chamber, they should never run into each other.”
I thought about that for a second, then nodded in my helmet. “Excellent idea, Commander. That’s why I brought you along. You’ve made your first design improvement.”
He muttered something about redesigning a turd, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to get mad at him. I had a big favor to ask.
The engine room made the forward compartment look roomy by comparison. Instead of seating for four, sensory equipment and the ship’s only bathroom, the rear space was squashed between the generator, the top of the turret and the single, massive engine. It was hot back here and stuffy. The air was thick with ozone.
“Will there be a crewman back here?” he asked.
I gestured toward two jump seats. They were folded up against the bulkhead between the two tubes that led in and out of the compartment. Nanite arms held them against the steel wall tightly. When touched, the arms lowered the seats and grabbed the occupant.
“See?” I said, flopping down in one. I grunted as the arms clamped onto me. “These seats are only for emergency flight safety, of course.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s great.”
He walked around the big engine, almost bumping his armored butt into my face as he scooted between me and the metal housing.
“Looks like you haven’t spared anything in the power department.”
“You’ve grasped the essential beauty of this design,” I said. “These ships provide the most bang for the buck of any design I could come up with. Raw power in a compact form.”
Welter nodded, but kept sneering and squinting as he ran his hands over the systems. He jerked his hand away from a hot spot and cursed.
“What I want to know is who’s going to pilot them?” he asked. “All your best pilots are commanding destroyers, including me.”
I cleared my throat. He shot me an alarmed glance. Seeing my expression, his face fell.
“Uh-oh, come on, sir!” he said. “You can’t-”
“Yes,” I said firmly. “I very much can. I have to. Every destroyer commander will man one of these new ships. Every destroyer pilot will man another, if we build enough before they hit us.”
“What? Then who will run the destroyers?”
“The gunners,” I said firmly. “And the marine sergeants after that. The Centaurs can’t do it, so we have to. Everyone is going on a crash pilot-training course.”
Welter eyed me in shock. “You mean I have to trade in my destroyer for one of these things? It looks like a flying bathtub.”
“Exactly.”
“But why have your best pilots fly your worst ships?”
“Because they aren’t my worst ships. They have triple the firepower of your destroyer. More importantly, the destroyers practically fly themselves. They have experienced nanite brainboxes to do most of the work. I don’t expect these ships will be so smooth to operate in battle.”
Welter let out a long sigh. “No,” he said glumly. “I don’t suppose they will. All right, I understand your reasoning. I take it you want me to fly this tub-the worst one of all, the prototype?”
“You’re finally catching on, Commander.”
— 25
Before we headed off into orbit on a shakedown cruise, I responded to an odd buzzing in my helmet. I noticed a set of words displayed in warning yellow, and pulled them up onto the center region of my HUD. On the visor before me, the words displayed read: ‘mailbox full. Message returned.’ I frowned at this for a moment, not recalling having sent any texts lately. I almost activated the warning and opened the report.
Then I realized what it was. The system was warning me that my mailbox was full. It wasn’t just any mailbox, either. It was the one that came from Star Force. Cursing, I decided I had to take a look. Possibly, Crow was crying for help. Who knew, maybe a hundred fresh enemy cruisers had come through the Venus gate and now approached Earth. I didn’t want to open those emails, but it would be criminal not to. Still, I somehow managed to put it off one more time. I justified this by telling myself I was in the middle of a critical combat test operation. Admiral Crow would have to wait a few more minutes.
“Take us up, Commander Welter,” I ordered.
As the ship lifted with an uncertain trembling, I felt for the armrests. Nanite arms snaked out and clamped my limbs into place. We rose out of the domed region very slowly.
Once free-floating in the open air, Welter applied thrust. At first he did so gently, then he gave it a surge of power. I was pressed back into my seat, despite the stabilizers, which were humming dutifully.
“Quite a bit of power in this beast,” Welter said, gripping the control sticks we’d rigged up.
Unlike Nano ships, these vessels had more direct control systems. There were brainboxes to be sure, but they had less knowledge of how to guide the ship than we did. Part of the purpose of this voyage was to demonstrate to the brainboxes how the controls worked and thus how the craft should be flown.
“Let’s take a few strafing runs at that mountain range,” I suggested. “When you are satisfied with the weaponry and atmospheric handling, take it up and we’ll do a few orbits.”
“Won’t that tip our hand to the Macros, sir? They must be watching.”
I shrugged. “Maybe a new kind of ship showing up will give them a reason to wait. We need time, and when faced with the unknown, the Macros tend to hesitate.”
Welter didn’t argue further. He was soon flying the ship in hard twists and turns. I could tell he was having fun despite himself. This ship had power, and power was always fun. Like a muscle car, it didn’t steer smoothly. Turning took a wide arc and lots of sickening Gs. The ship trembled when you pushed it, giving the feeling it might heel over and go into a spin. But it didn’t.
Welter pushed it, but never quite broke it. The first time he fired the gun, however, gave us a surprise. The entire ship bucked up under us. It felt like going over a speed bump in a car with bad shocks. We went over these speed bumps fast, and rhythmically. My teeth clacked each time the cannon fired. But it didn’t flip over, and Welter never lost control.
“We’ll need to teach the brainbox to give us a goose on the stabilizers every time we fire the main cannon,” he said.
“I’ll adjust the gain on the learning rate. Take another strafing run on that lake.”
After Welter tired of bombing the landscape with glowing pellets from the railgun, he took us up into orbit. Things smoothed out above the atmosphere, and I took the respite to finally open my email mailbox.
I opened the oldest email and read it quickly. It was from Crow, as I had expected. It was worded politely, but firmly. I was to report, and return to base ASAP. I grinned. It was weeks old. The second one was almost as cordial, but by the third email things began to get nasty. Crow used unpleasant words, mixed with Aussie slang. As far as I could determine, I was some kind of Wally with a genetic deformity in the region of my hindquarters. I wasn’t sure what a Wally was, but I assumed it was meant in a derogatory fashion.
The last email was a shocker, however. It wasn’t from Crow. It was from Jasmine Sarin.
When I’d left Earth many weeks ago, pursuing the Macro fleet, Jasmine had been a Major and my executive officer. I’d more or less left her in charge of the Star Force Marines in my absence. The first surprise was her new title: she was now calling herself Rear Admiral Sarin.
I stared at that, opening and closing my mouth repeatedly. Like a gaping fish on the deck of a boat, I didn’t quite know what had happened to my world. Jasmine had gone fleet? Crow had promoted her over me, and brought her under his direct command? I couldn’t believe she’d go along with it.
Even as I denied the obvious, it began to sink in. Sarin had been bucking for a promotion for a long time. I’d denied her requests. Then, from her point of view, I’d gone AWOL. Perhaps she’d told herself she was helping the cause of all Star Force by going Fleet. There had always been tension between the Marine and Fleet sides of the house, and having a sympathetic commander on the other side could help ease matters. Still, it felt like a
