“That’s a starfighter, boss,” Commander Samira O’Flannagain, his Commander, Air Group, told him. The gawky woman with the Ophiuchi accent adjusted her red braid as she turned to look at her captain. “A brand-spanking-new one, straight from an assembly line on Luna all the way here.”
Henry inspected the craft as he approached, shaking his head. The dark-haired Chinese-American Colonel was shorter than his CAG, though they both wore the same black turtleneck uniform. His uniform had a white collar, marking him as the captain of a United Planet Space Force starship, but both of them had the raven-with-quill-pen shoulder patch of Raven’s crew.
“Starfighters are spherical, Commander,” he said drily. “I’ve flown enough of them to know that.”
The craft in the flight deck was saucer-shaped. The SF-122 Falcon starfighters the deck had held before had been flattened spheres, but this was barely taller than the pilots would be.
Stepping up to the fighter, he assessed that it was the same three-meter diameter as the older fighter and would fit in the same hangers and launch tubes. The straighter sides meant it didn’t lose as much volume as he’d have thought, but something had to have been given up…
“I’m guessing less fuel capacity,” he said aloud. “Which makes this the fabled SF-One-Thirty Lancer?”
“Fabled is the right damn word, ser,” O’Flannagain confirmed. “I first heard about a GMS starfighter almost ten years ago. Stopped expecting to see one on my flight deck five years ago, but…well, we got the new simulators a year ago and I made sure my people were all qualified.”
Henry vaguely recalled a conversation around that point. He’d almost certainly even received a notification that the fighters were aboard, but Raven was just exiting a six-week intensive repair. There were a lot of messages in his inbox.
“Fill me in,” he ordered the CAG as he circled the starfighter. “I’m sure I have a technical briefing buried in my inbox somewhere.”
He could pull it up on his internal network, but that hardware was never quite the same as learning things the old-fashioned way.
“Stripped out the engines almost entirely,” the woman told him, touching the fighter with a fond expression. “Six light jets at the cardinal points; that’s it. Only capable of about five gees under reaction thrust and not for long.
“Main engine and the gravity shield operate out of the same projectors,” she continued. “My understanding is that in a bigger ship, they’d use different gravity projectors, but this is a starfighter.” She shrugged. “Gravitational maneuvering system basically leaves the ship in free fall down an artificial gravity well.
“She’s rated for three kilometers per second squared, fully compensated. With reduced fuel and no need for an acceleration tank, they managed to sneak a cabin with a kitchenette and a bed into her.”
“Seriously?” Henry asked. “I guess that makes sense.”
He shook his head. The UPSF’s Fighter Division had fought the war with starfighters that could get to 1.5 KPS2, half again the maximum thrust of their starships but still barely edging out Kenmiri capital ships.
Their Vesheron allies had better engine technology, stolen from the Kenmiri, and had regularly outmaneuvered Terran starfighters. Of course, Terran starfighters had gravity shields and the Vesheron ones didn’t.
The GMS was the long-promised alternative use of gravitic projection, the technology the UPA had mastered and neither the Kenmiri nor Vesheron had. And with that acceleration…
“You’ll be able to outfly anything else in space,” he told her. “I’m impressed.”
“I haven’t had a chance to take one of them out for a spin yet, but they also have one more feature I’ve fallen in love with,” O’Flannagain told him. “It’s almost as important as the coffeemaker!”
She gestured for him to join her as she hooked a mobile stepladder over to her.
“Climb up, boss,” she instructed.
Bemused, Henry obeyed and found himself on top of the flat disk of the spacecraft. O’Flannagain joined him, walking over to the most obvious feature of the disk: a man-sized groove running from one edge to the other.
“What does this look like to you, ser?”
“Missile mount,” Henry said instantly, but his eyes narrowed as he studied the size. “That is not the size of a fighter missile.”
“No, it’s not,” his CAG confirmed. “That’s a full-sized missile, ser. We’ll be able to draw our birds from Raven’s main magazines. And vice versa—we’ve stocked the flight-deck magazines with full-size missiles, though there’s no cross-loading systems.”
“We’ll fix that with the next generation of ships, I presume,” Henry murmured. He’d been involved in the discussions around several of the SF-122’s predecessors, and the fact that they couldn’t spare the mass for full-size missiles had been a perennial nightmare.
“How?”
“Amount of mass falling into the gravity well the GMS creates is irrelevant,” O’Flannagain told him. “So long as the birds fit in the bubble, we’re good to go.”
Henry nodded and then the dark-skinned Chinese-American smiled at his CAG.
“So, given all of that, is the fighter wing ready for deployment?”
O’Flannagain drew herself up straight and sharply saluted.
“Ser, yes, ser!” she barked. “I could use live flight time on the Lancers for my people, but we had the swap-over well planned. If Raven is ready to go, ser, we’re ready to go.”
“We’ll find the time for those exercises, probably en route,” Henry told her. “I have a meeting with Admiral Hamilton this afternoon, and I was hoping to tell her everything was green and ready to deploy.”
“Getting twitchy away from the action, ser?” his CAG asked. “Or away from the ambassador?”
He waved a warning finger at his subordinate.
“Are you ever going to stop trying to matchmake, Commander?” he said.
“In the general situation or the specific, ser?” O’Flannagain replied, then laughed. “Though, to be fair, the answer is the same for both: no, not really.”
“Why didn’t I cashier you, again?” Henry asked, but he was chuckling as he did.
“Because I keep hauling the entire ship out of the fire, ser,” she said. “And I’ve got your back. Down to hell and up to the other one, wherever you lead us. Enjoy your meeting, boss. The fighter wing is ready to go.”
Lieutenant Colonel Tatanka Iyotake was waiting just outside the flight deck, the broad-shouldered Lakota officer looking as tired as Henry felt.
“XO,” Henry greeted him. “Report.”
“You told me to meet you here,” Iyotake replied. “What do you need?”
“A report on the ship’s status,” Henry said. “While I head to the airlock. Walk with me, Iyotake?”
“Of course, ser.” The executive officer fell into pace beside Henry. “All of our damage is repaired. All weapons systems, defenses, power plants and heat radiators are online. Sensors are still in testing, but I expect them to clear those tests with flying colors by the end of the day.