Avenging Angels (The Seraphim Chronicles Book 1) (46 page)

It was shorter than a standard TRTV by a couple of feet. Its weapons pods and engines were larger, but the most notable difference was the tiny walnut-sized bumps scattered across the hull plating.

“What are these for?” she asked, running her hand across the bumpy surface.

“Those are the SINS,” a voice echoed throughout the hanger from behind Evangeline. She would have recognized that voice anywhere, and she spun around to find Colonel Mark Jacobs approaching them. He had stepped out of a transport dressed in his own environmental flight suit. Evangeline stared with wide, disbelieving eyes and gaped at her commanding officer while Kevin gave him a casual salute. Catching his raised hand in the corner of her eye, she snapped to attention.

“Commander?” Evangeline asked in surprise. “You’re one of them, too?”

Jacobs returned her salute with a quick touch to his forehead. “That’s not important right now,” he said, brushing her question aside. “There’s little time, so let’s get back to the task at hand.”

Evangeline, baffled by another surprise twist to her concept of the world around her, took a deep breath. Her mentor and friend was a Dissident, had been a Dissident for who knows how long. She did not know how to process the new information, so she returned to drilling Kevin with all her questions about the Seraphim’s systems.

“What are SINs, sir?” she asked, pointing to one of the nodules on the hull.

Kevin stepped forward and placed his hand next to one of the bumps.

“SIN is short for Sonic Interference Nodes,” he began. “Each one generates a hypersonic sound wave. The sound waves overlap, creating a dense layer of atmosphere, like a bubble, around the craft. They turn any atmosphere around you into a shield. The denser the atmosphere, the stronger the shield will be. We have a little joke around here when it comes to Seraphim; the more sins, the better!” He gave her a nod with his head as if it were her cue to laugh at the joke.

Jacobs gave a low rumbling laugh, but Evangeline did not. Although impressed by the concept, she still did not understand how it worked. However, she appreciated any addition to her defensive arsenal.

She looked around the motor pool to assess the situation. “How many other Seraphim do you have?” she asked. Kevin and Jacobs looked at each other, but Jacobs was the one who answered her query.

“This is the only one said. It’s the prototype. And quite frankly,” he said, giving Kevin another significant glance, “we’ve been unsuccessful at linking a pilot to its advanced systems. No one has been able to interface and get it to function beyond starting the onboard network.” He shook his head sadly as his eyes surveyed the magnificent structure.

Evangeline stared between the two of them, thinking they both must have lost their minds. Her eyes widened as the image of small, white mouse receiving an injection of an unknown substance flashed into her mind. With widening eyes, an understanding of their intent dawned on her.

“So what makes you think I’ll be able to do any better?” she fired at them. The idea that they wanted her to join a fight with an untested prototype was insane. She imagined the vehicle exploding in mid-air as she fired the weapons for the first time.

Jacobs stepped forward until he and Evangeline were toe to toe. He looked down at her just as he had in his office after the accident in the landing zone.

“Because you have the highest aptitude scores toward telemetric control I’ve ever seen. It was because of these scores and my involvement with your parents that I made sure you stayed in the corps.” He softened his gaze, and spoke with pleading eyes. “I have nothing but the fullest confidence in your capabilities. Will you please, at least, try?” he asked.

“Besides,” Kevin teased, “this is a once in a lifetime opportunity! Do you know how many other pilots would sell their mothers for a chance to fly a top-secret machine of this caliber?”

Evangeline looked over at Kevin, who also had caught her in his playful yet pleading gaze. She considered for a moment as her eyes swept back and forth between the two of them.

She let out an exasperated sigh and let her shoulders slump in defeat. “Okay! Okay!” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “I’ll give it a try.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Jacobs said, saluting her in gratitude.

Kevin just winked down at her and whispered, “Atta, girl.”

Evangeline pulled on her flight helmet and sealed the collar. She took a moment to gaze upon the prototype. She had no experience as a test pilot. She wondered that in all the history of men and women piloting a vehicle for the first time, if any of them had been half as nervous as she was at that moment.

She had never thought about it before, but she considered what it might have been like for the first pilots that underwent the procedure, accepting a permanent alteration to their bodies for an untested technology that, in theory, linked them to their vehicle. The technology had been standard in Olympus her entire life. She had never considered what life must have been like before the days of telemetrically-operated vehicles.

She felt a wave of newfound appreciation for the men and women, her brother and sister pilots, who fearlessly ventured beyond what had been the established limits of their time. Her legs trembled with mixed exhilaration and trepidation, feeling anything but fearless.

Taking a step toward the pod, she found the external seat control override and activated it. There was a hiss of pneumatics and electrical servos as the pilot seat descended from the cockpit above. She looked over the seat, expecting to find a new harness interface, but the chair appeared to be identical to the standard TRTV configuration she knew.

Wrapped around the headrest Evangeline noticed a U-shaped object. “What’s this?” she asked, picking it up.

“That’s the flight helmet,” Kevin called from outside the safety border surrounding the Seraphim.

Picking up the modified helmet, Evangeline rolled it around in her hands. “Why is it disconnected from the rest of the harness?” she asked looking over in Kevin and Jacobs’ direction.

“The helmet it designed to allow remote access to the Seraphim’s sensors while outside the cockpit,” Jacobs answered. “But, just like most of the Seraphim’s systems, it remains unproven.”

Evangline’s shoulders slumped slightly as she felt the weight of added expectations. The modified helmet looked like a pair of oversized carbon-fiber earmuffs. It was grey, matching the rest of the Seraphim’s exterior coloring, with an array of micro-displays embedded along the ridge connecting to two sides.

With a hand on each bulbous end, Evangeline raised the Seraphim’s helmet above her head with slow resignation. Sliding the U back across her hair, she rested the rounded ends onto her ears. She heard a beep in each ear, and then a hiss erupted behind her ears. She did not see the cranial plugs emerge from the lobes, sliding along the bottom edge of the bridge connecting the two ends.

The plugs tracked toward the center of her neck until they located the ports at the base of her skull, and inserting with a soft click. At the moment of insertion, the top edge of the bridge expanded like a translucent sheet across the top of her skull until it covered her eyes and cheekbones. At the same time, the lobes protruded forward, meeting to cover her mouth and nose.

Evangeline startled at how quickly her head became enveloped in a shell. She gave the top of her helmet a soft rap with her knuckles, and then tapped on the faceplate with a finger. The hollow sound of her rapping resonated in her ears. “I guess this new helmet wasn’t designed for combat.”

With a sigh, Evangeline reclined into the seat and the weight of her body activated the rest of the connection process. She felt the familiar rush of air along her spine as the ports in her suit opened, allowing the interface to enter her body. The tingle of micro-voltage zinged up her spine as the internal network scanned her nervous system, searching for the interface points installed along her backbone.

Evangeline felt a rush flood across her body as the Seraphim hummed to life

Off to the side, Kevin and Jacobs were both smiling broadly and exchanging a knowing look with each other. They both adjusted their weight with nervous anticipation, shifting on their feet as if they were standing on plates of hot steel sitting out in the scorching desert sun.

Evangeline felt the full weight of their expectations collapse on her shoulders. If she proved unable to interface with the Seraphim, their defense force would not only be one pilot smaller, but it was probable that the prototype would fall back in the hands of Olympus. She took a deep breath before moving on to the next step.

Skipping the manual interface, she attempted to utilize the full extent of the neural interface for her maiden voyage. She visualized her seat ascending into the cockpit and in less time than it took to finish the thought, she felt herself rising away from the ground and locking into place. The darkness in the cockpit dissipated as the soft glow of instruments and displays illuminated as the machine knew her eyes demanded more light.

She glanced across the inactive monitors for the standard flight instruments. One by one, as her eyes passed over the blank displays, they flickered to life and showed her the precise data she sought; fuel cell levels, ammunition capacity, engine status, and on and on. Everything about the Seraphim felt as familiar as her old patrol TRTV back in Olympus. The visceral familiarity to the cabin around her felt just like coming home.

She was curious about the exterior display interface. In an instant, the panoramic vista of the motor pool appeared in her HUD. She looked left and right and found the clarity of the images to be more brilliant than her own vision. The HUD zoomed into minute details from across the room just by her resting her eyes on them. Satisfied that the visual interface worked better than she expected it to, she proceeded to test some of the other systems.

Evangeline thought about seeing outside the cockpit with her naked eyes; the cockpit shielding retracted in a floating motion like a steel eyelid. Kevin and Jacobs were standing in front of her. They had moved from the side and seemed to be in the thick of a rather exciting conversation. She felt a sudden burst of frustration well up within her. So much had happened in such a short amount of time. She was fatigued, nervous, worrying about her husband, and she was at the brink at rushing headlong into a war with her government. In a flash of irritation, she ached to shoot at something.

Just as it had with her previous unspoken desires, the Seraphim responded. Its weapons pods activated, and her two friends, as well as two TRTVs whose pilots had just made their own neural connections, had targeting lasers directed at them.

Kevin and Jacobs both jumped back when the weapons pods popped away from the hull and bright, red lights flashed across their foreheads. Evangeline startled in the cockpit, suddenly anxious for the safety of her friends. She mentally retracted the pods as fast as they had activated. She had become accustomed to manual control of TRTV weapons that she had not realized how much slower her reaction time had become.

Kevin’s and Jacob’s fear spiraled into elation.

“That’s further than any of our other pilots have managed to get!” Kevin yelled, smiling from ear to ear. He held out his hand to Jacobs and they exchanged a vigorous shake. Kevin walked away from the safety zone toward his own TRTV and climbed in. Jacobs headed in the opposite direction, connecting himself to an older TRTV that bore signs of combat damage. To Evangeline it looked like an older model, with the name “Broadside” stenciled by the pilot’s cockpit plating. She knew that it was not his old call sign, and she wondered if the former pilot had also been a Dissident or if they had stolen the TRTV from Olympus.

She returned the cockpit shield back to its original position and resumed the panoramic interface. She looked over the pristine cockpit interior and felt through the other networks and systems. The Seraphim was an impressive and elegant ship, exhibiting a graceful sophistication her other TRTV seemed to lack. She caught sight of Jacobs looking at her from the dropped pilot’s seat of his TRTV.

“It looks like you were the missing component all along, Evans,” he sighed into her audio channel. “Best speed, Captain.” He gave her a salute, disappearing up into the cockpit.

Evangeline closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath to clear her mind.

“Well,” she said, talking to the Seraphim. “It looks like the shoe fits. What shall we call you?” She had finished going through all of the Seraphim’s systems: communications, engines, weapons, even a test of the SINs. “I think I’ll just call you… Little Star. How does that sound to you?” Her subconscious excitement at giving the ship her own nickname caused the engines to rev and roar. Evangeline threw her head back and laughed, thrilled that the machine seemed to approve of its christened name.

The hangar crew watched with awe as Evangeline roared her engines and her voice came through the external speakers.

“This is Little Star, ready for duty, Colonel!” The hangar erupted with cheers and applause, but Evangeline was less optimistic. She still believed their chances were slim to none, but felt she owed it to Jack, her parents, and to everyone she knew and loved to give the mission her best effort.

The jubilation in the hangar halted as the sirens began to wail. A voice over the PA cut through the noise of the sirens with a bone-chilling announcement.

“ALL PERSONNEL TO BATTLE STATIONS. INCOMING CARRIER WILL BE IN ATTACK RANGE IN FIVE MINUTES. ALL PERSONNEL TO BATTLE STATIONS! BEGIN PREPARATIONS TO LAUNCH COUNTER ATTACK.”