"To gain these bonuses, you need to have spent a minimum of ten hours controlling that vehicle--not that type of vehicle, not even that exact make and model of that vehicle, but that vehicle" --CyberPunk 2.0.2.0. Beta--New Rules for the Dark Future Rob entered the Victory sim chamber. It was a room filled with an even dozen VF-2 cockpits sunken into the floor. Several of the canopies were open. Rob sat down in one of them, and closed the hatch. The flatscreen of the canopy went from dark to the interior of the Concordia's fighter bay. He strapped himself in to keep from being thrown around the simulation: while the cockpit wouldn't move, inertia generators would simulate the accelerations he would stand. The forearm guard and glove of CVR-5 still flopped on his right side; his arm had only grown to the elbow. Most people didn't actually wear the armor to introductory sims, but Rob wanted to be authentic. How many lives had been lost because a pilot found out too late that his flight suit caught on something when he reached for a control a certain way? Lord knew that in VLI, he had "lost" dozens of test pilots on simulation runs, and each loss meant a heated discussion with the recently departed pilot, quickly followed by an ergonomic redesign. And those heated discussions were no fun when Rob found himself confronted with a very angry Zukowsky who had just jettisoned stores while trying to extinguish the number two engine. Familiarizing himself with the cockpit, Rob was glad that the controls looked exactly like the picture in his NATOPS guide. For once, the documentation crew was called in after the last redesign. Not like the original Alpha guide. ("What's this?" asked Mark "Haywire" Luchini in the early days, flipping the safety cover off a big black button with a glowing red chaos symbol on it and pressing said button. As Haywire watched every missile he owned shoot off into nowhere, Tricia called out, "Smart move, Scott Bernard!" From then on, they only let him fly Valkyries.) However, for Rob, the cockpit was only a secondary control structure. The true test lay in the wires on the left arm of the pilot's seat. As he grabbed the two wires, he put them in his mouth. Dammit, I should have left the cyberarm on until I could afford some downtime, Rob cursed in his inner thoughts. Bringing his left arm up to his face, he connected the wires to the ports in the forearm guard; he had jacked into the suit itself previously so that he could use the cyberports. Plugged in, he swung his facebowl downwards, relaxed his body with some Bene Gesserit prana-bindu techniques he had learned from Kelli. Finally, he spoke the word, "Link." He was no longer in the cockpit, but a new body. His chest was folded out from his back, his shoulders arms twisted in like some parody of a schoolgirl hiding her breasts, his high-heeled feet laid out behind him with toes curled, thrusters begging for fuel, his head slung beneath him and ready to fire laser blasts. And landing gear supporting him: one from each leg, a third at the pelvis. One at the nose, Rob corrected himself. This had always been the problem with direct link into variable-geometry mecha. He reconfigured his thought patterns to fit the new shape. Now, he had an underbelly gun mount, a nose, a fuselage, variable-sweep wings, and two main engines supplemented by smaller dorsal thrusters. And a GU-22 pod slung along his ventral centerline. "Standard retraining sequence," Rob subvocalized. He didn't have to learn fighter piloting again; he had logged plenty of hours on the Alpha and Beta, and even a few in the old Valkyries. He just needed to learn this particular Veritech. He went through the launch sequence, and was given a few minutes of free flight practice. He shifted to gerwalk mode (its official name, even if half the pilots insisted on calling it "guardian"), felt the new mode out, then went all the way to battroid. This mode was the simplest of all to link into, since it closely followed human anatomy. The birdlike feel of the gerwalk and the actual pure fighter mode were the problems, but experience and aptitude made them possible. He converted a few more times to make sure that he had complete control even in between configurations, then went into fighter mode and checked out his torque thrusters. He was rewarded with higher spin rates than he had ever encountered, an ability to almost rotosnap into any given direction. This caused an "afterburner skid" effect similar to the Rapiers, which was fatally annoying in most situations but often just what one needed for one-on-one dogfighting. The First Law of Fighter Combat is, of course, always point your nose at your enemy. The problem with flying is that there were always a dozen FLFC's, and each one had top priority. The art lay in determining which rule was most necessary at any given moment. A generic computerized voice sounded through Rob's spaceborne chassis: "Opposition one: versus. Your wingman is at your four o'clock position, callsign 'Skylark'." A radar blip suddenly appeared at Rob's four, and visually he sensed the Victory blip into existence. Rob switched his radar to deep penetration, and noted that the simulator was not kind at all to him: it showed two bogies way the hell down his six. He wasn't reading their radar blips, so they weren't scanning him--only reading his active radar beam and thus getting his bearing without distance. He cut the range down, then called, "Skylark: extend radar to full and follow me. I'm doing a 180 vertical." "Roger that, ReRob," called out a voice that belonged in an old Buick. Rob immelmanned, followed closely by his wingman. He checked his radar, linked to Skylark's, and noted only the two bogies. So the simulator wasn't pulling a fast one on him. The First Law of Fighter Combat is, of course, never assume that the enemy isn't going to throw more shit your way. Telescoping his visual, he saw his pair of bogie Victories--they had Super gear on, while he had only his wingman and his GU-22. Confirmation from base told him that they were renegade craft to be shot down. "I've got left," Rob called to his wingman, who pulled a few feet to Rob's starboard side. Rob was flying head-on to his bandit now, seconds away from gun range. It opened its missile ports (stupid, should have had them open before acquiring)... ...and Rob went into gerwalk mode, ruining the firing solution. Passing over the bandit's topside, he strafed with his head lasers, then reversed while transforming into Battloid. He grabbed his gun pod and fired upon the Victory while it was turning around. It launched all six long-rangers at him, and he decided to test the automatic anti-missiler. For a moment, his arms were things possessed, and the gun pod raked the missiles down quickly while he snuck a peek at his wingman, who was getting towards his adversary's six. Good. Rob went back to fighter mode in one fluid motion, and kicked in the afterburners. The one advantage he had over his bandit was a higher acceleration factor: the super gear weighed two-thirds as much as the Victory itself. Soon, he was on the bandit's six and scissoring with him to burn off the extra speed. Normally, a scissors maneuver requires both pilots to be canopy-to-canopy, as the First Law of Fighter Combat states that one should never lose visual contact with one's opponent. With a direct link into the Veritech, though, Rob had the option of viewing from any angle. So he activated the ventral cameras and failed to roll back, giving his opponent a perfect view of his exposed underbelly. Or, as Rob thought of it, giving his head lasers perfect angle on the bandit. He locked and fired. Boom. A quick scan of the tactical display showed him that his wingman was in trouble. Afterburners again, and he saw Mr. Buick being pursued by the other Super Victory. Settling in behind the Super, he caused it to flee from its targeting solution. Both turned to it and wiped it out in the crossfire. Both he and Skylark sprouted Super gear out of nowhere. The simulator's voice stated, "Simulation one: trainee victory. Opposition two: Invid." Rob let an inaudible groan out and refreshed his mind with another relaxation sequence, making a mental note to tell Kelli that her muscle- relaxation techniques even worked on Veritechs. As the type 3 Invid showed up at five o'clock low, he realized that it was going to be a loooong day... Virtual Labs, Inc. In Conjunction With Eyrie Publishing, Uninc. and Currier Kitchens Present An Undocumented Features Story "Phoenix" By ReRob Special Effects by Your Brain on Drugs Boom by "Do unto others, Then loot the bodies" Catering by Home-Home Cooking Author's Sanity by Peter Pan, Brockton Area Transit, and the M.B.T.A. Shameless plug by I need a job!!! Inspiration by Pat Benetar and Duran Duran Faceless Baddies by Endless Hordes, GmbH "I am M-5! I am the prototype microwave oven of the future!" --Teenagers From Outer Space Rob nearly staggered out of the simulator. He had just defeated, if memory served him, Victory fighters, Invid troopers, the Gorfian armada, Zentradi, Meltrandi, TIE fighters, Phentari, Eridani, half of Baron Kazra's main force, Decepticons, every Kilrathi fighter he could think of and a few he couldn't, the security forces of Rival Ninja Corporation, a handful of great western dragons, and the Ko-Dan armada. They even gave him a "bonus round" to destroy non-aggressive targets every fourth wave. He finally met defeat at the hands of a borglet "D6 of Doom" squadron. Thank the gods they had never actually ENCOUNTERED anything remotely like the Borg. Desperately searching for a soft bed (to crash in), a cold beer (to consume), and a sadistic simulation programmer (to verbally abuse), Rob stopped dead in his tracks when he saw a shortish Valkyrie fighter waiting for him in the middle of the corridor. It was none of the three, and Rob had slim hopes that it would lead him to any of them. The only reason that he didn't immediately think he was hallucinating was that he had built this sort of shortish Veritech a long while ago. It was an old friend of his, Steve Jupiter. Steve, originally named "Artificial Intelligence Research Project", was originally the brainchild of the SDF-17's own AI unit, Eve, and hotshot softechie Martin "PCHammer, Grey, Diggy" Rose. It had taken them about five years to create an AI program which was sufficiently different from Eve herself; without Grey's help, Eve would have simply made yet another Peripheral, and those weren't quite right. Cute, in their way, but not quite right. As it happened, the AIRP was quite different from Eve. More specifically, it considered itself male, called itself Steve Jupiter, and actually requested a humanoid body. In discussion with ship's engineer Mandeville, they decided to make the body a four-foot-eight Super Valkyrie Veritech. When Eve, Rose, and Mandeville actually sat down and figured everything out, they determined that Eve and Martin were mother and father to Steve, rob's HoloDECstation prototyping facility was the surrogate mother, and Rob himself was midwife, or, as Steve would say, "Uncle ReRob." However, Rob remembered that Steve had always been with Rose's Clay Pigeon Squadron, which Rob himself had been in with the Thundergod. And that the Clay Pigeons were definitely not assigned to the Concordia. Taking a second look, Rob noted that Steve's markings were that of the Victory squadron VVF-261, "Eight-Ball". A third look confirmed that Steve wasn't flat stealth black, as he had been before, but had a polished mirror surface. "Hey, Steve," Rob called, "what's with the new lack of paint job?" "Decided I didn't need full Shadow gear. I can be stealth-ready in thirty minutes, but let's face it: if you found a two hundred kilo Veritech on your scope, what would you do?" "Smack the scope until it registered correctly." "Exactly. Besides, a lot of people have complained that their eyes hurt from trying to focus their eyes on a walking black hole." "So you decided to have fun with mirrors." "Who was it that said that people admire you for what they see of themselves in you?" "I don't think they meant it quite that literally." "Well, I haven't gotten any complaints on this finish. Oh, by the way, I just saw the score on your last run." Steve handed Rob a unit patch. "Tricia okayed you: welcome to the Eight-Balls." Rob accepted the patch, only slightly displeased that it wasn't actually a beer. "Thanks a lot, Steve. And thank Tricia, too. And tell her," as he stumbled off to officer's quarters (he hoped), "that I am not getting into a cockpit for at least twelve hours." "The average Russian, son, don't take a dump without a plan." --The Hunt for Red October The senior officers met in the situation room. Admiral Ben "Gryphon" Hutchins was there as CINCSTRAT and captain of the Concordia. Colonel Patricia Currier of the WDF fighter command and Captain Robert Mandeville of design command, both senior officers in residence, were there as well. LTC Finney, security chief of the Concordia, was there along with most of the bridge staff. When all were assembled, Finney manipulated a keyboard, activating the holotank in the center of the table. It showed a field of asteroids, the WDF Strategic fleet on one side of it, and the Kilrathi battlegroup on the other side. "The Kilrathi have eliminated all anti-spacecraft weapons on ten inhabited planets between here and the Kilrathi borders. They have not made planetfall on these worlds yet, and in fact lack any sort of craft for ground assaults. Their fleet is here--" she used a pointer stick to note the ships "--and is a group of twelve Cl'tag class dreadnoughts and twenty-five L't'k class assault carriers. The craft most likely to be the Kilrathi flagship is this one--" point "--as it is the most recent mark of the L't'k. They have placed warp and fold interference pods in strategic locations between their borders and this asteroid field, and of course there are several well-armed surface fortifications along the old Kilrathi borders." "Because of these measures, we are on the other side of the field. Our resources consist of this Confederation class dreadnought carrier, these battlestars, several carriers of the Bengal and Kiev classes and these Gilgamesh class destroyers. In total, thirty-four ships, each of better armament, armor, and fightercraft than their Kilrathi counterparts. I will now turn discussion over to the captain, Admiral Hutchins." Ben stood up. "Thank you, Jamie. So what we have here is more than enough firepower to defeat this fleet flat-out, but a cagey adversary who knows that and is using this field to keep it from getting flat-out. If we send our ships through this field, we have to follow predictable courses in order to avoid the bigger rocks, and there are too many out there to play archaic video games with the phase-transit cannon." Several of the Terran officers who had been with the Force from the start chuckled at the reference. "What they want to do is either stalemate us here until they can get more reinforcements, or try to defeat our fleet with their fightercraft. This asteroid field is easily permeable by fighters and bombers on both sides." Colonel Currier spoke up. "But if they bring their fighters over here, we have both our fightercraft and our ASSkickers on this side to counter them, and they're still dead." The fighter jock's term "ASSkicker" referred to anti-small- ship weapons found on most capital ships, direct descendants of AA guns. "Probably, but remember: we have the same problem," Ben reminded her. "And we won't be getting reinforcements for a while, since most of our ships are in the shop. Even the Wandering Child needs a two-month makeover, since some safeties were bypassed and the Reflex Cannon melted some key components in the fold generator." "Hey, Ben, don't look at me, it was a rush job," Rob interrupted. "I'm not placing blame, just stating a fact," Gryphon said. "'Rush job' doesn't begin to do the situation justice." He grinned. "In any case, I'm willing to bet that the Kilrathi are not at full strength, but took the weakening effects of the Genom fleet's assaults en route to Cygnus Beta as a signal to stage an opportunistic offensive, and did not have their forces massed to stage this assault as they wanted to. They're probably pulling in ships from other places in the Empire of Kilrah, and they could be here in days or weeks. So, in my opinion, hitting them hard now is worth the difficulty. Any dissenting opinions or other options?" Silence. "Okay, then. Recent developments in the small craft designed for the new WDF fleets include specific anti-spacecraft bombers. We've come a long way from the Thundergod era. Most of the heavier stuff is concentrated within the Battlestars, and they have at least decent effectiveness in dogfighting. However, I would like them better protected. Terror, can you have somebody arrange a schedule of battle so that the Kilrathi are under constant fire by our Vipers, Dragonflies, Broadswords, and Crusaders, while making sure that they are adequately escorted by Veritechs and single geometry fighters?" "Yes, sir." "Okay. I'd like that flagship as first target, then the other carriers. We'll ignore the battlewagons for now, since they have the same problems getting to us as we do to them. If we do this right, we should be able to swat the dog's nose with the newspaper, send them back with their tails between their legs before this thing gets long and drawn-out. I know this isn't a military matter, but I for one have a wedding to attend." "They never say 'Hello' to you Until you get it on a redline overload" --Kenny Loggins, "Danger Zone" Rob seated himself in the generic Eight-Ball Super Victory (black with an eight in a white spot on the nose). Steve was standing on the fuselage behind him and between the missile pods, in gerwalk mode and mag-locked to his host. Rob strapped in, fiddled with the seat controls for a couple of moments, and twisted the front of the armrests so that the throttle and stick were rotated downwards. He grabbed two plugs from the right armrest and attached them to the appropriate places in the right arm of his CVR suit. A moment's disorientation, and he became the Super Victory. All was green, except for a stress abnormality which he determined to be the presence of Steve on his "back". And not a moment too soon. Tricia Currier's voice rang through his ears. "Eight-Ball one to Eight-Ball squadron, status check." "Eight-Ball two: lights are green, traps are clean." "Eight-Ball three: ready for battle." "Eight-Ball four: let me at 'em." Bengal T, the Mighty Halfling Wizard. The logo on his plane looked like Bilbo Baggins playing Mickey Mouse in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice". "Eight-Ball five: I wanna kill." "Eight-Ball six: happy and healthy." That was Steve Jupiter himself. Finally, it was Rob's turn. "Eight-Ball seven: linked, locked, and loaded." Of the squadron, Rob only really knew Currier, the Mighty Halfling Wizard, and Steve. "Eight-Ball to bridge: squadron ready." Vanessa Leeds, communications officer, answered, "Launching Eight-Ball squadron. Happy hunting." The squadron was a line of seven Super Victories side by side, with a small Super Valkyrie attached to the rightmost one. The left-hand fighter, Tricia's, rolled forwards into a chamber. A door closed behind it, and reopened in a few seconds. The continuous belt the squadron was parked on shifted to the left, and the second plane entered the chamber. This process repeated until Rob waited in front of the doors. They opened, and Rob saw the railgun he expected. He applied power to the main gear, and rolled into the barrel. Lights from the front of the barrel receded towards him, followed closely by the staccato thup thup thup of capacitors charging to the point where the plates neared buckling stress. When they reached him, he lurched forwards, the meatbody inside his cockpit almost losing his consciousness. He soon recovered, and found himself in a bilinear formation with the rest of the squadron. Steve detached and took position off his port side. "Six to one: I have a vector through the asteroids. Want it transmitted?" "Affirmative. Eight-Ball one to squadron: log Steve's transmission into autopilots. But keep it awake back there, people; autopilots don't guarantee." As they changed course to navigate the rocks, Rob checked six and found the Viper squadron the Eight-Balls were supposed to protect. He thought back to the old Thundergod days, where the WDF had only one anti-starship fighter. While it was effective, the problems and quirks inherent in the Rick Allen made it more of a testament to what happens when one lets one's design staff get bored. The craft had even enjoyed a long stint in the Clay Pigeon squadron, PCHammer's comedic brainchild. Now there was the Boeing Broadsword Bomber, out of the same mold as the Raptors and Rapiers. It was joined by a VLI project, the three-finned Viper (an upgrade of the Colonial Viper that the Caprican refugees had brought with them--but that, as Conan's biographer would say, is another tale), the Incom T-65 Dragonfly, and the Crusader. The Viper was a heavy armored ship with heavy turbolasers, kind of a less kludgy and less disgusting extension of the A-10 design philosophy than what Rob had had in mind with the T-god. The Dragonfly, with the two to four wing split, had lighter armor than the Viper, was more maneuverable, and sported a proton bomb launcher to boot. The Crusader, whose unique fin structure looked either like a dagger or a crucifix, carried anti-ship lasers and a variety of missiles. A fact considered ironic to many Christians in the Force, both true and recovering, was that the one ship which seemed inspired by the symbol of that religion was far from the pacifist the faith worships and was one of the most common platforms for the anti-ship AIM- 666-XL3 missile, dubbed the "Antichrist". Yes, Rob thought, The Thundergod days are truly over now. He realized an instant later that the Thundergod days ended in a more literal sense a matter of days ago--the Rick Allen had been berthed within the Phoenix when it was destroyed. Rob winced at the memory. A few moments after they navigated the natural barrier, Tricia spoke up again. "Fighter group, class unknown, five zero zero klicks at three twenty mark four. Here comes the welcome wagon. Change course to intercept, and ring break on my mark. Rob, you're the engineer, so would you do a pierce run on them?" "Roger that, Boss." The formation changed course. To the bogies, they looked like only two Victories, as the other four and a half were "stacked" behind them. The Kilrathi would not be fooled into thinking that there were only two fighters, but they had no idea how many Victories were stacked up. "Okay. Break now, now...now!" Eight-Balls one through five broke hard, forming an ever-widening ring perpendicular to their former course. Steve flew himself to just under Tricia's undercarriage. Rob pushed hard, going directly for the formation. He pulled up, inverted, pulled up again, and was racing for the formation at an angle, far too fast to attack--and too fast to be attacked--he hoped. He activated the recording cameras. He ripped through a formation of perhaps a dozen of these bogies, then set the autopilot to standard evasion routine and reviewed the tapes. Seconds later, he went back to control the craft and joined the ring, which was revolving in an unpredictable manner in order to evade the bogies, who had by then broken formation to deal with them. "I confirm unknown fighter type. Thirty-ton class. Long and heavy guns, high maneuverability, probable missiles. Forward fire only. Piloted by one Kilrathi. Naming new craft type 'Fishhook'". "Eight-Ball to Concordia: new craft type Kilrathi, and pursuing our respective sixes. Request permission to fire." "This is Concordia: reclassify Rob's Fishhooks as bandits. Permission granted and encouraged." "Eight-Ball one to squadron: engage Fishhooks. Be careful out there: I'll be taking a head count at de-briefing." The Victories broke to the attack. Several of them had Kilrathi "neatly and cleverly trapped at their six", and dropped into gerwalk mode to reverse thrust. Steve called over the general freq, "Six to one: keep your pursuer steady." Tricia lowered the amplitude of her jinking, and Steve reversed direction to intercept the Fishhook. The name of the craft seemed appropriate in Steve's mind. A cylindrical fuselage, with six forward-swept fins at equal angles from each other. Each fin had a pod on it, and the pods alternated from engine and railgun to missile launcher and railgun. In this way, it represented a more balanced version of the Jalthi. Odds were, however, that the ship was never intended to bring those weapons to bear on an opponent of the one eighty kilogram range that Steve represented. Jupiter made a mad dash for the ship, and pods opened from the fuselage and launched small rockets at him. Antimissiles, he realized. He instinctively gerwalked and deviated from his attack course, then reversed and went battroid while the antimissiles tried in vain to match his turn radius. A sharp elbow to the cockpit glass depressurized it, killed the pilot, and blew Steve clear. "One kill, ship almost undamaged. Dissection, Rob?" "Not...now!" Rob's lasers were proving rather ineffective against the heavy shielding on his target. He selected "tailfeather" mode on one of his missiles, and launched it. It headed straight for its target, then looped around the Fishhook and impacted the tail of the main fuselage. As Rob suspected, the Kilrathi had maxxed power to his forward shields by pulling it from the aft deflectors. Just then, the Mighty Halfling Wizard passed by Rob's field of view, with a Fishhook right behind him. Rob changed course to join the parade. The Kilrathi pilot was in the middle of a daisy chain: on his target's six, and with another bandit on his own six. He selected his reverse defense system and fired. Rob saw three missiles "fall" from his target and reverse themselves. Rob gained a lock on the Fishhook, and the missiles turned directly towards him. He fired lasers at the Fishhook, and crouched into battloid before thrusting out of the line of fire. Too late. One missile hit him in the belly, breaking into the cockpit and decompressing it. Only the CVR kept Rob's meatbody alive. Another got his left leg, destroying the engine and spinning him for a moment until he compensated. "This is seven: I'm hit! Damage to cockpit and left leg engine. Still fighting. Be advised: Fishhooks carry reversed radar riders." "One to seven: escape and return to Concordia." "Negative on that. Steve, I'm playing wounded mother." Rob began spinning around, his remaining engine spiraling him into helplessness. "Seven, return to base. That's an order, mister." "Sorry; no can do, One." He disengaged his engine and slowly tilted his leg to line up with his center of mass. Steve piffled a Kilrathi concentrating on the tasty feast of Eight-Ball seven. Another came in, on Rob's other side, but he stood there motionlessly. Commander Currier was infuriated, and almost in tears. "Get out of there!" Rob instantly realized that he had pushed her over the edge. Oops. He activated his remaining engine, and saw a quartet of missiles coming in at him. From Eight-Ball one. Three of the rockets impacted across his back, lurching him across space but not detonating. Duds? Another missile passed through the space he was in a scant moment ago, then found a new lock. "Eight-Ball seven, returning to base. Sorry about that, Trish." "Not as sorry as you'll be when I'm through with you." "In real life, they'd have his bags packed before he touched down." --Bob "Hagar" Mandeville, reacting to Maverick buzzing the tower in Top Gun. Rob commanded his meatbody to disconnect from him. Suddenly, he was human again. Or detian, anyway. He looked up and saw the lack of cockpit glass. Not a good sign. A crewman wheeled a ladder up to the port side of the Veritech. "Glad to see you made it back alive, Sir." Rob looked up at the lack of cockpit glass, and in a bad attempt at humor, remarked, "Sunroof. Neeeat." He removed his helmet, dropped it onto the deck, then flipped over the starboard side, landing on his feet. He felt general bruises, but nothing major. "Didn't you know I always come back?" He retrieved his helmet. "Just not necessarily in the shape I'd like to be in." Which the Veritech definitely wasn't. It was resting on nose gear, right mains, and the remains of the left leg. Even the hind fuselage had some big gouges chewed out of it. Rob found a bench and sat down in a kind of haze as techies tended to his wounded bird. What seemed like an eternity later, the remainder of the squadron returned. Rob heard Tricia's voice from across the bay: "Did Mandeville make it back alive?" "Yeah, he's over there, Ma'am." "Good." She started to walk towards him. "Because I'm going to kill him!" ReRob stood up; he knew what was coming. And that he deserved every bit of it. Colonel Currier started her tirade a good twenty meters from her target, helmet in hand. "What did you think you were doing out there, Mister Mandeville?" "The injured mother gambit." "Which almost got you killed. I had to disarm and launch four missiles to save your ass!" "No tactic is foolproof. You of all people should know that." "Cut the bullshit, Rob. You disobeyed a direct order from your superior, and that is unacceptable under any circumstances, especially in combat. You of all people should know that!" She continued, almost literally fuming. "The last time I saw an Eight-Ball pull a maneuver that...that stupid...was when Paul Heaton refused to pull out over Worcester! It's my job to make sure that we don't lose people unnecessarily, and you are making it impossible for me to do that job." She handed Rob a sheet of paper from her kneepad. "Consider your status in the Eight-Ball squadron terminated!" She stormed off towards debriefing. Rob watched her pass through the door, and looked back down at the note. It read: Sorry Had to be done Discuss further My quarters 1950 hrs --TCG A small smile showed on Rob's face, and he walked out towards the showers. "Who do you need, who do you love, When you come undone?" --Duran Duran Rob stood at Colonel Currier's door, in dress uniform. He wasn't quite sure where he stood with her, so he figured he'd let protocol smooth the way. He pressed the button. A few seconds later, the door opened. Currier stood there, wearing a "Be different--act normal" T-shirt and jeans. Rob smelled sweet baking from her quarters. She looked at her ex-squadron member with a "you must be kidding" look and said "A bit overdressed, aren't we?" Rob looked down and chuckled. "Yeah, I guess so." "Come on in, Rob." He walked in, then removed the uniform tunic, revealing his "I survived the Mok concert" T-shirt. Tricia took a chair, and motioned Rob over to the sofa. On the coffee table between them were a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a pair of glasses of milk. She offered him a cookie; Rob accepted. He noted that the centuries had not changed one immutable fact; Tricia Currier was still, and probably always would be, the Cookie Goddess. "Still the best, Trish." The Colonel kicked back a bit, grabbing a cookie herself. "You wouldn't believe how much I get in royalties from this recipe." "Oh, I'd believe it alright. Remember, I was the one who spent the last century on Musashi? And remember when Vaughn showed up and made that impromptu unpaid endorsement at Currier Kitchens in Vesper? I was there." Tricia laughed. The "endorsement" occurred when J. Random Tourist made a video of Vaughn talking to Rob about the cookies at one of Tricia's franchised bakery-restaurants. It was just a five second snippet of Vaughn picking up a cookie, pointing at it, saying "Currier cookies. I like 'em" and then chomping on it. Days later, the tape had been transmitted across the galaxy, and billboards were being propped up. "Now that was a stroke of luck," admitted Tricia. "I mean, even if the cookies weren't any good, I'd still be raking it in, after Vaughn plugged it." "Sounds about right," Rob agreed, "Vaughn's inane smile could sell Kevin Tefft a subscription to Buxom Babes." "Yeah, I guess you're right. I owe Vaughn a big favor." "He found Iczer-1, so he might just be hanging around with her and Iczer-2 down at Planitia when we come back. Bake him a batch of these, and he'll probably call it even." Tricia smiled evilly, then went to a drawer and pulled out a well-worn cookie cutter--Rob was surprised that it was still around. "A batch of cookies and a pink dinosaur cake!" "I'm the baby, gotta love me!" Rob's imitation of the character from that old show was at least half-decent. One day, Tricia decided that Vaughn's face looked remarkably like that of the baby from Dinosaurs, and he had been humorously lamenting the comparison ever since. Tricia had happened to have a large cookie cutter in the shape of a profile view of a six-inch T.Rex, and found an extreme pleasure in tormenting Vaughn with her small (and usually pink) dinosaur-shaped cakes. Since he liked Tricia's cakes so much, however, it didn't take too much persuasion to get Vaughn to accept one in any shape. "Oh, jeez. Talking about Planitia just reminded me of something, Rob. I promised Kei I'd have a wedding gown for her when we got back." Rob chuckled. "That oughta be a neat trick." "It won't be too bad. I've got her measurements, and I've had a maternity routine programmed in for a while. Never know when you can use one. So all I have to do is hit the holoDECstation, run the routine, and build the dress around the model." Rob said humorously, "Man, and I thought you could only design mecha with an HDS. I still get a kick out of it, though." "Kick out of what?" "The whole situation. Ben's been going out with Kei for three hundred years, she spent the next hundred trying to kill him, they get back together, and he still gets her pregnant before proposing to her. I married Deedlit, we were together for three hundred years, and then we started a family." "Well, that's Ben and Kei for you," Tricia mused, "Don't ask me to explain them. But you've got kids?" "Yeah. Surprised?" "A little, but maybe I shouldn't be. I just never heard." "Never had the time to tell you. We had three of them, back on Musashi, and they've all grown up by now." "Really? What are they like?" "You know what you get when you cross a Detian and a Salusian?" "No clue. Very furry, maybe?" "Nope. Might have been, if Deety wasn't humanized the whole time. You get elves." Rob specifically timed the last sentence to coincide with his hostess drinking milk. Predictably, she snarfed it out her nose. She grabbed a napkin to clean up the mess, and chuckled, "You're kidding! I do have to kill you now." "Yeah. When Sylvia--she was our first--was born, the ob-gyn was ready to fill out his resignation. She's hot music property now on Musashi. Her stage name is Black Rose." "I'll have to meet her someday. And the others?" "In the middle is Keyra, my only son. Engineer and all-around street fighter, with more than a little chip on his shoulder. Did a little...ummm...unauthorized law enforcement work around town. He's applying to the WDF academy. Finally, Vicki. A true fighter jock, just like her mother. Also applying to the Academy, with flight training hours in VLI." "I'll expect your daughter in my squadron in ten years or so. They're still Detian, aren't they?" "Yeah, kinda sort of. Detian genemods are dominant, and don't ask me how the designer managed it, but they always come through, even in half-breeds. Edison tried to explain it once, but DNA is a little out of my field. Only difference is that the ears point, and they have slimmer builds than Deety or I. They kinda look like a cross between Paul Ard and Veda." Paul Ard and Veda were the male and female Wedge Rat epitomes of slender builds. Neither were actually anorexic (in fact, Veda was an admitted chocoholic), but they looked like they spent a little too much time on the rack. "Yeah, I will have to meet them. They're going to the wedding, right?" "Oh, yeah, all three of them have RSVP'd in the positive. Sylvia's at U.P. now, rehearsing with Jim Tyrrell." Jim "Punkman" Tyrrell was the WDF's oxymoronically resident wandering minstrel. Rob spoke again. "I've got the distinct feeling that we've been sidetracking each other. What'd you invite me over for?" "I wanted to talk to you about today's mission." "I thought we did that--in the hanger." "No. I chewed you out in the hanger. I want to talk to you." "Aaah." "First off, I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings out there." "Well, you did, but I deserved it." "Yes, you did," she noted quite frankly. "And I had to, both because I was pissed off and because if I didn't, it would have disrupted discipline in the squadron. I know you're a captain, but I had to do it. Actually, that's why I had to do it." "I can be two grades superior to God and I still answer to you if I'm in your squadron." "Exactly." She sat back with her glass of milk, trying to put Rob at ease. She succeeded, but only to a point. "Now what happened out there?" "I did wounded mother with Steve Jupiter." "With one engine? You only do wounded mother when you're lightly but graphically hit, or when your chances of successful retreat are nil. We were only outnumbered ten to six, and every single Eight-Ball has more flight time logged than Kilrathi do when they retire. So you had a good escape chance, but not good enough for wounded mother." "It just seemed right at the time." "No, Rob, it just seemed suicidal at the time. If I didn't kick you out of the way with those missiles, we wouldn't be here holding this conversation. Did you want to die out there, Rob?" Rob flashed Tricia a pained look. "Maybe I just don't care anymore." "Well, I do care, Rob. All of us do, one way or another. You just need time. It was tough enough on me alone to lose Deedlit. She was a good friend. I couldn't stand to lose you, too That's why I kicked you off the squadron." Rob just sat there for a moment. In his current state of mind, he had missed the obvious. "Thanks, Trish. I guess that when you've counted on one person for so long, and lose her, you forget that there are other people who care for you. Thanks for reminding me." "I'll always be your friend, Rob. Even if I do have to kick you off my squadron." "You're much more than my friend, Trish. Much more." Rob and Tricia had been closer than most friends almost from day one--but in an absolutely nonromantic way. They were soul-siblings, Rob reminding Tricia of the brother she would never see again, Tricia reminding Rob of the sister he never had in the first place. He started to chuckle. "What is it?" "Just the incongruity of the situation. Look at this room. One of the hottest design engineers in free space, the second coming of Chuck Yeager, and a plate..." snag "...excuse me, about half a plate by now of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, like some kinda kiddie tea party." "Remember, Rob, we were human beings since before we did our respective engineering and piloting, and we've been friends since before we ever signed up for this outfit." "Now there's a take-you-back. Have you ever learned to write a calculus report?" "Too bad you only have one life, Rob. I have to kill you three times now; once for being stupid out there on the mission, once for making me snarf and once for bringing up calculus reports!" The two had met through an experimental calculus course at WPI which required project reports; Tricia was taking the course, and Rob had been tutoring the writing aspects of the program. "You know, it just seems so weird..." "Bha?" "Well, Edison Bell was right when he warned us about the dangers of Omega- 2. It plays tricks on your mind. Look at me, Trish; I'm four hundred and eighteen years old. Do I look it?" "Of course not, Rob; you don't look a day over three hundred." "Flattery will get you nowhere with me, hotshot. Fact is, as far as any doctor is concerned, I'm seventeen years old, and in perfect health. Never mind the vacuum exposure, the completely amputated arm"--he wiggled real fingers on his right hand for the first time in over a century--"scars from knee surgery, the one dimple from piano lessons, lung-tissue scars from that laser coolant accident on the Prometheus--and you probably have a longer list than I do, since I spend most of my time as a virtual desk jockey. You know what that does to you?" "No. What do you mean?" "They called Omega-2 treatment 'immunity from death'. More specifically, it makes you ignore death. I keep forgetting it's even possible for our type. Oh, once in a while, somebody or something will remind me--Shasti, the Bumas at Reunification--that Kilrathi you saved my ass from--sometimes I just think of Mike O'Malley and Steve Clark and it wakes me up. But I'm just so used to living--so full of the adolescent immortality syndrome--that I forget that I'm not immortal, and neither is anybody else--with the possible exceptions of Vaughn and Edison." "It still hasn't sunk in that Deedlit is gone," Tricia intuited. She got up, and sat on the sofa next to him. "No. I don't think it has. Deedlit died in transito--that dirty bomb fragged her transport signal. I couldn't even go around the shipyards with an interstellar Hoover and pick up the dust that was Deedlit, since she was just quantum waves at the time. It's one thing to look in a coffin and say 'yes, that's my wife' and it's quite another to have your best friend take you aside and tell you they lost the transporter lock." "Trust me, I know a little bit of what you're going through. I've lost enough pilots to know that when you die in a small craft, there usually isn't anything identifiable left for your loved ones. Is that part of it?" "Yeah, but only part." "What's the rest of it?" "She died on my ship." "No, Rob, your ship was the Wandering Child. That was the plan all along." "Not like that, Trish. The Phoenix was my ship, I built it. You want to know the story behind that ship?" "Tell me." Rob leaned back "It was all a big mistake. My intelligence was way off base as to the number of forces Genom could amass at one time, being on a peacetime footing. I thought that the Phoenix, the Daedalus, and a few markers I could pull in from places like Cybertron could shut the company down. So when Gryphon briefed me on fleet strengths, I realized that we were a minor player in a major war. I called her the Phoenix because it was reborn from the fall of Musashi. "I got word from UP that they wanted to use the Phoenix for bait, and I went with it. Not that I was happy about it; they wanted me to fix a fold drive on the fly. "We got there, in transporter range, and we got permission to dock at UP. I told them not to, to stay in the fight. While I left to what might have been the safest ship in the entire fleet. I never even hugged or kissed Deedlit good-bye, just gave her a thumbs-up. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that we'd be back together, enjoying a couple of cool ones in the O-club bar and a couple of hot ones elsewhere, within the week. Absolutely no fucking doubt in my mind." He sunk deeper into the sofa, if that was possible. "The last I saw of her, the turbolift doors were closing. I just assumed. Sure, I knew there'd be casualties, but I was so goddamn certain that the Phoenix would make it through. Why? Because I designed her. "That's the sick part about it. The entire bridge was ejectable, but there were no actual ejection seats in the bridge itself. I decided in favor of more overhead armor. I could have put them in and told everybody to wear CVR just in case. But I decided against it. Even though I remembered the Challenger quite clearly." "The Challenger?" Tricia interrupted. There was no Challenger on the rosters that Rob would have "remembered". "The space shuttle." "Now that's a long way back." "Yeah, but I thought I had learned my lesson from that. Largo didn't kill her, the Bumas didn't kill her, the transporter beam didn't kill her. I killed her. Me and my own piss-poor design work." Tricia placed a reassuring arm across his shoulders and stifled the urge to say, "You don't really believe that, do you?" In his current state of mind, he most certainly did. Instead, she asked, "Do you know what would have happened if you installed those ejection seats, Rob?" Rob was on the verge of tears. "What?" "Buma are programmed to consider biological intelligence a severe threat. One of the gunners would have been ordered to destroy the survivors. Deedlit would have been alive for about another 3.4 seconds, according to the statistics they gave me." "Somehow, that doesn't make me feel much better." "Eventually, it will." She pulled him towards her in a supportive embrace, and he almost grasped in return. Jeez, she thought, he probably hasn't had a hug since...since he lost Deedlit. And he's been desperately needing one ever since. Her views were confirmed by the dampness developing on her shoulder. "We'll just crack it open." --John Bigboote, Buckaroo Banzai The next morning, ReRob moseyed down to cargo bay four. There, he found a Fishhook, standing sideways on padded jacks and missing its cockpit glass. Strangely enough, the seat and "Jesus rings" (you know, the black-and-yellow ejector rings you grab while shouting "JESUS!" or praying to same) were still there. He heard a clanging noise emanating from it. This was not good. "Hello!" "Zat you, Rob?" Steve. That explained the clanging. The Valkyrie poked his head out over one of the fins. "Not much new to learn from this that we didn't get in combat. It looks like a Jalthi built for three dimensions. Big guns, coupla missiles, three engines placed on outriggers to max the torque out..." "And a mighty potent stench. You catch it?" "Lemme see." While Steve had a chemical analyzer, it wasn't on at all times like similar structures on humans are. "Hmmm...something organic, coming from..." He crawled over to the cockpit. Sounding like he had pinched his nose, he noted, "Oh. Looks like somebody forgot his kitty litter." "Nasty," Rob agreed. "but death by explosive decompression will do that to you. Steve, I'll be back in a minute. I'm amazed you can work with that stench!" "Didn't notice it until you mentioned it," Jupiter replied, "I've been using spectrograph to do all the chemical analysis, since I can't smell the armor and frameworking." Rob left the room, and came back five minutes later with a spray can labeled "Krazy Kevin's Organic Odor Killer". This, of course, was another product from the manic mind of Rob's friend, keyboardist, and former T-god gunner Kevin "Bitch" Tefft, chemist extraordinaire and absolutely no known relation to the famous frankfurt manufacturer of St. Canard. He took a deep breath, strided over to and leaped on top of the nose of the Fishhook, and sprayed the cockpit down. By the time he had to take another breath, Rob was relieved to notice that the stuff had worked. He put the can down behind him on the nose, and remarked, "An easier way to do this would be to just pull the rings." Steve looked up. "But man, would that leave a mess on the ceiling. I may have thrusters for feet, but I'll be damned if I'm going up there with a mop and a bucket. Besides, I'd rather keep the seat. If you don't need it, I could use some more furniture." As if Steve could comfortably sit in one of those things. "Actually..." Rob, of course, recognized most of the cockpit; it had to be simple enough for their techies to repair, and Rob knew more about Kilrathi fighters than some Kilrathi fighter techies. That was his job. "Spudwrench!" A half-meter cube on robotic arms and legs responded to his call, walking up to the side of the craft. Rob ordered, "Seventeen krelb sept wrench," and held his hand out behind him as if expecting some nurse to come up and hand him a scalpel. Which, in a way, he was. His "nurse", Spudwrench, opened its lid, reached in, grabbed what looked like a largish Allen key, and reached up to place it in Rob's hand. Rob considered it fortunate that his roving toolkit had that tool in seventeen krelb. The Metric system was fine, so long as everybody used it, and the Kilrathi were as stubborn as the old Americans were about using the system. Then again, whenever Kilrathi got their hands on a Federation ship, Rob imagined one of his furry opposite numbers would be cursing the inventor of the millimeter. Within a few minutes, he had the seat unbolted. He lifted the thing out of the cockpit and heaved it over the side. He'd dry-clean it later, he figured. "Spudwrench, catch!" He took the bolts and dropped them into the waiting lid of his animated toolbox. "Save as Fishhook seat bolts." He found it to be rather useful to know where all the parts from machines he dissected came from. He sat himself down in the cockpit, a bit lower than he should be since the seat was gone and he was now sitting directly on the ejector charge. He immediately checked and found that the charge was indeed disabled. "Thanks for safetying the eject, Steve!" "No problem. Just remember your safety precautions." Clang, clatter, clatter. Damn it if he isn't right, thought Rob. After all, he literally wrote the book on dissection of enemy hardware, and he screwed up by not safetying the eject himself. But Steve, of course, had the book on binary recall. Okay, cockpit check. Similar controls to older models, and absolutely inscrutable. Sometimes, I wish I did learn Kilrathi, he mused. But he had a Salusian. Solution. Damn those mental Freudian slips! He took a pair of wires streaming from a small box the size of an old-style walk-along cassette deck and jacked them into the twin plugs in his left wrist. On the box was the VLI logo and the acronym VHDS. "Translate visual Kilrathi to English," he "thought" to his wires. Instantly, Rob's field of view put English subtitles on every piece of writing in the cockpit. Okay. One major new control, labeled "Detector Floodlight Follower" Rob translated the VHDS's version all the way to "radar rider." So that's what happened. A thought entered Rob's mind. Naah, he thought. Then another. And a third. The floodgates opened for what seemed like an eternity, but could have been clocked as maybe ten seconds. He snapped his fingers, then leapt out of the cockpit, grabbed the pilot's seat, and ran out the door with all the gay abandon of Dr. Emilio Lizardo. Steve shrugged his shoulders and returned to his work. "This is the most important mission of your career. Screw it up, and you're coming home in a mailing tube." --The King of Salusia to (then) Lt. Perry Aldizinjal Beep. "Come in." The door opened. Admiral Benjamin D. "Gryphon" Hutchins saw what he least expected to see: ReRob in an almost manic state. He wasn't quite sure what was going on. "Hi, Rob." Rob immediately realized that Happy Fun Gryphon was neither happy nor fun at that moment. Something was seriously wrong. "Hey, Ben, what's up?" "This." Ben activated a small holotank above his desk. It showed the Concordia, the remainder of the Tactical Fleet, the astroid field separating the Federation and Kilrathi forces, and the entire Kilrathi fleet--fifty-seven capital ships. Fifty-seven capital ships?!? "Looks like our Kilrathi friends got their reinforcements," added Ben, "Just got a massive fold-in, three hours ago. Twenty new capital ships. We're evenly matched, Rob. Which means that our quick little war has just become long, drawn-out, WWI style trench warfare. That means fatigue, that means casualties, that means morale goes out the window, and that means we could be here for a year, maybe more. And I've got a fiancee to get back to. Whazzup witchew?" "I think we can end this border skirmish quickly." Ben slightly cocked his head, signifying interest. "What's up your sleeve?" Rob looked at his right arm, holding it up and flexing each finger in turn. "New flesh-and-blood arm, but that's not important now. What is important is that on our first mission against the Fishhooks, Steve got one almost intact and we can repair the damage." "Alright, what does that get us?" "A ticket into their flagship, maybe?" "And how do you figure that?" Rob hovered over Gryphon's desk. "Very simple. We engage Fishhook fighters from the flagship, destroy one in our jamming radius, launch our Fishhook on the far side of the Concordia, I land with the sortie with Steve following in stealth mode, I split during debriefing and, well, what better saboteur than an engineer?" "Rob, you're missing one major point." "What's that?" "You get out of that cockpit and onto that flight deck, and you'll immediately be recognized as human." "Well, I wasn't exactly intending to show up in full WDF dress uniform." "What do you want to do? Get a mask? They're cats, Rob, they use all their senses. You're going to have to look like a Kilrathi, growl like a Kilrathi, even smell like a Kilrathi." Rob returned Ben's emotion with studied nonchalance. "Been there. Done that." "What the?..." "Salusians have been pulling this sort of trick for millennia. You know those biosculpt tanks? The ones they used to humanize the entire 105th FTL Cavalry?" "Yeah." "They were around aeons before they ever met humans. The entire concept was originally intended for anti-Kilrathi espionage. I should be able to Kilrathify myself." "You need a genetic pattern for that." "Gunk on the pilot's seat; Steve was messy. I'm having sickbay extract it now, as well as set up a tank." "Okay. You'll be a Kilrathi. But can you act like one? Do you even know the language?" "Just downloaded it into my picocomp, along with social. Our friends the Bastard Sons of Kilrah left it in our library comps." "Wait a minute. Since when did you get a picocomp?" Rob lifted his left hand, revealing the twin golden discs on his wrists, covers for his interface plugs. "I've been wired ever since Shasti. I had a whole mechanical arm, so of course I got the mental mods. When I ditched the arm, I decided that I still liked the headware. Picocomp, Bio-87 math coprocessor, vehicle link, virtual link, and virtual HUD." He thought for a moment, then, "Damn! That's what I miss." "What?" "Back on the arm, I had a universal remote in the index finger." He looked at the new arm he grew. "Really couldn't install one here. Oh, well, the disadvantages of using flesh..." "No wonder you're so fucked up, Rob. You're a cyberweenie. Look what happened to Zoner." "Zoner and I are in totally different leagues. If cyber was a drug, I'd be smoking hash while MegaZone mainlined heroin. I'm not the one you can stick notes to with kitchen magnets. It's only a difference in degree, but one hell of a difference. And Zoner's still the best damned fleet admiral in existence." Ben stood up. "So you think you can pull this off?" "I know I can pull this off." Ben thought for a minute. Then: "No." Rob was incredulous. "No?" "No." "Why?" "Rob, you're a captain with almost three hundred years active service in the WDF. You're too important to risk." Rob stood up, being careful not to press his one inch vertical advantage. "Ben, You're an admiral, you're in charge of this campaign, and are authorized to...ordered to use any and all resources to end this conflict with as little damage as possible. The term 'any and all resources' includes my own person just as surely as it includes the Phase Transit Cannon. More than that, you're ethically required to win this one as quickly as possible, because of Kei. Our forces are just about evenly matched out here, the Kilrathi got reinforcements and are ready to handle a reduced-strength WDF, and could keep us out here for who knows how long! Don't you see? I'm trying my damnedest to keep your beloved Kei from walking down the aisle with your newborn in her arms!" Then, in a more hushed tone, "Ben, I can get us back while Kei can still see her feet." "Rob, I'd rather go back late than go back without you. Kei can wait; I love her, but she's in no danger, and face it, after four centuries, a wedding ceremony is just a gesture, isn't it? And, to be quite honest with you, ever since the Eight-Ball incident, I can't let you off this ship for fear that you're going to commit ritual suicide with a Kilrathi." "Ben, I give you this: my word that I will place my personal safety above success in this mission. I may not come back from a crippled ship, but if it is within my power, I will come back." The two admirals locked eyes for what seemed like hours. Finally, Ben saw what he needed to see: a look in his shipmate's eyes that told him that Rob stood squarely behind that statement. That would almost be enough. Almost. "Okay, Rob, you and Steve are on the mission. But remember this: you die on this one, and you have severely screwed up our strategic position. Which means that by the time I get back, my child will already be saying 'Mama' and 'auntie Yuri'. There's something I've noticed about you, and it's your problem, almost as much as it is Zoner's: you won't lift a finger to save yourself, but you'll move heaven and earth to help somebody you care about. So come back on this one, Rob. If not for yourself, for me. For Kei. For the baby." "You have my word on it, Ben. The tank will take three days. The mission will take less than one. In under one hundred hours, I'll be standing in front of your desk again. If I have to personally dispatch every Kilrathi on the flagship, I'll be standing right here in one hundred hours." "Okay, Rob. Good hunting." "Beauty and the beast. O'course, if anybody calls you 'beast', I'll rip his lungs out." --The Joker, Batman The biosculpt treatment is simply another retrovirus; it rewrites one's DNA to simulate that of another species. In fact, Omega-2 could be considered a biosculpt treatment, as it changes a Human into a Detian. However, as it is a morphologically mild treatment, it is survivable without any external assistance; in fact, the recipient generally doesn't even notice it working. However, when making external morphological changes, such as between Humans/Detians, Salusians, Kilrathi, and presumably Klingons and other humanoid bipeds, one needs to immerse the patient in a special chamber called an biosculpt tank to prevent trauma and shock. It wouldn't have killed Rob to take the Kilrathi retroviral injection with his Detian genemods (which are unaffected by this other retrovirus), but it would still have, in his own words, "hurt like a fuddrucker". Not that he spent those three days in some inert trance. He was receiving transmissions from his VHDS unit into his cybersystem, learning certain Kilrathi ways of doing things, and old ship layouts which might still be valid. Large amounts of data, the entire Kilrathi language for example, he simply downloaded into a picocomp; there was no way he could learn it in a half of a week. Steve's preparations took much less time: he had already downloaded all the Kilrathi technical data he needed, and didn't have Rob's complication of needing to interface with the natives. Rob would be working on the inside, using anonymity, while Steve would work from the outside using his simple stealth. His physical preparations consisted of a half-hour down in engineering getting spray-painted with stealth black. Finally, the genetic preparations were over. The biofluid drained out of the tank, and a shower turned on to pummel the remainder of the stuff from Rob's newly-grown orange fur. A hot-air drying cycle completed the process, and a techie opened a hatch in the tank. Able to see clearly for the first time in days, Rob noticed that about half the Sickbay staff, as well as Admiral Hutchins himself, were standing there--and Rob in his all-together. Being an official function, Rob saluted the C.O. "Sir." Gryphon returned the salute, then Rob took a quick scan of the room. "Uhhh, anybody have a uniform for me? Please?" "Examination room two," the techie offered. Holding his left index finger up in a "Hold that thought" gesture, Rob said, "I'll be back in a few minutes." Rob hastily padded--literally, since he felt the pads on the ball, toes, and heel of both feet, into the examination room, where he found a replica of the flight suit worn by the pilot of the ill-fated Fishhook. He returned, feeling a bit more dignified, though he heard a muttered comment saying, "should we tell Darensbourg?" Rob cleared his throat loudly to discourage the comment. That is to say, he attempted to clear his throat. Translated through his new responses, it came out as a hiss. Against their better judgements, several of the orderlies stared at him like some sort of monster in their midst. "Well, is the mission a go?" "As soon as you're ready." "You'd better believe I'm ready. We'd better get this show on the road before I get an incredible urge to shave." "All those kids, and they thought I was Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Rambo and Kerry Eurodyne rolled into one. And then--WHACK! Oh, my God, the memories alone keep me warm at night! Thank you, Largo, for an eidetic memory! God! It was so glorious! All the blood! The brains! The young lives snuffed out! I'm writing a book! I'm going to Disneyland! I want the movie rights!!" --Type 33/S Buma GRF-HN Rob sat in the Fishhook in CB4. The Fishhook required only minor repairs (dry-cleaning the upholstery and replacing the klasterglass) and was in full fighting order. He had the radio tuned to a frequency for this particular mission. "Eight-Ball squadron away." Minutes later, "Eight-Ball squadron baiting and engaging squadron of Fishhooks." "Mighty Halfling Wizard, just trapped a tasty morsel on the dark side of the Concordia, showing number three seventeen, now switching you over to the victim's radio--" Robots in the bay hastily painted the hull number on Rob's craft while the audio switched. "So the monkey boy can fight!" Alert sirens, multiples of them. "My offspring shall aven--" static. "That's your cue, Rob," said Leeds over the comm. "Ready when you are." A robot appeared in front of and to the left of the now-decompressed bay, and touched one arm to the deck. Rob gave a thumbs-up, the doors opened, and Rob jetted his way out of the Concordia. The Veritech Rob had all but destroyed, now repainted with Bilbo the Sorcerer, led Rob around the ship under remote control. Rob opened fire with his railguns and reduced Eight-Ball eight to mere slag. The Mighty Halfling Wizard returned to the ship to complete the illusion. Though he didn't see it, he knew that tailing his six was Steve Jupiter. A second squadron came out of the Concordia, and the order was given to retreat. Rob heard the order, though he pretended he didn't. He did, however, follow the group. He toggled the navigational lights on his Fishhook several times, the Kilrathi signal meaning, "My radio's out." His fellow wingmates flew a triangular formation around him, showing him which course to follow. They had determined that there might be some codes in use during the mission, and this was the only way to safely circumvent them. The signal reminded Rob of a technique used on ancient ground vehicles to inform somebody that they should perhaps activate their headlamps. As they returned to their ship, the Fangs of the Night, Rob "simulated" another emergency. He shook the control stick wildly, intentionally faking a short in the fly-by-wire system. He selected a collision course for the landing bay, and while his wingmates were lining up to destroy him to save their capital ship, Rob reached up and pulled the twin rings. A shaped charge blew the klasterglass upwards and backwards, while another charge ejected his freshly dry- cleaned (ancient Kilrathi secret, huh?) seat from the craft. While the Fishhook augered in, damaging the landing bay, Rob found himself free of the seat and in pure freefall. He then felt metal across his chest, though he saw nothing. A clank against his helmet, and he heard a familiar voice: "Jupiter's taxi service. Where ya wanna go?" "It's time to put the gun in your hand and take it to mister!" --Maria Mercurial Rob saw the futility of pointing from a half-klick out. Instead, he spoke into his helmet, "See the hatch between the third and fourth characters in the hull name?" "Yep." Steve's gunhead, which housed his speakers, was pressed against Rob's helmet. No radio contact was necessary. "Let's go." Rob felt acceleration, Steve rocketing him to his destination. They pivoted and retrofired, landing within a meter of the hatch. Rob opened the access door to the hatch controller, split a pair of wires, and crossed them. The door opened. Rob ducked inside, and tapped helmet to gunhead again. "You know what you're doing out here?" "No. Will that stop me? No." "Okay. Just keep an ear out." "Right. Take care of yourself. I need an overhaul in four thousand hours, and the engineering staff of the Concordia is ham-handed." Rob stifled a laugh; he didn't quite want to find out what a Kilrathi "laugh" was from the first-person perspective. "Alright." And with that, he ducked inside the chamber and dogged the hatch down. Thinking of the irony of that term, he finally broke down and laughed. When he saw other Kilrathi laugh, it looked like they were going to launch a hairball. To Rob it felt like dry heaving. Finally, the air cycled and the other door opened. Rob was out on the deck of the Fangs. He took his helmet off, and went to the nearest intersection to find a map. Good, he thought, quite similar to earlier models. He took the stairs down to the next level. On most ships in most navies, design becomes a compromise between security and repair. To design a truly tough ship, one not only has to make it so that parts fail rarely, but so that parts that do fail can be reached and repaired or replaced easily. In other words, integrity is not only a function of structural strength but of damage control efficiency. And damage control efficiency means multiple and easily accessible routes to all important parts of the ship. This, of course, annoys the Security people to no end, since more passages mean more places for intruders to slip by. So security people want fewer passages, or passages accessible to fewer personnel, or better monitoring of these passages. In the end, of course, the security people are bound to lose, since the ships are always designed by engineers and never by security officers. However, the security personnel have won at least some small moral victories, as could be witnessed on the Fangs of the Night. On board the Fangs, the main network of engineering passages are the crawlspaces. To access these spaces, you need to look into certain retina scanners to open certain hatches. Since these hatches were about five meters from each other, no one would be very fast, and all motions would appear on a master security board. All this was to Rob's advantage, for it provided absolutely no live security forces throughout the network unless something was tripped. Which Rob was very unlikely to do. He stopped at a door. It read "LJG Kraven Milkpaw"--or, at least that's what the subtitle in Rob's line of sight read. Milkpaw was the unfortunate who donated the Fishhook to the WDF's cause, so Rob knew it was vacated. The only thing he had to worry about was the chance that they were specifically monitoring this door. Rob did a bit of electronic voodoo and the door opened. Once inside, he looked up and saw an access panel, just as he had expected. He jammed the door controls shut. Then he snapped a table leg and used it to physically jam the door shut. Even if they knew he was there, they would have to blast their way in. Security people would never think of using the accessways to get in. Rob went over to the computer terminal and ripped the case off with a small prybar. He unzipped his flightsuit and took out the VHDS box. From a compartment, he pulled a half-dozen alligator clips. He clipped them to wires in the terminal, then flipped a switch. Humans had the advantage in computer security over many other races because of their instinctive urge to flaunt authority. The Kilrathi, for example, had the authoritarian rule mandated by almost constant war. This anarchic element surfaced on Earth in the late twentieth century as what were originally called "hackers" and then, more specifically, "crackers". In response to these, programmers spent more and more of their time and resources keeping these hackers and crackers from reaching and altering the data which were their goals. The escalation in this virtual war gave humanity a relative edge in both making and breaking computer security. All of this boiled down in an instant to the fact that a being with the body of a Kilrathi, the mind of a Human, the constitution of a Detian, and the reflexes of an Intel found himself in a playground of a logistics computer. A couple of password crackers, and he found himself in contact with the security program. He instructed the computer to take a new retina scan from his station, with the associated account of "csh". He then told the passage monitor that the csh account was not a person, but a test routine. Whenever it registered csh's retina, it would cycle through, and catch the motions in a file to be analyzed later. As if he was ever going to pick up that file. He took off the gator clips, opened the access hatch he found before, and boosted himself into the passageway. Clang. "Ow!" New body, new balance points, new reflexes. Damn. He backed up about a foot, and leaped again, making the hatch this time. He closed the hatch behind him. A smart security team, if one was searching for him and going to Milkpaw's quarters, wouldn't miss the fact that he was using the access ways, but it would take them a few minutes to figure it out with the hatch closed. For the next forty minutes, Rob went around the accessways, eventually making his way to the sections around the engine room. He didn't have to touch the actual engines; starship complexity was to the point where the term "manual override" had very little meaning. All it took was a little bit of creative rewiring... "Steve, you there?" Rob had tapped into the surface sensor net, not wanting to use his radio and thus call attention to himself. "Right here." "Want some power?" "Sure." Rob spliced a few pairs of wires. "Here you go. Wait until I get out, and take all their maneuver orders in the meantime and execute them. If they don't know you've got their engines, they won't look for us." "Roger that. How long till you get out?" "Maybe a half hour, I want to do some more customization. Yell if they find out." "Will do. Jupiter out." Another fifteen minutes, and Rob had found cables leading to the fire control computer. Normally, the Kilrathi computer nets were separate, or at least connected at only limited and well-monitored points, to prevent saboteurs from doing just what Rob was up to. As they would have said on Earth, "Sneakernet is the ultimate cracker stopper". Rob had just linked the fire control computer net and the drive computer net to the surface detection grid. All while Steve linked himself to the surface detection grid and did some software cracking. "Friendly fire isn't" --Murphy's Laws of Combat Steve Jupiter, "sitting" in guardian mode on the hull of the Fangs of the Night, felt a tap on his wingtip. He turned around and saw Rob staring back at him. Steve battloided, and they tapped helmet-to-gunhead. "Jack?" "Jack." Rob took out a pair of cables, and plugged them into his armor. He was already plugged into the armor, as it would be difficult to jack through a pressure suit without it. The other ends of the cables went into Steve Jupiter's back, while another pair of cables were already connected to a camera. Rob felt his mind swimming around in nowhere. He called out, "I'll take guns if you take engines. Want to burst a transmission out to the fleet?" "Too dangerous. They'll know we succeeded." "Just remember to keep our side out of gunrange." "You're telling me." Steve loaded the sensor data, showing the stars, rocks, and ships in the cybernetic nullspace. Rob "pointed", specifying a Kilrathi battle cruiser. "Hey, that one looks annoying..." "Let's party," agreed Steve. The Fangs of the Night edged over closer to the battle cruiser. Rob imagined that inside the ship, a helmsman was unfairly getting chewed out by the captain. Too slagging bad, thought Rob, Don't you know that all's fair in love and war? Rob let loose with the Fangs' main guns. For perhaps a half a minute, the targeted cruiser failed to react. After all, what is the protocol when your own flagship starts shooting you? Probably a quick "Hey, what's going on here?" call to the flagship, answered by an embarrassed admiral shrugging his shoulders and saying "Beats me." By the time the cruiser did react, it was too late, and the ship was up in flames. Fifty-six. "Rob, getting a self-destruct order. I'm intercepting it and stopping it." "What's the delay on it?" "Five minutes." "Let it through, and try to slow down the clock cycles!" The self-destruct, caught by Steve as it was essentially an engine overload, was one thing that could be manually overridden. One heavy weapon in the right place, the mag bottles go, and the ship's a temporary star in a fraction of a second. Steve transmitted again as Rob started pummeling another target. "I'm re-routing every other clock tick." Good. He just bought another five minutes. The crew wouldn't notice because they'd be too wrapped up in other things. "How much time do we need to exit kill zone?" "Two minutes." "Then we unjack with three, just in case." About five minutes later, the Fangs had destroyed two more ships, and escape pods were piling out of the flagship. "Thirty seconds to exit," noted Steve. Rob looked at the situation as it came through his jackplugs, looking for the densest concentration of capital ships he could find. Then: "course one seven five mark two oh three...five-eighths impulse. Engage. Jack out." Rob pulled his plugs, followed by Steve, having given the Fangs of the Night its last order. The Valkyrie scooped Rob up in his arms and took off at two gees, the max he could do with his Detian cargo weighing him down. Steve found a big asteroid and got to the Federation side of it. It's mass would be a better blast shield than any more distance he could make would be. Seconds later, the two saw light penetrating the field, then felt the rock accelerating them towards the Federation. Steve picked Rob up again and weaved through the field, ending up in the clear just as WDF fighter groups were passing through the other way. "Eight-Ball six to Concordia," Rob picked up through his helmet radio, "requesting landing permission." "Granted on bay one. Be advised: we are accelerating. Is the captain with you?" Which meant that they were pressing the attack, possibly through the field itself. "Right here." Rob's radio was now in range. "Admiral Hutchins wishes to see you on the bridge as soon as possible." "Get a security team to bay one to escort me. I don't need people thinking I'm somebody I'm not." The last thing Rob wanted was for some over-zealous greenie to blast him as a suspected intruder. Steve landed in battloid mode, putting Rob on his feet. Two security guards walked up to him, saluted him--then handcuffed him. "Huh?" "The captain will explain." They led Rob to the lift, which they took to the bridge. The three walked onto the bridge, and the guards removed the shackles, retreating onto the lift. "Sorry about the cuffs, Rob," said Gryphon from his captain's chair. "Figured it'd be best for safety reasons. When you're done here, we'll cuff you again and escort you to sickbay. Unless you like fur." "Not that much, Captain. What's the hull count? I missed the end of it." "Ten, including the flagship of course; eight damaged, and thirteen more out of position. The thirteen is what sunk it for them; now we're keeping them busy with our fighter groups, so they can't come around to get a clear shot at us. We're sending the main force through the rocks now. What the hell did you do to that thing?" "Took over engines and guns, and ran the whole show through a box on the outer hull. The last place you look for an intruder is outside the ship: what would that be, an extruder? It was their captain's idea to put on the self-destruct, so we just aimed the beastie into the core of their formation." "I swear, Rob, you almost got a chain reaction going." A voice from the side said, "Captain, you have an incoming message." "On screen." The screen blipped; a Kilrathi bridge, and it's commanding officer. Gryphon sat a little straighter and announced in a voice that sounded as if he was in serious need of Formula 44, "Kurath'ka chrak Concordia ni'ka vikh Benjamin D. Hutchins Khor'ak na'ha tharakh'na." As Rob pulled a surprise reaction, his faithful picocomp supplied, "Admiral Benjamin D. Hutchins, commanding, WDF Concordia and associated task force." Rob noted the Kilrathi on screen pull a similar face, then reply in English, "This is Captain Gurtav Nip, acting Commander in Chief of the Kilrathi forces in this sector. I wish to discuss terms of peace." Humans were one of the few races to make a fine and lengthy art of diplomacy, and the Kilrathi were one of the many who like to hammer terms out quickly. This suited Ben fine, as he was no diplomat. His only concession to that art had been to learn as many languages as he could, in order to address any enemy or ally in his own tongue. The Detian mind's organization being ideal for linguistics (by, as it turns out, design), this had not taken him over much effort during his time as a fugitive. "Our terms are very simple: this border between the Empire of Kilrah and the United Federation of Planets stands as it was four standard months ago. You leave, and we'll synchronize a cease-fire order." Gurtav looked to Gryphon's side. "One more condition." "What?" "You turn the traitor over to us." Ben followed Gurtav's eyes to their target. "Sorry, Captain. That's Captain Mandeville, and was never a citizen of Kilrah to my knowledge." "You can thank the late Kraven Milkpaw for the genetic material I needed for the face-over," noted Rob. "I assure you, however, that he was not captured, and that he died in the service of his Empire. We had to pick the DNA from his ejection seat." Rob took the knife from his Kilrathi flight suit, cut some hair from his head, and placed it in a plastic bag. He placed the bag in a materializer cubby and said, "Vision, would you beam this bag over to the Kilrathi when and if they accept?" "Of course, Captain." "Very well then. But I will transmit the synchronization order, and we will not leave until I am satisfied as to the proof of the genetic scan. We agree to the terms, so long as the sample provides evidence that Lieutenant Milkpaw's DNA are involved." The bag of fur disappeared. "I will transmit one pulse on fourteen point two seven megahertz." The captain's records, taken from camera footage from the remainder of the squadron, showed that Milkpaw died in combat and had no chance to betray his Empire. Gryphon pressed a button on his bridge controller. "All units, this is Admiral Hutchins. You will soon be receiving one pulse on fourteen point two seven megahertz from the Kilrathi. This is a cease-fire order, and will be obeyed under my authority. You will assume a defensive stature and allow the Kilrathi to retreat in an orderly fashion. Hutchins out." Then, to the screen again, "We're ready." "As are we. Synchronizing cease-fire...now." The Kilrathi captain pressed a button, and all firing on both sides stopped. Moments later, the comm station onboard the Concordia sprang to life again. "Captain, text message only from the Kilrathi." "Read it." Captain Nip to Admiral Hutchins: our sickbay has analyzed the sample and verified your claim. The terms are agreed to." On the screen, Kilrathi fighters returned to their ships, which then retreated into the void. Ben noticed that the door to the Captain's office had just closed. Considering that only he and the chief of security had access to that door, he found this puzzling. He motioned the security chief over, and opened the door. Standing in front of his desk was a Kilrathi with a funky haircut. "Rob?" The feline looked at his watch. "One hundred hours, more or less." Epilogue "I won't cry for yesterday, there's an ordinary world Somehow I have to find. And as I try to make my way to the ordinary world I will learn to survive." --Simon LeBon A pair of eyes looked out onto the inner surface of the vast Dyson sphere which was Utopia Planitia. Directly overhead, the sun stood eternally, a pair of small planets still racing rings around it. A few hundred yards away, the WDF Wandering Child, the second SDF built for the Wedge Defense Force, lay in drydock as workers replaced the burned-out components of the Reflex Drive. Her predecessor, the WDF Wayward Son, remained soaking in her own radiation light-years away from Planetia at her own final resting place. While the Wandering Child was one of the largest warships in space at eight thousand meters, she herself was dwarfed by the vast surface of the sphere. Only a small fraction of that surface was yet in use, leaving the rest as an exposed plasteel surface. The sky itself was gunmetal gray. The eyes surveying the scene were once, long ago, shielded behind optically curved glass to correct their inherent imperfections. Today, however, they gazed directly upon the scene with only a window of flat glass between them and the view. Today, those eyes were considered the best in the galaxy at what they and their mistress did professionally. The eyes and the person had a symbiotic working relationship: they would recognize the shapes of enemy fightercraft from across vast distances, and she would shoot them down. The lady who belonged to these eyes was, in spite of her profession, quite pleased with the fact that they recognized no enemy fightercraft at the moment. While one reason was simply that she had nothing at her immediate disposal to fire upon them with, there was probably something more. Thoughts from an unknown source entered her mind. I'll deal. It almost felt telepathic. Tricia quickly turned back to face Rob. "What was that? Sorry, I kind of got mesmerized by the view." "Oh, I can believe. It's a great flat, lets me see the shipyards, but it does sort of launch your mind into the ether. You asked how I felt about Deedlit. I said I'll deal." "You're alright, then?" "Not yet. She'll leave a hole in me, maybe even permanently. I'd like to say it'll be permanent considering how much she meant to me--still does mean to me, in fact--but that's mighty rare among Detians. With time, all wounds are healed, but I think that this one will leave a scar." Tricia had just swallowed some spaghetti: Rob had returned the favor of her inviting him over for cookies with some of his worlds-famous, four-hour, damn-the-vegetarians, stick-the-spoon-in-and-it-stays-up Italian sauce. "I'm still trying to put myself in your shoes, and I keep failing. Are you sure that 'hole' of yours is healed up enough?" "So that I don't need the psychological equivalent of intensive care? Yes. I've gotten to the point where I can at least get a decent night's sleep. It seems to me that a lot of different kinds of love have certain important things in common." "Huh? You lost me." "Something you said waaaaay back...when we were back at WPI, even. You mentioned that having good friends was more important than having a good boyfriend. Never having had a good boyfriend, I took your word for it." Trish chuckled a bit. Rob was careful not to make her snarf. Sending four-hour spaghetti sauce out one's nostrils hurts--even if you are a Detian. Rob continued: "Probably the best thing about having Deedlit around was that she was the ultimate stress buster. There were some times that I thought I'd go nuts if she wasn't there. I think I returned her the favor. You know how cuddling up with the right person can put your mind at ease, no matter what's going on in the outside world." Tricia nodded her head in agreement; she knew that rather well. The acceptance, and almost encouragement, that the WDF gave to forming relationships inside the Force had been credited with keeping morale up and post-traumatic stress disorder (shell shock) down. This had been a far cry from the accepted operating procedures in the armed forces defending the WDF's birthland, where units were often segregated by gender and same-sex relationships were officially frowned upon. The soldiers had nothing to do but watch third-run movies, listen to military radio, and catch new and educational diseases from the natives; it was a wonder they could operate at all. "A lot of times, though, just having friends around helps out a lot. It certainly kept me going on board the Concordia. You helped out a lot, and so did about a half a dozen others on board. Thanks for helping out, and especially for giving me a shoulder to cry on." "You're more than welcome, Rob. After all, you've helped me out enough times. Just thinking, are you going to stay with the Concordia? You seem stable enough, I'll give you your old slot in the Eight-balls if you want it." "Thank you, but no. It'd be kind of silly for one squadron to have a Colonel and a Captain in it, and I'm not exactly the Force's best Veritech pilot. I'm going to stay here for a while. Gryphon gave me the yards because he feels this insane urge to be in the Captain's seat, and I still have a company to run. Unlike your outfit, mine can't really be organized into little autonomous franchises, so VLI actually needs me." "So your starship days are over?" "Hell, no! Look at this." Rob got up and grabbed a folder, placing it on the table. "I haven't been here for one day and I get status reports of three new starship designs, including two of Ben's babies. Is he going to see them through? Noooooo. He says "Welcome to the shipyards, Rob," and lands them in my lap. And guess who's going to take the conn on the shakedown cruises." "You are, I take it? I guess you won't be staying home." "Exactly. The only difference with Ben and Zoner are that they're sure that all the bolts are tight on their ships. I get to figure out any SNAFUs that didn't get caught by the computer sims. And from what Cheryl tells me can sneak by on little bitty fighter craft, these designs are going to have problems that'll make Captain Gloval and the Incredible Flyaway Antigrav Pods read like a bedtime story!" It's the same old ReRob, thought Tricia. He'll be alright. After dinner, Tricia left to go home to her temporary stationside quarters. Rob cleaned up, read a few reports on the SDF-23 repair work, made a couple of mental notes about what he would have to do the next day, and went to bed. He took a pair of wires and placed them into the jackplugs in his left wrist. As the pink noise caressed his brain, he wondered if Tricia had someone special to go home to. He hoped that she did, but he had forgotten to ask her. Even as he lost consciousness, he knew that, asleep or awake, in spite of everything he had just told his old friend, the nights were going to be cold and lonely for a long time...