Chapter Four
“Easy with it,” Major Kevin Bowden said. “Easy…come right a little…”
The pilot, Burg Hrensku, initiated a ten-degree angle of bank, keeping the laser from going into its gimbal stops. Bowden tweaked the joystick minutely, re-centering the crosshairs on the target—a guardhouse with two mounted .50 caliber machine guns. A similar facility on the other side of the road was already a smoking ruin.
The crosshairs flashed, indicating the bomb had three seconds time of flight left, then the guardhouse detonated as the weapon struck home.
“Shadow, this is Hornet,” Bowden transmitted. “The gates are down. I say again: the gates are down.”
“Roger,” the ground commander replied. “The gates are down. We are en route.”
Two miles away, from behind a low hill, a column of vehicles started forward.
Bowden smiled and looked across the cockpit of the interface craft at his SpinDog pilot. “That’s two for two. Looks like the drinks are on you.”
“It is not fair,” his pilot said. “With the new lasers and laser receivers your Colonel Murphy had us autofab, it is almost too easy.”
“This one is, because no one’s shooting at us. It gets harder when there are missiles in the air.”
“Maybe next time I need to arm the satrap’s vassals,” Hrensku grumbled.
“Thanks, but no,” Bowden replied. “I’ve been shot at enough for two lifetimes, thank you very much.”
Bowden watched as the convoy proceeded past the wrecked guard posts and into the small village in the ravine behind it. Several muzzle flashes winked from inside the cluster of huts. The trucks stopped and the men inside deployed, going to ground to return fire.
The assault was over in ten minutes. The villagers had relied too much on the nested machine guns to keep them safe; they were unprepared for the new way of war the Lost Soldiers had brought to the planet. Bowden and Hrensku provided cover until the assault was over—they still had three more bombs if they’d been needed—then they returned to base.
Major Bo Moorefield was waiting for them as they came out of the debriefing room. “How’d it go?” he asked.
“No problems,” Bowden replied. “The new tech works well, and the indigs weren’t expecting their guardhouses to spontaneously combust. Looked like Cutter’s guys didn’t have much resistance.”
“Good,” Moorefield said with a nod. “Another one for the good guys.” He cocked his head. “Hey, they’ve started the quick turnaround on the jet you came in on.” The interface craft—when they were used in an atmospheric role—had become “jets” over the last few months, even though the scramjet aircraft were definitely not like the jets the Lost Soldiers had left two hundred years and almost as many light-years behind them. “Murphy needs to talk to you upstairs.”
“Ugh.” Bowden shook his head. “Two RATOs in one day.” The scramjets used rocket-assisted takeoff modules to get into the air for combat missions and trips to space to save fuel. Although the technology had improved recently, and they were less likely to malfunction, less likely didn’t mean the modules didn’t still fail spectacularly sometimes…making takeoffs far more dangerous than catapulting off an aircraft carrier, which Bowden had always thought was a crazy way to get into the air.
Bowden looked at Hrensku. “Want to take me upstairs?”
The SpinDog frowned, obviously not impressed with the idea of two RATO launches in a day, either, but then he sighed. “Sure. I need to get”—he paused, trying to recall the correct idiom—“some of my stuff from the hab.” The amount of slang that the SpinDogs were picking up had gone from being impressive to downright scary.
Bowden nodded his thanks, tossed out a little more slang: “Cool.” Although Bowden was fully qualified to pilot the interface craft in the atmosphere, he wasn’t qualified in space and needed someone to shuttle him up to the habitat.
Hrensku frowned slightly at the word “cool,” but nodded. “Let me grab a quick bite to eat,” Hrensku added, “and then we can go.”
“Would that work for Murphy?” Bowden asked.
“Yeah,” Moorefield replied. “It was important, I think, but not urgent.”
“You and Cutter coming along for the ride?”
Bo stared at the sky, then at the dying scrub of the Ashbands. “We’ll take the last one.” He smiled. “Not quite done saying goodbye to this shithole.”
Bowden shook his head. Why Moorefield and Cutter had jumped on Murphy’s downward-bound transatmo had been a mystery to him. Until, that is, he saw them staring at the sky and the desert and the barren hills; however much the place sucked, they were afraid they might never see it again.
Kevin shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just don’t go and get shot.”
“I’d better not,” Bo scoffed, “or Liza will kill me.”
Several days later, Bowden walked into the office of Colonel Rodger Murphy, aboard Spin One. Nothing had changed on the main rotational habitat of the SpinDogs, or in the CO’s office…except that almost a quarter of the usually tidy desk was now occupied by a sizable slab of metal.
Bowden jutted his chin at it. “I heard about the memorial. I was sorry to miss it.”
Murphy’s nod had a hint of apology in it. “Wish we could have waited, Kevin, but it was getting to the point where if we didn’t do it while we could—”
“—then it might never happen at all.” Bowden smiled. “Been there, done that. Looks like you left some extra space on the far right-hand margin.”
Murphy nodded. “I’d like to think we’re done taking casualties, but…” He sighed and leaned back in his chair, motioning for Bowden to take a seat of his own. “So, as I hear it, you’ve had a busy time down on R’Bak, gathering the simulator data and finishing the last training cycle. How’d it go?”
“Fine, sir,” Bowden replied. “The SpinDogs are getting pretty good at plinking targets with the new laser gear you got in the last download. Didn’t get to finish gathering data for the simulators, though.” He grinned. “Too much real work to do.”
“Hopefully, they are up to finishing the pre-evac target list without you, because I need you up here, now. A very different assignment.”
Bowden arched an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“I can’t give you all the details now, but I need you to learn how to fly spacecraft.”
“Okay…can you at least tell me what types of ships?”
Murphy smiled apologetically. “All of them, at least for now.”
“And that’s all the info I get?”
“That’s all you need at this moment. We’re taking a look at some…opportunities we may have, and I want you prepared if they come to pass. Go. Learn how to fly as well—or better—in space than you do in atmosphere. That’s a big enough task for now. I don’t know how things are going to shake out, but I need you ready for anything.”
Bowden shrugged. “I always wanted to be able to pilot the interface craft back up to the habs; I guess now I get to learn. I’m good with that, sir.” He looked around the office. “Where am I going for this training?”
“The training will start here, probably move to Outpost for a bit, and then will come back here for the final bits.”
“Okay…”
Murphy sighed and cocked his head, obviously trying to decide how much to tell Bowden. He gave a brief nod—just a single jerk of his head—to show he’d come to a decision and explained, “You will start by training with one of the RockHounds.”
“Not one of the SpinDogs?”
“No, a RockHound. You probably haven’t had much to do with them because they don’t have much to do with R’Bak.”
Bowden shrugged. “No, not a lot of contact. I know they’re scattered in small communities all over the outer system, and that they get pretty isolated during the Sear: minimal travel when the Harvesters come to town. Prospectors, miners, and salvage-monkeys, mostly.”
Murphy nodded. “And because they spend all their time in space, they’re the ones best able to teach you the tricks and traps of spaceflight. It was easier to have one come here to start the training since they don’t really have ‘cities’ or big facilities to work out of.
“Once you generally know what you’re doing, and your instructor pilot doesn’t think you’re too much of a hazard to people and equipment, he’ll take you over to Outpost to run a few flights in a more austere environment. Once he’s satisfied you can safely solo pilot in space, he’ll bring you back here for the final portion of your training—flying to the planet and back. Since the RockHounds almost never go to the planet, a SpinDog will instruct you on that portion.
“Does it all make sense now?”
Bowden nodded and sat back in his chair. “Yes, sir, it does. When do I get started?”
Murphy looked over Bowden’s shoulder and out the door. “Seaman Lasko, is Karas’tan out there yet?”
“Yes, sir,” a voice replied.
“Please send him in.”
A rather tall and thin man with dark hair strode into the room. The one thing Bowden noticed immediately was that the man’s eyes never stopped moving for more than a brief second. Search. Spot Target. Identify. Repeat.
“This is Karas’tan Kamara,” Murphy said. “He’s the RockHound who will be teaching you spaceflight.”
Bowden stood to shake the man’s hand and met his scanning eyes. As they made contact, a corner of the man’s lips dipped. Bowden chuckled to himself. Already been measured and found wanting. Just like starting flight training in Pensacola all over again. At least there weren’t any drill sergeants yelling at him. Not yet, anyway.
“Good to meet you,” Bowden said, suppressing a scowl of his own. “I’m looking forward to learning everything I can from you, although I’m sort of surprised to see you here.”
“Why is that?”
“I would have thought we’d be meeting someplace, uh…”
“With less gravity? I’ve spent weeks preparing for the weight. It was not pleasant.” He shrugged. “Are you ready to begin?” Kamara asked.
“Now?” Bowden asked. The RockHound’s lips—both corners this time—dipped again, and he looked like he’d just eaten something sour. Bowden smiled. “Of course, I’m ready. Let’s go!”
The man nodded once, said his goodbye to Murphy, and led Bowden through the habitat to a small room with a table, a couple chairs, and a marker board.
“Most of our training will be behind the controls of a ship,” Kamara said. “There are, however, a few things we need to cover before we get into one of the craft and begin flinging yourself around the system, as I’m sure you’re in a hurry to do.”
“Well, I hadn’t really given it a lot of thought,” Bowden replied. “My flight time has pretty much been limited to in-atmo work.” He chuckled. “In fact, I didn’t find out that I was learning spaceflight until about one minute before I met you.”
“But your people have flown in space, yes? You are familiar, I hope, with the concepts of spaceflight?”
“Some,” Bowden acknowledged. “I wanted to be an astronaut back when I first got into the Navy. I was on track for the program…but things happened that led me in another direction, then I wound up here, and I’ve pretty much been flying attack and support flights on the planet. There hasn’t really been a lot of time to think about flying in space.”
“What do your people do for this ‘astronaut’ training?”
“There’s a bunch of classroom work, I know. Studying what craft you’ll fly and space station systems—stuff like that—along with a bunch of other things like Earth sciences, meteorology, space science, and engineering. The astronauts in training also learn land and water survival, aircraft operations, and scuba diving.”
“Scuba diving? What is that?”
“It’s when you dive deep into a body of water and stay down for a long time using a rebreather or tank system.”
Kamara’s brows knit. “But your people have space flight, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you start out by diving in water?”
“Correct. Then the trainees—depending on whether they are going to be pilots or mission specialists—learn the different skills they need for their positions. Pilots learn to fly the craft and mission specialists to conduct spacewalks, perform robotics tasks, and conduct scientific research.”
Kamara laughed for a few seconds. “That is not how we’re going to do it here. We’re going to skip the majority of that and go right into space. After all, we’re here, and there are no bodies of water in which to do your scuba thing. Also, we will be flying small craft, especially to start. You will be a pilot and a mission specialist at the same time. There is no division of duties, beyond what I tell you. Every RockHound can fly and conduct spacewalks.”
“You asked how we did it, so I told you,” Bowden said. “I’m prepared to learn the way you want to teach.”
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Are you really prepared to learn? Your people show up here and immediately change the way everything is done. We have been safe here for many centuries, yet now we are exposed because of your blundering. Then, afterward, you start telling us how things are now going to be done, and why we have to do it ‘your way.’
“I have trained a number of SpinDogs in spaceflight, and the ones who have had the hardest times are those who were already familiar with flying in atmosphere. Spaceflight is different. Just because something works in atmosphere doesn’t mean it works the same way here.”
“Look,” Bowden said. “You can tell me everything you want—everything you can, really—about how to fly in space. I’ll gladly learn at your knee. It’s my understanding, though, that you don’t fly in atmosphere, so don’t knock my piloting skills until you can land a plane on a ship. When you’ve done that, then we can talk.”
His eyes got wide. “You’ve landed aircraft on ships? Like, the kind that operate on water? On purpose?”
“Yeah. Of course, the ships were a little bigger than the largest ones I’ve seen on R’Bak, and the aircraft were smaller than the interface craft I’ve been flying, but the principle is the same. Big ocean, little ship, and land the plane on it.”
“In a hover, like I’ve heard your helicopters do?”
“No, landing on it like an aircraft does at the airfield. Except the airfield is on the water, moving in all three axes, and is a whole lot shorter.”
“I don’t think I’d want to do that.” Kamara’s eyes narrowed. “It would seem to take a certain kind of suicidal idiot to even attempt it.”
Bowden chuckled. “Yeah, that’s what we thought sometimes, too.” He smiled. “Regardless, I’ve done that, and you haven’t, so how about giving me at least a little respect for my piloting skills, all right?”
A smile ghosted across Kamara’s face, then he gave a small twitch of a nod. “If you have rendezvoused with objects moving in all three axes, perhaps you will manage to earn my respect. I will tell you again, though, the people who have the hardest time with spaceflight are the ones who have a lot of atmospheric flight time.”
* * *
“This is what we’ll be flying,” Kamara said later as they approached a small packet-type craft in one of the habitat’s docking bays.
“Really?” Bowden asked. “Doesn’t look like much.” He’d seen some of the smaller craft before but hadn’t paid them much attention. They were fairly spindly-looking compared with in-atmo craft. “Where’d you get it from?”
Kamara frowned. “That’s my ship.”
Oops. Open mouth; insert foot. “Sorry,” Bowden said. “I didn’t mean anything bad by that. I just assumed you’d need something bigger, for umm…exploring things and bringing back ore and…” He tried to come up with something else to add but couldn’t. He tried a different tack. “I expected we’d be flying one of the interface craft, since I’ll have to learn liftoffs and reentries with it.”
Kamara shrugged, looking away. From his tone, Bowden could tell he was only partially mollified. “Perhaps if we had your capabilities, where we could destroy anyone who wasn’t our friends in the system, we might use bigger craft that are more noticeable. Then we also could fly wherever we wanted, whenever we wanted. As it is, though, we stay alive by staying hidden, and this craft is a lot easier to hide than the SpinDogs’ interface craft.”
“That makes sense,” Bowden said. He chuckled ruefully. “With our friends no longer here in the system, it’s probably a skill I need to learn, too. Maybe even more so than launches and reentries. Getting caught by a Kulsian military craft wouldn’t have a very good ending.”
“It would not.” Kamara shrugged. “Besides, this craft is a lot better for prospecting. It’s more maneuverable, which also makes it a better ship for you to learn on. There’s less chance of you wrecking it. It’s also smaller and less expensive so it will be cheaper to fix when you do ultimately wreck it.”
“I thought that we already agreed I had flying skills.”
“No, we agreed you had flying skills in atmosphere. You agreed that those skills translated into skills that were applicable to flying my ship. They are not. Almost everyone crashes spacecraft when they are learning, especially pilots with any significant in-atmo experience. Things don’t work the same in space, and your eye—the way you view things—is going to tell you things that will be untrue in your new environment.”
“Like what?”
“We’ll get to that, but for the moment, you’ll have to take it on faith.” Kamara shrugged. “Let me show you the ship.” He led Bowden around the craft, showing him the various systems. As a Navy Test Pilot School graduate and an applicant for the astronaut program, Bowden was able to understand the systems, even the ones he hadn’t necessarily seen before, like the asteroid capture system.
As they went around, a new question formed as he looked at the systems bolted to the skin of the packet. While some looked to be permanent fixtures, others were obviously new and didn’t look like a lot of thought had been put into where—or how—to hang them. “Are all these type of craft the same?” he finally asked.
“No,” Kamara replied. “The main parts are generally interchangeable—motors, fuel tanks, and such—but every RockHound has his or her own needs. Where they’re going, what they’re doing, and how they’re going to do it once they get there. About the only thing in common is that you won’t see any that are appreciably bigger than this ship.”
“Because of the need to hide?”
Kamara nodded. “Exactly.”
They started down the starboard side, and Bowden chuckled.
“What is it?” Kamara asked, sounding defensive.
“It’s nothing.” He pointed to a laser range finder. “If nothing else, I have experience with that. It’s what we use to bomb with.” He smiled. “It looks a lot better on your ship than the way they first wired it into the interface craft.”
Kamara looked around the hangar bay. “Don’t ever trust a SpinDog to wire anything into your craft. They are”—he thought for a moment—“sloppy.”
“What do you mean?”
“They don’t work on craft as if their lives depended on their repairs. Sure, they do…but they never go very far from the habitats or the Outpost. Somebody can always go retrieve them if necessary. We go out on our ships for months, prospecting and salvaging, harvesting oxygen and hydrogen from ice, and we are often out of range of help. If you are two days away from the nearest ship or ice chunk and find out you have a day’s worth of air remaining because there was a small leak…” His voice trailed off ominously.
“Yeah, that would be a bad place to be,” Bowden agreed with a nod. “Got it; always check everything that’s been done to your craft when someone else has been working on it.”
Kamara nodded seriously. “You should always treat everything in this ship as if your life depended on it. It does.”
Bowden took a deep breath and nodded. It wasn’t something he’d really considered before. Sure, you preflight your aircraft before you accept it and take it airborne, but it was easy to dismiss small leaks or other minor problems. He’d once pointed out a puddle of hydraulic fluid under the aircraft next to his on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier. The Intruder guy had laughed and said that was normal. “If it ain’t leaking, you better get it serviced ’cause it’s empty,” the bombardier had said at the time. Taking a ship into deep space for months at a time, though, would require a whole new level of detailed preflight.
You can’t just eject out of a spacecraft if it stops working on you.
Kamara chuckled. “I can see from the look on your face you grasp the seriousness of knowing your systems are operational.”
“Yeah. It’s not a matter of life or death. It’s more important than that.”
“It is,” Kamara said.
“Do you have the tac manuals for the equipment?”
“‘Tac manuals’?”
“Yeah, the publications that tell you how to use the equipment. I’d like to study them before we get started. Learn the checklists.”
“We do not have tac manuals. That is for SpinDogs. Some of the equipment comes with an installation or operating guide, but most do not. And we do not use checklists. Everything is too individualized with each craft. There is no standardization; you just learn what your craft needs and do it.”
“How about a wiring guide so I know how things are powered?”
“Did I not say that most ships are individualized? The wiring will vary with the ship and how it’s used. Not to mention everyone’s ships have different electrical busses…”
“How do you learn all the systems, then, if you don’t have the system specs for your gear?”
“You learn from one of the existing shipmasters.” Kamara winked. “And you’re one of the luckiest people on this hab.”
“Why’s that?”
“You’ve got me to show you not only the ship itself but also how to fly it.” He smiled. “Let’s step inside, and I will show you the interior.”