Wings of Honor Read online

  Moscow sniffed, no doubt expecting the compliment to be followed up with a jab, but when it didn’t come, his sneer faltered. He looked genuinely perplexed.

  “I mean it, Andrei. Good flying.”

  Moscow grunted something Coda couldn’t decipher and put some distance between them. Coda sighed. Playing nice with Moscow wasn’t going to be easy—especially if the other pilot had no intention of meeting him in the middle. Still, considering that their last encounter had ended in a shoving match, he couldn’t help but feel like this was an improvement. At this pace, we’ll be friends in no time.

  But even as he thought it, he knew it would never happen. They would never be friends, but maybe they could tolerate being in the same room, fly in the same squadron. That was something Coda wanted. Wasn’t it?

  19

  Simulator, SAS Jamestown

  Alpha Centauri System, Proxima B, High Orbit

  Battles. It was battles all day, every day as the pilots worked through the remaining roster, taking each other one-on-one in custom simulations built by the commander himself. Battle became life, an all-encompassing game that they lived, breathed, and dreamed. There was no class or studies. Only the gym and the game. Only winning and losing. And losing meant going home, so when they weren’t in the simulator, they were watching the battle unfold on the display board.

  Coda spent his time studying the other pilots, taking detailed notes about their strengths and weaknesses. He’d then eavesdrop on the commander’s evaluation to see how his own reviews stacked up. Oftentimes, he picked up on things that Commander Coleman highlighted, but the commander always had more to add, and Coda, even when he wasn’t flying, continued to learn.

  By the third day, a hierarchy was already beginning to take shape, and Coda was surprised to find that experience didn’t necessarily translate into success within the simulator. He and Moscow continued to be outliers in that regard, both placing within the top fifteen pilots, well above the failure line.

  Their friends weren’t quite so fortunate. Noodle and Squawks rode the line, above it some days and below it others, while Uno was consistently below it. Moscow’s friends were doing even worse.

  That night at dinner, after a particularly embarrassing rout, Uno was even more agitated than usual. “I’m sick of it,” he said. “It’s too complicated. There’s too much to keep track of.”

  He wasn’t the first pilot to voice the complaint or the first to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of commands the pilots were responsible for. Unlike transports and bombers, the Nighthawk was a single-pilot starfighter. They didn’t have the luxury of a navigator. It was just the pilot and the computer, and regardless of how much slack the computer picked up, there was still far more the pilots had to pay attention to than their previous drone training had prepared them for.

  “The stick has over sixty combinations alone,” Uno said, resorting to raw numbers and statistics as he always did when he was trying to make a point. “Did you know that? Sixty! Just tonight, I was trying to designate a target and turned off the cockpit lights. No joke. Yesterday, I thumbed the wrong weapon and dropped a bomb instead of firing my guns.”

  They all laughed. Noodle, caught in the unenviable position of having taken a drink of milk a moment before, spit it out all over his food.

  “Probably make it taste better,” Squawks said, and Noodle almost lost it again.

  “I’m serious,” Uno said. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “You just need to calm down,” Coda said.

  “I can’t,” Uno said. “The commander calls it ‘finger fire.’ Says it’s been around for hundreds of years. And he says it’s only going to get worse when we start flying for real and there’s radio chatter. ‘Helmet fire,’ he called it. I don’t think I’m cut out for this.”

  “You just need more time in the simulator,” Coda said.

  Uno barked a laugh. “And when am I going to get that? The commander has it running all day, and we’re already putting in extra time as it is.”

  “Wait,” Noodle said. “You’ve been flying without us?”

  “What do you think we’ve been doing every night?”

  “It’s the only personal time we get,” Squawks said. “For all I know, you’ve been dating a pretty little lady.”

  “The only date we’ve had has been with the simulator,” Uno said. “Little good it’s done me.”

  “We’ll be there again tonight,” Coda said, ignoring Uno’s bitter tone. “Come if you want. It might help your scores.”

  Commander Coleman stepped out of the Simulator Room just as Coda and the rest were approaching. Noodle and Squawks had taken Coda up on his offer to join them for after-hours practice, and they all froze as the commander spotted them.

  “Good evening, Commander,” Coda said.

  “Coda,” he said. “Gentlemen. You’re not looking to sabotage my simulators, are you?”

  “Just logging in some extra time, sir,” Coda said.

  “Personal time was built into your schedules to keep you sharp.”

  “We understand, sir. Thing is”—Coda nodded toward the door—“that’s all we think about. All we dream about. And the way we see it, the better we fly, the better we’ll sleep, and the sharper we’ll be.”

  Commander Coleman nodded appreciably. “I completely understand, Lieutenant. Be easy on my equipment.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  The commander turned down the corridor as Coda and the rest entered the Simulation Room. Having been the pilots’ home for the last few weeks, it smelled strongly of sweat and agitation.

  “Squawks, Uno, get ready to go. I’ll get you queued up.”

  “Who put him in charge?” Squawks asked sarcastically as he and Noodle made for their cockpits.

  “You did by joining my extra sessions,” Coda said then cycled through the various preprogrammed simulations in the control panel on the wall. After selecting one to his liking, he turned to join his squad mates. As he did, the door opened again, and Moscow strode in. He was joined by three of his friends, and all four of them froze, each eyeing the other. Apparently, Coda and his friends weren’t the only ones planning to log extra time in the simulator.

  Moscow appraised the scene and grimaced. “Come on,” he said to the others, turning to go. “We’ll come back later.”

  “No,” Coda said as Moscow’s friends turned to join him. “Wait.”

  Moscow stopped in the doorway.

  “You’re going to fly some extra simulations, right? So are we. Nothing says we can’t do it together.”

  Moscow’s eyes slid past Coda, finding the other three pilots behind him. “You want us to fly with you?”

  Coda shrugged. “Why not?”

  Moscow’s friends looked at each other warily. Why not? They had a thousand reasons why not. But their common need outweighed them all.

  Finally, Moscow shrugged. “Why not?” he repeated then strode into the room.

  “Squawks,” Coda said. “Take this one off.” Then a little more quietly, he said to Moscow, “Uno’s flying this one. Let’s try to keep things even, yeah?”

  “Sure,” Moscow said. “Bear, you’re up.”

  Bear, a female pilot with jet-black hair, had earned her call sign because she had a reputation for going “Momma Bear” when defending her friends. Though she and Uno were both below the failure line, Bear was in the bottom third overall, much lower than Uno.

  Coda made for Uno’s simulator, while Moscow and his group went for the other.

  Squawks fell into step at Coda’s shoulder. “What are you doing?” His voice was quiet, but there was an edge to it.

  Coda felt Moscow’s eyes on him. “We don’t own the simulator, Squawks.” Then just loud enough for Squawks, he added, “Besides, who would you rather shoot down? Uno or one of them?”

  Squawks grinned. “Good point.”

  Coda slapped him on the shoulder. “Just play nice, okay?”

  “Only down here,”
Squawks said. “I’m gonna kick some ass in the simulator.”

  “There you go.” Coda climbed up the ladder. “How you feeling?”

  Uno clicked the last latch of the harness into place then set the VR helmet on his lap. “Good.”

  Coda could hear the nervousness in Uno’s voice but didn’t mention it. It would only make him more self-conscious, and the last thing Uno needed was to think about himself instead of his opponent.

  “All right,” Coda said. “Listen, Bear is slow, and she’s overly reliant on missiles. If you get in close and take her with your guns, she won’t have a chance.”

  “Okay.”

  Coda wasn’t sure how it was possible, but Uno somehow sounded even more nervous than before. “Hey.” He let the word hang there until Uno met his eyes. “It’s just us. No statistics. No board. No full squadron, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good,” Coda said. “Have fun.”

  Coda stepped down the ladder then moved it out of the way. When both pilots gave him the thumbs-up, he toggled the start initiative on the wall panel, and the simulation began.

  It was a relatively brief encounter, with both pilots flying tentatively, like a pair of amateur boxers unwilling to commit to the fight. Despite Coda’s advice, Uno kept his distance, making sweeping movements at full thrust. The strategy played directly into Bear’s strength, and Uno met his end when he failed to deploy his chaff in time, allowing Bear’s long-range missile to take him clean in the fuselage.

  “Sorry,” Uno said to Coda as he and Squawks swapped positions.

  “No need to apologize.”

  “I didn’t listen to you.”

  “Maybe you’ll fix that next time, huh?” Coda smiled to let Uno know he was joking, but he would’ve been lying if he’d said there wasn’t an element of truth in his words. “Listen, Uno. You’re flying stiff because you’re thinking too much. Just let it go, and before you know it, the stick will be an extension of your body.”

  “Is that how it is for you?”

  “Me?” Coda asked. “God, no. I’m flying by the seat of my pants too. It’s just something my dad used to say…” Coda winced, wishing he could take back the words. “Anyway, just relax. Stop thinking. Let your training kick in.”

  Squawks’s battle was smoother. Unlike Uno, Squawks had all the traits of a talented fighter pilot. Unfortunately, he flew like he talked: fast, confident, and reckless. He took unnecessary risks that worked as often as they got him into trouble. Commander Coleman would have to train that out of him before he ever saw action, though Coda struggled to see how that could be done. Telling Squawks to fly slower and not take as many risks would be akin to telling him to be quiet. It was an assault on who he was.

  Maybe not train it out of him then. Maybe the commander can teach him to channel it.

  By the time their hour of personal time was nearing an end, everyone had flown except for Moscow and Coda.

  “Rematch?” Moscow asked, smiling wryly.

  Coda couldn’t tell if Moscow was trying to be an ass, or if his own feelings were still raw from the defeat. He decided Moscow was trying to have fun with it, nothing personal. “Not tonight.”

  “Still sore?”

  Okay, maybe he is trying to be an ass. “Something like that.”

  “You guys here every night?”

  “Yeah,” Coda said. “I take it you’re planning on making it a regular thing?”

  “That was the plan,” Moscow said. “The group needs the practice.”

  “So does mine,” Coda said. “No reason they can’t do it together, right?”

  “I guess not.”

  Just like that, he found himself in a shaky truce with Moscow. Every night during their hour of personal time, Coda and his three friends logged extra time in the simulator, and every night, Moscow’s group joined them. They didn’t always battle opposing teams. Sometimes, Uno took on Squawks or Noodle flew against Coda, but as the nights wore on, they began to offer each other advice.

  “When he’s on your ass like that,” Moscow said to Noodle one night after Bear had gotten in close and killed him with guns, “you can deploy your chaff. At those speeds, it’ll tear her apart. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box.”

  By the end of the week, the extra practice was already beginning to pay off. Moscow had cracked into the top five, with Coda right behind him. Noodle had worked his way into the top twenty, and every member of their alliance had broken into the top sixty. After that, it didn’t take long for people to realize they were spending more time in the simulator than the others. Some of the pilots asked to join their after-hours practice sessions, while others complained to the commander.

  Commander Coleman simply said that personal time was personal time and that he wasn’t going to discipline pilots for working harder than everyone else. After that, the simulator became a buzz of activity, and it became next to impossible to log an extra session.

  So Coda spent the time studying the other pilots in excruciating detail, augmenting the notes he’d already begun taking. Subconsciously, Coda knew that when it came to fighting the Baranyk, it wouldn’t matter how well he could fly if he couldn’t understand and outthink his opponent.

  For the remainder of the week, he put the strategy into action, leveraging what he knew about the other pilots’ deficiencies to destroy them in battle. When it was all said and done, he, like the rest of his group, had made his mark on the commander’s standings. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the commander’s opinion that he should have been worried about.

  20

  Commander Chadwick Coleman’s Quarters, SAS Jamestown

  Alpha Centauri System, Proxima B, High Orbit

  Commander Chadwick Coleman sighed as Lieutenant Hernandez left his quarters. The meeting hadn’t been altogether unexpected. Pilots, after all, left programs for personal reasons all the time, but what had surprised him was who the meeting had been with. Lieutenant Hernandez wasn’t a bad pilot, and his scores were good enough to graduate to the next phase of his training, but if he didn’t think he had what it took, then Coleman wasn’t going to argue with him.

  Unbuttoning his uniform, Coleman crossed the small room to his bookshelf, where he poured himself a drink. After a small sip that warmed his body from the inside, he returned to the chair and pulled up the flight roster on his tablet. He found Lieutenant Hernandez’s name in the top fifty and, with a second frustrated sigh, crossed it out.

  The pilots had done well, all things considered, in large part because their drone training had translated better than he had expected. Even then, it still wasn’t an equal replacement for basic flight. In his day, any X-23 pilot would have first flown other spacecraft before being selected for the Nighthawk strike fighter program—Commander Coleman himself had built his early reputation on flying long-range reconnaissance vessels, so he’d possessed at least some experience with fast-moving, highly maneuverable spacecraft.

  Still, transitioning from the larger, slower ships of the fleet to the X-23 was akin to jumping from a bicycle to a motorcycle. They were similar only in concept. But that concept created a foundation upon which everything else was built. The pilots of Coleman’s squadron didn’t have that foundation, or if they did, it was incomplete, the concrete not yet solidified into something that could be built atop of. That was why they’d logged so many hours in the simulator. During his day, a pilot only had to complete eight hours of simulated flight before moving to the real thing. Most of his pilots had already logged over fifty.

  They’re ready… or at least as ready as they’ll ever be.

  The only question left was with Lieutenant Hernandez’s sudden departure, would he slide the person from the fifty-first position into the top fifty?

  No, Coleman decided. That would be an insult to those who’ve earned it.

  It was done then. What had been one hundred was now forty-nine. Only half of the original recruits had made it to the midpoint in their training. He took another s
ip and set his tablet aside, then sinking deeper into his seat, he rested his head back and closed his eyes.

  The tablet buzzed. Coleman was alert in a heartbeat, noticing the red border that now filled the edges of his terminal, noting the priority message.

  With the development of the Shaw Drive, humanity had unlocked the keys to faster-than-light travel, but faster-than-light communication was still little more than a science fiction concept. That meant the ships of the fleet were often both battle vessels and mail carriers, carrying important information to other ships in the area like a bucket brigade. For high-priority messages, though, command leveraged courier drones whose sole mission was to jump to a single location via a jumpgate and deliver its message. Even with the receiving vessels reusing the courier drones for subsequent communications, the system was beyond expensive and only available to those with a captain’s rank or higher. Whoever had sent him the message had gone to a lot of trouble for him to get it as quickly as possible.

  Commander Coleman played the message. The man on the screen was in his early sixties, his skin smooth and showing little sign of his age. His hair, however, was pure white, matching his admiral’s uniform, and styled meticulously. But Admiral Orlovsky’s lively blue eyes were bloodshot and rimmed by dark circles, as if he hadn’t slept in days.

  “Commander,” the recording of Admiral Orlovsky said, “enclosed, you’ll find footage of a recent Baranyk encounter. The target was the mining colony of Numina 3, and as you’ll see, the enemy once again employed the use of their Disrupter. Despite recent fleet R&D upgrades, our forces were still rendered inoperable. The colony was lost, as were the Boston and Charleston.”

  The admiral paused, taking a deep breath. The hardness of his eyes melted away, and the façade of command disappeared as the admiral turned into the man Coleman had known for his entire military career.