Frontier: Book One - The Space Cadets (9 page)

***

She didn
’
t know if it was because of their schedules, or
because they were afraid of cover being blown, but she and
Soo-Kyung didn
’
t see much of Patrice or
Seamus for the next few days. Maybe it was a good thing -- there
was just so much to take in. The school was hitting them hard with
science, mostly physics, and mostly practical.

Not for the first time, she
wondered why they spent so much time in labs, when they were up in
space. Mister Stevens, their lab master, had them working on
experiments in understanding inertia and the transfer of force.
Aisha swore that if she bounced one more metal ball off another
steel block to measure the transfer of energy, she
’
d scream.

It was relief when, at the end of
class, their form master entered. He was a tall man with a craggy
face who only wanted to be called Simms.

“
Today, Cadets, we have a little
surprise for you. We
’
re going to the hub,
where you
’
re going to get your first taste
of being a real cadet. So take off your lab coats and safety
glasses, and rank up behind me!”

They followed him, in rank, up
ladders through section after section as they approached the hub.
With a giddy feeling, Aisha felt herself get lighter and lighter as
the gravity reduced. Finally, they entered through a hatch into a
wide, empty area.

She was floating again, weightless
as she looked down the long space of the central cylinder that
acted as the hub for each of the wheels that made up the
station.

“
The cylinders interconnect here,
and even though each wheel
’
s rim may spin
at a different speed, there
’
s no spin at
all,” said Simms, matter-of-factly. “So it
’
s perfect for simulating space-like experiences
without risking you guys out there in hard vacuum.”

Aisha was
finding it difficult just to focus on the space. It was
huge
and it seemed
unreal. She could see green patches around the
walls.

“
Gardens,
”
said Simms, catching her stare.
“
We
don
’
t
import
all
our
food you know, and the plants provide carbon dioxide
scrubbing.
”

Soo-Kyung was always straight to
the point. “What would stop us crashing into them, or any of the
buildings?”

“
Good old-fashioned nets,” said
Simms. “You can
’
t see them from this
distance, but there
’
s netting strong
enough to stop you from crashing, even though a good crash might
teach you a lesson.”

He thumbed a control on his link,
and a large hangar door opened behind him. In it were a number of
small ‘Y’-shaped spacecraft, with the cockpit at the apex, and
thruster engines at the peak of the
‘
Y
’
.

“
Find a ship and get in,” said
Simms. He didn
’
t need to ask twice, as
excitedly the students took a ship each.

Aisha got into her ship. The
cockpit was cramped, with a joystick to her right and a handle that
moved forwards or backwards to her left.

Simms’ face popped up on the glass
of the cockpit, and Aisha noticed the reflection of a typical
heads-up display. “You
’
ve all played video
games or used flight simulators,” he said. “And the control
concepts are the same. The joystick is used to tilt your craft left
and right with those directions. Forward or backwards will dive or
climb. Handle on your left is for main thrusters.”

She moved the stick, getting a
feel for it, as well as the throttle handle. It looked like this
might be an easy ship to fly.

“
There
’
s
two major differences in flying here,” he said. “The first is
gravity. There is no
down
. So learn to orient yourself on a
fixed item. The sun might be up, down or sideways. The Earth is the
same. You need a point of reference so you can measure your
position
relative to your enemy. Find one that
you
’
re good at
and stick to it. Got it?
”

“
Sir, yes, Sir,” they
replied.

“
The second,” he said, “is
friction. When flying in the air, wind resistance slows you down.
So between that and gravity, you
’
ll slow
down and you
’
ll fall. In a vacuum,
there
’
s no inertia. When you push your
engines to send you forward at a speed, you
’
ll continue in that direction at that speed
forever
. So if you need to slow down, you have to spend more
energy to push in the opposite direction. The same applies for
turning. In air, you have elevators on your plane that change the
resistance to make you turn. In space, if you want to go left,
thrusters on the right of your plane will fire, thus pushing you
left. What does this mean?”

They thought about it a moment,
before James, a white kid from New York spoke up. “We burn energy
in different ways. Braking costs energy. Turning costs energy. So
we need to ensure that we monitor our potential energy
effectively.”

“
Bingo,” said Simms. “Nice work.
Okay. First class. Start flying these things. The red button on the
joystick fires your lasers, the green button near your thumb is
your projectile weapons. Last pilot standing gets no homework for a
week. Go!”

“
Wait, what,” said James, before
his ship was immediately hit by fire from one of his neighbors,
splattering paint all over the cockpit, and he was out of the
game.

Aisha quickly dropped her ship
from the hangar, and accelerated as fast as she could away from the
melee. She had chosen the far end of the cylinder as her
‘
up
’
position, so
she tried to shift her mind into the mode that she was climbing
above all the other fighters. One by one they dropped. She had
burned close to a quarter of her meager supply of fuel when she cut
her engines, and continued to drift.

Projectile
weapons he had
said. She thumbed the stick, and felt a machine gun empty several
rounds. They shot out in front of her at high speed. Being a
friction free environment, they kept moving, without slowing down,
and without falling.

She could see how useful these
would be, tactically. One could shoot these widely and put up a
curtain that any ship coming towards her would have to go through.
They
’
d take hits trying to get through it,
perhaps enough hits to take them out of the game.

She turned her ship around,
pointing her nose back at the fracas below. Then, nudging the
joystick while she held the firing trigger, she spun her ship so
that the bullets shot in front of her, making a cylinder of fire.
With a few more nudges of the joystick, she widened the cylinder
into a cone surrounding the hangar. Any ship escaping the chaos
would take hits. The question is, were they enough to drop them out
of the game?

This worked both ways, though.
Ships down there could shoot bullets in her direction, too. They
were all too distracted by each other, but surely one of them would
have seen her escape, or, others had the same plan as her. The
worst thing she could do was stand still. She checked her radar,
and found an alarm that she could turn on for incoming mass. That
might give her warning, but warning wasn
’
t
enough.

And then there were the lasers.
She held the button and a lance of light lanced out from the nose
of her ship. No matter how tightly she focused it, she could see
that the laser still attenuated, so that at longer distances – such
as the distance to the hangar – it was clear the laser would have
little effect. She also noted that this wasn
’
t
Star Wars,
where laser bolts flew so slowly
through the air that one could dodge them. The speed of light was
the speed of light, so as soon as she pulled her trigger, she would
hit the enemy almost instantaneously. It was a question of whether
she was close enough that the focused energy of the laser would do
enough damage to take out another ship.

Again, she checked her scanners.
There was a basic radar that bounced radio waves off other sources,
with a computer filtering out what was moving and what was
stationary. Instantly she noted that this had several
disadvantages. First, in order to detect other ships, she was
sending out radio waves, giving away her position. Second, of
course, was that radio waves traveled slower than the speed of
light. If her enemy was armed with lasers, they could conceivably
kill her before she saw them.

A second scanner detected
heat
. It did this by analyzing the light spectrum coming
into the ship. Anything in the infrared band was hot, and again the
computer was smart enough to filter out stationary objects. If she
flew to a new position, and cut out all heat emission, or as much
of it as possible, and held her ship as still as possible, she
could be invisible to their scanners. It was impossible to come to
a full stop without firing her thrusters heavily and generating
lots of heat.

She would have to be gentle on
them, trying to keep her ship
’
s external
temperature as low as possible. She hatched a plan to hit her
thrusters gently in order to get her moving on a trajectory slowly.
Any incoming bullets fired at her old position moved relatively
slowly compared to lasers, so she would likely be out of their way
before they reached her. Any ships using lasers would show up as
red hot, so she could evade them before the laser could do too much
damage. She would glide silently and pick off ships one by
one.

She figured she
’
d be close to invisible on their scanners, but she
couldn
’
t fool anybody
’
s eyes. If they looked in the right direction at the
right time they
’
d still see
her.

By now more than
three quarters of her classmates were
‘
dead
’
, their ships towed back to the
hangar in shame. She counted the ships on her scanners, and they
were all present, flying around at high speed, dog-fighting each
other. Nobody else was drifting like her, trying to be invisible,
and they were all so busy that none of them
noticed.

One ship,
corkscrewing up and away from a pursuing fighter started getting
close to her. She held her nerve, wondering if her stealth tactic
was working. Sure enough, he didn
’
t see her and turned his ship,
heading back down towards the melee below. She opened up with her
lasers, lighting him up, and displaying as a
‘
kill
’
instantly.

She had given away her position,
so, quickly, she turned and thrusted away. Some of the surviving
fighters, including Soo-Kyung
’
s, began to
see what was happening, and flew away from where Aisha
’
s laser had come from.

As they were so intent on each
other, Aisha realized that she could get away quite safely, and
they didn
’
t have the eyeballs to seek her
out. That might change when it became one-on-one.

Soo-Kyung must have been looking,
for she flew her ship about half the distance from the hangar to
where Aisha had shot from. She stopped, gently rotating her ship.
Aisha could almost feel her friend
’
s deep
brown eyes searching for her.

Another fighter saw Soo-Kyung, and
she made for an easy target. It accelerated towards her, opening up
with its bullets. But Soo-Kyung was too fast, and she pushed her
attitude jets, spinning her ship to the side, and watching the
other one overshoot. She opened up with her guns, and
‘
killed
’
him
instantly.

But it was clear that she was
hunting Aisha now. Aisha realized that her best chance was to stick
with the plan. Silently drifting, watching with her eyes as well as
her heat sensors she saw Soo-Kyung slowly pick off the other
fighters. She
’
d lure them in and kill
them, or she
’
d wait until two of them were
focused on each other, and she
’
d kill them
both.

Like a lioness, Aisha
’
s roommate slowly made her way to the top of the
pecking order. Soo-Kyung was as smart as she was lethal. And she
knew that Aisha had retreated to a position of safety. It was
likely that she knew as much about the ship by now that Aisha did,
but how could she go into stealth the way Aisha had?

There were only three other
fighters left, now. Aisha watched as Soo-Kyung lured one of them to
chase her, right into the path of the third. It did her dirty work
for her, and now it was just Soo-Kyung, Aisha and that third. It
was piloted by a Brazilian kid that everybody called
Ronaldo.

She watched as Ronaldo turned and
chased Soo-Kyung
’
s ship. After the earlier
chase, when Soo-Kyung had lured the fighter towards Ronaldo, she
had shot off as fast as she could, trying to put as much distance
between her and Ronaldo as she could. On the heat sensor, her ship
was a bright light.