Wings of Honor by Craig Andrews (black authors fiction .TXT) 📗

than the others. Some of the pilots asked to join their after-hours practice sessions, while others complained to the commander.

Commander Coleman simply said that personal time was personal time and that he wasn’t going to discipline pilots for working harder than everyone else. After that, the simulator became a buzz of activity, and it became next to impossible to log an extra session.

So Coda spent the time studying the other pilots in excruciating detail, augmenting the notes he’d already begun taking. Subconsciously, Coda knew that when it came to fighting the Baranyk, it wouldn’t matter how well he could fly if he couldn’t understand and outthink his opponent.

For the remainder of the week, he put the strategy into action, leveraging what he knew about the other pilots’ deficiencies to destroy them in battle. When it was all said and done, he, like the rest of his group, had made his mark on the commander’s standings. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the commander’s opinion that he should have been worried about.

20

Commander Chadwick Coleman’s Quarters, SAS Jamestown

Alpha Centauri System, Proxima B, High Orbit

Commander Chadwick Coleman sighed as Lieutenant Hernandez left his quarters. The meeting hadn’t been altogether unexpected. Pilots, after all, left programs for personal reasons all the time, but what had surprised him was who the meeting had been with. Lieutenant Hernandez wasn’t a bad pilot, and his scores were good enough to graduate to the next phase of his training, but if he didn’t think he had what it took, then Coleman wasn’t going to argue with him.

Unbuttoning his uniform, Coleman crossed the small room to his bookshelf, where he poured himself a drink. After a small sip that warmed his body from the inside, he returned to the chair and pulled up the flight roster on his tablet. He found Lieutenant Hernandez’s name in the top fifty and, with a second frustrated sigh, crossed it out.

The pilots had done well, all things considered, in large part because their drone training had translated better than he had expected. Even then, it still wasn’t an equal replacement for basic flight. In his day, any X-23 pilot would have first flown other spacecraft before being selected for the Nighthawk strike fighter program—Commander Coleman himself had built his early reputation on flying long-range reconnaissance vessels, so he’d possessed at least some experience with fast-moving, highly maneuverable spacecraft.

Still, transitioning from the larger, slower ships of the fleet to the X-23 was akin to jumping from a bicycle to a motorcycle. They were similar only in concept. But that concept created a foundation upon which everything else was built. The pilots of Coleman’s squadron didn’t have that foundation, or if they did, it was incomplete, the concrete not yet solidified into something that could be built atop of. That was why they’d logged so many hours in the simulator. During his day, a pilot only had to complete eight hours of simulated flight before moving to the real thing. Most of his pilots had already logged over fifty.

They’re ready… or at least as ready as they’ll ever be.

The only question left was with Lieutenant Hernandez’s sudden departure, would he slide the person from the fifty-first position into the top fifty?

No, Coleman decided. That would be an insult to those who’ve earned it.

It was done then. What had been one hundred was now forty-nine. Only half of the original recruits had made it to the midpoint in their training. He took another sip and set his tablet aside, then sinking deeper into his seat, he rested his head back and closed his eyes.

The tablet buzzed. Coleman was alert in a heartbeat, noticing the red border that now filled the edges of his terminal, noting the priority message.

With the development of the Shaw Drive, humanity had unlocked the keys to faster-than-light travel, but faster-than-light communication was still little more than a science fiction concept. That meant the ships of the fleet were often both battle vessels and mail carriers, carrying important information to other ships in the area like a bucket brigade. For high-priority messages, though, command leveraged courier drones whose sole mission was to jump to a single location via a jumpgate and deliver its message. Even with the receiving vessels reusing the courier drones for subsequent communications, the system was beyond expensive and only available to those with a captain’s rank or higher. Whoever had sent him the message had gone to a lot of trouble for him to get it as quickly as possible.

Commander Coleman played the message. The man on the screen was in his early sixties, his skin smooth and showing little sign of his age. His hair, however, was pure white, matching his admiral’s uniform, and styled meticulously. But Admiral Orlovsky’s lively blue eyes were bloodshot and rimmed by dark circles, as if he hadn’t slept in days.

“Commander,” the recording of Admiral Orlovsky said, “enclosed, you’ll find footage of a recent Baranyk encounter. The target was the mining colony of Numina 3, and as you’ll see, the enemy once again employed the use of their Disrupter. Despite recent fleet R&D upgrades, our forces were still rendered inoperable. The colony was lost, as were the Boston and Charleston.”

The admiral paused, taking a deep breath. The hardness of his eyes melted away, and the façade of command disappeared as the admiral turned into the man Coleman had known for his entire military career.

“They’re going for our supply lines, Chadwick. Destroying not only our drones, but our ability to manufacture more. The courier carrying this message is equipped with a new Shaw Drive prototype. I need your report, including roster updates, capabilities, and battle readiness. And, Chadwick, I hope your work is going better than it is out here, because we’re going to need your pilots. We’re going to need you. I look forward to your report. Good luck, Commander.”

The image of the admiral disappeared as the screen faded to black. Coleman sat there for several moments before toggling the vid attached to the message.