Spooker
patreon
Grass Eaters 2 | 19 | Wingmate I
🕑 Added 2024-06-28 16:47:00 +0000 UTCNaval Station Charon, Charon
POV: Speinfoent, Malgeir Federation Navy (Rank: Beta Leader)
Speinfoent squinted at the Terran scripts written on the screen of the ice cream machine. “Which one of these buttons is the cho-co-late?”
Kaja pointed it out for him. “It’s the brown one.”
“Ah, I see,” he said, as he pressed the button and then operated the physical lever to squeeze out and stack almost half a liter of ice cream onto his comparatively tiny wafer cone. “I’ll be remembering this one.”
Kaja’s eyes widened at his growing tower of ice cream. “Are you sure that chocolate is safe for you?”
“Yes, Kaja, we are aware that we look like your pet dogs,” he acknowledged, slurping into his snack and smearing the chocolate over his snout. “But unlike for them, this is not toxic for us. And neither is your coffee. We can eat grapes too.”
“Sorry, I wasn’t sure. What uh— what else of our foods can you eat?”
“Without getting sick? Pretty much all of it. You should see the rations we have on our ships and we still eat those. Or used to. We are what you call obligate carnivores, so most of your grass-based foods have zero nutritional value and just pass through our digestive systems like they were never there.”
“Cool.”
“What about you, Kaja? You didn’t get anything from the lunch deli?”
“No, I’m not hungry.”
“What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?”
“Coconut.”
“I’ll try that next time. Maybe.”
There was silence for a few seconds as he continued to scarf down his dessert.
“So, do you know anything about the training we’re getting?” Speinfoent said between the last few licks of his ice cream as they made their way back to the group’s table.
“No.”
“Carla mentioned that we are getting pilot training first.”
“Oh.”
“What about you? What are you here for?”
“The AIW program.”
“Hm I haven’t heard of that. What’s the AIW program?”
“Advanced Interstellar Warfighting.”
“That sounds fascinating! I didn’t realize they have a whole program for that. Is that a yearlong program too?”
“Fourteen months.”
“Wow. That’s a lot of time, longer than our current program, even. What do they— what do they teach you?”
“Fundamentals of Interstellar Doctrine is the first course.”
“Sorry, that doesn’t mean a whole lot to me. Maybe it will make more sense when I get to my classes.”
Kaja nodded.
“You don’t talk much, do you Kaja?” Speinfoent teased. “This doesn’t have to be a job interview.”
She blushed. “Sorry.”
Beth and Uintrei sat down next to them, saving them both from the awkwardness. Beth bit into her chicken sandwich and said in between mouthfuls, “Don’t let her timidity fool you. We graduated from the same cadet class back in the day. Kaja is a tactical savant; she won the Luna Naval Academy’s Wargaming competition all four years in a row while she was there.”
“Luna Naval Academy? I thought we are at the Naval Academy here,” Uintrei said, confused.
“No, no,” Speinfoent explained. “This is the Staff College. All Terran Navy officers go through the Academy, but not all of them come to the College to study.”
“Wait. What’s the difference?”
Speinfoent shrugged. That was about all he knew of the difference.
“Okay, so here’s how this goes,” Beth said, putting down her sandwich and animating with her hands. “Strap in. I had to explain this to my parents, and I think they still don’t get it. For about twelve years of a Terran child’s life after they turn five or six, they go through primary and secondary education. How that is divided up depends on the district and sometimes the regions in each district. In my district, in year twelve, we have our A-levels. In Maurice’s district, they have the bac, or however they say it.” She pointed at Maurice as he sat down with them next to Durnio. “After that, some people choose to go to college.”
Uintrei said, “Like this one?”
“No, not exactly. College is a loaded word. That’s just the name of this place. Ignore that for now,” Beth answered. “Anyway, post-secondary education is usually four years. For the Navy, we go to a special college called the Naval Academy. The main campus is on Luna, and that’s where all three of us went.”
“What do you learn at the Naval Academy?” Durnio asked in between mouthfuls of his vanilla ice cream.
“Very similar to what the civvies do in college. History, chemistry, aerospace engineering, et cetera, depending on what you like. I majored in Xenolinguistics. Kaja was in Digital Intelligence Engineering. Maurice was in—”
Maurice cut in. “Political Science, concentrating in Interdistrict Relations.”
Beth nodded. “Then after that, most Naval Academy students serve five years as officers in the Republic Navy. At the time, I wanted to go home, so they granted me a waiver to do my five years in my district’s terrestrial Navy instead. Like I said, the one with real boats on water. Kaja was in the Republic Navy. Maurice, the Marines. All different services.”
“Ok, I follow that so far,” Uintrei said, nodding. “The Naval Academy is how you become eligible to be an officer in the Terran Republic.”
“Actually, there are three other paths to becoming an officer in the Navy besides the Naval Academy, but I won’t get into that now. After a few years of service, you may get promoted to a higher rank, usually based on time or merit, or in my case, my district’s terrestrial Navy had budget cuts and wanted to get rid of me, so they pawned me off back to Republic Navy.”
Uintrei grinned. “Sounds like their loss.”
Beth grinned back. “Exactly. Usually it takes quite a few years and tours before they’d send us here, but recent… events have sped up the process. Even our curriculums have been shortened. I’m guessing they’re about to send us off to fight in the Red Zone. And… Maurice here is probably one of the youngest Marine officers ever to come here.”
Maurice showed off his trademark humbleness. “Thank you, thank you, please hold your applause.”
“Is it because he killed a lot of pirates in the Red Zone?” Durnio interjected.
Beth giggled. “Is that what he told you? The version I heard was—”
“Oh please, there’s no need to tell that story again,” Maurice interrupted loudly with a smug grin.
“Desperate times, desperate measures,” Beth faux whispered conspiratorially to the three Malgeir students. “They’d promote anyone these days. Anyway, what about you Puppers? We’ve heard about The Sphinx over here on the news, but what did the two of you do to get here?”
“I broke our ship’s chef snout,” Durnio said.
“They falsely blame me for the destruction of my entire fleet,” Uintrei answered simultaneously.
Beth guffawed, and then seeing that neither of them were joking a moment later, asked, “Wait, seriously?”
Speinfoent nodded. “Extra ‘training’ is usually seen as a punishment in the Malgeir Navy.”
“Dang. Wow. Sounds like their loss, right?”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Speinfoent tried to itch his backside with his tail in his custom-tailored jet-black flight suit as covertly as possible.
His flight instructor, Kurt, looked quizzically at him. “Is there something wrong with your equipment, Speinfoent?”
He reddened. “No, sir.”
“Please don’t call me sir. It makes me feel old. Kurt or Commander, both are fine. As for your suit, let me know if anything is uncomfortable because you will have to get used to being in it for hours at a time.”
“Ah, it’s just a little too warm,” he answered more truthfully.
Kurt frowned, then fiddled with a panel on the front of his suit. “Huh. Twenty degrees. That’s a little too warm?” He pressed a few buttons on it, and the inside of the suit rapidly cooled to a much more pleasant temperature. “How about now?”
“That’s much better.”
“Good,” Kurt said, noting something down on his tablet. “That’s fifteen degrees. Let me know if you need another adjustment or if the size doesn’t fit right.”
“It feels good now.”
“And you had a light lunch, right?” Kurt asked.
“Bananas. Kaja said—”
“That’s fine. Anything that tastes the same coming up as they do going down will work.”
Kurt went back to his lesson, pointing at what looked like heavy machinery embedded into the wall of the habitat. “Let’s get started. This is a flight simulator for a Terran ST-6M. S stands for spacecraft, T stands for trainer, M is a new variant designation for Malgeir, as in the interiors are fitted to your physiology. Closer pedals, lower chair, color adjustments for your eyes, translations, and more sensitive screens for your paws. That sort of stuff. Thanks to the inertial compensators in there, this is as close as we can get to the real thing, including what happens if the compensators fail and you get to experience real acceleration on your body. However, we temporarily lowered the blackout safety limits for you because we are not quite sure how many Gs your body can tolerate. Other than that, it is virtually identical to the trainers we use for our own people. Any questions?”
Speinfoent shook his head.
Kurt pressed a button on his tablet and a hole opened in the machine, a chair extending out.
“Okay. Now, strap yourself in.”
Speinfoent got in and applied the seat restraints best as he could. Kurt double checked, pulling on it to make sure the fit was tight, grunting his approval. “Not bad, you figured that out pretty quick.” He positioned Speinfoent’s foot paws on a set of movable levers, pushed another button, and the chair slowly retracted into the machine, pulling him into the pitch darkness.
A moment later, the lights in front of him turned on. There was a panoramic screen in front of him, a view of a distant space station in his view of the starfield, and some buttons and controls on his side. A voice came from the cockpit speakers. “Look at the screen straight in front of you. Those are your avionics systems: navigation, communications, sensors, flight control systems, and battle management systems.”
Symbols and writing started appearing on the screen in Malgeirish. Circles, lines, and an apparent silhouette of the trainer spacecraft.
“Ok, now reach out with your hands err— paws in between your feet paws and feel for the circular loop under your seat. Do you feel that?”
He looked down and found the device. He gave it a light tug. It didn’t budge. He nodded.
Kurt’s voice came in through the radio. “Assume I haven’t evolved the ability to read your mind and use your words.”
“Yes, I feel it,” he said, holding the loop in between his paws.
“Good. That’s the ejection seat handle. If you pull hard on it, the pilot escape pod encloses, the engines and inertial compensators cut out if they’re still active, explosives detonate the cockpit around you, and your lifepod is jettisoned away from your spacecraft before it explodes. When that happens, you have about two hundred milliseconds to place your neck at the angle you want it to be for the rest of your life before the rocket boosters kicks in.”
Speinfoent hurriedly let go of the handle.
Kurt chuckled through the intercom, and Speinfoent squeaked a nervous chuckle in response.
“Don’t worry, that one gets everyone. In the sim, it just ends the scenario. We have a separate simulator specifically for bailout training. The gravity settings for that one are… unpleasant. Not as bad as the real thing I hear, but I’ve thankfully never had to experience that myself… For now, all you have remember is to look straight forward before you pull the loop if that ever comes up.”
“Look forward before I pull the ejection seat loop. Got it.”
“Good. Now, enclose your right paw on the joystick on your right. Broadly speaking, those are your manual rotational controls: pitch and yaw. In other words, that’s how you make the spacecraft look up, down, left, and right.”
“Right paw for rotation, got it.”
“Don’t just memorize this. Try it out.”
Speinfoent gingerly manipulated the control on his right paw and watched as the starfield rotated around him. It took him a second to get used to the inertial momentum of the spacecraft. When he released the controls, the spacecraft continued to spin.
“Now, do you remember Newton’s first law from school?”
“What’s Newton?”
“Right. Newton’s first law tells us that what is at rest remains at rest, and what is in motion remains in motion.”
“Ah, the first and second rules of kinematic motion.”
“Whew. Good. So they do teach that where you come from. To counteract the existing rotational motion of the spacecraft, you need to apply an equal force in the exact other direction. Try to stop the spacecraft from spinning.”
With some effort, he managed to mostly neutralize the spin of the spacecraft.
“Not bad for your first try,” Kurt said, sounding mildly impressed. “There’s a button that will do that automatically, relative to whatever you target, but for now, let’s stick to manual controls. Enclose your left paw on the joystick to the left. These are your reaction thruster translational controls.”
Speinfoent moved the spacecraft in all four directions, and after a while, managed to make the spacecraft come to a stop relative to the space station in front of him.
“To roll the spacecraft, use your feet paws. Push down on the left paw for counterclockwise roll, and on the right for clockwise. You will notice—”
“Clock? What is that?” he asked innocently.
Kurt sighed. “It’s an antique circular measurement device for—”
Speinfoent chirped. “I’m kidding. I know what an analog clock is.”
Speinfoent could hear Kurt’s grin in his voice as he said, “You got me there, joker. When you push down, you should notice movement in the other paw as well, like you’re balancing them on a stick. Now, give those skinny rear paws an exercise.”
He operated the spacecraft’s pedals experimentally, putting the spacecraft into a roll once in each directions before neutralizing it to a stop.
“Great job so far. Now let’s introduce some real thrust. The main engine throttle is on your uh— first claw on your left paw. There’s a wheel on that joystick. Rotate it forward until you hit the end.”
He did as Kurt instructed and heard the simulated noise of both the engines and inertial compensators kick in hard as they kept him from feeling the intense acceleration that’s supposed to occur as the main engines behind him went to full power. A widget appeared on the screen to show him his acceleration and relative speed to a station in front him, which started getting bigger slowly. He hastily cut the thrust in his left paw and the noise from the engines and the inertial compensator subsided, but he noticed that the spacecraft was still going forward. “How do I reverse thrust?”
“You don’t. The ST-6 doesn’t have main reverse thrusters. You have to spin around and put an equal force in the opposite direction. Remember your first uh— first and second rules of kinematic motion. Try that now.”
Speinfoent immediately realized how much more challenging that was. Spinning was rotation, and thrust was not. Getting translation and rotation both right at the same time was much harder than he initially expected, and his spacecraft was soon spiraling out of control. The view on the screen and the shifting inertial compensator gravity settings made him slightly dizzy despite logically knowing that it was limited by a failsafe.
After observing his struggle for a minute, Kurt’s voice came over the intercom again. “Don’t worry. This is a common problem with manual controls. Let’s try to recover. Don’t just look at the screen for what’s going on outside your window. Keep your eyes on your instruments and the station’s signature. First, neutralize your spin and roll. Then, counteract your vertical and lateral translation.”
Following the instructions, he was able to get his spacecraft to stop spinning after about a minute of fiddling.
“Good. Now you’re oriented again. But as you can see, your spacecraft is still moving relative to the space station. Attempt to neutralize movement on that axis again. This time, focus on your instruments and make a precise 180 degree on the pitch or yaw and stop all rotational movement before you hit the thrust.”
He tried to follow the instructions, but within a few seconds, the ST-6 was spinning out of his control again. At least the space station was no longer getting closer; they were getting away from it.
Kurt said patiently, “That’s okay. Calm down. Space is big and we’ve got plenty of it around us. Let’s recover and try that again. Remember, the view out the fake front windows is nice, but trust your instruments…”
