[▲] Gagarin Interstellar Naval Shipyards, Sol Sector
The crew took the news of their impending draft into active military service without much in the way of either shock or dissension. After all, they had been expecting it after what had happened during the now officially-titled First Contact Incident. They had been putting up with military intelligence and special science division officers picking over their ship and the wreckage they had collected for a solid two weeks as they made their way waypoint to waypoint back to fortified Terran Alliance space. People talked, and information leaked. For everything on board the ship already knew about what was going on, it was surprising that it hadn't yet hit the main information networks.
It was a sign of just how tight a ship the Headmaster Captain had been running, and just how much his crew respected him to keep it that way even though everything else felt like it had fallen to pieces.
Captain Michael delivered their orders without ceremony, much as he had told Flight Methuselah the whole of the situation surrounding the Incident weeks ago during their briefing. There was new information, however. All cadets in their first through fourth years were being transferred to other University Frigates as Naval High Command had been told by the Colonial-Terran Congress that they were too young to participate in live warfare.
This was what caused the most dissension in the ranks; everyone on the Heinlein, from the ten-year-old first year cadets up to her flight of nearly graduated pilots had kept things running smoothly and without incident just like any other majority-age crew stuck in the same situation. In fact they had probably done a better job of it considering main fleet crews weren't trained and schooled on the same ships they ultimately served on; there wasn't a person in the main fleet that would know the Heinlein better than even the youngest member of the cadet crew currently taking care of her. No one wanted to leave their home, not after they had lost friends in the battle and especially not after their home had been shot up by aliens who were in dire need of killing.
The younger crewmen were mostly being transferred to the INS Arthur C. Clark, a Thunderbird-class strike carrier constructed fifty years before the Heinlein. A few, the ones Nim knew had parents either in Congress, one of the military High Commands, or were part of the web of chancellors, governors, or colonization barons that governed Colonial space, were being reassigned to the Alkonst-class Frank Herbert, which was as close to a flying fortress as strike carriers came in the fleet. The Herbert was over a hundred years old but she was nearly impossible to kill or decommission—many had tried and they all had failed. That was probably what High Command was counting on to protect the high-risk cadets whose parents made them targets for every kidnapper in the galaxy. That, and Headmaster Captain Rungran had been Rear Admiral of Fleet Intelligence before taking his conditional retirement to head the ship. Scuttlebutt said the man's information network in the Colonies still put most black hat hackers to shame a decade after he officially left the game.
Captain Michael gave the cadets his word that he would bring them all back to the Heinlein as soon as High Command allowed him to, provided the ship was still fighting the enemy and there were some aliens that still needed killing. His promise seemed to soothe most of the cadets who were furious about being kicked off their ship so soon after they had watched their friends die.
Nim and the rest of Methuselah stood at attention as Sparrow and Colonel Redloader, who looked as though he had aged twenty years in as many days, announced that what remained of Roughneck—all three of them—were being reassigned as tactical advisers and main wing to the Issac Asimov. Unlike the Heinlein, her sister ship hadn't engaged any enemy forces, but she was being pulled back into the main fleet along with them because they were the most advanced strike carriers currently in the Navy. It was going to be their duty to prep the Asimov's crew to fight the incursion forces, which made Flight Methuselah the main engagement flight on the ship. They had been flying combined patrols with Roughneck for weeks; it was just the Colonel's announcement that made it official.
Looking off to her left without moving her head Nim watched Keiji's face carefully during the announcement. He had avoided most of them except when he absolutely had to speak with them, and he hadn't spoken directly to her since the day he tried to apologize for abandoning Seig and she had beaten the living crap out of him outside sickbay. With Sparrow and the rest of Roughneck going to the Asimov and Captain Michael saying nothing to the contrary, Keiji Yutani was back in charge of their wing.
The thought both disgusted and unnerved her. Keiji's going off on his own to rack up kills on the complete opposite side of the battlesphere when he should have been watching Seig's back was had landed Seig on the Sally Ride as a vegetable, not to mention nearly getting Karda killed as he tried to figure out where their other Abrams went as shit went under. Captain Michael had already denied her request to be redeployed in an Abrams-variant marauder so she was stuck with letting Keiji take up the responsibilities he had already proven he was willing to abandon the moment the enemy flitted through his crosshairs.
When Keiji finally noticed she was staring at him he visibly flinched in surprise. Luckily they were at the end of the Captain's briefing and he dismissed them all with a salute, then escorted himself out and back up to the bridge where he had bunkered down over the past two weeks. Keiji immediately got himself lost in the flux of cadets headed back to their bunks to pack up their kits for their mandatory two week leave and Nim lost all desire to chase him down when she spotted Sparrow's pale blond head weaving its way towards her. She waved at her now-former training officer as he simultaneously got get her attention with one hand while typing something up with one thumb—all while greeting several cadets as he passed them by without managing to bump into anyone or trip and fall on his face for failing to keep an eye on where he was headed.
They met up at the bottom of the stepped platform that had been set up in the port hangar bay in front of the scar left on the deck by the first casualties the Heinlein had ever suffered. Sparrow gripped her hand tightly and pulled her into a strong-armed hug, completely disregarding the fact that as a mere first lieutenant she was supposed to be saluting the major. "Guess this is it, my apprentice. Vijay, Nava and I are shipping out in a half hour to meet the Asimov as she jumps in at the Voyager waypoint."
"Now I am the master," said Nim with as theatrical a malevolent cackle as she could manage.
Sparrow laughed at the reference to his favorite classic movie of all time and the two walked side-by-side to the line of gray-blue marauders sitting dormant at the far end of the hangar. For the most part the deck crew had fixed them up quite well; Nim could hardly tell that her Stuka had once looked like a piece of flimsipaper subjected to a shotgun blast after flying nose-first into a debris field at full throttle. The wings and engine assembly missing from Karda's fighter had been replaced and the holes shot through Leo and Damien's marauders were invisible beneath a new layer of seamless surface plating.
There had been nothing left worth salvaging of Seig's Haya. Until his spot in their flight was filled, there was a white and blue INS flag magnetically stuck to the deck where it should have been in their line. It made her feel hollow just looking at it.
"What are you going to paint her with?"
With a start Nim realized she hadn't even given it any thought since being handed her commission and presented her wings. Now that she was officially a Marine pilot she was allowed to have a unique marker placed on the hull of her fighter, and up until three weeks ago she had been looking forward to that more than she had her eighteenth birthday. She and Seig had spent entire weekends debating the merits of all sorts of different designs present on fighters, even historical jets and propeller bombers, deciding which ones they would slap on their hulls the minute they got their wings. The only thing they had decided on was that whatever the design was, they would each be taking half of it, and it would somehow incorporate their unofficial University Frigate title of 'Disaster Twins.'
"I... have no clue."
Sparrow's amber eyes softened and he nodded. "Yeah, point seems a bit moot given everything we've been through, doesn't it."
She nodded stiffly. "Yeah."
"Well, you've got two weeks to decide." The pilot shrugged. "What're you doing with the downtime?"
"Lyall's on patrol somewhere she thinks is secret and my parents are on some deep space exoplanetary survey mission. I'm probably just going to shack up at some hotel in Armstrong and sleep."
The man groaned in disgust. "People like us don't do well in idle, MacNamara. You need to figure out something to do."
"People like us, huh."
"You and I, we don't work like everyone else. We don't sit and reflect on things because if we stop we die. When we start dwelling on the what ifs we suffocate ourselves with indecision and second-guessing even faster than we can fly." He shot her a concerned look over his shoulder. "If you bunker down and try to sleep this off you're not coming back sane."
Nim looked out at the undecorated fighter line, knowing he was right. She had been in that place before, right after she received news that her brother had died during a test flight of a new marauder system. She had rotted away for a week in her quarters, hounded by her bunkmate Shelke to get her ass out of bed and do something useful, all the while wondering if she had made the right choice in joining the Marines. Day in and day out she kept thinking she should have just joined her mother's exobiology team like the woman had wanted. She had always dreamed of having just one civilian sector child instead of worrying about all three of them jumping about space getting shot at.
Ultimately it was Seig who dragged her out of her stupor by getting her to plan the best and most technically demanding prank the University Frigate system had ever seen. Even when they were reamed out by the Headmaster Captain and had dishonorable discharges hanging over their heads like guillotines nothing seemed quite as grim as it did when she had been sitting idle, stewing in her own thoughts and going through a myriad of little details that may or may not have changed the outcome of the whole thing.
"Christ, I miss him," she muttered finally, shaking her head. "I even miss Shelke, the garlic-breathing bitch that she was."
"I miss Zee and Zen just as much. Hell I even miss Herald and all the shit he gave me about getting land sick." He shrugged and leaned to his side, tipping her to the left as his shoulder collided with her own. "And Banoub wasn't a bitch. She was the regulation version of you. It's why I kept you billeted together."
Nim choked down her sudden urge to scream. "Jesus fucking Christ, those five years of midnight couscous misery were your fault?"
"Remember what the Captain told you about hitting your superior officers!" cackled the major as he taunted her with a smug white-toothed grin. He stuck his hand in the front pocket of his jumpsuit and handed her a clear piece of flimsipaper. "The old man said to meet him there on the 26th. Place is kind of a dive, but then again, what do you expect from a joint built where there's real gravity?"
"He's seriously going to buy me a beer?" she asked, staring at the bar address printed on the paper. It was in some place called Irwin City on Luna, which she knew was somewhere near Armstrong, their next stop once they finished the docking checks of the Heinlein and released her to the retrofit crews on Gagarin. "That was a joke between me and Calli. He shouldn't have even heard it."
Sparrow dropped a hand onto her shoulder and said, "He's a good Captain, best in the fleet damn what anyone else says. He's also the only one that would ever put up with you and Seig doing what you did best—and trust me, if you hadn't pulled that last stunt when there was a rear admiral on ship, he wouldn't have come down on you like he did. So you damn well see to it you keep him and our ship safe, MacNamara. I'm really fond of this lady, as you well know."
"Aye aye, sir. We'll be here when you get back."