by M. Alan Marr
“I meant to ask you about that. During that part of the dogfight, you powered back in the atmosphere. Did you know that Yeti was going to dive?”
“Statistically, the odds were in our favor that he would. In combat, Yeti tend to dive rather than climb. We’re not sure why.”
“That’s it then?”
“There are other reasons as well. After we entered the atmosphere, we had to power back, open the vents, and allow the engines to stabilize in atmospheric mode.” Dev adds, “It’s not a problem, but in a combat situation, that can turn deadly if you’ve got a Brigand on your tail. They have the upper hand in that case. They have the maneuverability, they have the speed, they have the inertia. You have tug of gravity and atmospheric friction working against you at that moment. That’s why, for us, once you chase an enemy into the atmosphere, you need to make sure you get them. You either want to fight them outside the atmosphere or inside. Not in the transition between the two.”
“It probably won’t come up that often,” Chaz jokes. He looks at Dev. “What about you? Are you okay?”
“I’m worried I’m responsible for all this.”
Chaz is incredulous. “How?”
“If Adonis hadn’t been sent for me they might have been in a better position to defend Lyra. Vijay said no, but . . . I’m not convinced. Even if they weren’t in the area, their presence elsewhere could have had an impact.”
Chaz shakes his head. “Everything happens for a reason, Dev.”
Dev takes a breath and refocuses. The detection grid is clear of enemy ships. The other fighters from the Adonis are taking positions around the system for sentry duty.
“Chaz, I need to plot on our compression course to Trieste.”
“Our what?”
“Compression course,” Dev says. “To cover the distance in the shortest amount of time, we use what we call a Compression Drive. It allows us to connect two spacial coordinates, bridging the distance between them.”
“What, like a wormhole?”
“Uh, no.” Dev says. “This flight mode is based on compression theory.”
“Never heard of it.”
“We’re going to compress the space between two coordinates.”
“How is that different than a wormhole?”
“Aside from being TV fiction? Actual wormholes are natural phenomena, like eddy currents in space. Compression flight is as unnatural as you can get, forcing the laws of physics to yield to us, rather than us yielding to them.”
“Cool. How much time will this save us?”
“If Adonis was still flyable, it would take them days, if not weeks to reach Trieste. We’ll get there in about fifteen minutes. But it is going to use up just about all our fuel. And I have to warn you, it’s not very pleasant.”
“That’s okay, I’ll manage.”
Dev smiles at Chaz’s courage under fire. “Mind taking the stick?”
Chaz’s eyes light up with delight. “Really?”
“It flies just like one of your fighters. Pitch and roll on the stick. Pivotal yaw on the pedals.” Dev points to a sort of three-dimensional compass system on the instrument panel. “There’s our present heading. Try to maintain it. The throttles are set for max efficiency, so we’re good with that right now. It’s all yours. You have command.”
Chaz takes the right-hand control stick. The canopy glass in front of him suddenly displays flight instrumentation on the glass. “Hey, that’s cool, you’ve got a HUD.”
“A what?”
“Heads-Up Display.”
“Yes, the flight instruments have repeaters on the canopy.”
“Why didn’t I see this before?”
Dev replies as if it is obvious. “You weren’t flying.”
Chaz nods as if it should have been obvious, but nonetheless happily flies the ship while Dev begins his calculations on the navigation computer. He enters their current position, destination, current fuel numbers, systems status, as well as calculating the minimum fuel to reach orbit.
Chaz sees the detection grid plot a target and sound a proximity warning. The canopy repeater plots the same thing. He squints and looks out ahead and sees an obstacle—is that an asteroid? “Uh, Dev, there’s a very big rock in front of us.”
Dev doesn’t look up from his calculations. “Don’t hit it.”
Chaz—as if he has to be told—eases the stick left and banks the ship around the asteroid. The collision alert silences. He banks right to get back on course but over controls and rolls the fighter a few times.
Dev doesn’t waver as he makes his calculations, even as the ship is rolling. “Smaller corrections, Chaz.”
Chaz eases the stick left to null the roll. In a series of fluid movements, Chaz maneuvers the ship back on their previous course. “Wow, this thing flies great!”
Dev smiles and continues working. “I’m glad you like it.”
“I don’t suppose my lottery winnings can buy me one of these?”
“I’m afraid not.” Dev chuckles. “The mighty dollar isn’t worth much here.”
Chaz laughs slightly, then turns sincere. “I didn’t get a chance to say it back there, but you are one hell of a good stick.”
“Thanks.” Dev looks up from his work. “That’s right, you’ve never really seen me fly.”
“I mean, the Recon ship was impressive . . .”
Dev scoffs, “That’s not flying.”
Chaz laughs. “I guess compared to this, it’s not. Wow. Must have been hard.”
“What?”
“You’re a fighter pilot,” Chaz says. “You must have really missed this all that time back on Earth.”
“I did.” Dev nods. “I missed it a lot.”
Calculations complete, the three-dimensional navigation display initially plots two long opposing red arcs between their present position and Corona Borealis. The image turns slightly, and the arcs compress into a very short rectangle bending the cosmic grid with it. Numerical data populates the bottom of the display.
“Okay . . . looks like we have enough fuel for a compression course as far as Triton. That will leave us just enough if we coast at idle to reach Trieste.”
“Any reserve?”
“Nope.”
Chaz nods. “What do you need me to do?”
“Just tighten up your restraints and hold on.” Dev tightens his own harness as he explains, “The compression drive will open up the floodgates on the entire reaction system, channeling energy into the engines and gravity drive. The only way I can describe it is to imagine yourself being fired on the tip of a hypersonic missile into a solid wall.”
“We don’t have hypersonic missiles.”
“Oh . . . well, then just steady your breathing, don’t move your head around a lot, and try to stay focused. Take the handholds near your seat. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, and there’s going to be a lot of . . . stimulus.”
Chaz’s adrenaline is flowing again in nervous anticipation. “All righty, then.”
“I have command,” Dev says while taking the stick. Chaz raises his hands up to show him he is fully off the controls. His canopy display disappears.
“Okay, here we go.” Dev advances the throttles to full power and then jams them past the forward stops into compression mode, where they lock in place. The engines fire a second later, and the ship lurches forward in half a heartbeat. The roar of the engines and visual aura inside the cockpit is extremely disorienting. The bumpy ride gets increasingly worse. The instrument panel appears as a turbulent blur of heightened visual and auditory stimulus far beyond normality. As chaotic as it is inside the fighter, outside looks like the very universe is collapsing in on itself. None of the physical properties of the flight seem to make sense, outside or in. Chaz can register no individual feeling: falling . . . spinning . . . squeezing . . . crushing gravity. They are traveling extremely fast, yet it feels like they are slowing down as if trying to power through a steadily increasing thickness. Outside, the stars seem to be closi
ng in on them from all sides. Everything is completely out of sync. Nothing about this flight, sight picture or physical feeling, seems to make any sense; they are simply traveling faster than the Human brain can process.
“Breathe! Focus on the panel!” Dev yells above the engine noise, himself trying hard to remain focused.
“Right!” Chaz forces his gaze toward the panel and tries to concentrate on the compass. The aftereffects of the visual stimulus make it very difficult to even focus on a single digit of the compass heading. The increasing level of turbulence doesn’t help, either. Images are overlapping, dissolving into one another. Perspective is all screwed up. One display seems right in front of him, while the next seems a mile away. Closing his eyes made it even worse.
Dev steals a quick glance at Chaz and shouts, “Don’t close your eyes!”
Chaz snaps his eyes open wide and gasps for air. The second or two he had them closed was a dark and dismal internal hell, as if being trapped inside the psychotic brain of a madman.
“What the hell was that!” Chaz yells in fear.
“Keep your eyes open! Focus on the panel!”
By closing his eyes, Chaz cut his brain off of the only thing it can possibly make sense of right now, the panel. Chaz forces his eyes to stay open throughout this torture and does as Dev says. Only by keeping his head still and concentrating, is Chaz able to—somewhat—zero in on the compass, but the outside imagery is distracting. The stars continue their unnatural convergence toward the ship. The turbulence is still increasing, as is the crushing feeling and the sensation they are trying to accelerate through wet cement. Dev is focused completely on flying the ship. He doesn’t take his eyes off the instruments again. Chaz is squinting hard to focus and identify these awful sensations. The passage of time is conflicted as well. How long have they been flying? One moment it seems like this just started, while the next seems like they’ve been at it for hours. It is impossible to tell. Fatigue . . . that seems real. Exhaustion. Smothering . . . Chaz begins following the dynamic images. Dev doesn’t need to look to know Chaz is losing focus.
“If you can,” Dev yells, “concentrate on individual instruments!”
“I’m trying!” This takes Chaz back to flight school. Flying in the clouds can seem just as disorienting for new students. Despite conflicting perceptions and physical sensations, scanning the instruments with your eyes is the only way to keep the aircraft right-side up in the clouds. Same in this case, apparently, but on a much more physically demanding scale. It would help matters if Chaz knew what all the instruments did.
The shaking increases to an almost unbearable point as the stars outside converge toward a single spot. The ship crosses this threshold, and every feeling Chaz had to this point suddenly reverses with a vengeance. The crushing feeling now feels like he is being pulled apart at the seams. The turbulence is just as bad, if not worse. The heavy gravity feeling goes completely negative. Velocity. It now feels like their speed is accelerating wildly. Compression is now uncontrolled expansion.
“Oh, what fresh hell is this!” Chaz yells, his body again unable to adequately process the horrific conditions.
“We’re past the midpoint!”
Through the turmoil, the star field seems to be expanding exponentially. Far in front of them, a tiny blue speck becomes visible as if at the end of a tunnel. It is Triton. The end point, at last, makes the forward view somewhat comprehensible.
“There! Ahead!” Dev shouts, “Triton—Focus on Triton!”
Disorientation is an undeniable fact of life for every pilot (or passenger) on their first compression flight. In his periphery, Dev can see the reactant fuel numbers steadily counting down—forty-nine percent . . . forty-eight . . . forty-seven . . .
Dev calculated the compression course to Corona Borealis should deliver them to Triton with eleven percent fuel remaining. The flight tanks continue to count down, indicating seventeen percent . . . sixteen . . . fifteen . . . Dev prepares to throttle back, his experience dictating the deceleration profile. Just as the fuel percentage ticks down from thirteen to twelve percent, Dev pulls the throttles back out of compression mode. The contorted stars suddenly seem to curve outward, and they are once again back in normal flight regime. The engines spool down, and the fuel readout reaches eleven percent and stabilizes. Ahead of the fighter is the blue gas giant.
Dev smiles, as he does every time he sees his familiar home planets. “There’s Triton.”
Chaz blinks hard to get his bearings. “That was intense.”
“You all right?”
“Are you kidding?” Chaz says, full of excitement. “Let’s do it again!”
Chapter 20
Stars of The Crown
Dev has to smile at Chaz. What a trooper. He’s experienced more of the universe in the last three days than anyone on Earth ever has, or likely ever will. Yet here he is, no worse for wear, excited and eager to see what’s next.
Dev reduces power to efficient-cruise, then pulls upward on the throttle heads themselves, and powers all the way back to idle.
Chaz doesn’t understand the odd move. “What was that you just did?”
“Our throttles are linked to braking thrusters, so when we power back, we slow down. I just disengaged the braking thrusters so we can coast at idle power. We’re less maneuverable, but I need to let the engine cores cool down and conserve our remaining fuel.” Dev programs a message to transmit to the Crown. “I’m trying to manually send our battle telemetry to Trieste, but doesn’t look like it’s going through.” He thinks for a second or two and then looks ahead at a Triton moon. “Look, there’s Bellerophon. We could land and refuel and try to con—” Dev sees a great plume of destruction from the surface of Bellerophon reaching the uppermost confines of the atmosphere.
Chaz sees it. “The military academy?”
“God, it must be,” Dev says, rolling the ship over so they can see better.
Chaz watches the top of the giant ash cloud slowly expanding over the entire moon. “What would cause that?”
“Orbital bombardment,” Dev answers as he looks at the catastrophic plume. “It must have happened just hours ago.”
“Do they have weapons?”
Dev very slightly shakes his head but doesn’t take his eyes off the cloud. “Soft ammunition and training ships are no match for an orbital assault force.”
Chaz thinks about this militarily. “Then, that means . . .”
Dev finishes the sentence, “This was a well-planned attack.”
“What do we do?”
“We get to Trieste, fast.” Dev rights the ship, re-engages the throttles and powers up.
“What about our fuel?”
“Not enough if there’s a gunfight,” Dev replies calmly.
The fighter approaches Trieste. Chaz is amazed at the size of the planet. It’s hard to get an actual sense of scale, but Chaz sees they are closing in fast on a world that just keeps getting bigger by the moment, and they are still well outside the atmosphere. The planet does not show any outward signs of attack, at least on this side. No fireballs. No evidence of bombardment like on Bellerophon. Nothing seems out of the ordinary, at least visually. Their fuel is now at three percent. Dev looks at Trieste, big and beautiful. Huge oceans. Vast continents. A northern polar ice field. Vibrant blue seas. Vivid greens.
Dev tries to raise command on the com line. “Flight Commander Dev Caelestis, Adonis Fighter inbound, Admiralty base. Request approach clearance. Urgent.”
Nothing.
Chaz hears the same static over the radio that Dev does. Dev repeats his message to no avail. Frustrated, Dev changes frequencies to civilian bands. Snippets of music and normal com traffic is heard as he rotates the frequency knob, but nothing on any of the military channels. He rotates the frequency knob back to the military channels, selects all comm and transmits to all military channels. “Any CDF station, any CDF station, Flight Commander Dev Caelestis, Adonis Fighter inbound, Admiralty base. Urgent.”
>
Nothing.
Dev is frustrated. “All the military channels are dead.”
“What next, Commander?” Chaz says quietly in a way that conveys respect to the situation.
Dev considers planetary defenses and the risks of dropping in without clearance. He looks at their fuel: two percent. “We need to get down there.” Dev activates the ship’s distress beacon. “I’m sending out a distress signal. Hopefully they’ll hear it and not shoot us down.” Dev points the nose toward the Southern Continent. The fighter enters the atmosphere nearly as steep as they did while chasing the Yeti back on Lyra. The reentry fire passes quickly at this angle. Dev opens the engine vents; however, the portside switches begin flashing, alternating amber and red.
Chaz notices the flashing switches. “Hey, I don’t think your vents opened on one and two.”
“They didn’t,” Dev confirms, feeling the engines beginning to tremble. Dev uses the first two of four small slider switches along the curvature of the throttle arc to reduce power on the port engines and advances the third and fourth sliders slightly forward to in increase the starboard engines to compensate. The vibration and engine strain is growing. An alarm sounds as the portside engines begin to dangerously overheat.
“All the gauges on the left engines are flashing red,” Chaz reports.
“I know, I know!” Dev yells as they head down through the atmosphere. Two large booms issue from engines one and two, and dense smoke pours from the affected engines.
“I’m guessing that’s bad?” Chaz says.
“Thermal relief baffles just blew out. We’re fine.”
Suddenly, and without warning, a large section of engine one blasts out of its housing and destroys engine two in the process. The fighter is jolted and rolls into a steep, tumbling spiral to the left.
Dev fights the ship. “Okay, that’s bad.”
“Are we going to make it?”
“We don’t have enough fuel to make this pretty.” Dev powers back on the throttles and banks to the right to stop the spiral. “We’re going to have to put her down in the ocean.” The ship’s unsteady course over the water near the space port begins to waver. Dev attempts to compensate, but to no avail. “I can’t hold course!” The fighter is heading straight down. Both Dev and Chaz see the ship’s trajectory inching from the ocean toward the city.