Starcorp 1: Escape from Sol
More Time

“Hi,” Sawyer greeted with a sigh of relief.

“Hi,” CC returned with a bewildered look.

For the next several seconds, an awkward silence existed between them. They had nothing prepared to say to the other beyond this greeting. CC was the first person that Sawyer wanted to see after the battle. The sight of him was equally important to her.

“Are you okay?” Sawyer inquired after taking notice of her dazed demeanor.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” CC reported with a lack of conviction.

CC took a second to recognize that she was displaying a look of distress and then confessed to the cause of it.

“It was scary.”

“Don’t go back out there,” Sawyer returned with a quick response.

“I’m not quitting,” CC retorted with a shake of her head.

“You don’t have to do this,” Sawyer pleaded back at her.

“I’m not quitting,” CC spoke back with an intonation of resolve.

The two of them settled on that statement as the last word on this subject. They took a moment to make this agreement with silent stares. At the end of this CC became distracted by someone in her space capsule. After taking a moment to note this person with a look and a wave, she turned back to Sawyer with a report.

“It’s Marvin, I’ll bring him on.”

Martin and CC were situated inside the same space capsule with forty-four other members of the 2nd Wing. Sawyer was situated in a space capsule occupied by members of the 1st Wing. The conversation between them was being teleconferenced through Orion’s communication system. Among the mow pilots space, capsule allocations were based on their pilot status and their assigned fighter wing. Active pilots, or pilots assigned to a mow and to a wing, were kept grouped according to these assignments. Reserve pilots were kept together, but their capsule groupings were random. All the mow pilots that were a part of the battle were sent back to their space capsules for food and rest. For reasons of safety, the habitat portion of the basestar was shut down for the duration of this engagement. Space capsules were the bomb shelters of a basestar.

Being in separate space capsules caused only one restriction on communications, conversing could not be done face to face. In all other respects, communication was enhanced. Space capsules were communication hubs. This was built into them. Every space capsule was a functional command and control center. They were all capable of operating the spaceship it was in. This was a mandated safety feature that was put in place to address a situation where the designated command and control space capsule was damaged or destroyed.

Sawyer initiated this conversation with CC through the communication system built into his acceleration pod. He had plans to speak with Oscar and Martin as well, but they were not the priority at this moment. He knew that they both had survived the battle. The Orion mainframe was perpetually updating a list of the dead, injured and missing in real time. This was the first thing he looked at when he got back aboard the basestar. When he saw that CC’s name was on the list of the returned, he was quick to make contact with her.

“Hi,” Marvin greeted in a somber voice.

“Hi, Marvin,” Sawyer greeted back in an equally solemn tone.

Sawyer was not at all surprised by Marvin’s sudden appearance on his monitor, side by side with CC. He was accustomed to conversing with multiple individuals in this manner. He would have initiated this party connection if he had not wanted to speak with CC alone.

“Are you okay?” Sawyer questioned after an awkward pause.

Sawyer’s question prompted a snicker out of Marvin that came ahead of a sarcastic reply.

“Oh yeah, I’m having a great day.”

CC and Sawyer briefly chuckled in reaction to this report.

“Yeah, that was intense,” CC declared behind her laugh.

The three of them laughed again. After a grin, Sawyer added his jest to the conversation.

“Live fire definitely adds an exciting new dimension to the game.”

“Yeah,” Marvin agreed with a laugh. “Too bad it wasn’t in the arcade game.”

Once again, the three of them broke into laughter. Shortly into this, a blinking icon appeared along the bottom of Sawyer’s monitor. The label for it read “O. Nehru.” After noting this Sawyer reported to the others that Oscar was calling in. He then placed his index finger on the icon and dragged it into the window that CC and Marvin were sharing. The instant he took his finger off the icon a live image of Oscar popped into the window.

“Hey guys,” Oscar jubilantly greeted. “Was that great or what?”

Sawyer, CC, and Marvin were surprised by Oscar’s upbeat welcome. The three of them had to take a moment to register it. Sawyer was the first to respond.

“You’re awfully happy for someone that has just been in a space battle.”

“Are you kidding?” Oscar returned with a look of astonishment. “This is the best day of my life.”

“I can’t believe that you’re thrilled about this,” Marvin challenged. “We could have been killed out there.”

“But we weren’t” Oscar disputed.

“This time,” CC interjected.

Oscar took a second to note the mood of his friends and then he responded to it with an inflection of encouragement.

“Come on, we can beat these guys. We’ve done it a hundred times in the game pods.”

“This isn’t a game,” CC corrected. “Seventeen mows didn’t come back. And only three of their pilots have been recovered so far.”

The mows that did not return to the Orion were damaged to the extent of being inoperable. In most cases, this meant that the cockpit had been breached. If the pilot was inside when this happened, then he or she were certain to be dead. If the cockpit remained intact but was only impaired then the pilot had a chance at survival, assuming he or she was still alive after the impact. In this situation, the pilot needed only to get into the jettison pod and await pickup.

The jettisoned pod was a rectangular container that was just large enough for one person to fit in. This was a pilot’s only way out of a mow when it was space-borne. The jettisoned pod had a battery pack and a life support system that could sustain the life of an occupant for three-hundred hours, more or less. When jettisoned the pod would emit a beacon along with data on the disposition of itself and its occupant. This was an automatic function whenever a pilot abandoned the mow. The jettison pod would also begin to transmit whenever the data link and/or the power connection to the mow became severed. In this instance, it would also transmit data on the disposition of the mow and report on any readings of life within it. A non-functioning mow, with its jettison pod still intact and transmitting zero readings of life, was a strong indicator that the pilot was dead. On the outside possibility that someone had beaten these odds, there were a dozen Orion spaceplanes running down the mows that did not answer the recall to the basestar.

“You do know that we’ll probably have to go out there again?” Sawyer spoke with an inquisitive look towards Oscar.

“That’ll be great,” Oscar acknowledged with a smile and while bobbing his head in the affirmative.

“You are now officially crazy,” Marvin proclaimed with a look of incredulity and a shake of his head.

Oscar found amusement in this declaration and displayed a wide grin in reaction to it.

“You can’t really want to go back out there,” CC spoke with a questioning inflection.

“Yes I can,” Oscar disputed decidedly. “This is a once in a lifetime event. Aren’t you excited? This is going into the history books.”

Sawyer could think of nothing to say in opposition to this. He understood Oscar’s enthusiasm even though he did not share it. Secretly, he envied him for his fearless approach to life, and he knew that one day he would be proud to say he was here. But at this moment, the fear that he might not live past this event dominated his thoughts.

“Did you see your scores?” Oscar questioned with an excited expression.

“This is not a game,” CC lectured in a stern tone of voice.

“Come-on,” Oscar retorted with an inflection of incredulity. “I know you saw your kill totals. Sawyer, how many did you get?”

Sawyer had some reluctance to answer this even though the answer was on the tip of his tongue. He noted his kill total a second after the fighting stopped. This was easy enough to see. The mow computer maintained a running total of targets hit, missed and the percentage in the bottom right corner of his visor. After a moment of debate within his thoughts, Sawyer responded Oscar’s inquiry with a word.

“Seven.”

“You’re kidding. Seven?” Oscar reacted loudly. “I had eleven kills and I wasn’t out there half as long as you.”

Sawyer knew that Oscar’s amazement was well deserved. Seven-kills was well below the norm for him, given the opposition and the time. CC’s and Marvin’s totals of two and four were well below their norms as well. He knew that his game was suffering under the weight of his fear, and he was more than a little embarrassed by this.

“Come on, guys,” Oscar enunciated in an inspiring timbre. “We can do better than this.”

“Two-hundred and sixty-seven,” the crewman seated at the front left of Gruenberg’s Command and Control Spacefighter reported.

“What’s that?” Eckhart questioned with a hint of concern in his voice.

Gruenberg did not look away from the monitor he was studying as he responded to Eckhart’s inquiry.

“That’s the number of spacefighters we lost. Most of their crews were lost with them.”

“That’s nothing,” Eckhart insisted in an emphatic tone. “We still have an overwhelming advantage.”

Eckhart paused to hear if there was any disagreement with his analysis. He was shortly convinced that there would be no response and began to speak again with an intonation of urgency in his delivery.

“What do we do now?”

“We reset our formations,” Gruenberg advised with a curt delivery.

“How long will that take?” Elkhart questioned half a second later.

Gruenberg gave the inquiry close to no thought before answering.

“Two to three hours.”

“Three hours,” Eckhart echoed back loudly and with a shocked expression. “Can’t we speed that up?”

“We’re doing this as fast as we can,” Gruenberg affirmed with continued disinterest for the conversation.

Eckhart took a short pause to fume about this. At the end of this time, he came back with a response that was nearly spoken under his breath.

“At this pace, all of the starcorps could be gone by the time we get there.”

“That’s the plan, anyway,” Gruenberg reported with a flippant inflection.

“What does that mean?” Eckhart growled at Gruenberg with an angry scowl.

Gruenberg took notice of the anger in Eckhart and reacted to it by giving him his full attention as he spoke.

“They obviously don’t have the numbers to destroy us. If they did, they would be attacking right now. So, their intention must be to delay us.”

“So then, we have to move faster,” Eckhart insisted in a strident tone.

“I doubt they’ll be ready to launch within the next thirty hours. That armored starship wouldn’t still be here if they could.”

Eckhart was not reassured by Gruenberg’s assessment. It sounded too much like a guess. The thought of the starcorps escaping his grasp was too unbearable for him to consider. Also, Gruenberg’s casual behavior was irritating him. He wanted action. He wanted something to be done now to prevent the plan of the starcorps from working. After several seconds of frantic thinking, Eckhart blurted out the result of this effort.

“So, we go around them. We set off in ten different directions and we go around. They can’t hold up the entire armada.”

Gruenberg knew that going around the basestar meant going around its sensor field. The act of being in a perpetual turn around the field meant that this could only be done at a drastically reduced speed. By his calculation, circumnavigating the basestar and its spacefighters would not be possible any other way. The basestar could see everything within its sensor field and deploy its spacefighters in response to any force moving through it. In addition, he assessed that dividing up his armada would be dangerous. The last thing Gruenberg wanted to do was provide the spacefighters of this basestar smaller portions of his armada to engage.

“They won’t have to,” Gruenberg corrected Eckhart. “Going around that sensor field will take ten times longer than it will take to go through it.”

Gruenberg paused to give weight to his words. During this time, Eckhart could think of nothing to say to challenge this analysis. At the end of Gruenberg’s pause, he enunciated his last words on the subject.

“This is what you hired me for, Prime Minister. This is what I do. This is what I know. The quickest way to Mars is through that starcorp warship. We regroup. We reconfigure into a tighter formation and we go in heavy. This will draw out everything it has. After we’ve exhausted its fighter screen, we’ll destroy the warship. And then we move on to Mars.”

“Did Gourmand respond?” Noonan questioned while climbing back into his acceleration pod.

Noonan had just returned from visually examining the disposition of his pilots when he asked this question.

“No, not yet,” Joshua reported back to Noonan with a hint of impatience.

Commander Ronald Noonan and Admiral Joshua Sloan were in the command and control space capsule of the Basestar Orion. The first engagement between the UFP Armada and the mows of the Basestar Orion ended thirty minutes earlier. Noonan took a moment to note that there would be nothing to discuss on the subject he just raised until after Gourmand’s return message. This decision prompted him to bring up a new subject that was bothering him.

“Why didn’t you deploy the last thirty-four mows?”

Noonan’s question referred to the fifty mows that Joshua deployed instead of the full eighty-four he had remaining.

“I didn’t want to tip my hand,” Joshua returned with a shake of his head.

“Tip your hand?” Noonan questioned with a confused expression.

Joshua took notice that the commander of his mows was completely unaware of what had just happened. He turned to give Noonan a look as he gave his explanation.

“The commanding officer of that UFP Armada doesn’t know how many mows I have. I think the round number may have made him cautious.”

“You think he noticed the count,” Noonan acknowledged.

“He didn’t commit his third wing,” Joshua retorted with a soft shake of his head.

Noonan had been curious about this, as well. It was only at this moment that he was able to produce a halfway acceptable rationale for the UFP Armada commander’s choice not to commit the remainder of his forces. Despite this reasoning, he still thought it was stupid of this UFP Armada commander not to commit the third wing and he was quick to explain why to Joshua.

“He still should have sent in his third wing. How much damage could we have done even if we did have another fifty or one-hundred mows?”

“We could have dispersed his entire command, for one thing,” Joshua lectured in a benign tone. “After that, we could have attacked them in segments, kept them from regrouping and decimated a quarter to one-third of their number before returning to rearm the mows. But that’s if we had another one-hundred mows.”

“But they don’t know that,” Noonan acknowledged with a knowing look.

“No, they don’t,” Joshua agreed, glumly. “But they will.”

Noonan needed no explanation for this. They were down to two-hundred and sixty-seven mows. If forced to commit his entire compliment of fighters, he knew that the UFP Armada commander would take note of this number.

“How are the gamers?” Joshua questioned with a look.

“They’re pretty shook up,” Noonan advised with a shrug. “We may lose some of them.”

“How many,” Joshua questioned back with an inflection of concern.

“Ten—forty, I won’t know until it’s time for them to get back into their mows,” Noonan answered with a flourish of his hands and a shake of his head.

Joshua took a moment to give this some thought. Two seconds into this Noonan spoke up with additional information.

“The veterans are ready to go.”

“Veteran” was the word Noonan used to differentiate the security force volunteers from the gamers. These pilots were the reserve. They were there to step up if, and when, the gamers began to balk. This was not the scenario that Joshua wanted. The UFP’s overwhelming advantage in numbers reinforced his belief that he needed the best pilots available for a second battle.

“If you have to,” Joshua acknowledged. “But all standby gamers take precedence,” he corrected with a point.

Noonan anticipated this decision and disagreed with it. In his mind, the gamers were mentally ill-equipped for this fight. But this was an argument that he had been through before with Joshua. He knew that it would be a waste of time to discuss it again. Because of this, he agreed to it with an “okay” and a nod of his head. He then moved on to a new point.

“At any rate, if the mows are going back out there then we’ll need to assign three more veterans as wing commanders.”

This report took Joshua by surprise. He had given no thought to the veterans that were assigned as wing commanders in the last engagement. The report that all three of them needed to be replaced brought the subject back into his thinking like a storm.

“We lost all three?”

“Yes,” Noonan reported with a nod.

Joshua reacted more than responded to this answer.

“No! The security force volunteers are a last resort. I want Gamers in as many of those mows as possible, no exceptions.”

“What about the wing commanders?” Noonan challenged with an expression of shock.

“Gamers only,” Joshua insisted back with a stern expression. “I need our best pilots in as many of those mows as possible.”

Noonan took this with a look of frustration. He shook his head and fumed over this order. He knew that Joshua’s mind was set and resigned himself to this.

“Okay Admiral,” Noonan returned with more than a hint of umbrage.

Noonan turned away from Joshua after this. Annoyed by this command, he gave no more talk on the subject or on anything over the next twenty minutes. It was shortly before the end of this time that Chairperson Gourmand’s return video message came in.

“Admiral Sloan, we need more time,” Chairperson Gourmand commenced with an emphatic delivery, “At a minimum, I need you to add an additional eight hours to their time to Mars. I am ordering you to remain on station and to take whatever action is necessary to acquire this time. Good luck.”

As the message played out, Joshua took on an expression of dismay. The idea of disobeying this order, or resigning his commission, danced in and out of his thinking. But this was something that he could not do while he believed that the task was doable. He thought it all the more possible while he was in command. The thinking that had him distraught at this moment were the orders he feared to give to make that happen.

“Rest your pilots,” Joshua instructed Noonan after a moment of thought. “They’ll be going out, again, in a few hours.”

The rest period for the pilots lasted three hours and twenty-one minutes. Over the course of this time, Joshua watched as the UFP Armada reformed into squadrons, groups, and wings. After this, he watched as three wings of the Armada pooled into a single battle formation and began to thrust forward as one. Instead of spreading out across a wide front, these three-thousand spacefighters grouped into a tightly compacted, oblong shaped sphere. The elongated ends were aligned straight towards Mars.

The Basestar Orion was ten minutes into its summons for all pilots to get to their mows when Noonan got a report on the total number of gamers that opted out of this fight. His brief interview with a dozen pilots foretold of what was to come. Because of this, he was not surprised by this number. The trepidation in his expression was the result of his concern for how this number would affect Joshua’s plans.

“Fifty-three,” Noonan reported with an air of vindication.

“Pilots?” Joshua questioned back with a look of alarm.

“Yeah,” Noonan answered with a smirk and a nod. “That leaves us with a deficit of seventeen gamer pilots.”

Joshua took a moment to think about this with a stern look on his face. Noonan took advantage of this silence to advance his preference on how to manage this. He saw this as proof that the veteran pilots were better suited for this conflict.

“I want to send the veterans out this time.”

Joshua showed no sign that he heard the request let alone that he was entertaining it. His expression suggested that he was transfixed on the number of gamers that were opting out of the fight. He appeared to be contemplating for several seconds. At the end of this, he switched on the basestar’s public-address system and commenced to speak on the subject.

“To the crew of the Basestar Orion, this is Admiral Sloan speaking. I know that many of you did not want to be here, and that you had dreams for your futures that did not include risking your lives in a war in space. For this burden that I have encouraged so many of you to take on, I apologize. And I apologize for what I must ask of you now. Shortly, we are to be engaged in a battle that will determine the future of the starcorps. This is a fight that we cannot lose. Our families, our friends, everyone and everything that we hold dear will be affected by the outcome of this fight. This is a battle that I cannot run from, and it is a battle that I am obliged to ask you to undertake.”

Joshua took a brief pause after this to arrange the thoughts in his head into words to be spoken. He then took a strong inhale, fixed his face into a grimace of determination and began to speak again.

“It is a frightening thing to put the lives of others ahead of your own. But this is what I plan to do. I intend to win or to die trying. And I must ask you now to do the same. This is a battle that we must win! But to do so, we have to do better. We have to do more. We must break up this formation. We must turn it back. To do this, I need the best efforts of my best pilots. There is no hiding from this fight. If we die doing nothing, then we deserve what we get. And if we die doing less than our best then we deserve little better. I need you—I need your best game—Your families, your loved ones, your homes have need of your best game.”

Ten minutes after this message was transmitted, Noonan revised his report. All but six of the gamers returned to their mows.