Forge of War (Jack of Harts) (30 page)

He also enjoyed the music room.  A piano dominated it, an instrument he
couldn’t
play, but a pair of guitars hung from one wall as well.  He strummed a little song or three on one of them, and watched Samantha dry her hair.  That was one of the best parts of the night.

When she was done drying, she graciously allowed him to escort her up the stairs.  They reached what he assumed was her bedroom door and she pulled her arm from his to open it.  She stepped in, turned, and reached up to hold the scarf with both hands.  Electricity filled the air and he felt an attraction pulling him forward onto the balls of his feet.  He wondered if she was going to pull him in.  He wondered what he would do if she did.  The moment the answer crystallized in his mind, she smiled and patted his chest, pushing him back on his heels.

“Green,” she said in a mischievous tone.

He blinked in confusion, trying and utterly failing to figure out what that single word meant.  “What?” he finally asked.

Samantha laughed and patted him again.  “My favorite color.  Green.  Emerald actually, but I know you guys are handicapped with sixteen color vision.”

Jack sucked in a deep breath, enjoying the feel of her hand burning his chest.  He’d give her an eternity to stop doing that.  “I see,” he said with a wry a smile.  “Yellow.  Bright, sunshine, yellow.”

Samantha gave him a knowing smile and nodded.  “Good night, Jack.”

“Good night, Sam.”

Her smile grew softer and she pulled him down by the scarf so she could kiss him again.  An eternity later, she stepped back with a smirk and gently shut the door.  He leaned his forehead against the door, trying to get his breath back and trying to slow the beating of his heart.

After a very long time, a throat cleared behind him.  He straightened up tall and turned to see her father examining him with a lopsided smile covering his face.  “You know, Son, it’s normally customary for a suitor to escort the young lady to her
house’s
door, not her
bedroom
door?”

Jack cleared his throat to gain control of his vocal cords.  “Sir, there is
nothing
customary about your daughter,” he croaked out.

Her father laughed.  “Very true.”  He pulled in a deep breath and finally held a hand out.  “My friends call me Bruce. 
You
can call me Mr. McEntyre,” he finished with a wicked gleam in his eyes.

Jack smiled and took the man’s hand, even as confirmation of just who she was settled into his mind.  And it didn’t make a single difference to him.  “Nice to meet you, Mr. McEntyre.”  They shook and released.  “My friends call me Jester, by the way.”

Mr. McEntyre chuckled and patted him on the shoulder.  “Good night, Jack,” he finished and walked away.

“Good night, Mr. McEntyre,” Jack said as her father left him alone, in front of her door.  Jack swallowed as that sunk into his already addled mind.  The man trusted him.  Damn.  That made everything harder.  Jack took a deep breath, and stepped away from the door.  It was a real hard step, but at the same time real easy.  He didn’t want to leave.  That made it hard.  He would see her later, and her father would not try to chase him off with a shotgun. 
That
made it all kinds of
easy
.

The Hellcat cut through New Earth’s bright blue sky, engine exhaust painting white contrails of water vapor through it.  Maneuvering thrusters flared, flaps lifted, and she banked to the side, lines of ice crystals shimmering off the tips of her wings.  She pulled away from the last Hellcat she’d faced in trial combat, and Jack smiled in approval.

The Hellcat really
was
a good fighter, even if she wasn’t an Avenger.  He really liked the missile racks.  In a way, that made them better hyperspace fighters since they wouldn’t suffer the backlash of grav cannons, but they didn’t have the power to get there on their own.  And the Avengers hadn’t been designed to
fight
in hyperspace, just to travel
through
it on their way to hit the enemy.  It made sense.  With all the space taken up by the capacitors, they didn’t have the magazine space for dedicated missile packs like the Hellcat had, and capacitors that could push a ship into hyper could power grav cannons without working up a sweat.

Jack frowned in thought.  “Betty?”

Betty cocked her head at his tone, smiling over the yellow sundress she loved so much.  “Yeah, Jack?”

“I’ve got an idea.”

“I
thought
I smelled something burning.”

“Har, har,” Jack said with a shake of his head.  “Seriously, what do you think of these missile racks?”

Betty shrugged.  “Well, they’re certainly effective, though I miss the focused fire of a grav cannon.”

Jack nodded.  “True.  What if we could have both?”

Betty blinked and cocked her head to the side again.  “Oh,” she whispered.  “That’s…”

“I know…something to think about,” Jack finished for her.  “Hellcats don’t have enough power to twist gravity for movement, deflection,
and
weapons fire.”

“While Avengers have more power than we can use in combat, but never had the room for missile racks.”

“Until now,” Jack said with a smile.  The Peloran tech was
so
much smaller than Terran tech that placing it in a Terran hull left
lots
of empty space.  “We could fill those big empty wings with missiles now.  Imagine what a
missile
swarm would do to an enemy?  We could even fill the
nose
with missiles now that the turret isn’t there anymore.”

Betty shook her head.  “No, I’d rather use the power we have access to with the Peloran generators.  Besides, you don’t want missile exhaust flying over your cockpit do you?”

“Not especially.  What do
you
have in mind?”

Betty smiled.  “A third gravitic cannon of course.  We could make it bigger than the others.  And while we’re at it, we could move the
other
two out to the
ends
of the wings so if they overload they won’t blow us to kingdom come.”

“And what if
that
one blows up?” Jack asked with a wave of his hand towards the nose.  “I rather like my feet where they are.”

Betty crossed her arms and bestowed on him a raised eyebrow.  “Jack.  How many times have you seen an Avenger lose a nose and keep fighting?”

“Oh,” Jack answered in a subdued tone.  “True.”

“Besides, we’ll put it on the tip of the nose so there’s lots of room for you to see the pretty colors of an overloading gravitic cannon.”

“Thanks,” Jack muttered.  “I always
have
loved light shows.”

Betty gave him a sweet smile.  “I know.”  She shifted her head in thought and Jack held off on a response.  “The next fighter is incoming,” she said in an odd tone.

“What’s up?” Jack asked.

She shook her head.  “She’s coming down from
orbit
, not from the base.”

“Interesting,” Jack whispered.  “Well, patch me in then,” he added with a shrug.  “This is Cowboy Five to…” Jack trailed off as he read the screen showing its IFF signal and looked at Betty with questioning eyes.  That couldn’t be right.  She nodded to say it was.  He shook his head.  “To Independence Seven.  You must think you’re a good pilot to use that name.”

“I do actually.”

“Well, then hurry up and kill me.  We’ve got some pretty stringent
              qualifications requirements.”  And if this guy thought taking the name of that ship would help, he had another thing coming.

“I’ve heard,” the other pilot said, banked his Hellcat to the side and dove towards Jack faster than anyone he’d seen yet, missiles rippling out to engulf the fighter.

Jack jerked to the side as the missiles exploded all around on the sim screen, followed by lasers strobing up and down the Hellcat, racking up hundreds of points.  Jack laughed, brought the fighter around, and nodded at Betty.  “Well, if he wants it like that, let’s
do
this.  Give him the full treatment.”

“Full treatment, aye,” Betty answered with a mock salute and began to ripple missiles back at their target in a steady stream of a few at a time.

Jack dropped them in behind the other Hellcat, but it shot off to port before the missiles could track it.  Jack pulled to starboard on a whim, despite his wish to follow, and a swarm of missiles boiled up where he would have been.  “Ooooohhhh…tricky,” Jack whispered as alarms went off.  The man was behind and above them, firing another salvo.  Jack pulled up this time and brought the Hellcat around in a tight loop the missiles couldn’t follow.  They came out of the loop above and behind the other fighter.

Betty fired a full salvo of missiles and Jack pushed the throttle forward, cutting the pilot off from replicating his tactic.  The fighter pulled to port again and Jack frowned in thought.  The other pilot seemed to prefer portside maneuvers.  He might be able to take advantage of that.

His hand swung right and the fighter rolled to starboard a split second before another few missiles passed through their previous location, trying desperately to claw their way back into his fighter.  They were going too fast to turn though and sailed off into the blue sky.

“Betty, do some soft launches to his port side whenever you get the chance,” he ordered and dropped into a valley, buzzing over some trees.

“Got it,” Betty answered with a smile as the other Hellcat latched onto their tail.

“And cold launch
above
him
now
,” he added.

Missiles tumbled out of the racks, pushed out by the small magnetic rails in the wings, and fell behind the fighter as atmosphere clawed at the powerless hunks of metal.  They tumbled until their tiny minds picked up the target behind them, and then their drives exploded to life, throwing the swarm of missiles at the enemy Hellcat.

Jack pulled the throttle all the way back and the engine pods ceased their burn for a moment, before filling the air in front of him with fire.  Jack’s Hellcat slowed to a halt as the other Hellcat accelerated through the swarm of missiles, managing to avoid most of them.  The other Hellcat flew straight into his sights and Betty fired another volley of missiles straight into his engine flare.

Jack began to twitch to port, but had a bad feeling about that again.  He shifted starboard instead and found himself on his enemy’s tail, Betty sending a salvo of lasers into the denuded rear deflection grid.  Points rolled up on the simulation screen, showing direct hit after direct hit.

The enemy fighter pulled to port and Jack tried to follow, but once again Jack lost him and a salvo of missiles rained into their flank.  More points ran up the screen for the other guy, keeping him in the lead, and Jack swallowed.  He was really going to have to take this seriously.  The guy was good.

Jack flicked the stick to the side, took a deep breath, and stopped trying to plan anything.  He opened his eyes wide, relaxed into his seat, and let his hands move whenever he felt the need.  His sense of time faded away, and he became only dimly aware of the outside world, while at the same time hyper aware of
everything
.  He didn’t take time to consider anything, to think about anything, or to let what he saw affect his mind in any way.  He simply reacted to what he saw, taking no time or energy to ponder it.

An alarm sounded and he came back to full awareness.  He blinked dry eyes and pulled stiff fingers away from the throttle and stick, working his fingers back and forth to restore circulation.  He looked at one screen to see that half an hour had passed since the trial started, kicking in the automatic alarm to end it.  He cleared his throat, feeling phlegm break loose, and licked his dry mouth.  He glanced down on the sim screen to see he’d lost, by a few hundred points.  The score was higher than he’d seen in any sim before.  Of course, it had gone
longer
than the others too.  He blinked, looked again, and shook his head as he turned to look at the Hellcat flying next to him.

“Congratulations, Independence Seven,” he said with a smile and cleared his throat again.  “You beat me with that first strike.  You are a dirty and underhanded fighter.”

The other pilot laughed.  “I was beating you the whole time.”

Jack chewed his lip and shook his head.  “Yes, but some would say you
cheated
to take the lead.”

“True,” the other pilot said in an amused tone.  “But if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t winnin’.”

Jack chuckled and shook his head again.  “Truer words have never been spoken,” he said and cleared his throat one more time.  He needed a drink after this.  “I think it’s time to return to base.”

“Roger, that, Cowboy Five.  I need a drink.”  Independence Seven banked away, lines of ice crystals flaring off her wingtips, and accelerated towards Leif Erikson Spacebase.

Jack followed with a flick of his wrist.  “Betty, keep on his six and follow him back to base.  And patch me through to the Chief.”

Betty smiled, crossed her arms, and nodded.  “He’s on the line.”

“Chief here,” the commander’s voice said over the comm. system.  “Why are you calling, Jester?”

Jack worked his jaw back and forth several times.  His whole body felt sore.  He really needed to get up and walk around to work the acid out of his muscles.  “Have you been following the trials?”

“No…I have been doing paperwork.  Give me a second to…holy
frak
!  Who
is
that guy?”

Jack smiled at the confusion in the other man’s voice.  “I have no idea.  But he came in from orbit, not the base, and given the name of his ship, he thinks he’s as good as he is.”

“Yeah.  Look, let me get Bull and we’ll meet you at the landing strip.  This needs face to face.”

Jack nodded in approval.  “Agreed, Chief.”

“Chief out,” Charles finished and the comm. line cut out.

Jack looked outside the cockpit to see the other Hellcat dropping towards the spacebase and relaxed, working his legs and toes against the lethargy in them.  He watched as they came down to a landing and his jaw dropped as he saw the crowd ringing the landing area.

“Frak.  People were watching, weren’t they?”

“Yup,” Betty said in a proud voice.  “You two did really good.”

Jack looked at her with a raised eyebrow.  “I
lost
in front of them all.”

Betty still gave him a proud look.  “Yeah, but you lost going all out and big.”

“True.”  Jack shook his head.  “I just don’t like losing.”

Betty smiled.  “None of us do, Jack.  But sometimes we do, and that’s due to no failing of our own.  That is simply life.”

Jack sighed as the fighter settled down for a soft landing and the canopy began to open.  “Thanks for the fortune cookie.”  He unbuckled his restraints, stood up, and saw the other pilot vault out of his fighter to land with a shoulder roll.  “Damn.  He’s good,” he added with another shake of his head.

“Jack,” Betty said in a warning tone and shook her head.

“What?” Jack asked in an innocent tone and mentally measured the distance to the ground as the other pilot rose to his feet and brushed something off the shoulder of his blue uniform.

“Don’t do it,” she said and he turned to see her plant both fists on her waist.

“You don’t think I can do it?” he asked with a smile.

Betty sighed.  “I think you haven’t
practiced
it, and it’s stupid to do something in front of an audience you’ve not practiced before.”

Jack cocked his head to the side and nodded.  “Good point.”  He measured the distance again.  “Grav slide then?”

Betty smiled.  “Yeah, we can do that.”

“Good,” Jack said, stepped forward, and slid down to the pavement on an imaginary surfboard down a slope made of controlled gravity waves, leather flight jacket flapping in the wind.  He came to a stop and adjusted the tie that matched the khaki shirt and green slacks of his service uniform.  The other pilot gave him a nod of approval and ambled forward to meet Jack as his cyber jumped out of the fighter to land beside her pilot.