leaned back in her seat, and appeared to be thinking about it. “Of course you have. No one is saying otherwise. But … do you understand the sort of responsibility with which you’ve been entrusted? What’s the typical warload on your Starhawk, when you go out on patrol? I think they used to call it a force package?”
He shrugged. “Depends on the mission parameters. Usually it’s anything between twenty-four and thirty-two Krait smart missiles. And we generally carry a PBP and a KK Gatling.”
“How big a punch on a Krait?”
“Again, it depends. We usually carry a mix, five to fifteen kilotons. More or less for special operations, special mission requirements.”
“So what happens if you get mad someday and fire off a fifteen-kiloton nuclear warhead while you’re still inside one of America’s launch tubes, or maybe on the flight deck?”
“That would never happen!” He was angry at the mere supposition.
“Why not?”
“Well, there are interlocks to prevent that from happening, a munitions release inside the ship or an accidental warhead arming, for one thing. For another … well, damn it, if you don’t trust me with those things, why the hell did you turn me into a pilot?”
He’d actually wondered that for a long time. When he’d been taken into custody by the Peripheral Authority, he’d been handed over to the Department of Education for a series of skills downloads and aptitude testing. He’d scored high—“off the scale,” according to one of the soshtechs—in three-dimensional visualization, navigation, and conceptualization, plus lightning-quick reaction times and low fear thresholds. They’d fast-tracked him from an uneducated Periphery vagrant to pre-flight training level with downloads in spaceflight engineering, basic astronautics, and military history in six months of download hell. They’d followed that with a year of basic Navy OCS at the Academy, then flight training in California and on Mars.
The government had spent something like two thirds of a million creds to raise him from squatter to fighter pilot. And they didn’t trust him?
“It’s not about trust, Lieutenant. It’s about your emotional stability, about whether or not you’re going to have a bad day someday, maybe get pissed off at someone else in the squadron, and in an emotional moment you make a bad decision.” He started to protest, and she gave him a hard look. “It has happened before, hasn’t it?”
“You mean when I decked Howiedoin’ at SupraQuito? That was handled NJP.”
“‘Non-judicial punishment.’ I know. It’s in your record.”
“So I did my time. Got scolded by the Old Woman, restricted to quarters, and lost a month’s pay.”
“But it was a bad decision on your part, wasn’t it?”
“The bastard had it coming.”
“And you’re getting angry and defensive right now, just talking about it. Am I right?”
He was about to tell George to shut up and get out of his face, then realized she was trying to provoke him, trying to prod an emotional reaction out of him. “Don’t tell me what I’m supposed to feel,” he said quietly. “My mind is still my own. So are my feelings.”
“Up to a point, Lieutenant. Up to a certain, and limited, point. What I’m trying to establish is that you boost down those launch tubes almost every day with more firepower at your fingertips than has been expended in all of the wars fought by Humankind since World War I. The jihadist nukes that took out the city centers of Paris, Chicago, and Washington were in the ten- to twelve-kiloton range. The one that got Tel Aviv was a little more, twenty kilotons or so. Your commanding officers—and the Confederation government—need to know that you are stable, competent, and reliable. Naval space aviation requires cool reasoning, a clean organic-cyber network connection, and emotions that are under control. No hotshots. No show-offs. And no one who’s going to go off half-cocked when someone calls him a name, like Prim or monogie.”
Fresh anger flared for an instant. His fists clenched. “Okay!” He forced his fists to relax, then said, more quietly, “Okay. Look, if I’m a risk, a threat to the Navy, kick me out! Send me back to the Periphery!”
“Is that what you really want?”
The reply stopped him cold.
The Authority might have been swinging its mass around when it brought him in, but the truth was that Trevor Gray had really started growing when he joined the Navy. Hell, you could romanticize the free life of the Periphery … but what “free life” really meant was constant raids by other clans and families, near-starvation in the winter if you didn’t have a big enough stock of nano for food, clothing, and clean water, and a short, brutish life span that generally ended with a gang fight, with an accident, or with disease and exposure, all without the healthcare to see you through.
He missed his friends, the others in his TriBeCa Tower family. But in exchange, he’d received an education, social standing, implants, and a purpose … not bad for a filthy gutter kid from the Manhattan Ruins.
“It’s not about what I want,” he insisted, though the words sounded uncertain even to him. “Why even bring me in in the first place? I wasn’t bothering anyone out in the Ruins.”
“The Confederation is dedicated to bringing the benefits of technic civilization to all of its citizens,” she told him.
“Bull. They wanted someone who could fly Starhawks. If they don’t want me to fly, they can send me back to where they found me.”
“It’s not that easy, Lieutenant, and you know it. You—” She broke off in mid-sentence, listening.
“What is it?” Gray asked. She appeared to be receiving a base announcement of some sort. Gray’s in-head circuitry was attuned to the naval Net on board the America, not the Marine version in use here.
“It’s time for us to evacuate, Lieutenant,” she told him. “They’re ordering us topside, right now, to the transports.”
“So where does that leave me?”
“I’m recommending continued therapy, Lieutenant. With me, or with therapy teams on the America, or back at Mars, it doesn’t matter. But you’re going to need to break that PTED cycle before you launch in a Starhawk again.”
And he was dismissed. A Marine escort led him to the shuttle, and he never saw Anna George again.
He did know, however, that he was going to spend a lot of time thinking about just what it was he wanted out of the Navy, and about what the Navy wanted back from him.
Chapter Eleven
26 September 2404
MEF HQ
Landing Pad
Eta Boötis IV
1807 hours, TFT
“This
