Jackson Ford - Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

The Colony forces thought they could hold the area around Sigma Orionis—they thought they could take control of the jump gate and shut down all movement into this sector. They didn’t bank on an early victory at Proxima freeing up a third of the Frontier Navy, and now they’re backed into a corner, fighting like hell to stay alive.

Maybe this’ll be the battle that does it. Maybe this is the one that finally stops the Colonies for good.

Rainmaker’s path has taken her away from the main thrust of the battle, out towards the edge of the sector. Her targeting systems find a lone enemy: a black Colony fighter, streaking towards her. She’s about to fire when she stops, cutting off the thought.

Something’s not right.

“Control, this is Rainmaker.” Despite the chaos, her voice is calm. “I have locked on incoming. Why’s he alone? Over.”

The reply is clipped and urgent. “Rainmaker, this is Frontier Control: evade, evade, evade. Do not engage . You have multiple bogies closing in on your six. They’re trying to lock the door on you, over.”

Rainmaker doesn’t bother to respond. Her radar systems were damaged earlier in the fight, and she has to rely on Control for the bandits she can’t see. She breaks her lock, twisting her craft away as more warnings bloom on her console. “Twin, Blackbird, anybody. I’ve got multiples inbound, need a pickup, over.”

The sarcastic voice of one of her wingmen comes over the comms. “Can’t handle ’em yourself? I’m disappointed.”

“Not a good time, Omen,” she replies, burning her thrusters. “Can you help me or not? Over.”

“Negative. Got three customers to deal with over here. Get in line.”

A second, older voice comes over her comms. “Rainmaker, this is Blackbird. What’s your twenty? Over.”

Her neurochip recognises the words, both flashing up the info on her display and automatically sending it to Blackbird’s. “Quadrant thirty-one,” she says anyway, speaking through gritted teeth.

“Roger,” says Blackbird. “I got ’em. Just sit tight. I’ll handle it for y—. Shit, I’m hit! I—”

“Eric!” Rainmaker shouts Blackbird’s real name, her voice so loud it distorts the channel. But he’s already gone. An impactor streaks past her, close enough for her to see the launch burns on its surface.

“Control, Rainmaker,” she says. “Confirm Blackbird’s position, I’ve lost contact!”

Control doesn’t reply. Why would they? They’re fighting a thousand fires at once, advising hundreds of Scorpion fighters. Forget the callsigns that command makes them use: Blackbird is a number to them, and so is she, and unless she does something right now, she’s going to join him.

She twists her ship, forcing the two chasing Colony fighters to face her head-on. They’re a bigger threat than the lone one ahead. Now, they’re coming in from her eleven and one o’clock, curving towards her, already opening fire. She guns the ship, aiming for the tiny space in the middle, racing to make the gap before their impactors close her out.

“Thread the needle,” she whispers. “Come on, thread the needle, thr—”

Everything freezes.

The battle falls silent.

And a blinking-red error box appears above one of the missiles.

“Oh. Um.” Hannah Elliott’s voice cuts through the silence. “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen. One second.”

The box goes away—only to reappear a split second later, like a fly buzzing back to the place it was swatted. This time, the simulation gives a muted ding , as if annoyed that Hannah can’t grasp the point.

She rips the slim goggles from her head. She’s not used to them—she forgot to put her lens in after she woke up, which meant she had to rely on the VR room’s antiquated backup system. A strand of her long red hair catches on the strap, and she has to yank it loose, looking down at the ancient console in front of her.

“Sorry, ladies and gentlemen,” she says again. “Won’t be a minute.”

Her worried face is reflected on the dark screen, her freckles making her look even younger than she is. She uses her finger this time, stabbing at the box’s confirm button on the small access terminal on the desk. It comes back with a friend, a second, identical error box superimposed over the first. Beyond it, an impactor sits frozen in Rainmaker’s viewport.

“Sorry.” Stop saying sorry. She tries again, still failing to bring up the main menu. “It’s my first day.”

Stony silence. The twenty tourists in the darkened room before her are strapped into reclining motion seats with frayed belts. Most have their eyes closed, their personal lenses still displaying the frozen sim. A few are blinking, looking faintly annoyed. One of them, an older man with a salt-and-pepper beard, catches Hannah’s eye with a scowl.

She looks down, back at the error boxes. She can barely make out the writing on them—the VR’s depth of field has made the letters as tiny as the ones on the bottom line of an eye chart.

She should reset the sim. But how? Does that mean it will start from scratch? Can she fast-forward? The supervisor who showed it to her that morning was trying to wrangle about fifteen new tour guides, and the instructions she gave amounted to watching the volume levels and making sure none of the tourists threw up when Rainmaker turned too hard.

Hannah gives the screen an experimental tap, and breathes a sigh of relief when a menu pops up: a list of files. There. Now she just has to—

But which one is it? The supervisor turned the sim on, and Hannah doesn’t know which file she used. Their names are meaningless.

She taps the first one. Bouncy music explodes from the room’s speakers, loud enough to make a couple of the tourists jump. She pulls the goggles back on, to be greeted by an animated, space-suited lizard firing lasers at a huge, tentacled alien. A booming voice echoes across the music. “Adventurers! Enter the world of Reptar as he saves the galaxy from—”

Hannah stops Reptar saving the galaxy. In the silence that follows, she can feel her cheeks turning red.

She gives the screen a final, helpless look, and leaps to her feet. She’ll figure this out. Somehow. They wouldn’t have given her this job if they didn’t think she could deal with the unexpected.

“OK!” She claps her hands together. “Sorry for the mix-up. I think there’s a bit of a glitch in the old sim there.”

Her laugh gets precisely zero reaction. Swallowing, she soldiers on.

“So, as you saw, that was the Battle of Sigma Orionis, which took place fifteen years ago, which would be…” She thinks hard. “2157, in the space around the hotel we’re now in. Hopefully our historical sim gave you a good idea of the conditions our pilots faced—it was taken directly from one of their neurochip feeds.

“Coincidentally, the battle took place almost exactly a hundred years after we first managed to send a probe through a wormhole, which, as you… which fuelled the Great Expansion, and led to the permanent, long-range gates, like the one you came in on.”

“We know,” says the man with the salt-and-pepper beard. He reminds Hannah of a particularly grumpy high school teacher she once had. “It was in the intro you played us.”

“Right.” Hannah nods, like he’s made an excellent point. She’d forgotten about the damn intro video, her jump-lag from the day before fuzzing her memory. All she can remember is a voiceover that was way, way too perky for someone discussing a battle as brutal as Sigma Orionis.

She decides to keep going. “So, the… the Colonies lost that particular fight, but the war actually kept going for five years after the Frontier captured the space around Sigma.”