TWENTY-ONE

“I have been reluctant to bring this up,” Coxswain Angelito Mendoza said as they were passing through earth’s orbit. “But I was wondering why you piloted the boat going to Wolf and not myself.”

It was the first word that the coxswain had exchanged with his engineer. Dana hadn’t expected chatter but usually the Suds couldn’t keep their mouth shut for more than two minutes. Two hours had been sort of surprising.

Dana wasn’t sure about this assignment but it got the division out of the Therm which at the moment was everything she could possibly wish for.

As soon as they got back to the Thermopylae from the meetings in Wolf the thunderbolts started landing. Captain Higgins, the squadron CO, had been “reassigned” to a ground based facility along with Commander Prado his Sud counterpart. So had the Norte and Sud chiefs of engineering, the Sud flight chief, the Sud and Norte engineering officers and a host of other luminaries in the squadron.

Their replacements were interesting as well. Barnett had, as predicted, been assigned as Coxswain NCOIC. What was more surprising was that instead of a Chief, Thermal was now the Squadron Engineering NCOIC. Commander Borunda, formerly the Chief of Staff of the 142nd, was now the Squadron CO. His Sud counterpart, Commander Miguel Echeverría, was a no-nonsense former Argentinean Navy Captain with the personality of a grizzly bear with a toothache and, apparently, no interest whatsoever in currying favor from the Powers-That-Be in any of the various supplying countries. It had been Commander Echeverría who had mostly been wielding the hatchet, digging further into the issues with the squadron than even the scathing MASSEX report.

There was no single item on the MASSEX report that could be pointed to as “the worst.” As Dana well knew, the squadron was screwed up from bottom to top in every particular. One of the reasons she’d finally dug out for stealing tools was that inventory was being sold on the black market. So every inventory was “in discrepancy” in the polite euphemism used by the report. Engineering of the ships was simply execrable. Most of them couldn’t even get out of the Thermopylae. That had almost masked the fact that so was coxswain training and certification. What became apparent, however, was that virtually every record was fabricated, including coxswain flight time and training completion.

So the Navy had come up with this “evolution.” The SAPL Corporation had apparently started shaking the money tree. Dana, in some ways, was surprised it had taken this long. But as it was explained, SAPL had gone far past the point that it was making money as a mining laser. Continued expansion, all expansion in the last few years, was entirely for military purposes. SAPLCorp hadn’t bothered to bring that up, before, but they were starting to run in the red. The choice was to start taking portions of SAPL offline, and definitely stop continued expansion, or get some sort of funding to continue.

While the notion was being debated in the Alliance Congress, the Navy had offered a stop-gap. Much of the issues with SAPL related to cost of maintenance and moving things around which took fuel. One issue was that SAPLCorp wanted to do a large-scale mirror reposition based on a new analysis of how much heat the primary mirrors could absorb. Moving the entire field—there were more than twenty million mirrors of various sizes and positions—was out of the question but even moving some of the major mirror sets inward could net a five percent increase in power.

The Navy wanted the increased power for when, not if, the Rangora came back. And they just happened to have a small boat squadron that needed some serious space time. But preferably not in the dangerous confines of the scrap yard.

“I had never seen you in the simulator room and was surprised you were still flight qualified,” Angelito added.

Dana had continued to maintain her flight status by the simple expedient of taking any time there was available in the simulators. Fortunately, up until recently, they were virtually unused.

“I tend to go well after duty hours,” Dana replied, neutrally. The truth was that she could have gone at almost any time and gotten on the simulators. That was until a week or so ago when suddenly she couldn’t even find a slot at 0200.

“That would explain it,” Angelito said. “How much time…” he asked, then paused.

“Seventy-three hundred hours and change,” Dana said, filling in the pause. “One hundred and ninety-six hours of combat time.”

“Space flight time?” Angelito asked, shocked.

“Yes,” Dana said, considering her instruments. Unfortunately, all the fluctuations were just normal stuff.

“How? You were with the 142nd for only…?”

“I was transferred shortly after I’d been there four years,” Dana said. “I was in engineering for my first six months. I was on flight duty for three and a half years.”

“That’s…” Angelito said, muttering.

“Use your plants,” Dana said, sighing. “They’ve got a calculator. A bit over forty hours of space time per week. They don’t count the difference between the scrapyard and the Big Dark. Although there’s a sub-set that is ‘high difficulty environments.’ That’s about two thousand hours.”

“Which is?” Angelito asked.

“Scrap yard,” Dana said. “Which we’re not doing because…”

“Because Alliance thinks we’re not good enough,” Angelito said, angrily.

Dana hadn’t had much time with her coxswain. There had been virtually no combined training or flight time since she’d joined the unit. He didn’t have much of a reputation, good or bad, and except for some routine greetings and exchanges of information, they’d had little contact. She was sure, however, that he knew her reputation.

“Permission to change seats, Coxswain?” Dana asked, innocently.

“Why?” Angelito asked.

“Demonstration,” Dana said.

“Of your superior flying skill, Engineer?” Angelito asked, sarcastically. “I know your reputation.”

“Well, if you’re not up to the challenge,” Dana said, shrugging.

“This is space,” Angelito said. “What challenge?”

“Very well, Coxswain,” Dana said, raising her octave just a tad. “I’m sure you know best.”

“If you want to fly for a while,” Angelito said, unstrapping and getting up. “Sure. Whatever.”

“Not quite what I meant,” Dana said, getting up as well. “As Coxswain, you are responsible for the movement and safety of this craft. If we change seats, you are officially surrendering your position as Coxswain during the period of the maneuver.”

“What are you planning?” Angelito asked. He was one of the “tall” Suds and over topped her by a good bit. Also, like a lot of them, pretty handsome. She wished she didn’t find them all such a pain in the ass. They were mostly God damned gorgeous.

“A. Flight. Demonstration. CN,” Dana said, didactically.

“You have the conn,” Angelito said, waving at his seat.

“I have the conn, aye,” Dana said, sitting down. As she started reconfiguring the screens and seat she opened up the flight channel. “Raptor, Comet.”

“Go, Comet.” All the boats that weren’t deadlined from Bravo Flight were part of the “mirror movement evolution.” Raptor had had to commandeer someone else’s boat to accompany. He had pointed that out in no uncertain terms to Megadeath who was, finally, able to employ his nickname. The engineer of 17 was in for a hard couple of weeks until it was up to Megdanoff returning standards.

“Permission engage harsh flight training maneuver,” Dana said. “Comet has Twenty-Three conn.”

There was a long pause before Raptor replied.

“Comet has conn Twenty-Three, aye,” Raptor commed. “Harsh flight training maneuver, approved. Don’t bend the boat.”

“Don’t bend the boat, aye,” Dana said. “Athena, Comet.”

“Dana,” Athena replied. “It is a pleasure to hear from you.”

“Thank you, Athena,” Dana said, getting the shiver of thrill she always did talking to Athena. If she had to pick an AI who was her favorite, it was definitely the system’s space traffic control and primary defense AI. “Looking for some scrap to play tag with.”

“I suspected when I heard your communication with CM1 Kelly,” Athena commed. “Bits and pieces of an old mining project at six one eight mark three, sixteen thousand.”

“How fine?” Dana asked.

“Almost all detectable,” Athena replied. “It has sufficient similarity to the scrapyard if much smaller.”

“Roger, thank you,” Dana said, switching channels. “Raptor, Comet, permission to break flight for training purposes.”

“Permission granted.”

“Do we have enough fuel?” Angelito asked, nervously. They were supposed to tank when they reached the “evolution area.” More training, in reality. Most of the crews had never even done a docking tank.

“Plenty,” Dana said, as she carefully maneuvered out of the formation. She wasn’t going to hot-dog it near the 143 boats. As soon as she was clear of the formation, though, she rammed the piles.

“Oof,” Angelito grunted as the ship suddenly started pulling a relative three gravities. “Is that entirely necessary?”

“Harsh environment flight time shall be defined as maneuvers exceeding two gravities of relative internal acceleration for a period of more than twenty minutes or maneuvers in or around environments with the ability to damage the flight system or maneuvers in atmosphere or other planetary like environments which cause surface heating above five hundred degrees Celsius,” Dana quoted.

“So we’re going to be doing this for more than twenty minutes?” Angelito grunted. It wasn’t exactly uncomfortable—the flight seat was well designed to handle maneuvers—just a tad hard to breathe.

“Sixteen thousand kilometers,” Dana said. “Four hundred gravities. Do the math.”

“Uhm…”

“Two minutes,” Dana said. “Including turn-over and decel burn. I’m not going to go flying into a scrap heap at two thousand meters per second. Then there’s maneuver to adjust to its relative velocity and orbital mechanics.”

“Uh…yeah,” Angelito said.

“All of which you should be able to do while taking a measly three gravities,” Dana said. “On your plants, again.”

There was no reply so she flipped the boat for deorbit burn, doing a skew turn rather than cut power.

“Ugh!”

“Figured out its relative vector to ours, yet?” Dana asked.

“I’m still trying to figure out where it is,” Angelito admitted.

“Six hundred and ninety three meters from where it was when we were given the vector,” Dana said. “Anti-spinward since it was apparently one of those weird rocks that’s spinning in the wrong direction and we’re…here.”

“Here” was a collection of rocks, small asteroids or planetismals, that were, for space, remarkably close together. The remains of an earlier Aten mining project, the rocks were the space mining equivalent of furnace slag. They were mostly composed of silica and, strangely from an earth perspective, iron. And had at one point been nearly atomic level. Since the mining project shut down they had been slowly pulled together from their own microgravity. As the boat approached one of them made contact with another turning both back to dust. Most were the size of a small tract house. Some were smaller. There was dust for that matter and probably thousands of micro-meteors.

“We’re going there?” Angelito said.

“We’re going in there,” Dana answered, picking an open spot between two of the bigger rocks.

The rocks were moving in multiple vectors from their point of view. They were moving to spinward as well as “down” in relation to the elliptical plane. Most had some rotation around others. Furthermore, they were doing so at different velocities and had a slight approach to each other. Smaller rocks were circling them like moons, occasionally filling the slot between the two and just as occasionally colliding with each other then bouncing off randomly.

It was, in other words, complete chaos. For all practical purposes it was the sort of “asteroid belt” you saw in bad science fiction movies.

Dana shot the gap, a loud “bang!” coming from forward as one of the micrometeorites hit the screens, then flipped and applied power to swing around the sunward rock and snake through three more passages. There were more bangs and thumps as they shattered fist sized and smaller rocks into dust.

“The screens take up almost as much power as the lasers,” Dana said, yawing around the only rock that was significantly larger than the shuttle. “Minor masses that are below their threshold are not a problem or we couldn’t work the Scrapyard at all. But if the mass you hit is similar to your own, either due to relative approach velocity or static mass of the object, your deceleration on impact exceeds the ability of the inertial compensators and you turn into goo. And wreck the shuttle which would be the real bitch. Or, in the words of the manual: Intercepting a gravitic-engined vessel at any velocity and vector other than its own turns it into an unguided kinetic-energy weapon of somewhat lesser density, but the same vector and mass.”

“Please just concentrate on flying,” Angelito squeaked.

“This is a piece of cake,” Dana said, yawning theatrically.

Finally she cleared the mass of debris and headed back to the formation.

“That doesn’t even go in my log since it was less than forty-five minutes,” Dana said, unstrapping. “Your conn, Coxswain. Oh,” she added, hitting a control and bringing up the default screen layout. “I figure you’d want your screens configured back.”

“Thank you,” Angelito said, thoughtfully.

“Space is a very big place,” Dana said. “But crowded is a relative term. It’s a matter of velocity, maneuvering and size. If you’re in a spacecraft going near the speed of light and you pass through the solar system, you’re going to hit all sorts of stuff, like, say, planets, no matter how well you maneuver. On the other hand, your comparative mass, if you’re near the speed of light, means that the planets puff into dust rather than your ship.

“If you’re going slow through vast areas that are fairly clear, and Athena’s been steering us away from stuff like that scrap and we’re going damn slow, it’s pretty empty. If you’re working the scrapyard, no matter how slow you’re going it’s crowded as hell. And most of the stuff has more relative velocity than those rocks and most of the stuff is massier and more solid. So, CN Mendoza, if you found that a tad exciting you don’t want to work the scrapyard.”

“So the training was that we’re not ready to do more work so Apollo can make another billion dollars?” Mendoza said.

“Working the scrapyard pays off dividends to more than just Apollo,” Dana said. “For one thing, it’s one hell of a navigational hazard that will keep spreading out and making stuff like that end up all over the system. Two, it’s very useable scrap for the fabbers to make, oh, missiles and boats like this. Three, it’s damned good training and Apollo pays the Navy for our time. The fact that you’re not working the scrapyard is, seen one way, an insult, CN Mendoza, or, seen another, a rational appreciation of your space skills. The last, and honestly stupidest, way to see it is as ‘we’re glad we’re not making money for Apollo.’ As to your skills, CN Mendoza, I checked your flight records against other records and as far as I can tell, CN Mendoza, with the exception of your first week after arrival and this last week you have had only two hours in the simulator and less than nine in boats, period. So, technically, you’re unqualified as a coxswain.”

“I see,” Mendoza said, tightly.

“Which also explains why you didn’t fly the Wolf mission,” Dana said.

“And not because you’re in a relationship with Tyler Vernon?” Mendoza asked.

“And because, for various reasons, Tyler Vernon asked me to fly,” Dana said. “And I was given the choice of who among the junior coxswains was to take the other boat. I chose Benito because while I think he’s personally a pig, he’s a good driver.”

“And I’m not,” Mendoza said.

“How could you be?” Dana asked, exasperated. “There are three requirements for being a good driver of anything from a horse to a ship. Training, experience and talent. You had the basics of training but you lose that if you don’t practice it and keep current. This isn’t a horse or even a car. You have to do computations for three dimensional vectors on a constant basis. That takes not only knowing the physics, you have to be adept at doing them. You have to learn the tricks and practice them. You get all of that from, and this is an important point so please listen to me, experience, CN. Forget that you were playing Halo and going to parties when you were supposedly logged into the simulator, you should have been asking for more simulator time. And, frankly, you should have been out in boats every moment you weren’t on the simulator. That’s not your fault, it’s engineering’s and command’s. I don’t even know if you have talent. I haven’t seen you do anything that was actually hard flying and that is where the talent part comes in. After training and experience then you find out if you’re talented. If you’re not, you can still be a coxswain. You’re just not superb. Doesn’t matter. Navy doesn’t need superb coxswains. Navy needs trained and experienced ones.”

“And what the Navy wants the Navy gets?” Mendoza asked.

“What the Navy wants is what the solar system needs,” Dana said, sighing. “I’m not sure that’s getting through the cultural filters, though. But, I mean, you know you have to practice to be able to drive a car or ride a horse, right? These things are ten times tougher.”

“I drive a car just fine, thank you,” Angelito said. “As to horses, I am not a great son.”

“Translation issue,” Dana said. “Or do you mean you don’t ride horses because you aren’t a great son to your family?”

“I mean I am not the son of a…” Angelito stopped and thought about it. “I would say it in Spanish as a great man. But that comes out simply as great man.”

“Yeah,” Dana said. “You mean your dad’s not a big guy in your government?”

“No,” Angelito said, shrugging. “He is a senior official with the Ecuadorian military. But we are not… We do not live in the great house with the thousands of adoring peasants bowing at our feet.”

“You are…joking right?” Dana said.

“Exaggerating a bit,” Angelito admitted. “But only a bit. Do you know why Palencia and Benito do not get along?”

“Chilean and Argentinean?” Dana asked.

“That is part of it,” Mendoza replied. “But the greater part is…cultural. And class. And Palencia is all about whether you are of the proper class. And to him that means a very small and distinct group. My father, for example, is not of that class and therefore nor am I. Beni’s great grandfather was a stevedore. Benito’s grandfather became rich through simple trade. Dockyard work as a matter of fact and he started as a stevedore as well.

“He used his connections to ensure that one of his sons became an officer in the Navy and later an admiral. Oh, don’t get me wrong, Admiral Benito is a fine man and a good commander. But he, too, has had to struggle against the fact that his father was a merchant. You in America might call it ‘new rich’ but you really can’t quite grasp it. Palencia’s family came from the silver Argentina was named after. The family derives from Spanish nobility. They own a huge expanse of the pampas, still, and they are very much treated as nobility upon their lands. Many of the farmers, especially the older ones, do literally bow as they pass. That is what he means by class.”

“That sort of makes sense,” Dana said. “And makes more sense of Palencia, that’s for sure. I’m related to the last king of Ireland on my mother’s side. Does that help?” she asked, chuckling.

“If he was polite he would say ‘Of course,’ ” Mendoza said. “If he was being impolite he’d mention that he is, in fact, closely related to the current King of Spain and therefore half the children on his father’s lands are.”

“He’s certainly shaping up lately,” Dana said, mulling that one.

“Being told that all of our countries are about to be terminated from the Alliance for failure to meet standards might have something to do with that,” Mendoza said. “It has, you understand, put a bit of habanera in our willingness to comply.”

“What?” Dana said. “You’re serious?”

“I assumed you knew,” Mendoza said, uncomfortably. “I would appreciate you not spreading it around. Amazingly it has not been picked up by the news media. But with your relationship with Vernon I’d assumed…”

“My relationship with Tyler Vernon is…not of that sort,” Dana said. “And be aware that the relationship is very much… I’m trying to think of the word.”

“May-December?” Mendoza said.

“That’s a phrase,” Dana snarled. “And the opposite of what it implies. Something about philosophical or something. We’re friends. Just friends.”

“Platonic,” Angelito said.

“Yeah,” Dana replied. “That!”

“I appear to know your own language better than you,” Angelito said.

“If that’s a comment on the American educational system,” Dana said, “no comment. I still can do your job better than you can and mine as well. I am woman, hear me roar.”

“Women are a very major part of…” Angelito said then paused. “I’m getting a really large radar return…”

“That’s because we’re here,” Dana said, slewing one of the cameras and putting it on the main screen.

“That is…” Angelito said then considered his instruments. “I thought these mirrors were small!”

Perspective is very difficult to determine in space. But when something is still five hundred kilometers away and perceptible with the naked eye—and the viewscreen was set to zero magnification—it means it is either very large or very bright.

VLA Packet Twenty-six was both.

“The first series was,” Dana said. “SAPL finally figured out what any woman knows: Bigger really is better. Up to a point. I think they finally took down the five hundred kilometer mirror…”

“Five hundred kilometers!”

“I did not misspeak,” Dana said. “We ran a team out here one time to help move it. The joke was ‘how do you tell the difference between a mirror and a light-sail?’ ”

“Okay, how do you tell the difference between a mirror and a light-sail?” Angelito asked, still boggling over the VLA packet. Especially since the closer they got, the more mirrors he could pick out. They just went on and on.

“The logical answer is if you have to apply noticeable thrust to correct for the solar wind effects,” Dana said. “In Mister Vernon’s case, the answer is ‘if a planet can be moved out of its orbit by the solar wind effects.’ ”

Angelito laughed hard at that but there was a slightly hysterical edge to it.

“There are…so many…” He paused and leaned forward then brought up the view on one of his screens and zoomed in. “Are those…?”

“Paw tugs,” Dana said, nodding. The tiny dots were clustered to shadow-ward of the mirrors. “And that’s one of the Monkey mining control ships. I don’t think it’s the actual Monkey Business.” She pulled up the ship’s registry. “Nope. That’s the Monkey Bread. Rangoran built to Glatun specs. That ship came out of the same shipyard as one of the Aggressors we captured. And two that the Troy cut in half.”

“Uh…” Angelito said, pulling up the same information. “How…where did you…?”

“I happened to remember because I carried the Marine boarding party,” Dana said. “Second battle of Troy. And I was interested in the Aggressors. When I pulled up the information on the Aggressor I sort of found it amusing that one of the Apollo tugs was built in the same shipyards. The name sort of stuck in my head. Aruhop Ship Yards. No, I am not Hop. Are you? Wasn’t just those three. Aruhop is one of the big Rangora shipyards. Does military and commercial. About half the E Eridani fleet was built there. Besides, I like monkey bread.”

“I don’t even know where to start,” Angelito said. “So I’m going to leave it.”

“Leave what?” Dana said, distantly.

“Leave off that while you didn’t know the word ‘Platonic’ you seem to be a walking encyclopedia of ship types and their construction.”

“It’s called ‘a broad base of functional knowledge,’ ” Dana said. “One of the standing requirements to get promoted. And as part of that I’m wondering when Raptor is going to tell us to start…”

“Formation, prepare for one hundred gravity decel burn,” Raptor commed. “Open formation. Rotate turn to decel on my mark…”

“And that answers that question,” Dana said.