Squawks looked at him skeptically, then his face split into a broad smile. “Noodle. Cause you’ve got noodle arms?” He laughed. “That’s good. Accurate too. I’ve seen skeletons with more muscle than you.”
Noodle’s face burned crimson, something he tried to hide with a fake laugh. If Squawks noticed or cared that he’d made his squad mate uncomfortable he didn’t show it.
“What about you?” Squawks said, turning his attention to Coda. “What’s Coda even mean?”
Coda bit back a sarcastic comment about looking it up in the dictionary. Like Noodle, he wasn’t comfortable talking about his call sign. His hadn’t been given or earned. He’d come up with it himself and convinced the other pilots to call him by it—not an easy feat since that wasn’t how things were supposed to work.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Coda said.
“C’mon, man. We’re supposed to be getting to know each other.”
“Another time.”
“You’re no fun.”
Deceleration began thirty minutes before the transport ship docked with the jumpgate. The ship flipped on its axis so that the thrust of the engines pointed away from the direction they were traveling, and as if to remind them why their seats were made from a soft gel material, the pilots were shaken, battered, and bruised for the duration.
Jumpgates were a modern marvel—the first faster-than-light travel conceived by the human race. The how and the why were closely guarded secrets, and while its science well above Coda’s pay grade, he did understand it on a crude, fundamental level.
The jumpgate itself was like a giant gun that the transport ship would be loaded into, though instead of being shot across space, the ship was shot through it, arriving almost instantaneously at its destination. The jumpgate had limits on how far it could send them, of course, just as the ships equipped with EmDrives had similar, albeit much larger, limitations. However, Alpha Centauri, only 4.367 light-years away, was well within jumpgate capabilities.
As the transport vessel slid down the chamber of the jumpgate, Coda found himself growing increasingly uneasy. He had never given much thought to how he would die—he’d always assumed it would be somewhere on the front as his battle cruiser went down in a hail of gunfire—but he thought about it now. He could almost hear the news reporter on the vids.
“Lieutenant Callan ‘Coda’ O’Neil and fourteen other Terran Academy graduates, along with the heroic Nighthawk pilot, Commander Chadwick Coleman, are confirmed dead after a jumpgate malfunction.”
The reporter would keep her tone somber, her lips slightly downturned in mock sadness before she sent the program to a commercial break. It would be another tragic chapter in the O’Neil family story and one that would bring his father’s mistakes back to the forefront of public consciousness.
Coda did his best to hide his growing unease. Jump travel was, after all, a common form of travel these days, especially among the Sol Fleet. The front was uncomprehendingly far away and only accessible via the jumpgates, so fearing it was useless. But fear, like all emotion, was an irrational beast, and no matter how much Coda attempted to talk himself through it, his back still grew wet with sweat, his hands clammy and trembling, his breath shallow.
The loading procedure took several minutes, but once complete, the power-up process began. Blue bands of energy like a tempest of pure electricity stretched throughout the interior of the jumpgate, shining bright enough to wash out the backdrop of distant stars.
The ship began to vibrate. It wasn’t painful or nearly as violent as the acceleration and deceleration burns. Instead, Coda felt as if he and everything around him were brimming with energy, trembling with adrenaline-infused anticipation. Then, without any word from the ship’s pilot, the length of the ship appeared to stretch, the seat in front of Coda seemingly pulling away from him. When he reached out to touch it, his fingers brushed against the back of the gel cushion, and his arm looked as if it had stretched too.
The sensation was beyond disorienting, and he fought with everything he had not to vomit. Then, just as before and without warning, the world snapped back into perspective, and everything around him returned to normal. Even without being able to confirm it, Coda knew they had arrived in the Alpha Centauri System.
6
Hangar Deck, SAS Jamestown
Alpha Centauri System, Proxima B, High Orbit
Less than a full day after having his future ripped away from him, Coda found himself and the rest of the select group of pilots from the Terran Fleet Academy on the hangar deck of the SAS Jamestown. Commander Coleman stood in front of a squadron of Hornets.
Coda fell into parade rest with the rest of the squadron, watching his commander but wishing more than anything that he could run his hands along the dark exterior of the drones, feel the contours of its smooth body, trace its fuselage with his fingers. Seeing the ships felt like seeing an old girlfriend. Buried emotions swelled to the surface.
“Welcome aboard the SAS Jamestown,” Commander Coleman said. “This is Hangar Bay 7B. We’ll be spending much of our time here, but right now, follow me.” He spun on his heels and strode across the hangar through a set of double doors that hissed open as he approached.
They entered into a light-gray corridor lit with series of artificial lights set into the wall near the floor and ceiling. Having spent a year and a half in the wheel of the academy’s space station, it was odd seeing the corridor stretch out straight in front of him. The SAS Jamestown was one of the oldest ships in the fleet equipped with artificial gravity, and the lack of curve somehow made everything appear both bigger and farther away.
The Jamestown was a warship through and through, the evidence plain for all to see. The corners of the walls were rounded and coated with a compound that was soft
