20 October, 2582
“I mean, ultimately I guess we all just have a job to do, you know? You do your best and hope--”
“Sorry,” I interrupted the young blonde woman sitting across from me as I stood.
“Commander Swann, do you have time for an interview?” I yelled out the briefing room door. “Lieutenant Jameson and I are almost done.”
The man had just walked by and I wasn’t about to miss an opportunity to schedule him. Maybe with his co-pilot here he’d me more amiable to it. I didn’t hear his footsteps and wasn’t sure how far he’d made it down the hall, but he reappeared a few moments later and leaned on the edge of the doorframe.
“How many times did you have to ask her?” he asked with a nod towards Matrix.
“Just the once.”
“I’m disappointed, Matrix,” he said with a grin. His co-pilot spun in the chair to face him.
“I saw how persistent she was with you and that you were being your usual grumpy self,” Lieutenant Junior Grade Jameson replied. “Figured I’d give her a win.”
Commander Swann gave a single laugh and disappeared down the hall before I could ask again.
“Do you have to interview him?” Matrix asked, spinning back around.
I plopped back down in my chair with a sigh. “No, not technically. But it’d be best if I could. From purely a public affairs perspective, his experience makes his input valuable. Plus my boss knows him, so I’d feel bad if I went back empty-handed.”
“Well shit, try that then.” Matrix waved her hand dismissively.
“Try what?”
“Cara, in the flying community names and relationships are everything. Just drop your bosses name, say it’s a favor or something.”
I pursed my lips. “That seems...cheap.”
“Maybe. Depends on how bad you want it I guess.” Matrix leaned back in her chair and kicked her feet up on another. I mulled the advice over in my mind. In my fleet course to be a Public Affairs Officer we were taught that name-dropping would get you filtered answers. The interviewee would inevitably want to maintain a certain perception to whoever the connection was with. I didn’t really know the nature of Captain Meyer’s relationship with Commander Swann though, so maybe it wouldn’t alter Swann’s answers. He certainly didn’t seem the type to care about much and it was the best option I had short of hoping he slipped and ended up confined to a medical bed.
“What’s the next question?” Matrix’s voice pulled me from my dreams of the salty commander tripping down a flight of stairs.
“Oh, sorry.” I glanced back down at my tablet. “What do you think of your role in this war?”
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Traveling to the UNN Spitfire had been a two-week trip, but it had given me plenty of time for some spin-up reading on my assignment. I learned that the SRTS-5 “Chimera” was a bit of a hot topic for more than just its role in the current state of affairs. While the modified transport shuttle was catching a lot of flak in the public purview for becoming a go-to close air support asset, old discussions were also resurfacing about when the UNN had actively sought to discontinue the program more than a decade ago. Experts argued that the new starfighters provided both terrestrial and orbital small-vessel superiority, removing the need for a small shuttle capable of defending itself. The Chimera managed to survive in administrative limbo, undergoing several modernization programs--if you could call them that.
The result was a Frankenstein vessel of two old, overpowered engines controlled by mechanical inputs in the cockpit that starkly contrasted the state-of-the-art avionics program, digital readouts, and other holographic displays. The SRTS-5 had been dubbed the Chimera when the two door guns had been added a year later. They were, surprisingly, one of the most advanced parts of the craft; able to use a variety of ammunition, providing an overwhelming volume of fire, and supported by computer-aided targeting. They were a top-notch weapon system, though limited in their field of fire due to the small wings that jutted out from below the cargo bay doors.
Any attempts to fully automate their targeting by Fleet Command had been shot down from all sides. The pilots were too busy with the other flight systems and weapons to control the massive guns and letting the computer auto-target was seen as inhumane by policymakers within the United Nations of Earth. The engineers had made the most of it, affixing a harness for a gunner position and altering the cargo doors to open by sliding backward. The doors were then reinforced with additional armor so they would help protect the reactor nestled behind the small cargo bay.
It wasn’t the most interesting assignment, but it was a way to get off-planet, something I desperately needed if I were to promote quickly. The Chimera crew aboard the Spitfire I decided to interview were as standard as they come: a senior lead pilot, a junior co-pilot, and mirrored experience for the two enlisted gunners.
When I’d first met the two gunners they were in their heavily armored flight suits, the faceplate of their helmets covered by some added tech that made them look like robots. Despite the intimidating look, they had been nothing but kind. Over the past few weeks I had even grown accustomed to Corporal Strong's uncouth jokes. At first, I had wanted to reprimand him, specifically when he’d wolf-whistled at me, but Chief Hardin had informed me that the standards were different when a ship was underway and that the jokes were in good spirits. Also, the young corporal apparently hadn’t known I was an officer. I kindly reminded the Chief that rank didn’t matter and, while I was still within earshot at least, he gave the corporal a verbal reaming.
Corporal Strong was your typical meathead, covered in tattoos and muscle-bound from spending every free moment at the gym. He was young and enthusiastic about his job shooting a big gun and more than willing to tell anyone who would listen about it. I had spent most of my interview with him trying to get him to focus on answering my questions, preferably without cussing, and not just telling me cool stories.
Chief Hardin, on the other hand, was a grizzled senior enlisted with five o’clock shadow at all hours of the day and seemed to live on caffeine alone. He had a knack for always seeming busy and didn’t speak unless he felt the need. Luckily for me, he considered answering my questions as part of his job and our interview had been one of the best I’d had.
Lieutenant Junior Grade Jameson was nice as well, splitting the difference between the two enlisted on the crew personality-wise. She was rather intimidating to look at; beautiful blonde hair, a strong jaw, toned muscles visibly filling out her flight suit, and a full head taller than me to boot. She reminded me of the pictures of the Viking women from history lessons I’d had in college.
Surprisingly, I learned that she spent more time studying than anything else. My curiosity piqued, I had skimmed her bio on the net. She received her callsign, Matrix, for being such a quick-study. It was a reference to some old movie I’d never seen, but I assumed it made sense somehow. She had been top of her class in flight school, which earned her the freedom to choose her airframe and assignment. One article had quoted several of the instructor cadre who stated their surprise at her choice to fly one of the oldest vessels in the inventory rather than the starfighters. I felt the same, but I also never claimed to understand pilots.
Lieutenant Commander Swann, though, was a problem. The first time we met I had mistaken his vessel for the shuttle that would take me to the surface of the planet the Spitfire was orbiting. He eyed my large duffel only briefly before stating it was too big to fly with. A joke, I’d later been told. The weight of my gear was irrelevant. The two engines on the Chimera had enough power to turn its occupants into pink jelly if the pilots ever felt like disabling the onboard computers that limited their output.
Since that moment Commander Swann hadn’t stopped treating me like an outsider. After dodging my first two requests for an interview I hadn’t been able to pin him down to ask again. Ultimately I could do without his inputs, but I was supposed to gather information from every combat-related position of all ranks, and Swann was the highest-ranking combat pilot on the ship.
The other Chimera crew was as green as they came and therefore not particularly helpful. Their vessel had some large mechanical failure before I arrived that left it unable to fly. That meant the crew spent most of their time in the mess hall or goofing off, making it hard to track them down. Besides, not one of them had seen real combat despite the few hundred flight hours between them.
Swann, on the other hand, had cut his teeth as a junior pilot during the end of the Third Contact War and had now been part of the war against the rebellion for a little over three years. Captain Meyer had been very forthcoming with that information when giving me the assignment. He knew Swann personally, he’d said, and was eager to hear how an old acquaintance was doing.
Now, after resorting to name-dropping Captain Meyer, Commander Swann half sat, half leaned on a large, thigh-high crate in the middle of the hangar with his arms folded across his chest. I gritted my teeth. I had wanted this to be a bit more formal. But fine.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Searching for something to sit on, I found a small ammo can nearby and slid it over. I powered on my tablet and opened the recording program before maximizing the script with my questions. I knew he was watching me, but I couldn’t let him intimidate me out of doing my job. I finally had him. I was going to make the most of it.
“Your name, for the record,” I asked.
“Michael Swann.”
“And your current rank and position within the Fleet?”
“Lieutenant Commander and SRTS-5 Pilot, 15th Fleet. Currently assigned to the UNN Spitfire.” He sounded bored. I didn’t need his actual voice, the recording was just for my memory as I wrote, but I didn’t want him to fall into a rhythm of cookie-cutter, uninterested answers.
“You go by the callsign Darth, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Does that offend you?” It was an off-script question so I wouldn’t be permitted to use his reply, but I needed to break the current trend. It worked, seemingly, as I noted his raised brow.
“Why would it?”
“Well,” I explained, “I’m told that in the old movies it was a title given to evil, magic-wielding lords who killed people.” That got me a slight chuckle.
“It’s just a name, Ensign.”
I nodded my head slightly, scanning through the list of questions on my tablet. Not of all them applied to every interviewee, but I didn’t want to miss any.
“Alright, would you please state your experience in your current position?”
“I have just over seven hundred combat hours.”
“Over what timeframe?” I asked.
“Eight years and eleven deployments with various fleets. Listen, Ensign, if you want my background or bio they’re listed on the net. Let’s get to the real questions.”
I curled my lips. He wasn’t wrong, but this was part of the process. I certainly didn’t want him to feel like he was in control of the interview. Even so, I didn’t have much ground to stand on.
I shifted to sit straighter on my makeshift stool. “Fine. Commander Swann, in your opinion, is there justification for using weaponry that far outclasses that of the rebel faction, as they’ve been named by the United Nations of Earth?”
“Yes.”
“And what is that justification?”
“The people you’ve,” he pointed at me sharply, “been interviewing for the last month.”
“OK. Would you care to expand on that?”
I could tell this interview was going to be tiring. Swann thought himself better than the whole thing and I didn’t like having to dig to clarify answers, it made it easier for people to say they’d been guided into giving a certain response. Unfortunately, it was part of my job. Surface level information was dull and therefore useless.
“Right now,” Swann began, “you’re interviewing me, but I’ll bet the only reason you remember my name a month or two from now is because I’ve aggravated you. Or because Captain Meyer will ask about me. How many others have you interviewed on this little assignment? Do you remember their names? Have any idea what their life is like outside of the Fleet? These rebels, revolutionaries, whatever they want to be called, want to kill your interviewees.”
“And that justifies using superior technology to kill them?”
“We’ve got the tech, why wouldn’t we use it?” he said with a shrug. “You want us to forego our advantage? It doesn’t matter what weapons we use, Ensign, they want to kill us simply because of what we represent.”
“Don’t you want to kill the rebels because of what they represent?” Definitely not an approved question, but I couldn’t help myself from turning his words against him. Commander Swann licked his lips and pressed them together. I couldn’t tell if he knew admitting to it would be a bad look or if he was just holding back anger.
“Do you know why our callsign is Valkyrie?” he asked.
Don’t dodge the question, I thought and fought to suppress my scowl. “No, I thought it was Chimera.”
“That’s just an administrative name for the ship because ‘SRTS-5’ doesn’t roll off the tongue,” Swann said casually. “Valkyrie is what the ship is called while on missions.”
“OK, so why Valkyrie?” I cursed myself the moment the words left my lips. I’d indulged him when I was supposed to be the one asking my questions. Now he would get to ramble on about whatever he wanted.
“When this rebellion started more than a decade ago, Chimera’s weren’t launched at the start of skirmishes, largely due to the limitation on the use of force against our own kind--the policy that the public is so concerned about that the UNN has to send public affairs out here to interview us to make sure the Fleet doesn’t feel bad about doing its job.”
I flexed my eyebrows briefly, overlooking the off-handed insult as he continued, “So our guys would be down there dying and, much like the old Norse legends, we would descend from the skies and collect the critically wounded. Do you know how many people survive a high-G burn back up into orbit with severe wounds?” He paused just long enough for me to consider offering an answer before starting again. “Almost none. By the time we showed up, we were ferrying the dead. A Valkyrie.”
Swann seemed to collect his thoughts as he ran his tongue across his teeth behind closed lips. I was about to re-ask my question, but he began again. “In the last six years the Chimera program has been in over eight hundred engagements, almost all of them for close air support. Only three bases have been overrun in that time. You want to know what I think of these limited force policies? They’re garbage. We’re here to win. If I had it my way there wouldn’t be a ban on finite orbital bombardment. Not to be used preemptively of course, but so that every time the rebels group to attack us the heavens welcome them and not another member of the Fleet.”
Well, he answered your question, Cara, I thought, though his views were certainly a bit extreme. I could admit the rebels were better armed than they claimed, but they certainly had no defense against a warship turning them to ash from orbit. I also had no ability to fact check his statistics, though they seemed believable based on what I’d been reading the past few years.
“What about the civilians around the rebel combatants?” I asked.
“Marines risk their lives every day patrolling the colonies. There’s a waiting hand to save those who want to escape from a rebel settlement. Some take it. The ones that don’t are complicit.”
I took a moment to collect myself, scrolling down my tablet. Swann certainly was...stalwart in his views, though I suppose I had expected that. He hadn’t yelled, but his tone had changed from bored to fierce and I could tell I was getting to how he actually felt, however uncomfortable it made me feel. I found it hard to believe that Captain Meyer was friends with this guy. Swann was...ruthless.
“What do you think of your role in this war, Commander?” I asked, pressing on.
“Me personally or as a Chimera pilot?”
I wanted to say personally, just to see what he thought of himself, but that wasn’t the approved question. “A Chimera pilot.”
“The UNN has a single job. Protect the UNE. Protect means fight those that would do us harm. Everyone in the Fleet has a job and each job contributes to our ability to win that fight. My job is a direct reflection of the Fleet’s ability, but even the administrative jobs keep this whole war machine running. Shit, you look deep enough the janitor has an impact on how lethal we are.”
“So you see your role as protection. And by fighting I assume you mean killing the enemy?”
His eyes narrowed. “Ensign, do you understand what combat is actually like? People die. Not just the helpless bad guys,” he said with air quotes. “Two months ago a Chimera was shot down on Kepler-442b. All four crew members died on impact. If they had survived the wreck instead of becoming burnt corpses they probably would’ve been captured and tortured like the crew on KOI 4427b two years ago. The UNN’s hands certainly aren’t clean from some of the things we’ve done, but this war is not as one-sided as the holo’s back on Earth make it seem. Yes, a large portion of my role is killing people as part of the larger UNN effort to win this war. Where do you see yourself in that picture, Ensign? Do your articles sway public opinion in our favor? Do they help bring an end to the war? Or save UNN lives?”
“You would prefer I write propaganda, Commander?” My snark reply earned me a slight chuckle.
“If it would help.”
Commander Swann rose from the crate he’d been leaning on and walked away without another word. I bit my lip. I had other questions, but none of them were from the script on my tablet. Had he known that was the end? He’d certainly gotten the last word. I could almost respect how much pride he had, but his warped worldview was repulsive. How could he so blatantly not care about killing people?
A growing thump of boots against the hangar floor pulled my attention.
“How’d it go?” Matrix asked as she approached.
“Well,” I said, saving the recording and rising from my ammo box, “he answered my questions so, good, I suppose.”
“You don’t seem satisfied.” Matrix hoisted herself up to fully sit on the crate, legs dangling over the edge.
I made my hand relax and felt the stiffness in my knuckles from clenching my fist. “How do you put up with him?” I asked. “He’s all about the war. At least Corporal Strong’s enthusiasm about it is comedic.”
Matrix seemed to smile at the thought of Strong’s cheesy, gung-ho attitude. “He doesn’t like the war more than anyone else, he’s just damn determined to be good at what he does.”
“Killing people?” I asked, tapping through the menus on my tablet to create a folder with Commander Swann’s name and archiving the audio files.
“Saving them,” she answered. “Cara, it’s not that he doesn’t think the rebels are people, but, for now at least, they’re the enemy. They want to kill us too. If a pilot hesitates we endanger the whole crew. We have a responsibility to the people on the ground that we’re there to protect. All of this is far from ideal, but it’s the hand we’re dealt. We just have to have faith in the people with the power to make the decisions that send us to war or bring us to peace.”
“Why can’t he explain things nicely like that?” I asked, locking my tablet and rising from the small ammo crate.
Matrix let out a hearty laugh. “He is salty, that’s for sure.”