Cadet Flight Methuselah

004

“This is not a drill. This is not a drill. General quarters. General quarters. All hands to battle stations. All hands to battle stations. This is not a drill. This is not a drill.”

Nim hauled herself off the floor using the edge of the table and looked back out the window, catching one last glimpse of the alien ship before the blast plating slammed shut and sealed the squad room off from space completely. A dozen little crab-looking craft had been peeling off the side of the ship like shedding scales, and at her last glimpse, they had engines.

Whatever it was, they had fighters too.

“Holy shit we're goin' to war!” cried Seig as he scrambled to his feet.

“With who?” demanded Keiji, pulling his chin over the table and looking down with wide-eyed disbelief at the translated message still flashing on its surface. It disappeared the moment Seig snatched his computer back and headed for the door.

“With the goddamn ship out there that's not ours and shooting at us, you fucking moron!” Nim shouted in his face. She latched on to Seig's jumpsuit to aid her in getting back to her feet and the pair took off at breakneck pace out of the debriefing room, not caring whether or not Keiji followed them.

“We can't just launch our marauders!” the cadet shouted after them, standing rigid in the doorway of the squad room as though his feet had just gotten stuck in a gravity well. “Our flight's three months out from rated combat!”

“Heinlein's getting shot to shit and that's what you're worried about?” croaked Seig with a incredulous glare over his shoulder. He shook his head and continued on after Nim as she headed towards their general quarters duty stations on the gunnery deck. There was a kilometer of ship between them and where they had to be and they had to get there fast. “What a ditch humper.”

Another barrage rocked the Heinlein, this one hitting much closer to the launch hangars. Seig reached to his side and snagged Nim by the arm, keeping them both steady on their feet as roughly three dozen men and women in bright yellow and blue checkered jumpsuits and breather masks came swarming out of the briefing room reserved for the deck crew. Like masked ants they dispersed across the flight deck to prep the fighters for launch, each shouting out to their comrades in a kind of tech babble that Nim doubted she would ever understand. Even when she did her rotations as part of the maintenance crew the only words coming out of their mouths she could decipher were the ones related to her marauder and launching it into space.

The deck plates below the marauders designated to hit space first started to thrum with orange light that let the deck crew know that vacuum was now present right beneath their feet. Refueling crews checked each marauder's supply of breathing oxygen and fuel levels, the former of which was the only significant worry. A marauder could fly on a single fuel cell for upwards of a year if they kept to a single engine and vector; it could keep a hospitable environment for its pilot for perhaps only twelve to eighteen hours on a dead stick, everything depending on exactly how damaged the redundant systems and the pilot's exosuit wound up after a fight. Contrary to popular media, freezing to death in a cockpit was the leading cause of death for fighter pilots, not getting blown out of the sky by crackshot pirates. No one save the military really knew that because shit blowing up in spectacular fashions made for much better headlines than a dull report about a marine popsicle discovered floating in the void after a skirmish.

From the small box in the wall that contained the officer's lockers came a fully suited up Roughneck Flight, the lanky blond Lieutenant Colonel Herald leading the charge. Herald was Leo and Damien's training officer, as he flew a Proteus variant, the so-called “Jack of All Trades” marauder. Behind him was his second-in-command and Nim's training officer, the Earth-born amber-eyed Sparrow, shoving his head into his helmet with one hand as he hopped along coaxing his left exosuit boot to lock up around his calf all while finishing up a conversation with Herald from beneath his elbow. Sparrow had a weird habit of doing several things at once and usually it made him look like an utter idiot when on dry land. Still, the man was living proof that almost anything could be made to look graceful in zero gravity.