Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) (6 page)

Veronica switched mental
“hats” and replayed their orders in her mind. This was their first formal deployment as semi-independent craft, but it
was
going to be a hard one. They would spend seven days patrolling the Salmani 314 star system–an obscure, barely-visited star system with only two planets, neither of them even remotely life-bearing. Insurance statistics for the sector showed a sharp rise in pirate activity, and this was the perfect spot for a hidden base of operations. The odds were against actually finding it, but a patrol in strength stood a good chance of netting some of the more active raiders and forcing the rest to lie low for at least a few weeks. So
Avenger
was dropping her full corvette wing in a fast “orbit” around the system primary. Eighty corvettes amounted to one every 4.5 degrees along the ecliptic, but very few spaceships ever used approaches that were more than a few degrees above or below the ecliptic anyway. The ship would then patrol still others for a week until it was time to recover the corvettes.

The carrier started dropping the Pukin
’ Dogs in a long arc. Veronica watched on her main screen as the time for her launch counted down, wrapping her fingers around the stick and throttle. Ahead and behind her, Louis Bowman and Alyssa Yeboah were strapped into the Gunnery and EW/copilot seats; underneath them in the mid-deck, Kellie Alyse and Natasha Leblanc were sitting at the Engineering and Sensor stations. Being split across two decks wasn’t the most efficient setup for giving out orders, but a corvette simply didn’t have room for everyone in one place and her crew was expected to display high levels of personal initiative. In a way, every member of a corvette crew was their own department head.

Veronica smiled as the countdown hit zero. A regular cat shot was nowhere near as punishing as the emergency-power one they
’d ridden on their previous launch, and she barely felt a whisker of acceleration as the corvette’s well-tuned compensators damped out the momentum. The fighter hit space and turned to its first outbound vector, drive flaring brightly as it cleared the carrier’s inner zone. Unlike a bigger warship, a corvette didn’t have the power budget for compensators powerful enough to fully match its engines at military thrust, so maximum acceleration pinned crew members to the backs of their chairs at five gees. Her arms that felt like they weighed close to a hundred pounds as she carefully pulled the her craft through the three high-energy course changes required to fully separate from the carrier, and she found herself sighing with relief when she was finally able to throttle back to the relative crawl of “only” about four hundred gees. Within twenty seconds of launch,
Avenger
was boosting away at over 500
g
, leaving eight fighters and two dozen drones to blanket a star system.

Veronica decided that the reality of a detached flight patrol
already
felt very different from the romantic reputation. She was glad to have her crew members with her. “Being out here on my own, I’d go stir-crazy within a day.”

“
I know, Ma’am,” replied Natasha over the fighter’s intercom, “So would I.” They had all done training on a Firefox, the eighth and ultimate model of the venerable FA8C. A three-person heavy fighter capable of being flown and fully controlled in most flight regimes by one, the Firefox was faster and more maneuverable but could haul less firepower to the fight than the Tomcat. The last heavy fighter squadron had converted to the Tomcat-class corvette a year ago–the Firefoxes were now in service primarily as trainers, which they accomplished admirably. Their cockpits could be easily reconfigured for the training role, and they were easy ships to fly--far more forgiving than bigger, heavier Tomcats.

Natasha
grabbed her helmet out of midair and clipped it to the rack on the side of her seat as she settled back into her station and noted a small meteoroid. It was inside the corvette’s immediate course zone, so she tagged it as a possible navigational hazard. Lieutenant Gray would see it if one of her maneuvers brought the corvette into conflict with the movement of the ‘roid, or if one of her drones was going to come in contact with it.

Veronica checked her station chrono. 0900, ship time. It was time to turn to 270 and start a twenty-minute,
400g burn. Then she started writing the first log entry as part of the Captain’s post-launch housekeeping tasks. Everyone in the craft would be busy for the entire first burn, as they set up house for a seven-day mission. They had three probe deployments scheduled, and orders to inspect shipping traveling through the system–a report had filtered back to sector command in the last few days about smugglers moving goods–and worse–through the system under the guise of legitimate trade.

Ship’s log, 28/1/343. 1244 Avenger Time. LT Veronica Gray recording. Corvette D207 proceeding to orbital position ecliptic +3, stellar rotation 330.2 for first drone deployment. All systems nominal at this time.
With that, the first of what promised to be seven days of relatively similar logs was under their belt.

Yeboah looked to Veronica.
“Commander, we’ve got about fifteen minutes to catch up on our housekeeping. I’m going to grab Leblanc and take care of some points on the EVA checklist so we can get right out there when we reach the first probe drop.” At 400g, the crew would feel no acceleration at all except for that of the deck plates, so they could easily move about the cabin. The corvettes would each deploy a net of twenty-four probes in selected areas to act as a tripwire against illegal activity or enemy advances through the system.

On the flight deck,
Louis Bowman nervously picked his way through the checklist. This all seemed so easy when they were doing it in exercises and dry runs, and the actual tasks were still pretty easy–the motions were second nature to him by now. But he kept biting his lip in nervous thought as he double-checked each entry in his checklist. His combat deployments since joining the squadron had been indistinguishable from any other fighter’s deployments, just with a larger crew of spacers on board. Now they were doing missions that only a corvette could do, and they wouldn’t have support from the carrier or from any fighters other than their distant squadron mates for a whole week.

Kellie
’s hand squeezed Louis’ shoulder as she settled into the copilot’s seat, replacing Yeboah. “Relax, kid,” she said, “The captain won’t let anything bad happen to you or to any of us. Trust me, and trust her.” He found himself relaxing minutely at least. He flew through the rest of his checklist and managed to finish it on time.

Veronica smiled slightly at Kellie
’s reassurance.

*

Alyssa Yeboah and Natasha Leblanc stood on the rim plate of the airlock as they finished their power armor startup checks. One of the many uses of the versatile Cache suit was its ability to act as a heavy EVA suit.

“
Ready for your first professional spacewalk, kid?” She flexed her fingers in the metallic gauntlet, running startup programs. The HUD showed that she had a full suite of ready thrusters and two hours of air ready.

Leblanc
’s eyes glowed with excitement. Being able to move free of a spaceship was one of the Service’s great privileges. She’d spacewalk-trained in boot camp, of course, but she hadn’t been in vacuum since then.

The door cycled and she gazed out on deep space. Taking a deep breath, she stepped out onto the corvette
’s fuselage, walking on the skin of her home. She knew that she was technically inverted relative to the ship, but her perception didn’t see it that way.

“
Okay, now disengage your mag boots and jet over to the probe over there.” The big three-ton space probe contained both passive and active sensors, and could detect a space warp of a one-hundredth
gee
within two AUs.

Natasha
took another deep breath and clicked off her grav boots… and nearly laughed with the joy of feeling herself float free of the hull. Engaging her suit thrusters, she gently squeezed forward at a mere one m/s
2
, cautiously approaching the probe.

“
Now, stand clear of the probe at four meters, and we’ll let its externals deploy on their own,” came Yeboah’s voice over the comm. She was approaching at 4 m/s and did a quick backflip to put her thrusters in the right path to bring her to a stop next to Natasha.

Yeboah seemed to have no problem floating next to
Natasha but inverted relative to her. Suits tended to homogenize everyone’s body language but somehow Yeboah’s casual elegance came through just fine.

“
Skipper, we’re ready to begin probe antenna deployment.”

“
Roger that EVA-1, EVA-2, how’s your first spacewalk coming?” Veronica’s voice sounded tinny over the speaker, which annoyed Yeboah slightly. They had more than enough bandwidth for crystal-clear audio transmissions, but somehow Fleet wanted radio communications to sound… different. Like a spacewalker wouldn’t remember that the person talking to them wasn’t right next to her? She thought it was ridiculous.

Natasha
swallowed a little. “Exciting, nerve-wracking… beautiful. I can’t believe I’m out here, like this.”

“
Well, you two have fun out there, but don’t forget to wipe your feet when you come back in.” Yeboah could hear the dry, arch humor in Veronica’s tone.

“
Yes, Mom,” chorused the two women.

Yeboah sent a signal to the probe and it began unfolding. First the high-tech flower of its high-gain antenna, irising into position. Then came the antennae of the sensor systems, thorn-like.

“It looks like we’ve got a good deploy,” said Yeboah.

From the ship,
Kellie’s voice responded, “Good sensor feeds on this end, we’re ready to send Probey the Probe on his merry way.” The small probe boosted off downrange at a mere 8 m/s
2
, not even a measurable percentage of its mother ship’s amazing speed, “You two want to stay outside for a bit? We’re a half-hour ahead of schedule, we’ve got the slack to do it.”

Yeboah was about to demur, but she saw the look of wonder on
Natasha’s face. She remembered her own first spacewalk, and how she’d never wanted to go back in to the claustrophobic reentry capsule for descent back to Terra. It was a totally different feeling than flying about in a starship, and Leblanc would have plenty of time to come to see EVA as a hassle. Let her have the wonder.

“
Let’s take advantage of that half-hour, Skip.”

Chapter
6

Unseen by any member of
Avenger
’s corvette wing, the freighter
Arrant Knave
dropped from faster than light to slower, and headed in-system. Jonah Ress found it slightly inconvenient, or more accurately just a little bit
too
convenient in Duke Ifrit’s favor, that Ifrit’s own repair yards had undercut by twenty percent the price estimates of every other yard on the planet. More worrisome was that he hadn’t been allowed to check the contents of his hold until just before takeoff, a stipulation which had almost convinced him to scotch the whole deal. But in the end, they didn’t really have a choice, did they?

First Mate Benjamin
“Matt” Mattingly was more concerned with the fact that they were running drugs. He ran his thick fingers over the tight curl of his hair, trying to figure out the angles that Ress wouldn’t have. It was how their partnership had worked for more than a decade–Ress, as shrewd as he was on the business end of things, tended to let a lot of things slide as details and trust to Mattingly to work out those details in the end. True, every owner-operator in the outer rim had done runs from time to time that mixed legitimate cargos with illegitimate, but in this case, the illegitimate cargo
was
the main cargo, not a small addendum to the manifest that they could wave away and ignore the consequences of. Running a cargo like this made them drug runners in fact, not just a small courier company that happened to have something less-than-legal in one of their shipments.

Saving them at the moment was the fact that there was a
lot
of
nothing
in this star system. Many people took the fact that space had an ambient temperature of three degrees above absolute zero and assumed that because of this there was no such thing as “stealth” in space, that it was impossible to hide even the coldest ship’s heat flare. What they failed to account for was that no sensor had infinite resolution, and passive sensors tended to have lower resolution than active ones.

Ress had had to repeatedly remind him that they
didn’t have a ship
if they didn’t do this run. Besides, Alluvian silver wasn’t exactly
illegal
–it just wasn’t exactly
legal
either. It was a controlled substance on most worlds, making its import tightly controlled at best, and frequently an outright felony. It was a song and dance as old as the age of technology, especially when people put intellect and motivation to converting a basic plant product into narcotics.

A potent euphoric distilled from the needles of the Alluvium silverpine tree
(which in their native state were no more offensive than the coca leaf back on Earth), it was currently popular on inner worlds like Mahan and his current destination world, Tiara D, and even strong diplomatic pressure from the United Planets couldn’t keep Alluvium from exporting it. It was barred from shipping through United Planets space (and in much of the rest of the Stellar Alliance as well, due to strong lobbying from Terra), but that just meant it had to go the long way around. . . or under their noses, “Which doesn’t mean that smuggling it
isn’t
illegal, or
won’t
get us in trouble,” insisted Mattingly. He, at least, had toed the line–Richards and Carmona had outright walked off the job, forcing Ress to hire new kids off of Ifrit’s payroll.