Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) (2 page)

“
Very well, Sub-lieutenant. I can see from the look in your eye that this introduction
may
be a bit superfluous, but Lieutenant Veronica Gray, this is your XO and copilot, Sub-lieutenant Alyssa Yeboah.”

Both women broke out in
matching grins and clasped each other’s hand. “It’s good to see you again, woman!” said Veronica, “Still keeping people on their toes, I see.”

“
Skipper, I feel twice as good now that you’re here. We’ve been missing a plane captain and I know I’m good at my job but pushing this thing is
not
my job!”

Baldwin grinned.
“Scene right out of
Starfighter Command
. I’ll leave you to introduce her to the rest of your crew, Sub. I need to get back to
Double Nuts
.”

“
Yes, sir.”

Baldwin turned on his heel before walking back toward his own bird, humming a theme tune under his
breath. When he was safely out of earshot, Veronica wondered, “Does Captain Baldwin
always
talk in century-old pop culture?”

“
You know, there are some guys who are just fossilized in old movies and things. He’s one of them. Baldwin would say
Starfighter Command
’s as much a part of fighter culture as the Yeager drawl, but I think he’s full of shit.” Yeboah sighed, smoothed a hand over her hair, and nodded. “Speaking of fighter culture, you ought to know our squadron’s official name is the Flying Wolfcats, but nobody but a complete newbie calls us anything but the Pukin’ Dogs.”

Veronica nodded.
“Pukin’ Dogs it is.” She glanced at the blue and white patch on Yeboah’s arm. “It really
does
look like a sick dog, doesn’t it?”

“
That it does, Skip, that it does.”

Two women and a man scrambled out of the corvette. The man was green-skinned
, compact and slender, a member of one of the more exotically genetically-engineered strains of humankind. He had big eyes and moved fluidly. “Astronaut First Class Louis Bowman’s our fighter’s Gunner, and the token guy in our crew.”

Veronica thought about Bowman
’s background for a moment. Jardin, his homeworld, was an ironically-named world with plentiful sunlight but precious little vegetation that humans could actually eat; Jardinian soil had proven frustratingly resistant to attempts to introduce Terrestrial food crops into it. The humans of that world had actually been engineered to generate fifty percent of their daily energy needs through solar conversion, which gave their skin a green, pseudo-photosynthetic cast. The planet had been a political football between the Stellar Alliance and the Democratic Republic of the Sagittarius Rift almost since it had been founded. Its system (though not so the planet itself) was lousy with heavy metals, critical for fission piles and thus to bootstrap more-powerful but more finicky nuclear fusion reactors.

The young man saluted Veronica and waited for her to return salute, then dropped into a parade-rest stance.

“At ease, kid,” said Veronica. She gave a quiet, harmless-seeming smile while she committed his facial features to memory. His dossier photo hadn’t gotten his expressiveness right–but then, few dossier photos ever did their subject justice. She thought it might be a tradition, older than the stars.

“
Aye-aye, Ma’am,” he replied, the almost harsh sharpness of his voice an odd contrast to his flowing movements.

“
Bowman’s about ten months out of Basic.” Yeboah continued, “
Avenger
hasn’t quite rubbed the shiny off him, but he’s at least stopped squeaking
quite
so much. He’s a rated gunner with very good scores, but he hasn’t seen combat yet.”

Veronica
nodded and turned to the next member of her crew. Master Chief Petty Officer Kellie Alyse had been an enlisted instructor at the Academy while Veronica was a student. For reasons that she kept frustratingly under her own hat, she seemed to enjoy bedeviling Veronica’s steps as she moved through her career; she’d been on
Aquarius
too. Her dark complexion and amber eyes made many believe her wavy fire engine red hair
had
to be dyed; a popular attempted cadet prank at the Academy had been to try to find and steal the Master Chief’s hair dye. “I hardly need to ask
you
for an introduction.”

“
No, ma’am.” Kellie grinned. “It’s good to see you again.”

Aside from
a salty sense of humor and an uncanny knack for wringing every last drop out of any technology she touched, Kellie Alyse had an organizational acumen that should have already had her transitioning to the officer ranks as a “mustang”. Veronica figured she’d eventually be in a position to make that point, but for now bringing it up was likely to generate veteran-quality enlisted pushback.

A young
woman wearing her dark hair in a burr barely longer than a buzz cut snapped Veronica a salute next, and she returned it with equal speed. “Astronaut Second Class Natasha Leblanc, Ma’am. I’m your Sensors operator, I was the newbie until you got here, Ma’am.” Natasha’s accent showed hints of French-Canadian, and her dark-chocolate eyes seemed to pierce through Veronica. Her working uniform was Marine green rather than Flight blue, as well. She didn’t appear to be even twenty years old–and she probably wasn’t: average age for an A2C was nineteen years and three months. Enlisted flight suits didn’t carry decorations except for rank and a qualification patch, but Veronica had a feeling that Natasha’s undress blacks would be pretty slick.

Like herself,
Natasha was from Terra, one of the first planets settled by humanity (back when worlds orbiting stars other than Sol were referred to as
exoplanets
, in fact). The administrative capital of the Stellar Alliance and the headquarters of its Interstellar Navy, Terra was also by far the most populated human world, with nearly thirteen billion people to post-diaspora Old Earth’s mere eight hundred million.

“
Ok, kids. I need the grand tour of our ship here. Everything we have, I need to know. I need to know what rattles when we hit fifteen-hundred gees. I need to know what we usually carry for missiles, what our onboard food stores are going to look like when we start doing multi-day deployments, and what our powered armor loadout looks like.”

Yeboah grinned.
“I’ll take your questions last-first, since the armory’s right off the boarding tube as it would be in any sensible design. We’re carrying the very latest
Cache
light powered armor, one for each of us. For boarding ops that don’t require powered armor we’ve got standard M10 6mm carbines and M19 10mm handguns. Also, rocks, sticks, and harsh words.”

Yeboah led Veronica into the ship.
“Back aft here we have the galley and living space, pretty Spartan but you were never signed up for a luxury cruise here. Behind here’s a crawl space for the engines, that’s Kellie’s department.”

Alyse
mock-sighed. “Only because the rest of you can’t fit back there.”

“
With the delta being wide we’ve got some decent space in here, even if most of it
is
taken up by machinery. The flight deck and mid-deck are a
lot
more cramped than on regular corvettes, though. Missiles are Star Streak space-to-space nukes, kiloton range. If we have a destroyer to deal with, we’re going to be in trouble, but they should be good for anything that answers to the name frigate or corvette.”

Veronica nodded,
“And if we run into a heavy cruiser?”

“
That’s when you turn to me and say, ‘Sub-lieutenant Yeboah, bring me my brown pants.’ In sum, we’re a fighter with a few days’ worth of deployability. Not a ship that can be independently deployed for
any
real length of time.”

“
That’s an inevitable tradeoff since with the lethality of the weapons they were up against, fully independent corvettes were a solution with an inherently limited lifetime,” added Veronica, “Or so said the briefing packet I got on the Tomcat from Captain Fox.”

“
I’ve been up here for about six months while you were finishing up the
Aquarius
refit. The Old Man’s ok, right?”

“
Yeah, he finished up his physical therapy a month before we recommissioned. He has some scars, but he’s a tough guy. He asked me to say hi for him, of course.”

“
I’ll drop him an email in the next few days. It’s just, y’know, optempo is…”

“
What it is, and we both know that–and for that matter, he does too. Didn’t he teach us that himself in Command Dynamics?”

“
You’re right, Very. It’s just y’know, when Fox gives you his trust, you never, ever want to lose it.”

“
Dropping out of contact for a few days–or even a few months–wouldn’t do that, Alyssa, and we both know that.” The two walked forward through the hatch back into the flight deck, which was the closest most starships got to anything approaching fresh air. Even the hydroponics bays, sooner or later, started smelling of the same mix of fouled lubricant and metallic shavings as the rest of the ship; they just took longer. She waved her hand.

“
You’re in luck, Skip,” said Kellie, “Tonight’s burger night tonight, and the mess does pretty decent burgers for a change in the weather.”

“
I’m surprised. Well, maybe surprised isn’t the right word for it. But I’ve been in this woman’s Navy for the better part of a decade now, counting the Academy, and I’ve never known the food to be anything better than passable. Well, except on cookout days. But that needs a ship small enough to reenter the atmosphere, which a carrier definitely isn’t.”

Yeboah chuckled.
“Very, you actually won’t mind this that much. We’ve actually got some half-decent fries on this tub, and the burgers are actually good eating.”

“
That’ll be a pleasant surprise! You guys have to be kidding me, though. Decent food on a warship? Next you’ll be telling me the Terril have all become pacifistic vegans.”

Yeboah laughed,
“Well if you’ll believe that, let me tell you about what happened on our last flight with Commander Rias before he got promoted to NavAir… so no shit, there we were about half a billion klicks away from the nearest station. It was a quiet day and the last thing we were expecting was a Sagittarian light cruiser to drop out of FTL right on top of us…”

Ver
onica listened intently as Alyssa began spinning a story that both women knew bore only the most coincidental resemblance to reality.

Chapter 2

Jonah Ress stood a
t the edge of his rented hangar, wearing a displeased look. The yellow sun beat down on his battered face, and behind him his crew milled about trying not to stare too long at the immaculately white-suited woman who was offering them the job they desperately needed to get their starship back in the air.

Once upon a time, Ress had been a Lieutenant Commander in the Triangle Republic Navy Reserve, the auxiliary of what passed for a navy
in a second-rate excuse for a star nation. Now the gray coat of his TRN uniform had been meticulously stripped of its former regalia, except for the commander’s stripes on the sleeves. He said it was to mix in better with the civilian spacers around him, but really he’d sold off his buttons and insignia one at a time to make good on small shortfalls in his cash flow. And in reality, just about everyone who was working in the merchant marine had done time in
some
navy.

The woman made a fair impression of a demon, with delicately sculpted horns jutting up from her bone-white face and framing an eerily smooth fall of black hair. Her clothing was the exact same shade as her skin, giving the overall impression of an ivory statue with obsidian chips for eyes. The fashion on the outer worlds these days was for people of wealth and power to sponsor their agents to look outlandishly alien and
dangerous as a symbol of that wealth and power, and was difficult to imagine anything more so than this sort of full-body biosculpt job. She was unnaturally immaculate in the bright, hot sun and Ress wondered not for the first time during this meeting if she even perspired.

Out on the field, a new pilot was practicing takeoffs and landings with a propeller-driven airplane that looked like it had been old before humanity had ever gone to space. Ress
admired that kind of flying–the classics never died, and centuries-old DC-3s probably
still
carried more cargo on the outer worlds than an actual starship might have. Plus when all you had between you and a fatal crash were old-fashioned airfoils, you learned to fly without the bad habits that an antigrav-trained pilot frequently indulged in because they hadn’t had a stall-happy beast slapping them on the hands every time they got sloppy or careless.

The planet Maraway was one of the worst places in the galaxy to be marooned with a bum warp drive. Work had been so sparse for the last year that they
’d been forced to skimp badly on maintenance, so it had surprised absolutely no one on the rust-bucket light freighter
Arrant Knave
that their primary means of propulsion had succumbed to the inevitable and blown on touchdown. Not just a fuse, but two whole primary driver coil assemblies.