NaNoWriMo ’06 – Upon the Deep (Chapter 1)

In the tradition I set forth last year – the first chapter of one of the novels I wrote this year during National Novel Writing Month. This is a science-fiction novel set in the “near future”, in the aftermath of an anonymous alien attack on the Earth. As this is a (very) rough draft, bear in mind that things are going to get fleshed out before it sees publication, but….

Without further delay….

Chapter One

“All hands to battle stations! I repeat, all hands to battle stations!” The klaxons shrill call echoed through the hallways, the gunmetal grey walls and floor only seeming to amplify the sound as it bellowed forth from the speakers at either end of the long corridor. As the doors to the sides of the long corridor hissed open to let the inhabitants tumble out, the lights switched over to blood read, flashing in pulses along the length of the hallway, pointing those paying attention to the far ends where they joined with larger corridors.

There was a minimum of conversation as the crew moved to carry out the order from the command center, more concerned actually with griping the handholds along the walls and pulling themselves along, trying to avoid collisions where it was actually possible. For much of the crew, moving in zero gravity had always been something of an abstract concept before being stationed aboard the Independence, and that abstraction did not help one bit when it came crashing face to face with the reality of coping without normal motion. The comedy that ensued only served to remind the newest of recruits that there was more to such things as drills than simply doing what one had learned in training – it allowed for that one-time-only mistake to be made in a survivable fashion.

“Command, this is Sparky. Blue Squadron is in position and ready for launch.” Her delicate fingers gripped the harness slightly as she pulled herself down in the seat, forcing her feet into the thick straps latched to the pedals below as she struggled to get the padded webbing. She could see, looking down the row, that other pilots of her squadron were having similar issues, not accustomed yet to doing the maneuver without the benefit of a force to hold oneself into their seat. It was a small consolation when she realized just how bad things could possibly get when this really had to be done in a life or death situation. “Awaiting your signal to commence flight operations.”

“Stand by, Blue Squadron. Red Squadron, you are cleared for immediate launch. Good hunting.” The crisp British voice that came over her headset did little to steady her as she finally managed to pull the restraint into position, the harness’ release clicking over her torso as she got four of the five points of the harness wired. A soft profanity slipped from her lips as she pushed up against the strapping, feeling it yield in the slightest of ways as her fingers swam in the air before her, swiping for the strap a second or three, and then getting it firmly, pulling the metal clasp in to join the other four. Another glance along the row revealed a few eyes turned her way, and she could have sworn she felt her cheeks burn for a moment as she wondered what kind of spectacle she had turned herself into for the span of those moments that they had seen.

The moment for self-conscious thoughts, however, had passed and she returned her attention to the task at hand. Before her, she could see the expanse of space filling her view, the darkness of deep space and the steady pinpricks of lights that were the stars against that distant emptiness her only markers. Faced with such a grand scene, she felt truly small, almost as if unworthy to be sitting in the cockpit she occupied and had struggled hard to attain. The feeling would pass, she knew, given a few moments, but it still was an awe-inspiring sensation to realize just how far she had come from that small farming community where she had been born.

“Blue Squadron, you are cleared for immediate launch. Good hunting.” The high-pitched whine of motors filled her headset for a few moments as the ion engines of her fighter powered up, finally disconnected from the internal power of the carrier, the sound swiftly passing beyond the range of her hearing. A quick glance downward at her console indicated that everything was functioning within the normal ranges she had been trained to expect, the reactor powering the engines little more than a second thought when compared to the armament the fighter was carrying. Her fingers shifted nervously on the control sticks as her gaze lifted to watch the takeoff indicators, bracing herself a little in her seat as she watched it count down to zero, and suddenly the view before her changed as she pulled on the sticks, from a steady state view of the universe to an infinitely more dynamic one, the texture of the hull below fluctuating as her fighter raced over the plating of the ship’s skin.

“Blue Squadron, this is Sparky.” Her voice sounded strange to her in her ears, and she resisted the urge to yell in her excitement, not wanting to deafen the rest of her pilots. That would be embarrassing, especially during a drill, not that hse had not done such things when she had been back on the ground in training. “Form up into triads and fan out – keep your eyes peeled for any hostiles and don’t let them get the jump on you. Remember what we learned in basic and you’ll get your fighter back to the ship in one piece.”

An echo of brief acknowledgements flowed over her headset as she guided the fighter into another banking curve along the lower hull of the cruiser, watching the stars shift in their courses ahead of her. There was still no sign of an enemy in front of her, though the sensors (and she resisted strongly following suit with the older pilots who still insisted on calling it ‘radar’) were already screaming that unfriendlies were inbound to her position. Finally, she thought she saw the movement of a previously unseen glow flash ahead of her, and she punched it up a notch, careful not to get too overeager and get ahead of her wingmates.

“There you are,” she breathed softly into her microphone, her wrist flexing slightly as she followed the graceful arc the other fighter was making against the sable backdrop of the heavens. Perhaps two kilometers off from her own position and closing, she had barely noticed the light of the engines against the stars and went with her instincts, which this once rewarded her with a chance for a kill. “Alright then, just the way we did it on the ground. Buzz, Fireball, cover me while I go after our friend here.” Without waiting for the confirmation she knew would be following her comment, her left hand eased the throttle further forward, opening up her unnaturally-seeming silent engines further to close the gap between herself and the enemy, the right hand’s fingers flipping open the safeties on the weapons her fighter packed.

At one kilometer, her thumb twitched and she sent off a streamer of rail cartridges from the cannons in her fighter’s wings, knowing that they likely would not hit the enemy at all at the distance, but trying to force him into a mistake to better catch him and end the dogfight quickly. Survival, training had taught, was more a matter of minimizing mistakes than having any real skill at the matter, and she was determined to not end up her first dogfight by being a mark on someone else’s cockpit. The shots missed, somewhat wide as she had expected, though it achieved the result she had wanted. The starfighter on the receiving end of her volley wheeled in space, trying to come about to lock on to her, and she had just begun to calibrate her targeting for another volley when there was a shrill sound in her headset.

“What the he…” The alarm sound got louder still as the view began to rattle violently. She could not see anyone on her sensors within weapons range besides her wingmen and the target, which would in theory eliminate anyone else from hitting her, unless they had been unseen projectiles launched before the attack, left to float by inertia into the battlefield. As she tried to regain control of her fighter and pull it out of the way, the blasts continued, the enemy growing ever larger as it approached… and then all went black.

“God damnit!” Her voice lost all sense of volume as she bellowed out her frustration, resisting at the last moment the urge to tear off her helmet and throw it against the wall in front of her in her anger. There were sounds of general discontent that echoed in the chamber and over her headset, her fellow pilots who had not been expecting the outburst despite the spectacular end she had brought her fighter too. She slammed her fists down on the sides of her cockpit. “Flight Ops, Blue Leader. I need tactical view now, over.”

“Stand by, Sparky. Tactical on now.” The black view before her was immediately replaced by a gradually rotating tactical schematic of the space around the Independence, several sets of triangles flowing over her hull as they traced out their combat routes. Towards the aft end, where she had been before the finale that wrote her out of the script had been taking place, there were two smaller dots, which she did not need to even query the computer about to know that they were Fireball and Buzz. She sighed as she settled back in her seat, her fingers lifting from the throttle to tap her microphone a little more fully in front of her mouth, taking a deep breath to steady her nerves after her ‘death’ before she gave the next order.

“All pilots, this is Command.” The cool male British voice came over their headsets again as she closed her mouth, not wanting to cut into the message from the bridge’s air traffic controller. “Return to bays. This drill is now ended. Repeat, all pilots, return to your bays. The drill is now ended. Debrief will be in thirty-five minutes at oh eight hundred hours Zulu in the pilots’ ready room. That will be all.”

“That will be all.” Lieutenant Commander Eddington sighed as he put the microphone back down into the holder on the side of the mapping console and stared down at the myriad triangles and dots that were migrating towards the schematic’s docking bays. Here and there, about the diagram, sections of the ship’s drawing flashed red, symbolizing where ‘attackers’ had gotten past the defenses of the fighter net around the Independence, a half-dozen attacks on what could have been critical areas of the ship’s systems. That did not count the three fighter-to-fighter near-collisions, or the four friendly fire destructions of drone-fighters about the ship’s space, a number that he would not be happy reporting to the Captain.

“They’re getting better, if that’s any consolation.” Lieutenant Meyers peered over from flight operations, his headset settled firmly about his neck rather than pressed over his head, the speaker on one side visible where it would normally be hidden beneath his dark hair. “There was a lot less swearing and self-kills this time – I think only one person ran into their own rounds, and their bird made it back to the hangar in… well, three pieces.”

“It’s not much of one, but thank you for the effort, Lieutenant.” Eddington’s clipped British accent sounded funny still to most of the crew, though the bridge officers had forced themselves to become accustomed to the pronunciation differences amongst the various nationalities clustered together aboard the starship. In the course of a single morning, one often heard no fewer than a dozen languages being spoken between the time one rose and one reported for shift. Fortunately for all, a common agreement had been reached to limit operational languages to the language of the commanding officer, which rendered the Independence an English-language ship.

Slipping his feet loose from the restraints beneath the console, Eddington let himself gradually float up from his station. A flick of his legs sent him slowly across the somewhat Spartan command center, in the general direction of the ship’s main corridor for the level. He mentally counted off the time during his free-float, experience having taught him the speed with which the maneuver would send him through the clear air, before extending a hand to grip the rail. Another graceful twist of his body allowed him to pull himself into the corridor along the overhead rail to where he could snag one of the moving straps and let it drag him down towards the aft end of the cruiser.

It was hard to imagine a less imaginative design for a spacecraft – for all intents and purposes, a full third of the cruiser seemed to be engines, and the rest could be imagined as half useable space, half cargo. There was a faint mechanical sound that could be heard as one slowly let the transportation ring draw oneself around the vessel, a low pitched growl of the various ventilation and pneumatic systems that gradually instilled itself as the natural sounds of life to those who called similar ships their homes. Still, part of him contemplated that, for having grown up in a culture that had such dreams for the future and what spaceflight might hold by the time ships like the Independence would have been built, none of them seemed to have foreseen the dreary, gunmetal grey warships that mankind would build for their first leap beyond the solar system.

As he approached the captain’s quarters, his fingers slowly let slip the fabric loop and he let himself continue along solely under his own inertia. It was a rare pleasure to just glide, but one that he could afford for a short while longer, while it was somewhat predictable that there would be no major shocks or changes to the starship’s motion. Once they departed, however, he would have to break himself of that habit, lest he be doing that at some inconvenient time and end up a smear against the far bulkhead if something went wrong. His hand pressed against the ‘far’ wall from his superior’s quarters, both slowing himself down and curving his course until he could no longer touch the metal, which served also to bring him to the commanding officer’s doorframe where he could brace himself and nudge the ‘bell’.

“Come.” The word was simple and direct, something the ship’s air group commander could appreciate as he idly brushed his fingers against the electrostatic plate on the door, activating it. The magnets disengaged with a soft click, before the motors pulled the panel into the wall, allowing him momentary admittance into the commander’s private sanctum. Eddington was one of the few officers aboard the Independence whohad been so favored as to have seen the interior of that quarters since coming aboard, a place of myth and legend that certainly failed to live up to either. Where most of the crew would imagine the posh commander’s quarters as shown on so many of the science-fiction shows of the prior century, Captain Abel’s quarters were as Spartan as the remainder of the starship. A few touches of home – paintings done by his children, a calendar, photographs of the inlet where his fishing cottage was situated, a pair of blue crab shells from his last vacation – remained in places on the wall, though discerning eyes would notice that most were affixed with magnetic boxes or in plastic containers bolted to shelves to prevent them from floating away. A utilitarian desk hung over the bed on an arm that swung free from the wall, and it was reclining in the bed, half-fastened in the harnesses there, that the commander could be found. “I trust that you’ve brought the latest reports on the drill, Lieutenant Commander?”

“As ordered, sir.” Eddington tried not to read too much into the brief flash of emotion that passed over his superior’s face as he handed over the tablet that had been affixed to his belt, the display still set for the screensaver favored by the bridge staff. Those watchful grey eyes that many of the bridge crew had learned to fear began their devouring of the numbers presented on the monitor’s unblinking eye, in that manner that Eddington could almost imagine meant that the euros each destroyed craft cost were being added up, tallied against the salaries that the pilots were supposedly making. The fact that he had not been one of those who had lost a craft, that he had instead been simply supervising, did not make him feel any more secure in thinking he was to be left out of the addition game. “I think you’ll find,” he offered softly, “that they have gotten quite a bit better than the first time they drilled.”

“If I want an opinion on their combat readiness, Mister Eddington, I’ll let you know exactly what it is you are to tell me.” Captain Abel’s eyes lifted briefly from the lines of text on the screen, fixing the junior officer with a stare before returning to his consideration of the figures. Moments passed in shared silence as the junior officer attempted to hold his position in the middle of the room, a task complicated by the lack of gravity as he maintained something that passed for a floating stance at attention before the captain spoke again, quietly clearing his throat. “I see that we’re still having incidents of friendly fire among the drone pilots.”

“It is an improvement, sir. At least over what we were seeing on the first several drills.” Eddington left out the fact that he also happened to agree that the numbers were still problematic, though at least the sole consolation he was drawing from the figures was that the only ‘fatalities’ among the craft they were launching were the unmanned drones, rather than the piloted starfighters. It was far more simple to replace a machine, of which they had several dozen spares, than to try to retrain a pilot for life in the cockpit. The first few months that he had been with the fleet had been littered with numerous trips back to the surface to handle the unpleasant duty of informing parents and loved ones of deaths among the pilot corps, a duty he did not care to have to undertake too many more times in his career.

“An improvement, yes, but still not acceptable in my book, Mister Eddington.” Abel lifted his eyes from the lighted display, the steely grey that offset the salt-and-pepper of his hair staring solidly at the junior officer as he floated in the middle of the cabin. “I trust that you’re going to discuss with the men during the debrief that this is unacceptable once we’re actually on our mission and far from home without ease of resupply. I cannot afford to have this crew compromised because some overeager fighter-jock decides he or she can open fire through other craft of ours without consequences.”

“Of course, sir.” It went without saying that he had expected the lecture on the conduct of warfare by the pilots and their need for further discipline. He held back the thought that tempered the issue – that many of the drone pilots were in fact rather green and fresh from basic training – since it would do nothing to bolster his case for the time being with the commanding officer of the carrier. The new recruits, much like those who had been longer in the service and therefore more accustomed to the rigors of life aboard a warship, were expected to conduct themselves according to a minimum standard which included their ability to hold fire if a friendly was in the way between them and their target. Better that they should learn while they were still near the mother planet than while out in deep space where there were fewer chances for redemption.

“If there’s nothing more, Mister Eddington, then I would think you ought to be down in the briefing room preparing for your meeting with the pilots. I expect a detailed training plan from you on my desk before sixteen hundred hours today, with details on how you intend to ensure that our new pilots keep from making swiss cheese of their comrades. You are dismissed.” Abel extended the tablet computer back to the officer, who pushed off from the ceiling to settle his feet against the ‘floor’, an arm reaching out to take back the monitor before he saluted and pushed himself back towards the doorway to the corridor beyond. The door hissed open behind him, his mind counting off the seconds before he was clear from the frame, and then he reached out for one of the traveling loops along the conveyer and latched on for the ride towards the pilots’ ready room.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” Sandra ‘Sparky’ Arco’s helmet glanced off the gunmetal grey wall with a loud thud, narrowly missing the boy’s head by a few inches before caroming around the room with the frenetic energy of a kickball from planet side, sending other pilots scrambling to get out of the way of the rapidly traveling headgear. “If that hadn’t been a drone, you moron, I could have been killed!”

“Lighten up, Chief.” For his own part, Victor ‘Buzz’ Cabot seemed to be living up to his nickname, having not even flinched at the near-miss he had between the flying helmet and his unclad head, nerves of steel perhaps amplified by a shot of liquid courage before coming into the ready room. “It’s just a drone, for cryin’ out loud. It’s not like you were really in the cockpit, and it was just an accident – maybe next time, you ought to hustle that cute ass of yours out of the way a little more quickly when we’re closing on a target.”

“I oughta just strangle you and save the enemy some trouble.” For all of her seventeen years, Sparky stared down Buzz with a glare that would have given a far older man more than a little pause before proceeding with the conversation, though that would have likely been from lack of want to get into such things with a teenager. But Buzz himself was only just entering his third decade, feeling quite confident in his ability to master the situation, and he held his ground, meeting the gaze with his dark eyes, and puffing out his chest a bit. “I swear to God, if I had something to say about it, I’d have you remandedback to flight school – this is the second time in three drills that you’ve not held your fire when I’ve been in the way.”

“So why don’t you then, Lieutenant, if you think you have the stones?” Buzz’s hands moved to turn him against the wall, palms pressed back against the cool metal as he glared back at the younger woman. “What are you gonna do about it?” The other pilots started to back away as best as they could, arms and legs swimming through the open air to get out of the path between the two remote fighter jocks as if setting up for an old fashioned gunfight in some western town. The tension built between the two, so tight that the room went entirely silent, save for the steady whirr of the ship’s systems and the hiss of the ventilation through the ducts overhead. The question of which would be the first to flinch, the first to move, the first to lash out at the other would likely determine just who the top dog was for the time being among the pilots in the ready room.

“Attention!” The familiar British voice of their flight controller cut through the ruckus, the door’s hiss within its frame entirely unnoticed as the pilots crowded around the pair determined to have it out physically over their issues. “Officer on the deck. Take your seats and prepare for the debrief for this morning’s battle drill.”

The grumbling followed the announcement that the debriefing from the simulated battle was about to begin, the tension slowly ebbing from the room, though not entirely dissipating as one would have hoped in such a situation. A fight might have gone a long way to take care of the pressures between the different crews, between the cliques that had formed in the first few weeks since the last squadrons had been assigned to the Independence, though the presence of one of the bridge staff put something of a damper on such thoughts. Floating through the air, grabbing whatever seats they could towards the front of the room, the rows were quickly filled with pilots seating themselves without regard for which squadron they were members of, whether drone pilots or cockpit based. Eddington slowly slid in behind the podium, his eyes on the tablet before him as he slipped his feet into the harness beneath the stand, giving the pilots time to settle themselves and quiet down without his direction.

“It is oh eight hundred hours Zulu, and this is the pilots debrief after battle exercise zero zero seven. Lieutenant Commander Eddington, flight operations officer, recording.” He tapped the microphone faintly, listening for the faintly delayed echo in his own earpiece as he ensured that the computer system was indeed catching every word he said, the recording prepared for command on the ground to review when they had a spare moment. He was not entirely sure that they really did look over the recordings of most debrief sessions, save for the occasional noteworthy one where they would incorporate corrections for the mistakes made by the crew, but that was not a matter he normally let himself become consumed by. Rather, he concerned himself with simply trying to help keep his pilots alive, and by doing so hoped to keep himself out of the captain’s quarters as often as he might be able to do.

“First things first – good job out there today with the live fire exercise and not managing to get any of our meager pilot company killed for a change. It is a vast improvement over the first few such exercises aboard Defiant, and I shall be rather happy to report such to their flight operations officer when he and I meet next week to review flight readiness.” There were scattered smatterings of applause at the news that they had at the very least surpassed one of their sister crews in their readiness, a sound that had a quick end put to it as Eddington’s gaze passed over the audience, making it clear he did not appreciate the interruption. “That is not cause for celebration, mind you – there are still too many issues with space control around the Independence and too many near misses between our fighter craft when you are in the air. Out where we are going, there is no room for circus acrobatics or for joyriding – every move you make in that cockpit, whether it is a drone-craft or a live starfighter, may very well be the last thing you ever do, and I want you to bear that in mind as you go out there. Am I understood?”

It was not particularly that Eddington liked being cruel or condescending to the pilots. Rather, he preferred to do everything in his power to keep them alive, and if it was a choice between their liking him and their coming back in a state that would permit them to dislike his manner of operating the pilots’ corps, he would willingly choose the second any day of the week. A few of the pilots, certainly the leaders of the squadrons, appreciated the attitude even if they had, on occasion, privately come forward to advise that he could be easier on the newer crews and give them time to acclimate to the starship. As he looked over the crowd again, waiting for the response he expected, a few “yes, sir”s could be heard in response to his question as some of the longer-tenured pilots got the message . Hopefully, they could herd the remainder along to the point they needed to be at before the ship-out date.

“Very well – I believe I have made my point sufficiently clear on the matter of your piloting in close quarters. I would like to address the issue of friendly fire among the drones, before we proceed with a tactical analysis of this morning’s drill and the failings in your coverage of our defenses.” The groans that rose from the assembled pilots only emphasized to his ears that there was a good deal more the crew had to learn before they were ready to be dispatched to the battle that awaited them.