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This is your virtual briefing.
The text window popped up as Vango Markis stared out like a god over the solar system. With nothing else to do as he cruised back home, he had been running tactical plots of where he thought the Destroyer went and what he could do about it if he was in command.
A stylized clock counted down with a time-sped blur, presumably to allow him to mentally prepare himself, then the universe went away, leaving him staring at a screen. Obviously whoever had intruded on his waking dream was making sure he paid attention. Then words appeared.
Your A-24 Avenger II is now being automatically processed by the EarthFleet Auxiliary Ship Gladstone. When completed, your A-24 Avenger II will be fully fueled and armed, and all battle damage repaired. If any issues occur, you will be informed.
“Huh,” he said to himself, and then the slide changed.
Your A-24 Avenger II service has been completed. All systems read nominal. Good luck, Flight Lieutenant Vincent Jonah Markis, and good hunting.
The screen of words disappeared. Hastily Vango dialed down his time sense back to realtime as he realized that the servicing had actually taken hours if not days, though it flew by in seconds for him. Back in his virtuality, he moved his viewpoint outside his ship to see the Gladstone and two other auxiliaries frantically servicing Aardvarks.
Grabships, with their two huge padded waldoes extending from the nose like mechanical arms and hands, seized the little warships one by one and maneuvered them into enclosed docking bays like big missile tubes. As soon as one had been placed inside, the door shut and presumably the atmosphere was restored to allow the maintainers to work in relative comfort.
He tried to move his viewpoint inside the Gladstone but encountered a null zone of no data, so instead he waited until one of the docking bays opened its doors. The Aardvark he viewed flew gently backward and out, pushed by a low-speed ram, and a grabship, well, grabbed it as soon as it was clear, hauling it off to set it in position several kilometers away. Attack ship drives were too hot to use near the motherships.
Other Aardvarks cruised, lined up in precise rows pointing toward the distant solar system. Occasionally an attitude jet flared, keeping a ship on station. Vango’s display told him they were about three months from the solar system at their current slow speed, but he had to believe that once everyone was topped off they would accelerate to shave off time.
Another query showed the projected path of the enemy, hundreds of billions of kilometers to the side. Confirmed sightings dropped off near another cluster of comets and asteroids whose distance was better stated as more than a light-week away. That data was over a month old. He wondered if his ship had been updated by the Gladstone or was he still running on just the A-24 network.
Next he looked at the orders queue, hoping their reduced force, now given their stings back, would turn to intercept, but it was not to be. Instead, they would proceed by wings and squadrons toward Grissom Base on Callisto, taking advantage of their interior lines, falling back on their defenses, regrouping.
Of course, orders could always be changed. Otherwise, why bother to rearm the Aardvarks? Though General Yeager was gone, Vango was sure the Fleet’s leaders were keeping their options open.
Besides...he pulled back and oriented himself above the plane of the solar ecliptic, and manually projected a course for the Destroyer. If it kept curving inward toward the sun and Earth, the fleet’s course still generally aimed for an interception. Vango superimposed a scale on his view in astronomical units, a compromise between light-hours and kilometers. Earth was one AU out, by definition. Callisto orbited Jupiter at about five AU from the sun. Pluto’s orbit varied, but could generally be called fifty AU out.
Vango and the fleet were only one hundred AU out, much closer than they had been for the fight. Expending all fuel, they might be able to get home in a week. Without accelerating, three months. He figured reality would fall somewhere in the middle, so that they could arrive with enough gas to fight, sometime before the enemy got there.
Now he ran the numbers. It appeared just under fifteen thousand ships remained combat capable. The rest had either been lost, or were too badly damaged to put back in service. Presumably their pilots were being decanted and faced a long trip home, even longer if the auxiliaries intended to go out to the battlefield to search for survivors.
Perhaps the drifting men and women would just be written off as too expensive to recover. He forced his mind away from contemplating that, and said a prayer for them.
Speeding up his time sense once more, his apparent velocity leaped forward as the edge of the solar system rushed toward him. It only seemed like hours before he reached Pluto’s orbit and had to slow down to begin to read and absorb the long queue of intelligence updates that awaited him. When he got tired of catching up, he slowed himself further to normal and slept.
In this manner he and the rest of the fleet returned to Callisto base.
While he expected a homecoming, he was not prepared for the sustained appreciation of everyone there and, at a distance, that of the people of Earth. We’re heroes, he thought. The half of us that survived. I guess it’s always that way. Grandpa and Dad always told me that heroism is just about doing your job the best you can, and living through it. I guess they were right.
Never having to buy a drink was nice, but not being left alone got old, so after a while he settled down to a life of hard training, visiting Aunt Jill – too bad Uncle Rick was gone back to Orion – and hanging out with Token. A few of the female pilots made passes at him, but after Stevie, he just wasn’t interested in risking his heart again, or even being distracted from the mission.
Nothing mattered but that damned Destroyer, waiting off the rim of the solar system like a lion in the darkness. In his mind, in his dreams, it roared and lusted for his blood.
