But the wide wings were the final nail.
Lotor nosed up and reduced Yukawa drive. The ship dropped a meter or so, and he caught it on the McLean generators. He slowly reduced power, and the ship smoothed toward the dust below.
The trap of an antigravity screen, of course, is that "down" is toward the generator and bears no relationship to where "real" vertical should be.
The ship was three meters high and, to Lotor's senses, descending quite vertically. Close enough, he must have decided, and he slid the generator pots to zero.
The ship dropped a meter, and one wing hit a protruding boulder. The ship toppled.
According to the remote flight recorder, at that moment the IP hit the McLean controls at the same instant that Lotor figured out that something was very wrong.
Lotor kicked in the Yukawa drive. By the time he had power, the ship had already fallen to near horizontal. The blast of power, coupled with the McLean push, pin wheeled the ship.
Cycloning dust hid most of the end. All that the cameras recorded was a possible red blast that would have been produced as the cabin opened like a tin and the ship's atmosphere exploded.
It took most of the planet day for the dust to subside. Rescue crews felt their way in, looking for the bodies. Neither the corpse of Lotor nor the IP was ever recovered.
Sten, Sh'aarl't, and Bishop held their own wake and attempted to sample all the beers that Lotor had not gotten around to trying before his death.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Others in the class were killed, some stupidly, some unavoidably. The survivors learned what Sten already knew: No amount of mourning would revive them. Life—and flight school—goes on.
The barracks at Imperial Flight Training were not as luxurious as the psychologically booby-trapped ones in Phase One. But passes were available, and the pressure was lightened enough for cadets to have some time for consciousness alteration—and for talk.
A favorite topic was What Happens Next. Sten's classmates were fascinated with the topic. Each individual was assuming, of course, that he would successfully get his pilot's wings.
They were especially interested in What Happens Next for Sten. Most of the cadets were either new to the service or rankers—they would be commissioned, on graduation, as either warrant officers or lieutenants. Sten was one of the few who was not only already an officer but a medium-high-ranking one. The topic then became what would the navy do with an ex-army type with rank.
"Our Sten is in trouble," Sh'aarl't opined. "A commander should command at least a destroyer. But a destroyer skipper must be a highly skilled flier. Not a chance for our Sten."
Sten, instead of replying, took one of Sh'aarl't's fangs in hand and used it as a pry top for his next beer.
"It's ambition," Bishop put in. "Captain Sten heard somewhere that admirals get better jobs on retirement than busted-up crunchies, which was all the future he could see. So he switched.
"Too bad, Commander. I can see you now. You'll be the only flight-qualified base nursery officer in the Empire."
Sten blew foam. "Keep talking, you two. I always believe junior officers should have a chance to speak for themselves.
"Just remember... on graduation day, I want to see those salutes snap! With all eight legs!"
Sten discovered he had an ability he did not even know existed, although he had come to realize that Ida, the Mantis Section's pilot, must have had a great deal of it. The ability might be described as as mechanical spatial awareness. The same unconscious perceptions that kept Sten from banging into tables as he walked extended to the ships he was learning to fly. Somehow he "felt" where the ship's nose was, and how far to either side the airfoils, if any, extended.
Sten never scraped the sides of an entry port on launch or landing. But there was the day that he learned his new ability had definite limits.
The class had just begun flying heavy assault transports, the huge assemblages that carried the cone-and-capsule launchers used in a planetary attack. Aesthetically, the transport looked like a merchantman with terminal bloats. Sten hated the brute. The situation wasn't improved by the fact that the control room of the ship was buried in the transport's midsection. But Sten hid his dislike and wallowed the barge around obediently.
At the end of the day the students were ordered to dock their ships. The maneuver was very simple: lift the ship on antigrav, reverse the Yukawa drive, and move the transport into its equally monstrous hangar. There were more than adequate rear-vision screens, and a robot followme sat on tracks to mark the center of the hangar.
But somehow Sten lost his bearings—and the Empire lost a hangar.
Very slowly and majestically the transport ground into one hangar wall. Equally majestically, the hangar roof crumpled on top of the ship.
There was no damage to the heavily armored transport. But Sten had to sit for six hours while they cleared the rubble off the ship, listening to a long dissertation from the instructor pilot about his flying abilities. And his fellow trainees made sure it was a very long time before Sten was allowed to forget.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Sten loved the brutal little tacships. He was in the distinct minority.
The tacships, which varied from single- to twenty-man crews were multiple-mission craft, used for short-range scouting, lightning single-strike attacks, ground strikes, and, in the event of a major action, as the fleet's first wave of skirmishers—much the same missions that Sten the soldier was most comfortable with.
That did not logically justify liking them. They were overpowered, highly maneuverable—to the point of being skittish—weapons platforms.
A ship may be designed with many things in mind, but eventually compromises must be made. Since no compromises were made for speed/maneuvering/hitting, that also meant that comfort and armor were nonexistent in a tacship.
Sten loved bringing a ship in-atmosphere, hands and feet dancing on the control as he went from AM2 to Yukawa, bringing the ship out of its howling dive close enough to the surface to experience ground-rush, nap-of-the-earth flying under electronic horizons. He loved being able to hang in space and slowly maneuver in on a hulking battleship without being observed, to touch the launch button and see the battlewagon "explode" on his screen as the simulator recorded and translated the mock attack into "experience." He delighted in being able to tuck a tacship into almost any shelter, hiding from a flight of searching destroyers.
His classmates thought that while all this was fun, it was also a way to guarantee a very short, if possibly glorious, military career.
"Whyinhell do you think I got into flight school anyway?" Bishop told Sten. "About the third landing I made with the Guard I figured out those bastards were trying to kill me. And I mean the ones on my side. You're a slow study, Commander. No wonder they made you a clottin' officer."
Sten, however, may have loved the tacships too well. A few weeks before graduation, he was interviewed by the school's commandant and half a dozen of the senior instructors. Halfway through the interview, Sten got the idea that they were interested in Sten becoming an instructor.
Sten turned green. He wanted a rear echelon job like he wanted a genital transplant. And being an IP was too damned dangerous, between the reservists, the archaic, and the inexperienced. But it did not appear as if Sten would be consulted.