There weren’t any.
“Good,” Commander Coleman said. “Before we begin, there’s one last thing I want to bring to your attention. With this new phase, we also enter a new evaluation period. Please see the board with the updated standings.”
The red failure line that separated the safe pilots from the rest moved up. With one click of a button, Commander Coleman had just changed the fates of more than a dozen pilots.
“I don’t understand, sir,” one of the pilots in the front row said. “I thought you said anyone with an overall score of seventy would advance.”
“You’re absolutely correct, Fireball,” Commander Coleman said. “There’s been enough progress throughout this group that Command and I felt it was time to raise the bar. As I mentioned before, we don’t need good pilots. We need the best of the best. That’s why of the eighty-seven remaining pilots, only the top fifty will be moving on. Your battles will mean something, so make them count. Coda, Moscow, you’re up first. The rest of you get with Lieutenant Commander Chavez and get your assignments. Let’s get started.”
Coda separated himself from the throng, making for the simulator. Moscow appeared at his shoulder, smirking.
“You ready to be embarrassed, O’Neil?” he asked quietly.
Coda had to chew on the inside of his cheeks to keep from snapping something back. He lost his mother because of your father. Keep that in mind. Always keep that in mind. “Good luck,” he said instead.
Moscow looked at Coda skeptically and muttered something under his breath before they diverted and climbed up the ladders into their separate simulators.
Settling into the cockpit, Coda strapped in and adjusted the straps so that he was snug against the seat. When he was satisfied he wouldn’t be thrown out of the simulator once it started rotating, he pulled on his VR helmet.
The simulation was already running, and Coda found himself looking down the barrel of the launch tube. A track nearly one hundred meters in length ran down its center and was attached to a pulley system that would hurl the starfighters out of the side of the battle cruiser like an arrow shot from a bow.
Coda went through his preflight routine, activating the various guidance, tactical, and weapons systems. When all glowed green, he settled into the gel seat and waited for instruction—except it never came. One moment, he was waiting patiently, visualizing his victory, and the next, he was hurtling down the launch tube, his Simulator attempting to replicate the force generated by accelerating to over three hundred kilometers per hour.
The small black dot at the end of the launch tube quickly grew larger until he was hurled into the black of space. The simulated environment nearly took his breath away. He was surrounded by the aftermath of what looked like a full-scale battle. Derelict ships and debris floated in high orbit around a blue-and-green planet, forming something of a ring around it. Streaks crossed the upper atmosphere where pieces of debris burned up, pulled down by the planet’s gravity.
Coda punched his fighter to a more suitable combat speed.
“Speed is life,” Commander Coleman had taught them, and the old posters and quotes spread throughout their ready room had only reiterated the motto.
He oriented his battle map so that the planet was down. In this simulation, his orientation was a simple exercise, but in the black of space without reference points like the glowing ball below, it was much more difficult to maintain orientation and thus understand where one was located in the greater context of battle.
To solve that challenge, the early brass had devised a strategy allowing pilots to orient their fleet based on an artificial plane extending from their capital ship to the enemy’s capital ship. Everything above the plane on the z-axis, called “positive-Z,” became up, and everything below, or “negative-Z,” was down.
The simple exercise allowed battle commanders to keep the battle organized and execute complex strategies that made sense to every ship and fighter, regardless of their personal orientation. Of course, Coda was a fighter pilot, and his orientation might change twelve times in a three-second time span, so the exercise was necessity rather than preference. In the heat of battle, starfighters didn’t have time to worry about minor details like up and down.
He set a course that kept him on the upper outskirts of the wreckage. His navigational thrusters spat out puffs of compressed air, allowing him to weave his fighter through the drifting debris as his targeting computer scanned the battlespace for Moscow’s signature. In most instances, the computer was quick, easily distinguishing friend from foe, but having to catalog each piece of battle wreckage was slowing it down.
Keeping his eyes alert, Coda spotted the enemy capital ship cresting the curve of the planet at the same moment his targeting system beeped. A red box appeared around the vessel on his screen, marking it as an incoming enemy. Turning sharply and increasing thrust, Coda quickly left the debris field behind, settling into an approach vector. By the time Coda was halfway there, Moscow appeared, his location distinguished only by a red box bracketing his fighter.
Moscow must have seen him too, because in a heartbeat, the two fighters were racing toward each other on an intercept course. These one-on-one scenarios hadn’t changed much since the early days of flight, and they almost always began with both fighters racing toward each other, opening fire. Then if both missed, they streaked past one another to loop back around for another pass. That was when things got interesting and when superior flying skills came into play.
As his and Moscow’s fighters entered weapons range, Coda opened fire. His seat rumbled as his cannon hurled digital projectiles. Moscow did the same.
Tracer rounds cut through the black of space like shooting stars as Moscow and Coda used
