16: Fighter Training Revelations

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Space was stupendous, to ponder being one small part of one small galaxy amongst countless others in a limitless universe can make one feel minuscule and meaningless. For dominant species accustomed to terrestrial life, this can bring about a sense of confusion and despair. On the other hand, as a being moving among the stars I had the feeling of being part of the universe; the part of the universe that gets to experience itself, the eyes and ears of the universe. Not that I had ears anymore, but I could still take in the monumental silent majesty of outer space.

Floating in my robot suit fixed inside my space fighter, I gazed out into the stars. The blackness of the negative space between them seemed at once not to exist and at the same time to consume all.

In the middle of my existential conundrum, my twin robots started to sing a little electronic song that sounded like a soft Mozart piece played on a Moog synthesizer. I leaned back and felt very comforted by them. It was a beautiful universe, so quiet, so peaceful, so sublime.

"Thanks, guys."

Our little space moment was interrupted by a camouflaged man-tank climbing around on the outside of the ship. He jumped free as two of the remote ships whizzed by. Death fired his jetpack and went sailing after them.

"Let's see what you can do."

A laser blast struck my fighter and sent me tumbling. That was the first time I saw the sheer magnitude of the Banga. Her huge mass sat stark white against the blackness of space. She kept passing my field of vision as I spun. 

Another blast hit my fighter, this time adding a gyroscopic twist to my out of control spinning. There was a sun and a solar system nearby. Its brightness shined at me every second rotation. Banga, blackness and stars, Banga, sun, small planets, Banga, blackness and stars, Banga, sun, small planets, repeat, repeat, repeat. I thought I was completely disoriented until a third blast sent me spinning like a top.

"Power failure." "...Switching to backup," chimed my droids.

The fact that this was a live-fire training exercise finally dawned on me. 

Engage thrusters, level fighter, throttle forward. 

The tracking system showed a remote ship coming around for another pass at me. I tried X's move from when we were racing in the Robo-a-gogos. I dropped my fighter in space, went in full reverse below the droid ship, which flashed by above me firing into empty space. I hit all three thrusters and put myself in a position behind it. 

Left, right, up, down, increase speed

It moved like a fly trying to avoid a swatter.

Small and fast, the droid ship changed direction constantly, but I was on its tail. My fighter was equally agile and quick. I learned its handling quickly. The droid ship must have anticipated it would not be able to lose me. It turned around and faced me, while still simultaneously racing away and constantly changing direction. My intuition told me it was going to fire. 

Power dual cannon. Lock. Fire. 

I saw the red glow of the droids weapons start as my shots hit it. There was an explosion and I flew right through it. The small bits of metal left behind tinged off my hull. I looped back around engaged the fighter's vacuum and sucked up all the debris. I was an environmentalist on the battlefield.

"Hands, I suspected you were the save the world type."

X was laughing over the communication system and of course, she played music. This time it was Queen, the Flash Gordon soundtrack. I hadn't heard those songs in years.

"Hands! Ahhh, ahhh, he'll save every one of us!" X sang.

X's music added to the excitement level. The screaming laser beam guitar sounds filled the silence of space. She maneuvered her fighter alongside me and we flew in formation down along the mountainous white cliff that was the port side of the Banga. 

Lock parallel flight path.

Ahead of us, I could see it was Dr. Death running along the outer hull firing some kind of blaster rifle at one of the droid ships. He was hitting it, but only marring its surface. He continued running and diving out of the way of the droid's return fire. As we were about to overtake him the droid ship exploded. I vacuumed up the remains.

X fired her grappling hook landing gear and snatched Death right off the surface of the Banga. She retracted it and Death hung off the bottom of her fighter. She accelerated beyond attack speed and I watched the triple stack of blue thruster jets trailing behind her. 

Engage full thrusters, match speed and trajectory. 

"We're going to pull away from the Banga to draw out the droid ships, clearly you get the whole flying in formation thing. The main thing to remember out here is that the Banga's engines are on and not stopping, so you don't want to get too far behind her or you'll never catch up again. You dig?"

She fixed her heading on the star of the distant solar system and we rocketed forward across the surface of the Banga and off the starboard bow.

My fighter was tied into the Banga's sensor array. I zoomed in on the distant solar system. The ship's computer fed the details directly to me and I displayed them using the fighters holographic imager. A bright white giant star centered the system with fourteen or so orbiting bodies and a massive asteroid field. The inner planets were smoldering balls of scorching hot iron and lead. Two planets orbited in the habitable zone and both had an atmosphere. The closer one, Varan, was a swamp, muggy and hot with high nitrogen levels, like Earth at the time of dinosaurs. Most of the planet was covered in shallow water with massive rainforest jungles on the higher ground. It was endlessly raining, though there was a band of desert just above the equator that circled the planet giving it a kind of tan stripe.

The second habitable planet, Varanidi, orbited further out and was an ice world locked in perpetual winter with one main landmass surrounded by a partially frozen ocean. The next planet out was a gas giant with two sets of rings. It looked like a giant atom or Saturn with rings going in two directions. The gas giant's gravitational pull destabilizes the ice world making the frozen ocean surface heave and crack. There was a great abundance of sea life under the ice.

The system was the ancestral home of the Varan people, a race evolved from reptiles. The Varan were known for their love of deep space travel. Early on they colonized the second ice planet and went through a fundamental change. They adapted their cold-blooded bodies to cold temperatures and developed an antibody that acts like antifreeze in their blood. They're known to be able to withstand the vacuum of space with minimal damage, it slows them down and they will go into a state of hibernation if they stay out in it for more than a week.

Early attempts at space travel by the Varan left manned ships stranded in space. Later when they were found, the crew was curled up like potato bugs, floating in a state of suspended animation. When thawed out, they came back to life. They would shed their entire skin after the hibernation sleep and be no worse for wear and tear. They suffered no brain damage and retained perfect memory. 

It was a hell of a survival mechanism that made them natural risk takers when it came to space travel. It still takes more than 20 years of travel in any direction to reach another system, so the Varan not only took to the stars early, they also took to long flights early.

The Varan homeworld had a large population of elders that live in a primitive fashion at one with nature. It's become a type of retirement planet for old spacers that want to return to the wilds of the hot jungles. Varan has a small moon with a base containing ships for any transportation needs to and from the planet. The Varan Moon is also the seat of their government.

On Varanidi, there are two modern metropolises; a fishing town on the coast and a towering city in the snow-covered mountains. They ran a galactic fishery and dealt in specialty items from the frozen sea. Varan ice lobsters were considered one of the most tantalizing delicacies among foodies of the stars.

Beyond the gas giant was an unstable mix of planets colliding with each other. The resulting asteroid belt glowed and reflected the sunlight with the sparkle of diamonds in space. To the thrill of shiny object lovers everywhere, the Varan asteroid belt contained literally billions of metric tons of pure uncut diamond. 

Early Varan ships were made out of diamond. They looked spectacular but ultimately didn't have a lot of privacy. You could still find a diamond scout ship here and there being traded in black markets. Though not considered the most cutting-edge ships, they still fetch a high value in many galactic sectors. 

We would be passing by the Varan system in two days.

I had muted the intercom while I was learning about the area; the light was blinking like crazy. I opened the channel to the blaring sounds of electric guitars. 

"They're taking the bait, droids hate to be ignored. Let's cut around and dive at the ship. We'll cruise over the surface and give Uzi a fly by," X said. 

"Vronsky will be glad you checked out the ship from the outside. I love that guy. You know that he introduced me to Jonas, right? I was in Malibu shooting some bike chase scenes for this movie and it'd been raining. I met some guys who kept talking about swimming with whales and sharks. It seemed like a cool thing to do, so I went out with them in this hired boat. The crew wasn't too happy about going out in the rain and choppy sea, but anyway, there ended up being a school of sperm whales out there. I jumped in for a free dive and guess who was there, Vronsky. He had his giant whale dick out and he was fucking this whole school of females. Don't tell him I told you that. 

"Anyway, I was blown away by all this and, like the fool I am, I swam up to them. I could've easily been smooshed by the rolling around of their sex-crazed whale orgy, but Vronsky took me under his side and protected me from the crushing mass of the fuck fest. I guess I kind of cock blocked him a bit but he still took me safely over to the boat. I climbed on him and hugged him like you'd hug a giant redwood and told him I wished I could stay with him forever. 

"Apparently, he was supposed to be looking for interesting human profiles in the simulation, not just getting it on with all the female whales. So get this, he looks up my profile and tells Jonas about our interaction. The very next night, I had this dream about Jonas and then I woke up on the Banga. I've been loving it ever since. It's home. And there she is..."

I could see X nodding her head at me and pointing to the ship.

The Banga floated in space like a colossal white monolith. It sloped to the battle bridges on top and bottom. At the back third of the ship, there is a huge sphere, like a small moon was stuck midway through the hull. Only the top and bottom sections are visible, the rest is consumed by the outer structure. Inside the dome was the supernova dark matter containment unit with enough energy to power the ship for ten thousand years. Behind the sphere, the ship gets chunkier and breaks into three ginormous thruster engines, similar to the fighters but set horizontally. 

It was impossible to tell from the outside that a Mediterranean sized ocean was held within. There was a forward battery of cannon and more placed around the massive hangar doors on both sides of the ship. The Banga shone like a white giant with a tail of bright blue trailing behind. She had a rather elegant design considering her scale.

Trust me when I say almost everything is beautiful in space, especially from the cockpit of a speedball fighter craft.

Correct course, opposite mothership. 

Once we started to head toward the ship, it approached with incredible speed. Before I even saw the first droid ship Dr. Death launched out from under X's fighter. His jetpack threw him directly into the path of the droid ship, which he proceeded to tackle in space. The remote fired in all directions. Death hung onto its wing disrupting its ability to maneuver correctly.

"Fire the landing gear!"

Engage grappler, target droid ship.

X and I fired our grappling legs and they sunk into either side of the droid ship. 

Cut starboard. 

Death let go and we veered off in opposite directions ripping the droid ship in two. The explosion illuminated the surface of the Banga turning it even whiter. I circled around to vacuum up the debris. 

The last droid ship appeared firing at Dr. Death, who managed to dive out of the way. I did a notch up and down move that felt like being on a roller coaster, then aimed for a head-on collision with the droid ship. It shot to the left and X, rather than shooting it, rammed it with the side of her fighter sending it spinning out of control. 

360 corkscrew spiral, re-engage enemy. 

I readjusted and followed Death's tracer fire. 

Engage cannon, lock. Fire. 

The last droid ship was destroyed. X sucked up the refuse.

With Dr. Death taking the lead we sunk into a perfect triangle formation and skimmed the deck at top speed. 

Align delta pattern, match speed and trajectory. 

We raced along the length of the Banga. It was rocketing in one direction and we were going the opposite. When we passed the battle bridge I could make out the glow of Uzi's red eye looking out the window. It zipped by like a blur even with my enhanced vision. I swear I saw him smirk.

Our live-fire mission was over and I assumed it was a success. We were coming up on the dome and I could sense the dull thud of the drive even in space. We raced up the convex surface and Dr. Death signaled by putting his arms out in a T. We stopped at the peak of the dome. Death gave us the radio silence hand signal. The Flash Gordon soundtrack ended and X and I hovered at the apex of the ship.

There, far below, hiding in the wake of the Banga's engines was a rusty shoebox of a ship. It reminded me of a rectangular rusty metal Richard Serra sculpture I'd seen once in New York. The vessel was about the size of a Brooklyn brownstone townhouse and about the same shape. I immediately thought of one thing: Pirates!

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