The Lost Aria (Earth Song Book 3) Read online

  "Is this a good idea?" Minu wondered aloud as they immersed into the buzz of other craft. The old transports were known for finicky guidance control systems.

  Like the rest of the craft, the avionics were not original. The vehicle weaved and dodged with unerring accuracy even as the other craft swerved wildly to avoid the sudden appearance of the blazing transport. At twice the size of most other vehicles, it maneuvered like it was a tenth the size. True to Aaron's words, 11 Gs of gravitic impellers made for a smooth ride. They dove deep into the afternoon traffic pattern, dodging still more vehicles and now navigating between buildings. One last hard turn and a small park came into view. Almost before Minu recognized the clearing, the transport flared nose up and came down with almost no sense of motion.

  "We need a little of the sense of motion to get through so the crew know what's going on," Minu said to Ted who nodded in agreement.

  "Other test pilots have said the same thing."

  "It's almost like flying a video game like this," Aaron also agreed. “We don't want them taking risks because they have 'lives' left.”

  The transport settled and doors opened, and kept opening! Each transport originally came with two doors, one passenger door on the left and a cargo door in the rear. This transport now sported three more doors. One opposite the original left hand forward, and two more behind those. She turned around and saw the rear cargo door was now the entire width of the craft allowing the loading of anything as long as it matched the interior dimension. Aaron flipped a switch and low couches rose from the floor just as a platoon of soldiers swarmed aboard. It was stunning to watch her training in action for real. The original transport, with only two doors, was difficult to load and egress quickly, taking more than ten seconds no matter what she tried. With five doors the platoon swarmed aboard in less than five seconds.

  As the last man's boots cleared the door all five closed and the craft threw itself back into the air. Outside in the park Minu caught a glimpse of civilians standing around, jaws hanging down as they watched the spectacle of a military exercise in their midst. But she only had an instant before the transport spun and rocketed back into traffic, following an entirely different extraction route than it had on coming in. A glance at her troops showed a healthy mixture of exhilaration and fear among their faces. A petite blond, Denise, not much taller than Minu, sat in the second squad. That meant this was first battalion, A-company. Minu looked but couldn't find their Chosen lieutenant so she asked where he was.

  “Didn't make the trip,” the Saber sergeant said.

  Minu gave Ted a look and he explained. “This was not scheduled. The men volunteered since they were in town here and wanted a ride home.”

  “And there just happened to be a full platoon of soldiers from the same unit handy?” Everyone grinned and a few chuckled. “You guys are a real pain in my ass some times.” Open laughter was her answer this time. She shook her head and turned back to Aaron, but he was smiling too. They'd cleared the city’s traffic and were accelerating past the speed of sound. "Well done," she told her friend and patted him on the shoulder. He didn't turn from the controls though she saw him wink.

  "Yeah?" Aaron said and patted the controls, "Watch this."

  They reversed course and rocketed into the city a second time. For a moment it appeared they were going in the same as before. But as they swung around the main avenue the transport suddenly stopped and ascended like an elevator next to a high rise hotel. Clearing the roof, it angled sideways and set down just as nicely as the previous time. All five doors swung open and five seconds later the soldiers were gone. Aaron punched the throttle, doors closing as they vaulted off the side of the building. Minu saw the excuse of a ride home disappear as they left the men behind. She'd known it was all a setup when they landed and the soldiers piled in.

  "Very well done," Minu admitted. Aaron and Ted grinned at each other. "It's a transport all right. But then again it already was, just not as well suited for what we wanted. So you've boosted the avionics, improved the propulsion system, and punched a couple holes in the hull. What else can it do?"

  "Next," Ted said. Aaron nodded and climbed away from Leavenworth, turning east and heading towards the valley past the city.

  "Here we go," Aaron said. He flipped a control, and the transport began to change. It was disconcerting to sit there and see the transports interior narrow and flatten. Her seat reclined and those which had appeared in the rear fell back into the floor. The window widened and lengthened as well, vastly increasing the pilot’s arc of visibility even though it became shorter. Through the smaller side windows she could see long sleek pods extending from the hull on sturdy thin wings.

  "Oh my," she said in amazement.

  "You haven't seen anything yet," Ted said soberly.

  Aaron took the controls in both hands and put the now fighter through its paces. He nosed over into an eleven G dive pulling out at the last second hard enough that Minu felt the stomach lurching maneuver even through the powerful compensator. He did barrel rolls, a couple of split S, an Immelmann or two, and finished it all off with a vertical ascent where he shoved the throttle as far ahead as it could go. The impellers screamed each time the fighter broke the sound barrier, sending shock waves thumping in quick order through the hull. Outside the blue green sky turned purple, and slowly continued to darken.

  "Better level her out Aaron," Ted warned, "we haven't worked out the program for reentry yet."

  "You mean it can go into orbit?" Minu said in awe.

  "Oh, certainly," Ted said, "and probably to another planet. Romulus or Remus at least, if you want." Minu looked up as Aaron leveled the flight path. The pale green face of Remus moved slowly above their heads, tantalizingly close. She'd only recently watched an ancient movie called The Right Stuff. Floating at the edge of space set her mind off on flights of fancy and raised the hairs on her arms. She silently chided herself for getting excited about flying into space when she'd traveled thousands of light years with a single step. "The big problem is the life support. It's really only good for a few hours, and we don't have it worked out we haven't worked out re-entry without burning up, and I'm not sure how effective the impellers will be with less gravity to push against once you're out of orbit."

  "But it is possible, right?" Minu asked. He nodded his head and eyed her. Minu's mind was working overtime, whirling with the possibilities, plans churning, probabilities colliding. She heard a groan of metal fatigue and looked down. She'd been grasping the chairs with her cybernetic right arm so tightly she'd bent the hand rest. "Sorry about that," she told Ted.

  "It's just a prototype," he said nonchalantly but eyed the damage with a slight frown.

  As the ship nosed over Minu could clearly see the curvature of Bellatrix from the edge of space. There was the great equatorial sea, several thousand kilometers away, and the mountains extending away from Steven's Pass below them. Even the view from her aerocar at fifty thousand meters couldn't compare to this. It was exhilarating, and addictive. Floating there like that, she felt like one of the old Mercury astronauts on Earth. "How did you do this?" she asked.

  “Not telling our secrets yet,” Ted said.

  "We still haven't shown off her teeth," Aaron said as they raced down as fast as or faster than they'd gone up.

  A smooth as glass eleven G pullout brought them out low over the western plains of the great equatorial desert approximately a thousand kilometers from the distant ocean. The fighter was doing at least twice the speed of sound. Aaron tapped in commands and slid a one eye reticule visor down over his head. "Now you’re going to see some serious shit," he said. He pulled the fighter over hard enough to take the breath from her lungs. Suddenly the empty desert gave way to an encampment. She could see personnel carriers, portable troop barracks and weapons emplacements. Minu felt a shudder through the fuselage as streaks of light leaped from both wings. Both personnel carriers vaporized as the fighter rocketed over the camp at less than ten meters above
the sand. Aaron started banking one way, then reversed his turn. Minu had the impression of a streak of light flying through the space they would have occupied had he not reversed his turn.

  "Impressive simulations," Minu said as she felt the Gs.

  "What makes you think it's a simulation?" Ted asked.

  Half way through the turn to bring them back in line for another attack something hit them like a hammer. Outside the air glowed orange for an instant and an alarm chirped on the console. "Gregg's too good a shot for his own damn good," Aaron said calmly.

  "Tell me that beamcaster was turned down," Minu said. No one answered her and for the first time she felt her heart start to race. This was a real world test she was part of. Might have been nice if they'd warned her beforehand. They either meant to show off, or were ready to put this craft through its paces.

  More beams of energy danced by as somewhere below Gregg did his best to blow them out of the sky. The cool, calculating part of her brain noted that there were too many shots for one weapon and she wondered how many Chosen were down there trying to kill them. Did any of them have a vested interest in seeing her die, or this test failing? Had her friends thought that through? They finished their mach speed turn and came back on target. Another beamcaster scored a direct hit. The flash of light and wash of reddish colors was a clear statement that these were full powered weapons. Without the shields they would have died instantly, bodies flashed boiled into a cloud of chemicals and water vapor. The chirping alarm became a buzzer.

  "How many more can we take?" she asked.

  "Shhh," Aaron snapped, the reticule over his eye glowing green as he squinted, trying to find the gunners. Minu held her peace so he could do his job and Aaron slapped a control. The sound of power relays snapping loudly could be heard somewhere under her feet and the fighters beamcasters came alive pulsing bolt after deadly bolt into the enemy camp. Unlike before there were no balls of fire or spinning debris (the troop transports must have been loaded with explosives for effect). The beamcasters cut swaths of destruction through the camp like a surgical knife. Both troop barracks were sliced in half, bursting into flames, and the beams continued onward to cut through weapons emplacements. The volume of fire coming at them was halved.

  Minu knew even with the fire lessened they'd probably score a couple more hits and the shields wouldn't last. Aaron held steady as they raced over the camp, giving Minu a good look at the smoking remnants of the two destroyed weapons emplacements. There was no sign of any dead operators. She'd known that must be the case, but the simulated attack was too realistic to allow that kind of assumption.

  Another beamcaster hit the shield which glowed blue this time, the alarm became a loud ringing. It seemed that Aaron was waiting to be hit because the instant the shot scored he laid over on the controls and back as hard as he could. Even through the compensator they felt several Gs push them into their seats and the hull groaned in protest. He cut the throttle and reversed it. Minu didn't think she'd ever felt herself pulled in more directions at the same time and wondered just how much time Aaron had spent familiarizing himself with the craft.

  The maneuver flipped them over and turned them back, a split S, now facing the camp once more at a surprisingly short distance from the center. Aaron flipped a control and stabbed at the joystick. From under the fighter came flashes of laser light and dancing plasma. "Shock rifles!" she said, a laugh in her voice. The chin mounted side by side weapons with their high firing rate raked back and forth across the camp like a buzz saw. Aaron fired the beamcasters a couple times for good measures, sweeping the enemy camp clear of anything man made and leaving only smoking ruin and mangled debris in his wake. "Very impressive," she said, almost in a whisper. It was like watching a movie unfold.

  "Damn fool maneuver," Ted snapped from behind. He looked pale and she suddenly remembered he was a very old man.

  "Are you okay?" Minu asked, reaching over to touch his hand. It was a little clammy.

  "He'll be fine," Aaron laughed. "He’s just freaking out because a few of the systems were hit and miss in testing."

  "Like the structural integrity boosters," Ted said and slapped Aaron in back of the head with the flat of his hand.

  "Ow!"

  "Okay, explain," Minu ordered them.

  Since Aaron was massaging his head, Ted took it up. "That little transformation we did to turn this into a fighter is managed by basically taking the transport apart and not bolting it back together." Minu gave him an open jawed look of confusion. "Instead of bolts, welds, and such, we use magnetically powered couplers and forcefields."

  "Are you telling me the only thing holding this together is magnets?" Aaron looked at Ted and Ted looked back at him.

  "Yeah," Aaron said.

  "Basically, yes," Ted agreed. Minu looked agog. “The cockpit and a few critical systems are structurally held together by flexible dualloy assemblies, so should the systems fail there is a small measure of survivability.”

  "Small measure?” Minu gasped. “So if you turn the power off it just falls apart?"

  "No, but it becomes unstable on the various hinge points that allow it to change shape. And considering this smart ass was pulling those maneuvers at more than the speed of sound..."

  "If the fields failed we would have been torn to pieces," Aaron finished for him, "but that wasn't going to happen."

  "You seem so sure," Ted said sarcastically, "considering we had a critical failure during testing only a week ago."

  "That was a week ago."

  "Would you two quit," Minu snapped, "is this thing ready or not?"

  "Yes" "Sort of" were their answers. She wasn't sure who said which.

  "What about the third mode?"

  "We're still working on that," Ted admitted.

  "Good enough," Minu said, “let’s head home.”

  "Thanks for the workout," Aaron said into his headset. Minu thought she heard something about asshole and cheater come from the headset but Aaron just grinned as he turned and accelerated them towards Steven's Pass. Minu was smiling herself, she wanted to know how and why they had done it this way, but she had her multi-role fighter/transport.

  The flight back took a few minutes, but it was long enough for Ted to explain his methodology. In engineering a new craft from the ground up they’d run into the same problem as Minu in building her shock rifles. Too many Concordian technologies just didn't work with human engineered components, and they needed too many things that were hard to come by. The team had taken one of the badly damaged transports she'd used in the series of war games and started using it as a test bed for various techniques, including the ground breaking structural integrity fields an idea Gregg had heard about from an old science fiction television show, of all places. A few weeks ago they realized that all the planned features and components had been built into the test bed transport. It wasn't the transport anymore; it had accidentally transformed into the intended end product. They’d abandoned the new ship, cannibalized it for parts, the remains of which Minu had despaired over, and finished the first working model.

  That model was recently destroyed by the mentioned unexpected failure of the structural integrity fields, but the problem was worked out and this subsequent model was perfect. She'd stumbled into the office on the day of the finished product’s maiden combat test run. “Pure coincidence,” Ted assured her. “The systems integration went flawlessly.”

  "So what are you calling them?" she asked.

  "We thought we'd leave that up to you, boss." Minu looked at Aaron and thought. By the time they were landing back at Steven's Pass, she’d made up her mind.

  Chapter 9

  Octember 22nd, 521 AE

  Leavenworth, New Jerusalem Tribe Territory

  Hard to believe it had only been a few hours since she'd flown over this town at Mach two. It looked different at cruising speed as Minu approached in her trusty bright red aerocar. The city of Leavenworth was alive with traffic, lights and sounds as night app
roached. She marveled at how much the city had grown in the few years since she'd first visited. Fans of old Earth history often made the comparison between Leavenworth and Manhattan. Her happy recollections were brought to an end when she remembered the reason for her first trip to this city. She cursed silently at herself. That first weekend of romance and love with Christian was a life changing event, in more ways than one.

  Minu handed the cars control over to the city traffic management network, allowing it to guide her into a landing in one of the interface zones around the perimeter of the city. It was illegal to land a flying craft inside the city traffic zone except in a designated parking area. They all charged for the luxury now. She had to wonder if she was going to have issues to deal with tomorrow after Ted and Aaron's little display worked its way through the news. It was hard to miss a ten meter long fighter flying through your town at the speed of sound.

  Once on the ground and using wheels instead of impellers, she steered through the busy twilight traffic towards a familiar building. It was once one of the tallest casinos, now it was just average. The Dunes was named after a hotel in the old Earth city of Las Vegas, the model used when Leavenworth was first conceived. The cities even shared the same nickname, Sin City. Lucky for her, she really didn't believe in sin. Minu didn't believe being a Chosen went well with the theory of sin or most religious doctrines in general. She knew there were some observant religious Chosen, but like the rest of the religious in their world, they were in the minority.

  She navigated her car through the thick ground traffic. Designed to ply the skies, it was a tad clunky on the ground. The wheels were half the size of a traditional ground car, and the suspension even more reduced. It added up to a slow turning, poor handling ground car. Luckily it was only a short drive from the landing zone to her destination.