The klaxon sounded at 0400. No-one actually thought that it was a real alert, but its shriek was inescapable.
“All hands to battle stations! Enemy starcruiser at 37 degrees elevation, 22 degrees bearing. Acceleration 10g, distance five light-minutes. All hands to battle stations!” That damn message was blaring over the intercom, in far too calm a tone for there to actually be anything hostile in the system.
Still though, Commander Ervin Norton was a pilot on the UTFS Warden-the best of the damn best.
“All hands to battle stations! Enemy starcruiser at 37 degrees elevation, 22 degrees bearing. Acceleration 10g, distance five light-minutes. All hands to battle stations!” That damn message was blaring over the intercom, in far too calm a tone for there to actually be anything hostile in the system.
Still though, Commander Ervin Norton was a pilot on the UTFS Warden-the best of the damn best.
On big ships like the Warden, crewmembers were quartered almost directly adjacent to their battle stations. They had to be-if they had all accommodations blocks in one area, it would take precious minutes for crewmembers to arrive.
Admiral Hazzard had a habit of pulling these drills at unholy hours of the morning, so most pilots slept in their flightsuits.
For some reason-likely simple inertia-they were still called that, despite the lack of any flight on the part of the pilots. As he rounded the corner onto the flight deck, he was greeted with its typical barely-ordered chaos. Pilots stood outside the consoles they would shortly occupy, wired into their disposable drone fightercraft, waiting for Ervin’s orders.
“Officer on deck!” Someone shouted, and the various personnel in the room-not just pilots-snapped to attention and saluted.
“At ease, soldiers.” Ervin replied. “Support Group, what’s our situation?” Ervin may be the commander of this fighter wing, but that didn’t mean that he got told about any of this crap beforehand.
A man wearing the insignia of a Support/Logistics officer stepped forward into the center of the room. Fleet protocol gave him just over a minute and a half to summarize the situation before the pilots had to get into their Consoles.
“We’re facing a routine system incursion-a single ship, though it’s easily classified as a Monitor, as we’ve already detected at least two hundred hostile fightercraft. We’ll likely be outnumbered out there-although if past experience serves, we have easily superior technology and personnel. As for the situation, well...” Awkward pause. “We’ve been through it all before.”
Unfortunately, that was true. There were only so many drills that they could run, and they had gone through them all months ago.
Ervin shot a sympathetic look in the directions of the Support Officer, then said, in a voice loud enough for the whole room to hear, “We’ve been through it before, so I expect a near-perfect performance from each and every one of you, understood?”
He was answered with a rousing cry of ‘Sir, yes sir!’.
He nodded. “Wonderful. Everyone, get in your Consoles.” Ervin made his way to the far end of the room, making sure that each pilot was strapped in correctly, before readying himself.
The door of his Console closed, surrounding him in black for just a moment, before it lit up with pinpricks of light. The starfield was there, yes, but the most of the points of light were a bright green-they were his starfighters.
The drone fighters they flew were long, almost cylindrical affairs. They were designed to be able to be launched out of the same tubes as a missile, so that was a logical choice. They had a single large engine, capable of getting them to far higher speeds then they were really useful at. They surpassed by far the speed at which RCS Thrusters became useless for maneuvering, so they had to steer via Gravitic Manipulation, which allowed for far finer course correction. The fighter had a cluster of rapid-reaction particle beams mounted at its front, each capable of frying the computer of a hostile missile or fighter. The fighters weren't pretty-the Warden actually carried a dozen or so unarmed drones built to look visually appealing for flyovers and propaganda purposes-but they got the job done.
He flipped a switch that gave him personal control over a fighter, and his view morphed into a point-of-view camera mounted on the fighter’s nose cone, surrounded by various meters, gauges, and scales. He was in heaven.
There wasn’t much chatter over the radio-every fighter operated more or less autonomously. Formations were useless once you started moving at relativistic speeds, and even if you could coordinate fighters that well, the fact that they each had to be mounted with an Ansible to be worth anything made it a horribly stupid idea.
The routine was practically scripted. They didn’t even feel like they were legitimately dogfighting-they were playing a video game.
Ervin’s particle beam sliced through a fighter, his fighter pulled a ridiculously tight turn, and dispatched another opponent that was encroaching on his space-a mere ten miles away.
When he fought, he was in Flow. When he trained against a human, he had similar experiences. When he drilled against a computer though, it ceased to engage him.
He put his fighter on a course that took it directly towards a cluster of several hostiles, and activated the self-destruct sequence. The opposing fighters weren’t giving off Ansiblic signals, so he assumed that there were meat pilots in there.
The screen flashed white, then cut to the outside of the Warden, in the point of view of a new fighter, launching from the Warden’s Launch Deck. He went through three more before the last hostile was eliminated-which was approximately three more fighters then he would have lost in actual combat.
His Console swung open, and he stepped out onto the Flight Deck. He caught a couple of looks directed his way from his pilots, more than a few of them seemingly surprised by his ‘poor performance’.
Let them stare. He thought. If the Admiral’s going to work us like this, surely he knows what’s going to happen to us. We’re not built, psychologically, for this game.
Hell though, the TJ Club was open after drills, so there was an upside.
The TJ Club was the best-kept secret in the Republic Fleet. Organized on each ship by a few mid-ranking officers like Ervin, it was a highly illegal enterprise that operated out of one of the Warden’s massive Ansible Sinks. The Ansible Sinks were massive chambers, filled with tubes and grids, that enabled the ship to fold, operate its Ansibles, and manipulate various fundamental forces of physics. They were also a hell of a place to hang out-they were zero-g most of the time, but sometimes there’d be a surprise shift in it, and you’d find yourself falling up or into a wall.
The substances that were distributed there just made the whole thing that much better.
The entrance was guarded by a pair of men in Marine’s jumpsuits. They were in on the thing, of course-though few people below the rank of Deck Officer were allowed in. Ervin nodded, and one of the marines opened the door for him.
The place had originally been a sterile white. Now though, it had been overhauled with better lighting, and several subtle magnetic points for attaching boxes or coolers to. Ervin grinned, and kicked off the wall, landing in a nook in the far corner, framed on several sides by the fins that-were the ship to rapidly accelerate or change course-would likely tear him apart.
A few minutes later, someone in a Midshipman’s uniform dropped in-they had to keep a few of those around to serve the more important officers, after all.
“The usual, sir?” The boy asked, and Ervin nodded. The Middie produced a pair of syringes, each filled with a pale white liquid. TJ, or Torpedo Juice, was the drug of choice in the military. A cocktail of various chemicals and nanomachines, its primary advantage was that, while you could get a buzz, there was a second injection that nullified the TJ’s effects. Its name derived from the old practice, in Earth’s submarine navies, of distilling drinking alcohol from the propellant that had been used for primitive torpedoes.
The needle pierced the skin of his arm, and the TJ flowed into him. His world became clearer, brighter, more engaging. It became harder to focus, and he kicked out of the corner, drifting in freefall.
A klaxon sounded, even louder than usual to his drug-enhanced system. A moment later, his blissful drift between walls, surrounded by several others similarly occupied, though a few seemed to be sober enough to have realized that things were about to get interesting, came to an abrupt end as he crashed into a wall.
Every Ansible Sink in the room was on, at something that felt like two or three g’s. Had he been in the same alcove as he had been a second before, he would now be a red slush pasted on its walls.
“All hands to battle stations! UTFS Warden to Flank Speed, repeat, UTFS Warden to Flank Speed! This is not a drill, repeat, this is not a drill! All hands to battle stations!”
Ervin grabbed the second syringe, and practically stabbed it into himself-not into his arm this time, into his thigh. In the high gravity though, he had to try multiple times.
The door at what now appeared to be the top of the room swung open, and one of the marines stuck his head in. “Damn!” The soldier swore, barely audible, and slammed his hand into a button by the side of the door. The gravity became a constant 1g around the entire chamber, without the random fluctuations it had experienced a moment before. “Everybody out!” He shouted, gesturing wildly.
Ervin knew what that button was-it was an emergency switch, used for when mechanics had to work in these rooms in battle. It reported the situation directly to the bridge, and they’d manage to put two and two together.
Shortly after a drill, the ship accelerates to flank speed. An Ansible Sink is cut off. A large number of officers are loopy for the rest of the day. Admiral Hazzard would realize that he had found his ship’s TJ Club, and, well, he wouldn’t be happy.
Ervin idly wondered, as he made the disconcerting switch from ‘wall-down’ gravity to the ship’s normal field, if he should just turn himself in to the Tactical officer in charge of the Military Police right then and there.
He shook his head though-he had been called to Battle Stations, and he was still an officer of the United Terran Fleet. He had a duty-and, given the address they had just been given, this was legitimate.
Slightly groggy, he found himself on the Flight Deck, the Support Officer detailing how there had been a surprise raid on some frontier world called Tantaline, by an unknown, presumably alien attacker. The Warden was cruising at maximum acceleration towards the system’s primary foldpoint.
Ervin gave his spiel next, about how they had little or no idea what the capabilities of the enemies at Tantaline were, and when the Warden might expect to meet them in combat. He dismissed his pilots to their Consoles, and turned to face the doorway.
He knew what he’d see there-two Tactical agents, with the badges of Military Police Officers. “Mr. Norton.” One said, vocoder masking whatever he ordinarily sounded like, “You’re going to come with us.”
Ervin nodded. “Thank you for waiting until we were alone, gentlemen.”
The Agents didn’t respond-they didn’t even cuff him. It was probably arrogance, but he wasn’t about to resist them. They escorted him to the Brig, down on one of the lower decks. A man in a Tactical uniform sat there. Visually, he was indistinguishable from any other Tactical soldier-hell, some people even just called them ‘Tacticals’, they were so hard to tell apart. Viscerally though, this man was... Different.
“Mr. Norton.” He said, gesturing to a chair. “Please, sit down.”
Ervin complied.
“I assume that we all know why you are here, Mr. Norton.” The man from Tactical said.
“Yes, Sir.” Ervin said, voice cool. What he had done was clearly stupid-he was an idiot, and whatever he was about to be given, he deserved.
“I hope you understand why this is unacceptable behavior, Mr. Norton. Tactical, as the legal authority for all criminal cases involving personnel of the Fleet, has been monitoring these ‘TJ Clubs’ for some time. We have decided, however, that it is not worth the risk to combat effectiveness at the moment to spend time waiting to prosecute them-we need only make a few, high-profile examples of participants in them.”
Why are you telling me this? Ervin wondered. If you were going to make an example of me, you sure wouldn’t tell me about it.
“You’re being given an opportunity, Mr. Norton.” The man slid a pair of files over to Ervin. “One of these contains transfer orders, to be executed immediately, as well as papers granting you immunity from criminal prosecution, signed on the First Citizen’s authority. The other contains a summons, and orders to immediately take you into custody, on the same authority. Take your pick.”
Ervin shrugged. “This is why everyone hates you, you know. It’s not that you make us do anything-rather, it’s that you put us in situations where you’re offering us the only way out.”
The man didn’t move, as Ervin took the first packet, asking, “When do we begin?”
Admiral Hazzard had a habit of pulling these drills at unholy hours of the morning, so most pilots slept in their flightsuits.
For some reason-likely simple inertia-they were still called that, despite the lack of any flight on the part of the pilots. As he rounded the corner onto the flight deck, he was greeted with its typical barely-ordered chaos. Pilots stood outside the consoles they would shortly occupy, wired into their disposable drone fightercraft, waiting for Ervin’s orders.
“Officer on deck!” Someone shouted, and the various personnel in the room-not just pilots-snapped to attention and saluted.
“At ease, soldiers.” Ervin replied. “Support Group, what’s our situation?” Ervin may be the commander of this fighter wing, but that didn’t mean that he got told about any of this crap beforehand.
A man wearing the insignia of a Support/Logistics officer stepped forward into the center of the room. Fleet protocol gave him just over a minute and a half to summarize the situation before the pilots had to get into their Consoles.
“We’re facing a routine system incursion-a single ship, though it’s easily classified as a Monitor, as we’ve already detected at least two hundred hostile fightercraft. We’ll likely be outnumbered out there-although if past experience serves, we have easily superior technology and personnel. As for the situation, well...” Awkward pause. “We’ve been through it all before.”
Unfortunately, that was true. There were only so many drills that they could run, and they had gone through them all months ago.
Ervin shot a sympathetic look in the directions of the Support Officer, then said, in a voice loud enough for the whole room to hear, “We’ve been through it before, so I expect a near-perfect performance from each and every one of you, understood?”
He was answered with a rousing cry of ‘Sir, yes sir!’.
He nodded. “Wonderful. Everyone, get in your Consoles.” Ervin made his way to the far end of the room, making sure that each pilot was strapped in correctly, before readying himself.
The door of his Console closed, surrounding him in black for just a moment, before it lit up with pinpricks of light. The starfield was there, yes, but the most of the points of light were a bright green-they were his starfighters.
The drone fighters they flew were long, almost cylindrical affairs. They were designed to be able to be launched out of the same tubes as a missile, so that was a logical choice. They had a single large engine, capable of getting them to far higher speeds then they were really useful at. They surpassed by far the speed at which RCS Thrusters became useless for maneuvering, so they had to steer via Gravitic Manipulation, which allowed for far finer course correction. The fighter had a cluster of rapid-reaction particle beams mounted at its front, each capable of frying the computer of a hostile missile or fighter. The fighters weren't pretty-the Warden actually carried a dozen or so unarmed drones built to look visually appealing for flyovers and propaganda purposes-but they got the job done.
He flipped a switch that gave him personal control over a fighter, and his view morphed into a point-of-view camera mounted on the fighter’s nose cone, surrounded by various meters, gauges, and scales. He was in heaven.
There wasn’t much chatter over the radio-every fighter operated more or less autonomously. Formations were useless once you started moving at relativistic speeds, and even if you could coordinate fighters that well, the fact that they each had to be mounted with an Ansible to be worth anything made it a horribly stupid idea.
The routine was practically scripted. They didn’t even feel like they were legitimately dogfighting-they were playing a video game.
Ervin’s particle beam sliced through a fighter, his fighter pulled a ridiculously tight turn, and dispatched another opponent that was encroaching on his space-a mere ten miles away.
When he fought, he was in Flow. When he trained against a human, he had similar experiences. When he drilled against a computer though, it ceased to engage him.
He put his fighter on a course that took it directly towards a cluster of several hostiles, and activated the self-destruct sequence. The opposing fighters weren’t giving off Ansiblic signals, so he assumed that there were meat pilots in there.
The screen flashed white, then cut to the outside of the Warden, in the point of view of a new fighter, launching from the Warden’s Launch Deck. He went through three more before the last hostile was eliminated-which was approximately three more fighters then he would have lost in actual combat.
His Console swung open, and he stepped out onto the Flight Deck. He caught a couple of looks directed his way from his pilots, more than a few of them seemingly surprised by his ‘poor performance’.
Let them stare. He thought. If the Admiral’s going to work us like this, surely he knows what’s going to happen to us. We’re not built, psychologically, for this game.
Hell though, the TJ Club was open after drills, so there was an upside.
The TJ Club was the best-kept secret in the Republic Fleet. Organized on each ship by a few mid-ranking officers like Ervin, it was a highly illegal enterprise that operated out of one of the Warden’s massive Ansible Sinks. The Ansible Sinks were massive chambers, filled with tubes and grids, that enabled the ship to fold, operate its Ansibles, and manipulate various fundamental forces of physics. They were also a hell of a place to hang out-they were zero-g most of the time, but sometimes there’d be a surprise shift in it, and you’d find yourself falling up or into a wall.
The substances that were distributed there just made the whole thing that much better.
The entrance was guarded by a pair of men in Marine’s jumpsuits. They were in on the thing, of course-though few people below the rank of Deck Officer were allowed in. Ervin nodded, and one of the marines opened the door for him.
The place had originally been a sterile white. Now though, it had been overhauled with better lighting, and several subtle magnetic points for attaching boxes or coolers to. Ervin grinned, and kicked off the wall, landing in a nook in the far corner, framed on several sides by the fins that-were the ship to rapidly accelerate or change course-would likely tear him apart.
A few minutes later, someone in a Midshipman’s uniform dropped in-they had to keep a few of those around to serve the more important officers, after all.
“The usual, sir?” The boy asked, and Ervin nodded. The Middie produced a pair of syringes, each filled with a pale white liquid. TJ, or Torpedo Juice, was the drug of choice in the military. A cocktail of various chemicals and nanomachines, its primary advantage was that, while you could get a buzz, there was a second injection that nullified the TJ’s effects. Its name derived from the old practice, in Earth’s submarine navies, of distilling drinking alcohol from the propellant that had been used for primitive torpedoes.
The needle pierced the skin of his arm, and the TJ flowed into him. His world became clearer, brighter, more engaging. It became harder to focus, and he kicked out of the corner, drifting in freefall.
A klaxon sounded, even louder than usual to his drug-enhanced system. A moment later, his blissful drift between walls, surrounded by several others similarly occupied, though a few seemed to be sober enough to have realized that things were about to get interesting, came to an abrupt end as he crashed into a wall.
Every Ansible Sink in the room was on, at something that felt like two or three g’s. Had he been in the same alcove as he had been a second before, he would now be a red slush pasted on its walls.
“All hands to battle stations! UTFS Warden to Flank Speed, repeat, UTFS Warden to Flank Speed! This is not a drill, repeat, this is not a drill! All hands to battle stations!”
Ervin grabbed the second syringe, and practically stabbed it into himself-not into his arm this time, into his thigh. In the high gravity though, he had to try multiple times.
The door at what now appeared to be the top of the room swung open, and one of the marines stuck his head in. “Damn!” The soldier swore, barely audible, and slammed his hand into a button by the side of the door. The gravity became a constant 1g around the entire chamber, without the random fluctuations it had experienced a moment before. “Everybody out!” He shouted, gesturing wildly.
Ervin knew what that button was-it was an emergency switch, used for when mechanics had to work in these rooms in battle. It reported the situation directly to the bridge, and they’d manage to put two and two together.
Shortly after a drill, the ship accelerates to flank speed. An Ansible Sink is cut off. A large number of officers are loopy for the rest of the day. Admiral Hazzard would realize that he had found his ship’s TJ Club, and, well, he wouldn’t be happy.
Ervin idly wondered, as he made the disconcerting switch from ‘wall-down’ gravity to the ship’s normal field, if he should just turn himself in to the Tactical officer in charge of the Military Police right then and there.
He shook his head though-he had been called to Battle Stations, and he was still an officer of the United Terran Fleet. He had a duty-and, given the address they had just been given, this was legitimate.
Slightly groggy, he found himself on the Flight Deck, the Support Officer detailing how there had been a surprise raid on some frontier world called Tantaline, by an unknown, presumably alien attacker. The Warden was cruising at maximum acceleration towards the system’s primary foldpoint.
Ervin gave his spiel next, about how they had little or no idea what the capabilities of the enemies at Tantaline were, and when the Warden might expect to meet them in combat. He dismissed his pilots to their Consoles, and turned to face the doorway.
He knew what he’d see there-two Tactical agents, with the badges of Military Police Officers. “Mr. Norton.” One said, vocoder masking whatever he ordinarily sounded like, “You’re going to come with us.”
Ervin nodded. “Thank you for waiting until we were alone, gentlemen.”
The Agents didn’t respond-they didn’t even cuff him. It was probably arrogance, but he wasn’t about to resist them. They escorted him to the Brig, down on one of the lower decks. A man in a Tactical uniform sat there. Visually, he was indistinguishable from any other Tactical soldier-hell, some people even just called them ‘Tacticals’, they were so hard to tell apart. Viscerally though, this man was... Different.
“Mr. Norton.” He said, gesturing to a chair. “Please, sit down.”
Ervin complied.
“I assume that we all know why you are here, Mr. Norton.” The man from Tactical said.
“Yes, Sir.” Ervin said, voice cool. What he had done was clearly stupid-he was an idiot, and whatever he was about to be given, he deserved.
“I hope you understand why this is unacceptable behavior, Mr. Norton. Tactical, as the legal authority for all criminal cases involving personnel of the Fleet, has been monitoring these ‘TJ Clubs’ for some time. We have decided, however, that it is not worth the risk to combat effectiveness at the moment to spend time waiting to prosecute them-we need only make a few, high-profile examples of participants in them.”
Why are you telling me this? Ervin wondered. If you were going to make an example of me, you sure wouldn’t tell me about it.
“You’re being given an opportunity, Mr. Norton.” The man slid a pair of files over to Ervin. “One of these contains transfer orders, to be executed immediately, as well as papers granting you immunity from criminal prosecution, signed on the First Citizen’s authority. The other contains a summons, and orders to immediately take you into custody, on the same authority. Take your pick.”
Ervin shrugged. “This is why everyone hates you, you know. It’s not that you make us do anything-rather, it’s that you put us in situations where you’re offering us the only way out.”
The man didn’t move, as Ervin took the first packet, asking, “When do we begin?”