Кристофер Банч - Fleet of the Damned

Mahoney beetled his brows in deep interest. He was seated at the dinner table with the man, his tubby pink-cheeked wife, and their large brood of obnoxious children.

One of the snotty so-and-sos was trying to get his attention, tapping his sleeve with a spoon dripping with gravy.

"A moment, son," Mahoney soothed, "while I hear what your father has to say." Little clot, he thought, I'll wring your bloody neck if you touch me with that thing again.

"Go on," he told the farmer. "This is a subject that concerns all of us."

"Clottin' right," the farmer said. "The Tahn are lower than drakh and bleeding us all."

"Please, dear," his wife admonished. "The children." She turned to Mahoney. "I hope you'll forgive my husband's language."

Mahoney gave an understanding smile. "I've heard worse."

The woman giggled back. "So have I. Still… If you had to live with these Tahn, you'd understand why my husband becomes so heated. They really are—" She leaned closer to Mahoney to make her point. " Different , you know."

"I can imagine," Mahoney said. He settled back with their good after-dinner port to listen to the farmer expand on his subject. It was enough to chill the blood of a tyrant.

Mahoney was absolutely sure what was going to be in his report to the Eternal Emperor. But he had decidedly mixed feelings about it. Like, who were the heroes and who were the villains?

"Yes, please," he said. "Another splash of port would go down just fine."

Imperial flight school, Stage or Phase Two, began in deep space. Sten and the others in his class, now referred to as "mister," regardless of sex or whether they were even human, started with pressurized spitkits—space taxis.

Learn… learn in your guts… which direction to apply force. Understand when to brake. Learn how to calculate a basic orbit from point A to (radar-seen) point B. Then do it again.

Once they were competent, the next step put them in actual ships. More time passed as they learned, still in space, the use of the secondary—Yukawa—drive.

As they grew proficient, the navigational bashing intensified. A ship under AM2 drive, of course, could hardly find its "course" under any but mathematical conditions.

Sten, in spite of his worries about calculating, was getting by. He still needed occasional offshift coaching from Bishop, but things were coming more easily.

One thing that helped, Sten thought, was that he was hardly a raw recruit. During his time in Mantis, he had gone through a great deal of real combat, from mass landings to solo insertions to ship-to-ship combat. There was a large mental file based on personal experience backlog that made it easier for Sten to translate raw numbers into a clotting great asteroid that he would rather not intersect orbits with.

On the other hand, Sten's experience also made it hard for him to keep his mouth shut on occasion.

Phase Two of flight training differed from Phase One in that the IPs seemed as if they wanted all the students to graduate. But it was far from being perfect.

Too much of the tactics was theoretical, taught by IPs who had never flown combat in their lives or who were reservists called back as part of mobilization.

A lot of what was taught, Sten knew from experience, was a great way to suicide. He wondered about the teachings he didn't have a reference point on—were they equally fallacious?

It was a great subject for B.S. But only Bishop and he could really debate the point; with the others it quickly became a great excuse to slander whichever IP was on the "Most Hated" list for the week.

Training progressed. All the students were rated as at least acceptable in deep space.

Then the hard part started: landings, takeoffs, maneuvers on worlds with various atmospheres, weather, and gravitation. Thus far training had washed out only a dozen cadets and killed just three.

But then it got dangerous.

Lotor had one bad habit—and it killed him.

A somewhat talented pilot, he stood above midpoint in the class standings. His failing, Sten learned later, was not uncommon.

Lotor felt that a flight was over and done with when he had his ship within close proximity of its landing situation. Sh'aarl't had told him repeatedly the old cliché that no flight is complete until one is sitting at the bar on one's second round.

Lotor's oversight couldn't be considered very dangerous in a time when antigravity existed. He probably could have flown privately or even commercially through several lifetimes without problems.

The Empire trained for emergencies, however.

Situation: A combat team was to be inserted on a near-vacuum world. The ground was silicate dust pooled as much as twenty meters deep. Sharp boulders knifed out of the dust bowls.

Requirement: The combat team had to be inserted without discovery; a landing on Yukawa drive would stir up enough dust to produce a huge cloud that would hang for hours and surely give the team away. Also, the ship had to be landed in such a manner as to leave no lasting imprint in the dust.

Solution: Hang the ship vertically about fifty meters above the surface. Cut Yukawa drive and back down on the McLean generators. Hold centimeters above the surface long enough for the mythical combat team to unload, then take off.

The IP gave the situation to Lotor, who analyzed it and found the correct solution.

The two of them were in a Connors-class delta-winged light assault ship. Flight training not only taught emergency situations but, very correctly, sometimes used unsuitable ships. Sten agreed with that—he'd spent enough time in combat to know that when one desperately needed a wrench, sometimes a pair of pliers would have to make do.

But the wide wings were the final nail.

Lotor nosed up and reduced Yukawa drive. The ship dropped a meter or so, and he caught it on the McLean generators. He slowly reduced power, and the ship smoothed toward the dust below.

The trap of an antigravity screen, of course, is that "down" is toward the generator and bears no relationship to where "real" vertical should be.

The ship was three meters high and, to Lotor's senses, descending quite vertically. Close enough, he must have decided, and he slid the generator pots to zero.

The ship dropped a meter, and one wing hit a protruding boulder. The ship toppled.

According to the remote flight recorder, at that moment the IP hit the McLean controls at the same instant that Lotor figured out that something was very wrong.

Lotor kicked in the Yukawa drive. By the time he had power, the ship had already fallen to near horizontal. The blast of power, coupled with the McLean push, pin wheeled the ship.

Cycloning dust hid most of the end. All that the cameras recorded was a possible red blast that would have been produced as the cabin opened like a tin and the ship's atmosphere exploded.

It took most of the planet day for the dust to subside. Rescue crews felt their way in, looking for the bodies. Neither the corpse of Lotor nor the IP was ever recovered.

Sten, Sh'aarl't, and Bishop held their own wake and attempted to sample all the beers that Lotor had not gotten around to trying before his death.

Others in the class were killed, some stupidly, some unavoidably. The survivors learned what Sten already knew: No amount of mourning would revive them. Life—and flight school—goes on.

The barracks at Imperial Flight Training were not as luxurious as the psychologically booby-trapped ones in Phase One. But passes were available, and the pressure was lightened enough for cadets to have some time for consciousness alteration—and for talk.