by Kalina, Mark
Jessa had the style and manner of a pilot down pat, though. Her avatar was a short female with flared hips and ample, though not excessive, breasts. Her face was a portrait of a black haired pixie, with black eyes just a touch larger and more almond shaped than plausible, an affectation custom-built into the biosim avatar. Zandy had no idea what Jessa's birth body had looked like but figured it was very likely nothing like her current avatar.
"Hey, Pixie," said Zandy, managing a weary smile at Jessa. The two pilots shared the main room of their quarters, though each had a separate private space attached. All together, the three rooms made up the volume of a small planet-side room, or a large station-side room. Though every crewmember aboard the Conquering Sun had their own quarters, volume was not endless even in the giant assault-ship and the quarters were small. But just as the daemons needed to spend time in human-like avatars, they also needed room to act human while wearing those avatars. Smaller ships could cut corners in terms of crew space, but that also reduced their effective endurance. A cramped swift-ship, intended for scouting and fast raids, would start seeing crew efficiency fall sharply after a deployment of less than a thousand hours. The Conquering Sun was intended to be almost perpetually deployable. A long patrol might cross a dozen systems over a whole tenkay, ten thousand hours without a full stand-down. A tour of duty could last for patrol after patrol, with only a few hundred hours of off-ship rest and recuperation in between. The volume allotted to her crew was the comfortable minimum calculated to keep the crew able to operate at full readiness, indefinitely. Volume for quarters was compact, but never too cramped.
The ship's crew quarters could have been a wasps' nest of individual rooms, but there, too, experience had shown that putting the crew together, letting different duty specialties mix, aided the efficiency of the crew. Which was why Zandy shared this space with Jessa.
"So you got killed, hey?" said Jessa. "Rough."
"Yeah. You don't get anything like that flying the 'Sun."
"Nope. 'Course we run sims every shift. It gets tense. After all, it's not really nearly as hard to run a VR for us; all they have to simulate in VR is the optical data and the gees."
"You don't get any gees, Pixie."
"Well it's not like you have to feel your eighty gees in a biological body, Zandy," Jessa said, sitting down next to the taller woman.
Zandy sighed. "Nope. Eighty gees would turn a meat-brain to liquid with chunks. But I feel the acceleration. It's a strain to accelerate that hard; you can feel the interceptor hull frames compressing, and... it sort of hurts, I guess. Not actual damage-warning pain, but..."
"I get it. Psychosomatic. I think everyone gets it from one stimulus or another. Every daemon."
Jessa looked critically at Zandy.
"Damn, Zandy, you're fried. You're tensing up your avatar. Gonna strain the articulation if you keep this up." Jessa's hands settled on Zandy's shoulders.
"You need to relax," the dark haired woman said as her hands moved down over Zandy's back. "Feel good?"
"Yeah. It feels good," said Zandy. A look of mild annoyance crossed her face as Jessa's hands moved around her and unfastened the front of her uniform. The look relaxed into resigned pleasure as the other woman's hands cupped Zandy's breasts.
"All right, Pixie. You always want to fuck."
"And you like it," said Jessa, bringing her mouth close to the blond woman's ear. Zandy turned and kissed her, gray eyes looking for a moment into her lover's black eyes.
"I like it," said Zandy, half amused at herself as Jessa pulled off the uniform's top.
Zandy had not been attracted to women, when she had been biologically human. There had been a single fumbling experiment at the Academy, but never a repeat. Her affair with Jessa had started a little while after she had been assigned to the Conquering Sun, still new and a bit clumsy in her biosim avatar. Jessa had started with jokes, and playful shoves or hugs, or experiments to see if she could get to a place that tickled; supposedly impossible for a daemon, but actually fairly easy; psychosomatics at work again. The touches had become more and more intimate over several hundred hours. Zandy had been surprised to find herself making love with the other woman, but then, after the soul-shocking change from biological human mind to neural-net daemon, changing sexual orientation seemed like a minor step.
It was only a half-way change anyway, thought Zandy as Jessa pulled off Zandy's uniform pants and began to work her mouth down Zandy's body. Zandy had entertained herself with a male lover the last time she was on leave from the ship. But aboard the ship their relationship seemed to just... fit somehow. Zandy gasped as the other woman's mouth found its goal and then pulled back and reached to start undoing the seals on Jessa's uniform.
3
The Conquering Sun and her escorts were in high orbit of Yuro IV, and the night-side of the planet turning below the Hegemonic Fleet ships was velvet blackness speckled with the gleaming gold of artificial lights. A cluster of cities spread along the coast of one of the continents, fading out into a dusting of settlements and then into uninhabited darkness. Yuro IV was one of the last worlds to be colonized directly from Old Earth, but that still made it one of the "old" worlds, and even though its growth had been slow, the major cities counted their populations in the millions. Of course there was still a frontier down there, and room for vast population growth before the local ecology even began to feel any strain, but there were urban zones as well.
Cities at night always looked lovely from orbit: a glowing pattern of golden lights across black background. Like ornate jewelry, mused Demi-Captain Freya Tralk. The observation window in her tiny quarters gave a wonderful view of the planet below. It would have been nice to have the time to take leave down there, perhaps. Or perhaps not. She had seen dozens of worlds, in the tenkays since she had joined the Fleet. Some were pleasant in truth, air spiced with the scents of alien plants, breezes cool or warm against an avatar's skin. Others were better seen from orbit, where distance masked the squalid or grimly industrial realities and showed only golden lights.
Not that it mattered. Her presence aboard her ship was non-negotiable, just now. The Hegemonic Fleet swift-ship Ice Knife orbited alongside her giant companion, the Conquering Sun. The ships were in a geostationary orbit, more than thirty thousand kilometers above the planet. Barring emergencies, singularity powered ships were not allowed into low orbits of inhabited worlds. From thirty thousand kilometers, the exhaust plume of a singularity reactor powered plasma drive would cause amazing fireworks and aurorae in the planet's upper atmosphere, but no serious damage. From a low enough orbit, it would be a blow-torch of atmosphere-cooking heat and radiation.
Ice Knife was oriented with her dorsal aspect facing the planet, but even so, Freya could just make out the reflection of the system's star shining on the orbital elevator, like a long, straight, silver string rising up from the equator of the planet. Yuro IV had been independent before annexation by the Hegemony, some nine hundred thousand hours (well over a hundred local years) ago, but the orbital elevator had been a Hegemony project. Singularity powered ships were not allowed within close range of the elevator's orbital hub either.
Most ships that called on the planet parked in a geostationary "anchorage" orbit far from the orbital hub, and took orbital transfer shuttles to the orbital hub. Some of the bigger cargo shuttles were larger than small starships, but their low-powered drives made them safe, or at least safe enough, to come near the fragile orbital hub of the planet's space elevator.
Ships that visited the Yuro system and did not have business with the habitable fourth planet rarely bothered to enter its orbit. The vast Jyu-Lau Deep Space Anchorage Station, orbiting in the stable leading LaGrange point of Jyu-Lau, the largest moon of the gas giant Yuro V, saw to their needs. Her own ship was in planetary orbit of Yuro IV to allow some of the squadron's crew to take some leave hours planetside.
From her viewport, Freya could see the occasional flare of a shuttle's electro-thermal drive as
it shifted orbit, but Ice Knife's orbital position was wrong to give her a clear view of the elevator and its capsule-trains, running goods and people to and from the planetary surface.
She could not see the Conquering Sun at all from this view port; from her frame of reference, the assault-ship was "below" Ice Knife, facing the little ship's ventral aspect. It would have been hard to find two more different looking ships in the Fleet. The Conquering Sun was a vast spindle of curves and angles, studded with laser arrays and sensor masts and radiator fins, shaped only for deep space, and "streamlined" only by the requirements of anti-radar stealth. The assault-ship stretched for almost a kilometer and a quarter; twelve hundred and six meters from forward sensors and retracted bow-shields to the aft radiators and exhaust guides of the main drive. Ice Knife, in comparison, was a narrow angular wedge, looking a bit like a high-tech arrowhead. Intended for rapid scouting and pursuit, she was actually streamlined for atmospheric reentry, able to retract sensor masts and radiator panels at need. At a hundred and sixty meters long and seven kilotons, the swift-ship was less than a seventh the length and not quite one quarter of one percent of the mass of the assault-ship.
All mine, thought Freya, with a mix of pride and irony. She ran a careless hand through short blond hair so pale it was almost silver and half-smiled. Pure luck that silver hair was in fashion at the Hegemon's court now. Not that she could make anyone believe that she had chosen her avatar's hair color to match her birth-body's natural color, with no consideration of current fashions. She had not wanted to radically change her appearance when she chose her biosim avatar, and apart from her coincidentally fashionable hair, her looks were somewhat the opposite of her sleek command. She was broad shouldered and short, with wide features and light hazel eyes over a snub nose. She had refused to spend money for a custom avatar, not wanting to compete with others who spent small fortunes on avatars individually made by famous designers. As it was she looked rather like a publicity vid of a young Fleet recruit; earnest, open features that were just cute enough to be photogenic, but in no way sleek. Maybe if she customized her avatar's face to look "older" she could aspire to the look of grizzled assault-ship commander. As it was she looked far too young, though with avatars looks were nothing to judge by. And for that matter, she would have considered a lumbering assault-ship a poor trade for the command of her agile, dagger like swift-ship.
She had fought to get this command, and fought hard. She could recall, with perfect clarity, her heady joy at being appointed to command the Ice Knife. A command so early in her career was an unambiguous nod of approval from Fleet Command. The attendant elevation of her social rank to telestos was almost lost in the sheer thrill of having her own ship; never mind the fact that she was now a noble of some consequence among the power structure of the Hegemony of Suns. It was rare, not unheard of, but rare, for a someone born to a commoner demoi family and then inducted into the aristokratai to attain any noble rank higher than hetairos, the lowest noble rank.
It was not rare, per se, for a commoner to make it into the Fleet Academy; about half of the young officers graduating the Fleet Academies came from demoi families, though only commoners (and a few scapegrace near-failure children of the aristokratai) had to go through the grueling ten thousand hours of Basic Selection training. On the other hand, that still came to less than one commoner in a million making it into the Fleet in any given tenkay. It was no easy thing for a commoner to get a chance to become aristokratai.
The Hegemony was an aristocracy in functional fact. The noble aristokratai held every position of political and military power, ran every aspect of the interstellar government across more than a hundred star systems. But it was a meritocracy as well. The children of the aristokratai received the best preparation and the powerful benefits of patronage, as well as access to the Examinations which, if passed, allowed the noble-born to short-cut around the most grueling parts of the Academies' curricula. But not even the noble-born automatically gained aristokratai status. Those failing the Examinations, or choosing not to take them, didn't get automatic access to the Academies, and even if they got in, had to pass the exact same harsh curriculum as any commoner accepted into an Academy.
Of course commoners, demoi, got no preparation beyond what they managed for themselves, and few had any patronage. But though the qualifications were exacting, qualified applicants did get a chance to enter the Academies. And if they made it through, a commoner could become aristokratai, just like their noble-born fellow applicants. But for a demoi-born like her to be promoted so high, so young, that was truly rare.
She had influence now, of course. Her performance in the Fleet was well above the high standards that defined the average. High enough that people had taken notice. There were high nobles, acro-telestai and equetai, who watched her and exchanged small favors to increase her chances for success. But they would not have done it had they not expected her to one day be able to return the favor, to them, or perhaps to their descendants.
And the result was this, her own swift-ship. Seven thousand tons of sensors and weapons... singularity reactor, plasma drives and reaction mass... and two dozen Fleet crew, all under her command.
The day she had taken command of the tiny ship had been the happiest day of her life. With equal clarity she remembered the sudden swooping disappointment when she learned that her swift, subtle new ship would be slaved to a lumbering assault-ship; an assignment that put paid to her ambitions of pirate-hunting bonuses and the ultimate desire of all swift-ship captains, an independent patrol.
Independent patrol was one of the things swift-ships were best suited to; there were hundreds, even thousands of supposedly empty star systems throughout the volume of the Hegemony of Suns, unoccupied, empty of valuable planets. But it was possible, even easy, for someone to set up shop in those empty systems, using them as a base for smuggling... or piracy. So the Fleet sent swift-ships to systematically patrol such systems; just dropping in to a system and taking a good look was usually enough to prove they were still empty, or to find out that they were not. For the most part, it was boring duty, as Freya could personally vouch from two tours of duty as crew on Fleet swift-ships, before she had earned her own command. On the other hand, if there was something in one of the supposedly empty systems, it was the discovering swift-ship that got to deal with it. Granted that sometimes the smugglers or pirates could FTL out of the system before they could be intercepted; just the same, sometimes they couldn't. The bonuses, and the prestige, that came to the captain and ship that captured or destroyed a pirate were substantial. And none of that was possible for a swift-ship tasked to escort an assault-ship.
And yet, it had not turned out to be as bad as she had thought it would be. Instead, over the course of the last nine thousand hours, being under the orders of Command-Captain Kai Ari-Kani of the Conquering Sun had proven to be a stroke of good luck almost as great as Ice Knife herself. Of demoi origins himself, he none the less had the perfect, easy manner of a multi-generation noble, not only confident enough in his competence to forgo excessive formality and micromanagement of his subordinates, but also confident enough in his aristokratai status to not seek to browbeat and dominate the mid-ranked nobles, like Freya, under his command.
Under Captain Ari-Kani's stewardship, the Conquering Sun had become a name associated with elegance and tactical brilliance. He had wielded his huge assault-ship with a lance-ship's high style, with none of the ponderous tactical formality that Freya had expected from an assault-ship commander. He had used the swift-ships to their best capacity as well, allowing them the freedom to use their speed and agility and allowing the swift-ship captains to run their own ships, to improvise, giving them every chance to shine.
And not only in space operations; his superbly picked crew and smoothly, even elegantly, run ship had made otherwise despised "show-the-flag" cruises a matter of enjoyment and political profit to his subordinate captains. Unlike many senior commanders, he had made sure that his sup
eriors knew of and remembered his swift-ship commanders. Moreover, his insistence on a "civilized ship" meant that deep-space deployments were never without lively society: dinners, concerts, debates and discussions. It was utterly unlike anything Freya had ever previously encountered in the Fleet, and she had come to feel privileged to be one of his captains.
Ice Knife was one of two swift-ship scouts that accompanied the Conquering Sun; the other swift-ship was the Skyrunner, a brand new ship with a brand new captain, which had joined the little fleet only six hundred hours ago, replacing the swift-ship Ghostwing, which had been reassigned to a coveted independent patrol.
Still, the very fact that Ghostwing's captain had gotten an independent patrol was proof that Freya's Ice Knife could one day get the same. For now though, the huge assault-ship and her escorts were detached on patrol duty for the next tenkay at least. Of course, patrol for an assault-ship was a different sort of mission from patrol for a little swift-ship. Assault-ships didn't often spend their time looking in on supposedly empty systems; instead, their patrol took them across the Hegemony's inhabited systems, stopping at empty systems only if Fleet Intelligence or Fleet Research Branch suspected there was something of interest there.
It was a substantial commitment of combat power to send one of the Hegemony's biggest capital ships on patrol, but nothing else served quite as well for a show-the-flag mission. The whole mission was basically politics, Freya supposed, but it had its upsides; she had gotten to visit more of the Hegemony's worlds than most Fleet personnel got to, and the "incidental" scientific survey and exploration work was fascinating in its own right. The three ships had explored star systems that had not been visited in generations, and taken detailed sensors data from dozens of uninhabited planets and moons for astronomical research. There was a satisfaction in doing this sort of work, in showing the Hegemony that the Fleet had more than just a military purpose.