:: 29/12/2000 ::
In the debriefing, there were some interesting brought up. First, Jacyn and Nolan got the highest kill amounts out of the squadron. Considering their bloodlust and need for action, few of us found this surprising. Nolan, now more than ever thought of as "Napalm", got three Fighters down, and two Corvettes. Jacyn got six Fighters and one Corvette. Since both of them got over five kills, they were considered aces by the Navy's standards. We were all promised that the Engineering team would paint on our kills on our fuselage, but Nolan leaned back in his chair and said, "Well, I don't know if they have enough paint to decorate my ship," and this got the laughter of everyone.
With my mere disabling of the Missile Corvette and Fighter, and killing another Fighter, I didn't consider my accomplishments as glamorous as they, but from what both Commanding Officers had told me, mine were far more useful. The commando platoon that was aboard the Troop Transport, the 82nd EVA Pulse Rifle Squadron, was able to disable the Missile Corvette and bring both the Fighter and the Corvette onto the Base to be repaired, and would be operational in about eighteen hours. The Corvette's crew was locked in our small brig for interrogation.
Alia, Jude, and the two Exodus vets had killed the other eleven Fighters and five Corvettes, but I'm not sure how many each. The 1R units were not present at the debriefing. They scored absolutely no kills, and only flew alongside their wingmen without firing a shot, not even in the debris field.
Currently, they were in the hangar being worked on by Tetral Soban, our head of Engineering on the ship. Frankly, none of us cared for them one way or another, and there was even a petition going around to get them disassembled and receive some good pilots instead. Commander Paktu's opinion was unshakable, however, and she had stated that they were of special importance to the squadron. In their databanks, they had complete records of 200 planets that have been explored since the Exodus, as well as histories and tactical knowledge of twelve races, and complete galactic scans the Mothership made during its travels. We maintained that they should be onboard as advisors; since their lack of freethinking meant that they contributed nothing to a combat situation, save for being extra targets.
When the briefing was over, I stormed into my room and began talking to my least favorite squadron member. "What the hell was wrong with you?" Jacyn stared at me with his vacant eyes. "What do you mean?" I opened my mouth in surprise. "What do you mean, 'What do you mean?' I'm talking about out there!" I pointed out our window into the stars. "I take enemies off your back, but you don't even think about helping me when I'm in trouble. Now what is that about?"
He grinned at me. "If you want the truth, it's that I consider the life of a Flight Officer tactically more important than that of a Cadet." This last word was heavily accented. I pounced on him. My fists began pounding his chest into pulp. "You bastard! How could you?" After getting over the shock of it, he landed a blow right in my jaw, which sent me toppling into the lockers. He charged and rammed me into them. Blood dripped out of my mouth. We were clawing at each other's throats when Jude and Nolan opened our door.
They looked at each other, and then ran over to us, Jude grabbing Jacyn and Nolan getting me. They yelled at us to stop it, but both of us were trying to squirm out and kill the other one. If they hadn't intervened, I know one of us would have been killed. Nolan yelled louder, "Stop it! STOP IT! He's not worth it!" When we agreed to calm down, they loosened their grips on us, but not enough for us to escape.
Jude, who always seemed like the pacifist of the group, yelled, "Now I don't know what you dumbasses were arguing about, but it isn't important now. We've been called to the briefing room, and if you wash yourselves up, Captain Naabal just might not have you two kicked out!" We did calm down; I felt all my muscles lose their tension. They let us go. Jude was right; we were a mess. We had bled from scratch marks on our arms and neck, blood was still in my mouth from being rammed into the lockers. He continued, "You don't have to like each other, but you don't have to kill each other either. Now get ready and be in the briefing room ASAP. Jake, you in particular will want to be there."
When the Commander first spoke, I stopped wondering what Jude meant by that. She looked at me. "First of all, I would like you to congratulate Jake Sjet on his promotion to the rank of Lieutenant, effective immediately." My squadron mates looked at me with amazement and gave me a vigorous applaud, even that no-good Jacyn was giving me a small clapping. The Commander proceeded to step down and walk over to me, removing my mere Cadet's single button from my blue flight suit's collar, and replacing it with two silver stripes, showing off my new rank. She whispered in my ear, "Congratulations, Lieutenant." She smiled, and walked back up to her stage.
"My next issue is closely related to this first topic. Lieutenant Sjet has been promoted due to his disabling of two Turanic vessels that are now being serviced for immediate use in our missions, which an Interceptor would not be the best ship. But the more important use of them has already been implemented. While we got no information from the Corvettes crew, who are now under constant guard in the brig, we were able to decrypt the databanks of their ships. We found some interesting information, that which may be the most important since our arrival at Hiigara."
She pressed some buttons, and a rotating picture of the Taiidan symbol appeared over the podium. It faded out, replaced by a very unusual looking craft. It looked very much like a Turanic Ion Array frigates, only with the outer hull stripped off and greatly increased size. "The battle we just fought was purely accidental. Those ships were part of an advance crew for a large convoy of Turanic vessels. How they got this far into space without a Carrier I'm unsure, but the point is that their convoy is responsible for the construction of this vessel." She pointed at this fearsome device.
"As you know, since we killed the Taiidan Emperor the Empire has split into to factions: The Taiidan Republic, with whom we have a shaky alliance with, and the Taiidan Imperial Loyalists, who remain violent enemies of us, despite their small size. These Turanic were helping the Imperial Loyalists to construct this vessel, which is called in their databases as an Ion Accelerator. The schematics of it show that it is about twice the length of a Heavy Cruiser, but only has a crew of fifty men. It is based on obscure principles that allow it to absorb Ion Cannon discharges and Plasma Bomb energy, amplify it with the solar arrays that you can see here, a clearly Turanic design, and fire it back at its enemies. With enough force, this weapon could destroy a Heavy Cruiser in a single shot."
She clicked some controls on her datapad, and the display from the holoplate changed. Now it showed a long line of some kind of Turanic fleet. When the image zoomed in on one of them, the convoy ships looked a lot like the ships used to ferry our people to Kharak millennia ago, but they had the trademark Turanic "patchwork" metal hulls and a few light cannons attached to it.
The image zoomed out even more, and showed a small portion of the galactic map highlighted with a green route running through it. It ended in a small green circle, which was zoomed into to show a simulated construction of the Ion Accelerator. It was located in a small asteroid belt, which fleets of Resource Collectors were harvesting to help the construction of the weapon. The hologram zoomed out back to the Galactic Map (which had Hiigara's position relative to the construction site highlighted by the Kushan symbol. Our location was also highlighted. Two more green lines were branching out from the construction site, and all three were superimposed. "As you can see," she continued, "there are three convoys heading to that area. Now if we can destroy all of them, they won't have enough supplies to continue the project."
She looked directly at us. "If this weapon is built, then we are doomed. From simulations we've done based on the specifications given to us by the Turanic ships, only kinetic weapons like bullets, mines, and missiles will harm it, which narrows our possible attack force to Fighters and Corvettes, and lots of them will be needed to destroy it. To exploit this limitation, you can bet that Turanic Missile Corvettes and Missile Destroyers will be defending this thing, which will get a lot of pilots killed.
"We haven't given this information to Fleet Intel yet, and if we do it might scare the Imperialists and the Turanic to accelerate the project. Because of this, we will have to do this ourselves. We will be hypering in on one of the convoys, the one closest to our position. Once we do that, we'll use all our ships, including auxiliary ones like the Black Runner ("Yes!" whispered Napalm,) to destroy it. We will leave once our engines are charged, and get them when they exit hyperspace in the Dunari Nebula. Good luck to us all, and may we have Hiigara's strength."
As we were walking out, I followed Nolan to the hangar. Since our ships were docked outside the ship, the chamber we entered wasn't really a hangar, but it contained all the equipment, spare parts, and crew needed to repair a vessel. We met the head of Engineering that Nolan told me about, Tetral Soban. As one may picture, he was a short, pot-bellied, greasy man. He wore a white shirt that had large oil marks on it which seemed to show off his largesse. He was working on one of the robots with a screwdriver and he looked up at us, as we got close. He closed the hatch on the robot's back and positioned it upright. He said, "You're right on time. I just made the finishing touches on this here fella. Check it out."
He pressed some buttons on a datapad he had aimed at the robot, and it hummed to life. From its red jaw, I recognized it as 1R-D. It got up, addressed us as "Hello Lieutenant, hello Colonel." While it snapped a salute to us, I found myself wondering, How does this robot know I'm a Lieutenant? I've only just been promoted. It then turned away from us and began helping one of the engineers with welding a sheet of metal, probably a section of the secondary hull, turned back to us, said, "I must leave now. Sergeant Gaalsien with his soldier's simulator training. Good day, gentlemen."
Nolan and I stared at it leaving the hangar. We turned to Soban, and he explained, "Every person's everyday chores are set up on the ship's network, which the robots are now patched in to. They analyse the different jobs at hand, and when they are done with theirs they go to offer assistance with the job that is the least complete." I asked, "But we don't want these robots to be maids, we want them to fight." Soban laughed a guttural laugh and slapped me on the back with a greasy hand. I smiled back and made no attempt to wash the disgusting feeling off, as that might have been considered rude. "They are also patched into our military telemetry. The Angel Base's central computer designates all ships in its range with a threat factor, depending on what it's ship class is, how many ships it has destroyed, and what it is targeting. The 1R units will then attack the most threatening ships, but with the proper amount of caution, of course."
He continued, "Oh, by the way, Lieutenant, good job on bagging those ships. We're having a lot of fun figuring out how they work." He looked around, then whispered, "You wanna see them?" We both nodded vigorously. He beamed and said, "Follow me."
He walked us to the docking bays for the Corvettes. Unlike fighters, which locked on their entire hull to a Support Frigate or Troop Transport to dock, there are retractable tubes on the underbelly (six of them for our vessel) that attached over the cockpits of Corvettes, through where a pilot could safely enter them. We did so, and we marvelled at the insides of the Corvette.
First, we saw pictures (maybe of the pilot or political figures) posted on the dark, camouflage walls. The Turanic were large, reddish-brown, beetle-like creatures. No, they were more like crickets, but with a shell. They were all about five feet in height at adult age. There was a double bunk bed (or should I say bunk cots,) at the back, and at the front were two metal swivelling seats, for a pilot and co-pilot. The whole thing was about ten square meters of space. Bits of the hull were taken off for analysis, and the control panel in the cockpit seemed hastily screwed on; the engineers were obviously wondering how their electrical systems worked. The whole place was dirty. There were no bathrooms or showers, and the place seemed to be strewn with assorted papers and foodstuffs, either because of their lack of aesthetics or because of the battle that was fought.
The whole thing seemed like one could live in here for several days without docking, though one probably wouldn't want to. We wanted to see more, but when we looked out the canopy windows there was already the blue box of hyperspace closing us out of space. Tetral looked at us and said, "You guys should probably get some rest. From what I've heard of your mission, you'll need it."
