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  She thought it was going to get worse now, too. Lieutenant Hadley had already reamed her out, listing all the mistakes she’d made. Beth had bristled at some of his charges, but she’d kept it inside. He’d been the one who’d ordered her to stay back, after all, so those “mistakes” were on him. The facts of the matter, however, were that she’d made three fatal mistakes. The first was forgetting the torpedo she’d dodged. The second was forgetting that Rose, for all her programmed personality, was still a limited AI, and when she’d put her on the task to continually update the firing solutions, she could only put the torpedo warning up on the display.

  The third was the most egregious. She’d been too cautious. She’d been waiting for the perfect shot, something that put Mercy at risk and had ended up with Beth being taken out of the exercise.

  As a commercial scout pilot, deliberate and well-thought-out decisions were what was required. A fighter pilot had to have that confidence and ability to make quick decisions if they were going to be effective. Others in the Navy usually considered them brash, but that’s the type of person who was needed.

  And ever since she sat there in her “dead” fighter, going over every step of the fight, she wondered if she didn’t have what it took. The warrant officer was being a dick, but what he’d said fed into her doubts.

  The two entered the ready room, moving to the far-right bulkhead, where as junior enlisted, they would stand in the overpacked room. Most of the red force was already in place. These were some of the best pilots in the Navy, now assigned to the OPFOR to put squadrons through their paces. This had been the first “battle” between the two squadrons with three more to go before the Stingers were certified as combat-ready.

  One of the red pilots caught Beth’s eyes, then smiled and pointed his hand like a pistol and mimicked firing it at her. She knew in an instant that he was the one who’d taken her out. With all the grace she could muster, she nodded back at him.

  Next time, buddy!

  Technically, the Stingers had “won” the engagement, but the mood among the squadron was sober while the red force pilots were in good spirits. With more and better fighters, the Stingers should have done much better. Aside from Beth, the lieutenant, and Warthog, the squadron had lost 16 of the 44 Wasps. It could easily have been 17, but Beth’s last-gasp firing of her torpedoes made the two red force Wasps react just enough for Mercy to keep them at bay until Delta Flight arrived.

  “Attention on deck!” someone shouted as seated pilots rose to their feet.

  Rear Admiral Kyra Rubenstein entered the ready room, followed by a couple of captains and a posse of lower-ranking officers. She reached the empty front rank of seats, then said, “At ease. We’ve got a lot to go over today, so let’s get going.”

  The admiral was the sector air officer, and she had decided on a hands-on approach while the squadron went through certification. Unlike the CO, she had never been a pilot, instead commanding the larger ships where her GT height wasn’t an issue. If the quick look she gave the CO as she took her seat was any indication, she didn’t think he should be in the cockpit as well.

  One of the captains accompanying her continued to the podium, then said, “As the admiral has said, we’ve got a lot to cover here today, so get yourself comfortable.”

  There was a low murmur of laughs.

  “We’re going to start with an overview of the exercise, then go into details on each engagement with deep dives into Bravo and Fox Flights . . .”

  Oh, shit. This isn’t going to be good, realized as she prepared herself for a long and very uncomfortable afternoon.

  Chapter 11

  “So, you like being a pilot and all?” Spaceman Apprentice Mikel Botha asked as he scrubbed the urinal in front of him.

  Beth turned her head to him and thought for a moment, trying to pick the right wording. “We’ve all got jobs to do, Mikel. Like this,” she said, pointing her brush at the urinal she was cleaning.

  She did feel special, being a pilot, but it wouldn’t do her much good with her dwindling reputation in the station if she sounded arrogant. And what she’d said was true. For all the good being a pilot did here, the command master chief could still assign her to lead the two-person working party to clean the heads.

  “I know, but, you wear the blue, just like other pilots,” he said, pointing at her work coveralls.

  “And what am I doing now? Cleaning pissers, just like you.”

  Botha laughed, then said, “I guess you’re right at that.”

  “That’s me, petty officer in charge of heads,” she said.

  Another petty officer came in, saw the two, and shrugged, unsealing his overalls.

  “Hey, we’re cleaning in here,” Beth said.

  “And I’m pissing. So what?”

  “So what? This head’s secured until we’re done, that’s what. You didn’t see the sign?”

  The petty officer already had his hand inside his overalls, but he rolled his eyes, said, “It ain’t going to make any difference,” and left.

  Beth knew she could have let it go, but she didn’t want to watch—and listen—to him piss, and she wasn’t happy she was even in this position. This had been the sixth time she’d been assigned to a head-cleaning working party. The master chief was simply exerting her authority over her, making sure Beth knew, pilot or not, that she owned her.

  Heck, she didn’t even use a urinal, and here she was, getting to know more about them than she wanted. It was mind-boggling that after centuries of amazing technological advantages, urinals hadn’t changed much, and they still needed manual cleaning. Mercy said there had to be a high-tech lab somewhere that had developed a pisser that kept guys from dripping on the deck, but the Navy brass suppressed it so that they could have something to assign sailors to do.

  “How’re you doing in there, Leung?” she called out to the sailor cleaning the shitters on the other side of the sinks.

  “I’m OK.”

  “We’re about done out here, so we’ll be there in a few.”

  Spaceman Recruit Glorya Tantus Leung was a quiet, unassuming sailor. She’d been busted down from E3 to E1 for sucker-punching her petty officer, dropping him like a ton of bricks. She could have been court-martialed, but it had been handled with mast. She’d also been fined and assigned additional duty, which was why she was with Beth cleaning heads, and had been with her each time Beth had been given the duty. She knew there was more to the sailor’s story, and she was curious as to what really went down, but the sailor kept to herself.

  She cleaned the last urinal in the line, then dumped the brush in her bucket and stood up, knees creaking. She didn’t have to do the cleaning herself. As the petty officer in charge, she was not being punished, and she could stand back and just watch—“supervising.” She knew that was what most others did, but with only three of them, the task would get done a lot quicker if she pitched in. Beth might be a petty officer, and a pilot at that, but while she resented the master chief’s harassment, she didn’t feel she was “above” anyone else. If the heads needed to be cleaned, then she was going to help get it done.

  She just started to join Leung in the shitters when the announcement over the 1MC said, “All Stinger pilots, report to the ready room.”

  Beth whipped off her gloves and dumped them into the disposal.

  “Botha, you’re in charge now. Finish up this head, then report back to your division.”

  “What about the other two?”

  “If the command master chief wants them cleaned, she can come get me after I find out what’s up.”

  She briefly considered changing into a new set of overalls, but she didn’t want to wait to find out what was going on. It could be something as routine as signing a new Next of Kin doc, but something in her gut told her it was something else—something big.

  She ran down the passage to find out.

  Chapter 12

  Beth’s instincts had been right. Less than a week after certification, the squadro
n had a hot mission—reconnaissance, but still hot.

  The surveillance spooks had collected several hints of what could have been evidence of an alien presence: tiny ripples in space that had no other known explanation. The three most likely locations were selected, and three eight-Wasp flights were going to recon the areas, loaded down with the best surveillance instruments available. This was not a combat mission. Each Wasp would be armed, of course, and free to implement full capabilities, to include G-Shot, if it became necessary. But the intent was to get in, find out what was there, and get out.

  Each eight-Wasp flight would transit, along with another four-Wasp flight and a monitor, through three gates, making a round-about route to the target gate. While the eight Wasps entered the target systems, four more would guard the gate, ready to destroy it should it be threatened—even if there were still fighters on the other side. No aliens would be allowed through.

  What surprised Beth, though, was that Fox Flight was assigned to one of the missions. After the brutal debrief of her first mission, where their actions had been stripped bare, Fox Flight had been given support-type roles for the next three missions against the OPFOR. Yet here they were, not only merged with Delta Flight, but with Lieutenant Hadley in command.

  “He must have blown the CO to get us here,” Mercy has said as they got out of their overalls and donned their flight suits.

  Beth wouldn’t have cared what he’d done—she just wanted vindication. She knew that some of her fellow pilots had decided she was out of her league, a politically-correct addition to the squadron, and as such, a dangerous wingman. Others (she hoped) had not made up their minds, and she wanted to prove herself to them. She couldn’t do that by being in the rear with the gear but instead had to be at the tip of the spear.

  “Better not fuck up, Ant,” Warrant Officer Nicolescu passed on the S2S. “I want to get back in one piece.”

  And that was the one bad thing about the mission. Nicolescu was in Delta Flight, and so now they were together, designated “Purple Flight.”

  The pairing of Delta and Fox was not accidental. Delta was commanded by Tuna, a mustang lieutenant who’d made it up to chief before accepting a commission. With Bull and Ranger, a Petty Officer First Class, and Uncle, another lieutenant, this was the most experienced flight where the flight leader would be junior to the lieutenant. The CO was giving him—and Fox—a chance, but paired them with another strong, experienced flight.

  Beth ignored Nicolescu. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of a response. They wouldn’t be actually flying together, anyway. Delta and Fox Flights might be under one command, but they would be flying as separate maneuver elements.

  “Kick some ass, OK?” Josh asked as he checked the weapons station connections.

  “We’re just going there to look around. You know that.”

  “Yeah, I know what they said, but I don’t think the aliens heard that.”

  Josh had turned out to be a very capable plane captain. Senior Chief Garcia had done her a solid with him. He seemed to intuitively understand what Tala needed, and she thought he was better than any of the others, no matter their experience level.

  “Just make sure my guns are ready, young spaceman.”

  “Up and ready, oh exalted Petty Officer Third Class Floribeth Salinas O’Shea Dalisay,” he said, coming to an exaggerated position of attention, a palm-forward salute.

  Beth just rolled her eyes. Josh had a weird sense of humor, no doubt about it, but she wouldn’t trade him for anyone else.

  The launch warning came, and it was time to get to the rails. All eight Wasps lined up, with the gate drone on the far side. The other four Wasps had already launched, and the Third Fleet monitor should already be on station. Josh and the other plane captains got into position, ready to send them off.

  Beth half-expected the lieutenant to give them one last pep talk, but evidently, even he must have figured they’d had enough. Each pilot sat alone in silence. Beth felt her nerves rising.

  “Purple Flight, are you green for launch?” the CAT officer finally asked over the net.

  “Roger, we’re green, CAT.”

  “Purple is green,” Mercy said with a laugh on their S2S.

  “Understand green. Standby, launch in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one!”

  Josh and the other plane captains were a blur as each Wasp shot down the rails, separated by less than a second in time, but tens of kilometers of distance that opened up farther as the NTC guided them off the station and towards the gate arrays.

  For all the excitement of the launch, it would take most of a day to transit through the gates, building up speed as they went. Within half-an-hour, Beth was bored, and one big minus when comparing a Wasp with a Hummingbird was that the Wasp didn’t have an entertainment console. Beth popped in her personal earbud, then tried to relax and listen to music.

  At least no slime, she told herself like she did every time she pulled down her tubes. She had some low-particulate snacks like jerky and chocolate, but the tubes held up to six liquids, two being protein shakes. They weren’t great, but anything was pretty good compared to slime.

  To her surprise, there was a handwritten note attached to Tube 6 that said, “Try me.”

  Curious, she took a tentative sip—it was Coke!

  You son-of-a-bitch, Josh!

  Carbonated beverages were a no-go aboard a Wasp, and even if smuggled on, they quickly lost their fizz. But this was just great, just like normal.

  Josh had broken regs to get her the Coke, and she was required to report him, but there was no way that was going to happen. She took another long sip, then pushed the tube shelf back up. She wanted it to parcel it out for the entire trip, and she still had hours to go.

  ***************

  “Scans on as soon as you pass the gate,” Lieutenant Hadley reminded them as they lined up for the final approach.

  This is it. Get it together, Floribeth.

  Beth was both excited and nervous—excited that she was finally on her first real mission, but nervous that she’d screw up. While she’d performed OK on the last three exercises—nothing extraordinary, but nothing negative, either—the ghost of the first mission was still haunting her. It wasn’t so much that fact that she’d been “killed” but that she’d let down her fellow pilots.

  “Approaching gate in twenty seconds,” Rose told her.

  She’d reset her settings on her AI. Rose now monitored all data streams, then announced what she prioritized as the most important, even if asked a specific question or given a specific task.

  Beth kissed her cross, then held her breath, the last a weird habit she’d taken to while entering a gate, and a moment later, Tala shot into SG-9222, a binary system on the far side of the galaxy. She flipped on her scans, the primary being a Case densitometer. Case made mining equipment, and the densitometer was a one of their commercial scanners, modified for usage with a Wasp. In addition to the normal scanners on a Wasp, each of the eight in the flight had an extra scanner in an attempt to cover all the bases. The science types gave it a low probability of being useful, and so, of course, it had been installed on the junior-most pilot’s fighter.

  It seemed like they were right. They were still quite far out, but the densitometer was only getting vague readings on potential mineral deposits.

  “Return gate emplaced and coordinates locked,” Rose said.

  Beth barely paid attention to the report. She noted that the drone that had followed the fighters had given them their way back, but since changing the AI’s settings, Rose’s pseudo-personality had taken a hit.

  “I’m getting something, but I don’t know what,” Ranger passed.

  Beth did pay attention to that.

  “What’re you getting, Ranger? And on which system?” the lieutenant asked.

  “On the Six-F. I’m running the results through my AI now.”

  Am I the only one to name my AI? Beth wondered for a moment. Mercy had give
n her a ration of shit when she’d told her she’d named Rose, but in every holovid, the AIs, real or fictional, always had cool names.

  “I’ve got nothing concrete, and it could be internal static, but my gut tells me this could be something. Sending over the azimuth now.”

  There was a pregnant pause, and Beth knew that seven pilots were waiting for Swordfish’s decision.

  Are they out there?

  “Delta Flight, adjust course toward the possible source. Fox, continue on present course. Ranger, you keep your Six-F on whatever it might be.”

  The original plan was for both flights to conduct flybys of the system’s two stars, never slowing down as Beth had done in her Hummingbird, but using a gravity assist trajectory to whip around each star and head back to the gate. What might take three or four days in a scout would take the fighters a little over eight hours—although that also took into account the fact that the gate had been opened well within the system, not outside, as they were with the various exploration corps.

  “Of course, the fucking Delta dicks get the glory,” Mercy passed on the S2S.

  “We don’t know that it’s anything,” Beth said.

  She understood Mercy’s sentiments, though. She might have almost bought the farm the last time she encountered one of the aliens, but she was in a Wasp this time, and not alone. She’d sure like to meet them again from a position of power.

  “And we don’t know that it’s not, either.”

  “It’s not like we’ll be that far apart, so if it is them, we’re just a shout away.”

  Which was true. The two stars were an extremely tight binary orbiting each other at six AU. As they took advantage of the stars’ gravitational pull, the two flights would be about an hour apart.

  “Fox Flight, I’m changing our course,” the lieutenant passed. “You’ve got the new one now.”

  Beth pulled up the trajectory on her display. He’d obviously been considering the same time factors that she had. Their previous course had them slinging around the star from the opposite side of the other star. Now, the course had them slinging around from the inside. The lieutenant had just cut the response time in half, should Delta get into trouble.