Winds of Change snippet 2

Sitrep:  I got the manuscript back from Rea and I went and shot it off to Goodlife after edits. She said to expect it in a week.

Here is a snippet from another story:

Grease Monkey

Pyrax:

Admiral Chambers frowned as she read the orders. They came direct from Admiral Pashenkov so she couldn't dispute them, nor would she. She would miss Trajan though. He had turned out to be a good officer, a bit bent but not broken by the war. She was glad he had gotten himself sorted out and had found some peace. She hoped the order to go to the gate star system didn't break him. It would be a damn shame for the navy to lose his services.

She had to admit they were gambling a lot by sending him there rather than to Airea 3 and the long way. There was no guarantee that the Spacebees in Tau would be able to get the gate functional in time. From the reports she had read about the war fronts there, it wasn't good. Admiral Logan was pulling out all the tricks to stop the Taurens though.

~~~-^-~~~

Warrant officer Mack Ihejirika stared at the kid that had been assigned to him. He was the number one plane mechanic on the carrier. He had spent years perfecting his profession into an art and now they sent him another fresh kid straight out of the schools as an understudy.

The kid was stuffed with book knowledge. Who knows what they taught the kids these days. It was all recipe, follow-the-directions crap, not true art. The art of a true mechanic was in being able to diagnose a problem and solve it with the clues they had. In being able to find ways to keep them flying with “bush fixes” and even tuning them to do better than expected.

A true mechanic was hands-on. They could do anything from an engine teardown to reprogramming the sensors. There were of course specialists, but they were not the maestros of the trade like he was.

Technically, he had dozens of plane captains and mechanics on the ship. They answered to him and Lieutenant Eli Grande. But Eli wasn't a natural mechanic. He was another guy who had learned the trade from going to class rather than hands-on. He spent most of his times in meetings and doing paperwork.

To be honest Mack preferred it that way. Eli took care of the paperwork and logistics while he got his furry hands dirty. He could tune a fighter or bomber to fly at its best level, sometimes squeezing a bit more speed and efficiency out of the systems that designers hadn't expected.

“Ah, I'm Spacer First Class Rob Potlik,” the human kid said.

Mack sniffed and then turned away, ignoring the extended hand.

“Sorry, sir,” the kid said as he set his spacebag down and came to attention.

“Don't call me sir,” he muttered.

“Ah …”

“I said, don't call me sir. I work for a living,” the brown Neogorilla growled. He was a light brown and had a mix of gorilla and human features. Some of his ancestors had gene formed themselves to be more conformist to humans. He was annoyed at that but he was publicly indifferent to people seeing him as different. He rather secretly treasured being different. He liked to stand out.

“You fresh from the trade schools?” the gorilla asked as he watched the squadrons outside the window. Ordinarily you couldn't see the tiny specs in the black depth of space but the window was a smart window. It had icons around each craft with basic data like IFF.

Barb was mixing it up, running the squadrons through the ringer as usual. In order to stay on top as CAG, she had to have the best fighter. Her double O was having issues though. In fact most of the lead squadron had some gremlins in the OMS.

“Yes, … ah, Warrant Officer,” the kid said. “I was top of my class. I wrote a paper on …”

“Papers,” the gorilla sniffed harshly. “They interfere with art. I don't need a piece of paper telling me if I know how to do my job!” he turned to point a finger into the chest of the kid.

The kid flinched, looking a bit fearful, but he held his ground.

Mack was silently impressed. So, the kid did have some backbone. He had passed his first test.

He had come into the navy after spending time in the space racing league as a teen. He'd been something of a loner, all mysterious, never letting friends into his room. His parents had tolerated his talk of mechanical work as art.

He had bonded with Barb over their mutual past with the space-racing league. She had been in Pyrax; he had been in Bek. Two of the pilots in her lead squadron had been in the racing league in Antigua, another in ET, and another had recently transferred in from Bek.

They had all been flying since they were ten. In Barb's case, six. She and her brother Lyle had been flying shuttles too. She hated the things.

He growled as he turned to listen to the chatter. The kid seemed to relax with a “few” shoulders slumping. Mack snorted again and then grimaced when Barb began to complain bitterly about the sluggish response to her plane.

The kid looked up to the audio chatter and frowned. “Sir, there is a problem with the OMS? As I was saying …”

“No, there is a bump on my canvas!” the gorilla growled, turning a glower on the kid. “No one messes with my art! Until I know what to do with you, hands off, got it?”

The kid nodded in earnest.

~~~-^-~~~

Captain Atler checked on the new fighters and nodded. The crews were still shaking down with the new designs. They were good, damn near E class according to all reports.

An E class used an A.I. to balance the power supply load and shields. They were smart A.I. that tended to bond with the host pilot in a symbiosis.

Cobra fighters used dumb A.I. to do the same job. They weren't as effective as the smart A.I., but they got the job done. The new approach was an artificial neural network to balance the shields and reactor. It made the process almost instinctive for the system, taking a lot of the processor load off of the A.I. and freeing it up to better support the pilot.

The shields had also been reshaped. Any energy shield was simple; it was due to the natural effect of gravity curving back in upon itself. Fighters had flattened egg-shaped shields that made the network keep working to balance it. By incorporating the neural network and making changes to the fighters’ design and incorporating Lemnos force emitter tech, the designers had made more efficient shields.

The new naval fighters had dropped the need to be aerodynamic in favor of a space-only platform. The Marines, however, wanted to keep the aerodynamic design since they had to operate in the soup. They were taking on the old Cobras as they were phased out.

All of those changes meant that there were places things could break down and definitely hardware to learn about, explore, and find the breaking points. She would much rather it happen in a training exercise rather than in combat so she pushed the CAG to keep a rigorous training schedule while they still had the opportunity to do so.

~~~-^-~~~