My Other Car is a Spaceship (6 page)

This is just too weird for words! I’d swear I
actually have several arms and legs.
He opened his eyes and the illusion vanished. “What’s actually happening when I think I’m moving my phantom limbs?”

“At the moment, nothing. I have the interface set
for input-only. Once you’ve mastered the techniques necessary for fine control, you’ll be able to set the yield or intensity of each weapon we have, vary the interior temperature of the ship, set course and engage the hyperflight drive—in short, you’ll be able to do everything needed to operate the ship except cook breakfast.”

Hal
shook his head in wonder. “Incredible. And I can do all that from here in bed?”

Kalen nodded. “Or anywhere else on the ship.
Your wireless link has a range of nearly a kilometer. As I said before, in a battle situation, you’d probably want to be on the bridge to make it easier to coordinate with the other crewmembers; but strictly speaking, you don’t
have
to be there. Sometimes I think the real reason for having the pilot on the bridge is so the rest of the crew can actually see someone flying the ship.

Hal
grinned. “Makes sense. So now what?”

“For now, we keep doing what we’re doing. I
’ll introduce new input little by little, and you’ll work on identifying the source of the signals and how to respond to them. Eventually you’ll be able to monitor and manage thousands of sensors and controls throughout the ship without conscious thought.”

Hal
whistled. “Sounds like fun. I guess we’d better get to work.”

He shifted his position with a determined look and let his eyes go out of focus.

The hours turned into days, and the days into a week. After Hal mastered all of the internal sensors, Kalen added the rest of the external ones. He had a spherical view of space around the ship for as far as the eye could see.

Correction: as far as cameras and high-gain sensors can see.

The majesty of the view caused him to gasp.
Wow. Would you look at that? Stars, moons, planets, asteroids, comets. It’s-it’s magnificent. So
this
is what the astronauts see when they’re out here. Incredible!

A split second later, views in other spectra overlaid the visible. He “saw” space in infrared, x-ray, microwave and dozens of other frequency ranges. Rather than being overwhelmed, he found the experience exhilarating.

This is incredible! I can pick out solar flares on the sun and hotspots on Io. It’s like being Superman with x-ray and heat vision, only I don’t have to worry about kryptonite—merely pirates.

At first
the sheer magnitude of what he experienced threatened to overwhelm him—too many inputs coming too fast. Little by little, Hal learned to interpret the new sensations.

This is all so bizarre
—not only that I can do all this stuff, but that it feels so natural after such a short time. This must be what it’s like to be a spider, with all those legs and compound eyes.

Stretched out on his bunk
in ship-issue tan jumpsuit—the pilot’s color, he was told—Hal mentally toggled the communication relay to the captain’s implant.

“Kalen. I think I’ve about mastered the intricacies of controlling the lights and temperature and scanning the exterior sensors. I’m sure the rest of the crew could manage that without me. When am I going to start learning the things you brought me aboard to do?”

“I’ve been monitoring your progress. You’re ready to begin lessons in basic navigation and piloting. When I’m convinced you won’t run us into something big enough to be nasty, we’ll visit the asteroid belt for weapons training.”

“Yee-ha!
” Hal sported a huge grin, even if Kalen couldn’t see it from the bridge. “Now we get to the fun part. How do I begin?”

“I
’ve unlocked the navigational database. You have full access to the star maps, hyperspace routes, and procedures for navigating around celestial bodies. As for piloting, we’ll begin with the maneuvering thrusters, magnetic docking grapples, and the exterior repairbots. After you master those, we’ll move on to the main engines, set at minimal power.”

“
Great. Let’s do it.”

Hal had the enthusiasm of a puppy, wanting to do everything, to get into everything, and occasionally getting himself in trouble. Fortunately, at this stage there was nothing he couldn’t also get himself out of. As with the other controls, he quickly mastered the techniques needed to safely and efficiently move the ship about and to remotely pilot the ‘bots. After a few hours, he was ready for the main engines. These took a bit longer to master, as they involved many levels of control: from low-power cruising up through hyperflight. Still, he was an experienced fighter pilot and with the neural interface it took him little time to make sense of it all. By the end of two days, he had done well enough to satisfy even Kalen.

Or
, to be precise, Kalen said, “That’ll have to do.”

Then it was time to move on to weapons training. As with a
jet fighter, it wasn’t simply a matter of pulling a trigger. There were a number of weapons systems, both offensive and defensive, active and passive, and Hal needed to know what each was for, how they all worked and when to employ them. But this was what he lived for.

God, I love blowing
stuff up! I’d forgotten how much I missed it.
He grinned happily to himself.
To think I once wanted to fly orbital shuttles. This is so much cooler!

He had just
obliterated a small asteroid with the antiproton cannons. As Kalen said, “The APCs pack a wallop against an unprotected target or a small pirate ship, but they can be stopped cold by a powerful-enough energy shield—the kind the bigger ships tend to have.”

N
ext he tried out the mass driver on a sixty-six-meter chunk of iron and rock hurtling past
Adventurer
at several hundred kilometers per hour. The ship zigzagged through the asteroid belt, dodging rocks and simulating evasive maneuvers while Hal lined up his shot. He had to wait for an opening between two other asteroids and….

Gotcha!

The mass driver, or MD, had a much greater useful range than the APCs. It was the equivalent of a big gun on an Earthly battleship, firing large loads great distances. It accelerated a 108-kilo slug of depleted uranium to four-tenths the speed of light in a fraction of a second.

No energy shield known could stop
a mass driver slug. If you hit your target, you killed it. That was the good news.

The bad was that unlike a
n asteroid that cooperated by flying in a straight line, a ship that jinked in three dimensions and fired back was anything but an easy kill. Without the instantaneous link offered by the neural interface, it would be nearly impossible for human reflexes to respond fast enough to hit a ship. Even with the neural link and all the advanced firing and target acquisition technology at Hal’s disposal, it still was tricky. A missile could
track
a target, but a slug could only fly in a straight line.

The next drill involved t
he quark-enhanced missiles. They were used to beat down the shielding that was so effective at stopping the APCs. A direct hit by a quem, or a couple of near misses, and the APCs had a chance to do some damage against even the biggest raider. The missiles were in somewhat short supply, so Hal had to content himself with simulating missile launches.

Too bad
we don’t have something like a Gatling gun for close-in dogfighting. But then again, this ship wasn’t designed for that. Most engagements happen at a distance.

All right then. Next up, defensive weapons.
We’ve got short-range missiles and lasers for picking off enemy missiles and we’ve got false-image camouflage to fool sensor-guided missiles—sort of like high-tech chaff. We’ve got heat projectors to throw off heat-seeking missiles. We’ve got multiphasic energy shields to absorb or deflect energy weapons. Whew! I can see I’ll be busy for a while.

After eleven days of training, Kalen called Hal into his ready room.

“You’ve done well,
Hal. I couldn’t be more pleased with your progress. Your initial training is now complete.”

After accepting Kalen’s kudos,
Hal grew serious. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. I noticed a couple of days ago that many of the bridge crew looked worried or nervous. I ignored it at the time; but since then, if anything, they’ve gotten even more so. What aren’t you telling me?”

Kalen sighed. “I guess it’s time you knew anyway.
As I mentioned earlier, shortly before Tompkins’ final shore leave we had had a run-in with a pirate—a big one. What I didn’t say was that we took a serious beating before we were able to drive the pirates off. That’s why we’re short on missiles.

“
Four days ago, one of the sensor operators saw indications that an unidentified ship was on a direct course for Earth. It’s a big one and a long way out, but it’ll be here within two days.”

Hal
whistled, then frowned. “Four days? You can detect ships that far out?”

“Not
usually. But this ship is big and its hyper drive is out of tune. That combination produces a disturbance in hyperspace—sort of a squeal—that’s detectable with the right equipment.”

“I see. Obviously there’s a lot I still have to learn about this stuff. But w
hy didn’t I know about the telemetry? I thought I was tied into all of the ship’s sensors.”

“Normally you would be, but I took the liberty of disabling your access to a few specific systems
and reducing the sensitivity of others, so as not to distract you from your training. I’ll restore your access immediately.”

Hal
nodded. “Good. Thanks. So what else can I do to prepare for the upcoming battle?”

“There are recordings of our previous
skirmishes, here and elsewhere, as well as instructional recordings of classic battle techniques. It would be a good idea to learn as much as you can about tactics, both the pirates’ and ours. This is why we were looking for an experienced fighter pilot, rather than someone off the street who happened to have the talent for hypertasking. That, and we needed someone who’s battle-tested.”

“No kidding
. Still, it’s been quite a few years since I’ve been in combat.”

Kalen nodded. “True, but at least you have that experience. A civilian wouldn’t.
He might flinch or freeze under fire. You won’t. I’m sure it’ll all come back to you quickly.”

It was
Hal’s turn to nod. “I’d better get to it, then. I’ve got some tactics to learn and some rust to knock off. Keep me apprised of the bogey’s progress.”

“I will. Thank you,
Hal, for risking your life like this when you could have been home, relaxing in your retirement.”

A grin spread across
Hal’s face. “Are you kidding? I haven’t had this much fun in ages. I’d have
paid
for the opportunity!”

Kalen responded with a tight smile.
“Perhaps so. I just hope you don’t have reason to regret my bringing you here when this is all over.”

When Kalen said “instructional recordings,” Hal envisioned watching videos on a monitor. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Wow. I certainly never imagined anything like this!

As soon as Hal initiated the first lesson via his neural interface, he found himself sitting in the command chair of a ship.

This isn’t
a VR simulation of a ship; it’s an honest-to-god ship in the middle of a battle—and we’re being fired on!

Inst
inctively, Hal’s heart rate kicked into high gear; adrenaline flooded his system, sweat peppered his brow. Even though intellectually he knew he was in no actual danger, his body responded to the stimuli he received not only visually but through the myriad neural inputs recorded during an actual firefight. Hal found himself experiencing what the real pilot did, moment by moment, in that long-ago battle.

It was a weird sensation
. Both his mind and body reacted to the events as they unfolded. Yet simultaneously he felt/saw/heard/sensed what the other pilot did. It was like watching two versions of the same movie, one superimposed over the other but slightly different and out of synch—and involving
all
the senses. He
saw
the enemy ship through the pilot’s eyes and absorbed the sensor data via the pilot’s neural interface. He
heard
the sounds of battle: the metallic rumble of missiles feeding into the launcher, the scream of damage klaxons and the cries of the injured. He
felt
the ship shudder from multiple impacts and felt the weave of the command chair’s fabric armrests through the other pilot’s fingertips. He
smelled
the stench of burnt paneling mixed with sweat and fear, and he
tasted
blood when the pilot bit his tongue.

It all feels so
…natural. Almost like memories, but more vivid.

The parallel experiences acted as a sort of feedback loop. At first,
Hal’s efforts at evasive maneuvers differed considerably from the original pilot’s, and his reaction times lagged the other’s. Eventually, Hal began to develop a feel for the pilot’s tactics, technique, and style. Soon his own reactions resembled the other’s. In less than an hour, he was able to anticipate the pilot’s moves and match them exactly. Not long after, he used that experience to experiment with his own variations on those maneuvers. In several instances, he was able to get the drop on the bandit even faster than his doppelganger did. Other times, he got his ass blown out of the sky.

What an amazing way to
learn! It would have taken me weeks back home—first in a simulator and then in a plane—to learn to do some of those moves and to do them as well as the other pilot did them. And yet I mastered them in an hour.
He broke into a self-satisfied grin.
Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks!

T
hat’s one lesson down, several dozen to go. I don’t know if I’ll be ready by the time the bandits get here, but at least I won’t get bored.

A frown creased his brow as an annoying thought occurred to him. He mentally toggled the
captain’s implant.

“Kalen?”

“Yes, Hal?”

“Just curious, but if you have all this fancy ‘instructional recording’ technology that could have taught me to fly the ship in a few hours, why did you make me spend
almost two weeks doing it the hard way?”

Kalen’s laugh
echoed inside Hal’s head. “Simple. We don’t have any recordings of that type aboard.”