Approximately 35,000 words later, here is one of the more exciting scenes in my latest project. Enjoy!
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After
ten days of dedicated training and drilling, the squads moved on to more
advanced tactics and combat simulations.
The pilots found themselves spending endless hours, flying through
simulated space, shooting at targets with all manner of weapons. Their training even covered unconventional
weaponry and hazardous flight conditions.
Jack
monitored his squad’s progress closely.
TSgt. Val Manson took the training most seriously, and received the
highest scores of the squad. SSgt. Aizu
Yishima’s scores were exceptionally high as well, especially in the various
combat simulations. SSgt. Misti Hernandez
had a bad penchant for flying and fighting too aggressively, often causing her
to make decisions that put herself in danger.
Elyssa, Zack, Brock, and Asheminja had very even scores across the
board. Nikola, Monica, and Rowan were
still struggling in certain areas, but were meeting the bare minimum
requirements. It was only Astronaut First
Class Patrick Davis that lingered behind; he was capable of flying and
shooting, but he often lost control of his craft, sending it spiraling out of
control. In some simulations, he
accidentally got his squad mates killed with collisions or friendly fire.
One
of the most intense combat simulations had the squad flying over the surface of
a Hot Jupiter planet; the squad flew along the dark side of the gas giant, to
shield itself from the intense heat of the nearby blue star. Inside the simulator, Jack could see the
swirling surface of the red and orange world, occasionally lit up by fierce
lightning storms. With winds exceeding a
thousand miles per hour, the bands of colored clouds drifted beneath the fighter
swiftly. At the edges of the planet,
where the star’s intense heat and radiation licked the sides of the planet,
there were wisps of hot energy, and a bright aurora was blazing on the planet’s
atmosphere.
Ahead,
there were several targets; one large battleship, and a squad of fighters, all
of Terran design. Jack spoke over the
comms, “Ghost Squad, get ready to engage.
Just like we planned; stay flush against the planet’s atmosphere, and
let the gravity do the work. Be careful
not to fall into the planet, and stay on the dark side.”
The
enemy targets started toward Ghost Squad, unleashing a torrent of bright pulses
from their particle cannons. The squad
broke apart to evade the flying energy pulses; most of the beams passed into
the stormy surface of the planet below.
Jack’s
computer locked onto the enemy formation, and he fired a missile at them. As the rocket soared ahead, the targeted
fighter pitched up and started to fly away from the planet. Having to fight gravity, its ascent was too
slow. The projectile slammed into its
underside, blowing the craft into a cloud of debris. The wreckage whipped by over Jack’s vision.
The
other fighters in the squad targeted and fired their missiles, which streamed
up and caught some of the enemy by surprise.
Several of the fighters were shredded to pieces and obliterated. Zooming past the fields of debris, Ghost
Squad pushed toward the main target.
Straddling
the terminal line of the planet, the battleship’s shields became ablaze as half
of it was exposed to the blue star’s direct light. Its cannons targeted the fighters and started
firing endless streams of laser fire. With
split-second reaction time, all of the fighters were able to pitch and roll out
of the path of the laser beams. The squad
broke apart and widened their formation, drawing the battleship’s fire wider
and farther apart.
Approaching
the battleship, Aizu unleashed all her missiles at the vessel’s bridge
tower. Some of the battleship’s cannon
fire shot the rockets down, but a few of the projectiles broke through the ship’s
shields and rammed into the structure.
The tower’s side was blown off, its walls breaking off. Crewmen on the bridge were sucked into open
space.
Zooming
toward other sectors of the ship, Asheminja and Val pounded the aft section
with their cannons and missiles, obliterating the engineering sections. Pieces of the hull plating were torn off,
exposing more and more of the interior decks.
Nikola
said, “I can get a good shot at the reactor from here. I recommend all craft pull away from the
target now!”
All
fighters close to the ship veered away, flying back into the planet’s dark
side. Observing his squad’s progress,
Jack warned Patrick, “Ghost Ten, fall back now! It’s going to be danger close
very soon!”
“Ugh,”
Patrick replied. “I’m trying! Gravity is a total b*tch!”
“Use
the gravity to your advantage, fall down to the planet and ride the momentum
back to the safety zone,” Elyssa explained. “Idiot…”
Indignantly,
Patrick cried, “Sorry I’m not a tactical genius like you!”
“Just
do it,” Jack ordered. “Ghost Eight, take the shot as soon as he’s out of the
way.”
“The
window is closing fast,” Nikola warned, as he continued to fly forward, dodging
the battleship’s cannon fire.
Swinging
around the battleship, Patrick’s fighter dipped closer to the planet’s
surface. The side of the U-shaped craft
became exposed to the star’s direct light, reflecting brightly. Jack warned, “Hurry it up, Ghost Ten. You’re in the hot zone!”
“Holy crap,” Patrick exclaimed, as his systems started to overheat. The fighter’s hull plating buckled under the
intense bombardment of pure heat and radiation.
As the fighter flew into the planet’s dark side, its hull plates ripped
off, with a trail of shrapnel and leaking coolant behind it.
“Holy crap!” he cried again. “Just lost my starboard bulwark! I’m losing coolant like
crazy!”
“Just,
keep on that trajectory, and ride the gravity towards us,” Jack said. “Ghost
Eight?”
“I
only have a minute left, or else I’ll have to make another pass,” Nikola
explained.
Watching
Patrick’s descent toward the planet’s atmosphere, Jack ordered, “Do it.”
“Package
is away,” Nikola said, as his fighter launched a warhead. The projectile flew directly into the
battleship’s exposed engineering decks; it slammed into the reactor room and
detonated, breaching the matter/anti-matter chamber.
As
the matter and anti-matter collided, its detonation caused a brilliant flash of
light that blinded Jack’s vision for a moment.
When the light faded, the entire battleship was reduced to a field of
shrapnel that either burned up in the star’s light, or fell to the planet,
turning into fiery streaks as they entered the atmosphere.
Patrick’s
fighter was suddenly struck by falling wreckage, which chipped away at his hull
plating and pushed him deeper into the planet’s stormy surface. He screamed as his descent became
uncontrolled.
“Calm
down, Davis!” Jack yelled. “What’s your status?”
“I’m
screwed sir!” Patrick exclaimed. “I can’t break into escape velocity at this
angle! I’ve lost my stabilizing thrusters! The MAM reactor’s overheating! Crap,
it’s all going to hell!”
“You
can make it out of this, if you calm the hell down and do what I tell you to,”
Jack calmly assured. “Bring your bow up slowly.
You need to get into a stable orbit, before you can break free of the
gravity. Just take it one step at a
time. Ghost One, see if you can get down
to him and use your tractor beam to help him out. Ghost Six, cover them, make sure there’s no
more debris flying around.”
Asheminja
and Val flew closer to the planet, try help Patrick out. Val dipped lower into the atmosphere,
directly above Patrick’s damaged vessel.
He engaged the tractor beam: a
steady stream of ions touched the dorsal side of Patrick’s fighter, pulling it
into a more stable trajectory.
Patrick
tried to pull his craft up, but he cried, “I can’t do it! The ship’s not
responding!”
“It’ll
be slow, but you are making progress,” Jack assured.
“Come
on, Davis,” Val urged. “I can’t carry you on my own; the gravity is pulling
both of us down. I need you to pull up!”
“I’m trying!” Patrick shouted.
“Try
harder.”
As
Patrick struggled to pull his craft out of the atmosphere, Asheminja darted
over the other fighters and shot down some flying debris from the enemy
fighters that were previously destroyed.
As she blasted away clouds of the wreckage, pieces were flung out in all
directions. She warned, “Heads up, there’s
debris everywhere, and I can’t guarantee that they won’t hit you.”
“Keep
up the controlling fire,” Val urged. “We don’t want to get hit by any of that stuff.”
Asheminja
twirled and rotated her fighter in all directions to vaporize as much debris as
she could. Some random pieces were flung
into the planet below, and she cried, “There’s incoming!”
One
large piece rammed into the dorsal side of Val’s craft. It rolled uncontrollably, causing his tractor
beam to yank Patrick’s fighter upwards.
The momentum flung Val deeper into the planet’s surface, where his
fighter disappeared into a cloud of rushing gas. Caught in a thousand mile-per-hour hurricane,
his fighter was flung through the orange clouds for miles on end. With each passing second he remained in the
storm, his fighter lost more and more of its structural integrity, with the
friction of the atmosphere and the stress of conflicting air pressure systems. He cursed as hull plates started to peel away
from the vessel.
Patrick’s
fighter was flung upwards, rushing to escape velocity. He was hurdling directly toward Asheminja’s
fighter; she saw his approach and darted out of the way just in time. Upon doing so, her fighter ran through a
cloud of wreckage, which cut into her fighter and sheared off part of her hull.
Patrick
continued to spiral out of control. In a
panic, he cried, “Oh no, oh frakk me, I can’t stabilize! I’m–”
With
his matter/anti-matter reactor overheating, his fighter suddenly became
engulfed in a powerful blast of energy.
He was vaporized instantly; the shockwave pushed the surrounding debris
into the planet’s surface, and Asheminja’s fighter plummeted down with it.
Then,
the simulation ended, and all of the training pods opened up. As the pilots wearily stepped out of their
simulators, Elyssa approached Patrick and yelled, “You are such a frakk-up,
Davis! You killed two of us out there, all because you couldn’t keep yourself together!”
“You
think you could do better?” Patrick defensively clamored. “I was doing the best
I could!”
“You
flew too close to the hot zone, and you know it!”
“Tech-sergeant,
stand down!” Jack commanded. Stepping
closer to them, he said, “That’s the whole point of these simulations: to identify our weak spots and improve on
them. So, squad, what went wrong? What
can we learn from all this?”
Glaring
at Patrick, Elyssa said, “Some of us still need to learn how to fly right.”
“Hey,
I don’t need to take this from you or anybody else. This could have happened to anybody!”
“No
it couldn’t have, because I wouldn’t have gotten myself in the same s**t-storm
you did.”
“You don’t know that, Kuntz,” Jack retorted. “The
lad’s right, this kind of situation could happen at any time. It could have been you caught in an uncontrolled
gravitational descent. You have to stay
calm and remember what we learned before.
SCUE: Stabilize, Correct, Upward,
and Escape. You all remember what that
means, right? Stabilize your descent.
Correct your angle so it’s not all that steep. Angle yourself upward, and push it to Escape
velocity.”
“I
tried that!” Patrick said.
Val
suggested, “Maybe you should have considered ejecting. As bad of a shape as your fighter was in,
reaching escape velocity might not have been possible. That was a call you had to make, but you
panicked.”
“I…I
know…”
“Maybe
that’s another lesson to learn,” Jack said. “Know exactly when to eject. That
was a tough simulation, and these are good lessons we can learn from it. I want all of us to focus on learning from
our mistakes, rather than to point fingers at each other. I want another two hours of sim-time from
everybody today, level three environmental programs. See if you can apply what we learned. Davis, let’s talk about what happened.”
Jack
led Patrick to an empty office branching off from the training rooms. As soon as Jack closed the door, Patrick
defensively exclaimed, “Sir, TSgt. Kuntz is right, I am a screw-up. I can’t ever seem to keep things together!”
“Nobody
here is a screw-up,” Jack countered. “I am concerned though, because you
currently have the lowest score of the lot so far. From what I see, you panic too much, and it
causes you to lose control and make things worse. Your synch-ups are instantaneous, so I know
it’s not technical or anything. I got to
know, what’s going on in your mind when you hook up to the machine?”
“Well…I
don’t know. I guess it has always made
me feel uneasy, sir.”
“Are
you comfortable allowing an AI to access your thoughts?” Jack asked. “You do
know that the machine never goes in any deeper than the surface-level
commands. The fighter doesn’t ever get
to know your inner-most thoughts and secrets; it’s only there to accept your
commands.”
“I
know, and it’s not that. Having an AI
reading my mind doesn’t bother me,” Patrick expressed. “It’s something else, I
don’t know. I get uneasy, and
anxious. I think it’s just the nature of
flying that makes me nervous. If it’s
one thing these simulations have taught me, it’s that things can go to hell really fast. We’re travelling at
thousands of miles per second in an airless environment, surrounded by
radiation and rocks and stuff that could kill us all instantly. I can’t help but to get jumpy, thinking that
one wrong move could mean instant death.”
Jack
said, “Well, that’s the vicious cycle of death.
You make yourself too anxious, worrying about things like this. And then, you know what happens? You get yourself killed anyway, because you
lose control.”
“Yeah!
So, how can I maintain control? How do I keep my cool the way you and everyone
else can?”
“Believe
me, it’s not easy. We’re all nervous, we
just learn to overcome it and keep focused on the mission. You just can’t dwell on things; do not fly
around, worrying about the dangers and what could
happen. You just got to keep your mind
focused on the mission, and doing your job.”
“That’s
easy to say, but in the heat of the moment, it’s impossible!”
“I
know. But that is why we are here: to be brave.
We have an obligation to Star Force to face death and danger
head-on. They would even say that we may
need to give up our lives for the human race.
If all else fails, think about that.
Think about, who would suffer if you fail. Think about Manson and Saj during the last
sim. Think about everybody else being
evacuated from the Earth. They’re all counting on you, and all of us, to
protect them. Maybe then, you’ll be able
to stop being a nervous wreck, and act like a real pilot.”
“Yeah,
I think you’re right, commander. Next
time, I promise to keep it together.”
“I
hope so,” Jack said. “The next simulation will be the last, before we get to
fly the real thing. I want your last sim
test to be perfect.”
“Thank
you sir, no pressure at all,” Patrick sighed.
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