“Gonna call youPorky.”
He squinted at her. “Asin possessing the qualities of pork?”
“No, as in thecartoon character. Somebody so cute you just know he’s hiding somedevious plot. Seems better than just ‘why?’.”
“Sure.” He gave herharness a tug and then clambered past her cockpit to the open hatchat the rear.
She heard the hatchflow shut at the same time her cockpit canopy began assembling itselfover her.
“I’m tied off,”Kinn told her over the intercom.
“Gotcha, Porky.”She stabbed at an orange button and the control surfaces startedgrowing into her suit. She wriggled, trying not to laugh as the newplates appeared inside her armor.
The command holoappeared and she initiated her engines. The deep, gut tingling rumblewas a serious rush. She could feel the power coursing through thefighter as the pitch drives spooled up to full charge.
The other fightersaround her were lifting off the ground as their drives reached fullFE and could then focus their effects with enough accuracy to avoiddragging along a chunk of pavement with them.
She felt thepower in her small craft, felt it in her own bones. She was one withher fighter. No wonder Luna loves this kind of stuff,she thought. She could feelthat her power levels had stabilized,ready forlift-off; she flexed her legs.
She lifted off andhovered among the rest of the flock, turning to see her mother comingup next to her. It was so easy to forget she was strapped into acockpit.
Not that she was tryingall that hard to remember.
“Ghost Squadron,Squadron Leader,” Luna’s voice crackled in Gabriella’s ear.“Trail formation till we’re outside. Form up on me.”
Gabriellaactivated the Acknowledgedicon and waited for her formation’sturn. She would be the middle call-sign in a three fighterformation. She looked left, watching HotDog’sfighter until it lifted off.
She flexed her legsharder, pushing her hands forward and she raced up behind her flightleader.
“Rascal, thisis HotDog.Watch your spacing,” he warned over the flight-net. “Any closerand you’ll get a whiff of my FEO’s aftershave, over.”
“Hotdog, this isRascal. Roger, nobody needs that, over.” Hotdog’s flight-engineersmelled like somebody crashed a tanker of sugar into a vinegarfactory.
She eased back and sether follow algorithm to the new distance. The long string of fightershammered their way through the air of the gigantic farming districtby brute force.
Their enginesmade littlenoise at full power butthe sound of air being shouldered aside was loud enough to have mutedany conventional engines back on Earth. The sound transmitted throughthe vehicle, the vibration reaching in through her suit.
They’d alreadycovered more than a hundred kilometers on their angled climb and theystill couldn’t see the ceiling. Gabriella ran a quick check on hersystems, even though Porky was pretty much doing that constantly.
Her aunt keptbilling these sessions as ‘outings’ but she was pretty seriousabout ensuring her family was trained for battle. The leadingfamilies of the empire and the republic were a varied bunch but theones that got taken seriously were the ones that hadthe best military forces.
The best militaryforces tended to be led by nobles that shared their risks. It waspartly a function of morale. Most units fought better when they knewthe lord sending them into battle was fighting alongside them.
It was alsobecause nobles that fought beside their forces tended to be the sortwho understood what they were doing. Lunawanted the next two people in line forthe fief trained, so here Gabriella was, starting to question if itwas even worth her time to go home again.
How could she goback to Cali and enroll in some university as if it even mattered?Could she sit in some freshman Physicscourse when she already understood how a path drive could move theUniverse past a ship?
Was there even anysense in it?
They came up onthe tunnel leading out the spinward side of the farming district shelived in. The squadron streamed into the hole and she wondered if shewas the only one remindingherself of thefifteen-kilometer diameter as she roared toward the seemingly tinyopening.
The walls racedpast all around her and then they rolled to dive down a verticaltunnel at a junction that had to be more than thirty kilometers indiameter. The brightly lit rimof light in the far distancemarked the star-lit inner end of thetunnel.
The white dwarf wouldhave been visible had the transit paths been built straight along thestation’s radius but then travelers would have a star in theirfaces while trying to avoid collisions with tunnel walls.
They emerged intothe central space of the station, the shuddering of atmosphericturbulence fading quickly to relative silence as they left the airbehind. She looked over at the formation indicator just as the chimesounded, followed by the diagram changing from trail to vee.
She adjusted her followalgo, sliding to starboard while Nutcracker slipped over to port.They formed a vee behind Hotdog while he moved into the flight’sassigned position in the overall squadron formation.
They headed fortheir current search area.The premise had been that the agricultural areas were the most likelycenters of any remaining populations. There was a more or lessregular network of entry tunnels and the second anti-spinward branchin each tended to lead to an agro zone.
Thesquadron broke into five pairs of two flights each. Hotdog had thelead for his two flights and he led the way down toward one of theirassigned tunnels.
They burst into an agrozone and spread out to fly low over the terrain. Gabriella noticedmore than the usual jungle areas here, though the trees looked verydifferent. They were shorter and tended to be mostly canopy with baretrunks beneath their coppery orange leaves.
Maybe the fields themselves break down and turnto jungle? Gabriella wondered.She couldn’t figure out if that proof of the ancient’sfallibility was comforting or frightening.
“Hotdog – Saltlick.I’m seeing banners down here. Fabric banners. Don’t thinksomething like that would last hundreds of thousands of years, not ifthey’re exposed to weather.”
Gabriella glanced atthe terrain mapping to see where Saltlick was seeing banners. Thatwas why she almost ploughed into a pyramid in a large clearing.
“Shit!” she gasped,pulling up short in less distance than you’d need for a tenniscourt. Her fighter’s forward sponsons swung up, splaying out tokeep
