by Ron Collins
A Quasar was nearly invisible to any sensor system ever devised.
A Firebrand, however, was not.
It was the middle of the night before launch, and neither of them could sleep, though in Jarboe’s case that wasn’t anything new.
Nimchura, however, wasn’t used to tossing and turning. After a couple hours of it, he finally gave up and slipped out of his cot to head out to the front platform to take in the nighttime sky.
Jarboe was already there.
“What the hell is going on, Deuce?” Nimchura said.
Jarboe gave a motion with his shoulders that would have been a shrug if it had ever completed. “What do you mean?”
“I mean what’s going on? I haven’t seen you crack a smile since we got here.”
“I smile a lot.”
“Bullshit.”
Jarboe just stared at the stars.
“You thinking we shouldn’t have come here?”
“Naw. That’s not what I’m thinking.”
“Then what the hell is it? I mean, aren’t you supposed to be the one mentoring me?”
Jarboe half-chuckled at that. He sucked in the strange Galopar air. “I don’t know, Yules. Just…I’m…I’m trying to figure out why we’re here.”
“We’re here to fly the guts out of a TriplePlus Firebrand.”
“Yeah.” Jarboe thinned his lips out, then brought his gaze back to the moment. “I guess I’m thinking a little bigger.”
Nimchura rolled his eyes. “You’ve been reading too many news clips.”
Pieces about Sunchaser had been Jarboe’s favorite, it seemed. Nimchura had done his best to ignore all that. Yes, he was fighting to win, and the audacity of the U3 terrorists made him angry, but somewhere among all the construction and the training and the late-night conversations with Jarboe and the rest of the squadron, Yuletide Nimchura realized fully, and without any misgivings, that he truly was here pretty much completely because he loved to fly.
That was it.
Which, he supposed, was no great surprise.
“Maybe you’re right,” Jarboe said. “Maybe I am reading too much. It makes me think, though.”
A flare crossed the sky—a shooting star.
Nimchura looked at Jarboe and saw he was struggling.
“I lost a lot of friends on Sunchaser, Todias. And we lost more guys on the Einstein thing.”
“At least those guys on the skeeter went out like they would of wanted to.”
“Did they?”
Nimchura wasn’t sure what to say. He listened to the local insects calling, and bent to pick up a rock, which he twirled in his fingers. A growl came from the distance, but they both knew a guard would take care of it.
“Can’t imagine they wanted to suffocate out in space,” he said.
“Hmm,” Jarboe replied, shrugging. “If we don’t make it through this, I suppose there will just be another wave somewhere.”
“I suppose so,” Nimchura said.
“Don’t you think about Sunchaser?”
“I try not to.”
“Janie Lowell. I think about her a lot. She liked games. Anything that you had to outthink someone else. Now she’s gone. Just like that.”
“Sucks.”
“Yeah. Sucks. What sucks more is that I know she didn’t really care much about Universe Three one way or the other. She was just doing her job, you know? Just doing what she loved to do, and now she’s gone.”
“You’re gonna be fine, Deuce,” Nimchura said. “You’re the best flier I know.”
Jarboe snarfed.
“I’m serious. You’re a helluva flier.”
“Yeah,” Jarboe said. “I know.”
They were quiet after that. Then Jarboe went back to the barracks, and Nimchura was left sitting in the darkness, looking up at the stars, and immersed in the music of alien insects.
Jarboe lay flat on his back on his cot, a thin sheet pulled up over his legs and halfway up his belly. His arms were raised over his head, hands clasped behind his skull. The buildings were not made to last. Their walls were thin, and the windows were merely stretched plastic. The quiet they held was really just a muted tone of chirping insects and the occasional wind that scrubbed that plastic.
He closed his eyes.
Nimchura meant well. He did. But he was fighting a game he didn’t understand. How could he? It was a strange game, hard enough for Jarboe to understand, better yet convey in a way that didn’t seem trite or petty. But it was a game, and it was an important game.
Jarboe had taken Nimchura under his wing. He had taught the guy something, he supposed. Nimchura seemed like he had matured a bit, was more under control. But what did it matter? What did it mean?
Nothing, really.
It turned out that Nimchura was right about him.
Life had always come easy to Jarboe. He was a jack of all trades, gifted enough to succeed at pretty much anything he decided to apply himself to. But that fact was that he hadn’t really wanted to apply himself to anything. He didn’t succeed because he loved anything—he had succeeded merely because that was what was expected.
He did the Academy like his dad.
Went to Flight School like his grandmother.
Took on Nimchura because it was his job. Even the thing with the skeeter: He hadn’t done that because it was the right thing to do—he had done it because that was his job. Very pure. Very simple. You do your job, and you move on. That was his life.
Nimchura had said it all those months ago.
Jarboe was a mission man.
Then the UG sent them out on the talk trail and he had to carry the water, talk about the mission in that hyped-up tone of professional excitement, and listen to the commentators blather on about heroism and sacrifice, and he said all the right things because he had been so well coached and because that, too, was his job. All while his insides were rotting out from the memories of Sunchaser and friends like Janie Lowell, and from the idea that the rangers inside that skeeter were all dead now and probably would be regardless of anything he had done.
There had to be more to life than this, though.
More to life than being a mission man.
He didn’t know what that was for him, but lying there in his cot that night, in a temporary barracks on a remote planet, Alex Jarboe made a decision that whatever that life was for him, it was starting tomorrow. It would begin when he woke up, follow him through morning ops sessions, and tag along as he strapped himself into the Firebrand he had helped build with his own hands. It would start when he did the prelaunch checklist, start again as he hit the Go Launch sequence.
Tomorrow, Deuce Jarboe was going to change. He was going to begin to live. Tomorrow he would begin a quest to learn about life, enjoy the moment, and to find out what he truly loved. Tomorrow, Deuce Jarboe was going to become more like Yuletide Nimchura.
The sense of happiness that draped him as he faded off to sleep was more alien than the grasses and animals of this planet, but it felt good.
It felt very, very good.
When Nimchura followed Jarboe into the barracks a bit later, he found his wing leader flat on his back, snoring like a lumberjack.
They were ready, he thought.
Tomorrow, the UG was going to strike back right where Universe Three lived.
CHAPTER 32
Galopar
Local Date: Masked
Local Time: Masked
Nimchura stepped into the hover that would take them to the launch pad and stood next to Jarboe. He cradled his flight helmet in the crook of one arm and held onto the balance bar with the other. The entire hover had been covered with a uniform layer of gray-blue paint to prevent rust—which would have made sense if they were actually going to be there for any real time—including the floorboard, which was already scarred up and peeling. Little Brother had been up for over an hour, making Nimchura squint at the horizon as he took his place.
“Don’t forget to leave the light on,” Jarboe
said to the driver.
“Yes, sir,” the driver said.
Jarboe looked at Nimchura and finally cracked a smile.
The craft lurched away. Rather than carry his flight helmet, Jarboe had put it on and left the restraint dangling and his visor in the up position. He held the balance bar with both hands, feet spread, and levered himself left and right as the hovercraft made its turns.
“You look a little like a kid in a coaster park,” Nimchura said.
“Maybe I am,” Jarboe said.
“Good dreams last night?”
“Good enough.”
Nimchura braced against the last turn. He didn’t care why Jarboe had woken up in this frame of mind, he was just happy to have the more stable wing leader back. Momentary grade-schooler aside, Jarboe had been his old self from the moment they met for breakfast and the final mission brief. He wore his old calmness about him today, a sense of oneness with the world that made everything else seem right.
As the hover straightened up, their Firebrands loomed ahead, standing in liftoff configuration, their noses pointed up into a cloudless blue sky. A single tech stood below each one, running final calibrations and prognostic checks.
It was finally time.
The last of the Quasars launched five minutes earlier. They would now catch up, and get the pack turned toward Atropos.
“Time to get in the chute, eh?” Jarboe said.
Nimchura nodded.
“Doing all right, Yules?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
Nimchura climbed into his machine, settled into his skyward-facing seat, and toggled all the preflight checks. Green and blue lights fired up across all the controllers. The hydraulic lifters cycled the air surface controllers for their final tests. The cockpit was stuffy and humid until the air handling kicked on. Then it was cold, and his breath fogged the plasteel cowling that loomed over him. His skin tingled with the usual thrill of being behind the stick of a high-performance spacecraft, but he also felt the claustrophobic sense of being alone and encased in a dark metal compartment.
He looked at the displays as they came up.
Everything was fine.
“I’m good to go, Deuce,” he said into their channel.
“We have green for launch,” Jarboe said to the controller.
Nimchura put his hand on the joystick and played the mission over in his head.
If their intel was right, Icarus was likely to be stationed over Atropos City right now. At least they should plan it that way, and if it turned out not to be true, all the better. But UG’s data on the terrorists’ operations said they would leave one of the Star Drives in orbit over their settlement, and use the other for sorties. It was an idea that made sense to Nimchura—U3 were evil, not stupid.
The mission profile called for them to approach from the east, and if everything went well they would be in and out of at least their first pass before U3 skimmers had a chance to scramble.
He wondered what the encampment would be like. U3 had a few thousand people at their disposal, and he had already seen firsthand what a few hundred were capable of building in less time than U3’d had. After thinking a bit, he realized it didn’t really matter.
Atropos “City” was going to be destroyed.
They had surprise on their side, so it should be a breeze.
A piece of cake.
“Vengeance Group Red, you have Go for mission.”
“Let’s do it, Yules,” Jarboe said.
Achieving escape velocity was as exhilarating as always. A fist-hard crunch of weight on chest and a sense of gravity that pushed blood into places you didn’t think it ever went. Then, suddenly he was floating in space and the plasma engines kicked in, and things were all back in place again.
“Give me a full burn on my mark, Yuletide.”
The tone of Jarboe’s voice was like hearing from an old friend. Nimchura had been right. Jarboe’s bout with whatever he was bouting with was nothing a real job couldn’t cure.
“Prepared to give you the burn, Mission Man,” Nimchura replied with a grin.
“You’re sounding pretty sprightly there, Yules. You okay?”
Nimchura hesitated, almost rising to his wing leader’s bait.
“I got your right, Deuce. Don’t ever doubt that.”
“Roger on the no doubt. Let’s go get us a Quasar.”
Someone, somewhere, said that war is mind-numbing boredom interrupted by periods of sheer terror. Whoever said that got the boredom part exactly right. Three local days spent in the cockpit of a Firebrand, seventy–five local hours, to be precise, is a long goddamned time.
Through that time, Nimchura and Jarboe towed their Quasar, and all they had to look at were the stars, their ever-present control readout, and a seven-centimeter by six-centimeter display that had been rigged to play movies or shows. At least there was that.
They slept in staggered periods, though Nimchura mostly zoned at best.
He discovered that he loved the feeling of being in a gray state inside the cockpit, though. It felt like he was connected to everything at once, his body flowing out into every cubic centimeter of the vehicle, over servos and through wiring, into the metal traces that ran across circuit boards, and through optical processors that shaped light into collinear flows that became processed into information. His nervous system felt the pulsing stream of electrons that were keeping his spacecraft operational, the sound of the Taylor and Getz engines reverberating through the frame of the spacecraft to give it a feeling like it was his entire world.
But the rest of the time was just that—boredom. Radio silence meant the Firebrand pilots couldn’t even break it by chatting with each other.
Occasionally he would put eyes on the Quasar behind them.
At least he wasn’t stuck in one of those pieces of shit. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be locked into a floating tin can with thirty-nine other soldiers for three days.
No, he corrected himself. For seventy-five hours.
Seventy-five very long hours.
As they came upon Atropos, the curve of the planet filled his view. It was beautiful in its own way, blue and orange that faded to a brown storm front below them.
Nimchura’s blood pumped like a locomotive.
“Vengeance Q Red, we are Go for release,” Jarboe said over the radio. It was the first live voice Nimchura had heard since the launch.
“Roger that, Vengeance Group Red Leader,” their Quasar replied. “We have forty more than ready for release.”
Nimchura was too busy coordinating his own release point to find humor in the Quasar’s message, though, yes, he could well imagine forty rangers were more than ready to get the hell out of that transport pod.
They kicked the Firebrands in tandem and the Quasar was free.
It immediately began firing trim rockets to put it on a direct course to entry.
“Burn on three,” Jarboe said.
“On your three,” Nimchura replied.
Then they were racing through space, preparing an entry maneuver that would take them into this foreign planet’s atmosphere. They would make the first passes on the settlement, scouting for big guns and taking them out. Protecting those forty rangers that they had just carted across space for three days.
“Roll down,” Jarboe said, hitting the burn.
Nimchura whooped as he matched Jarboe’s precisely made roll as they dived toward the planet. The upper atmosphere scrubbed white noise into the cockpit. Heat shields shed plasma trails. The ex-temp gauge rose within acceptable parameters as a fiery cone built on the nose of his Firebrand.
They broke the planet’s ionosphere with a sudden burst, and for the first time he saw Atropos City laid out before them on the ground.
It was late morning, and the sky was high, and shifted toward the purple spectrum.
Cloud cover was wispy.
The ground below was green and brown, and dark blue across the oceanlike body of water to the west. Th
e settlement itself looked disorderly, but bigger than he had expected. Buildings were made of earthen-colored materials, some even multilevel, some belching smoke. The roads were still dirt, but seemed cleared for the most part. As they flew closer, he could pick out vehicles of various types. The entire thing was clearly rudimentary, but still felt advanced in some odd caveman-in-the-future way.
“Roll dive, Vengeance Two,” Jarboe said.
“Roger that,” Nimchura replied, twisting the stick and feeling the glorious sense of gravity push him into the seat.
He didn’t see the energy ray coming until Jarboe’s machine disintegrated in front of his eyes.
“Deuce!” Nimchura screamed as he flew through debris that rattled against the skin of his craft.
He twisted his head left and right, hoping that Jarboe’s Firebrand would be beside him, but nothing was left of his wing leader’s craft but a scintillating cloud of fire and metal. He pushed the skimmer hard right and peeled off before the U3 targeting system could acquire his signature. The target was below him now, an easy shot.
“Give me a reading, Vengeance One,” he said to Jarboe in a voice that was no longer calm.
Still no answer.
He clenched his jaw and rolled into his run at the U3 skimmer base.
He dipped. He jogged left.
He twisted and turned through chaff and another laser blast that would have taken him down if he hadn’t grabbedhard air and jaked away at the last moment. He dropped three weapons, and confirmed hits on the laser turret and what appeared to be a hangar. Fire scored the ground. Plasma blasts filled the air with spidery trails of smoke and fire. U3 buildings exploded. To the east, a Quasar made it to the ground, but another exploded in mid drop.