Battleship Furiosa (6 page)

There was no sign of disagreement
between then, and as she tapped her Secpad, she indicated to Nate
that he could leave.

"Thank you, Ensign. Now get some
rest. I suspect all of us are going to be very busy, and
soon."

Nate rose to his feet and made
for the door. The officers waited in silence, but as soon as he was
through
, he could hear them talking. The
door hissed shut, and he found himself alone in the corridor, all
apart from the tall, impatient figure of Lieutenant Commander
Holder.

"Well?" she asked,
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

Nate looked a little confused.
Her voice was foreign, exotic, and oozed class. It was unusual to
hear the accent these days, and Nate was certain it descended from
the British people. Many of them had relocated to Terra Nova in the
centuries since the founding of the first colonies. Over time, the
accent had changed until it became the dominant sound of the rich
and privileged in the Alliance. Nonetheless, there was something
attractive about it that Nate found hard to ignore.

"You think these attacks are a
ruse, too?"

The Lieutenant Commander smiled, and
Nate found it hard not to join in. This was something very rare
from her, especially after the violence and tension of the last
mission.

"Indeed."

She then placed a hand on his shoulder
and turned to move back into the passageway.

"It's time we talked about
Captain Cornwallis' rationalisation plan for our
pilots."

"Plan, Sir?"

Nate gulped as he listened.
Rationalisation was not a word he was used to hearing, but he
suspected it meant changes, and perhaps even cuts to their
squadrons.

"
Yes,
the plan," she replied, still maintaining her friendly tone, "It
seems that with all this trouble, High Command wants to improve the
effectiveness of the fighter squadrons in the fleet."

She stopped for a moment.

"Our people are working well
together. That’s why I requested that the Corsairs and Knighthawks
be granted a more permanent relationship."

Nate's eyes could not have opened
wider even if he'd tried.

"It won't happen immediately, but
if Command agree to it, we'll be joined permanently into a Space
Combat Wing with a single senior commander. It's a big step, but it
will lead to a more effective unit. Corsairs will take over fighter
combat duty with the Lightning interceptors. Knighthawks will take
the heavy assault duty using the Kerberos pattern fighters and the
gunships."

"Is that possible?"

She
nodded.

"
Of
course. Pilots will move between the squadrons depending on the
need at the time. We'll use the right people in the right roles.
But first, we have to survive the next few days."

She then indicated off into the
passageway.

"I suggest you do whatever it is
you planned on doing, and fast. Your turn will come again in no
less than six hours. We're all on rotation duty now, and if we're
both right, the Star Empire is not going stop anytime
soon."

She made to move and then stopped
again, shaking her head as she looked at her Secpad. When her eyes
moved to Nate
, he could tell there was a
problem. As she looked back, Nate found himself completely absorbed
in her eyes. She was at least eight years his senior, yet she
looked as young as any of the others pilots. Only her voice and her
calm demeanour made her stand out as something very
different.

"I need to see my
pilots."

She
pointed to Nate and lowered her gaze a fraction.

"Commander Higgins wants to see
you, though, and now."

She walked away, but not
without a final parting comment, "Good luck,
Ensign."

Nate was so busy watching her
elegant form as she walked away that he almost forgot what she had
said. Finally, the officer vanished from view, leaving him alone in
the passageway. That was the point when her comments finally hit
home, and just as before, his nerves returned.

Wait, what?

He began walking in the same
direction taken by Lieutenant Commander Holder, and with every
step
, he quickened his pace. Something
even he had learnt well by now, was that the waiting was always the
worst.

What have I done now?

Alliance Armoured Assault Ship 'ANS
Relentless'

23 December 2472

The meeting with the Commander did not
go well, and Nate felt numb even thirty minutes after having left
the room. It was not from nerves or even fear, this time he was
simply angry at the verbal punishment he'd received. He was not
happy, and though he tried to distract himself with the machinery
of war around him, he still could not shake off the talk he'd just
been given by Commander Higgins. Nate was sure he'd given a good
account of himself, and his reward had been a stern dressing down.
Just over an hour ago he'd been engaged in battle, dodging bullets,
and vaporising enemy fighters. Now he was back aboard the ship, and
while other pilots continued to perform patrols, he was stuck here,
knowing that he might have lost any chance to get back out in
space. He closed his eyes for a second and took a few slow
breaths.

What else could I have done?

For all the blame
was laid at his feet, and Nate could not see how
the action or failures of Rex could be fairly placed on him. They
had never gone through the pressure-based training and selection of
the normal fighter units, or even through the military academy.
They were civilians, and most of them still weeks, or even months
from their eighteenth birthdays. They were Academy cadets, and to
expect the same from them as fully training military personnel felt
unfair.

"Top deck, launching fighters. Flight
three prepare for rotation."

The loudspeakers announced the
next batch of fighters to be prepared. No sooner did one group
leave; another would form up on the deck for combat. Even if Nate
got to fly again, it would not be his turn for another four patrol
launches. That was at least a bit of time to clear his mind. He
looked to the right where the large display on the wall showed the
distant Rift. For a moment, it could have easily been confused as a
window out into space.

"Launching!"

The ship didn't even shudder as a
pair of Corsair Squadron fighters blasted out into space. He waited
until they came into view, the bright blue and white from their
engines marking their acceleration towards the Rift. More dots
showed where pairs from other ships were doing the same.

Another launch
and another battle.

Nate shook his
head and sighed. Little seemed to have changed in this
particular zone of the conflict, or policing action as he'd heard
some of the officers describing it. There was a real fear of
labelling it as anything more, even though ships had now been lost
on both sides. As far as he could tell, both were massing ships for
some kind of big showdown, and the outcome would determine the fate
of the remnants of the Byotai Empire.

A pilot from Corsair Squadron
took off his helmet, nodded politely, and stopped to look at the
screen. He spotted the shapes of his comrades moving off towards
the Rift and then looked back at Nate.

"Nothing is getting past us in
this system. Right?"

Nate nodded as the pilot moved
away. He couldn't agree with the pilot, though. He knew the kind of
numbers the enemy had access to, and it was starting to unnerve
him. The longer they remained in the Fiorr Veej System, the more
time they gave to the enemy to carry out his plan.

There they go again.

Far off into the distance, and
just near
the Rift, came a cloud of
glistening light. To the uninitiated, it might have been an odd
celestial event. Nate knew better, though. The lights were the
telltale mark of gunfire. It was too far away to make out exactly
what was happening, but he suspected it was yet another attempt to
run the blockade. While this never-ending skirmish continued, so
the fighter squadrons from the assembled ships carried on running
patrols along the Rifts. For all this action and excitement, he was
back on Relentless and in trouble again. He'd done everything asked
of him, but for all that, his authority in the Squadron had been
questioned. He closed his eyes for a second and tried to shake the
image of Commander Higgins from his mind.

It's not fair.
I did my part, and so did Rex, even
if he did screw up a bit.

J
ust
thinking of Rex started his blood pumping again. The two had never
really been friends, but events over the last weeks had brought
them together. The closer he and Cassandra became appeared to have
an adverse effect on him as well. With each day Cassandra drifted
away, and no matter what he said, she seemed to try and avoid him.
He took one more deep breath and then opened his eyes. He looked
back so that he could see Billy and Matilda still talking. They
were in a world of their own as they sat on an empty loader. The
machine was a wheeled platform that could move people and equipment
silently around the deck. Nate waited and listened for a second.
They were talking about the latest ground war addition to the Star
Crusader simulation. He'd like to have joined in, but they would
easily tell something was up, and he didn't want to talk to them
about the dressing down he'd received. Instead, he returned his
attention to the engineer working on a battered looking Bullnose
gunship's weapon mechanism. It was marginally interesting, and the
more he concentrated on it, the more he could try and forget about
what had just happened. The man slid out from underneath the
spacecraft, wiped his left hand, and then pointed to its
nose.

"Ensign,
let me just reattach the chain drive and I'll be with
you."

Nate
nodded politely and watched the man work. On the floor
beside him was a metallic case containing multiple new parts, as
well as a series of schematics on a previous generation Secpad
unit. There were new chain parts, as well as sections that had just
been removed.

"
Okay..." he started, "If we change out the links here, we
can increase your rate of fire by up to nearly sixty
percent."

The man pulled on the chain
drive
, and it began to make a clicking
sound as it moved through the ammunition. Nate watched with
interest as the belt open and closed the revised loading gear that
the man had just fitted.

"Now,
by combining this with the mixed ammunition, you upgrade
the entire gunship to B3 specification."

He licked his lips as though showing he
was most satisfied with his work.

"And all of this was done on
board Relentless, with no time spent back in dock, or with refit
engineers back at the factory."

The engineer sat upright and
double-checked the tension on the belt with a metallic tool. As he
pulled on
the unit, he continued to
speak, "CTC have started shipping upgrade kits for all our
front-line fighters. Lightning, Hammerhead, Bullnose, and even the
brand new MQ-5 Avenger."

His eyebrows lifted as he mentioned the
drone.

"You've flown the Avenger, right?"

Nate smiled.

"When we first escaped aboard
Relentless, we took control of the Avengers. They're all gone now,
though."

The man chuckled.

"Yeah, we noticed that when we
transferred over from Warlord. The upgraded Avengers are quite the
thing, right now."

Nate nodded and then pointed to
the loading motors.
They were
electrically driven and powered by the onboard generator. The dull
cogs were covered in thick, heavy-duty looking chains that helped
pull the ammunition directly to the gunnery system.

"But won't that increase the heat
of the loading wheels here? I thought the design for the original
Hammerhead was to use these chin-mounted guns as a low rate of fire
support weapon. Is this really workable, long-term?"

The man smiled, perhaps pleased
that the young pilot actually understood something of the
mechanism. There was always something of a contest between the
experienced and well-trained engineers and technicians in the Navy,
and the pilots that flew the spacecraft. Nate was one of the few
pilots to have ever shown much of an interest in the mechanical
side of anything on the landing deck. The man rubbed his chin and
left a smear of grease on the skin.

"
Yeah,
you'd be right if this were atmospheric combat. The gun system
would overheat after two, maybe three seconds of firing. The real
problem with that type of combat is the friction, both on the
mechanism and travelling through the atmosphere."

He pointed to the open section.

"Entering a planet's atmosphere
with entry points like this will see you ripped apart. Even at
high-altitude, friction with the air will burn through the innards
of a gunship and gut you in a fraction of a second."

Using his hands, the man
demonstrated the
launching of projectiles
from a railgun system. As the one hand moved, he explained
carefully, "Right now, you have a gunnery system with what, a
ten-round magazine per gun? That's a three-second burst at the
most, and then you're done."