Battleship Furiosa (24 page)

"The name is good, though,
Backfire. Perhaps it is the right call sign?"

Billy piped up in agreement.

"Definitely, Ensign Cassandra
'Backfire' Hurley."

Cassandra shook her head.

"Really, not cool, guys."

Nate nodded along with the others.

"I agree. The name fits, and you're
kind of well known for that incident. Embrace it, Cassandra. It
could be a lot worse."

Cassandra looked both angry and
pleased at the same time, and as usual, Nate had no idea how to
react. She seemed to switch between hot and cold with him all the
time, even when he didn't do anything.

"Whatever you say, Star Crusader."

Valdis angled her head and looked to
Nate.

"Like the game?"

Nate shook his head, knowing exactly
where this was going, and as before, Billy joined in.

"When we first met, he was crazy
about the game. He was always downloading upgrades to the system,
just wouldn't shut up about it. So we used to tease him with the
name."

His head turned to Nate, and he looked
genuinely confused.

"When did they stop?"

Nate laughed, but deep down he was
trying desperately to diffuse the situation.

"After our first big
win
. Then the six of us were suddenly a
lot more interested in the game."

He emphasised the word game, but Valdis
was already intrigued.

"I see. Well, Star Crusader. It's time
to move on."

The nine pilots walked away in a
loose group along the long corridor at the side of the hangar deck
that took them deeper inside the ship. As they took a few more
steps, Flying Officer Dogg spoke to Nate.

"You said six, but there are only four
of you here. What happened?"

Nate swallowed uncomfortably.

"Rex, he was our lead pilot. He had
a...difference of opinion with our officers. He's back on the
ship."

"And the other one?"

Matilda heard them
and answered for him.

"That would be Jack. He died in the
first weeks of the revolt. We lost a lot of good people."

Dogg lifted her head and hissed through
her mouth.

"I understand. We have all
suffered."

They carried on
qui
etly, each thinking about those no
longer with them. All apart from Billy, who seemed to find
something unusual and exciting with every step along the
passageway. High-level lighting cast faint shadows onto the
polished floor, and their feet made gentle clunking sounds. They
were heading for the crew deck, and conveniently for each of them
it took them past other parts of the ship. Nate looked to his
Secpad bracelet and tapped it to bring up the
schematics.

She's big, but she's not that unusual
inside.

He smiled to himself as he
checked the position
of the key parts of
the vessel. There was the main hangar deck that they had so far
spent much of their time aboard, as well as additional decks for
fighters and drones. Closer to the bow the infantry deck housed a
company of soldiers, and above that, the substantial medical deck.
Next up was the command deck, with the bridge positioned in the
centre. Crew and engineering were next, with most of the additional
space taken by the multiple gunnery decks that littered the ship
from top to bottom.

What a work of
art
, though!

As they moved onwards, Nate found
his eyes dra
wn to the exquisite designs
of artwork and imagery of Byotai heroes of old filled the ceiling,
but his friends seemed more interested in looking through the row
of small windows on the one side as they passed the next massive
section. Valdis ran her hand provocatively along the glass and
nodded to the line of spacecraft.

"This is the automated fighter
bay. Here we use machines to move the fighters and boarding
shuttles into position on the hangar deck."

Billy stopped at one of them and
looked intently at a long metallic unit. From where he was, it
looked like a long series of combs attached to a single, long shaft
extending out from one side of the deck. They'd seem similar
mechanisms aboard major stations and military bases before, but
never inside the ship.

"What are those things?" Billy
asked,
"Some kind of loading
mechanism?"

Valdis stopped alongside him and
moved her face close to the glass. Her warm breath misted up a
small segment for a few seconds. Nate looked to her, but her
interest in him had either waned, or she was genuinely more
interested in talking to Billy about the ship. Nate watched as her
attention drifted away and wondered if she and her friends saw the
new pilots as little more than playthings, something unusual to
occupy themselves with in their downtime.

"Effectively, yes. Legion
b
attleships are over half a kilometre
long, and still only carry three and a half thousand crew at full
strength. Using automation like this reduces the crew numbers and
makes better use of her size."

Her face creased as though she was
concentrating, or at the very least trying to remember
something.

"Without the equipment, the crew
numbers would be closer to five thousand, for no tactical gain.
Instead, we get more spacecraft, soldiers, and
weaponry."

Her arm extended outwards, and a
waft of the cinnamon aroma drifted about her. Nate noticed it
immediately and looked at her body with intrigue. This close he
could see her armour plates, but it was the glimpses of her skin
that intrigued him the most. Her face was easy to see, but her
hands, parts of her forearms, and the middle of her chest all
revealed the soft, patterned flesh that Nate found so
intriguing.

Patterned like that all over her
body.

He didn't mean to do it, but as
his eyes wandered
, he began to wonder
what she looked like under the closely fitted clothing and armour.
Though her species were reptilian, they were still very close in
size, build, and muscular form as a human. If he hadn't known any
better, the Byotai could quite easily have been a distant cousin of
humanity rather than an alien race.

Well, the Biomech were supposed to have
meddled with worlds millennia ago. What if they modified a basic
humanoid and deposited them on planets?

He shook his head as he dismissed
his speculation. Biology was not something he'd spent much time on,
but that didn't mean he was unaware of the history of his own
race.
Every child knew from its teaching
at school that there was evidence for human ancestry on Earth going
back at least eight million years.

What were they
c
alled? Homininae, yes that's
it, the subfamily that includes us and other extinct relatives. In
school they said it was other species, not just humans. But that
started eight million years ago.

It was an incredible number and
one
almost impossible to fathom. Even a
hundred years felt like an incompressible number. It was, after
all, only a generation ago before they'd even met these different
races, finally confirming that mankind was not alone in the
universe. The more he thought about it, the more he had serious
doubts about the Biomechs, whose involvement in the history of his
own region of space was reckoned to be no more than several
thousand years.

Valdis noticed him looking,
especially at her bare skin and tilted her head sideways, before
extending her tongue in a flicking gesture. It was something Nate
hadn't seen before, and as it retracted, she feigned a smile. There
was a glimmer of recognition, but Nate was completely unsure what
that actually meant.

Is she interested in
me
, or perhaps showing
nothing more than an amused reaction towards my
behaviour?

She
lifted her left hand to her soft cheek. As her fingers
touched the skin it lightened a little. Nate's eyes narrowed as he
noticed a gleaming ring on one of her fingers. It was surprisingly
plain, a dull iron colour against her flesh. She let the metal
touch her cheek, and then closed her eyes for a moment. Nate looked
away and found both Cassandra and Billy looking right back at
him.

"What's going on?"
Nate asked.

Cassandra pulled back her head and then
shook it.

"Yeah, you tell me. You know she's an
alien, right?"

Nate turned his head back around
and found Valdis with her eyes open, and her mouth opened a little.
Her hands were now at her sides.

"Yes, the mechanism, Ensign Mitchell.
It is actually a stowage arm that runs from the fighter bay secure
bins."

Her hand drifted from left to
right.

"You can see where it
moor
s off to the right."

The articulated section vanished inside
the structure of the ship, and Billy's eyebrows lifted as he
spotted a boarding shuttle hanging from one.

"Individual craft are manoeuvred
away for maintenance and can be stored inside the secure bins for
safekeeping on long duration flights. It also means we can carry
much larger numbers of shuttles, drones, and fighters if they can
be stowed away in the hull."

She looked to the others, but
then her eyes locked onto Nate's. She moved them down to his hands
and smiled as he placed one on top of the other, as though
embarrassed for her to see his own flesh.

"By keeping spacecraft away from the
fighter deck, it is possible to use this large space as a training
hall. On medium and long-duration missions it is used daily for
large-scale training exercises."

Nate nodded.

"I see. Our amphibious assault ships do
something very similar. The large space is used for conducting
training missions and combat drills."

"Yes, the same for
us,
" said Valdis, still keeping her
attention on his hands.

"Except our b
attleships are expected to do the same job with two hundred
and fifty marines or soldiers squeezed inside."

She reached out, grabbed Nate's
hand, and then placed it against the wall of the
corridor.

"Y
ou
see, Furiosa is battleship first, and an assault ship second. Her
primary role is ship-to-ship combat, and that is why every part of
her is optimised for ranged-battle in deep space."

She glanc
ed towards a group of armed soldiers waiting in the middle
of the space. There were about fifty of them, an odd mixture of
heavily armed Byotai soldiers and Alliance marines. Though both
were physically about the same size, the Byotai wore armour that
massively bulked them up.

"What's the armour all about?"
Ensign
Fletcher asked.

Svana, one of the Byotai pilots
laughed and started to walk away. As she passed
Billy
, she tapped his
shoulder.

"Since the war, our people have been
upgrading everything. New guns, new ships, new fighters and new
armour."

She then chuckled and pointed at the
back of the group.

"Byotai soldiers are the best in the
galaxy."

Svana walked away while shaking
her head, but not before uttering one last thing.

"I just wish they'd actually fought
with us, and not against us."

With Dogg following behind, she
left the group, and their voices dropped in volume until it was
impossible to make out a word either of them said. Valdis snorted,
and Svana muttered something before continuing far off into the
distance and then vanished into another wide passageway.

Valdis looked to the small group, and
her eyes stopped scanning past them as Cassandra and Matilda tried
to interrupt her.

"What's her problem?"
Cassandra asked.

Billy gasped, and then upon
realizing what he'd done, lifted his hand to cover his mouth. It
was a pointless gesture and merely drew even more attention to him.
Something he had definitely wanted to avoid.

"Don't mind her," said
Valdis,
"Svana has lost, like all of us.
She has trust issues that beat us all, though."

Matilda seemed the most
interested with this and moved closer to Valdis. Lilija whispered
something, and Valdis said just a few words to her. As they
watched, one of the boarding shuttles was lowered to the deck and
stopped without making a sound. Its side doors opened, and the
mixed group of warriors marched inside. The group of pilots passed
into the next section and towards the infantry deck. This part of
the ship was much more spartan, yet the detailing and design was
still closer to a museum than an actual ship.

They walked in relative silence
for a few more minutes until rounding a corner. Off in the distance
was Svana, and just before went round the next corner, she stopped
and then looked to her right. At the same time, her right hand slid
down her body to her flank and grabbed at her Seax
pistol.

What's going
on?
Nate thought.

A large blast door burst open,
and a single soldier staggered out and then collapsed, blood
dripping from a wound. He looked up and grunted a few words before
falling down, dead. Svana checked his body, presumably for a pulse,
and then peaked inside the doorway. A gunshot blasted, and she
ducked back, narrowly avoiding the impact. She signalled back
towards the pilots to stop, and then shouted loudly in her own
elite language. Valdis yanked her own pistol from her flank and
used her left hand to make them all move to the sides of the
passageway.