[▲] INS Robert A. Heinlein, Ibn Battuta Waypoint
It had never been so glaringly apparent just how empty the Heinlein had been until they launched from the Gagarin Shipyards with a full crew. When she was a University Frigate Nim had known every serviceman and cadet by sight, even if she didn't know their whole names or where they were stationed. There were just enough crewmen to make holiday parties fun but not so many as to have everyone constantly bumping into each other on their way to their duty stations. Now there were always a handful of people on every maglev car, legitimate crowds of personnel standing around in the common areas gabbing on downtime, and actual waiting lines ten to twelve crewmen deep to use the common com stations.
She wasn't entirely sure she liked it. When she had loaded out during the Incident she had done so to protect her friends on board the Heinlein. These new people on her ship were faceless, nameless drones she couldn't bring herself to care about if she tried. And she had been trying.
The expected ego chafing was also starting to get very annoying. The cadet crew had handled their duties with distinction during the Incident and so most of the mid-grade enlisted staff had been transferred to the Asimov, leaving the ship in the capable hands of their ex-students while they went on to train those who hadn't seen combat. The section leads were still on board, but it was mostly the sixteen- and seventeen-year-old ensigns training people twice their age how to do what they did while the leads wrangled duty schedules, billeting assignments, and requisition orders for the dauntingly massive personnel influx. And it was pretty clear that a lot of the new people didn't like being told what to do by officers young enough to be their own kids. Even the new wing brought on to replace the obliterated Flight Lazarus, pulled together from redundant patrol flights on the capital ships INS Tetsu Yano and Francis Drake, were not thrilled with the fact that they were subordinate to the "teenage kids" in Methuselah though they had been flying for years longer.
And just to make things even more awkward, Methuselah was now the only original flight left on the ship.
Flight Loonies, which had been under Shelke's command, had been officially dissolved. With Shelke dead her XO Sabrina Hepburn had taken over for the return to Gagarin. Not long after they left for Luna Nim heard that Keifer Jackson, Sabrina's co-Abrams pilot, had utterly lost it and was now under heavily supervised psychiatric care. With the Heinlein now being part of the main fleet Loonies' twin Proteus pilots Franklin and Brandon Brighton had to be split up since siblings could not serve on the same warship. Frankie had opted to transfer to the INS Erwin Rommel and his departure left Loonies gutted, so Sabrina, Brandon, and their Hayha pilot Greg Sherlock had been transferred to the Asimov and merged with what was left of Roughneck. With them had gone Sebastian Connor, Heinlein's best marauder machinist mate and the only person left alive after the IED explosion she trusted to make changes to her Stuka without her presence. She hoped Asimov was making good use of all the Heinlein crew they had adopted because she sure as hell missed them.
Now it was just Methuselah, the replacement guy, and the new eight-man flight which called itself Flight Errant. Nim didn't even like their name; it clashed with the theme of her ship, which had always drawn a flight's name from the books written by Heinlein himself. It was like they didn't want to fit in.
As they made the thirty-six hour jump journey out to the Ibn Battuta Waypoint to rendezvous with Minuteman and what remained of the Tiaha fleet Nim had busied herself studying the Seawolf Interdiction Fighter. Or as much of it as she could, considering that Cooper and his band of lab coat commandos-and the rest of them did wear lab coats, though none of them were white and one man, the propulsion specialist Kilmore, lined the edges of his with silver space tape-kept the fighter tarped and locked down. Eventually she quit coming down every few hours to look at the thing and holed herself up in Methuselah's quarters studying its technical schematics. They were impeccably organized for a military project manned by supposedly civilian contractors, though the person who last wrote up the whitepapers was in dire need of a spell check. There were way too many useless e's and u's in the words.
Having spent the past ten minutes trying to use her disappointed motherly stare to get her attention, Calli finally slammed her hand over the top of Nim's computer to force her to recognize her presence. "Hi there. Stop calling Vic 'replacement guy'. He thinks you hate him."
"Hate's a little strong-I'd stick with indifferent."
"Well your indifference is annoying the hell out of me. And Karda. And Damien. But they're too nice so I'm calling you on it."
"I don't do it out loud," Nim retorted, stealing her computer back from beneath her palm so she could continue memorizing the layout of the SIF's backup power systems. "When he's around."
"What're you going to do after we pick up the new Proteus pilots we're supposed to be assigned when we join the new battle group? Are you just going to start labeling them Alpha through Zulu?"
"What's wrong with that?"
"It makes you a bitch, that's what."
"We were fine how we were."
"You can't operate a strike carrier during war with a skeleton crew; it's tactical suicide. And we were down to half a skeleton crew after they had to redeploy all the sub-fives to Clarke and Herbert."
She sighed and looked across the table at her friend. Calli's off-blue eyes rimmed by the quicksilver-colored implants that allowed her to process the visible light spectrum were staring right back at her with a hard angry shadow around them. "I'm coping with it, all right? Get off my back."
"No, I'm going to cling to your back like those monkeys they have at Damien's place until you grow the fuck up. Don't think I won't."
"That's... really creepy." She flashed the Athena pilot a sneering grin. "But you're short enough."
"A short Y-axis makes it easy to snap space sticks like you in half when they piss me off." She leaned forward with both elbows on the table, not carrying over any sort of ill will about the snipe at her height. Calli had known her too long to take any insults like that seriously, particularly when they came from Nim any time she had her face in a technical manual. "Did you see the little white and black one Damien's sister had on her shoulder all the time? It was adorable-but can you believe we evolved from things like that?"
"I know," mused Nim, slouching back in her chair and slinging her arms over the back. "Evolution screwed us. Do you know what I could do with a prehensile tail?"
From then on the two engaged in a heated and almost scholarly debate about how useful and useless prehensile tails would be to spaceflight and CIC operations. When Damien, Karda and Leo walked in after their showers they gave the two women looks that said they clearly believed their fellow pilots had descended into insanity. They got the same apprehensive stare from the replacement guy when he joined them a half hour later, but eventually he joined in and offered his two bytes. Apparently Vic's parents were exobiologists off studying the blue four-armed space monkeys that had been discovered in the Centarus Arm a decade ago. He knew a hell of a lot about evolution for a guy who, according to his records, barely passed every biology and chemistry class he'd taken on the Niven.
"Attention all hands this is the Captain," came Michael's voice over the shipwide com. Immediately their entire animated conversation ceased and everyone stilled themselves to listen. "Prepare to exit bridgespace and rendezvous with the Tiaha Migrant Fleet in zero five mikes. Assume damage control state two condition Bravo." The source of his voice switched over to their personal computers instead of the ship speakers. "Flight Methuselah, Flight Errant, mount up for load out. Captains Yutani and Shalimov, secure com Juliet with me."
Everyone dropped what they were doing and filed out of their quarters, meeting up in the hallway with half of Flight Errant. They all swapped the standard pleasantries and headed to the maglev, then parted company as Errant launched from the starboard side while Methuselah always had and always would launch from the still-scarred deck where they had suffered their first ever losses. As her flight jogged down the corridor towards their lockers she was met at the door by Cooper, his overlong brown hair looking particularly knotted beneath the green calibration visor shoved up over his head.
"All righty, here you go," said the scientist, walking straight up to her and dumping a matte gray torso shell of an exosuit into her arms. "Have fun, bring her home in one piece with lots of datapoints for us."
"Excuse me?"
Cooper grinned and waved his hand towards the fighter line to herd her along. "No pressure."
Sitting where her Stuka should have been at the end of the line was a ship with a flat gray hull that looked like a marauder that had been squished by the thumb of a giant. The repeater cannons had been moved away from the main body of the fighter and brought almost inline with the cockpit, though they looked slightly larger than the ones on her fighter. A rounded framework connected the fuselage and the particle cannons on the wingtips with open holes in the frame where she expected there to be more... ship. The missile battery was behind the cockpit now, along with a third repeater cannon, both of them streamlined to look like mere curves in the ship skin instead of additions tacked on after the fact. The one thing good she had to say about it was that the maneuvering thrusters looked a lot more fancy than they did on her Stuka-but then again, there was only half as many.
"Most of that boat is missing," said Nim in a deadpan. "I'm not loading out into a live theater in half a fighter I've never sat in before! I'll be a liability to my flight!"
The scientist cackled almost hysterically as he slapped her on the shoulder. "I've got a bet going with the Captain on this! Trust me, it'll be fun!"
"Like hell you do."
"Fine, it's just with Baskerville." Cooper sneered at her like one of Damien's more immature nephews denied a second cookie after dinner. "It'll still be fun."
"Move it, MacNamara!" shouted Keiji, sticking his head out of the locker room with an irate look on his face. Either he hadn't noticed-which was unlikely-or he just didn't care that there was an experimental fighter sitting in his line. She suspected that there was something seriously wrong with him since they met up on Luna, but now it was a verified fact. Pre-Incident Keiji Yutani would have raised hell by storming up to the Captain's office and protesting such last-minute changes to his flight's roster.
Now he just looked impatient. For some reason it was pissing her off more than Cooper's suddenly dumping the SIF off on her without space trials.
"I get now why Aries decked you," muttered the pilot as she headed to her locker.
"Use that shell," reminded Cooper, tapping his chest as though she would somehow forget to put on a vital piece of her own equipment. "Cole cloned what he could off your last VTI but you really took a torch to that thing, yanno? Lucky we got the procedure down after all the VTIs Aries fucked up with his zero-G ring stunts. Obviously genetic, that."
Glowering at nothing in particular she slipped into the locker room, doffed her jumpsuit and suited up in her exosuit quickly. Out of habit she looked to left. Nothing but the red holographic lockout was there.
"What's the plan, cap?" asked Karda as he slapped his knee and chestplate to start his suit diagnostics.
"We're being temporarily assigned to the MSC Sirocco as vanguard," replied Keiji as his own suit diagnostics came back green. "Flight Errant is patrolling this space with Agamemnon Wing while we head to the Sirocco, beach, and jump with her to the Caminha Waypoint to provide the fighter detail. Anansi is waiting for us there and will pick us up but our CIC is going to be running out of Calli's Athena until the Heinlein joins us with the last of the Tiaha fleet." He looked at Nim. "Can you fly that thing?"
She rolled her eyes as she started diagnostics on the odd gray chestpiece she now had to wear. The second she got back she was painting the thing a normal matte black and if Cooper didn't like it she was going to introduce his backside to the deck, damn the collateral coffee damage. "Not like I've got a choice, unless any of you guys saw where he put my baby. Fucking wet-eared flight crew not watching the damn deck. Bastards."
"There's holes in it already," remarked Damien with a half-grin. "Bet you can't thread an asteroid through one."
"You find me the asteroid and I'll make you eat those words, monkey herder," she said with a smirk, finding the idea to be the best thing anyone had come up with in a while.
Karda sputtered and laughed at the same time, evidently recalling just how many monkeys had populated the premise of the Lewis family nature reserve. With a chuckle Damien elbowed him in the side and said, "Space pirate baby face."
Instantly the youngest member of their flight had his mood crushed. "Cap, they're picking on me again."
"For fuck's sake, don't whine and don't purposely damage the new fighter," muttered Keiji in a momentary return to his old rule-obsessed self. "Troskaya you're with Halpern at all times. The rest of us are fluid unless there's resistance. Then we follow Isis formation."
"Think we'll really find some aliens?" piped up Vic, a disgusting tone of anticipation in his voice.
Before any of them could chew him out for what they thought was disrespectful Keiji turned around and looked down at him where he sat on the bench. "We lost a lot of our own to them, Kiergaard. And that fleet out there lost almost ten thousand of their people when they were ambushed. Grow up and take this seriously or you're going to turn into a statistic."
Slapping Seig's empty locker the replacement guy said, "What, like this guy whose locker nobody's going to reassign?"
"His name is First Lieutenant Seig Ironside, and he is our brother by the blood we all shed," said Leo in his philosopher's voice. "He was the best Hayha pilot in the fleet. And before you again make the assertion that your skills are the better, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the battle that claimed the lives of seventy-five of our shipmates-seventy-five men and women who fought and died while you sat unawares on the opposite end of the galaxy engaging in simulated combat."
Damien offered the blindsided Vic a sympathetic smile, but the words that came out of his mouth were less so. "If you can best that, we'll take you seriously. Until then, though, you're just running off at the mouth, mate."
Grinning, Karda elbowed the new guy in the shoulder and said cheerily, "It's kind of our thing, calling bullshit when we see it. Welcome to Flight Methuselah!"