ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

PART FIVE

“On course, Commander,” Colonel Akamas reported to Aeneas when the latter arrived on the bridge. “One centare from our initial warp point. Colonel Sark reports that the new duty schedule for the squadrons has been put into effect.”
“Good. Estimated time to our target area?”
“Colonel Klymene puts it at six standard days, four centares, twenty seven centons, my lord. Four jumps in all. ‘Target area?’� he added.
“Force of habit. Perhaps ‘destination’ would be better.”
“It pays to be cautious, my lord,” Akamas agreed. “Do you want anything set up in advance?”
“When we arrive, I want one striker squadron set up for ground attack—nuclear weapons—and the other for ship-to-ship stuff. Missiles and rail guns.”
“Consider it done, my lord. You really think we’re sailing into something?” Akamas added, lowering his voice so the bridge crew couldn’t overhear.
“I don’t know. Half of me hopes we find something…and the other half doesn’t.”

Apollo spent a few centares making certain that his squadron was properly settled into their new quarters and that their vipers and equipment were in place and being tended. Half of  Blue squadron’s vipers were suspended from handling cranes near the hangar bay ceiling, but that was the normal state of affairs aboard the Columbia; viper fighters were small, but strikers took up four times the space and Columbia had two full squadrons of them.
His inspection completed, he recalled Miriam’s invitation to drop by the simulators, so he once again checked the ship’s deck diagrams and made his way to the striker simulator chamber.
In the control room, several striker crews were standing around watching the monitors, men and women both, dressed in black flight suits, helmets and gloves lying on convenient flat surfaces around the room. They and the two techs running the simulator were chatting back and forth in Sagitaran but when they noticed his presence they switched over to Standard out of politeness.
Miriam turned and said, “They’re about finished in there, in more ways than one.” Her weapons officer, a short, handsome Sagitaran named Sarpedon, smiled and nodded.
“Trouble?” Apollo asked.
“Just watch…oh, too late,” said Miriam.
“They hit that hill on pull-up. Told you they would,” Sarpedon said to Miriam. “I told those twits about that hidden gun, but nooooo…..”
In a centon, two exhausted-looking warriors staggered out of the simulator, both of them dripping sweat. “Unfair,” the pilot complained.
“In what way?” Miriam asked dryly.
“The ground came up and hit us.”
“Yes, we’ll discuss that later,” Miriam said.
The next crew went on into the simulator as the techs set up the next flight program.
“Ever flown a striker, Captain?” Sarpedon asked.
“No, I haven’t.”
“You should,” Sarpedon advised.
“He’s right,” Miriam agreed. “Sarpedon, go find the Captain a flight suit and a helmet. You should find out what you’re missing,” she told Apollo.
Redressed in the black striker crew flight suit, Apollo followed Sarpedon back into the simulator control room, where the crews were hooting derisively at the apparently futile efforts of the crew in the simulator. Leaning over the shoulder of the one of the pilots to watch the happenings on a monitor, it abruptly occurred to Apollo that he was, by a surprising margin, the tallest person in the room. Finding Miriam and drawing her back slightly from the others, he asked, “Why is everyone so short or should I be polite and not ask?”
“G-resistance,” she replied. “You viper pilots have it easy-in space you’re cushioned by your drive field and in atmosphere on conventional engines you’re structurally limited to about four Gs. A striker can pull over nine.”
“I’m beginning to have second thoughts about this.”
“You’ll love it. It’s real flying; not that crap you do,” Miriam replied.
Ignoring the implied slight to viper pilots, he said, “I seem to recall hearing you imply that you were getting past it yourself.”
“I only think that way in the morning,” Miriam replied.
Too soon, it seemed to Apollo, it was their turn to go in. The simulator was a featureless black chamber, in the center of which sat a strike fighter cockpit section. There was a second room next door with another striker cockpit; either two different training missions could be flown simultaneously or the two could be joined to permit the two simulators to fly a joint mission or adversary tactics.
The two-person crew of a striker sat side-by-side, the pilot on the left, the weapons officer on the right. For such a large ship, the cockpit was startlingly compact. Apollo fit into the right-hand seat snugly. A ground crewman was present and leaned in to strap him in tightly, then went around to the other side to help Miriam do the same. He stepped back and the canopies, split down the center, swung down and locked.
“Ready?” Miriam asked, checking her switch settings.
“Not entirely, but let’s get it over with.”
“Simulator One, ready,” she reported.
“This is simulator control,” one of the techs said over their helmet headphones. “This is a ground attack mission in the Borallus theater. Your target is a group of nomen in approximately company strength massing for an attack on a Colonial fire base. Your weapons load is 12 200 kilo anti-personnel bombs with standoff fusing, plus a full load of cannon ammunition. Your navigational information is loaded.”
“Should I do anything?” Apollo asked.
“I can run most of it from here, and we shouldn’t need countermeasures. Just kick back and enjoy the ride.”
“Right.” Apollo squirmed a little, looked at his seat more closely, said, “Is this an ejection seat?”
“Yes, that is an ejection seat. We use stripped-down strikers on Borallus. Don’t worry, it’s a replica. Simulator Control, you may begin.”
Suddenly they were on Borallus, sitting at the end of a runway with the engines idling. The sky was a brilliant, hard blue, with sparse drifts of ice crystals high in the atmosphere the only visible clouds. The gravitic field of the simulator accurately reproduced the slightly higher gravity and even through the thick armor glass of the canopy Apollo could feel the oppressive heat of Borallus’ sun. The illusion was entirely convincing.
“This is a ramp takeoff,” the simulator control tech announced. “Ramp is up and locked.”
“What’s a ramp takeoff?” Apollo asked. “Why don’t we just…take off?”
“On Borallus, the gravitic drive goes the same place as the escape capsule. We strip it out so we can carry more payload.”
“But the ramp?”
“It gives you enough impetus to get airborne without a full-length takeoff run. Keeps the base smaller, the area we have to defend with ground troops more compact. The war on Borallus is really out of hand, in case you hadn’t heard.”
I guess I hadn’t, Apollo thought, considering the implications. My God.
“Gamma leader is ready for takeoff,” she informed the simulator tech.
“Cleared, gamma leader.”
Miriam pushed the throttles all the way forward and into the afterburner detents. As the engines spooled up she released the brakes and the striker began to roll, every bump and ripple in the sun-baked concrete runway reproduced perfectly. The ramp ahead of them seemed to Apollo to come up too quickly. Surely they weren’t going to have the speed….
The striker’s nose gear hit the ramp with a bang, then the mains, and suddenly Apollo felt a horrible sinking sensation as it got airborne, wings clawing for lift, engines screaming. We’re going to crash, he thought, unable in spite of knowing it was a simulation to resist shrinking back in his seat.
But the striker leveled off and began to climb, Miriam turning it onto their attack vector. They had reached perhaps three hundred metrons altitude—not what Apollo would consider a healthy cruising level but far enough off the ground to seem fairly safe—when she pushed the nose down and pulled out of the dive maybe fifty metrons off the ground.
The tortured landscape streaked past below them, blurs of sand and rock. Apollo had to look away; he glanced over at Miriam. Her eyes, all of her that was left visible by her flight suit and helmet, were looking far ahead, her right hand wrapped firmly around the stick grip, left on the throttles. She seemed confident; not relaxed but sure of herself.
The autocontrol was off; she was flying manually.
Apollo forced himself with difficulty to look back out the windscreen. This is only a simulation, he told himself. Then the thought hit; Lords, she does this for real.
“Target coming up,” Miriam said, sweeping around a tall spire of rock. She pushed a button on the stick grip and a holographic display sprang up around them, presenting information on the surrounding terrain, targets, and threats. The viper had been intended to have such a display-Apollo had had the chance to test it once and had loved it-but people who had never been in a cockpit in combat had deleted it for budgetary reasons. “Master arm on. The weapons selector panel is on your left flatscreen display. Just touch the indicator that says �Master Arm.’�
Apollo did so. “Master arm on,” he confirmed. His center display now showed a diagram of the striker’s weaponry, 12 bombs, six on the belly pylon, three under each glove vane. “Anything else?”
“Touch all the pylons. That will set them to go together. No such thing as a second pass on Borallus. No need to mess with the fusing,” she added.
Apollo did as directed; the previously gray bombs turned green on the display.
“OK, here we go,” she said.
A hill was coming up fast; she eased up and over it, and pushed the stick forward even before they’d cleared the summit.
“Right where they’re supposed to be,” Miriam said, easing the throttles back a touch. The nomen, according to the target display, were moving down the draw at the bottom of the hill, heading for a Colonial base at its far end. Apollo could see nothing but a blur, but at the moment the weapons dropped he thought he caught a glimpse of figures crouching amidst rocks and rilles; he certainly saw the muzzle flash of someone taking a shot at them, then the striker leaped upward as the dead weight and drag of the bombs left it.
“Weapons gone,” Miriam said, hauling the striker hard around a spur of rock; she clearly had chosen that escape route to get them out of weapons range of the nomen as quickly as possible. “Looks like we hit them; I saw a couple of nice secondaries in the mirrors.” Apollo turned and looked; he could see several columns of black smoke rising behind them.
They rose up and away from the bloody sand and rocks of Borallus into the clear blue sky. Apollo asked, “Do you ever get used to it?”
“Flying strikers?”
“Killing people,” he said, more harshly than he’d intended.
She shot back, “I’m not going to give you a history lesson—you should bloody know this—but suffice it to say that the nomen failed to have anything resembling a decent reason for wiping out our outposts when the first revolt began, twenty yahrens ago. They kill everything they get hold of, men, women, children, pets. They rape everything first, then torture it, then they kill it. I suppose you feel clean and noble fighting the Cylons; that’s like shooting a blasted toaster!”
“That’s a war for survival, this is a war for tylium.”
“Tylium is survival. Apollo, would you try not to be an astrum for a few centons?”
“Killing living beings….”
“What the hell would you do if we were attacked by living beings? Roll over and let them butcher us?”
“The nomen….”
“The nomen are monsters.” Miriam realized she was hyperventilating and fought to control her breathing. Apollo, you sanctimonious.... she thought, remembering. Remembering Borallus, the friends she’d lost, one of whom she’d killed herself to prevent her capture by the nomen, remembering her own last tour there, little more than a yahren and a half ago…she and Sarpedon had taken a hit from a missile, had had to eject. On the way down under her parachute someone on the ground had started shooting at her, and a bullet had caught her under her right breast and exited through the top of her right shoulder. She remembering being more concerned that the pierced strap of her parachute might not hold than by the wound, at first. The ground came up rather suddenly and she did not make a very good landing; getting the parachute unfastened was a chore; with torn muscles all over the right side of her body she could hardly use her right arm. The pain of a collapsing lung hit her all at once as she was reaching for her survival radio and she fell to her knees in agony. Gods that hurt…. Sitting in the simulator now she could almost feel it. She’d heard a noise behind her, hoped it was Sarpedon, who must have landed nearby. It was a nomen. With difficulty she got her slug pistol out of its shoulder holster and leveled it at him left-handed. The nomen bared his teeth in a ferocious grin. He did not bother reaching for his laser boles; he was clearly unafraid of her, small and female and Colonial as she was. He was perhaps ten metrons away. She put two bullets into his chest; she had loaded the pistol herself and selected the ammunition for maximum effect; alternating rounds of hardball and hollowpoints; hardball in case the nomen wore body armor, hollowpoint for knockdown effect. Both shots hit him and he didn’t even react. She gripped the pistol with both hands, fired two more rounds, both hits into the chest; nothing. He was a metron away and reaching for her gun. She leveled it and punched two more rounds through his face. The nomen had a micron to look surprised before a bullet from behind blew his face off in a pink cloud.
“Frack!” she heard Sarpedon say. “Sorry I’m late, Miri…frack, you’ve been shot!”
Very good, Sarpedon, she thought, and fainted.
Coming back to the present, she glared over at Apollo again. Do you ever get used to it, killing people? How the hades dare he?
Apollo shrank back from her glare. He had seen her angry before, but never like this.
“And who gives you the right to judge me?” she asked, her voice quiet and dangerous. “On Sagitara I would call you out for that.”
“You’d what?” Apollo was unfamiliar with the term.
“Never mind,” she muttered. “You’re Caprican; I couldn’t anyway. Besides, there is Amala.”
Apollo looked away, wondering at her terminology. Call you out…what does that mean? he wondered. For the first time he noticed, startled, that there was a striker off their right wingtip, flying along patiently in formation. Where the heck did that come from? “Miriam?”
“What?” she snapped.
“Are we supposed to have company?”
“Company?” She looked around. “No. Someone wants to hassle. Well, let them,” she said, and banked away hard. The other striker did the same, turning hard away in the other direction.
“Master arm on,” Miriam said, adding, “The gun this time.”
Apollo did so, then held on for the ride.
She pulled the stick back hard and they were climbing, with the other fighter just ahead of them, just out of gun range, in a vertical rolling scissors, each striker trying to turn in on the other to bring its cannon to bear. Abruptly the lead striker seemed to stop dead in the air; it actually dropped backwards a short distance before its nose dropped and turned towards them.
“Nice try,” Miriam remarked, going evasive. The G forces came up again; Apollo’s vision blurred, started to break up into spots. The other striker dove past them. Apollo wanted to turn his head to watch but realized that he simply could not turn his head, which suddenly weighed eight or nine times what it normally did. Out of the corner of his eye he saw, disbelieving, Miriam’s head turning to look. That explained where the surprising muscles in her shoulders and neck came from.
Putting the striker’s nose down, she followed the other striker back towards the sands of Borallus. Full power on, they were not gaining in the least, flying against an equal adversary.
“I know what he’s going to do,” Miriam commented professionally. She pressed a switch on the throttles and the speed brakes snapped open just as the striker ahead deployed its own speed brakes. “Thought he could make us overshoot.”
Both strikers retracted their speed brakes, leveled off, racing along a thousand metrons or so off the rock-strewn dunes below.
“If we had missiles….”
“Waste of payload on Borallus. The nomen don’t have an air force—yet. Suppose that’s the next thing the Cylons will ship them.”
“Then it’s a standoff. He’s just as fast as we are.”
“In the real world, yes. But he wants to fight.”
The striker ahead of them did one of the tightest reversals Apollo had ever seen outside of zero G. Miriam jinked to foil the other striker’s gunnery solution, then pulled around hard to follow. That did it for Apollo. When he regained consciousness a few microns later the two strikers were once again heavily engaged in a turning contest.
“Make a mistake, damn you,” Miriam muttered.
Thankfully, Apollo watched woozily as the other pilot did. He tried another reversal, was just too close, and Miriam put a burst of shells into his flight path. Most of them hit the other striker; it exploded into a bright smear of flames and thick black smoke and plunged headlong into the desert below.
And then the simulator deactivated and they were sitting in a dead cockpit in a blank black room. Apollo realized that his heart was pounding, sweat pouring down his body. He blinked, forced himself to ease down as the adrenaline started to drain from his system. On her side of the cockpit, Miriam was calmly resetting switches, looking little the worse for wear. Finished, she opened the canopies, popped her harness and climbed out. Apollo undid his own harness and exited rather more shakily. He leaned back against the simulator’s abbreviated fuselage, utterly wrung out.
The door opened and a pilot dressed in the same black flight suits as they wore strolled in. Commander Aeneas smiled and greeted Miriam, “Well fought, cousin.”
“Keeping your aging hand in?” Miriam replied.
“Aging? Never. What do you think of striker flying, Captain?” he asked Apollo.
“It’s different,” Apollo said.
“Mmmm,” said Aeneas.
They exited into the control room. “All right, Sarpedon, let’s go,” Miriam said, adding to the control techs, “And give us something more challenging than that, would you?”
“As challenging as you like, my lady,” the senior tech replied.
Apollo glanced around the room at the waiting striker crews. They were, he decided, some of the hardest-looking people he’d ever seen. Hard, and proud of it, and obviously contemptuous that he had practically staggered out of the simulator.
As they strapped in, Sarpedon commented to Miriam, “You should have called him out. It would have been fun to watch.” He had been listening to their cockpit voice feed.
“It would have lasted about six seconds,” Miriam replied dryly. “Apollo’s had a different war than we have.”
“He’s been living in fairyland compared to what we do.”
“Yep. Simulator One is ready,” she reported, and returned to her own war.

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