Independent Flight

By KL Tremaine

It only seems simple until your plan meets the real world.
Veronica Gray is a promising young officer of the Stellar Alliance’s Interstellar Navy. Assigned to the star carrier Avenger, her copilot, Alyssa Yeboah, is a natural electronic warrior. Together with their three crew members, they are the corvette Dog 207.
Jonah Ress is a down on his luck spacer. Short on spare parts, time, and the patience of his crew. His ship, Arrant Knave, carries a hot cargo and a loan with a lot of strings attached. His first mate, Benjamin “Matt” Mattingly, sees danger at every turn. To get through and settle the bill, they fly the unfriendly skies.

And if Dog 207 gets in the way, that might just be too bad....

• Language: English
• Publisher: KL Tremaine
• Release date: Jun 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311432919

KL Tremaine

K.L. Tremaine lives in Minneapolis with her partner and more electronics than are probably good for her. She lives within walking distance of three lakes. She is a qualified library paraprofessional and has a B.A. in Creative Writing from Augsburg College.

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Independent Flight

K.L. Tremaine

Copyright 2014 by K.L. Tremaine

Smashwords Edition

To every woman who has looked at the night sky, wondering what’s out there.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Independent Flight Text © 2014 K. L. Tremaine. All rights reserved. Published by Artemis Flight Books.

Cover Art © 2014 Azahara Carmona. All rights reserved.

The following fonts are used in this text: Days by Alexander Kalachev (cover, chapter headers) in 14, 28 and 36 point sizes, used under a Creative Commons attribution 3.0 license. Gentium Book Basic by Victor Gaultney (interior text) in 12 point size used under a SIL open font license.

Visit the author online at http://artemisflightbooks.wordpress.com

Visit the cover artist online at http://azayuki.deviantart.com

Acknowledgments

No text comes into the world without a complicated birthing process mediated by the input and assistance of multiple people, who act simultaneously as grandparent, parent and midwife.

Jaclyn Desiree Arceneaux, my primary editor; MinnSpec, Megan Kalka, Penny Horwitz, other members of The Royal Manticoran Navy (http://trmn.org), Betsy Tremaine, and others, who were part of the process of taking the rough clay of my original text and turning it into the words on these pages.

Cary Waterman, Doug Green, Stephan Clark, Kathy Swanson, Dal Liddle, George Rabasa and Cass Dalglish of Augsburg College; and Cecilia Konchar-Farr of St. Catherine University.

Beth Kinderman of Beth Kinderman & the Player Characters, because the TV shows we love the most do drive us to drink, and sometimes to write.

Gene Roddenberry, David Gaider, Seanan McGuire, Kurtis J. Wiebe, Ann Leckie, David Weber, Mercedes Lackey, Gael Baudino, Rachel Gold, Susan Jane Bigelow, and any number of other authors who have influenced turns of phrase and provided a fertile bed of modern culture in which my ideas have germinated.

I wish to have no Connection with any Ship that does not Sail fast for I intend to go in harm’s way.

Captain John Paul Jones

Chapter 1

18th of 1st Month, 343 SE

June 11th, 2529 CE

Space was a perfect, implacable, chill beauty that refused to be simplified. Within the simple sweep of the eye, galaxies beyond count glowed, making a distant carpet of stars and planets that always beckoned with its mysteries. Space was, and its emptiness was both eternal challenge to the bold and eternal caution to the wise.

Veronica Gray anxiously reviewed her assignment packet. She had just completed a successful war gaming series in the Artemis System, and both the twin bars of her Lieutenant rank and the matching second full ring of braid on her cuffs were still shiny. She was the senior passenger on a lightly-populated shuttle with half a dozen Sub-lieutenants and Ensigns (she had to remind herself not to pronounce the lower rank as en-swine, she was a Lieutenant after all, and Lieutenants were supposed to be more mature than to engage in childish mockery of the lower grades!) and perhaps a dozen or so enlisted personnel flying with her.

The photos of her soon to be subordinates gazed back at her from the screen of her tablet. She already knew two of them–one she was close friends with, the other she had learned from–and was closely perusing the files of the other two. The names were a mix of familiar and unfamiliar elements, the results of the inevitable project of cultural mixing of a human species that had been spreading through the galaxy for the last five centuries.

Veronica looked at her reflection in the window, then breathed some frost onto it and traced the outline of a starship with a slender fingertip before the cabin heater wiped away the ice.

The subtle trace of her finger remained. Her mind’s eye filled in the details of the starship she had just left a few days prior–the heavy cruiser Aquarius, pride of the Interstellar Navy. She had been Senior Officer Aboard during the ship’s six-month refit and the two months of shakedown that had followed, which although technically not a captaincy had entitled her to wear the coveted Red Jersey of a starship’s commanding officer. She was still wearing that jersey now; she hadn’t had time to change clothes since she got her new orders and was hustled onto a shuttle less than four hours ago, and in any case she was officially allowed to wear it until she was formally accepted to her new assignment on board the carrier Avenger.

Aquarius was big–at three-quarters of a million tons the Aquila class was almost half again the size of any other heavy cruiser in the fleet–but she was modest compared to a battle carrier. For now Avenger and her task group of fighters and escorts were a mere cluster of tiny chips of heat and light in the distance, but rapidly growing closer. Veronica felt the subtle quiver of the shuttle’s warp engine reversing the focused spacetime distortion that propelled it, dropping velocity at just under 3,000 meters per second-squared. Another slight rumble from the bow marked the uncovering of particle beam maneuvering thrusters for use, and she suppressed a chill of anticipation. The deck of a starship would soon be under her feet again.

She tapped her toes against the shuttle’s flooring. The senior-most passenger was last-on and first-off of a shuttle, a tradition that dated back to the old Interplanetary Solar Space Agency back on Earth and Mars in the 21st Century. It was a perilous tradition; on the fortunately rare occasions when it really mattered, being first-off was far more likely to put an officer in harm’s way than to rush them to safety. But Veronica was hardly in a position to alter it one way or the other.

Measuring eight hundred meters long and massing two million tonnes, Avenger was home to nearly seven thousand people and home base to nearly two hundred fighters, corvettes, bombers, and utility craft. Her companion destroyers and frigates were barely visible, holding formation hundreds of thousands of kilometers away to spread their sensor nets as far as possible. Between the vastness of space and the reach of modern communications, even a close formation spread out beyond any mundane frame of reference.

Corvette crews were doing gear and system checks on their fighters when the Fleet Replenishment Shuttle landed on the deck. A shuttle-sized puff of moist air sighed out into space as the personnel transport slid through the force field barrier, set its wheels down, and rolled to a halt against the landing tractors. The shuttle’s warp engine was still spooling down from its flight and the bow-mounted retro-rockets were cooling from cherry-red, but its wings folded up and a folding ladder unfurled as the primary hatch opened. Veronica made her way down the ladder as soon as the telltale showed green, feeling as though she were almost floating–having grown up in 1.2g, fleet-standard 0.8g felt amazingly light.

Permission to come aboard? A normal combat starship’s boat bay was relatively quiet, but that was because it was relatively small, holding only a single space-to-space pinnace and a handful of transatmospheric shuttles. A carrier’s primary flight deck was a thirty-meter-tall, cacophonous cavern packed with hundreds of craft and she had to strain to be heard over the din.

Permission granted, replied the captain of the side party, a Chief Petty Officer, and reached out to shake her hand.

Chief? I’m Lieutenant Veronica Gray. Veronica took his hand and shook it, showing no lack of strength in her grip. She suddenly felt glaringly conspicuous, a red jersey in a sea of sky blue--fortunately, she would be wearing the same once she reported in.

"Gray, I’m Master Chief Fei Sha, flight engineer for Four on the Floor. He pointed to a nearby spacecraft bearing the number 204 on her nose just above an exaggerated image of a hand on an ancient manual automobile transmission shifter column. My plane commander, Lieutenant Commander Yuliya Saitova." Saitova, a compact woman with nearly-black hair and piercing brown eyes, looked over the new pilot with the practiced eye of a veteran of space combat. Tomcats like Four on the Floor were tremendous hogs of deck, hangar, and elevator space; but the Independence-class carrier was built from the keel out with the oversized fighter corvettes in mind, so they weren’t nearly as awkward as on older carriers laid out for standard fighters. And the sixty-meter craft delivered an unmatched balance of speed, power, and range. I’m glad to be here, Commander. Captain Fox sends his compliments, along with my transfer orders. She held out the data chip.

Thank you, Lieutenant, but you want Captain Baldwin. Saitova pointed to a man in a tan jacket, lazing against the right main-gear tire of another Tomcat. Veronica couldn’t quite make out his face, but she assured herself that it was there. Her cheeks colored as she recognized the newbie mistake she’d made.

"I’d appreciate a place to go freshen