by Damon Alan
The chief let go of the grappler's access ladder and floated under the small ship. He pretended to inspect the hover ports.
The lieutenant shook her hand. His grip was strong. “I know. You're my new navigator.”
“Great. I just arrived on ship this morning and I've been wondering about my team.” Sarah jabbed a thumb toward the deck chief. “I've been wondering about him also. So… is he going to be a dick the whole time I'm on board?”
“Until you get promoted past ensign, probably. Did he tell you he doesn't want to know your name yet? Just in case?”
Sarah laughed. “No.”
“Most overused line in the military.” The lieutenant looked under the small fighter. “Right chief?”
“If sir says so, sir,” the deck chief replied.
“Our copilot and the weapons officer will be here soon. The captain says I can take us out for a shakedown.” The lieutenant patted the hull of the grappler. “We're going for a training run. Suit up.”
“That sounds great, Lieutenant…?”
“Charlton Davits. Call me Chip.” Chip pointed to the cockpit of the combat spacecraft. “We're family in those seats.”
“Chip.” Sarah nodded and imagined a potato chip on his forehead. Her father taught her that method of remembering names in her early teens. She hadn't forgotten a name in years.
Chip pointed at Sarah's marriage bracelet. “You're married?”
“Yeah, is that a problem?”
“Not at all. It'll give you reason to fight even harder. And stay alive. What's your partner's name?”
“Vonn. Vonn Elander. He's a recruiter for the Navy.”
Chip laughed. “Rooked into this by your own husband?”
“No—”
“Just kidding, Ensign. If you're flying grapplers, it's because you asked to be here. I know.” Chip looked at the chief, who was still inspecting the same exhaust port. “Chief, Ensign Dayson needs a suit. If we have any new ones, suit her up right. No sense making her sit in anyone else's butt sweat.”
“You got it, L-T. Follow me, Ensign.”
The deck chief showed Sarah her locker and suited her up. The suit looked new and didn't smell like butt sweat, at least not that Sarah noticed.
* * *
Chip's head turned hard right, his eyes glanced back toward Sarah and the ensign sitting to her left.“Okay, you're all three new, so do exactly what you're told. If you do, we all get to live. When we're done today, I'll let you know which of you I plan to keep, if any. If I call you by name, it's because I've bothered to learn it, as our chief would say, and that's a good sign. The decision about you staying is mine to make, so if you want to be here the time to give your best is now. Any questions?”
Sarah blinked in disbelief. “We're all new?”
Chip laughed. “Yep. Her Majesty is growing her navy quickly. Welcome to the new age of military firepower.”
“Wow…” the weapons officer whispered.
“Oh yeah,” Chip said, “that reminds me, all mics are voice activated. If you want privacy, there is none. All speech goes to all crew members. The exception is my mic, I can select each of you individually. When I do, your answer goes only to me.”
Sarah nodded. She studied the four holographic displays arrayed in a semi-circle around her as she listened. Below the displays her control panels circled her as well, arranged so that no matter what direction her gravity couch faced she'd have access to the tools she needed.
Chip flipped some switches on his instrument panel. Sarah heard turbines spin up in the hull of the grappler, somewhere behind her. “We're going to do some maneuvering to see if I can kill you. After that, if none of you are dead, I have permission from the Captain to simulate runs on the Marius. I'll control the vessel manually at or below six Gs. Our suits are power assisted so we can operate normally in higher Gs, but I will usually control the ship through the AI by voice when we are under heavy acceleration.”
“Why the 6G limit? Our power suits function past twelve Gs.” The copilot, a woman Sarah's age and as fresh from the Academy, asked the question before Sarah got it out. In simulations they'd used power suits to 10Gs inside the centrifuges.
“Because there are times when our voices will be more steady than our hands, such as when we're maneuvering to avoid fire. You don't get that in the ground side sims, and you can't tell the know-it-all instructors down there anything. Our AI doesn't talk back. It responds only with text at your station. His name is Chipotle.”
Sarah laughed.
“That's funny?” Chip said.
Sarah realized nobody else laughed. “Umm… I thought it was, but I was mistaken. Sir.”
Chip paused to silence a tone alarm. “The fusion plant is running at optimum. We'll skip the checklists today, I already ran them all to save time. After this mission it will be awhile before we launch into space for live training again, so we'll have our butts in these seats during our shifts running simulations. You'll learn this boat and our checklists until you can fly with your eyes closed and recite the checklists in your sleep. Clear?”
The three new crew members gave their affirmatives.
“Excellent.” Chip turned around and looked at his displays before selecting a switch. “Prepare for acceleration.”
Sarah's seat extended into a standard gravity couch. The leg section lowered into the hull below. The cockpit floor folded away to accommodate the process.
Chip keyed the grappler's radio. “Flight ops, this is grappler One-Eight. Request launch and permission to maneuver near the Marius.”
The return transmission squawked in Sarah's ear, over the drone of the grappler's fusion plant and compression turbines. “Grappler One-Eight, ejection in thirty. Permission granted. Simulated attack runs on the Marius approved, we'll be returning simulated defensive fire. When you're dead your boat will go inert. Keep that in mind with your vectors.”
Chip paused his flight prep to address his crew. “What he means is that if we're on a collision course with the Marius when we're shot, we'll run into the Marius if we're close.”
“They don't have safety locks to prevent that?” the copilot asked.
Chip laughed. “No. If we hit the ship we have done the Navy a favor by eliminating an incompetent crew.”
A countdown appeared on Sarah's retinal display.
“Roger, flight ops, ejection in fifteen, we'll keep an eye on our approach vector. One-Eight out.” Chip made final adjustments for launch as he settled into his grav couch.
Sarah regulated her breathing. She couldn't remember ever being this nervous.
“Here we go,” Chip said.
A magnetic catapult fired and the grappler blasted from the side of the Marius into space. They hurtled outward for a few moments to give them distance from the capital ship, then Chip dumped reaction mass into the fusion engines. The ship leapt forward at four gravities.
“Four Gs,” Chip said. “How do you feel?”
Sarah answered. “We had eight in the sims planetside. This doesn't feel like much.”
Chip laughed mischievously. “Let's go to eight then, Sarah, and see how that feels in a non-sim environment.”
Sarah watched the console between the pilot and copilot as Chip pushed the fuel feed levers forward. The ship shook as nuclear fire exploded from the back end. Her body sank into the grav couch, which instantly adapted to the high gravity environment. It squeezed her extremities hard enough to hurt, but the action pushed blood toward her head. The grav couch rotated with the ship's thrust to keep the line of acceleration perpendicular to the plane of her back except for any acceleration along the Z-axis. The main engines, fortunately, didn't thrust along that line.
“I haven't done twelve yet, Lieutenant,” Sarah said.
A nervous laugh erupted from the copilot. “And I think we should avoid it.”
“The lady asked for twelve,” Chip said. “Chipotle, twelve Gs, present vector.” The fuel feed levers edged forward as if controlled
by invisible hands. The grappler accelerated even more quickly, and Sarah immediately regretted her request. The gravity couch clamped on her extremities like a vise, pushing blood where she needed it. The pain gave her something to focus her thoughts on as she fought to retain consciousness.
“Oh shit,” Sarah grunted into her throat mic. She watched the Marius recede into the distance on her tactical sensor array.
“Agreed,” the weapons officer said. “Back it off.”
“Greens,” Chip lamented. Sarah assumed he was rolling his eyes if they could still move. “Okay, I'll back it off.” Chip ordered Chipotle to reduce the fuel mix.
Some vision returned to Sarah's eyes, and her skin quit trying to split and separate from her skull.
“Better?” Chip asked.
Three affirmatives including Sarah's own groggy response echoed in her ear.
Chip reduced the thrust further and waited for the new crewmen to recover. “We will never burn at those levels for long. Our bodies can't take it, even with the grav couches and power suits. The good news is data from other systems indicates the Hive can't handle excessive acceleration either, even their non-human inhabited networks.
Chip made some adjustments to the engine mixture.
“I've backed it off to six Gs, you should be able to handle that indefinitely.” Chip paused for questions. Getting none, he continued. “Alright, let's try the grappling engines. You puppies up for that?”
“Do it,” Sarah replied. The copilot agreed, but the weapons officer sounded reluctant.
“Our motion will be violent. The tubes connected to your helmet will jet high pressure air to keep your face and visor clean if you vomit. It will, however, be in your suit with you.” Chip sounded delighted to explain that detail, which made Sarah wonder if any of them would return to the Marius unsoiled.
“Grapplers in three… two… one…”
Sarah slammed to the side and her grav couch rolled appropriately to minimize the effect on her body. A moment later it rotated nearly one-hundred eighty degrees around as the grappler engine changed the direction of acceleration.
Outside Sarah's window the weapons rack reflected an orange light. Something behind the cockpit was hot enough to radiate in the visible spectrum. Sarah was unable to report it over the sound of the weapons officer puking in his suit. She waited for him to finish, assuming that if the small craft was having a catastrophic failure there was little to be done.
“Are we— uphhh” Sarah grunted as the ship change direction yet again. “on fire?” It felt strange vocalizing low for the throat mic.
“No, that glow you see is from the radiators for the fusion power plant,” Chip replied. “It runs at full cap to po— uggg— to power the grappler motor.”
“Oh.”
Chip turned the grapplers off, and reduced the acceleration to three Gs. Sarah felt as if she were in normal gravity after several minutes of much worse. “Okay, we know why we have the grapplers, right?”
“Evasion of enemy fire,” the weapons officer said. His voice sounded weak.
Chip laughed. “How's it smelling in that suit?”
“Marvelous,” was the response.
“It'll happen to us all, many times. Okay, next question. Who controls the grappler?”
Sarah answered. “Activation is by either pilot, however if we're in evasion I control generation of the random number sequence from my station. That random number sequence is fed into the engine, which then fires randomly at varied times, power, and direction based on that sequence.”
“Good… good.” Chip cut thrust to nothing, and rotated the ship until they faced the opposite direction. He reactivated the engines and burned four Gs to decelerate. Their speed dropped to zero, then they accelerated back toward the Marius. “Man your stations as you've trained, we're going to attack our home away from home.”
The three new crewmen checked their stations. Sarah optimized the holodisplays as she'd learned to use them in simulation.
“Lariss, you have the controls. Take us in violently enough the Marius doesn't kill us. They'll be pointing one or two railguns at us on the first pass. Simulated, of course.” Chip waved his hands toward the right side controls of the ship. “Do it.”
Lariss. Sarah imagined a lariat on the copilot's head, like a crown.
Lariss activated the grappling engines for manual control. The ship lurched forward and acted much like an atmospheric craft thanks to the grappler motor.
“Nice,” Chip said. “How do grappling engines work?”
Lariss answered. “There's a segmented track in the grappler compartment that interfaces with the quantum foam present in all vacuum. We basically drive on the foam like a tank drives on dirt. The track disrupts the zero energy state and applies that energy to the movement of our ship. The affected space drops to a lower energy state, which slows the expansion of the universe an undetectably small amount.”
Chip intertwined his gloved hands as if he was cracking his knuckles. He said, “Correct, although the quantum foam isn't only in vacuum. We could theoretically operate in an atmosphere, although there isn't anything aerodynamic about this ship. You guys are doing great. Lariss, take us in.”
Lariss situated herself and assumed control.
Chip keyed the radio. “Flight ops, grappler One-Eight, request simulated nuclear release.”
“Granted, One-Eight. Your board will show green momentarily.”
“Roger.”
The grappler plunged through space toward the Marius. Lariss manually moved the small ship in what she thought to be random directions.
A defense AI on board the Marius looked for any repeated patterns and would direct defensive fire appropriately. Sarah looked through the canopy toward where she thought the Marius would be… nothing. Intellectually she knew she'd never see it except possibly as a passing streak, but emotionally she wanted more.
The weapons officer spoke. He sounded stronger, but Sarah nearly wretched as she imagined the smell inside his pressure suit.
“Weapons are green, Lieutenant,” he said.
“How long until firing range?” Chip asked.
“Four minutes.”
“Defensive fire will reach us any moment.”
The grappler flew two more minutes before the ship's controls froze. The engines shut down and the ship flew a straight line while tumbling in a slow roll. The crew of One-Eight watched the stars spin as all acceleration dropped to 0G.
Chip laughed and clapped his hands. “We're dead, people.”
Sarah struggled with the reality of dying on the next four approaches as well. Lariss seemed to be flying by textbook rules, as much as Sarah could tell.
The Marius seemed an impenetrable target, yet data from systems invaded by the Hive indicated the opposite was true. In actual combat ships died like trees in a forest fire.
After letting Lariss fly five runs, Chip took over on the next approach. “You guys are doing everything by the book, I'm impressed. Now I need to prove to you this can be done. Nav, set a random sequence for the grapplers, then enter it. After that, have a dozen more sequences ready. I'll need them.” Chip settled back in his position, his fingers rested lightly by the controls. “We're not going to tell them that I'm flying, if we do they'll cheat and assign more guns to us than they would if this were real defense.”
He's full of himself.
Sarah did as ordered. Her display indicated the grappler engines were evasion ready, and the next twelve random number sequences were in standby. “All loaded, Lieutenant.”
Chip tossed her a thumbs-up from the front. “Then let's go.”
The grappler burst forward at eight gravities. Instead of switching to voice control, Chip kept the ship on manual, using the fusion engines for forward thrust and the grappler motors to jerk the ship in what appeared to be random directions. But they weren't, Chip was flying the ship just as Lariss had.
Sarah couldn't see how Chip flying was going to make a differe
nce.
Chip flew until they reached the zone where the computer predicted their chance of death exceeded twenty percent. He engaged the grapplers in evasion mode and reduced the fusion engine to six Gs. The effect of the grappler engine varied forward acceleration between four and eight Gs. The net effect was a ship that popped randomly in all directions. Chip never accelerated directly toward the Marius, but varied the thrust line in a wide cone. This presented the targeting computers on the Marius extra variables to guess at.
“Using the grappler engine in opposition to the main engine thrust is a violation of regs,” Lariss said.
“Yep,” Chip replied. “Sure is. Obeying regs is small comfort if you're dead.”
“But—”
“Watch, then judge,” Chip answered. “If I don't get us in, you can turn me in. If I do, you learn to fly like me. Deal?”
Lariss gestured a thumbs up. She seemed open to new ideas. Sarah liked that, she didn't want to fly with a rigid crew.
Grappler One-Eight flew toward the Marius, violently jerking back and forth. The weapons officer called off near misses as simulated kinetic kill slugs zipped by them, throwing up once more in the process.
The radio crackled. “Chip, you asshole, you're flying that boat aren't you?”
Chip answered the irritated voice. “Had to show 'em it could be done. Oh, and you're simulated dead.” Chip switched to internal chat, but left the external mic on. “Breno, launch the weapons.”
Sarah watched the weapons board go red as the grappler simulated dropping its two dummy missiles.
His name is Breno. Sarah smiled to herself. Chip. Lariss. Breno. And Sarah. Grappler One-Eight.
A different voice contacted them. “One-Eight, this is ops. Congratulations. Return to base. I repeat, RTB.”
“One-Eight, roger, we're twenty-five out for recovery,” Chip answered ops, before returning to internal comm.
“Okay, I don't think I'm going to have any problems with this crew. I want to live as much as you guys do, so train, and train hard. Congratulations on not getting sick, ladies, I'm impressed.”
“Yeah,” Breno agreed. “It's not fun.”