by David Adams
“Okay.” I nodded. “Just be aware that I’m not Jewish. I don’t know how to deal with that kind of thing.”
“Laugh,” said Shaba. “Laugh or you’ll just find yourself crying all the time.”
Good advice. “Will do.”
As though trying to relieve the tension, Shaba punched me in the shoulder. “So, wanna know why Jewish men get circumcised?”
I couldn’t help but smile. “No idea.”
“There’s no way a Jewish woman is going to touch something that isn’t 10% off.”
I snorted. “That doesn’t relate to the Holocaust.”
“Yeah, but it’s still funny.” She grinned at me. “C’mon, you laughed. You laughed!”
“Right, right.” I took a step back, raising my hands. “Fine, you’ve convinced me. The jokes stay.”
“Thanks, Captain.” She sounded like she meant it too.
“Just call me Magnet for fuck’s sake.”
“Thanks, Captain Magnet.”
I waggled my finger at her, and she ran laughing down the corridor.
“What are you, like, six?” I shouted at her back, and then with nothing better to do, I wandered back to the flight deck.
Four hours later
This plane was Dove’s craft, so named for his love of the brand of soap. The ship had a white dove spreading its wings by the cockpit. I wiggled my way into the cockpit, stretching my legs out to the pedals, moving the seat back as far as I could. I was a tall guy and fortunately modern fighters were a little more accommodating than the atmospheric ones of old, even though the basic design hadn’t changed much. The Wasp, itself, was an international effort based off the Vietnam-era F-4 Phantom, reverse-engineered by the Chinese, then hacked together, rebuilt, redesigned by a committee in Iran, given Australian avionics and built with US materials and structural engineering principles, and thrown into space.
The end result was some kind of Franken-craft that resembled the Phantom only in a very superficial way, like a Ferarri with a Volkswagon Beetle body kit. This was a modern craft made of carbon fibre and atmospherically sealed and it flew like a dream, but aesthetically it felt like something from the Cold War.
The contrast between old and new tickled me in a way that I couldn’t quite explain. Pilots were strange like that.
Touching a few of the screens, they lit up and the power-on sequence began. I tapped some of the keys, threw some switches, and the whole craft hummed as the reactionless drives gained power and the warning lights, one by one, turned green. Everything was done by muscle memory; I didn’t even look at the buttons I was pressing. They just happened.
It was like I’d never left.
My headset crackled. It was a low power signal sent by broad-beam infrared laser between craft. Far more stealthy than our radios which broadcasted freely, although not nearly as crisp or reliable. “Magnet, Iron. Status report.”
“Green across the board, Iron. Comms laser is tracking. Ready to launch.”
“Very good.” There was a slight pause as he changed frequencies. “TFR Rubens, this is CAP Flapjack 019, we are ready to depart.”
Shaba answered. It must be her turn in Operations again. I knew exactly what she’d say.
“CAP Flapjack 019, launch when ready. Disengaging communications cables and maintaining radio silence on my mark. Mark.”
Together, Iron and I lifted our ships off the deck, and I pushed the throttle open and we accelerated into space, wingtip to wingtip, then banked towards our first waypoint. I settled back in my seat, getting comfortable as the engines settled and the ship coasted on its inertia.
The sky of this system was full of stars, and I took a moment to admire them. I was wrong; the view hadn’t gotten old. Not yet, anyway.
“We got a standard four point patrol today,” said Iron in my ear. His voice was thin and choppy; the laser kept cutting out, making it hard to hear. “Once around the planet, nothing fancy. Four hours, then we’re home.”
“Confirmed,” I said, settling back in my seat.
We coasted through space, two little stones falling through the vast ocean of space. The gas giant the ship was hiding behind loomed in my monitor, a huge unmoving ball shimmering blue like a cold sun, reflecting light from starlight, sunlight, and every source. Two sets of rings formed a huge X that I pointed my nose towards.
The planet had almost fifty moons, most the size of small planets. Typical gas giants were solar systems within solar systems; the interplay of their various moons along with their own substantial gravimetric influence made jumping to their swirling, everchanging Lagrange points a risky proposition. That was exactly why we had picked it.
Half an hour ticked away. We reached the apex of our four point patrol, and just as protocol said we should, Iron and I sent out a single radar ping. I aimed mine towards the nearest moon, a frozen, rocky world that was a dull grey in my FLIR, long ranged infra-red cameras.
Seconds passed as the wave reached out, but when it came back, there was a tiny, dense object in the upper methane atmosphere.
Moving into space at high speed.
Iron broke radio silence before I did. The transmission came across our radio; he clearly didn’t want to risk the unreliable infrared communications and if we could see the target, they could see us too. “Magnet, Iron. You seeing that contact?”
“Confirmed. Looks to be strike-craft class.” We only had a handful of fighters aboard and they were all accounted for. “Warbird is still docked, right?”
“Right,” said Iron. “There’s no way he could be this far out.” We were closing towards the moon at almost a hundred thousand kilometres an hour, but we had time to discuss it. “Ping it again to make sure.”
We both did. The contact had moved, higher and faster, turning away from us.
“They’re rabbiting,” I said. “They must be heading to the L1 Lagrange point.”
My thoughts exactly. The little dot on my radar screen was painted red for a bogey and it was moving fast. They couldn’t make that rendezvous. If they jumped away, we were in trouble.
“Protocol says to waste him,” said Iron. “We’ll ripple fire; three shots, you fire first, I’ll delay ten. Intervals of ten.” Dumping missiles like that was a very aggressive move but if it had been me, I would have fired everything in two or three volleys. “Weapons free.”
“Confirm weapons free, lighting him up.” I flicked the safety off, my targeting radar lighting up the contact like a neon sign. “Master arm disengaged, good tone. Active radar guidance engaged.” I checked the last of my systems then depressed the fire button. “Fox three.”
A slight shudder ran through my craft as the missile leapt off its rail. Immediately, an unknown French-accented voice filled my headset, female, coming through on the emergency frequency.
“Unidentified Wasp, Broadsword Scarecrow transmitting in the blind guard, buddy spike; I say again, buddy spike. Abort, abort, abort.”
My blood turned cold, my finger still depressing the missile release button. I had just fired on a friendly. What the fuck were they doing out here?
Fratricide, or so-called ‘friendly fire’, was distinctly unfriendly. It was the scourge of modern combat. I released the missile release button as though it were a million degrees, immediately moving my thumb over to the radio dial and switching to match frequencies.
“Scarecrow, Magnet; copy your last, aborting missile strike.”
In the few seconds since I fired the missile was nearly a kilometre away. I reached out for the missile abort, thumping the knuckle-sized button to absolutely no effect. A small red warning light clicked on indicating some kind of malfunction. I watched my missile fly through space, the thin trail of exhaust soon becoming too distant to see, a thin trail pointing towards the frozen moon.
Mother fucker.
“Scarecrow, Magnet; be advised, missile away. Abort malfunctioned, it’s autonomous now. I say again, you have an incoming active radar guided munition. Employ defensive m
anoeuvres, deploy chaff and EM bursts on the upper bands.”
I turned my attention to my radar screen and watched, horrified, the little yellow dot that represented my missile slowly drifting into the planet’s atmosphere towards my target, the red mark which I knew wasn’t an enemy at all. I did the only thing I could do; call for help. “Rubens, Magnet; mayday mayday mayday. We have a blue-on-blue in progress. My bogey’s a friendly, missile abort is non-op. Request emergency interdiction with anti-missile fire and trip-A support.”
There was a pause, then the red blip suddenly turned blue as the Rubens updated my ship’s targeting information, a label next to the contact reading ‘AH-44 Scarecrow’’. In my mind’s eye I could imagine the hubbub in Operations as Mace updated the targeting information. Shaba would be in command now.
Her voice came through the line. “Magnet, Rubens; missile is out of range. Nothing we can do now. We are prepping for emergency jump into the L1 point. SAR is preparing to scramble when we appear.”
SAR would be Warbird in his fighter. By the time the ship’s jump drive was powered, though, there was no way they could help. “Christ, they’re going to get fucked up. Jesus, fuck!”
My outburst was a serious breach of radio protocol but nobody said a thing. My radar screen showed Scarecrow swinging to port, presenting their bow to the incoming missile; this was a standard avoidance maneuver. They accelerated, their defensive turrets firing wildly, the rounds showing up as little grey streaks on my screen.
Scarecrow broke left and the missile followed, plowing through a cloud of chafe. The Broadsword was trying to force the missile to overshoot; it was a good tactic and they pulled the manoeuvre at precisely the right time. Whoever was flying that bird was good.
“Turn you mother fucker, turn,” I snarled, watching the yellow dot chase down the green dot like a cat after a laser pointer.
Scarecrow began to turn inside the missile’s arc, but then the missile’s retro-thrusters engaged; tiny engines designed specifically to defeat this kind of trick. The two signals merged, a shower of grey debris blossoming out from the Broadsword. Scarecrow rolled over like wounded animal, slowly falling back into the icy atmosphere.
“Christ, it hit them. Scarecrow’s hit. They’re hit. Jesus, fuck.”
“Rubens, this is Iron, confirming missile impact. Mags, hold formation, you’re all over the place.”
“They’re going down. Fucking hell, fuck! Fuck! Fucking-”
“Magnet, Rubens; easy, easy. Report received, nothing you could have done. Jump complete. SAR en route, break. Interdiction in seventeen minutes.”
I stared at the blue dot as it shredded debris. Far ahead, up through the magnification provided by my HUD, I could see the faint twinkle as the damaged aircraft plunged through the planet’s thick atmosphere, a thick trail of smoke following it down. The fire from its aft section was a bright light on my thermal camera, starkly visible against the dark cold below.
“Scarecrow, Magnet. All crew egress aircraft immediately—eject, eject, eject.” I couldn’t hear anything but faint static. “Any receiving Scarecrow crew, eject, eject, eject. Punch out, you’re burning.”
“I’m not seeing any chutes,” radioed Iron, “they’re at fifty thousand metres.”
I searched for the little rectangular mushrooms that would signal escaping crew, trying to pick them out from the white spots of falling debris. “God fucking dammit. Dammit, you bastards, pull the handle. Pull the fucking handle!”
“Magnet, Rubens; cut the chatter. SAR is en-route.”
“Fuck you! Fuck you, you fucking—you gave me the green light! You let me—you cleared it! What fucking monkeys don’t even know where their own damn ships are? I said—I asked—I checked—”
“Magnet, Rubens; sir, you need to take a breath and calm down.”
“No, you need to calm down!” The ship got closer and closer to the surface. Unintentionally or by design they were heading to the equator. The warmest part of the planet. Perhaps they were holding off on ejection so that they would avoid any hazardous areas. They were awfully low, though.
Seconds passed. The fire grew, hungrily gnawing along the metal hull, turning the ship into a falling comet. Lower and lower it fell, lazily and gracelessly tumbling end over end, clearly uncontrolled. Then, unexpectedly, the ship regained some semblance of control. It wobbled, uncertain, although its nose still pointed straight towards the hard, frozen ground.
“Scarecrow, I say again, eject, eject, eject—”
They speared into the ground like a lawn dart, a cloud of flame and dark smoke blooming on the surface of the world of ice.
For a second all I could do was stare, then my finger somehow found the talk key. “Fucking Jesus, they went in. Scarecrow went in hard.”
“Rubens, this is Iron, confirming Magnet’s last. Scarecrow is down on the surface.”
“They blew into a million bits. I didn’t see any chutes, no telemetry on escape modules. Tom, you reading anything?” His callsign slipped out of a mind too full of helpless guilt to function.
“Magnet, Iron; I’m seeing no chutes. Uhh... Mike, look... RTB, I’m scrubbing the CAP. Warbird and Psycho will launch immediately and take over. We’ll discuss this back on the ship.”
Guilt turned to rage. “Discuss it? What’s to fucking discuss? We—and by we I mean I—just fucking killed seven of our own guys! Jesus fucking Christ, Tom. They’re fucking dead. I can see the wreckage on my magnifier. That ship’s in pieces. That ship’s in pieces. They’re fucked.”
“Magnet, Iron. Look, these things happen.”
The fire control officer on the Sydney had told me the same thing after they had nearly shot me. The words recalled the rage of nearly being killed to my mind. “No they don’t! They don’t just fucking happen! Bad weather just happens! Where are the safeguards to prevent this kind of shit from happening? Why weren’t they squawking transponder data? Where’s the fucking IFF? ROE says light up anything non-hostile? Where’s the working abort on our missiles, huh?”
“Mike, listen to me—”
“FUCK YOU!”
Iron’s tone became ice cold. “Lieutenant Williams, listen to me very carefully. I am returning to the TFR Rubens immediately. You are to accompany me. Form on my wing and RTB.” There was a faint hiss of static as he changed frequencies. Iron was talking to only me now. His tone softened. “We’re going to fly in together, okay? Wingtip to wingtip, we’re going to land it together. Just take a moment, first, and take a breath... then make your heading zero-zero-zero relative to the initial and come in nice and slow. There’s no atmosphere here, so take things as slow as you like.”
I didn’t know what to do. Muscle memory took over and my plane hovered vaguely off Iron’s side, heading towards the Rubens. My attention was fixed on the FLIR and the burning wreck of the ship I’d destroyed. “Fuck. Fucking Jesus, fuck. Fuck, look at all that smoke.”
“Don’t look at it. Don’t think about it. Just think about landing. The rest is noise.”
I couldn’t. Instead, I just focused on Iron’s voice. My visor misted up. “God fucking dammit. If I’d waited just one more second. One.”
“Forget it. Forget about it. You had the authorisation, you did it, it’s past. Look, Mags, control your lateral thrusters, you’re jumping all over the place.”
“I can’t see.”
“Lift your visor and wipe your face with your glove, okay? I know this is hard for you—it’s hard for me too—but we can’t do anything about those guys down there. We can’t. It’s done, okay? It’s done. What’s not done is getting you home safe-”
“I can’t breathe!”
“Take off your mask, you’re hyperventilating. Wings level buddy, call the ball.”
“Christ, I fucking killed them, Tom. I fucked them up.”
“No, you followed your ROE. This is command’s fuck-up, not yours, okay?”
“I’m in damn command!”
“Not here you aren’t. I painted the
target, I set weapons free, you did what I told you to do. Mike, I need you to call the ball, buddy.”
“I screwed up, Tom. I shouldn’t have even been flying this mission.”
“I know, man.”
“I fucking pulled the trigger. I did it. I did that. They’re fucking corpses. Oh, Jesus.”
“No, man, don’t think about it. Keep wings level. You’re a little hot, but you’re doing good. You’re doing good.”
“Fuck. Fucking Jesus, Tom. Nobody got out. Why didn’t they get out?”
“We don’t know. Nobody knows. Don’t think about it. Just focus on the landing, you’re still too hot. Reverse thrust, quarter power, two second burn.”
“What about their families, man? That CWO sounded French. Belgian maybe. Where do you think they were from? The Tehran? The Beijing? They don’t have French crews. It—it just doesn’t make any sense, Tom! Fuck!”
“It doesn’t matter, man. None of that noise matters. Now, slow it down, you’re still way, way too hot—reverse thrust, quarter power, two second burn or you’re going to stack it.”
“I can—I can’t see.”
“Mike, you’re too hot! You’re too hot—”
“Magnet, Rubens; you’re coming in too fast. Reduce velocity.”
“Rubens, Iron; Magnet’s coming in way too hot. Pop crash-nets and dispatch damage control teams to the main hanger bay. Mike! Mike, listen to me man, don’t do this! Mike! Mike, think of Penny, man! Think of Penny! Mike, Mike! MIIII-”
Screaming metal on metal.
The whole world was a roar of disintegrating metal and splintering fibreglass, drowning out all other noises with its power. The rear of the ship broke up as it hit the crash net, blowing debris through the hanger bay in a shower of sparks. The impact threw my limbs out in front of me, flailing around in the microgravity. The cockpit snapped off and began tumbling end over end.
Fuel and munitions exploded together, evaporating the ship’s body, a bright flare quickly extinguished by vacuum. Alarms of every description joined the cacophony as my spacecraft tried to tell me it was cut in half. The canopy shattered into a thousand pieces and the air rushed into the decompressed hanger bay, silencing all sound. Pulled down by artificial gravity the cockpit tumbled end over end until the cockpit thumped on its side, careening sideways across the flight deck, a wall of metal silently sliding past inches from my head.