LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Six

       29 June 2405

       VFA-44

       Outer System, Texaghu Resch System

       112 light years from Earth

       1106 hours, TFT

      “PriFly, this is Dragon One,” Gray called. “What’s the hang-up?” They were supposed to have dropped two minutes before, but Primary Flight Control had called for a hold.

      “Wait one, Dragon One,” a voice replied—one of the traffic control personnel in PriFly. “There’s been a hitch. The Space Boss is talking to the admiral now.”

      The “Space Boss” was Commander Avery, America’s primary flight controller.

      Gray scowled. His cockpit was projecting a view of surrounding space, overlaid with icons representing the ships of CBG-18 as they continued to emerge from metaspace. A dozen Confederation vessels were out there, now, with more popping in every moment as the light from their Emergence reached the America’s sensors.

      There were no icons representing enemy or unknown vessels. It appeared that this system might be clean.

      Possibly the drop was going to be scrubbed.

      Well, that was the battle cry of the Navy: hurry up and wait.

      “Dragonfire Squadron, this is PriFly,” Commander Avery said. “The drop is scrubbed. Repeat, the drop is scrubbed. VFA-51 will remain on Ready Five. All others will stand down.”

      VFA-51, the Black Lightnings, was one of the Dragonfires’ sister Starhawk squadrons on board the America. Commander Alton Crane was their new skipper, and like the Dragonfires, they’d taken heavy losses at Alphekka, and a good half of the pilots were newbies.

      Gray felt a jolt as his Starhawk began rising within its magnetic cradle. A moment later, it passed through the drop-tube vacuum seal, allotropic composites within a nanomatrix that made solid metal flow like a thick, viscous liquid, allowing the fighter to be drawn into the carrier’s flight deck while maintaining the compartment’s atmospheric pressure. His cockpit melted open and swung away as a rating outside triggered steps that grew out of the deck.

      “Short flight, huh?” the guy said, grinning.

      “The best kind,” Gray replied with considerable feeling. “Uneventful.”

      An hour later, Gray entered the crew’s lounge, located at the third-G level of America’s number-two hab-module stack. The compartment was large and furnished more like a civilian social center Earthside, with numerous entertainment pits, food bars, and low couches grown from the deck and turned soft. The overhead was an enormous dome, and at the moment, it was displaying the view outside. The local star, yellow, bright, and showing a tiny disk, gleamed halfway up the gently curving bulkhead.

      Shay Ryan spotted him and walked over. “Hey, Skipper,” she called. “Looks like they don’t want us here, either.”

      Like Gray, Ryan was a Prim, formerly of the Periphery areas that once had been Washington, D.C., until rising sea levels had reclaimed the lowland areas as a ruin-littered salt marsh. Like Gray, she’d joined the service because she’d had few decent options. Like him, she mistrusted both government authority and technology, but she’d tested well on her inborn spatial and coordination skills, and they’d made her a fighter pilot.

      “Hello, Shay,” he said. He walked over to a food bar and placed his palm on the contact. He ordered a cola, which rose from within the black surface a moment later in a sealed cup with a built-in straw. “Looks like we lucked out, huh?”

      “Shit. I don’t like going through all of that, getting ready to drop into hard-V, and then suddenly get pulled back. They’re just jerking us around, y’know?”

      “Any day they pull us back,” Gray replied, “is a day we don’t get into a knife fight with toads.” Toads was pilot slang for the blunt, heavy, hard-to-kill fighters used by the Turusch. “And that suits me just fine.”

      “I guess. Hey … did you see? A couple of our old friends are on deck.”

      Gray turned and glanced in the direction she was pointing, his eyes widening a bit. “So! They’re allowing the spiders out to play?”

      “Maybe the brass trusts them now.”

      Gray glanced at the Marine staff sergeant standing behind the two Agletsch. “More likely they figure they can’t do any harm here. Let’s go say hi.”

      Gray and Ryan both had met the two Agletsch three months earlier, just before the battlegroup had departed from Earth’s SupraQuito synchorbital complex. They’d been at a restaurant called the Overlook, and an officious headwaiter had been trying to expel the two many-legged aliens for no other reason than, as far as Gray could tell, that they didn’t happen to be human. Gray, Ryan, and several other service personnel had lodged a protest by leaving en masse, taking the Agletsch with them to another restaurant, one without so narrow a definition of acceptable patrons.

      And they’d gotten to know the two pretty well, Gray thought, as well as it was possible to know beings with both physiologies and psychologies utterly different from anything from Earth.

      A small crowd had gathered around the two Agletsch, who were standing with a lieutenant commander in a full dress uniform. Gray thought he recognized the guy—someone on Admiral Koenig’s staff. When he pinged the man’s id, he got back a name and rank: LCDR N. Cleary.

      He wasn’t sure which alien was which, but he had their names stored in his implant memory. “Hey, Dra’ethde,” he said. “What brings you down here?”

      The Agletsch on the right twisted two of its eye stalks around for a look, identifying itself for Gray as the one he’d named. “Ah! You are the fighter pilot Trevor Gray, yes-no?”

      “Yes. We met at SupraQuito, remember?”

      “We do. We are delighted to see you again. And Shay Ryan as well! We remember you, too.”

      “Stay clear of this, Lieutenant,” Cleary said. “We’re on duty.”

      “Doing what?” Ryan asked. “Watching vids?”

      A three-meter-high portion of the viewall dome directly in front of the small group had been turned into a display window, showing, it appeared, a portion of the local star.

      “We’re looking at what scrubbed your drop, Lieutenant,” Cleary said. “And we would appreciate it if you would stand back and not crowd.”

      Gray and Ryan did move back, but only one step. Gray was intensely curious. So far as he could see, they were studying one quarter of the system’s G2 star. Nothing remarkable there at all.

      “We have heard of this sort of thing, Commander,” Gru’mulkisch said, apparently continuing an interrupted discussion with Cleary. “But only in whispers. The Sh’daar masters do not speak of them.”

      “Is it Sh’daar?” Cleary asked. “Did they build it?”

      “Perhaps,”

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