1. I'm... gonna have to explain what a "bolter" is, aren't I?
2. Like I said in my responses to the comments you guys made last chapter, the current situation doesn't lend itself overly well to in-depth character studies, and I'm sorry... so while this is largely an Aerie chapter (Gasp! Yeah, she made it...) I don't really think there's all that much we can "learn" about her this time out.
3. I'm reactivating the "Lynching Line," just in case.
XV: Bolter! Bolter! Bolter!
Sabre 300 Alpha, designation: Sideshow One
Combat Air Patrol around TCS Gallante
1419 Hours, Synchronized Mission Time
“Tyler… Tyler, y-you… all right, back there?”
Seraph tried to turn in her seat, hoping to get a glimpse of her gunner’s status, but her body refused to cooperate. Her vision was blurry, and she couldn’t seem to bring anything into focus. Every time she tried, she got dizzy. Her neck hurt, a dull ache that didn’t seem to be coming from any specific injury that she could pinpoint, and she felt largely numb from the waist down; there was a slight, odd tingling in her left knee, but she couldn’t determine much more than that. Her arms felt sluggish as well, and her shoulders were sore from where her crash harnesses had hauled on her, keeping her from hurtling forward through the front of her fighter’s canopy.
Her mouth was dry, and her tongue seemed swollen and thick as she tried once more to talk. The words came out in a weak slur, sounding more like a groan than any known language, and there was an unusual, but vaguely familiar, coppery taste in her mouth.
Right.
She must have bitten her tongue.
The only instrument display still operational was blinking in and out, the images fuzzy and distorted. Without exception, however, they were all a rather unhealthy shade of red, indicating catastrophic system-wide failures. It was a small miracle the ship hadn’t already disintegrated. Not that she was ungrateful, but she was rather curious as to just how that miracle had been accomplished.
She managed to turn her head slightly to her side, catching a glimpse of her shredded starboard wing through the clear material of the fighter’s canopy. Drifting just off the battered section of aeroframe was a small cloud of debris from what appeared to be an orcish torpedo. The warhead section was clearly intact. Had it exploded, it would have likely vaporized everything in the immediate vicinity. The fuselage behind the warhead remained intact for a couple of feet, but everything beyond that had practically disappeared. The propulsion section was gone, any surviving chunks probably lodged in the Sabre’s hull.
Seraph let her hand fall away from the flight stick; her fingertips brushed against her thigh. She moved lower, reaching under the seat for something, and after a second or two of blind groping, her fingers finally closed around a metal ring… and hesitated.
With a sigh, she released it. She was pretty sure she had some kind of neck or back injury. Popping the ejector seat would probably do her in. And even if it didn’t, opening the fighter’s interior to hard vacuum might just kill Crewman James, if he wasn’t dead already. If he had been conscious, and capable of toggling his own ejector system, she might have risked it, but she wasn’t about to leave the poor kid all by himself in a half-dead, derelict ship – especially since her lousy flying had gotten them both into this mess in the first place.
Her hands were still moving like lethargic snails, but they were functioning… if barely. Her small, lightly calloused fingers wrapped around the throttle controls, and she gently tried to ease power back into the engines. Most didn’t respond, but she thought she felt a faint shudder pass through the stricken ship as one of the Sabre’s four thrusters powered up slowly. The fighter was tumbling slowly on all three axes, so she applied just enough juice to stabilize the drift and get the ship moving in something faintly resembling a straight line. She boosted the output up to about 15%, not daring to go any higher for fear of detonating the one good engine she had left.
The battle still raged outside, though it had drifted a good deal away from her position. She imagined the rest of her pilots were still trading shots with their orc counterparts and were oblivious as to what’d happened to her. She almost wished they -were- out there worrying about her, but discarded that notion almost as soon as it’d appeared. One missing Sabre wasn’t very high on the list of anyone’s priorities at the moment. In front of her, the sleek silhouette of the Gallante was still intact, knifing through the black of space. While there were blast marks all across her hull, the white eight-pointed Star of the Confederation was still intact on her prow. Painted next to it in bold letters were the ship’s name, and the Navy motto: Sic itur ad astra (Such is the Path to the Stars.) Despite the precarious nature of her own situation, the sight brought a faint smile to her face.
That smile turned into a grimace and clenched jaw as a loud burst of static and the high-pitched squeal of feedback assaulted her sensitive ears.
Static.
Feedback.
The comm system was still intact.
“Flight Control… Flight Control, are you receiving?” she rasped into the mike, feeling lonely and desperate for an answer.
“Acknowledged, Sideshow One, go ahead.”
She heaved a sigh of relief, then uncrossed her fingers (She hadn’t even known they’d been crossed in the first place) “Damage level critical, Control…”
“Copy. Do you wish to declare an emergency?”
The question had her momentarily, but completely, taken aback. “Er… yes!”
There was another burst of static through her earphones, and she was afraid she’d just lost communications capability entirely, but then a message began coming through quite clearly on another frequency. “This is Gallante Flight Control to all units. Sideshow One is attempting emergency landing… all pilots, stand clear!” Whoever it was on the other end of the line clicked back to her. “Ok, Sideshow One, you’re cleared for immediate landing... crash crews are on standby, call the ball…”
She swallowed. Hard. “R-Roger, ball…”
Seraph wrestled with the flight stick as she eased her wounded ship closer and closer to the Gallante’s hangar bay. With only one engine active, the ship kept wanting to drift to one side or the other; keeping the fighter from spinning off into space was becoming harder and harder. The hydraulics were shot to hell, computerized assists were offline, and most of the control surfaces weren’t responding properly.
Unfortunately, she was committed now. Only a few hundred meters from the opening of the hangar bay, there was no time to back out.
“You’re drifting too far starboard, Sideshow One… correct immediately.” The voice on the other end of the comm line was firm, but gentle – reassuring and confident, both. Understandable. You always wanted the guy talking you through a rough landing to be both cool and calm. She nudged the ship in the right direction, then began to ease back on the throttle as her one functioning display clicked off the distance.
300 meters…
She could make out the faint blue shimmering of the hangar’s magnetic containment system. The magcon field was the type of thing that people started taking for granted one second after it had been invented. Everyone used them, no one knew how they worked. To most people, how the fields could manage to keep little molecules (like air) contained, while still allowing something as huge as a 15-ton Sabre heavy fighter to pass through, was an utterly unfathomable mystery.
200 meters…
“Little high, Sideshow One… bring your nose down a tad.”
100 meters…
“All right… power down a bit more…”
50 meters…
“Flare now, pilot…”
The Sabre’s nose drifted upwards, though the ship as a whole was still tracking generally “down.”
“25 meters… 10… that’s it… watch the transition…”
The Confederation fighter passed through the magnetic field, going instantaneously from pure vacuum to a normal density atmosphere. The switch was worse than expected, and everything started coming loose. The ship’s wings had been so badly damaged, that the twisted nubs utterly ruined any aerodynamic capability the fighter had once possessed. The air tore and pulled at the injured craft, nearly sending the ship plowing into a nearby bulkhead. A streak of paint scraped off on the wall marked the Sabre’s passing.
The one functional engine flared as the ship’s pilot tried desperately to compensate; she ended up overcompensating, instead, applying too much thrust. The fighter pitched up, the deployed tailhook skimming just over the first tripwire and failing to catch.
One word, emphatically repeated three times blared over the loudspeakers. “Bolter! Bolter! Bolter!”
Disaster was a hair’s breadth away and getting jumpy.
The crew members working in that area of the flight deck scrambled out of the way as the damaged Sabre kicked up, coming in too fast for a proper landing.
Realizing her mistake, Seraph cut her engines entirely and forced the craft’s nose down. The landing skids slammed into the metal deck, the impact nearly bouncing the fighter back up, but the Sabre’s pilot was leaning on the controls, dead-set on keeping the ship grounded. Sparks shot up from the deck as steel grated against steel. The horrible shrieking noise of metal on metal assailed the entire hangar bay as the fighter tried to grind itself to a halt. It was shedding speed fast, but not fast enough as the opposite wall began to loom larger and larger in front of it.
One of the flight deck crews, in a remarkable show of audacity, rushed to intercept the careening fighter, hastily erecting a tangle of crash webbing in front of the out-of-control Sabre. It plowed into the nylon and rubberized net, the force of the impact tearing some of the thick straps, but while some ripped apart, the rest held. The ship finally came to rest, smoke trailing from the engines, columns of steam rising from exposed surfaces, and a spread of tiny fires caused by thrown sparks strewn in its wake.
The crews were swarming over the wreck in seconds, hosing the frame down with fire suppression foam, hauling in heavy machinery, and maneuvering ladders into position. The emergency carbon dioxide systems kicked on, venting CO2 into the affected areas to help stifle the flames. Backup lighting left portions of the deck tinged blood-red, even as the regular illumination flickered, and in some places, died completely. Sirens and klaxons blared, echoing throughout the bay, summoning crew members from other posts to mob the deck and help out wherever they could.
…
This had been the third botched landing Imoen had seen since Commander Pierce had been incapacitated and she had been forced to assume command of the Gallante’s starboard hangar bay. Neither of the other two had been as outwardly messy as this one. She grimaced, hoping that this ship’s flight crew was still alive, even if the craft itself was a complete write-off. The pilots and gunners of the last two wrecks hadn’t been quite that lucky. She was just about to order a few more hands over to the area to help out, when she caught sight of the names stenciled on the fighter’s fuselage, right underneath the cockpit canopy:
Crewman Tyler “Nightstalker” James
Flight Lieutenant Aerie “Seraph” Ilaren
Imoen had been holding a heavy, industrial-grade hydrospanner in her hands. It clanked loudly as it hit the deck; she didn’t notice. “Oh no…”
