Mmm num ba de
Dum bum ba be
Doo buh dum ba beh beh

—Queen, Under Pressure

‘LOOSE ITEMS SUCH as a pens, coins or tablets may be lethal. Please secure them carefully.’

The cadet next to him chortled. “What an understatement! With 8 G’s of acceleration a pen becomes a bullet.”

“One way to write your obituary.” Farrel zipped his storage bag shut. “Mag, is your hairclip pressure-fit or lock-up?”

“Lock-up of course. They warned us.”

Farrel gave her an awkward grin. He was still unsure how to act around girls but his fellow cadet didn’t seem offended.

Their flight instructor climbed up and down the vertical aisles, checking that each student was properly secured. Once complete he addressed the shuttle. “Okay Cadets! Now, as trainees of the Outer Planets Bureau, you are the best of the best — ”

This prompted a chorus of jeers from the students. The OPB was the fifth and least prestigious of the planetary bureaus. Everyone was here because they failed to get into the other four.

Read more: Moment of Inertia

(Except Farrel. The OPB had been his first choice.)

“On this training flight you will experience full acceleration and maneuvering forces — no internal dampening! This is to prepare you. Inertial compensators are wonderful devices for freighters and pleasure cruises, but during battle there is lag, and as fighter pilots you have to learn how to fly under G-forces.”

The cadet next to him leaned over and whispered, “We will be sore tomorrow.”

“To begin, a series of exercises….”

♌♌♌

Why can’t we leave the snow and ice and go out Father? And see other people and places?

Those words of his 6 year old self echoed as the rocket’s acceleration slammed Farrel into his seat. The cabin was filled with groans as the G-forces increased.

(Rockets were an anachronism in the modern era of anti-grav and massless thrusters. But some cargoes reacted badly to the exotic energy fields of such systems so Earth still maintained a few rocket shuttles.)
And because modern space fighters used vernier jets for maneuvers, training their pilots in one of those rockets sort of made sense.

(But mostly it was a fun method for torturing the cadets.)

Farrel, exerting great effort, raised his head enough to look out the shuttle’s window. He could see Antarctica below, blurry and too-bright.

Where my father is buried. It looks… small.

The rocket slammed them through various accelerations while the instructor ordered them raise their arms or enter commands in the control pad in front of their seat. One or two cadets passed out on the more extreme maneuvers.

The cadet next to him grimaced. “In a real fighter we would have compression suits to make this easier! You don’t seem to be having any trouble.”

It was true. “I grew up in a hard environment.”

“Wow, lucky you!”

Eventually their shuttle ascended into a high orbit and the crushing acceleration was replaced by microgravity — they were in freefall.

‘Cadets will uncouple in groups when directed for zero-gravity maneuvers.’

Farrel grinned as he watched his fellow students sail around the cabin. Kefyrzz, an orange-skinned Parapynid, was a hopeless klutz. The same double-dip vestibular system which gave his species incredible balance in gravity left him helplessly disorientated without it.

(There were over 900 worlds in the Galactic Alliance. The majority of the cadets from Earth were human but not all of them.)

A familiar blue face sailed up the aisle from behind him. “Well hello there!”

“Dafyd!” Farrel grinned at his best friend and reached out to touch his hand.

‘Cadet group Eta, uncouple and make your way forward.’

“Guess we can’t talk!”

“See you John!”

He wasn’t the best in micro-gravity, but he learned eventually and got satisfactory marks. He even got to do a zero-gravity dance with Dafyd, holding hands and swinging in a circle while the other cadets hooted.

“When I pull you tight…” the room spun, “we got faster!” laughed Dafyd.

Their instructor pointed. “That is a prime example of the conservation of angular momentum. When they get closer the moment of inertia decreases, so their angular velocity must increase! To slow the spin….”

They separated until their arms were as far apart as possible and they were spinning in a slow circle, grinning at one another.

“How do you feel cadet?”

“Dizzy!” said Farrel.

Kefyrzz shouted “I feel dizzy just watching you!”

All too soon they were told to return to their seats for the return trip.

“All the way to orbit just to go back to campus. Seems like a wasted opportunity.”

“No space station or warship will make time to give a tour to cadets from the Outer Planets Bureau.”

“True.”

A normal shuttle descent using aerobrakes would be just 1.7 G’s, but the academy once again wanted to torture the cadets so they were put through a series of high-speed turns to simulate atmospheric maneuvers in their fighters. Farrel endured them easily.

This has been a good day. he thought. Maybe tonight—

The entire shuttle bucked and shrieked and they were thrown into a violent spin! The lights went off.

“These drills are — ”

“This isn’t a drill!” he shouted.

The hull of the shuttle creaked as the spin continued. Electricity crackled on the exterior of the hull, momentarily lighting things through the windows. Then emergency lighting came back on, along with their system displays.

“What happened?”

“We struck something!”

“Something hit us!”

“Space debris!”

“Turn on the anti-grav!”

“This shuttle hasn’t got one dummy!”

Something hurtled down the aisle next to them at bullet-like speed before impacting with a wet crunch of the rear bulkhead. It was the instructor.

“Who — ”

“Mister Farquad!”

“Why did he unbuckle?”

“Can you get to him in the back?”

Farrel drew a breath. It was getting harder to do so. He could see Farquad’s empty chair and the railing which he must have been dragging himself along….

The cadet next to him asked “Is Farquad — ?”

“He’s dead. He was trying to get to the cockpit. The pilots aren’t correcting this spin.”

“Shit.”

There was a scream as another student fell from his seat and caught himself several rows later. He had made the same conclusion Farrel had and had gotten out of his seat.

“The cockpit is further from the center of spin than we are. They are pulling more G’s than we are.” Farrel unbuckled his restraints and braced himself against his chair.

“Oh God — the pilots have passed out!”

Another student fell down an aisle on the far side of the cabin. This one did not catch himself.

With effort Farrel crawled over his classmate until he was at the aisle. There was a handstrap here and he clung to it was a white-knuckle grip as the shuttle’s spin shifted and his legs lifted into the air!

For a moment he was dangling, supporting 5 or 6 times his own weight using just his arms. He could feel his muscles tearing! And then arms grabbed his legs, pulled them in, planted them against headrests. His classmates, helping him!

He took an enormous effort to climb to the next row of seats, flailing for the handstrap. The cadet used her own magnified weight to hold him in place while he let go of his safe handhold and flailed for the next.

“Thank you.” was all he could say.

One row at a time, Farrel picked his way up the inside of the aisle. His fellow cadets helped him all the way, bracing his feet and arms, pushing him on through every mighty step to a further aisle. Five rows. Six. Six more to go.

Farrel wasn’t the only cadet making the attempt. The littlest had the best shot — easiest for their compatriots to brace and push along, most immune to the oppressive cube-root of G-forces spinning the shuttle. One of them fell suddenly but was caught by the leg of his uniform and swung violently into the seats in the middle of the shuttle. His classmates dragged him to safety. He had broken his face but he was alive!

One of the girls in the front row was being supported by her classmates, leaning to grab the bar that could haul her towards the cockpit. She grabbed — and missed!

Farrel watched in horror as she went tumbling into space directly in front of him, accelerating impossibly fact directly towards him. He barely had time to brace himself.

She knocked him loose. His wrist, twisted in the handstrap, creaked and the bones moved wrong. He ignored the sound of her tumbling past him and flailed for a foothold — stepping on someone’s face — they grabbed his foot and steadied it there despite the pain and pulled himself back in!

Four rows left. Three.

Every centimeter was agony now. He would barely breathe. Some of the cadets had simply passed out or had their eyes rolled back in their heads as blood flowed away from their brains. Farrel took breaths and tensed his chest, forcing pressure up into his neck until his temples pounded and he was dizzy.

First row.

He didn’t take the route the falling girl had used. He went around the side, supported by his classmates around his legs and he crawled up stairs and over padded handrails. Was the gravity worse here?
He braced himself against the floor and took a few painful breaths.

I really shouldn’t know the instructor’s access code.

He reached up and keyed it into the cockpit door.

The door slid open and the unconscious body of the copilot fell out, bouncing across the railing and landing across the front row of cadets with a heavy thud. They managed to hold onto him.

“Not… a great sign.”

Farrel pulled himself up over the lip of the door and slammed the close button so he could stand on it.
Everything was uphill. Impossibly uphill. He sagged against the sideways bulkhead. The pilot was dangling limply from his seat.

Farrel breathed deeply, oxygenating his blood. He knew how to fly a fighter. All he needed to do was make the spin less bad and then the pilot could wake up. Get the oxygen in his brain, climb up there and then do something smart in the very short window before he passed out.

“Easy.”

Built in cabinets had handles. They broke under his many-times-magnified weight but when he distributed it over 4 at once they only creaked and bent so he slowly climbed up the side of the hallway towards the cockpit until he was at the controls and could scramble under the control panel, and then lever himself into to the empty co-pilot’s chair.

The radio was squawking at him. ‘Shuttle this is NEMEAN-1, please respond!’

“Shit they sent a lion?” The Nemeans were combat mecha. Fully capable of flight inside an atmosphere and ideally suited for a delicate situation like this where they might need to actually touch an out-of-control craft.

‘Glad you could joins us pilot.’

“Pilot’s blacked out. I’m a cadet.” He looked over the controls. There was an awful lot of red and non-responsive systems.

‘You have to slow the shuttle’s spin. You are rotating too fast for me to catch you.’

He caught a glimpse of a shadowy shape outside the cockpit, as the shuttle spun, an enormous combat mecha equipped with jets, quadrapedal feet and jaws. It could manipulate the shuttle, but not if it was spinning so fast that it ripped apart the moment they came into contact.

“Everything’s broken.”

‘Is there anyone else I can talk to?’

“Just give me a minute!” he snapped. Things were getting dark around the edges. “Attitude control is out. The fins are… gone. Maneuvering thrusters… empty.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Then a firm command. ‘Do it anyway.’

“Yes sir.” The shuttle was a mess. Prior to the hit everything had been configured for these high-G maneuvers, not steady flying….

The mecha outside wasn’t just a Nemean, it was Nemean-1. The person at the controls was one of the best pilots in the Galaxy.

“You only need me to slow down the spin?”

‘Well if you don’t the shuttle is going to tear itself apart in 90 seconds when you hit the next atmosphere layer.’

“No pressure then.”

‘None at all.’
His arms were heavy but he reached out for one of the few control systems still working — the fuel pumps. There were fuel tanks in various locations around the shuttle. Right now the ones near the outside were empty and the ones near the center were mostly full. He set the pumps into motion to reverse that.

Slowly the shuttle’s spin began to slow. He found it easier to breathe. “I’m about 60 percent of the way there. Once this is done you’re going to have to try a grab.”

The pilot was starting to move a little.

‘Good work. What did you do?’

“A rocket ship has liquid fuel, right? So I pumped it to the the tanks nearest to the sides of the shuttle. You know; conservation of angular momentum. Just like putting your arms out to slow down when you’re spinning.”

♌♌♌