Valor's Duty (Children of Valor Book 3) by Kal Spriggs

Author:Kal Spriggs [Spriggs, Kal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-05-15T18:30:00+00:00

“Wrong, you're dead,” Commander Pannja said, his deep voice calm, just loud enough that I could hear it a couple meters away. The cadet in the simulator in front of me groaned as the instructor reset his simulator and he had to start over again.

“Stay focused, Biohazard,” Commander Pannja turned to face in my direction and my attention went back to my screen. Just as I did, a set of warning indicators popped up. Everything seemed to happen at once and I began to go through reactions that I'd been practicing for months, one after the other.

I wasn't, quite, fast enough. My simulated flight terminated with my warp fighter impacting some of the uncharted debris that I'd tried and failed to avoid. “You're dead, too, Biohazard. That's why you pay attention to your course first, and other people second.”

I sighed as I realized that I'd been set up. He'd timed his words to distract me exactly for that purpose. “Yes, sir,” I murmured.

He gave me a grin, his white, even teeth bright against his dark skin, “Try, try, again.”

My simulator reset and I began again. We'd long-since passed the drills and rote rehearsals. Now we were doing complex evolutions, attack runs through the length of a system on moving targets. Flying a warp-drive ship was nothing at all like anything else I could describe. It was far faster than anything else humanity had ever built, and warp fighters were amongst the fastest.

At the relative velocities we traveled, our sensor feeds were so distorted that it took even the advanced navigational computers long seconds to make sense out of it. We didn't experience any sensation of movement, but the warp drive moved our 'bubble' of space around in relation to the rest of real-space. That made possible changes of direction and speed that simply didn't make sense. Under a chemical or nuclear driven thrust, those would have turned a crew into red splatters on bulkheads, if they didn't rip the ships apart entirely.

Of course, the human mind had to direct those maneuvers. Given the severely limited response time, we had to drill evasive maneuvers and plans over and over again so that we could select a response and avoid collision or intercepting fire... and we had to do that while maintaining a formation and intercepting a moving target.

In a normal warp-drive ship, that was merely very hard. But warp fighters and warp missiles were too small to fit a conventional warp drive. They instead mounted warp-envelopes, which allowed for high relative velocities. The problem was, they didn't turn or change direction like a normal warp-drive, which could instantly alter direction, speed, and heading relative to normal space.

Warp envelope craft had to physically turn their hulls in order to turn their drive fields and change direction. The problem was, if they did that too quickly, the ship, or missile, felt the physical acceleration and that was hard on crew and components. It came back to the turning crew into raspberry jam on a bulkhead.

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