Wing Commander #07 False Color by William Forstchen (best books to read in life .txt) 📕

they'd soon have the shields permanently on-line, and maneuvering drives ready to lift them into a better orbit before the next time their present elliptical path brought them back through the rings again.

With luck. . . .

Hornet 100, VF-12 "Flying Eyes" Orbiting Vaku VII, Vaku System 1454 hours (CST)

"Watchdog, this is Kennel. Put a couple of your birds four minutes ahead, same orbital vector. And keep your eyes peeled for anything big enough to be a bother."

"Kennel, Watchdog. Copy. Viking, we'll take point. Lefty, Drifter, you two maintain your position." Babe Babcock accelerated her fighter to the new vector, settling in ahead of Karga with her wingmate close by. She was feeling irritable today, the result of a whole string of petty frustrations that had started with the hot water heater in the squadron's ready room showers going belly-up just when she wanted to use it that morning and culminated in the discovery that her regular Hornet had earned a down gripe from Lieutenant McCullough and had been pulled from the flight line to have a navicomp fault repaired. As a result she'd been forced to take out Hornet 100, the fighter normally reserved as a back-up craft and designated for use by the Wing Commander when he chose to fly a mission with the lesser mortals of his command.

She didn't like Hornet 100. The target lock system was slower than it should have been—though it was still within acceptable tolerances, a good pilot knew the difference in a combat situation—and it was fitted with an APSP rather than the extra pair of missiles she would have preferred to mount. But it would have taken too long to reconfigure the fighter's load, so she'd taken the fighter despite her preferences. After all, it was another routine patrol, more practice than anything else—for the carrier's flight crews as much as for the Flying Eyes.

She was starting to regret her new assignment to the Karga. She'd liked duty aboard the Independence, and had regarded Kevin Tolwyn as the best kind of Wing Commander, a CO who was willing to delegate responsibility to his squadron leaders and let them have their own heads most of the time. Bondarevsky, her new Wing Commander, might have been a big-time war hero and an intelligent, capable officer, but he was a hands-on type of leader who wanted to have a part in anything and everything going on around him. It made Babcock uncomfortable to know that he might turn up to look over her shoulder any time, any place, always ready to offer an opinion or point out an alternative.

But more than the change in personalities, duty aboard Karga wasn't exactly what she'd signed up for. The crew and officers' quarters were still a long way from being refurbished, and recreational facilities were something between horrible and nonexistent. And the daily flight ops were becoming something of a joke. Vaku was a backwater even among backwaters, and Karga's endless orbit was a study in monotony. The pilots who had come across from Independence weren't even involved in much of the refit work, since they had to do flight duty, so they didn't even have the technical challenges the rest of the crew faced to keep them fresh.

Babcock was starting to think she ought to volunteer for one of the squadrons designated for the Kilrathi birds. At least then she'd get a crack at extensive combat simulations, instead of nothing but routine patrol work.

"Come on, skipper, we're coming up on the rough spot!" The voice of her wingman, Lieutenant Eric "Viking" Jensson, brought her back to reality. "One minute."

"Copy," she said. "Stick close to my three, Viking." "Close enough to reach out and touch you," he replied, drawing his fighter in tight beside hers.

"You do and you'll be up on charges," she said sweetly. "Again." Viking was a big, blonde, handsome Dane who'd grown up on Terra but drifted out to the frontier after being turned down by the ConFleet Academy as unsuitable officer material. He'd done better on Landreich, but three times in a relatively short career he'd landed in hot water by making unwelcome advances to female officers. If he hadn't been a naturally brilliant fighter jockey he would probably have been cashiered long since. Still, despite his reputation, Babcock was glad to have him in the squadron . . . as long as he knew where to draw the line in his personal pursuits.

They were coming up fast on the arbitrary "edge" of the gas giant's rings. They were impressive by any standards, out-showing even Saturn in the Terra system, but though they extended for thousands of kilometers outward from the superjovian world, they were less than a hundred kilometers thick. Made up of ice ranging in size from dust up to chunks like small boulders, the density of the ring field was fairly low, so that ships could pass through without much danger of major collisions. Unshielded, Karga had passed through the rings hundreds of times since being damaged, and had collected only a few extra scars as a result.

Still, a ring system wasn't exactly a pleasant place to fly. Particles of debris clouded sensor scans and confused computer imaging systems, and an unlucky encounter with a substantial ice boulder could ruin your whole day. It was particularly bad here and now. Normally a carrier had enough sensor arrays and sufficient computing power to compensate for the inhibiting effects of the rings, but Karga's systems still stubbornly refused to resolve the data gathered into anything useful. That meant she and Viking had to be doubly careful making the transit. And they also had to be the eyes for the carrier. If they picked up anything large enough to be a threat, they'd have to deal with it. Karga still couldn't maneuver away from danger under her own power, and her point-defense batteries couldn't fire as long as the sensors weren't able to distinguish individual targets.

"Here we go!" Viking called.