Approximately 35,000 words later, here is one of the more exciting scenes in my latest project. Enjoy!
--------------------
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 couldhappen. 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.
