Incursion Vector

017

[▲] MSC Sirocco, Ibn Battuta Waypoint

"You're what, sixteen, right, Wildcard?"

"For a few more months, yeah. Why?"

Over the comex Nim could hear the puzzled frown in Vic's voice as he tried to figure things out. "How the hell did you graduate from the University Frigate system already?"

"Because I am that awesome.”

"Seriously, dude. What the hell?"

After landing in the MSC Sirocco's somewhat ghostly fighter hangar, Flight Methuselah had been given very little to do but chat while the ship's navigators plotted their jump out to the Caminha Waypoint. From there they would be jumping to four other waypoints before they hit their final destination, but they would only be doing so once the rest of the fleet caught up with them. No one was taking any chances that the alien attack on the Tiaha fleet was some random freak accident because no one could say it was. Everyone was a bit on edge, but no one more so than the fleet itself, which was having to rely on outside military help for the first time in centuries. She had the distinct feeling that the crew of the Sirocco did not like them on board, even with the captain announcing that one of their own was in the fighter wing.

Nim had spent most of the time fixing her new VTI while listening to everyone over the comex. All of the fonts were wrong, the thing gave her audio cues for the stupidest shit, and all of the fatfinger-failsafes she had painstakingly removed from her Stuka's VTI were back in place even though Cooper claimed he had cloned it. It was taking longer than expected, though that was probably because she was actually trying to remember what her old VTI had looked like. Those memories were so wrapped up with Seig that recalling them was shockingly painful. He had been really good at things like HUD and VTI customization. His reasoning was that they were flying fighters around in space saving the galaxy so their screens had to look at least as cool as the stuff they came up with for vids.

It was just how they always worked. She figured out the basics and Seig smoothed out all the rough edges. The best part was they never had to discuss anything—they were nearly always on the same page, and on the rare occasion they weren't, it took all of a minute for one to catch the other up. They didn't even have to use complete sentences.

To keep herself from becoming depressed and useless she had decided to pay serious attention to her flight's chatter. Vic, whose callsign was rather fittingly Hardcover given how he was always almost always toting around a bound book of some sort, hadn't had much time to chat with the rest of them between running combat simulations for hours on end and familiarizing himself with the Heinlein's layout—the other day he had managed to get himself so utterly lost in the engineering subdecks that the rest of Methuselah spent twenty minutes tracking him down before roll call due to his not having switched his computer's registration over to the Heinlein from the Niven. And in his defense the actual reason why Karda was so young wasn't something he could find out by just reading a personnel file, even the highly classified ones they now had as pilots who had taken part in the First Contact Incident.

"You may as well tell him, Wildcard," said Damien with a chuckle. "It's a pretty good story."

"And ruin my genius pirate mystique?" retorted Karda. "Ugh, fine. You know I got busted for smuggling when I was twelve, right? My uncle and I were delivering supplies—perfectly medicinal alcohol, smuggler's honor—to a dry colony, one of the preacher fellows sold us out to the baby navy, and my uncle made me go military instead of prison."

"Yeah, I read all that. But why didn't you end up with the rest of the cadets your age?"

"Because my parole officer was a prick," replied the pilot with a malicious cackle. "He wanted to make an example out of someone and he picked me. Gave me the fifth year UF entrance test instead of the third year Naval Academy's betting I'd wash out and he could toss me in prison to pad his numbers. Still, I passed—lowest score ever to make it on a ship, mind you—so he had to send me into the UF, and I ended up assigned to the Heinlein 'cause no other Headmaster Captain wanted my dead weight. It was actually the COB who saw he'd given me a mislabeled exam when she was setting up my duty schedule.”