Firestar
Copyright© 2009 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 2
Corey pulled open the hatch to her squadron’s Ready Room and stopped, assaulted by the noise. A party was in full swing. Members of her squadron were talking, eating, and sipping punch. One was even dancing on a table. Corey stopped in her office long enough to look at the stack of reports on her desk and decided they could wait. Instead, she poured herself a glass of punch and joined in.
“What’s the occasion?” she asked Midori.
“Aside from surviving a suicidal plunge through the kin-stealers?” Midori laughed. “Stasya just got a letter from her sib-sister. Chasti is pregnant, and it’s a boy.”
“That is worth celebrating,” Corey said. She lifted her glass to Stasya. “Congratulations!”
“We’re all at that time of life,” Midori said. “Have you thought of having kids?”
“Not really,” Corey said. “Maybe I should, but I don’t know. I know my sibs are talking about it.”
“Mine too.” Midori took a sip from her glass. “I don’t know. Having three little girls running around calling me Mama seems a little strange, not at all like what we’re doing now.”
“Yeah, and then there’s the time we’d need to raise them. My Family says you can’t leave them until they’re 10.”
“My Family says the same thing.” She shrugged. “Who knows, maybe I’m an aunt and don’t know it. I haven’t been home in more than a year, and my sibs aren’t very good at writing me.”
“Mine are,” Corey said. “The funny thing is, they keep promising holopics, but somehow never remember to include them.”
“When my sibs do remember to write,” Midori said, “they always send me a couple of dozen pics. I’ve got them coming out of my ears.” She started to say more, but someone called her name. “Be there in a moment!”
Corey took another sip of punch and settled in the corner. That’s where Svetlana found her a few minutes later.
“You look lonesome over here,” her lanky Second said as she sat down.
“I don’t want to spoil their fun,” Corey said quietly. “Being the Old Lady does that.”
“Old Lady?” Svetlana snorted. “By my count, there are at least 12 girls in the squadron who are older than you.”
“You know what I mean, Svetya,” Corey said. “There are only three members of the squadron younger than I am; Chloe in B Flight is the baby at 19.”
“You’re what, 24?”
“23; I’ll be 24 next month.”
“All right, 23. You’re right, it does seem funny to call you the Old Lady.”
“Or the Eldest.” Corey gestured at the revelry with her glass. “A year ago, I would have been right there with them, laughing and having fun.”
“I saw you a year ago,” Svetlana said. “The Auldearn was at the base at Weon for a refit, and somebody organized a party in this one mess. You were sitting on the side, just like today. Why don’t you mingle?”
“I don’t know. I think I’ve always just felt happier by myself.”
“Are your sibs like you?”
Corey chuckled. “Heather? She’s a biologist. She’s outgoing when you can pry her out of her lab. She’ll talk your ear off about her work, but otherwise...” She shrugged. “Sonia’s the party girl. She’s never seen a party that she didn’t join. When we were younger, she’d drag us to every event she could find. If she was here, she’d be up on that table, or in the middle of the group, talking everyone’s ear off.”
“Did you party much when you were younger?”
Corey shook her head. “No, I was usually off with the coyotes, or leading a group of tourists into the mountains. If I wasn’t doing that, there was probably something else going on that grabbed my attention. I never found anything to talk about with my cousins.”
“You can’t have been Old Sobersides all through life. Did you have any fun at all?”
“Well, there’s my flute.”
“And you belong to the orchestra here on the ship. What about back home?”
“I don’t get back home that much any more. I’d rather stay with the Fleet.” She finished her punch and put the glass to one side. “I should get to work. I have to write up what we did today, including evaluations of those missiles we used.”
Svetlana laughed. “Let me read it when you’re done. I need something to put me to sleep.”
“Oh come on. It isn’t often R&D actually gives us something that works. They just need a few tweaks.”
Svetlana shrugged. “They need more than that. Stasya got chased by one.”
“So we have to work on our targeting protocols. Still, I’d say they were a success.”
“All right,” Svetlana nodded, “I’ll grant you that. I know the Navy pumps a lot of money into R&D. You’d think we’d get more of a return on our investment.”
“We will. You’ll see.”
Svetlana grunted in doubt. Corey laughed, slapped her Second on the knee, and returned to her office. It was a small compartment, but the Navy had managed to fit a desk, a chair, and three file cabinets into it, but only by allegedly repealing the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
The stack of reports she needed to wade through seemed to have grown in her absence. She wondered if paperwork was a living organism. If it had DNA, she would bet money that Heather could isolate it and develop an antidote for it. Then she snorted. If you removed the paperwork, something just as bad would replace it in the ecology of a warship.
She was halfway through a report on the damage the squadron’s fighters had taken when the light on her comm began blinking. She pushed the shunt contacts on the back of her hand against the comm.
“Squadron Lead Andersen.”
She listened to the message and sighed. “Midori,” she called out through the door of her office.
Midori separated herself from the party and drifted over, cup still in hand. “Aye, Ma’am?” She was shorter than Corey and thinner, but her eyes danced with amusement when she eyed the stack of reports on the desk.
“I need you to take a couple of flights out,” Corey said. “I’d go myself, but I’ve got a ton of reports to get through.” She gestured at the stacks lining her desk. “This is going to keep me busy until after dinner.”
Midori slid into the office and sat down. “What are we doing?”
“Apparently, there were some Idenux hiding near one of the other inner system planets. Now that we’re mostly concentrated over the remains of their base in the inner system, they’ve decided to make a run for it. A couple of cruisers are going to head them off. You’ll go along to help out.”
“At least it isn’t ground support,” Midori said. “That isn’t any fun at all.”
“Eighth Squadron drew that little chore.”
“Eighth? I thought Fifth was on tap for that.”
“They had someone go Mechanical, and the whole squadron is in reserve while they sort things out.”
‘Going Mechanical’ was when a pilot refused to push the button that disconnected her shunt from the sensors on her fighter. The pilot stayed in her Personal Capsule, living up in the Glory for the rest of her life. That cut her off from her friends, her Family, and her sibs.
Nobody would admit why someone would ‘go mechanical.’ There were many theories, and cynics noted that nobody asked the fighter pilots or others who worked up in the Glory why it happened. The fighter squadrons were tightly knit, and a pilot choosing the Glory over her friends and sibs would upset pilots enough that they lost their edge for a few days and were best kept out of combat.
The Navy found things for the Mechanicals to do, guarding stations, exploration, and other tasks. Several stations and bases had Mechanicals with them as last-ditch guards. They were still carried on the rosters as members of the Navy, but with special needs.
“I’m sad to hear it, boss. Was it anyone we knew?”
“I didn’t recognize the name. Anyway, I’d love to go, but...” She gestured again at the reports scattered across her desk.
“I’ll bring them all back,” Midori promised. “Do I get Svetlana?”
Corey glanced at her Second, who was sitting on one of the couches, watching the party, but not taking part.
“Go ahead. She’s been moping around the Ready Room a lot lately. It’ll do her good to get out.”
“I thought combat would cheer her up. It has in the past.”
“I did, too,” Corey said. “Now go. I’ll tell Kendra you’re taking the girls out.”
Midori nodded. “Thanks, Ma’am.” She tossed Corey a salute and left, calling out names.
Corey told Fighter Director Kendra Silversmith, who was leading the squadron, and then went back to her reports. The one for Captain Johnson wasn’t too bad, though she had to stop frequently to remember what had happened in those first few seconds after they’d crashed into the Idenux formation. Things had been a little too hectic for her to step aside and take notes.
The one that caused her to want to scratch somebody’s eyes out was the one from R&D. They wanted the targeting information and launch parameters for every missile the squadron had fired. She needed a good euphemism for ‘We aimed at the biggest clump of them and let fly,’ but nothing came readily to mind.
She finally broke off for dinner. Midori was back by then, and she debriefed her. She got in an hour of flute practice before returning to her reports. When she finally got to bed, she decided it’d been a productive day. Her squadron had had only one wounded, and Nikki would be released for duty in a few days.
The next morning, she sat down with Janice over breakfast.
“I realize that the Idenux are male gendered,” she said, “but are they men?” That was a favorite topic that filled the off-duty hours.
“Clearly not men as we know them in the Families,” Janice said. “For one thing, they aren’t locked away to assure their own survival.”
“That’s only because men make up something like 2% of the Families,” Corey replied. “Now if the Idenux would voluntarily reduce themselves to that number...”
They both laughed at the idea. “It would certainly solve a lot of problems,” another voice said.
First Officer Anita Sharapova, the Jellicoe’s Executive Officer, settled on the bench next to Janice. “Just who I was looking for.”
“What’s up?” Janice asked.
“We’ve got some unexplained activity in the outer system that needs to be checked.”
Janice put down her spoon. “What kind of activity? Enemy ships? I thought we had someone do that yesterday.”
“We’re not sure. One of our scouts detected some gravitational and neutrino sources just beyond the hyperjump limit. They seem to be isolated in a large clump of rocks. There could be one or two bases hidden out there. There are probably several bases in this system we haven’t found.”
“That’s because we came here without any pre-planning,” Janice said. “The clerks back home will have a fit. Sure, we won a victory, but we didn’t follow orders.”
“I only worry about the clerks on Seconday,” Officer Sharapova said, “and that’s still five days off. Anyway, we think there’s a base there, the Idenux may be trying to evacuate it on the sly, and the Captain wants a squadron to check it out.”
“I’ll send Corey and her crazies,” Janice said.
Officer Sharapova glanced at Corey. “Is it my imagination, Janice, or does Third Squadron always seem to get the scouting missions?”
“It must be your imagination.”
Officer Sharapova shrugged. “Just thought I’d mention it. It isn’t any of my business, at least not yet. Scan reports that they found a wormhole with a terminus not too far from the largest of the rock clusters.” She glanced at Corey again. “I’ll send a couple of cruisers along in case you need extra firepower.”
“They’d only get in the way,” Corey said. “Besides, we’d leave them far behind. If we have any trouble, we’ll just out run it as usual.”
Officer Sharapova nodded. “I’ll send them anyway, but you’re right, it’ll be a couple of hours before they could get ready. Be careful, and use your discretion.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.