Hegemony (5 page)

All six of the First Wave pilots who had been in the simulation were at attention in the captain's briefing room. Interceptor Commander Shank had come in with Zandy, but had taken a seat, leaving her to stand before the captain. Captain Kai Ari-Kani and Executive Officer Lyn Psan were seated at the briefing table as well. It looked like this was going to be quite an inquisition.

Zandy stood at attention, one foot hooked under a stanchion to keep her from floating in freefall, and spared a little of her thoughts to be amused by the ritual; an uploaded mind in a biosim android body "standing" at attention in zero gravity in front of another android. On the other hand, such rituals were good for morale and discipline. The Fleet had tried to operate without them once, to no great success. The other pilots were at attention as well, some a bit unsteady in their biosim avatars. Getting "killed" in a high fidelity VR sim was hard on the "deceased." It was supposed to be, Zandy thought.

As a Junior Pilot Officer, she was the lowest rank here, a fact clearly shown by the sparse gold markings on the left shoulder of her uniform. The senior officers' uniforms bore streams and constellations of gold rank and status glyphs.

Captain Kai Ari-Kani wore a biosim avatar, but it was a custom piece, a perfect model of the biological body he would have had at his current age, if he had never been uploaded. He was a handsome man in an exotic manner, with pale skin, dark eyes, and a wide nose and mouth in a high-cheekboned face framed with a cap of wiry, curly dark hair. More than good looks, he had a presence that one sometimes saw from senior officers and some of the highest social-rank
aristokratai
. His eyes tracked along the faces of his First Wave pilots.

"I can't say that I'm happy with these results,
telai
," said the captain, formally polite, "in spite of the fact that we 'won' that battle." His voice was very smooth, though not at all soft.

"The simulation put us against a Coalition
'Victory'
class assault-ship in a simple intercept scenario. Had it been real, we would have won. But interceptor pilot losses would have been high. Excessive."

"100% for First Wave," said Executive Officer Psan. Lyn Psan was a striking woman, broad shouldered, tall, with long space-black hair, held down in free-fall with an elegant pattern of silver mesh, and pure blue eyes that made the cliché about "eyes like lasers" seem plausible. Even so, Zandy thought that her beauty were almost as much a matter of her carriage and posture as her actual appearance. Zandy had no idea if her birth body had been as attractive as her current avatar. Even for a biosim avatar, Psan was notably beautiful; a matter of art that defied mass production.

The captain was facing Interceptor Commander Shank just then, who was sitting conspicuously straight backed and still, an unnatural posture in free-fall. Shank was the coordinating officer of all eight interceptor waves aboard. He was also, Zandy thought, very likely to have been the "enemy ace" who had so devastated their wave.

The captain kept his gaze moving over the pilots and the Interceptor Commander for a moment, and then nodded.

"Please, pilots, take seats. Take a moment if you need to, I know that getting 'killed' in a high fidelity simulation can be disorienting." The captain's gaze met Zandy's for a moment and he gave her a small sympathetic smile before continuing. "And now, tell me why you think things happened the way they did," said the captain.

An hour later, Zandy made it back to her quarters aboard the Hegemonic Assault-ship
Conquering Sun
feeling drained and edgy. Her biosim body was not at all fatigued. It was a close analog of a biological human body and it
could
get tired, but her avatar had done nothing more strenuous than moving a few hundred meters through the ship in zero gravity. Her mind, though...

"Argh," Zandy said as she entered the small main room of her quarters.

"'Argh' is right," replied Jessa, pausing to give Zandy a measuring glance. "You look half... no, you look about three-quarters done in," she said judiciously.

Zandy looked down at her quarters-mate. Jessa Amnir was one of the three assault-ship primary pilots aboard; her duty was to control the entire massive assault-ship. In Zandy's estimation, calling herself and Jessa both a "pilot" implied a similarity that was simply not there. Fully loaded and at full power, with the engines on the verge of melting, the
Conquering Sun
could just manage three gees of acceleration, while Zandy's interceptor rarely spent a moment at under fifty gees.

Jessa had the style and manner of a pilot down pat, though. Her avatar was a short female with flared hips and ample, though not excessive, breasts. Her face was a portrait of a black haired pixie, with black eyes just a touch larger and more almond shaped than plausible, an affectation custom-built into the biosim avatar. Zandy had no idea what Jessa's birth body had looked like but figured it was very likely nothing like her current avatar.

"Hey, Pixie," said Zandy, managing a weary smile at Jessa. The two pilots shared the main room of their quarters, though each had a separate private space attached. All together, the three rooms made up the volume of a small planet-side room, or a large station-side room. Though every crewmember aboard the Conquering Sun had their own quarters, volume was not endless even in the giant assault-ship and the quarters were small. But just as the daemons needed to spend time in human-like avatars, they also needed room to act human while wearing those avatars. Smaller ships could cut corners in terms of crew space, but that also reduced their effective endurance. A cramped swift-ship, intended for scouting and fast raids, would start seeing crew efficiency fall sharply after a deployment of less than a thousand hours. The
Conquering Sun
was intended to be almost perpetually deployable. A long patrol might cross a dozen systems over a whole tenkay, ten thousand hours without a full stand-down. A tour of duty could last for patrol after patrol, with only a few hundred hours of off-ship rest and recuperation in between. The volume allotted to her crew was the comfortable minimum calculated to keep the crew able to operate at full readiness, indefinitely. Volume for quarters was compact, but never too cramped.

The ship's crew quarters could have been a wasps' nest of individual rooms, but there, too, experience had shown that putting the crew together, letting different duty specialties mix, aided the efficiency of the crew. Which was why Zandy shared this space with Jessa.

"So you got killed, hey?" said Jessa. "Rough."

"Yeah. You don't get anything like that flying the
'Sun
."

"Nope. 'Course we run sims every shift. It gets tense. After all, it's not really nearly as hard to run a VR for us; all they have to simulate in VR is the optical data and the gees."

"You don't get any gees, Pixie."

"Well it's not like you have to feel your eighty gees in a biological body, Zandy," Jessa said, sitting down next to the taller woman.

Zandy sighed. "Nope. Eighty gees would turn a meat-brain to liquid with chunks. But I feel the acceleration. It's a strain to accelerate that hard; you can feel the interceptor hull frames compressing, and... it sort of hurts, I guess. Not actual damage-warning pain, but..."

"I get it. Psychosomatic. I think everyone gets it from one stimulus or another. Every daemon."

Jessa looked critically at Zandy.

"Damn, Zandy, you're fried. You're tensing up your avatar. Gonna strain the articulation if you keep this up." Jessa's hands settled on Zandy's shoulders.

"You need to relax," the dark haired woman said as her hands moved down over Zandy's back. "Feel good?"

"Yeah. It feels good," said Zandy. A look of mild annoyance crossed her face as Jessa's hands moved around her and unfastened the front of her uniform. The look relaxed into resigned pleasure as the other woman's hands cupped Zandy's breasts.

"All right, Pixie. You always want to fuck."

"And you like it," said Jessa, bringing her mouth close to the blond woman's ear. Zandy turned and kissed her, gray eyes looking for a moment into her lover's black eyes.

"I like it," said Zandy, half amused at herself as Jessa pulled off the uniform's top.

Zandy had not been attracted to women, when she had been biologically human. There had been a single fumbling experiment at the Academy, but never a repeat. Her affair with Jessa had started a little while after she had been assigned to the
Conquering Sun
, still new and a bit clumsy in her biosim avatar. Jessa had started with jokes, and playful shoves or hugs, or experiments to see if she could get to a place that tickled; supposedly impossible for a daemon, but actually fairly easy; psychosomatics at work again. The touches had become more and more intimate over several hundred hours. Zandy had been surprised to find herself making love with the other woman, but then, after the soul-shocking change from biological human mind to neural-net daemon, changing sexual orientation seemed like a minor step.

It was only a half-way change anyway, thought Zandy as Jessa pulled off Zandy's uniform pants and began to work her mouth down Zandy's body. Zandy had entertained herself with a male lover the last time she was on leave from the ship. But aboard the ship their relationship seemed to just... fit somehow. Zandy gasped as the other woman's mouth found its goal and then pulled back and reached to start undoing the seals on Jessa's uniform.

The
Conquering Sun
and her escorts were in high orbit of Yuro IV, and the night-side of the planet turning below the Hegemonic Fleet ships was velvet blackness speckled with the gleaming gold of artificial lights. A cluster of cities spread along the coast of one of the continents, fading out into a dusting of settlements and then into uninhabited darkness. Yuro IV was one of the last worlds to be colonized directly from Old Earth, but that still made it one of the "old" worlds, and even though its growth had been slow, the major cities counted their populations in the millions. Of course there was still a frontier down there, and room for vast population growth before the local ecology even began to feel any strain, but there were urban zones as well.

Cities at night always looked lovely from orbit: a glowing pattern of golden lights across black background. Like ornate jewelry, mused Demi-Captain Freya Tralk. The observation window in her tiny quarters gave a wonderful view of the planet below. It would have been nice to have the time to take leave down there, perhaps. Or perhaps not. She had seen dozens of worlds, in the tenkays since she had joined the Fleet. Some were pleasant in truth, air spiced with the scents of alien plants, breezes cool or warm against an avatar's skin. Others were better seen from orbit, where distance masked the squalid or grimly industrial realities and showed only golden lights.

Not that it mattered. Her presence aboard her ship was non-negotiable, just now. The Hegemonic Fleet swift-ship
Ice Knife
orbited alongside her giant companion, the
Conquering Sun
. The ships were in a geostationary orbit, more than thirty thousand kilometers above the planet. Barring emergencies, singularity powered ships were not allowed into low orbits of inhabited worlds. From thirty thousand kilometers, the exhaust plume of a singularity reactor powered plasma drive would cause amazing fireworks and aurorae in the planet's upper atmosphere, but no serious damage. From a low enough orbit, it would be a blow-torch of atmosphere-cooking heat and radiation.

Ice Knife
was oriented with her dorsal aspect facing the planet, but even so, Freya could just make out the reflection of the system's star shining on the orbital elevator, like a long, straight, silver string rising up from the equator of the planet. Yuro IV had been independent before annexation by the Hegemony, some nine hundred thousand hours (well over a hundred local years) ago, but the orbital elevator had been a Hegemony project. Singularity powered ships were not allowed within close range of the elevator's orbital hub either.

Most ships that called on the planet parked in a geostationary "anchorage" orbit far from the orbital hub, and took orbital transfer shuttles to the orbital hub. Some of the bigger cargo shuttles were larger than small starships, but their low-powered drives made them safe, or at least safe enough, to come near the fragile orbital hub of the planet's space elevator.

Ships that visited the Yuro system and did not have business with the habitable fourth planet rarely bothered to enter its orbit. The vast Jyu-Lau Deep Space Anchorage Station, orbiting in the stable leading LaGrange point of Jyu-Lau, the largest moon of the gas giant Yuro V, saw to their needs. Her own ship was in planetary orbit of Yuro IV to allow some of the squadron's crew to take some leave hours planetside.

From her viewport, Freya could see the occasional flare of a shuttle's electro-thermal drive as it shifted orbit, but
Ice Knife's
orbital position was wrong to give her a clear view of the elevator and its capsule-trains, running goods and people to and from the planetary surface.

She could not see the
Conquering Sun
at all from this view port; from her frame of reference, the assault-ship was "below"
Ice Knife
, facing the little ship's ventral aspect. It would have been hard to find two more different looking ships in the Fleet. The
Conquering Sun
was a vast spindle of curves and angles, studded with laser arrays and sensor masts and radiator fins, shaped only for deep space, and "streamlined" only by the requirements of anti-radar stealth. The assault-ship stretched for almost a kilometer and a quarter; twelve hundred and six meters from forward sensors and retracted bow-shields to the aft radiators and exhaust guides of the main drive.
Ice Knife
, in comparison, was a narrow angular wedge, looking a bit like a high-tech arrowhead. Intended for rapid scouting and pursuit, she was actually streamlined for atmospheric reentry, able to retract sensor masts and radiator panels at need. At a hundred and sixty meters long and seven kilotons, the swift-ship was less than a seventh the length and not quite one quarter of one percent of the mass of the assault-ship.