You always hear how cold space is but until you have to punch out of a starfighter that’s actively exploding around you, you don’t really get it.
My name is Lieutenant Ryder Morrison, and I’m recording my story while I wait, drifting in the cold of space, for a rescue and recovery shuttle to get to me. Flight Control assures me that they have my beacon and they’re on the way, but there’s still a wicked battle raging out there.
…
I guess I’m something of an anomaly in the League Navy. A starfighter pilot, and a damned good one at that, who hails from an ascetic community on a pastoral planet at the ass end of nowhere. When the adults in the commune told me that space was a cold place, what they meant was that it was a dead realm where humanity was not meant to tread. They were convinced that the ships flinging themselves across the stars were harbingers of the end times, if not the very means by which the end times would come about.
I never took them seriously, though.
Our planet, Messis Pace, was considered just big enough to warrant a shuttleport in the main city. I would spend hours when I could slip away listening to various crews talk about their trips. I fell in love with space without ever going there.
When I was 12, a new shop opened up in the city. It sold itself as an entertainment center for anyone, even though it was mostly the city folks and the offworld crews that took advantage of it. It was almost a year before I mustered up the courage to walk in myself.
It was your typical entertainment plex. Plenty of flashing lights, noises of all sorts, cheap toys purchasable by some in-house currency. You know the place.
What drew me in, though, was the simulator setup. I learned later that this particular entertainment plex was sponsored by the League Navy Recruitment Office. That name wouldn’t really have meant anything to me back then, but the practical upshot of that sponsorship was that any of the simulators were completely free to play. All you had to do was log your citizen chip.
I tried all four of the simulator setups that they had. The marine sim was exciting, but I wasn’t very good at it. I never made it out of the first building without dying. The artillery sim was flat out boring. I played it once and knew it wasn’t for me. The fleet sim was amazing. I’ll still, to this day, hop into a fleet sim when I get the chance. Commanding an entire fleet or switching over to piloting a capital ship can be such a rush, though nothing like the fourth one.
The fourth sim was a starfighter sim and it felt like coming home, something that I really didn’t have a lot of experience with at that point, since the commune never really had that home feeling people always talk about.
But the starfighter sim, oh, it felt good. It felt right.
When you hopped in, the sim gave you a series of choices: fighter or bomber? Fleet action, patrol, or station defense? League, Terran, or Confederacy? You better believe that I played all of the options, multiple times. I never got tired of it.
Eventually, I settled on my preferred choices: League, starfighter, and Fleet Action. By the time I was 16, I had broken the records that the sim came with and kept setting the new records higher and higher until I was the only person who could break them.
On my 18th birthday, two things happened that changed my life forever, and they happened within hours of each other. The first was that the commune kicked me out. They were perfectly pleasant about it, and they pitched it as “you clearly aren’t happy here, so go and find your happiness.” It doesn’t matter how well you dress it up, getting kicked out of your home stings no matter what.
The second thing happened when I wandered into the Entertainment Plex a few hours later when I finally arrived in the city. I stopped in at the front desk and asked if they could hold my rucksack for me for a bit while I played in the sim. The manager, practically an old friend by that point, agreed, but they also told me that there was a special promotion happening with the sim that day. An ace League pilot was going head to head with anyone who wanted to try their luck. I leapt at the chance.
I learned later that this pilot had come down with a recruiter specifically for me. They grabbed about a dozen other likely candidates, but they had come because of my scores, and the pilot was there to verify them.
I waited for my turn in the sim pretty impatiently, but eventually I was able to climb in. The visiting pilot’s voice came over the radio and let me know that we were going to do three runs. The first two would be the patrol run and the station defense run, and we’d do them together.
They went fine. We won, she and I. We didn’t set any records, and I think it was because I was nervous, but by the time we got through the second run, I was loose and in the zone. The third run was a head to head fleet action match. I got to play the League side in the Xiphos fighter I was the most used to. She went Terrans in their SIV fighter.
I’m not gonna lie, it was a hard, nasty fight. I knew she was good from when we had been flying together, but she had been holding back, trying to match me. Head to head, though? She pulled out all the stops.
Within the first three minutes, the rest of my squadron was out of the fight and I was so far on the defensive that I didn't know how I was gonna make it. She was pushing me so hard that I could feel the simulator struggling to keep pace with our maneuvers. I had to make my fighter dance in ways that I never knew it could. In the end, she won, but not because she shot me down.
I realized during the last few minutes that I had been thinking about this all wrong. My task wasn’t to survive her, or take her out, my task was still the normal job in any fleet action sim: defend my capital ships and destroy the enemy’s. In that task, I had been failing, but I saw an opportunity to try and make a comeback on that front. I broke off my dogfight with the mystery pilot and raced out to try and get one of the enemy missiles to lock on to me, which wasn’t terribly difficult. The hard part was trying to get it into position to hit a Terran capital ship without dying myself. I failed at that, but the after action report showed that I took out a frigate with the maneuver, and that was pretty impressive.
When I climbed out of the sim pod, the other pilot did too. She introduced herself as Glyse McKenzie, starfighter pilot for the League, and she wanted me to join up as well. I barely waited to hear the actual recruiter’s whole spiel before I signed on. I rode up to our small little system station with the two of them, and before they departed for the League cruiser that had brought them out here, McKenzie gave me her contact info and told me that once I was out of basic to hit her up and see if she couldn’t swing getting me posted to her new ship.
Two years later, and there I was, stepping off of a shuttle into the landing bay of a destroyer heading out to go patrol the League/Confederacy border systems. The LSX Archigos was going to be my home, hopefully for a while.
That was the hope, at least.
Then Tel’Erani happened. You probably know all about Tel’Erani. Absolute shitshow from the drop. I don’t know how we managed to get so out maneuvered, but we did, and it ended up with the ship in a bad way and a lot of her crew dead.
I made it through that fight, though the fighter I was in came back minus a wing, which would normally get me a whole heap of grumbling from the engineers and a proper reaming from the CAG, but on that day, anyone who came back got a pass.
And we got transfer orders too. Any crew members who were still upright and didn’t need critical medical attention were transferred to a true beast of ship named Rekonin. This new ship wasn’t really even ready for combat yet, and we spent the first few weeks of our posting trying to get the ship ready for action while still handling our typical tasks.
For a few months we worked on getting the Rekonin in as close to fighting trim as we could. We also had several small skirmishes against the newly aggressive Terrans, even though no one had declared war yet. I heard Major McKenzie talking about a feeling like something worse was coming.
I wish we hadn’t learned what worse looked like.
…
I’ve managed to slow my rotation down to something less vomit-inducing, which is a plus. The downside is that I’m starting to feel the cold, and that’s a bad sign. Our ejection systems only give us a set amount of power before they start ramping down less critical systems to maintain the oxygen. Some of the older pilots at basic used to say “Toes gone cold, time to hold your nose.” It’s a ridiculous saying, considering the fully sealed helmets we wear as part of our flight gear, but it gets the point across. With this slower rotation, though, I’ve managed to get a truly staggering view of Earth. The home of humanity from way, way back.
God, she looks pretty.
I know a lot of people in the League are loath to give the Terrans credit for anything, but I’ve seen pictures of what Earth looked like when the people that formed the League left for Mars, and she didn’t look this good back then. The Terrans really brought her back from the brink.
…
Where was I?
Right, on board the Rekonin after Tel’Erani.
By the end of May, things felt like they were looking up. The Terrans hadn’t made any big concerted pushes, neither side had made a declaration of war, and by all accounts, the war we were expecting to erupt any day failed to happen. I don’t know about you, but that is just the best feeling in the world.
Not that it would last, of course.
On the 31st of May, reports started to come in about people going nuts and killing off their commanders. Entire ships started coming up as damaged or completely destroyed. And it wasn’t just in the League. It was also happening in the Republic too, along with a message sent out on Terran channels calling for anyone not from one of their noble houses to overthrow their noble commanders and seize their ships themselves.
The Major had been waiting for something to hit the fan, but she didn’t really know what that something was going to be, or how wide the fan would fling it. The answers were: chaos, and all across human space.
We were in a briefing when word came down that Rear Admiral Circean on the Wallace had narrowly dodged an assassination attempt by her aide. That one report took a lot of the crew from worried and confused to properly pissed off. The Archigos had been part of the Admiral’s task force along the Confederacy Border, and the Rekonin was, at least nominally, filling that same spot. We all liked the Admiral, at least as much as anyone can like a Flag Officer that they rarely see.
Major McKenzie, though, was the one who was hit the hardest. Word came in that Prometheus Station, back in the League home system, had turned into a slaughterhouse. Her father happened to be Fleet Admiral McKenzie, and we all knew that he had just recently returned from an inspection here on the Rekonin back to Prometheus Station. The Major was, quite understandably, worried about him.
After the evening mess that night, she got some relief on that front when we were informed that Fleet Admiral Alastair McKenzie had, by right of position in the line of succession, become President of the League.
It wasn’t long before we had some serious orders drop on our door: Make all speed to Calysto to link up with a massive force that ended up being aimed directly at Earth. Apparently the asshole responsible for the sucker punch at Tel’Erani had survived and had gained control of some fairly impressive tech that he was pointing at humanity’s home.
Look, I’ve learned a lot in the nearly three years that I’ve been out here away from the commune. I know that the Terrans revere Earth to a degree that the rest of humanity kind of doesn’t any more. But that doesn’t mean that we’re blind to the importance of the birthplace of our whole species.
Long story very short: you shouldn’t threaten someone’s home, even if two thirds of them are estranged from that home at the moment.
President McKenzie must have cashed in, like, every single favor he had to pull together enough ships to try and save Earth. Our side was mostly League and Freelance ships. Someone even managed to scrape together an entire fleet of pirates to take a crack at these homeworld-burning assholes.
Our forces clashed like normal for a bit, even though the other side had been augmented with some ridiculous new tech that made most of our weapons look like water guns. I was out with the rest of the fighter squadrons, popping missiles, screening our big ships, taking some opportunistic shots where and when we could, you know, typical fighter ops.
I hate to say it, but we were losing. We had the numbers, but whatever this new tech was that they had found for themselves really made that numerical advantage less of an advantage than anyone would want. It wasn’t looking good for us.
And then, more Terran ships arrived.
If I said that there wasn’t some discussion about punching our collective tickets with a series of ramming runs, I’d be lying. The talk was getting fairly serious until Major McKenzie told us to shut it and pay attention. The new Terran ships were on our side.
Some relic of the pre-Charlemagne days, an old Kali-class Super Dreadnaught, was leading this new fleet and they were charging right in at one of the flanking squads of Bastions. And she was butchering them.
I heard the Major mutter something on an open comm line. Something along the lines of “Damn, the Doctor really armed her up.” but I still have no clue what she was talking about. I was just thrilled that they were on our side. And that we were starting to win.
And then my fighter took one railgun round too many. It punched through the connecting spar holding my wings on and right through my main engine compartment too. My ship gave a hard shudder and started breaking up as I punched out.
…
And that pretty much brings us up to no-
“Lieutenant Morrison? Flash a light if you’re still with us.”
I flailed around a bit until my rotation took me back to facing the battle and saw a Terran shuttle rocketing towards me. I grabbed my survival light and flashed it on and off a few times.
“Got you, Lieutenant. And don’t mind the Terran colors. We’re all working for McKenzie today.”
Minutes later I collapsed back onto a seat in the shuttle cockpit and spared a glance for my rescuer. He was a slim, athletic looking guy, probably pretty close to my age. He looked over at me and grinned.
“I’m Lieutenant Commander Ishmael James. Nominally, I’m the CAG for the Moskva, but we had to choose between fighter tubes and the big guns, so I’m stuck ripping this brick through space.”
A voice cut in over the open comm channel.
“Oh quit your whinging, Ishmael! The big guns were kinda critical to the whole plan, and you know that.”
Lieutenant Commander James rolled his eyes and muted the feed.
“My boss, Captain Dmitri Yen. He gets testy when people start shooting at him.”
“As long as they aren’t shooting at me, he can be as testy as he wants.”
James laughed.
“Well, sit back and enjoy the show. We’re making a beeline for Rekonin to drop you off. Maybe they’ve got a spare fighter for you.”
I groaned.
“Oh they do, and I do want to get back out in the fight, but I think I’ll just get a quick nap in while we’re getting there.”
“Fair enough LT, fair enough!”