Threshold of Victory

by Stephen J. Orion

  “Jesus, we came out with some speed on,” Kelly ‘Clumsy’ Smart observed from behind him as she took care to step over the hatchway.

  Kelly topped out Tarek by over six inches, and it was a height she never seemed to get used too. Some pilots took a while to earn their call signs, but Kelly had collected hers off a doorframe on the first day in flight school. With all the height, she might have been intimidating, but somehow, she radiated kindness from her brown braids to her bootlaces in a way that no military pilot probably should. In the military, where everyone was known by their surname, somehow everyone always referred to 2nd Lieutenant Smart simply as Kelly.

  Tarek didn’t have time to respond. It had been a snap briefing, and CAG Jenson wasn’t even waiting for the late comers to get seated. He was a precise man who, according to Kelly, “lived in the numbers.”

  “The Arcadia’s mission to rendezvous with Battlegroup Olympian is on hold. We’re redirecting to a priority alarm on the surface of Bryson II.”

  “That’s Grimball, right sir?” A pilot down the front asked.

  Jenson’s lip twisted. “Yes pilot, Grimball. We’re on approach now, and time is short, so I’ll ask all of you to direct any further questions to your team leaders after the briefing.”

  He tapped a key on his podium, and a three-dimensional image appeared in the air towards the front of the room. A craning of necks flowed across the assembly. The image showed a green-hued reproduction of a surface complex, perhaps a town.

  “The settlement of Box Grid has been under occupation by Task Force August for over forty-eight hours. Less than an hour ago, the Maulers sprung a massive ambush as a part of a planet-wide counterattack. The task force is locked in close-quarters battle with little intelligence on the force they’ve engaged. Their commander, Major Penial, is creating a strong point here…” He pointed to the holographic display with an officer’s wand, indicating a large flat area in the town’s north eastern suburbs. “…at the space port. He has requested an aerial extraction, and we will be providing that.

  “Mission plan is as follows: the 87th Squadron will be escort and defensive reserve for the Arcadia for the duration of the mission. The carrier will make atmospheric insertion at Waypoint Alpha.

  Once we’re satisfied the carrier is under no immediate threat, the 109th will detach and move to engage any enemy at Box Grid that may jeopardise a landing. At the same time, Heavy Lifter Warhorse One will move to Waypoint Bravo just outside the engagement box and orbit until cleared to advance.”

  Tarek exchanged a glance with Kelly. She was in the 109th ‘Undying’ Squadron; he was the pilot for Warhorse One. For both of them, this would be their first mission against the real live enemy.

  “Our cold zero,” Kelly whispered.

  “Beats hauling freight while I watch you guys fly combat drills,” Tarek said as lightly as he could.

  “It is expected,” said Jenson, “that the enemy ground forces will be accompanied by anti-aircraft weapons, but this is not confirmed. What we have confirmed is that enemy aircraft have joined the attack, mostly Bugs, but a few Scarabs as well. Destroying enemy fighters is your first priority, while Mauler AA can pose a threat to our slower moving craft your Snowhawks should be able to stay ahead fairly easily. Arcadia is on site in fifteen minutes. Get to your ships.”

  The pilots left the briefing room as a crowd, loosely falling into their squadrons and flight sections. Tarek gave Kelly’s shoulder what he hoped was a reassuring squeeze as she pulled ahead to join the rest of her unit.

  “So you and her, huh?” Flight Officer Tony ‘Maize’ Jackson said.

  Jackson was the co-pilot for Warhorse One, and despite having a longer military history than Tarek, it was apparently so lacklustre that they’d rather have someone new than someone whose call sign came from a bulk crop, regardless of how well it matched his hair colour.

  “Would you stop implying that I’m trying to get into the pants of every girl on the ship?” Tarek shook his head as they emerged onto the broad hangar deck.

  “Oh okay.” Jackson paused for a beat. “So is it the boys you’re after then?”

  “Neither.”

  “Horse crap!” The co-pilot puffed himself up and practically preened. “Is that not why we all became pilots, for we are the hotness against which ladies cannot restrain themselves.”

  Tarek shot him a dark look, and Jackson raised his hands.

  “Or the boys, hey, I don’t judge.”

  Tarek didn’t answer. Jackson wasn’t as bad as he tried to come across, and in times when patience was more readily available, the man could be great company, but that wasn’t now. Tarek knew he should be excited, or at least scared, but instead he found himself in a foul mood, and he was struggling to keep a lid on it.

  The hangar deck was the rest and repair site for the Arcadia’s fighter wing, the combat arm of the carrier, which meant the ones who did all the real work. For the moment, the repair alcoves were mostly empty, their equipment dutifully stowed, but that could change in a hurry. Down the centre of the deck, the pure white Snowhawks of the 109th were arrayed with their noses angled to the sides of the ship for rapid launch. A flight of five were already on the elevators for the port side launch tubes, and through the glass floor, they could see another quintet of fighters in the starboard launch racks, these from the 87th ‘Cold Sabres’ Squadron.

  As for the Warhorse, she was relegated to the back of the ship, accessible via a docking brace on the top of the carrier, which required a long walk of shame – across the hangar deck, up an exposed set of gantry stairs, and along a catwalk. Tarek wasn’t sure whether it was more gutting when the pilots stared or when they ignored him because they were too busy with the real work. He’d learnt to disconnect from it, or so he kept telling himself, ignoring Kelly and her colleagues as they readied themselves to save lives while he sat on his hands and waited until everything was safe.

  Halfway to the stairs they were joined by the Warhorse’s commander, Lieutenant Walters. He was a big man, not overweight but laden with muscle and bone. He didn’t waste words, but when he did speak his voice came like a deep rumble in the earth.

  “Silver,” Walters said, “you good?”

  “I’m solid sir,” Tarek answered.

  Walters pinned him with a searching stare and then nodded in satisfaction.

  Jackson spoke up. “My first live mission, I wasn’t good or solid, not like now. Now I’m a stone-cold killer. If you can’t keep it together, don’t worry I got us.”

  “This time isn’t for play,” Walters said, ignoring Jackson’s commentary. “If we screw up, people die.”

  Except, Tarek added mentally, we can’t possibly screw up. Fly, wait, land, wait some more, fly back; a child could have done it.

  “Lieutenant Walters, you and your people step up.” A new voice from across the deck, stalling them at the base of the stairs.

  Walters shook his head but gestured for his team to follow him over to where the Undying Squadron had assembled into three neat ranks. The voice that interrupted them belonged Lieutenant Commander Aristide ‘Eternity’ Phillips, and whatever your timeline or rank, he wasn’t the sort of person you said no to.

  Peer Aristide Phillips was one of the rare members of the Constellation ruling class who had elected to serve in its military. By virtue of his family’s wealth and influence, he was blessed with an unending string of life-extension treatments; he was over sixty but, like an ageless vampire, he looked no more than twenty. An ‘immortal’. He had the youth and vitality of a new recruit and decades of flight experience, albeit it none of it in combat. He’d gone through the academy with the rest of the 109th pilots and had proved he had no equal, even among the instructors.

  Right from the start, they’d seen Tarek’s own talent, but with a Peer of the Realm in the squad, they knew how it would play out. They’d dubbed him ‘Silver’ to remind him that he’d be second place in everything. Hard to compete with an immortal. And so it we
nt, right up till graduation when they’d put him in the logistics wing – his file suggesting he was talented but lacking – while fourteen lesser pilots joined Phillips in the 109th. It was tempting to think that, if Phillips had never existed, Tarek would be leading the squadron instead of flying freight, but that wasn’t how these sorts of things worked. You try to change, and they put you back where you started but with a different insignia on the jacket.

  “Jackson, Walters, congratulations. You might not know it, but thanks to your celebrity friend here, you’ve got a back stage pass to invincibility,” Phillip’s said, making a dramatic open-handed gesture to the squadron before him.

  “Uh-huh.” Jackson folded his arms raised a corn-colour eyebrow in Tarek’s direction.

  The squadron leader now turned to address the entirety of the assembled pilots. “We are the Undying. We share a pledge that no member of this squadron will fall. You’ve heard the stories, you know the fail rate. Statistics say its fifty–fifty that one of us won’t make it back from this. The same numbers say it’s one hundred percent certain that one of us won’t make it past the month. I say numbers are for pessimists.”

  “And the CAG,” Bryce ‘Softball’ Hanagan, lurking in the back row, added just loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “And the CAG,” Phillips admitted. “But I’ve lived long enough to know the numbers don’t govern you until you let them. Humans were made to break the rules. I’m living proof of that, and I invite you all to join me, join me as proof that we cannot be killed by numbers, or odds, or percentiles. We will endure, till all others fall.”

  “Till all others fall,” the squadron repeated back in unison, their voices rising over the growing roar of the Arcadia, piercing through the atmosphere. Tarek whispered the mantra, trying it on; it tasted bittersweet and definitely too cheesy to say at any real volume.

  “Are we done, sir?” Walters asked.

  “Almost,” said Phillips. “You chose your pilot well. He’s an honorary member of the Undying and the pledge to break the odds is his also. We protect each other, and he protects you.”

  Phillips slapped a hand down on Tarek’s shoulder. “Look after him, and he’ll bring you back from every mission. You have my word on that.”

  The statement was punctuated by a screaming reverberation through the deck as the launch catapults hurled the fighters from Cold Sabre Squadron into the air.

  “I’m sure he’s very good, sir,” Walters said. “But if we’re to make our launch window maybe I should get to my ship.”

  Phillip’s had a look on his face that said he clearly wasn’t keen on the lifter commander’s apparent unwillingness to take to adopt his enthusiasm.

  “People need to believe in something, Lieutenant. We don’t win by practice alone.” He eyed Walters a little longer but found him implacable. “Dismissed.”

  “Hustle,” said Walters.

  The instruction might have been meant for his own men, but it was sort of cast out for general use as the big man took up a swift jog back to the stair. Jackson and Tarek gave chase while behind them the Undying made a mad scramble to get into their own craft. ‘Fashionably late’ was not a term the Constellation Navy was particularly fond of, and as a plus, the need to makeup time gave everyone an opportunity to work off some nervous energy.

  “So, they still seem to like you,” Jackson said as they rushed back and forth up the switchback stairs into the Arcadia’s spinal corridor.

  Tarek said nothing.

  Their long run down the beam of the Arcadia quickly reached its end, and Tarek sank his concerns into the work in front of him, pulling himself rapidly up the ladder that crossed a snug docking collar from the heavy lifter to the carrier.

  “I’ll retract the ladder,” Walters said they reached the top. “Get this beast powered.”

  The Combat Heavy Lifter was not a subtle ship. Bigger than some corvettes, she had enough carry-space to stow a full company of arcoms or tanks, and it was, in fact, this purpose for which the craft had been adopted by the Constellation Navy. The words one used to describe a fighter, like ‘sleek’ or ‘light’, couldn’t be applied to the Warhorse by any stretch of the imagination. She was a utility; unarmed and massive, but with one of the most powerful VTOL systems in the known galaxy.

  Tarek and Jackson moved through the ship to the cockpit which hung out on the port side. Here there was a side-facing console that belonged to the ship commander, marking the point where the two pilots went their separate way. Tarek climbed up to the pilot’s seat that peered out over the hull of the lifter while Jackson swung down to the co-pilot’s station where he had the perfect view to coordinate a landing.

  Tarek wouldn’t have traded with him for all the money in the Peerage. Where he sat, the sky spread out around him to infinite dimensions. At these altitudes, uncountable brilliant stars still shone through the thin sky, and the only sound was the distant rolling thunder of the Arcadia’s drives pushing her through the shallows of the atmosphere to keep her afloat. The carrier’s gun-metal hull stretched out below the lifter, sensor towers and cannon emplacements scanning the horizon, its primary island towering up from hull, twinkling with its internal lights as the crew went about their duties. While he watched, five Snowhawk fighters boosted free of the ship’s port side in staccato succession, peeling away like synchronised divers.

  “We’re buttoned up,” Walters said through the headset. “Silver, give me power; Maize standby to unbolt us.”

  The ship was sealed, and now it was considered a mission environment, until they came back they were pilots, not personnel. Everything that was Tarek and Jackson was staying on the carrier so Silver and Maize would have clear heads to fly into battle and back out again. Tarek may have a lot to work through, but Silver just had a mission to fly and more than enough talent to do it.

  He flicked a switch and the Warhorse’s main engine rumbled to life behind them, idling its pressurised ion chambers to provide the generator something to feed off. Another toggle cut the power/air link to the carrier, the lights diming momentarily as the ship found its local source. The pilot set the screens before him flicking through an array of status reports.

  “Silver reporting,” he said. “Power holding steady, all tell-tales green.”

  “Maize,” said Jackson. “I’m green as well.”

  For a few minutes, they just waited while Arcadia control satisfied itself that the ship had reached a stable altitude and her airspace was clear. When the white fighters of the Undying slipped out of their defensive holding pattern in two staggered arrow formations and boost away towards the horizon Tarek knew they would be following shortly. Subconsciously he held his breath.

  “Maize, bring us out,” Walters finally ordered.

  The thrum of the engines became a decentralised roar as the ship’s vertical take-off lift thrusters came to power. From his station, Tarek could see the fiery blue glow of the nearest engine reflecting back off the deck, burning anew the scorch marks in the thermal plating. There was a grinding thunk from below as the docking locks were released, and with a lurching suddenness, the heavy lifter climbed clear of the carrier, the larger ship’s long hull sinking rapidly out of his field of view.

  Dragging her own massive weight, the lifter’s climb steadily slowed, the primary drive taking over from the VTOL system and beginning to push it forwards.

  “Flight is stable. Over to you, celebrity,” Jackson said.

  Tarek shook his head in irritation. He already had his hands on the fight controls which was fortunate because his colleague gave him no more warning before surrendering control to the main pilot station. As the feedback system transmitted into the ship’s controls, he felt its mass tugging at him through the yoke. The Warhorse was not an aerodynamic ship, and she felt like it. Despite the thin atmosphere and her powerful engines, you could feel every change in air pressure that slapped against the ship’s blunt nose.

  But when it came to basic flight, Tarek was a consummate pr
ofessional. He could have flown a budget shuttle through re-entry during a storm and his passengers wouldn’t feel a thing. He had.

  So, when he took up the bearing the Snowhawks had followed, it was with a sublime grace lost on his crewmates. The navy was about power and precision, they didn’t expect elegance, but his method had become so practiced, so ingrained, that tiny, precise adjustments in anticipation of turbulence were instinctive.

  It was an art you could lose yourself in. The good distance pilots had to, otherwise boredom set in and mistakes happened. The battle they were flying into, the ramifications of what he could, and couldn’t do, all become subsumed beneath the simple attentiveness.

  If he had to do another ‘fly, wait, land’ then by god he would fly.

  ****

  Human Occupied Mauler Settlement

  Codename: Box Grid

  Planet Grimball, Bryson System

  19 April 2315

  “Connor, you still with me?” Lieutenant Rease asked, her arcom peering down the final two blocks leading to the starport.

  “Right behind you,” he said. “What have we got?”

  Rease did not subscribe to her own legend – being a survivor meant she’d seen how quickly this war threshed through young soldiers. She’d learnt the hard way not to trust anyone except the group. Numbers could slow the tide, give you time to react and push back.

  That being said, there were times when you had to trust one person, and for Rease, that person had become Connor. Most arcom pilots were meteoric; they blazed into battle, inflicted impressive casualties, and then died a victim of their own courage. But that was not Connor. His greatest strength was he knew his limits. He was dependable, and he had a steady courage that didn’t require momentum or bravado.