LIGHTNOVELONLINE 48b: A Pilot’s Duty
The entire mess hall erupted in cheers as the newly named Captain Erickson dismissed the crew. For a crew that had known Echo for literal years, they were nearly as invested in this as Echo herself was, and it showed. Many of the crew showed their love to her, though in differing ways. Some kept it to a few simple words, but several were blatantly unprofessional with the woman who was, at least temporarily, their boss. There were thumps on the back, attempted high-fives, and a couple of crew that performed a tradition they called ‘tacking on the rank’ where they would use varying amounts of force to (supposedly) ‘make sure it stays on’. I really didn’t get it, the whole thing looked painful even when Morik gave the patch a quite firm thump.
My girlfriend seemed oblivious to it all, though. She looked to be in a haze, likely even more stunned than I was at her father’s announcements. I wasn’t too worried though. Judging by the way Echo almost possessively rubbed at the patch, I was fairly certain she was happy with the promotion despite her nerves.
I wasn’t as thrilled about my new job, having not had any real preparation for it, unlike Echo. She’d been training for this all her life. I’d flown a starship before, but the helm panel on the Forge was only a distant memory for me, and the simulator time I had racked up over the last week was just that, simulator time. This was the real deal. Thankfully, both of us had backup for this trip.
With the meeting adjourned, the Erickson family plus myself and Jay (who might have become my adoptive father) all filed through the corridors, avoiding the bustling crew, until we reached what seemed to be a conference room. It wasn’t decorated, but the snacks and drinks made it clear that a small celebration had been planned ahead of time. I noticed ruefully that among the other drinks, a certain ornate glass decanter sat with a familiar dark amber liquid inside. Rachael started passing around drinks, but I politely declined the whiskey that had once burned like lava in my throat. The woman insisted that I at least have a cup of wine to toast with and I did accept that, if only to keep with the rest of the crowd. I did note that Echo eagerly took a tumbler of the whiskey. One could suppose that a captain could do whatever they wanted on their ship, so I wasn’t going to judge. Not that I would anyways.
Once everyone had a chance to finish a drink and one of the baked goods that were provided, we all wrapped things up and set them in a cold cabinet before moving as a group towards the bridge. It was interesting, sudden;y being a part of the crew. I got less attention than Echo, of course, but there were some welcoming words and well wishes sent my direction as well.
The command center for the ship was exactly how I remembered it from my previous visit, despite the vastly differing circumstances. Unlike a military ship, there were very few people that needed to actually be present for ship operations and having an extra few people in the room started to make me realize how small it really was. There weren’t enough seats for everyone, so my mentor along with Echo’s mother and grandfather all were standing in the limited open space near the engineering display. To my amusement, Jay even pulled out a comically small three legged stool that folded out from an even smaller cylinder. I took a brief pause to fondly watch the girl of my dreams embrace her own dreams and sit in her father’s chair. Even if I hadn’t known her for as long as the others in the room, I was as proud as any of them of the freshly anointed captain.
With her seated, I was forced to face my own nerves as I approached the unoccupied helm station. Casey had evidently found a spare chair somewhere and brought it to the bridge, having set it right next to their usual spot. For a brief moment, I felt bad for supplanting the enby pilot, but they really didn’t look to be at all put out and I had bigger things to worry about.
The chair was… uncomfortable to me. Not physically as much as mentally. In what felt like another lifetime, I’d sat at the helm some while on the Forge, but that had been a long time ago and I’d not flown anything bigger than the Oxide since. The controls were entirely unlike my (regrettably) former ship as well. There were no directional sticks, no flight yoke, just a lot of buttons and status indicators. The simulator had prepped me a lot for this, but my nerves were no longer as steeled as they once were.
I took the next couple minutes adjusting the console to something I could be a bit more comfortable with, from the positioning of the seat to the placement of some of the different windows on the display. Casey, despite their high levels of snark off-duty, proved to be quite helpful and even set up a new user profile for me so that my settings would be saved.
Echo, er, Captain Callisto, that is, called out, asking for readiness reports and others started chiming in. I responded in kind and reported the helm to be ready with all of the confidence I could muster for the sake of my girlfriend. As nervous as I was, she had a lot more weight on her shoulders and I didn’t want to add to that pile.
Traffic control seemed to be in on the Erickson’s plans as well, and gave some kind words to Echo, to which my girlfriend made a quip about the controller’s poker buddy. An inside joke, perhaps? I wasn’t going to say anything.
Finally the order came to move away from the station and I took a deep breath before allowing my training to do it’s job. My fingers carefully picked out the thruster controls and began their dance across the console. ‘I’m a pilot,’ I reassured myself in my head.
“And a naturally talented one, at that,” answered a very different voice in my head. I would have jumped out of my skin (and still quite nearly did since I hadn’t expected her to pipe up) had I not known who it was that spoke.
“Thanks, Vox,” I told my digital friend. I still hadn’t really gotten used to it yet, but the new cranial co-processor implants the institute had given me allowed Vox and I to communicate entirely without the use of the sub-vocal microphone that had been needed before. I’d not not been able to use that particular feature much before, since it required a much stronger connection with her computer core than was possible previously, but the new portable sub-core I’d built solved that particular problem.
“Just uh,” I started back at her. “Some warning, please, like I said before?” We’d experimented with the connection some over the last few days since the core was finished, but Vox had developed an unfortunate habit of commenting on the randomest things at the most unexpected times. I swore that she was doing it on purpose just to mess with me, though the SAI denied it every time.
Vox’s response lacked any hint of emotion, as if she were just another AI, something I was discovering that she often did when she was teasing or being coy. “Apologies, Miss Adresta. The intensity of your thoughts must have triggered the protocol to activate our link.”
I could only roll my eyes and smile at her, regardless of the fact that she couldn’t really see my face. “Sure, and you weren’t just watching me like everyone else that isn’t crew on this ship.”
“It is my directive given by yourself to assist in maintaining your privacy, Miss Adresta. I would never monitor you without permission.”
“Of course not, Vox. Silly me.”
Before I knew it, we’d already begun approaching the slipspace gate for the system. That approach brought up some other feelings though, anticipation being chief among them. I’d not brought it up before out of slight embarrassment, but I had never been to the Sol system before. Part of me saw it as a right of passage, but another part of me found that line of thinking rather silly. We weren’t going to Sol III, we weren’t going to Earth. The explorer in me wanted to just spend the next year crawling all over the cradle of humanity, but I knew I couldn’t. We had a job to do and I wasn’t about to distract from it.
My musings ended as I heard Echo give the order to engage the star drive for our passage through the gate. Hands steadied by sheer determination, I changed from the standard control layout on the console to one specifically for faster-than-light travel. Being a slipspace gate jump, we didn’t need much out of the engines beyond the warp field, so the drive only spooled up to its lowest setting. Even still, the deck plates under my boots quivered with the unfathomable (to me, at least) power of the main reactor.
All seven emitters arrayed around the massive ring structure of the gate glowed with the essence or reality itself and my console readouts showed that field integrity was at one-hundred percent.
It was once again time to tell physics to fuck off and by the stars, that never got old.