Author's note: this story has been re-edited to bring it up to my current standards as part of an effort to make Ebooks. It features improved editing, grammar, punctuation, and also includes rewrites and expanded scenes where necessary. Please see my bio for more information.
CHAPTER 1: U.F.O
The alarm blared, the sound of boots hammering on the deck joining the siren as the hangar bay was filled with a rush of activity. The running figures and idle spacecraft were illuminated by flashing, orange warning lighting, instructions coming through on loudspeakers and radios as the personnel hurried to their positions.
Jaeger was already wearing his helmet, double-checking the seals on his flight suit as he made his way towards his plane, listening to the chatter in his ear.
"...heat signatures in the Oort cloud, nothing showing up on radar, but there's a lot of interference from small bodies and debris..."
Just like with every long-range patrol, or
Bug hunts
as they were colloquially known, the UNN
Rorke
had been drifting along the edge of Coalition space and scanning for Betelgeusian activity for weeks now with no contacts. Jaeger was itching to get back into the cockpit, to stretch his wings in the black void of space. Being cooped up inside the jump carrier was nearly enough to drive him crazy.
His chest swelled with excitement as he arrived beside his ship, its angular, black chassis making it look like it had been chiseled from a block of solid onyx. The airframe was designed for the lowest possible radar cross-section, the swept wings, dual tail fins and the pointed nose betraying the vessel's atmospheric flight capabilities. It was an FS-26 Beewolf spaceplane, a short-range fighter that could operate both in deep space and in the atmosphere of a planet when necessary. Looking closely, one could make out the innumerable nozzles and thrusters that were spaced out all along the hull, used to orient it in a vacuum where its aerodynamic design counted for naught.
He stepped out of the way as a Krell lumbered past him, the gigantic reptile carrying a missile in its muscular arms as if the nine foot, two hundred pound projectile weighed no more than a pool noodle. The alien looked to be about fifteen feet from nose to tail, eight feet tall due to its hunched, bipedal posture. Its back was covered in scales and armored scutes like a crocodile, spinach green in color, and it was wearing a yellow poncho that identified it as a member of the engineering crew.
Jaeger watched the alien as it leaned under the craft's delta wing and began to affix the missile to a vacant hardpoint. When it was done, it stepped out from beneath the plane, its long tail dragging along the deck.
"We good to go, buddy?" Jaeger asked. The Krell turned its alligator-like snout in his direction, then curled its many-fingered hand into a fist, giving him a thumbs-up. The Krell lacked the vocal apparatus to reproduce human speech, but they understood the language well enough. They were just one of the many alien races that served alongside humanity in the multi-species Coalition.
Even as he climbed up to the cockpit, Jaeger could hear the other pilots spooling up their engines and running thruster diagnostics. The deck crew moved off as the vessels prepared to launch, Jaeger sliding into his seat and hitting the button that would close the transparent canopy. The cockpit was high on the nose of the craft, which provided excellent visibility, and he watched the yellow-clad figures retreat to safety as his suit jacked into the plane's internal systems.
The full-faced visor on his helmet slid down, sealing over his head with a hiss, the heads-up display overlaying his field of view with ghostly green graphics and information as it flickered to life. External cameras mounted all around the vessel streamed a video feed to his helmet, the latency low enough that it allowed him to see through the chassis in real time, giving him an unobstructed view in every direction. If an enemy craft were below, or even directly behind him, this system would allow him to view it as if he was looking through glass.
The helmet was designed both to feed him system information and targeting data, as well as to protect him from the certain death of decompression if his vessel should lose pressure. He felt cool air across his face as the oxygen supply turned on, his flight suit shifting like it was a living thing, flexing and tightening around his limbs. It could contract to restrict blood flow to his extremities during the extreme-G maneuvers that space combat often required, preventing him from blacking out, at least to a point.
As soon as his gloved hands found the joystick, he felt like he was home, hitting switches on the control panel and booting up the various systems. The vessel seemed to wake up, its thrusters swiveling and shooting puffs of gas as the flight computer ran diagnostics, the rudders and ailerons tilting. The main engine of the craft stretched like a limb, the vectoring nozzle expanding and contracting, Jaeger feeling a rumble beneath his feet as it spooled up. The data readout on his HUD showed that all systems were green, weapons operational, propulsion gas canisters and chemical fuel tanks full.
Before him was the hangar's shimmering force field, a flimsy energy barrier that would keep the atmosphere in, while allowing solid objects to pass. Beyond it was the velvet blackness of space, dotted with twinkling stars, the void calling to him. He listened intently to his radio as he secured his straps, waiting for the order to launch. They had been on standby for so long that he felt like he might explode if he didn't get out there in the next couple of minutes.
"Beewolf two-zero-six and two-zero-niner, feeding coordinates to your flight computers. Your orders are to follow the patrol route and investigate the anomalous heat signatures."
That was Jaeger's plane, and
Scorch
had been assigned as his wingman, excellent. The callsigns that the pilots used might sound aggrandizing to the uninitiated, but they were more often than not assigned as a reference to some monumental fuckup or as a squadron in-joke. Richard
Scorch
Baker had earned his callsign when he had failed to retract his radiators during reentry while training at the academy, causing them to melt and overheat his engines. Fortunately, he had been able to glide to safety. Jaeger's callsign was
Bullseye
, a reference to him accidentally firing an extremely expensive missile into deep space during a combat exercise.
He looked around, noticing that two other fighters were starting to taxi into position as well, waiting for their turn to launch. They must have been ordered to patrol along a slightly different route to cover more ground. It looked like
Boomer
and
Scratcher
. Boomer hadn't figured out that breaking the sound barrier while doing a low flyby over a populated area was a bad idea, and Scratcher had been caught sharing a bed with a Borealan recruit within his first week on the job.
Jaeger lined up his plane ready for takeoff, using his helmet to look through the floor of his cockpit to make sure that he was properly aligned with the markings on the deck as Scorch taxied up beside him. He looked over his shoulder, watching as a metal panel rose from the deck of the hangar on a pneumatic piston, the angled square of blackened metal designed to deflect and absorb the heat from the engine during takeoff so that it didn't cook the vessels directly behind it. As large as the hangar was, there were still dozens of fighters and dropships crammed into the space.
Unlike in the atmosphere of a planet, there was no need to gain a great deal of speed in order to generate lift. One needed only to escape the artificial gravity field of the carrier and then they were in open space, where only short bursts from the engines and thrusters were necessary to maneuver. Extended burns were usually a very bad idea, because the more momentum that was generated, the more thrust would have to be applied in the opposite direction to slow down again. Space flight had almost nothing in common with atmospheric flight, there was no banking to turn, there was no danger of stalling. The aircraft could move in any direction, and at any speed in a three-dimensional space, the only limiting factor being fuel consumption and the G-forces applied to the pilot.
Some argued that fighters flown remotely would be better suited to the task, able to execute maneuvers that would turn an organic occupant to jelly. But due to the massive distances involved where space combat was concerned, the only way to ensure a low enough latency connection for that to be viable was by laser transmission, which could be obstructed by objects and hazards. You couldn't send a laser signal to a vessel that was on the other side of a planet, for example, not without satellites already in place to bounce the beam. Automated drones were a possibility, but so far the only species that had developed advanced enough computing technology to achieve that were the Brokers, and they weren't too keen on sharing it. At least for the foreseeable future, Jaeger wouldn't be out of a job.
The indicator on his HUD turned from red to green, signifying that he was clear to launch. Wasting no time, he gave the throttle a short squeeze, orange flames splashing against the panel behind him as the acceleration pinned him to his seat. In a flash, the brightly lit interior of the bay was replaced with the darkness of space, only the relatively thin barrier of his canopy protecting him from the freezing cold and the deadly radiation. Space looked so serene and pristine, but it was actually swarming with charged particles that would turn his chromosomes into Swiss cheese, along with dust and debris that could hit with the force of a bullet. The spacecraft were made of stern stuff, but every spacefarer feared the day that the cruel hand of fate might send an errant micrometeorite hurtling towards his head.
He rotated the fighter on its axis and retracted his landing gear, angling the nose towards the vast field of ice and rock in the distance. To his right, he could see the jump carrier and its trailing support vessels, torpedo boats and CIWS frigates floating along in a lazy formation like a pod of dolphins surfing the bow wave of a ship. Only the largest vessels in the Navy were big enough to house the nuclear reactors that were needed to power the jump drives, the smaller vessels had to be towed in their slipstream. The carrier was already dwindling to the size of a toy, the ocean-grey hull shaped vaguely like a giant snub-nosed bullet, with recesses along its length for docking dropships and other craft when the hangars were full. Its belly and flanks bristled with weaponry. There were lines of closed hatches that housed torpedo bays, long railguns on flexible arms, and point defense turrets jutting from its bulbous hull. A carrier could both defend itself and deal an incredible amount of damage to anything that was unwise enough to get into range.
A burst of flame drew his eye, and he made out Scorch leaving the hangar, using the telescope function on his visor to zoom in on the fighter as it drifted towards him. He heard crackling static in his earpiece, and then mission control came through.
"We've got some weird heat signatures showing up on the thermal scans, could be recent collisions between large bodies, but it's not likely. Radar won't be of much use out there, there's a lot of shit floating around, so keep your eyes peeled. Remember, don't engage unless necessary, this is a recon mission."