*** Part 1 - Controlling the Flow ***
*Pivot's General wears silver hair well.* Aimee mused, leaning back in her chair. She let her gaze travel up and down the man as he paced on the podium in front of them. *People talk about General Auspus being handsome, but Pivot's General is handsome too, in his own way. I actually like his look better, the mature look. Grown up, like he can handle all of the responsibility. Auspus never looked like that, he just looked like an angry kid all the time.* General Hunter looked up from his screen suddenly, and Aimee ducked her head to look at her nails, blushing.
"Do you suppose your squadmates will be joining us any time in the next few days?" General Hunter growled at the assembled rookies. "Much as I enjoy the free time, I *do* have other things I should be attending." Aimee glanced to her left and right, as if Preston and Missy would've magically appeared since the last time she had checked.
"I did tell them the meeting was in five minutes." To her right, Li frowned. "They said they'd be right up."
*Oh six orbits, please let them not be missing the meeting because they're having a quickie.* Aimee mentally begged. General Hunter grunted and crossed his arms, looking around the room and resuming his pacing. Aimee took the opportunity to glance around the room again herself. It was a lush and well furnished room, like all rooms in Orbital Pivot. Unlike the others that she had seen, this room also clearly served a purpose; the rows of seats were comfortable, but they faced the giant screen in the front. It felt vast and empty, probably because only a handful of pilots had stayed on. Normally this room would be used to brief pilots and security before missions. Today it was occupied by her squadmates and nine pivot pilots, each from different squads as far as she could tell. *The only ones who stayed.*
The doors slid open and Preston and Missy entered. Aimee sighed. Missy's brown hair was mussed up, and Preston wore a stupid half-smirk. They had the decency to at least look ashamed, and Missy murmured an apology to the room as she sat in the empty seat next to Aimee.
"Now that we're all here." Hunter glared at the two late rookies, then flicked an image up on the screen. "This is what we have to deal with. This is realtime radar data, streamed to us from the nav room." It took a few minutes for Aimee to interpret what she was seeing, and while she did so she leaned towards Missy.
"You delayed a meeting so you could fuck your boy toy?" She hissed. "You should get his libido under control."
"Boy*friend*." Missy gave her friend a look, half hurt and half annoyed. "And it was my idea. You're always telling me I should come out of my shell aren't you?" Aimee rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to the screen.
"Can you tell us what we're seeing here sir?" One of the rookie pilots from Pivot asked. "Us pilots are used to flying, not dealing with that nav stuff." Aimee raised an eyebrow. Captain Appet had made sure her squad knew how to read a basic radar readout.
"You should know that 'nav stuff', even as a pilot." Aimee's voice was even, but held a trace of the disdain she felt. "If you lose comms in your ship, knowing the nav stuff is what will save your life when you don't have techs giving you directions. Cap App would've made us run laps if she heard us talking like that about navigational ability."
"Okay, you know so much, you want to tell us what we're looking at? *Rookie?*" The Pivot pilot sneered.
"It looks like Orbital Pivot is surrounded right now. They're in spherical formation around the station, so I doubt they're lining up to land. At a guess I'd say they're protecting us from something? Twelve fighters, all either cruiser, heavy cruiser, or darts. There are also two heavy transports outside of the ring...are the fighters protecting us from the transports? But why we would need so many...and what threat the transports could be to us...I'm confused." Aimee admitted. The pivot pilot chuckled, and Aimee clenched her fists.
"Shut your face Pilot Riteon." Hunter's bark silenced the room, and Aimee turned her attention back to the General. "At least she tried to answer the damned question. Rookie...what was it?"
"Aimee, sir. Aimee Nesbit."
"You tried, but you have it wrong." The General gestured towards the display with his screen as he talked, leaving Aimee to wonder why she cared about his opinion of her. "Rookie Nesbit was almost correct, but looking at it backwards. Those heavy transports are carrying the shipment from Orbital Minera. Obviously the Academy and Techrider shipments aren't coming in today, but we can survive without those. Without Minera supplies, the outlook is a little grim." He didn't need to explain why. When Aimee was three years old, a transport carrying supplies to Techrider had been waylaid by a team of Terran Shrikes, ripped to pieces before it could drop off its supplies. The energy resources and raw materials were used constantly in any Orbital's supply, and the loss of those materials, even for a few days, was devastating. She was too young to know the whys of it, but Aimee remembered those horrible nights huddled in her room in Techrider, as the entire Orbital stayed on emergency power for four days.
*Orbital Pivot probably has even higher power consumption than Techrider.* Aimee realized. *Who knows how long they can last without materials.*
"Can they do that?" One of the pilots asked, incredulous. "If they keep us from getting our materials, they're all but killing us? Is the Marshal just going to allow that?"
"The Marshal won't get involved in this dispute." General Hunter growled, and Aimee noticed the warning look his Chief of Information gave him. "Not unless a covenant is broken. In other words, as long as there's something we can do to fix the problem, we can't look to Orbital Basura for help. General Auspus isn't directly killing us, he's just trying to force us to surrender to him. The Marshal *apparently*," another warning look from his Chief, "doesn't consider that worthwhile enough to take action. A surrender to Academy will most likely come with quite a few provisions and reparations that will put is in quite a poor position. That surrender is something we're not giving him. That's why you're all here. There's twelve fighters out there. We've got two full squads in here. Eighteen."
"General, with all due respect..." Marcus clearly struggled for words when the attention of the entire room turned towards him. "It's not likely that they sent newbies on a mission to freeze out the supplies. Those twelve are probably very experienced pilots. More experienced than rookie level, at least."
"It's true." General Hunter nodded. "We caught a little bit of chatter before they moved to a private comm channel. There's at least one Captain-level pilot out there, Captain Leftran." Murmurs ran up and down the room. "That doesn't mean we'll just roll over and let them walk over us. We're sending you out to clear a path."
The murmurs abruptly ceased into a deadly silence.
"You want us to...to fight them?" Missy asked, quietly.
"General, no orbital has ever sent troops to directly kill another. Ever, in the history of the orbit." Another pilot spoke just as quietly.
"And I wouldn't ask you to."
"If we break the covenant, won't that bring Orbital Basura down on *us*?"
"We don't necessarily have to break the covenant to break the blockade." General Hunter nodded to his Chief of Research who sat next to him, and she stood, displaying a series of schematics on the screen behind them.
"Orbital Techrider's final set of schematics before they cut off communication included a type of weaponry that uses ionized clouds of matter to distribute electrical current through its target. While they cut off the schematic stream before they finished sending us this data, our engineers have finished the designs on their own. The main benefit of this new ammunition is that instead of wasting resources building ammunition for our ships, we can use atomized scrap metal and garbage instead. An added benefit is that, given a few hours notice, we're able to build a low-level version of the ionization guns, allowing us to use non-lethal ion rounds. The electrical current of this ammunition will be enough to knock out a ship's systems without blowing a hole in the walls of the ship." Aimee took in the new information as the Chief of Research sat back down.
"Are there any questions?" General Hunter asked.
"Why are we being expected to fly against Academy pilots with another squad of Academy pilots?" It was the same pilot as before, and Aimee clenched her teeth. "No offense meant, but how do we know they won't split their loyalties when we get out into the air?"
"Orbital Academy is trying to have us killed." Aimee spat. "No offense meant, but we have more reason to avoid the surrender than you do, since one of the provisions of that surrender will probably include our execution. You're more likely to turn on us than vice versa." She turned to the General. "I do have a question though. Why are we having this meeting now? If you've just finished building these weapons, won't it take us days to design ships to hold the weaponry? Not to mention building the ships themselves?"
The General looked confused rather than answering, but to his left his Chief of Engineering piped up with a smile.
"Oh sweetie. You're on Orbital Pivot now. This is what we do."
***
A few hours later, the nine Orbital Pivot pilots were laughing at them, but Aimee didn't care.
"Holy shit." She breathed, and around her her squadmates looked in equal awe. The ships weren't just gorgeous, they were works of art. They had begun as typical cruiser frames, but from there they had been trimmed down in size, and their metal gleamed with a reflective black sheen. The lines of the ship were sharp, and the overall effect was as if shards of black glass sat in the large hangar bay.
"They look so slender and sexy." Marcus walked around his ship sitting next to Aimee's, giving it an appreciative once-over before he started his preflight check.
