“This is going to take a little getting used to,” he mused. Interesting. Had that sentence been a thought, or words spoken aloud to himself? He checked; it hadn’t been broadcast over any speaker system or radio, so it was purely internal. The nature of this new state of being was filled with fascinating features.
He checked on his passengers. They’d be crew once they were fully integrated into their fighters, but it seemed unfair to force them into that transition immediately. Instead, Max prepared a virtual room for them to inhabit, a simulation not that different from the one they’d experienced in Valhalla. He’d yanked the images directly from video feeds of the Hermes, so they were gathered in a set of virtual rooms set in the actual ship. He could monitor their progress. At the moment they were all walking around, chatting. He heard a nervous undertone to their conversation that was completely understandable.
They were someplace new, facing a threat they didn’t understand to defend people they thought they’d left entirely behind. Their circumstances had changed instantly from property that had no rights to being people again with futures. And they were mortal now. They could die. All of that had to be sinking in. It wasn’t going to be easy for some of them to adjust, which was why he was glad there were more than thirty of them. If a few cracked under the pressure of transition, he’d still have enough to pilot the entire fighter compliment.
That felt cold to Max, but he figured there was some reason to be. This was about defending their homeworld. All of them were expendable if their lives could save Earth from invasion. These would-be pilots had known that going in.
A quick thought and Max materialized inside the virtual space. He stumbled with his first step, unsteady being back on two legs again. Would that get easier with time? He hoped so.
“All right, everyone. We’ve got work to do and only a short time to get you all ready for the fight ahead,” Max said. He’d chosen an image for himself dressed in Navy uniform, his rank insignia plain on his shoulders. It was important that he demonstrate command right from the beginning.
“Are we sure there’s going to be a fight?” one man asked.
Max concentrated and the names of each person flagged over their heads for him. There were so many benefits to being in virtual space instead of the real world! He was terrible at recalling names. This was going to be much more comfortable.
“Grimalf - do you prefer that name or your old one?” Max asked.
The man hesitated a moment. He looked surprised at being asked the question. “I’m honestly not sure. We can choose?”
“Of course. You can be whichever you prefer. Although maybe one way to manage both names is to use your old human name, and make the Valhalla name your pilot callsign?” Max asked.
“That works for me,” Grimalf said.
Max tweaked the name tags to show both. “All right. Each of you is now an Ensign in the UN Navy unless you had a higher rank in the service beforehand. Some of you did.” He nodded toward Sam.
“Been a while, though. I have as much to learn here as anyone. I’ve never flown a ship before,” she said.
“I’ve already prepared uploaded basic flight skills to each of you. You’ll understand what’s involved in controlling your craft before you ever enter the vehicles. But that won’t give you hands-on experience, and there’s no substitute for that. We need to get you all up to speed as quickly as we can,” Max said.
“How long until we arrive?” a man whose tag said he was called Harald asked.
“Three days.”
There were some surprised looks and sharp breaths at that news. What had they expected? Max pushed aside his annoyance with an effort. That was why they’d been chosen: so that the ship could get to Neptune faster than a flesh-and-blood human could manage.
“We’ll begin flight training immediately,” Max said. “Everyone, to your fighters.”
8
The fighter’s engines thrummed in response to Sam’s mental command. She activated steering thrusters to alter her vector as she shot around Triton. The alien ring would be in her line of sight in under thirty seconds.
“Look sharp, people. Our best shot at taking this thing out is on the first run,” Sam said.
She checked her radar. Most of the wing was in position, but Gurgle’s fighter was slipping out of alignment. Again.
“Gurgle, correct your flight path. You’re coming too close to Xiang,” Sam said The Wasp fighters were accelerating at a rate that would have been impossible for a flesh-and-blood human to survive. The digital minds flying the little ships only felt that as extra stress on the steel frame of each vessel. The fighters were their bodies, which meant the pilots could push their Wasps to the mechanical limit.
“Gurgle do,” her old friend replied.
Sam watched as he corrected course. If he over-corrected, he risked crashing into someone else. That was the downside of flying at these speeds. Even a small error tended to be fatal, as they’d learned the hard way. Space, Sam found, was as unforgiving a place as its reputation had suggested.
“You’re overcompensating for the turn, Gurgle,” Sam said. “Sending you a new flight path now.” She quickly had her onboard systems plot an adjustment for him and tight-beamed it to his fighter. The change worked. His ship shifted back into its proper place in their formation.
The rest of her fighter wing remained silent through the exchange, but Sam knew what they had to be thinking. This wasn’t the first time Gurgle had trouble controlling his ship. It was going to get someone killed.
Was bringing him along the right thing to do? Sam wasn’t sure. She’d thought he would adapt to flight just fine since he’d spent over a year as a dragon. But so far he was having more trouble than the rest of them. It might have been better to leave him in Valhalla, as much as that would have hurt him.
Streaks of coherent light flashed past Sam’s cockpit. Shit, she’d been distracted by Gurgle and missed the enemy approach entirely. She sent her fighter into a tumbling spin toward Triton to see if she could foil the attack. Erratic movements made her more difficult to track. It was the best chance of staying alive out there. A quick glance at her radar showed that she was in trouble. There were six enemy ships in the front attack line, and another six coming on fast behind them.
“Someone want to get this guy off me?” Sam called into her radio.
“On it,” Harald replied. More blips appeared on her tracking as he fired missiles to engage the enemy ships. Their missile fire was woefully inaccurate against the alien fighters. Winning against them often came down to their nose-mounted railguns against some sort of laser ray-gun thing the aliens had. It wasn’t close to a fair fight.
No one had promised her that things would be fair on this mission. If anything, quite the opposite. She’d known going in that this was going to be hairy and possibly suicide. So why do it? Maybe staying in Valhalla would have been the better idea. Let someone else do the hard work of keeping the planet safe. It didn’t have to be her.
Sam worked at clearing her mind. Everything about piloting her ship was a mental exercise. Distraction was lethal. She needed all her concentration focused on dealing with the threat. That, and leading the others. If there were a real reason she’d come along it was for them, because she wanted to be there to support her friends. These people had become her family, and she’d be damned if she was going to let them go off into real-world combat without her.
“Harald, Grim, take your wings and hit them from above the ecliptic. Xiang, your wing is with mine. Arc around close to Triton and then swing back. We’ll catch them in a ninety-degree pincer,” Sam said.
The other wing commanders called in that they understood. Sixteen fighters. That was all she had to play with, out there, against six enemies. If they didn’t take out these six quickly, it was going to be twelve enemies, at which point it was all over but the crying.
Pushing the throttle to the engine’s limits was second nature to her now. Her people weren’t going to p
ass out from g-forces. They could drive their little ships as hard as possible. Sam shot toward the large moon with every bit of boost she could get from her drive. The three ships in her wing followed, and she could see Xiang’s group right above hers. Four of the alien vessels followed her. The other two broke off to intercept Harald and Grim’s wings. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do.
“Arc back toward them - now!” Sam hollered.
The ships were nimble, but nothing could just stop on a dime in space. There were two ways to change vector. You could either flip the ship over and decelerate as hard as you’d accelerated, or you could use steering thrusters to change the vector of your movement without trying to slow down. The turn wasn’t anything close to tight, but they could create a wide arc back around toward the enemy ships. Now they were nose on toward each other. Judging from the radar image Grim’s people had engaged the other two aliens, but Harald’s wing was driving in toward the same targets she was.
“Now we’ve got you,” Sam said. She fired missiles into the teeth of her opponents. Once she was just a little closer, she’d activate her railgun as well.
A ship exploded to her right. Then another. Two of her wing-mates down in as many seconds! What…?
“Enemy to port,” Xiang called out.
There they were - the second wave of six fighters. Sam thought they still had a little more time before they were able to engage her people. That had been horribly wrong, and now her flank was open to raking fire from the fast ships. One of Xiang’s fighters exploded and then his ship came apart in a ball of fire as well.
“Shit, we’re in trouble!” Sam shouted. She jinked her stick hard to avoid the beams of energy lancing into her people. One after another she was losing ships.
Worse yet, she’d only managed to take out one of the four ships ahead of her with missiles. The other three had turned directly toward Harald’s wing. They were tearing his fighters apart. Grim’s people were holding their own, but the battle was falling apart rapidly. They just didn’t have enough ships to overcome the aliens’ technological advantage! The last fighter from Xiang’s group blew to shreds. Sam had only one escort left, rocking off with three alien ships on his tail.
It was over. They’d lost. But she was still alive, and if Sam knew anything, it was that there was always a chance to do something crazy while you were breathing. Even if you no longer actually inhaled and exhaled, she chuckled to herself.
This time Sam flipped the fighter hard over, firing her thrusters in a dive directly toward Triton’s atmosphere. Three enemies saw her moving and took off to follow her. Twisting and dodging, she managed to avoid their blasts. They were gaining on her, but not quickly enough. She was going to make the atmosphere before they caught up with her.
“Sam, we can’t hold them! We have to withdraw,” Grimalf called out. “Can you get out?”
“Pull back with anyone who can. I’m cut off. Going in,” Sam said.
Grim didn’t reply for a second. “Good luck.”
They’d known each other a while now. It wasn’t always about luck. Mostly surviving battles was about skill, guts, and sheer determination. But having a little luck didn’t help. Sam just hoped she hadn’t used up her fair share.
Her fighter bucked as it shot into a thick cloud. The stuff was denser than she’d thought! Which was good. Her ship could handle it. She was hoping theirs couldn’t.
The human Wasp fighters had been designed to operate mostly in space, but they had atmospheric flight controls as well. She could make the fighter move through air. But the alien ships were awkward things, all spindly parts. Sam was betting that even if they could handle the thin atmosphere Triton had, they couldn’t fly where she was going to take them.
Dead ahead was precisely what she was looking for. Triton was geo-thermally active. She’d seen the massive gas geysers sprouting from the surface on their first approach and remarked on how beautiful they looked. But plumes of hot gas miles high could be deadly, too. Sam drove her fighter directly into the cloud. Her ship bucked and pitched in the sudden turbulence, but it was holding together.
The alien ships broke off from the chase, swooping back into space and scrambling for altitude. One enemy didn’t turn quite quickly enough and lost control of its dive. The geyser twisted it until it spun entirely out of control. It shot past Sam’s ship, a streaming meteor on a beeline for the surface below. That was one less she had to worry about. But there were still plenty more. The one advantage she had was that she’d left them all behind now. Not much further and she could punch back out of Triton’s atmosphere right near the ring.
There was a heavy torpedo mounted underneath her fighter which had a hot date there.
Sam pulled up. The fighter shrieked under the stress. She was putting the thing through its paces, to be sure. But it only had to hold together for a little longer. “Just get me in range to get a lock and shoot this thing.”
Getting away was going to be tricky. The alien ships were faster, hit harder, and could fire from more extended range. Once they caught up with her, it would be over. But if she could complete her mission before they nailed her, at least it wouldn’t be for nothing.
The atmosphere thinned. Sam checked her radar. There was the ring. It was almost in range. The targeting system locked it in, and she lined up the shot.
“Shit!” A giant shadow cut off her light. The big alien ship was right on top of her! It wasn’t showing up on her radar at all. “That’s cheating, damn it!”
There wasn’t time for anything fancy. Her scanners were showing energy buildups across the enemy ship’s bow. Sam gave the mental command to launch her torpedo half a second before ten beams of coherent light blasted her Wasp to smithereens.
9
Thank god it was just a practice run. It seemed like every practice session they ran was getting worse. Sam wasn’t sure if Max was boosting the difficulty or if they were just wearing out. On the plus side, she’d at least managed to get a torpedo off on this run. That was a new record.
There were a few seconds after the explosion where Sam couldn’t sense anything around her. No touch, no sound, no sights. She was used to the experience though. It wasn’t like that was the first time she’d had her ship shot out from beneath her. She’d lost count at fifteen. Sitting tight through the brief transition was smooth enough now.
Awareness and sensation snapped back into place. She was back in the familiar meeting room where they’d all gathered when they first arrived on the Hermes. That was two days ago. Every second since had been spent on training. It turned out that despite Valhalla Online having sleep-cycles, they didn’t actually require sleep as digital minds. They could keep going long after a regular human would have collapsed.
Not needing sleep and not wanting a break were two very different things, though. Sam felt bone tired, an odd metaphor since she didn’t have bones. When she was still in the game that thought would never have crossed her mind. The place felt real enough that her mind had simply accepted that reality at face value. Now that she was out in the physical world again everything felt like a reminder of her state. The way she slipped from her virtual human body into a fighter-body was only the most glaring evidence.
It was wearing on her. She could tell that it was wearing on them all. In Valhalla, they’d never had to ask questions about who and what they were. They all knew, of course. But there was a constant consensus of pretense there, where everyone made believe it was all real. It was their reality, so that made sense. It kept them sane.
The real world had consequences. One of them was a nagging set of reminders that their bodies were gone. They had nothing but this ethereal existence. They’d locked themselves out of the virtual afterlife. Was that a mistake? Would they ever come to feel like this state was normal?
“That didn’t go well,” Max said from the front of the room.
“Understatement of the century,” Harald groused. He plopped down in a chair. Around the room the other
pilots followed his lead and settled in to discuss the practice run.
“Did I nail the ring?” Sam asked. “I didn’t get to see if there were fireworks or not.”
“You did,” Max said. He grimaced. “Don’t let that make you think of the run as a victory. Your one torpedo only damaged the construct. My best guess is that we’ll need to nail it with more than one shot to completely destroy it.”
“Better than we’ve done before,” Grimalf said.
“Depends on whether you count dying as better or not,” another pilot said. That was Mala, one of Xiang’s wing in this run. He didn’t look happy.
“That’s a real risk when we go out there,” Max said. “If you can’t handle that you might be better off staying on the ship. We’ve got thirty fighters and thirty-five pilots. The extra five people will help me man the Hermes, maintaining sensors, weapons, repairs, and so forth. I’m sure I’ll need all the help I can get.”
“Count on me for that,” Mala said. “I didn’t sign on to get blown to bits in the first skirmish.”
Sam bit back a harsh retort. She understood his feelings. It was hard to handle this loss after loss, without any break in the string of failures. They were used to losing some battles and coming back from the occasional setback another day. But when they went out there for real, it was going to be their only shot. If they were blown up in the real Wasps, they’d be gone. Dead for good, the last traces of their minds wiped away in the blasts. That was perhaps the most frightening thing of all, for someone who’d battled for years without any risk of real death. Mortality sucked.
“Max, we need a breather,” Sam said. “We’ve been going at this for days. I think we need some downtime to relax.”
Ghost Wing (The Ragnarok Saga Book 4) Page 5