So It Begins (28 page)

  “They’re tiny,” I whispered to Conner on my right. He jacked in and I felt his presence join me in the bow.

  The gun cruisers, all thirty, were clustered in orbit around the star. Beefed up fighters was exactly what they were.

  “Hey, Lieutenant Valk,” Conner called over to one of our pilots sitting in a sling a few meters down the compartment, “They changed the attitude thrusters. Looks like you’ll have more kick.”

  The pilots all jacked in and the forward feeds got crowded. I could see what Conner meant about the thrusters, and I called up a schematic. The forward and aft attitude thrusters, mounted at four points around the hull, were easily several meters longer than on plan. I heard groans.

  “You know what that means,” someone griped over the neural link we had established by all jacking in together.

  “They failed initial maneuvering drills so they welded on extensions,” someone else said.

  “Careful on those hairpin turns.” I recognized Valk’s voice. “The spot-welds might snap.”

  I tuned out the chatter. I only had eyes for the guns. I had never seen such guns on ships so small. They had to be 150mm’s. The barrels were ten meters long at least, extending between the attitude-thrusters. The engineers must have installed strong gravity dampers to keep the guns from rolling the ship while firing. It was good that we would be in suspension, because it would be a bumpy ride.

  I zoomed in tighter and saw the skeletal hulks of loading servos on either side of the breaching. Damn it! “Hey, Conner,” I said. “Those are manual load. We’re going to have Ordnance Jockeys in our crews, manning the servos.”

  “Why the hell’d they do that?”

  “Don’t know.” No one used manual loaders.

  We docked a little over forty-five minutes later, the first of seven dockings as our meager crew was distributed among ships craving experienced crewmembers. I boarded the
Glory
, my new home for a year or two, or three.

  I hauled myself through the docking hatch and waited to be inserted into suspension in the smallest, most constrictive space yet. The sound of waves crashed around my ears and I clutched at handholds. The central open tube, around which the stasis containers were wrapped, was smaller than it seemed on the schematic, maybe two meters across. I waited behind two others, a female pilot named Lieutenant Pordue and another gunner named Bell, neither from my former posting. They stripped us of our clothes, so now I was cold as well as claustrophobic, in exchange for 1mm skin suits. The suits were to protect our skin from suspension fluid. I noted that they bore a number in the center of the back, as well as our stripes of rank. My promotion had come through. I was a sergeant. I gripped the handhold tighter.

  The life support techs, both with missing legs and titanium leg-cuffs, strapped us into our containers and coupled multi-colored tubes and wires to the ports in our cuff-flanges. I held onto the open edges of the canister.

  “You been suspended before?” the tech asked, glancing at my white-knuckled grip.

  “A bunch of times.”

  “So you know the routine. Sorry to rush, but you’re the last ones in and we’re shipping out as soon as you’re secured.”

  I could feel the drive pods rumbling to life. We were moving already? “They’re not wasting time, huh?” I said.

  “No time. Let’s get your neural link connected.” He pulled a thick cable from the wall of the container, thicker than any I’d ever used. “Lean forward.”

  I leaned and he screwed the wire into the connection behind my ear. “That’s it. The sedatives are flowing. You’ll be accepted into the neural link as soon as your body’s asleep.”

  He slammed the container doors on me and I concentrated on breathing slowly while the sedatives took hold. I couldn’t see. I hyperventilated. Cold suspension fluid pumped in around my hips and I could hear displaced air escaping through vents. I panted faster and faster, willing the sedatives to creep their way through my veins to my brain.

  My world lit up with lights and I blinked rapidly.

 
Where
?

  I turned around. I was standing (standing? How did I get legs?), in a wide corridor with bright lights and a calm, beige carpet. I felt gravity. Lieutenant Pordue and Sergeant Bell stood beside me, both looking alarmed. We were dressed in shipboard uniforms.

  “This is amazing,” Bell said.

  “Welcome to the consensus-reality of the ship,” someone said, and we turned to face a Lieutenant who hadn’t been standing there before. We saluted.

  “I’m Lieutenant Roarke,” he said, “and we are underway. We’ll be jumping to hyperspace as soon as we get free of the star’s gravity well.”

  “This is all simulated, sir?” I said, looking around. I had used recreational holos before, but I had never used them in standard operational conditions.

  “We figured, since we’re all in the neural link, why not make the ship seem like a big one? It’s laid out like a standard Class B-6 Destroyer. Everyone gets private quarters, and all quarters have portals. There are complete recreation facilities you can use on your downtime. However, there’ll be little downtime in the near term. You will undergo a series of war simulations while we’re in hyperspace, designed to familiarize you with combat on this ship.

  “Let me show you the external feeds.”

  The corridor vanished and we entered one of the attitude thrusters. Ship status outputs scrolled behind one of my eyes as I looked out of the visual feeds down the curved hull of the
Glory
. The feeling of a vast ship around me vanished.

  “You can go to external feeds any time you want,” Lieutenant Roarke said. “You can access shipboard status reports from inside the simulation. You can even visit your body if you want to.”

  We returned to the corridor.

  “Where is everyone?” Sergeant Bell said. “Things are quiet for a ship-wide neural link.”

  “I was giving you a moment,” Lieutenant Roarke said. “I’ll connect you to the link now.”

  I shielded my mind, something I’d been trained to do during battles when busy neural cross-talk could grow cacophonous. The
Glory
opened up around me and I felt the consciousness of the other two hundred and ninety-nine souls on board. The chatter was loud across fifty bands. I damped all the private bands, and then the official bands that didn’t relate to guns, until only the Command Channel and the Fire Control Channel remained. The lieutenant nodded when he saw that we’d all adjusted.

  “Import ship’s time and on-board schematics. Remember, we have no intraship transports. If you’re aft and want to get to the bow, just move your avatar there. It’s not necessary to walk.

  “Here are your commanding officers. Sergeant Bell, you have been assigned to Forward Gun #3, on the port side. Go with Lieutenant Amadio.” They vanished. “Sgt. Kirchov, you have been assigned Aft Gun #11, also port. Go with Lieutenant Burkett.”

  I followed Burkett’s avatar, reading his destination via the neural link we shared. Ship’s schematics pinpointed our final location at Gun #11, Aft.

  “Meet Annie,” Burkett said. “She is your girl while you’re on the
Glory
, so take good care of her.”

  I entered Annie’s processing node and looked down the length of her twin barrels through her targeting feeds. She was so new that her paint hadn’t even been scratched. Stars glimmered in the black beyond.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said. I wanted a target to shoot.

  Burkett threw a virtual arm around my shoulder. “She’s special and requires far more concentration than you ever gave to those great banks of guns on your dreadnought. There you could fire at will. Here, you have one gun and limited ordnance. Every shot counts. That means you will have to assign importance-levels to your targets. You have two targeting techs in your crew, and they’ll feed you vectors and proximities. They’ll interface with the guidance computers and suggest priorities, but you’ll be pulling the trigger.”

  “And . . .?”

  “You’ve got to choose your ordnance for each shot. Homing rockets to find the weak points in their shields, warheads to follow them in. High-yield, non-nuclear rockets for close targets, low-yield, high-velocity rockets for their fighters. That’s why we’re using human loaders instead of automatic conveyers.”

  “You couldn’t get the loading computers to coordinate cleanly?”

  “We couldn’t get you gunners to coordinate cleanly with the loading computers. Your two ordnance jockeys will direct the loading servos and the conveyors from the armories. They’re fully integrated into the loading computers, and you’ll be integrated with them. It makes it easier on you.”

  I continued staring down Annie’s barrels. If I had been able to feel my heart I’m sure it would have been pounding. I was King of the Cannon. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “No one has. We’ll run simulations on the way to Bountiful to bring you up to speed.”

  “When do I meet my gun crew?”

  “Right now.” Four presences entered the gun, my two targeting techs and my two ordnance jockeys.

  “The simulations will begin when we enter hyperspace,” Lieutenant Burkett continued. “You’ll start by yourself. Later you’ll link with the other guns and learn to coordinate with Fire Control.

  “The pilots will be running their own simulations. Eight attitude thrusters and four drive pods. You should see these ships bob and weave once the pilots get integrated. Final simulations will involve coordination between the gun crews and pilots. Not only will your targets be moving, but so will the ground beneath you.”

  “I can’t wait,” I said.

  “We’re going to put you through your paces. Think of rescuing Bountiful as a dry run for the future. When the go-ahead finally comes to penetrate deep into their territory, we’ll be ready.”

  I grinned. “Bring it on.”

  “One last thing, Sergeant. During the simulations, if you shoot off one of the thrusters or shoot one of your fellow guns I will personally tear you a new asshole. Is that clear?”

  “That is clear, sir.”

  “Thirty minutes to hyperspace entry. Everybody introduce yourselves and prep for simulation. Good luck.”

  I gripped Annie’s virtual control arm. Time to see what she could do.

  I easily survived the first half-dozen simulations with limited bogeys. As the number of bogeys increased, I struggled to cover my little piece of the
Glory
. I had to learn to differentiate the threat level of my attackers, and change ordnance quickly as new threats presented themselves. We took a beating from small-fire, but survived several simulations because I was able to neutralize the shipkiller threats.

  I figured it would be easier once we meshed with the other guns. It was harder. We had to avoid double-teaming targets and wasting ammunition. I needed to watch for threats that adjacent guns missed. And I needed to be aware of the
Glory
around me. Several gunners shot off thrusters and received visits from Fire Control officers. I had numerous near misses.

  But our sixteen guncrews were experienced and we got the hang of the gestalt quickly. Then they brought the pilots into our simulations. Good God! The ship spun and twisted and lurched so much I couldn’t hold a bogey in my sights. I missed so many targets that I ran out of ammunition and received a reprimand. The pilots had their own share of troubles. Several times gun-recoil pushed us into incoming rockets. The dreadnoughts I’d served on barely shivered under full recoil.

  I was again pleased at how quickly my two targeting techs and my own cybernetic implants adapted to the pitch and yaw. We anticipated lead-times and made good on a number of hits. By the fifth shipwide simulation, the pilots kept the ship steadier and we gunners had more time to aim. The Aylin fighters fell like dominoes. We maneuvered in tight on their heavy cruisers, evading defensive fire and dropping rockets.