“We are cleared for departure.” Veriss said from her command chair, her voice distorted slightly by the helmet of the hefty null-suit she now wore. “Mister Avel, please take us out.”
“Aye commander.” Maxin replied, his voice similarly altered by a suit of his own. He especially sounded strange through his helmet, Cai thought. Probably because he was doing his best to suppress his accent.
“Engines are hot, thrusters are vectored.” The exo said, running his checklist for what had to be the fourth time in two minutes. With a nod of satisfaction, Maxin pressed a button on his console and sounded the general alert.
“Attention, all hands. Prepare for Catapult launch followed by hard burn in one minute from mark.” He said through the intercom, then paused a second, maximizing the dramatic effect before saying: “Mark.”
Cai could just imagine his friend’s shit-eating grin under his helmet. For a short moment he took some kind of anxious offense from that. This was a serious moment, after all. Perhaps the most important one in their lives. Not a time for their propulsion officer to be overly enjoying himself.
Cai’s protest was torn out at the root when he felt an ache in his jaw and realized that he, too, was grinning from ear to ear.
The sixty seconds appeared on the screen of Cai’s command center and began ticking down, though every single one of them felt more like an hour. Around him, his fellow crewmates were conducting all manner of pre-flight tests and system diagnostics, just in case something unexpected would pop up before the point of no return. So far all the system conclusions glowed with a reassuring blue.
As the ship’s officer of offense, Cai had a disappointingly low workload during launches. One could argue that his very presence on the bridge was unnecessary, but hat didn’t mean he was going to be absent for his crew’s first real launch. Besides, he needed something to keep himself busy. Something to keep his thoughts away from his little brother, who had so mysteriously vanished on his way home.
He pressed a few buttons on his screen and pulled up the diagnostics menu for the ship’s armaments. He couldn’t run a full evaluation while they were still stuck in the launching clamps, but that wasn’t the point. He just needed something on his hands. To not be the only one doing absolutely nothing.
The control server for the weapons had to be booted first, costing Cai a few more seconds than he’d liked. Then, the diagnostics ran through as many weapon components as it could access in launch mode.
One by one, the results were displayed on his lenses. The Magna-cannons -all six of them- reported back as fully operational. Their rapid-response targeting systems were in tiptop-order, too. Cai only saw one slightly concerning lag spike in one of gun four’s muzzle coils. The delay was within tolerance, if barely, but Cai would check on it after the launch anyway.
With the server now running warm, the process sped up, and the remaining weapon checks came pouring in: The bolt launchers showed no faults, nor did the point defense luxes. To test their moving parts while the weapons in question were still tucked away in the ship’s skin was where the limitations of a pre-launch check came into play, though. Once they were clear of the RAL-port, he would run a full test on those as well.
For now, Cai was satisfied. He closed the diagnostic screen with ten seconds to spare and switched to situational overview mode.
His helmet lenses connected to the ship’s external cameras and let him peer through the thick bulkheads and armor panels as if they weren’t there, giving the impression that the ship had turned completely transparent around him. The tight confines of the ship’s bridge vanished, instead granting vision of the looming curve of the RAL-port and the mechanical arm that was currently the only thing keeping them from dropping into the swirling clouds of yellow and brown which covered Sindrion Tertus, hardly three-hundred kilometers below
SDA UKY-7618. That was their ship’s official name. Unofficially, Cai and his team called her the Striker Nebula.
She was a Vigilance-class, a frigate designed for the express purpose of system defense. As such, the Nebula and ships of her lineage were meant to be well-rounded and versatile, focusing on performance in formations rather than individual capabilities.
Ships of the Vigilance-class measured nearly 90 meters in length and about 25 meters in beam, making them smaller than some gun turrets on the humongous Stalwart-class battleships they would often be assigned to escort
The Vigilance-class had a distinctive silhouette, her superstructure consisting of a central orb connecting the ship’s fore and aft. These were both conical in shape and tapered down to the vessel’s tips, giving the Nebula symmetry over all three axes. Her engines, too, were mirrored on both the front and backside. With their robust swivel joints, the engines could rotate to nearly any vector, giving the Vigilance-class unparalleled maneuverability. This also meant that the Nebula didn’t truly have a defined bow or stern. With equal engine power on both ends, she had no need to perform flip-and-burn maneuvers like most other ship designs. Instead, she could simply light up her other end and change thrust direction at any moment, though that did mean the crew could be in for a rough ride if caught unprepared.
Being launched from a RAL-port’s magnetic catapult wasn’t supposed to be quite as turbulent an experience, but Cai had been told the difference in g-forces was marginal at best. As a low-altitude space elevator, the port had to be constantly supported so as not to fall from the skies. Ships departing from the port would therefore not be in a stable orbit, and could only rely on their powerful main engines to break free of the gravity well. The challenge here was that these engines could melt through the port or the rings keeping it aloft if they were ignited anywhere near them, which is where the magnetic catapults came in.
By hurling the smaller vessels far enough away from the port’s rings that they could safely ignite their main engines, the RAL-port could deploy her entire fleet capacity of three-hundred ships in a little under two hours.
The seconds to the Nebula’s launch reached single digits, and Cai felt his stomach turn in anticipation. A deep, rumbling whine could be heard, reverberating through the vessel as the catapult clamps charged up. The sound stopped exactly as the timer reached zero, and for one excruciating moment, nothing happened.
Cai had just enough time to wonder if something had gone wrong, then his world became one of force and compression as Striker Nebula was launched out into Sindrion’s thermosphere at nearly fifteen times standard gravity, angled at a ballistic course away from the RAL-port and her rings.
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Fighting back the initial shock of now weighing more than a ton, armor excluded, Cai hastily adjusted his breathing. He sucked in tiny, shallow puffs of breath, keeping as much pressure in his lungs as possible.
The variable gels in his armor wrapped around him, cushioning his body as much as they could while his organs contracted reflexively, sacrificing some of their effective functioning to better handle the crushing force pushing down on them.
Cai was painfully aware of the beating of his heart as it struggled to circulate his blood. He focused just as he had been taught in his training, groaning as he flexed his anchor fibers. With a sharp flash of pain, the thousands of tiny muscles spread through his body pulled his capillaries wide open, easing the load on his life pump ever so slightly.
The oppressive force vanished as quickly as it had appeared and Cai found himself sucking in a deep breath of relief. For a few more moments, the vertical momentum of the launch was all that carried them upwards, granting Cai what was likely to be his last experience of normal gravity for a while.
By all accounts, the velocity at which the RAL-port had launched them was nowhere near sufficient to sustain a stable orbit. Cai knew that before long, the gravity of Tertus would drain all the kinetic energy they used to ascend, after which they would plummet down towards the planet. The enormous gyroscopes contained within the Nebula’s central screamed their high-pitched song as they spun to life, the tone increasing until it slid into the background of the ship’s ambience.
Maxin took reign of the Nebula and used the gyroscopes to line her engines up with the planet’s perpendicular, monitoring the horizontal distance between the ship and the space elevator they had just launched from.
Nearly a minute and a half after the catapult launch, the Nebula reached the apex of her arcing trajectory and gravity fell away for a brief moment before Maxin had the engines spit out bright plumes of ionized xenon and electrons. The ship’s linear acceleration kicked them all back in their seats as the Nebula finally gained altitude on her own power.
“We are ready to achieve an orbit, Commander.” Maxin said, his enthusiasm strong enough for his accent to shine through the formal front he had put up.
“Take us to escape velocity. Our exit is located in sector 25-B.” Veriss replied. If she was stoked at all about the team’s first mission, she showed none of it. “By the book please, mister Avel. The void is busy today” She continued, pulling up the current ship traffic logs around Tertus.
Cai blinked a few times, then looked around. He was still in situational overview mode, and thus capable of seeing what existed beyond the vessel’s hull with what seemed to be his own eyes. Normally, the distances between objects in the void was so great that other ships would be mere specks, only visible because of their drive plumes, and even then hard to differentiate from stars. The augmented reality of his helmet let him zoom in as far as the ship’s external scopes could, and also displayed any other relevant information from the ship’s myriad of sensor equipment.
Where normally Cai would see next to nothing, now he saw hundreds –if not thousands– of Runoran vessels, each highlighted by his visor and their vectors displayed.
From any considerable distance away, the combined transponder signums of the many satellites, defensive platforms, and ships -both civilian and military- seemed to cover the planet in an impenetrable cloud of blue.
His display shifted and zoomed in to fit their current position, the scales adjusting automatically until only the individual orbits of the nearest objects were visible. The intricate, 3d mesh of criss-crossing ship vectors, constant orbits and restricted areas formed a navigational challenge the likes of which even some experienced commanders were anxious to undertake.
Cai, on the other hand, felt nothing approaching doubt. Be it the blatant overconfidence of his youth or his unwavering trust in Maxin’s skills, he was certain the Nebula would make it through her maiden voyage unscathed.
A wave of vertigo washed over Caj as Maxin angled the ship towards their desired orbit, though he quickly bit his bile back down. With a sudden rush of movement, the previously stationary Nebula started to move over the chart overlay, gaining a steadily growing orbital vector of her own.
Active sensory equipment beamed bundles of full-spectrum radio waves ahead and formed EMAS targets from the return echoes, then the ship’s rudimentary intelligence suggested alternate flight paths based on the inert debris on their projected course. Maxin, Pian and Veriss constantly exchanged their observations and thoughts, discussing alternate routes and thinking ahead of the traffic situation. With the speeds at which voidships crossed low orbit, having a mere hundred kilometers between you and the nearest object suddenly felt very claustrophobic, and warning claxons started to blare whenever anything came within five hundred klicks of the Striker Nebula.
“That troop transport is going to give way to the incoming mining swarm at 347 to 22.” Harlan noted, then highlighted the expected interaction between two vectors the navigational team had not yet addressed on the chart. “We’ve got to give them more space.”
“Good catch.” Maxin said, but Cai shook his head no. “There’s an outgoing cargo-hauler right behind us.” He broke in. “It’s scheduled to breach in three minutes. Particle backwash could render us blind if we don’t clear it in time.”
“Also true, I was keeping an eye on that.” Maxin relented with a sigh. "Cai is right, we can’t slow down. We’re boxed in. Should we hail orbital control?”
“Not on our first launch.” Veriss said resolutely. Cai could hear the gears of her head turn as she considered the situation, even through the intraship comms, though she reached a conclusion in mere seconds.
“We go to a lower orbit.” She said, nodding to herself. “Bring us down 300 clicks, mister Avel. That should be enough vertical clearance.”
“Gonna be slicing atmo for a while, then.” Harlan warned. “We’ve already broken VE, the Nebula isn’t built like an Aero, we’ll be turning this tub into a sauna.”
“We’ll be spending enough time on the float to radiate all that heat away. I’m giving the order.” Veriss replied, then waved her hand to signal the conversation was over.
“Aye commander, taking us down.” Maxin said before running his fingers over his console. Not a moment later, the Nebula’s engines angled up and shot four plumes of high-energetic plasma away from the planet, pushing the ship down as a result. Cai watched as the time to closest approach with the troop transport they had been monitoring decreased, then slowly broke even, and finally started to increase as their vectors grew further apart. It took the ship’s computers a moment to calculate the new situation, but it ultimately concluded the other ship no longer formed a collision danger. They were clear.
“Recommend changing course to starboard, fifteen degrees.” Pian said, running the numbers behind their new course change. “We’re back to RAL-altitudes. Don’t want to hit the ring towers.”
“I see it.” Maxin said and veered away from the trio of military space elevators, identical to the one they had just departed from, which loomed in front of them. The Nebula dipped deep enough into Tertus’ cloud cover for the flames of friction to engulf them, and an alert light flickered on as external temperature started to rise, just as Harlan had predicted.
As soon as all complications were well and truly behind them, Maxin angled the ship back up to regain a higher orbit. From one moment to another, the flames dissipated, signaling that the atmosphere was once again thin enough to be considered part of the void.
As chaotic as their launch had been, the crew of the Striker Nebula had not gone into the transit unprepared, and the primary exit window they had selected was still available to them. The Nebula found her gap, guided by Maxin’s hand, and left Sindrion Tertus behind. Cai was planetbound no longer.