Legacy

by Bob Mauldin

  Sitting in the darkened cockpit of her crippled fighter, Miranda began cursing her own stupidity. Sensors dead, she could only sit there and wait for the bogey to come back and finish the job. She didn’t even know if her message got out. After several minutes of nothing, she finally cracked. “Damn you! Come back here and end this charade! But winning one battle won’t win you a war, you bastard!”

  Drifting in the silence of space, without even the whisper of her life support system for company, Miranda lifted her visor and waited. She finally noticed, among the darkened instruments of her control panel, a small, red blinking light. One small light to hold on to, in that great darkness. She stared at it for a time, then reached out and touched the blinking light. Instantly the light went out, and several seconds later, all of her systems came back on-line.

  With the return of her systems came her radio, and an incoming message. “Congratulations, Mamba One. You found the reset button. Consider yourself fortunate, Commander. This is only an exercise and you have a reset button. You are cleared to return to base. Report for debriefing as soon as you have settled your craft.”

  Recognizing the voice, she muttered, “I don’t know how Commander Kitty does it.” As she located base on her screens and began her approach, she muttered, “I could kill that man.”

  Lieutenant Commander Miranda Lee, first holder of the Stellar Cross of the Terran Alliance, was thoroughly pissed at herself. Just too damned cocky, she thought. Well, she’d just had that kicked out of her. She eased the nose of her ship through the force field and into the docking bay. Mad as she was, she realized that the engineers and science teams were doing a good job. This new force field, for example. The Builders, as the previous owners were now being called, had the technology, but for some reason, had never adapted it to this use. Now it wasn’t necessary to pump the air out of a bay so a ship could enter or leave. The selective field made life so much easier.

  Likewise, the interior capture fields. Adapted from the shuttles, they caught an entering ship and the docking crews could move it to wherever they chose. She shut her systems down as she felt the field take hold and began to get ready for the ass-chewing she foresaw in her future. As she stepped down the ladder provided by the deck crew, an ensign was waiting. Saluting, he said, “Ma’am, Captain Baylor’s compliments, and would you report to his office in one hour?”

  The hour Captain Baylor granted her let Miranda shower and change before reporting. Might as well look my best for the funeral, she thought gloomily. At the appointed time, she knocked on the Captain’s door, was ushered in and asked to sit down before she could go through the formula of reporting. She found herself sitting opposite the highest ranking members of the combined crews. I have to quit this. I’m not going to be able to survive the attention, much less any combat! she thought. Captains Baylor and Hawke, Commanders Hawke, Walker and Frost, were all present. Frost was the new Chief of Engineering for Orion, and probably the one who screamed the loudest when she red-lined her ship.

  The debriefing went much better than she had expected. The only low point was when Chief Frost chewed her for exceeding her red-lines. She defended herself by stating the obvious: that it was absolutely necessary to know exactly what your vessel was capable of. And bordered on insubordination by saying that she would do the same thing again under the same circumstances. Having been questioned extensively by most of the officers present, Miranda was feeling very wrung out.

  She was beginning to think she would walk away from this debriefing clean until Simon spoke. He went over, in great detail, everything that she had done, continually asking, “Why?” during her encounter with the fighter and shuttle. It turned out that the pilot of the shuttle was Commander Kitty, who apparently had been annoyed, but not all that surprised, when her craft was disabled so handily. As they discussed her maneuvers, Simon made a point of stating that there was no wrong move for her to have made, as, up until this point, there was no such thing as space combat tactics. “In this field, we are quite literally flying by the seat of our pants,” he cautioned. “So, all in all, you are to be commended for your performance today, and for the way you handled yourself throughout the entire exercise.”

  Simon ended on that note and everyone stood up to leave. As they did, Kitty maneuvered herself beside Miranda. Placing her hand on Miranda’s shoulder, she slowed down to let the men go on ahead. In an off-hand tone she commented, “Apparently you weren’t aware that there was a cockpit voice recorder on your vessel today.” Miranda looked at Commander Kitty questioningly. They reached a juncture in the corridor, and as Kitty prepared to go to quarters, she looked both ways before confiding, “There are times when I could happily kill that man, myself.” Turning on her heel, she left a stricken Miranda standing alone in the hall.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Simon was furious to the point of a total melt-down. Two reasons were that his wife and First Officer refused to allow him to get her out of harm’s way. The second reason was the one responsible for most of his anger: she was right.

  It had started the day before, on an upbeat note, oddly enough. Simon and Daniel had been on Galileo’s project deck when the last Mamba, number twenty, was brought in for its systems check shortly after the power core had been initialized. The crew and technicians present let out a ragged cheer, acknowledging the promised celebration as the interruption in Orion’s basic mission ended. Thirty days of non-stop production had produced those twenty ships and their eighty anti-matter missiles and more than enough pilot-hopefuls to fly them.

  Kitty and Miranda had started a training program using one of the original fighters to familiarize trainees with their future craft as well as the more unpleasant task of identifying those who weren’t going to be able to interface with the upgraded neural net well enough to serve in a flight capacity. Getting a long-range patrol up and prowling the fringes of Orion’s sensor range became a priority issue and permanent if sketchy air cover would become the rule before Galileo left.

  Now that Orion had some protection, Galileo could go back to Earth and pick up more volunteers. Simon had made a list of people he wanted to be on that trip. Gayle and Stephen because they made a good recruiting team. Several of the first thirty-five from the DenverCon, because of their contacts. And Kitty as acting Captain.

  Simon broached the subject several days before Galileo was scheduled to depart. The confrontation in the Hawkes’ quarters began when Kitty told Simon, “No.”

  Kitty sat there calmly and waited for Simon to run down. When he finally paused to take a breath, Kitty jumped in with both feet. “My turn.” Simon opened his mouth, and Kitty spoke first. “Shut up for a minute.” Shock value, that, as one of their rules had always been to never use those two words to each other. “This isn’t as much Captain and First Officer as it is husband and wife, and you know it. You want me away from here so I’ll be safe. But that leaves you here and in danger.”

  She laughed at the startled look on his face. “I’m perfectly capable of figuring out the same things you are, Dear. Now. One of us has to go back and supervise replacing the recruits. That should be you since some decisions should be made on the spot. And I,” she said, fists on hips, “don’t want to leave here with my job half-done.”

  Kitty finally decided to put Simon out of his misery. “Besides, Captain Dear,” she said, a half-nasty smile on her face, “you aren’t cleared to fly one of the new ships yet, so you can’t teach anyone else how to fly one. You signed the order that gave me and Miranda the power to license a pilot and neither of us will certify you in the time we have left, so I stay and you go. And Miranda and I have things under control and don’t need your help. You need to realize that I can handle my end here, and that you are the one most qualified to handle things back on Earth. Besides, we can keep in touch by radio.” Her decision was hard to put into words and her voice cracked at the end.

  It took some doing, but Simon finally bowed to the inevitable, and two days
later Galileo finally left for Earth. The night before departure was a strange experience for most of the crew. They were about to watch their comrades leave again, and the last time had produced some very unpleasant results. For Simon and Kitty it was a problem because they had never been separated by over twelve thousand miles in their sixteen years of marriage.

  The strain was beginning to get to everyone, and it was almost with a sense of relief that Galileo made her way out of the maze now surrounding Orion and disappeared into the deep black.

  With Galileo’s second departure, a new sense of purpose began to invest Orion and her personnel. Plans had changed again. The fluidity of plans around the two large craft had become a hallmark. Now, the theory was that if three of the old-style fighters could run off their attackers, then surely, twenty of the newer, meaner version could keep them safe until Galileo could get back. Especially with the maze in place.

  Consequently, Daniel kept patrols out at all times. He had Engineering, already overworked, design a series of sensor buoys that would warn them long before any craft could sneak up on them again. These would be placed by some of the farther ranging patrols, first in near-Orion space, and later farther out on the edges of the solar system by ships going out on their trials or on patrols.

  Kitty Hawke, now Wing Commander, and her executive officer, Lt. Commander Miranda Lee, shared an office built into one corner of the flight deck. With the extra personnel left behind by Galileo, lured either by the mystique of the new Mambas or a sense of outraged duty, they were able to man all twenty fighters. The few old-style fighters were pressed into service as trainers, allowing prospective pilots a chance to get some experience on a plow horse, so to speak, before taking on the more high-spirited chargers that were the Mambas.

  Orion returned to her original purpose of building full-sized, long-range ships. Two weeks after Galileo’s departure, the keel of the first vessel was nearing completion. With the additional assistance of the Mambas not on patrol, Orion’s Engineering department estimated the completion of the first ship sometime in November of two thousand eleven.

  Kitty chafed under the knowledge that Simon had gone back to Earth leaving her with all the potential problems that were inherent in that situation even though she had fought for it personally. Privy to all the staff meetings up until Galileo left, she was as aware as anyone else of the possibility that the government, U.S. that is, would most likely be all over them as soon as it became aware of their return. The days that passed with no report of trouble were a balm at the end of each weary day. The first week was a no-brainer because it would take that long for the huge ship to get back to Earth. Each day after gave her more hope that they had misjudged the situation.

  Her reason for staying with Orion was still a valid one, and from the moment Galileo disappeared into the inner system she and Miranda had their hands full training the new pilots in the fine art of fighter control. That they were making up rules and tactics as they went along was obvious, but it was a start.

  Kitty’s days began early. She got up, showered, had a hurried breakfast in the mess hall nearest her quarters, and hurried to her office on the lower deck. By the time she arrived, the morning Flight Operations shift was on duty, crawling over the off-shift fighters like so many ants over their queens. By the time Miranda arrived, Kitty had the days’ training and patrol rosters posted, made coffee, and was going over the reports from the previous day as well as the late shift’s reports on flight readiness for the assembled fighters waiting on the main deck.

  The calm ended the evening she stopped by the radio shack, called that for some esoteric military reason she never bothered to ask about, and read the evening report filed by Galileo’s Comm officer. Surprisingly, she read, it was reporters who first began to harass the returnees, the government a close second. Transport Control was busy pulling people out of jails until the authorities gave up on that and just started asking questions. Her emotions, already low after having to wash out two gifted pilot-hopefuls earlier in the day, couldn’t take the stress any longer.

  Tears rolled down her face as she made her way back to the room she shared with Miranda. Expecting Miranda to be gone, as was her usual habit, Kitty didn’t wipe the tears away as she entered her apartment. Her thoughts were only for the bed she wanted to cry herself to sleep on. The separation from Simon, while not as long as other times in their marriage, was considerably farther, and not able to be ended as easily as other times. That separation and the loss of the two pilot-trainees, added to the bad news from Earth about the rash of arrests and escapes was more than her overloaded psyche could stand.

  Miranda looked up from the report she was reading and said, “You know, I used to read novels. Now I feel lucky to make it through one of these reports before bedtime.” It took that long to register the tears flowing freely down her boss’ face. She set the paper aside and moved to Kitty’s side, using an arm around her shoulders to guide the weeping woman to a chair. Seeing the crumpled up piece of paper so obviously from Communications, and knowing that Galileo had only been back at Earth for two days, Miranda guessed at the worst possible scenario. “Kitty! Simon ... is he okay?”

  Kitty nodded wordlessly as tears and sobs emanated from the despondent woman. “Yes, at least so far. It’s just that everything is getting so complicated, Randy,” she managed to choke out. “I trust Simon to handle things there, just like he expects me to do the same here, but I’m just not ... I don’t have the experience he does with things like this!” Kitty waved her hand in the air trying to indicate the whole of her life at present, but only making Miranda look at the paper she had clutched in it.

  Not knowing exactly what Kitty referred to, Miranda focused on the paper and managed to extricate it almost intact from Kitty’s grasp. Reading it twice to make sure she missed nothing, Miranda said, “Kitty, Dear, we knew this kind of thing was going to happen. Remember, Simon told us that the government would do all it could to take Galileo away from us. And truthfully, I wouldn’t mind giving her to them after we dismount all the weapons and wipe the computer. Now that we’ve got all of her information duplicated on Orion ...”

  “It’s not just that, Randy,” Kitty wailed. “I had to wash out Rita and Larry today. They each did fine in the old trainer, but neither one of them could tolerate the helmet.” “The helmet” was a euphemism for the neural net built into the suit and helmet of a pilot that essentially made that pilot one with her ship.

  Connected to the net via connections wired into the helmets, almost twenty percent of the applicants reported a buzzing throughout their entire bodies. Never enough to impair their senses, but enough and then some to distract them from the concentration needed to fly one of the new ships. The condition disappeared the instant the pilot removed her helmet, and only happened in about one out of five cases so far, leaving the two women guessing that the problem lay with the person and not the new system. “And I don’t like not being able to talk to Simon when I need to.”

  Miranda listened to Kitty talk well past the time the two of them usually went to dinner. Taking the opportunity to call the mess hall while Kitty took a restroom break, Miranda ordered a couple of plates delivered to their room before the stewards went off-duty. Finally, the commander of the new fighter detachment, worn out from worry and stress went to bed. Miranda tucked a light blanket around her boss’ shoulders, turned out the light and looking back from the door, said, “You’ve got tomorrow off. We’ve only got two more pilots to certify, and I can handle that. Get some rest and call Simon. I know you won’t be able to talk to him, but you can message and reply as often as you want until you can get this talked out, hon.”

  Simon’s mission to Earth was not faring as well as operations aboard Orion, primarily due to the people equation. The return of almost five hundred people to the Denver/Billings area after a nearly year-long absence had been a recurring topic of discussion at the weekly staff meetings. So vocal were the arguments that Simon h
ad had to step in a number of times to separate potential combatants.

  Preferring to lead from the best position available, Simon tended to listen to both sides of an argument, let the two sides get all of their information on the table, then try to sift through the partisan posturing and, hopefully, arrive at a solution that would work for all involved.

  From the snippets of conversations heard and overheard in daily shipboard life over almost a year’s time, Simon surmised a goodly number of the crew accepted for the Orion construction had told no one of their leaving for any number of reasons. Most or all of them would be listed as missing persons, and any one or two would arouse considerable attention when they showed up. But almost five hundred ...

  Surprisingly, just under half had stayed in the asteroid belt to begin construction of the first ship. Their continued absence would be commented on in light of the return of so many others. And there was the very real problem of telling eight families about the death of a loved one. And of having to convince them that it was no hoax. And it irked Simon that one of the missing only had a name. No one could ever remember him, Derek Carter, ever talking about his background, so he had no one to contact.