nothing serious.”

  “Do you have time for a break?” Ayan asked in whisper.

  Jake checked their disposition in the wormhole and the ship status then nodded. “We don’t come out of this wormhole for ab
out forty minutes.”

  Stephanie surrendered control of the Flight Operations Deck to Minh-Chu, and descended the short staircase at the rear of the bridge by picking her feet up and sliding down the railings on her hands. “Good time for a break, Captain,” she said.

  “I’ll take half an hour,” Jake replied, carefully standing up. The deck didn’t seem to tilt nearly as much as it did the last time he attempted to rise.

  Ayan tucked herself under one arm and walked off the bridge with him. She chuckled a little when they finished the short journey. “I remember seeing how close your quarters were to the bridge on the schematics, but actually making the trip in ten steps, seven for you, is another thing entirely. If you’re not careful, you’ll serve your whole command in a ten by fifteen metre area.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Jake replied. “I’ve never wanted to explore the ship more than I have today. Getting knocked off my feet, not being able to help with repairs or check damage myself has been a pain in the ass.”

  “No one expects you to do any of that,” Ayan said. “Your place is the command centre.”

  “I’m a mission driven Captain. I’m too good on the ground, or in a boarding team to get stuck on the bridge full time,” Jake said. “At least, I used to be.” A wobble in his balance made him overcompensate, fighting the support of his suit, and he leaned against the lockers beside his door, pulling Ayan into his arms. It wasn’t intentional, but he was glad to have her to himself in a private space, even if it was for a short time. “Lapse in balance there.”

  “Sure, sure,” she said, looking up at him.

  “While we’re here,” he said before kissing her. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and reciprocated warmly. The world spun a little, but he did his best to ignore it, and held her, one hand around her waist, the other across her back. Ayan leaned against him fully, and even through his light armour the feeling of her in his arms, the long, open kiss, the light rose and lilac scent of her was nearly overwhelming. Nothing he could remember from his life could compare. He did not press the situation, but kept trading intimacy, enjoying the moment with her without showing intentions for more.