Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) (4 page)

“
We’ll see how you do in exercises tomorrow,” Baldwin got up from his chair, “Good to meet you, Lieutenant Gray. Hope you’re in for the long haul here.”

Veronica
turned back to her crew as the wing commander made his way back to his own table.

“
Sca-ry.”

Later in the evening, tired enough to make a good impression of drunkenness, Veronica
finally
returned to the berthing quarters set aside for the crew of
Dog Two-oh-Seven
. A steward had placed her space bag on the single low cot in the back-center of the room, reserved for the corvette’s commanding officer. She didn’t have much to unpack–Naval officers learned to pack lightly between assignments and not to pick up too much in between.

But there were a few personal knickknacks that few officers avoided, like a gold-plated sidearm, a memento of her earning sharpshooting qualification, and a handful of electronic congratulatory messages from friends and family.

She picked a message at random and clicked it on.

“
Hello, Scary! If you’re getting this message you must have gotten to your next assignment.” The woman in the picture was short, intense, dark-eyed and –haired, with the distinctive features of the House of Huýnh, the royal house of the planet Cyrene and the Star Queendom of Artemis. She was Princess Sandra, third daughter of Queen Elaine VI. “Congratulations on getting your first command, even if it
is
a dinky little corvette. My first ship is still building. They’re going to give me a tac officer slot on the next ship to come out of the docks–I think she’s
Boudicca
, but I could be wrong. You’d think being a member of the royal family would
help
with spending months waiting shore side while they put together your next assignment, but they wanted to put me on the newest ship in the fleet. I suppose I’m lucky they’re even willing to put me on something that isn’t one of the Home Fleet fortresses.” Veronica paused the recording to laugh at Sandra’s obvious frustration, “So anyway, I’ve got some months to kill and you’ll probably be getting a lot more of these as time goes by. As long as Admiral Song doesn’t decide she can’t find
any
ship glorious enough to merit the honor of being sullied by the boots of a member of the royal family. I swear I ought to have Tallest give her a talk. Assuming she’s not totally busy with Crown Princessing.”

Veronica paused again to recover her composure from the princess
’s utterly informal tone and obvious frustration.

“
Anyway, I’ll be back in space in a few months, it’s just annoying that I’ve got to sit tight and wait right
now
. Besides, I owe you for that last war game.”

Veronica smiled as Sandra
’s message ended, pulling a soft purple blanket out of her space bag. It was decidedly non-regulation but she’d carried it with her to every assignment anyway, because it was a comforting reminder of friends back home. She just had to find places to stow it during inspection time. Wrapping herself up in it, she considered the ceiling above her bunk.

Deep inside the structure of the starship, there was little or nothing to tell her that she might have been in space at all. There were no windows
–not in the pilot berths, certainly. The senior officers of a carrier probably had them; she’d certainly had a spectacular view of space as senior officer during
Aquarius
’ refit.

Captain Fox
’s steadiness and Princess Sandra’s teasing buoyed her heart as she lay on her bunk. Lights out would be in a few minutes. Sleepiness pressed down on her, and so she barely noticed when the rest of her crew filed in.

Chapter 4

The following morning, at an hour where only the magic of many, many cups of coffee allowed anybody on
Avenger
’s flight line to be functional, it was time for the newly full-strength air wing to test itself.

Skin-suited pilots and aircrews sprinted for their planes in the eerie, silent precision of vacuum ops.
The last wisps of frozen atmosphere that the flight deck ventilation system couldn’t suck away curled around pilots’ legs, giving the impression of mist clinging to the deck. Under combat launch protocols, the carrier’s control systems initiated auto-start sequences on all small craft, sending ship power flowing in for a last-minute drink as their fission piles came up to full power.

The crew of
Dog Two-oh-Seven
split up as they reached their corvette–Alyse and Leblanc dove through the small ingress door in the side of the bow while Veronica, Yeboah, and Bowman took the ladder up to the cockpit above. Their seats rested under an expansive canopy augmented by virtual visual projection--a gloriously expensive panorama from which to find and destroy enemy starships. Today the enemy starships wouldn’t be real; with a lack of convenient alien or otherwise hostile fighter assets to test his squadrons against, Commander Baldwin had decided that pitting them against each other was the next best thing.

Veronica glanced over the sill of the canopy as she ran her checklist, and watched with a certain envy as Baldwin
’s already-mounted crew raced through their preflight sequences with practiced efficiency. She knew that her own people would get to that point, but it was hard not to feel a little inadequate comparing their eager not-quite-fumbling to the casual smoothness of their long-connected counterparts on
Double Nuts
. That crew had been flying together for over a year now, and it showed.

Veronica felt a muffled clank as a rotary launcher filled with missiles was lifted into position from deck storage. A ground chief held up a hand with four pins on each finger
–the rotary launcher was ready, its missiles live and hot.

A muffled curse came from below just as the cabin air pressure gauge came up to 609
torr
, standard flight pressure. “Captain, we need a yellow light; Leblanc’s stuck in her straps.”

Veronica blew a sigh through her teeth and slapped her hand down on the button marked
Five Min Hold
. Her ship’s place in the launch line auto-reshuffled eight places back.

“
Baldwin won’t be happy about this,” she groused.

“
No he won’t. Ivey had them drilled to a T, I wonder why Leblanc’s suddenly slipping things up now.” Yeboah looked as irritated by the delay as Veronica, as a pair of Wasp interceptors rolled past them to take their place in the queue.

“
New captain jitters, Alyssa?”

“
Probably. I hope she gets over it soon.”

“
If she doesn’t, there’ll be hell to pay. Being taught to run a tight ship has its advantages.”

Alyssa rolled her eyes.
“Very, I bet you’ve
never
been that patient with small screw-ups.”

Veronica shook her head.
“Not when I can help matters, no. I’ll try to be gentle and forgiving on Leblanc
this
time, since her new plane captain just came aboard and this is only her third major flight war game since she came to
Avenger
. Next time, her ass is grass.”

That actually had Veronica worried. Sixty percent of her flight crew
–herself included–were relatively new to the world of fighter piloting. Anything could happen, and to a certain extent probably would, but she had to keep on top of it and stifle any problems, just the same.

“
I’ve got her untangled and buckled, Captain,” came Kellie’s voice, “Call us clear; I’ll be strapped in by the time you finish.”

“
Roger that. Flight control, this is
Dog Two-oh-Seven
, ready for liftoff.”

“
Roger.
Dog Two-oh-Seven
, this is
Avenger
launch control, you are third in queue.”

Two craft ahead, a focused distortion in space built behind
Striper One-One
, a long, slender
Wasp
-class interceptor. The ship’s deck on the catapult level was designed to absorb and safely redirect the spacewarp of a fighter’s drive–but the people on a flight deck
weren’t
, so they were safely behind shielded doors. The catapult fired, and the fighter screamed down the deck, approaching and then breaking a kilometer per second before it hit space.

Veronica looked over at Alyssa and grinned. In just a couple more minutes, they
’d be on that cat as well, getting ready to fly out into space. The mood on the flight deck was one part frantic, two parts electrical as commander and pilot ran through the last points on their checklists.

“
Flying Wolfcats Two Zero Seven, this is control,” Veronica startled herself into remembering that “Flying Wolfcats” was the official name of her squadron, “advance along the yellow line to catapult one and hold.”

Releasing
the wheel brakes and inching the throttles past idle thrust, Veronica rolled her craft forward along the yellow line as commanded. Ahead of her on catapult two,
Dog Two-Oh-Eight
, her wingman, shot into space.

There was a loud
clunk
as the catapult nose tow dropped into place on the cat shuttle.

“
Flying Wolfcats Two-Zero-Seven, catapult in three. Two. One.” Veronica pushed her throttle forward by halves, bringing the tremendous power of the fighter to its utmost a second before control counted “Launch.”

The holdback tractor disengaged just as the catapult
induction motor fired. Even with inertial damping set to maximum, the ride was brutal–then her fighter was out in the endless black, surrounded by tiny points of light that were her fellow pilots.

“
Pukin’ Dogs, this is squadron lead. We and the Pit Vipers are to accelerate outsystem for an hour. We’re going to practice a carrier assault. For the purposes of this assault,
Avenger
is playing the part of a joint Hesilan-Imperial strike squadron.” Everybody shuddered. A war with even one of the major foreign powers was likely to severely task the Interstellar Navy; both at once would be nearly impossible to fend off without resorting to the assistance of the Alliance’s foreign allies–and many of those had convoluted political strings attached. “Her fighter squadrons are Red Force; they’re defending the strike package as it advances on an Allied planet. We are Blue Force, we’re a strike sent out to disrupt the enemy formation and hopefully mission-kill its carrier. We’re outnumbered and outgunned, so we’ll have to think smart. On our way to the initiation point, any plane captain who has a bright idea had best comm me. Baldwin out.”

Baldwin didn
’t fade from Veronica’s screen.

“
Ok, new kid. You’ve got a reputation of being some pretty hot shit, I want to see what you’ve got for us.”

Veronica
’s throat went dry and closed suddenly, and she coughed.

“
You don’t have to if you don’t
want
, Lieutenant, but you’ll probably be buying drinks when we get back to the carrier if you don’t. Commander Josephson’s got an uninterrupted string of successes in protecting the ship from attack, in exercise at least.” Veronica figured Baldwin was probably exaggerating–but her aggressive side was piqued, and she wanted to take Baldwin up on the challenge.

“
Captain, you know the problem with a dispersed attack group is the potential to be defeated in detail.”

“
I’m well aware of that, Lieutenant, wasn’t born yesterday.”

Veronica resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Childish displays of sarcasm weren
’t going to endear her to her commander just now. “Sorry, Sir, I’m just setting up the basics of the scenario. A basic attack formation’s just a group of lines of attack in multiple waves, to engage and attrite enemy air defenses before the real core of the strike shows up. Well we don’t have the raw numbers in our strike package to push a successful strike home using basic tactics–but if we use some of our torpedoes ahead of time to create convincing enough decoys, we can make the enemy believe we’ve got a much thicker strike package than we do.”

“
We’re in a pretty good position, there are about forty decoys in our strike package, so it’s just a question of when to deploy them and with whom.” He grinned. “You know we cheat too…”

Veronica shook her head
, not entirely certain where the sudden non sequitur was going. “Change the parameters of the sim?”

“
You did that once before, Lieutenant.”

“
I exposed a serious hole in the exercise staff’s operational security by doing it. Got commended for it.” She grinned. “I’ve got an idea I think will work. Get me six comms officers and thirty minutes, I’m going to simulate some attack chatter that will improve the appearance of these drones.”

“
Lieutenant, if this plan of yours works, I’ll buy you drinks.” Baldwin’s voice softened and his face lit.