“You know that’s not what I’m asking.”
Pila watched Jees, coldly evaluating.
Jees tapped her head with a metallic finger. “Everything that counts about me is still here. And what I am is a pilot. I want to get back out there and prove it.”
Pirius nodded, thanked her, and let her go.
Pila waved her hand, and a box in a Virtual checklist turned from red to green. “It’s obvious. We take her.”
“We do?”
Pila shrugged elegantly. “She’s a volunteer, one of the few we’ve had. She can handle the mission technically. Her nerve isn’t broken, according to the psychologists. In fact she’s powerfully motivated; she has a grudge against the Xeelee, and who can blame her? But we aren’t going to find many like her, Pirius.”
From the beginning Pila had complained bitterly about the pool of available candidates. “The superannuated and the criminal,” she said. “That’s all that’s being made available to us. Crew who are useless anywhere else, and so won’t impede Marshal Kimmer’s own grand goals. And there are precious few of them…”
The fact was, in this war walking wounded were rare. Day after day, the fragile greenships flew into Xeelee fire like moths into flames. If anything went wrong, your chances of surviving were slim: death worked efficiently here.
Even “criminals” were hard to find. Penal units were handed the worst, the most dangerous assignments, and if you happened to survive an action, you were thrown back out again. Life expectancy was not long, the turnover rapid. But then, if you fell out with a Doctrine cop, you had demonstrated some incorrigible character flaw — and, deemed beyond hope of rehabilitation, you were eminently disposable.”
But Pila had quickly found that even these battle-damaged antiques and failed renegades were hoarded, like every other resource, by jealous, empire-building local commanders. Pirius decided he was going to have to visit a penal detail to try to drum up volunteers. And that meant he would have to go to Quintuplet Base, where he knew at least one incorrigible rebel was still stationed — himself.
When he told her his decision, Pila grinned, her eyes quite without humor. “For the first time I am glad I have been forced into this assignment. I will enjoy watching you confronting your own unresolved issues, Pirius.”
But he was able to put that aside for a while, as he had a much more agreeable chore to complete first.
A week after Pirius’s promotion, the first test flights of greenships modified to Nilis’s full design were scheduled. Flexing his squadron leader muscles, Pirius decided to take the very first flight himself.
So he found himself sitting in a greenship’s pilot blister, with Torec as engineer and the intimidating presence of Commander Darc as navigator. Before the great dislocation of Blue’s irruption into his life, Pirius Red had actually completed his pilot training, but he had never flown in action. It was a huge relief to be aboard a greenship again, back where he belonged.
He checked over his ship. The greenship sat on its launch cradle on the tightly curving surface of Rock 492. The feather-light gravity of the dock touched the ship gently, and Pirius could see that the rails of the cradle had barely made a groove in the loose surface dust.
Light as a soap bubble it might be, but it was an ungainly beast even so. It was a superannuated fighter, one of just five begrudgingly donated so far by Marshal Kimmer and his staff. And it had been in the wars. The central body was scarred and much patched — and you could clearly see where the nacelle bearing the pilot’s pod had once been sliced clean through. This ship had been sent out again and again, until it was too battered to be worth fixing up: too worn out, in fact, for any use except Nilis’s complicated project.
This beat-up old bird would have been ugly enough if it had been left as nature and the Guild of Engineers intended. But Nilis had made things worse with his “enhancements.” Not one but two of Nilis’s patent black-hole cannons had been fixed to its flanks, along with a bulky pod where the exotic ammunition for these weapons was stored. The whole thing was swathed in a tangle of cables and wires and tubing. The ruining of the greenship’s classic streamlined finish didn’t matter, of course, since a greenship never flew in an atmosphere. What did matter was how the massive pods attached to the main body affected the ship’s dynamic stability.
The greenship was a mess, no two ways about it. Pirius thought the ironic name Darc had given it was apt: Earthworm. This poor ship looked as capable of swooping gracefully through space as fat old Nilis himself.
But still, this was the bird Pirius was going to fly today. And as he and his crew worked through their final preparations, he felt his heart beat a bit faster.
Then, with a soft command, he powered up his control systems. Much of the display was standard, concerned with handling the ship in its normal modes under the FTL drive or the sublight drives, after his years of training as familiar to Pirius as his own skin. Most of these displays were Virtuaclass="underline" only life-support controls were hardwired, so they wouldn’t pop out of existence no matter what hit the ship. But now Nilis’s additions booted up. Designed in haste and patched in hurriedly, they overlapped each other as they competed for space, crumbling into flaring, angry-looking crimson pixels.
Torec was grumbling about this. “Lethe,” she said. “It’s just as it was back in Sol system. You’d think they would have ironed this out by now.”
Commander Darc said, “We’re all under pressure, Engineer.”
Despite Torec’s complaints, one by one, the ship’s systems came up. When most of the flags shone green with “go,” Pirius snapped, “Engineer?”
“It’s as good as it’s going to get,” Torec said gloomily.
“Then let’s get on with it.”
Pirius grasped a joystick and pulled it back steadily. He could feel the ship around him coming to life: the thrumming of the GUT-energy power plant, the subtle surges of the sublight drive. But as the ship lifted off the dirt, he could feel an unwelcome wallowing as the ship labored to cope with its additional mass. The inertial shielding seemed to be hiccupping too. He wasn’t surprised when an array of indicators turned red.
As they hovered over the dirt, his crew labored to put things right. “The problem’s the power plant,” Torec called. “The weapons systems have been patched into it. There’s enough juice to go around, in theory; the problem is balancing the demands. Greenship power plants aren’t used to being treated like this.”
“Work on it, Engineer,” Pirius said. “That’s what these trial flights are about, to flush out the glitches and fix them.”
“Well spoken, Squadron Leader,” Darc said dryly. “But you might want to look at your handling. That extra mass has screwed our moments of inertia.”
Pirius said, “The nav systems have been upgraded to cope with the changes.”
“Well, the patches don’t seem to be working. The central sentient thinks it’s stuck in one sick ship.” Darc laughed. “It isn’t so wrong.”
“We’ll deal with it,” Pirius said grimly.
The crew continued to work until they had got the blizzard of red lights down to a sprinkling. Then, when he thought he could risk it, Pirius lifted the ship away from the Rock. The ascent was smooth enough.
Pirius glanced down at the receding asteroid. He could see the shallow pit from which they had lifted. Standing around it, in defiance of all safety rules, was a loose circle of skinsuited techs. These complex trials, as Nilis’s team tried desperately to turn their prototypes and sketches into a working operational concept, had drawn a lot of cynicism from these world-weary techs, especially the Engineers’ Guild types: these observers were here, he knew, not to watch a successful trial, but to see a cocky pilot crash and burn. His determination surged. It wouldn’t happen today.