NAVY OPERATION AREA, CHARON (400 KM)

POV: Speinfoent, Malgeir Federation Navy (Rank: Beta Leader)

Kaja wasn’t at breakfast the next day either. Or the one after that. He doubled back to try to find her at her bunks, but it seemed like she had already gone to class. He thought they’d formed some kind of semblance of a connection talking about piloting, but she straight up seemed to be avoiding him now.

Speinfoent considered his options. None of his interactions with the Terrans so far had given him any cultural insight into what to do in a situation like this. Sure, the etiquette around post-mission briefings was direct and brutal, but that was intentional, and the blame wasn’t supposed to be placed individually. The Terrans seemed to treat many of their rule violations seriously, but what was he supposed to do? He couldn’t report Kaja! Besides, maybe she was telling the truth about being sick—

“Hello, Terra to Sphinx! You there?” Kurt called out from the backseat of the ST-6M.

He snapped back to reality. “Yes, sorry. What was the question again?”

“Do you see the mission targets?”

Speinfoent focused his vision on the sensor interface projected in his helmet, trying to decipher the symbols on the three-dimensional holograph. There were two green circles near his position, and four white squares far to his direct front. Each shape had a singular line attached to it, indicating their directions. “The white squares are the bad guys, right?” he asked.

“Excellent deduction, Beta Leader. These are indeed the enemy ships we were looking for. Vector us onto the leading bandit.”

“Should we perform a zero-intercept?”

“You tell me. Should we?” Kurt asked.

Speinfoent considered for a second. “No, no reason to slow down to give them more time to shoot back at us. I think a medium speed, ballistic course is fine?”

“Put in the course then.”

He entered the target burn into the flight computer, allowing it to automatically neutralize his current spin and input a moving intercept, while keeping his paws on the manual controllers just in case. Then, the engines cut out after a few seconds, their inertia leading them on a creeping trajectory towards the targets.

As they approached the enemy fighters, numbers began showing up below their indicators on the sensor board: two of them were labeled with the number 29 and then a few seconds later, the other two showed 27.

“What do the numbers mean?” he asked. “Is that the range to target?”

“No, but not a bad guess. Our sensors are identifying and displaying the types of enemy spacecraft: Raytech SF-29 and United SF-27, turn of the century cheap parasite fighters commonly found in private security fleets or in our case… pirates. Don’t let their age fool you. Most of these are heavily modified for acceleration, armament, or both.”

Though knowing it was a training scenario, Speinfoent felt a small degree of apprehension. “How should we best engage?”

“Up to you. They haven’t seen us yet…”

“But?” Speinfoent said, sensing the caveat coming.

“We’re stealthy enough with our size, but even unmodified, these pirate parasites have all-aspect radar warning receivers with no real blind spots. Our low probability of intercept radar may not be showing up on there yet, but the second you lock any of them up on the active fire control radar, they’ll redirect their visual sensors this way and find us instantly.”

“So what you’re saying is I have to lock and take them all out at the same time.”

“That would be logical. Luckily, you can do that with the fighter’s combat systems. If you keep the sensors on Track While Search, it’ll let you track all four of them without alerting them immediately. Then, when we get in range, you can launch missiles at them in quick succession.”

“Why wouldn’t I always use Track While Search?”

“The other mode is better for burning through electronic jamming and TWS loses sight against stealth ships more often. And you need to beam them with your fire control radar to accurately tell where they are before you release your weapons. You did the reading I gave you, right? Now, focus. Lock them up.”

Speinfoent tapped the panoramic screen in front of him, engaging the sensors to lock up all four of the pirates passively. Two vertical bars surrounded each of their hollow square symbols to indicate the lock on the sensor board, and four large squares showed up in his helmet display.

Kurt explained, “You can now see where they are in your helmet. But more importantly, look at the dynamic launch zone widget on the right side of the reticle.”

He focused on the helmet’s green bar on the right as instructed, topped by a number indicating 10,000 above and a number 50 to the left of it.

Kurt continued, “That bar tells you when to launch your munitions. At the top of the bar is the range scale, which is roughly how much distance the entire bar represents: in our case, ten thousand kilometers, and as you can see the triangular pointer right under that shows we’re about nine thousand away. On the left is the closure rate, fifty kilometers per second. Under that, the upper point marked in the bar is r-optimal: that’s the range at which the target physically should not be able to maneuver out of the attack envelope of our missile, including with their estimated energy state. And finally, under r-optimal, we have the r-min, the minimum range at which the seeker will arm, track, and detonate safely.”

Stolen novel; please report.

“So, I should wait until we reach the optimal engagement range and fire? Seems pretty similar to our ship command.”

“Precisely so. But I think you’ll find in some future scenarios where that will not always be the case.”

Speinfoent waited a minute as the triangle pointer inched towards the r-optimal marker. The simulated enemies appeared blissfully unaware of his presence bearing down on them.

Kurt added helpfully, “Remember, your launch button is on the index— no, excuse me, the second claw on your right paw. It’s a two-stage trigger. The first stage opens the internal weapons bay, and the second stage releases the weapon.”

A few seconds later, Speinfoent saw the bar reach the optimal launch range. He depressed the trigger four times in quick succession.

The only sounds Speinfoent heard were a few muffled noises as the weapons bay slid open and four Hummingbird missiles glided off their racks into space. The diamonds that represented them floated alongside his ship and he craned his head around to look at them ‘through’ the canopy with his helmet. A second later, he saw a bright flash as they lit off their powerful engines, speeding past the ship to home in on their targets.

The reactions from the pirates were swift and unmistakable. Bright flares and radar chaffs filled the space around them on the optical sensors and they each immediately took an inclined angle away from the missiles, attempting to evade in three dimensions.

“Fox Threes. Good launches,” Kurt said. “Now, burn us away from them, ninety degrees and keep tracking the bandits with our radars until the missiles are using their own.”

“Roger.” He entered the new trajectory into the flight computers, which slanted the ship away from the pirates: enough to start accelerating away from them while keeping them in the detection cone of the targeting radars in his ship’s nose. He noticed a new icon appear on his helmet under the launch widget, showing a Terran letter ‘A’ followed by a countdown timer.

A few seconds later, as the indicator reached zero, Kurt reported, “They’ve gone pitbull. The missiles are on their own now.”

In response and remembering the training manual, Speinfoent input a new trajectory, this time burning fully away from the targets as the missiles activated their own onboard sensors to track the enemies. He watched as his loose missiles follow the pirates in, their countermeasures proving ineffective at fooling its seekers.

Then, things happened quickly.

First, he heard the intermittent beep of his own radar warning receiver at one second intervals. Beep. One second. Beep. One second. Beep.

A couple beeps later, all four of the pirate ships exploded and disappeared off his sensor contact board, and the beeping stopped.

“Splash all bandits,” Kurt said.

Right as he was about to ask Kurt how he’d done, the radar warning beep came back, this time sounding much more urgent.

Beep, beep, beep, beep…

A singular red circle appeared back on his threat board, marked with the squiggly Terran letter ‘M’.

To add to his anxiety, Kurt half-yelled into his ear, “Vampire! Vampire! One missile! Six o’clock! They must have gotten one off!”

Taking a deep breath from his oxygen supply to calm himself, he remembered the training videos. First, the pre-programmed countermeasures. He activated them.

Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.

Flares and chaffs started dropping out the back of the spacecraft on short intervals.

There was an engine sputter as he took over manual control with his controllers. With his left paw, he commanded the engines to their maximum thrust and dumped all the extra energy in the ship batteries into the ship’s thrusters as it vectored away from the missiles. He counted to five seconds in his head, yawed and pitched at a forty-five-degree angle with his right paw, and repeated.

In the corner of his eye, he watched on the threat board as the incoming missile changed course twice, then thrice, to keep up with his anticipated trajectory. Then, right as it got into the inner circle of his threat indicator, it went ballistic, apparently having run out of fuel, and then exploded harmlessly into space a few hundred kilometers away from him.

“Vampire trashed,” Kurt confirmed. “Good, you remembered the training videos.”

Speinfoent turned around and grinned towards him in the back seat. “Not bad, eh?”

“Not the worst I’ve seen. The smarter thing to do would have been to let the flight computer plan out and execute the random evasive action, and you were trying to run with a full fuel tank,” Kurt said, “But nobody gets everything right on their first try. We can save all that for the debrief.”

Kurt operated the console in the back seat, and the scenario disappeared. Several sensor contacts appeared back on his sensor board, showing the Republic Navy ships around the nearby anchorage. “Now fly us back to Charon.”

His enthusiasm slightly dampened but not extinguished, Speinfoent programmed the flight computers to follow a trajectory back to the base.

There were a few minutes as he heard nothing but the hum of the ST-6’s inertial compensators, then Kurt piped up in the back seat, making small talk. “What’s on your plate after this?”

“Hm? Sorry?” Speinfoent asked, turning towards the back seat.

“What’s your next class today, like after lunch?”

He made a face at the Terran flight instructor. “Orbital dynamics. Three hours of it.”

Kurt grimaced sympathetically. “Ouch. I was never good at that stuff. Fun, though, when you figure it out.”

“Fun?”

“Yeah, it’s like playing chess, right? You know a computer can do it better and faster than you a hundred out of a hundred times, but it’s still a lot more fun when you get the solutions yourself.”

“That’s… one way to put it.”

“Yeah, this whole parasite piloting thing… you know it’s not the whole point, right? Even a sub-Terran intelligence chip can do these missions with their eyes closed, and they don’t mind as much when they get blown to bits by pirates. And what are parasite spacecraft controlled by an intelligence chip? Missiles. That’s why the Navy doesn’t really use these anymore.”

“Right. It’s just supposed to teach us concepts for larger ship command.”

“Yup. Still… it’s fun,” Kurt grinned. “And it keeps me in a job.”

Wrestling with his conscience for a minute, Speinfoent decided he should ask someone about what was on his mind. He turned around to look at the back seat. “Kurt, what is the punishment for rations smuggling in the Terran Navy?”

Kurt looked at him quizzically. “Rations smuggling? What’s that?”

He shrugged instinctively. “Smuggling. Of rations.”

“Stealing food? Like from the mess hall? Why would you want to do that? It’s a free buffet. You can take as much as you want; that’s not stealing, just being a glutton.”

“Oh.”

Kurt thought for a moment. “There’s regular smuggling on base, I guess.”

“Of what?”

“Your usual contraband. Alcohol. Fireworks. Combat drugs. Why?”

“Nothing, just wondering how seriously they take it.”

“Depends. Nobody cares if you pack in a bit of celebratory whiskey in a mouthwash bottle. That’s fine as long as you don’t over-indulge and get caught drunk-joyriding the surface recon vehicles by the MPs. The more dangerous and the illegal stuff: non-judicial punishment, demotions, stuff like that. Trying to steal weapons, or selling anything in bulk, would probably land you behind bars. Again, why?”

“No reason. Just wondering.”

Kurt looked at him sternly. “If you’re looking to bring home those energy drinks you guys love, the suppos will probably give you a box of them. But anything more serious, like weapons or tablets, they’ll find out. There are markers on all of them, and the scanners never miss them. They take that stuff seriously. It’s easier to disappear a spacer than a grenade at Charon.”

“Understood. Don’t worry, I won’t do anything stupid.”

I really hope my wingmate isn’t caught up in something like that either, Speinfoent thought to himself. I must find out.