Carrier was outputting now, making EM noise in a wavefront an enemy would eventually intercept in increasing Doppler effect, and to confuse their longscan they were going to pull a pulse, half-up to FTL and abort the bubble, on a heading for the intercept zone—that was the scary part. That was the time, all sims aside, that the theoretical high became real, light, true hellride, with herself for the corn-node that integrated the whole picture.
They tranked you down for jump. They didn’t for this move. They told you what it was going to be, they pulled disorientations and sensory assaults, and learned the them-techniques from the starship crew, and hoped you could get the threads back when you came out—but meanwhile you just kept talking to the computer and the carrier and moving your markers with the joystick, laying the strike and the strategy as if you were seeing it tamely on the light-table instead of on monitors, with numbers and grids floating in glowing colors. Reality became hyper-extended vision, into mathematical futures, chaos of nature, two intersecting presence-cones of human action that had to narrow at a proximity to Luna that was truly harrowing.
Hard to breathe. The flight-suit squeezed the ribs in efficient pulses, oxygen flowed—damned sure not the pod this time. This was real—this was—
Moment that the brain skipped. . . moment that they weren’t—anywhere, and all the data left the brain void. A voice said, like God, Stand by sep, Hellburner; she recalled that procedure, scanned her crew’s LS, TAG and STAT data glowing gold at the upper periphery of her midrange vision and said, mechanically as any machine, “Sep go, that’s go, go…”
Bang!
“We have absolutely identical interests,” Villy said to the gathered reporters, while Graff folded his arms and leaned against the wall by the door. Captain Villy rested elbows against the podium and said in that voice mat had to be believed: “Let me explain where the UDC stands. Yes, there’ve been problems in the past. As a test crew, in this facility, we’ve seen ideas that worked and we’ve seen ideas that didn’t—we’ve worked with a lot of bright-eyed young pilots and techs that came in here all impatient to be trained in equipment we ran when it didn’t have all the buttons they put on it—who never gave a damn about what we knew so long as the buttons worked. That’s the truth. And I’ll tell you, having the future operational crews shoved in here to be part of the testing procedures—that’s been a hell of an adjustment for us—but the Fleet did call this one right. The physiological demands of this equipment are hell; and the crews that can fly this baby are going to be so scarce in the general population they’re probably going to give some of us a chance to be honest working crew.”
Tidbit of real News. Graff pricked up his ears, saw Optex record lights like so many blinking eyes among the reporters.
“They say the other guys have to grow ‘em in vats, and eighteen years from now we’re going to see their hand-raised clone pilots in the cockpit. That eighteen years is the lead we have, because they tell us the merchanters that won’t take our side, won’t take the Union side either. Union doesn’t have the insystem crews we do—they’re a lot more mechanized, their mining equipment’s state of the art, a lot of robots. Their miners sit on big ore-collectors, they don’t have our antique equipment and consequently they never developed the pool of experienced insystem crews like we drew in from our asteroid belt—“
“What about this tape?” a reporter asked, out of turn. “What about this Union mind-tape?”
“It’s not Union,” Graff said from near the door, and drew an immediate concentration of steady red lights. “It’s ours, and it works only on the reflexes, a glance left or right at the panels, mathematical formulae and routines, nothing as organized thought or attitudes… It covers the same kind of memorizations you do in school—“ He trusted they did such things in schools. These reporters were Earth’s equivalent of com and he doubted they had any experience in common. He wanted Saito down here, but Saito was on the carrier, where FleetCom with a test proceeding mandated she be; Demas was God knew where—Demas had taken refuge in Ops, he was willing to lay bets…