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KS Desiccator; Hangar Alpha
En route to Grajeda System, Avalon Sector; ETA: 04:12
The Nitir System, Clarke Quadrant, Gemini Sector
MAY 05 2793/2793.125; 2347 Hours (CST)
Vell Ricaud climbed the ladder and vaulted himself into the cockpit of his heavily customized Danrik-class heavy fighter. Closing the canopy as he secured himself in, he began prepping the engines for ignition and the bussard ramscoops for opening.
"You sure it’s wise going out there in a one-man fighter, Vell?" David Hassan’s voice came over the vidcomm system. His flagship-of-the-day, the Salvia-class destroyer CS Lilliana, was not visible through the end of the Desiccator’s hangar but should have been directly to port.
They’d spent the last few hours jumping system to system, sector to sector. So what if he wanted to go on a little joyride in his personal fighter? "I can be a lot more helpful if I’m out there fighting those bastards one on one," Vell replied. It made sense enough. "I want to be ready to kick some ass right beside my fleet when we jump and the shit hits the fan. Besides, what good am I just sitting around on the bridge of my flagship?"
"Point taken. Just watch yourself, I don’t want to give my people an extra liability out there."
"Christ, gimme me a little credit over here, David." With that, Vell hit the afterburners, slamming himself back in his seat as his Danrik fighter went zero to eight hundred and eighty KPS in a heartbeat once clear of the hangar. Blazing through the transparent magnetic shields in the hull that separated the vacuum of space from the oxygen-laden artificial gravity environment of the Kindred flagship, the fighter shot out. Pulling the ship onto a vector parallel to the Desiccator, he set the comm to the Kindred fleet’s private, encoded frequency. "Everybody check in," he spoke. "I want a head count, people."
One by one the men and women pilots of the Kindred’s fighter task force reported in. In the end, he verified he had all seventy-five of his fighters with him, forty of which being Blade-class heavy fighters and the remaining thirty five being the Vendetta-class light fighters. All the pilots had proved their worth in the field, completing the countless gun-for-hire mercenary missions issued to the Kindred over the past few years. Those who died were immediately replaced by other up-and-coming pilots. It was a dirty business, not even an entirely legal one yet, but it was his.
After today, Vell did not want to think about how many of them would be returning to the Tri-System. That mysterious fleet out there had already broken through the Confederation’s front lines—annihilated an entire Confed fleet.
"Nervous yet, Vell?" David came back over the comm’s default channel.
"Why shouldn’t I be?"
"Aw, don’t worry about it, Vell. This is a done deal—Confed’s got everything they have out there right now. Hell, we’d be lucky to even find any remainder of this so-called alien fleet to shoot at out there by the time we arrive. At any rate, I’ve got as much of the CIS militia fleet I could spare behind us for backup."
"I just wish I knew what to expect," Vell said. It was certainly the truth.
"Well, we’re going to find out in about ten jumps. Hope that bucket of yours has got plenty of missiles."
"Locked and loaded, David. You...?"
"You think the CIS call these crates Destroyers for nothing? Hell yeah I do."
"Heya, handsome," a new voice intruded over the comm, overlapping the end of Hassan’s transmission.
"Fancy meeting you out here," he spoke. Checking his Celestial 3D HUD and pulling up a target information screen, he verified it. The Tiger Shark-class cruiser Fatale.
Melissa Banks chuckled over his headset. "I couldn’t let you go out here all alone, now could I? Getting blasted all by yourself... that wouldn’t do at all."
"Hey, I’m pretty handy with a flightstick, you know."
A mischievous chuckle could be heard. "Oh, believe me, I do."
Vell was about to say something in protest but stopped himself. The fleet, Jump Drive-linked on a preset course to the Avalon Sector, was preparing to make its next jump.
Since the invention of self-sufficient artificial jump points for in-system jumps a few decades ago, travel time had been cut down to a fraction of what it had been in the past century. Within a given system, a network of artificial jump points provided for quick and easy travel around the system or to the natural jump nodes (the garden-variety Antigraviton Tropic Anomalies) that took a traveler to an adjacent system. Only recently had man-made "jump gates" been invented, which allowed the Confederation Exploratory Services to manufacture their own jump nodes from one gate in a predestined system to another gate in another system—the only real caveat being that the system jumped to had to be nearby.
Vell swallowed involuntarily. A half-hour, maybe less, and they’d be at their destination. He’d never admit it, but he was getting edgy and nervous. Damned nervous...
All of a sudden, the reduction in travel time suddenly didn’t seem like all that great of an achievement.
Sol-Central Space Station; Office
of Fleet Admiral Braddock
In orbit over planet Earth
The Sol System, Terra Quadrant, Sol Sector
2358 Hours (CST)
Christopher Blair entered the private office of Fleet Admiral J. Rainford Braddock. Walking down the steps to the bottom level, he approached the man’s desk, finding the admiral seated with the back of his chair facing him. Blair paused for a moment, taking the opportunity to glance about him.
He had come aboard Sol Station, without doubt the chief superstructure orbiting Earth, and found it to be immensely different from any Confed space station or superbase he had ever seen. Nearly the size of Luna, it seemed a like naval base with shipyard facilities and a cityscape of its own, more or less like Orion Starbase or the Confed HQ Jupiter-1 Starbase... with a human touch. He remembered the last time he’d visited Orion, back in the year 2673 when he’d gotten his first peek at the in-construction TCS Vesuvius just before having his little chat with Tolwyn. Like the Orion, there were plenty of carriers around—make no mistake about that—carriers, supercarriers, megacarriers, cruisers, dreadnoughts, corvettes, destroyers, frigates, and goliath-sized ships in drydock he couldn’t even begin to recognize from his era.
But he couldn’t dwell on the past anymore. In the twisted name of eugenics and the Black Lance, Tolwyn’s Gen-Select nanobots had cost him over a century—clinging to memories of what once was and could never be again as time moved ever onward would change nothing. Humanity was being slaughtered out there like cattle, a conflagration of death sweeping over it from the Spinward Unknown Territory of deep space. They needed him.
It was time for the Heart of the Tiger to return... whatever that meant.
Blair straightened his blue Confederation uniform and corrected his stance. He’d taken the uniform out of mothballs from the locker he’d been shown just before he left Bishop Station, wanting to make a good impression on the brass. He was pretty sure that Confed had changed the look of their uniforms by now, but dressing up in his civvies didn’t seem a better alternative.
"Commodore Blair! It’s commodore, right?" Admiral Braddock cheerily exclaimed as he whirled around in his chair. He was an older man with graying hair and a face just beginning to wrinkle. The man looked to Blair more than a little like Daniel Wilford, one the Border Worlds Union’s chief advisors that directed Blair and the others aboard the BWS Intrepid during the Black Lance conflict, then became the commanding officer of the TCS Midway, a megacarrier of Blair’s own design. He was right about the uniforms, Blair noticed. The new Confed uniforms seemed to be several shades darker blue, streamlined with black rather than Blair’s white. The black streamlines highlighted the thick shoulder pads they seemed to have underneath and ran down the right side of the shirt to disappear beneath the belt. He couldn’t see the trousers of Braddock’s uniform, but he suspected they were similar to the top, probably with more black pinstripes running down the sides of the legs to the boots.
"A pleasure to meet you, Admiral," Blair spoke, simultaneously saluting. The admiral returned the salute, but seemed anxious to dispense with the formalities of duty.
"The pleasure’s mine, Commodore! Damn, son, I used to read about you in grade school! ‘Heart of the Tiger,’ wasn’t that what the Kilrathi called you?"
Grade school, huh? It had been said Blair was a living legend back in his day and age. Now, in this distant future he found himself in, it was taking on a whole new meaning. "Yessir."
"How about that... the man who single-handedly destroyed Kilrah!"
"I wouldn’t say single-handedly, sir. A lot of good pilots died during that mission." Not to mention the countless others who’d given their lives to allow the Kilrah mission to even go forward, he made the mental note. He knew. He was there.
"Oh, I apologize," Braddock quickly spoke. "It’s just a little awkward—you know—one of the Confederation’s greatest heroes standing right... well..."
"It’s okay, Admiral. I think I’m the one who should be feeling awkward."
Braddock nodded understandingly. He arched an eyebrow suddenly. "You know, Commodore, I can’t help but remember hearing you were dead. Some unreliable documents from the Archives seem to, ah, substantiate this, but then documents from TCIS totally negate it... I don’t recall the specifics offhand, but if I’m not mistaken, history recorded you died well over a century ago. After that goddamned Galactic Civil War II sixty years ago, after the purged databases and corrupted archives that resulted from all those saboteurs’ work, Confed records are anything but reliable."
"Sure sounds like it, Admiral."
"For the most part, history was rewritten from memory and whatever data was kept on-hand. Truth is, the history we see in archives today is only what the powers-that-be want us to see. All the same, I think I remember a little from someone. Something... something about a Confed pilot... a Gemini privateer... damn, I can’t remember." Or did he? The different expressions playing out on the Admiral’s face seemed not unlike those of a bad actor’s, but Blair didn’t think it necessary to suggest such. "I just think I read that you died—and were not cryogenically frozen. Things are so screwy now I can’t even reliably look into it if I wanted to." Braddock threw his arms up futilely. "Ah, hell. Don’t mind me."
Blair shrugged. "Well, I might as well have been dead, but I think I’d remember if I was killed. I don’t."
Braddock sighed, letting the matter pass. "I’ll tell you, though, galactic matters haven’t been nearly as exciting as they were in your time, Commodore. After you reduced the Kilrathi to a bunch of feuding clans and helped put a lid on all those damned Nephilim invasions following your tour of duty on the BWS Intrepid, things have been pretty mellow. Since the second Civil War, all we’ve really had to deal with is just the usual assortment of pirates and such, maybe the Scatterbelt Wars if you want to count them—still, nothing they’ll ever write a page into our politically-corrected history over."
"Until now," Blair added.
"Yes..." Braddock’s face went stiff, "... until now. There’s a force out there in the Spinward Rim. It’s taken out the Twenty-Second Fleet and right now we’re fearing the worst for further offensives from whatever’s out there. If they can rout an entire fleet we can’t afford to leave anything to chance. The next line of defense against the incursion from the Spinward Unknown Territory will be the entire Confederation armada, massed along the border and ready for anything they send our way. Confed HQ’s calling in defense forces from unaffiliated systems as well. The Plooriad Reaches, the Firekkan Commonwealth..."
The Firekkan Commonwealth... why did that name sound so important to Blair? He shrugged it off.
"... The Tri-System CIS and other neutral militia, the Free Republic of Landreich, the Andorran New Republic, the Union of Border Worlds, the Varni/Mantu Combine—we’re calling in favors from everybody. Hell, chances are, if the Kilrathi start taking a beating they’ll join the fight, too."
"If I may, sir," Blair began his request, "I’d like to request immediate transfer out of the Space Navy and reinstatement in the Space Force." It was as good a moment as any.
"Granted!" Braddock said expectant of the request, with heartfelt enthusiasm. He began typing on his touchpad console at once, making a poor showing of playing down that he had evidently known that was what Blair had wanted all along. "With your transfer to the Space Force, your new rank will be ‘brigadier general.’ How do you feel about becoming a CAG?"
"Er, a commander air group?" Being in command of an entire air group’s fighter wings? It had been difficult enough being the wing commander of a single fighter wing of squadrons on the Victory, let alone multiple. Still, if the Admiral placed such faith in Blair, he felt a certain obligation to oblige. It was for his own good. "Sounds good to me, but I thought a CAG was a Navy position."
"You’re right, but I think in this case not for you... you want to have your cake and eat it, too, yes?" Braddock smiled.
"Sir...?"
"You want to lend your pilots your experience, and get your turn in the cockpit as well, yes? You’ll make an excellent CAG, but you can’t lead by example unless you're back in the Space Force and in the cockpit to some degree."
Blair couldn’t argue with that. "I agree."
"And so does ConFleet High Command, glad to hear it. I... I think I’ll assign you to a Dentares-class fleet carrier I think is... just right for you." The older man gave a chuckle. "Uniquely so."
"Oh?"
Shuttle Barbados-Five
Arrival
The Komarov System, Gegarin Quadrant, Hawking Sector
MAY 06 2793/2793.126; 0158 Hours (CST)
The now-Brigadier General (O-7) Blair ’s shuttle was just a few klicks behind the megacarrier. The colossal ship had been ordered less than an hour ago to delay their trip to the Spinward Rim and await boarding.
The shuttle slowed, hitting the retros as it took up a trajectory on the five kilometer-long megacarrier’s port side that would take it into a docking bay that was clearly only one of at least several dozen. Easing in, it passed through the electromagnetic shields to touch smoothly down before a crowd of assembled crewmen, each awaiting their chance to catch a glimpse of the living legend himself.
Blair gave the pilot a pat on the shoulder,—another ecstatic admirer of him—thanked him, then made his way down the exit ramp, straightening his new uniform as he went.
The commanding officer of the vessel,—a woman, to Blair’s intrigue—one Captain Julianna Diena Kincaid, met him on his way down. She extended a slender hand to him after exchanging the customary salute. "Welcome aboard the TCS Blair, General," she spoke, bearing a knowing, bemused grin.
Blair took her hand, a look of suspicion on his face. "The Blair?" he practically gasped. He didn’t know whether he was embarrassed or proud. It certainly explained why no one had told him the name of the Dentares megacarrier he was being assigned.
"I think I can speak on the entire crew’s behalf when I say it’s an unexpected and true honor to finally meet our carrier’s namesake."
Hooo boy, Blair thought to himself, suddenly feeling more than a little bit time-sick.