Spooker
patreon
Grass Eaters 2 | 20 | Wingmate II
🕑 Added 2024-07-01 16:47:01 +0000 UTCNaval Station Charon, Charon
POV: Speinfoent, Malgeir Federation Navy (Rank: Beta Leader)
“So how was your class?” Speinfoent asked his wingmate as he spotted her exiting the classroom alone. Several other Terran students in Kaja’s class had gathered outside the classroom, now openly gawking at him. He flashed a grin and waved at them. Some waved back; a few pretended not to see in embarrassment. “Interstellar doctrine, right?”
“Yes. Fine. Yours?”
“Well, I didn’t throw up when I got out of the simulator today, so that was nice.”
Kaja laughed. “That’s good.”
“I had to sit down on the floor for a good minute before the world stopped spinning though.”
“This is normal for your first few times.”
“Is it? I hope it gets better with time. I had a dream last night where I was trying to fly through those waypoint markers they put on the practice scenario, and every time I got closer, they just kept hopping away from me in a random direction.”
“You will master that too.”
“Good. It’s fun though. I hope after the training, they will let me fly one of those ST-6s for real.”
Kaja looked confused. “What do you mean? That is the point of the training.”
It was Speinfoent’s turn to look confused. “Huh?”
“After a few more lessons in the simulator, you will fly a real one.”
He tilted his head. “Isn’t that very expensive? All pilots have to train in real spacecraft?”
“Of course! That is why the real ST-6 has two seats. One for you. One for your instructor.”
“Hold on. How much real flying is my training?”
“About fifty hours.”
“Fifty hours?! That’s two full days!”
“Two full— right. And you need to fly at least one hundred hours a year to maintain your certification,” Kaja added with a smile, clearly enjoying his reaction.
“One hundred hours?! A year? That’s including simulator hours, right?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“But that’s crazy. My job won’t even involve combat piloting!”
Kaja shrugged. “Mine neither. It’s just a requirement to understand ship command. Like how Marine officers have to learn to walk and run and shoot in Basic Training too, even if their robots and suits do their job for them most of the time.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t cost what… two thousand credits an hour for a Marine to run around a track and fire a few shots out of a rifle!”
“The ST-6 costs about fifty thousand credits an hour to fly.”
“That’s… exactly my point! How does your Republic even manage to afford all this training?”
Kaja thought for a moment. “It’s cheaper than losing a full warship. Train more here, die less out there.”
Speinfoent instinctively wanted to refute that but couldn’t come up with anything. “That’s… one way to put it, I guess.”
She asked quietly, “How many— how many hours do your pilots train on average?”
Speinfoent looked at her in surprise. He didn’t remember her ever asking him a question with so many words. He’d almost gotten used to carrying the conversation when he was with her, but talking about piloting seemed to have made her chattier than usual. “Frankly, I have no idea. I think hangar bay pilots get to fly when they need to. And of course, the navigation officers are always flying.”
She nodded. “I see.”
“How many flying hours do you have?” he asked out of curiosity.
“I have almost eight hundred hours.”
“That’s not including simulator hours?!”
“I passed three thousand simulator hours last month,” she replied proudly.
“You are messing with me, right? That’s one hundred and twenty full days in a simulator.”
“One hundred and twenty-five Terran days,” Kaja said, shaking her head. “I have been sim flying since I was twelve.”
“And you’re not a combat pilot?”
“I am not.”
“I am almost afraid to ask, but how many hours do actual combat pilots in the Terran Navy fly a year?”
“We have very few combat pilots since we no longer use parasite fighters in combat. Some shuttle captains log the maximum of a thousand hours a year,” Kaja said. “But not all hours are the same.”
“Huh. What does that mean?”
“Flying a transport ship on autopilot is not the same as active combat training. Some people fly one thousand hours. Some people fly one hour, a thousand times,” she explained.
“That’s— hm— oddly enough, I think I understand what you mean.” He thought for a while, then added, “Is that what Beth meant by wargaming, when she said that you’re the champion at the Academy?”
Kaja blushed. “No. That is different. That is more like command simulations.”
“Ah, I think I’ve seen those,” Speinfoent said, nodding. “Those simulator rooms. I’ve been in one of them the last time I was in Sol. And those exercises about Celestria.”
“Yes, that’s it. And Beth didn’t tell the whole story. At the Academy, there were two divisions in the tournament, tactical and strategic. I only won in tactical, which is the easier category.”
“There’s no need to be modest—”
“No! Strategic is really much harder,” she insisted.
“I keep hearing Terrans using those two terms. And sometimes it seems they are interchangeable. What’s the difference?”
“Tactics are smaller scale, within a single battlespace. It’s almost always within a single system, sometimes around a single planetary body. In the tournaments, you usually get a squadron of ships and play in real-time or in time warp. The strategic competition is usually about a multi-system campaign, played in turns.”
Speinfoent nodded and was surprised to hear her continue. “And on top of that, there is operational art.”
He asked, “Operational art? What’s that?”
“It’s supposed to be about integrating the two, but I’ve just started learning it in class.”
“Speaking of class, did you see my schedule? I have a two-hour class on flight controls and then three hours on orbital dynamics this afternoon!”
Kaja winced sympathetically. “Oh yes, I remember Orbits class at the Academy. It was required for all engineering majors.”
“But I already know how orbits work! You feed where you want to go into the computer, and it tells you how to get there!”
She broke into a sly grin. “Then the class should be easy for you!”
Speinfoent looked at her, his face slowly drooping as the realization came over him. “They won’t be letting us use a navigation computer in the class, will they?”
“Not at first. But they aren’t needlessly cruel. They won’t make you do the math by hand. You can use a regulation graphing calculator.”
He groaned as she continued, “But that’s just for a few weeks. Then, you get a nav computer with half its functions disabled. And you get more and more of its functionality back until you finally get to use it unrestricted. The test questions at the end are the hardest though.”
Speinfoent started repeatedly smacking his forehead with his paw. “This class is multiple months?!”
“It’s a full two-quarter course: about six months.”
“Is there a chance I can enroll in a class where I build houses for rich idiots instead?”
“No, sorry,” Kaja answered in uncontained mirth. “That course is only available for Marine officers.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Speinfoent dragged his paws out of the classroom, exhausted both physically and mentally. He felt a curious gladness when he noticed Kaja was already waiting outside.
She initiated the conversation with a grin on her face. “So… how was Orbits?”
“You should at least pretend to feel sorry for us. I haven’t done this much math since I joined the Navy. No, actually, since… ever.”
“Where’s Uintrei and Durnio?” she asked.
“They’re still finishing the last couple questions in there,” he pointed his paw at the classroom wearily.
Kaja craned her neck towards the side to look into it. “Hm… not bad. At least you were still faster than a few of our students.”
He was too tired to even tell if that was meant to be a compliment. “Kaja, I’m hungry. Let’s go get dinner early.”
Suddenly Kaja shirked back and her face changed color. She stuttered, “N— no, I can’t. I’m skipping dinner. You— you can go to the mess without me.”
Speinfoent looked up, confused. “But you didn’t have anything for lunch either!”
“I’m not hungry,” she insisted.
“I thought the rule is that wingmates need to stick together for meals.”
“I’m feeling a little sick. I’m going to head back to the bricks. You’ll be fine without me.”
“Maybe you are feeling sick because you did not get enough nutrition for lunch—” Speinfoent started, but she was already scurrying away.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
“Maybe she’s a rations smuggler,” Durnio and Uintrei said simultaneously when Speinfoent brought up Kaja’s absence at the mess tables.
Durnio continued, “I knew a guy who used to do that. Had a deal with the head chef to get the good stuff delivered to his cabin instead of eating with everyone at—”
“Shhh… keep it down,” he admonished. “If she is, I don’t want to get her in trouble.”
“Get who in trouble?” Beth asked as she laid her full tray of fried chicken on the table. “Are you three scheming without me?”
“N— no. It’s nothing. Hey Maurice!” Speinfoent said as the last Terran of the group joined their table.
“Hey, what is up, my favorite three Puppers.”
“We are the only three Puppers you know!”
Maurice grinned. “And you’re my favorite. Where’s Kaja, by the way?”
“She’s sick,” Speinfoent replied casually.
“That’s odd,” Beth said, biting into her chicken. “She seemed fine to me earlier.”
Speinfoent lowered his voice. “Did you see her at lunch? She didn’t eat anything at lunch today. Not yesterday, either.”
Beth and Maurice shared a meaningful look.
Beth said, “Oh, I’m sure she’s fine. Probably just needed to take a nap after a long day.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “Maybe we should visit the base corpsman and see if—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Beth said dismissively. “I’m sure your wingmate will be fine.”
Maurice nodded in agreement.
“Oh yeah. By the way,” Beth said, “I’ve been practicing my Malgeirish with Uintrei. Give me a second.” Then Beth pulled out her tablet, cleared her throat meaningful, and read something out loud from her notes in the alien language without her translator.
Speinfoent and Durnio looked at her confusion.
Speinfoent took a guess. “You need to… release the chickens?”
Uintrei and Beth burst into laughter simultaneously.
When Uintrei could finally breath, she wheezed, “No, dummy! She said you should try the fried chicken. I, for one, understood it.” She looked proudly at Beth.
Beth said in between gasps of laughter, “I guess I still need some more practice.”
Maurice asked, “Didn’t you major in Xenolinguistics at the Academy?”
“That doesn’t make me fluent in literally all the alien languages! My concentration was Znosian. Much easier than Malgeirish.”
Durnio seemed surprised. “You can speak Grass Eater without a translator?”
“Speak it? At one point, I was dreaming in it instead of English!”
“And you chose to learn Grass Eater over Malgeirish?” Durnio asked in faux outrage.
“Of course! One day, maybe they’ll send me on a super secret operation to go steal a Bun battleship. I’ll need to know what the buttons say so I can fly it away. Malgeirish? Not nearly as useful,” she said as she picked up one of the wings from her plate.
Speinfoent looked at her skeptically. “Steal a Grass Eater battleship? You’re way too big to fit in their tiny—” He shut up from a mean look from Uintrei, immediately realizing the social faux pas he made.
Right. Some Terrans prefer being small.
Durnio saved him from further embarrassment. “How do you say ‘fried chicken’ in Znosian?”
Beth bared her front teeth and made a series of high-pitched noises, which their earpiece translators helpfully translated into, “Fried farm flesh.”
“That is pretty cool!” Durnio said excitedly. “How do you swear in Znosian?”
“Sadly, they don’t really have swear words, just insults,” Beth said, but completed the rest of her sentence in a similar high-pitched warble, “But they say: by the Prophecy, we are hatchlings in deep water!”
Then she helpfully reverted to her native English, “That means they’re truly screwed.”
“Okay, okay. Teach me this one. How do you say in Znosian, ‘lay down your weapons, or we will eat you alive’— What? Don’t look at me like that, I wouldn’t actually do that; it might come in handy one day, right?”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Meta
Znosian translation for ‘lay down your weapons or we will eat you’: Sku besht jo sresk sme si zdanti glara jo!
