MGiS 6 - Proportional Response - Chapter 3

Chapter 3

You know what I want to do? I want to meet one of these ‘dogs’ that Desmond always talks about. They sound like wonderful creatures, so full of honest affection and also fiercely defensive of their families. They remind me of a number of species that have been domesticated as pets, but Desmond can’t seem to settle on one description. There can’t be that many different breeds, right?

~Raegan Cliffrunner, personal journal.

“I swear to all that you hold dear: if you kill us Lila, I’m going to murder you!” Chloe growled as she clung tightly to her crash harness as the shuttle flipped through another unrestrained barrel-roll.

“Oh this is nothing. She’d have to hit something out here to really be in danger of damaging my girl, and there ain’t nothing out here for a quarter light-year” cackled the copilot through the open doors to the cockpit. “If it really bothers you, I can turn the inertial dampeners back on?”

“No, it’s fine,” growled Chloe, the heavy metal bar crossing her chest creaking in her grip. “I just wanted Lila to know the potential consequences…”

“Ease, Precious,” Desmond said, patting Chloe on the thigh gently as the shuttle abruptly reversed direction and spun the other way.

Across from him, Audra let out a yelp of surprise and her tail rose into the air, hovering like a threat before she was able to wrench it down to the ground once more and stuff the scaled length underneath herself once more.

“Sorry Audra!” Lila said with a giggle of excitement from the cockpit.

“She’s not actually sorry,” Sasha grumbled from beside Audra, her ears flat against her head as she clung on for dear life.

“No, no I’m not!” Lila fired back with another laugh as the shuttle curved into a sharp turn.

After his conversation with Gregor, Desmond had taken to heart a lot of what the older Uth’ra had told him about clan expectations, which basically boiled down to supporting each other and not to think with his dick.

Since each ‘branch’ of the clan was pinned at the clan male holding it in place, it was his job to ensure there was no disharmony amongst his mates. And that included ensuring they were happy with their place in the clan, so he needed to work to encourage them in their personal projects so they would be content in their contributions.

Which was how they ended up here in one of the ubiquitous combat shuttles the Hegemony used to deliver them to Rifts and move crew or equipment between ships.

The Fist of Defiance didn’t have fighter bays—it was a battlecruiser and had limited space so had opted for more shuttle bays to deploy troops when it was constructed—so the combat shuttles filled in that role for it when the ship needed to engage with the enemy or provide point-defense. And when Desmond had asked Captain Skytreader if there was a way he could get Lila some flight time, she’d only waited long enough to confirm that Lila’s flight license covered ships up to the shuttle’s tonnage before making it the deck lieutenant’s problem.

A lieutenant who had promptly told Desmond that if Lila was flying, he’d be with her to ensure that the Va’Aelfa didn’t wreck the shuttle. He hadn’t argued, since it would also be good training for him and the girls while observing. Until they met Lila’s ‘trainer’ and learned her mindset.

“All right, Lila. Bring us around in a tight curve left, I want a hundred and ten degrees on the nose if you can manage it. Never try for ninety, the inertial dampeners won’t handle it and you can shear off your engines,” coached the copilot, her large green ears wiggling in amusement as the Boghet flicked something on the console in front of her and a holographic course projection appeared on their view screens.

“You got it, Zee!” Lila chirped excitedly.

Desmond only had a moment to brace himself against the straps, swearing internally at himself that he hadn’t decided to take the time to put his armor on, before the shuttle jerked and his feet left the ground.

On his right, Raegan whooped in excitement as her booted feet left the ground and she was held in place with only her crash harness while the other girls all started swearing again.

“Incoming missile! Down!” Zee barked sharply, slapping a switch that made the lights in the shuttle flash bright red and a klaxon start sound.

Lila didn’t hesitate and Desmond felt his stomach abruptly surge trying to escape through his lips as the shuttle adjusted on its Y-axis and dove in response to the adjustment. Audra’s tail flicked through the air and thumped into the ceiling again, drawing another bark of pain from the scaled woman.

“Audra, coil into the harness next to you!” Desmond ordered and the Nagat fought against the opposing forces of gravity to wrestle her massive tail into place, twining it into the empty harness that Lila would have occupied if she was back here.

“Good job!” Zee cackled, flicking off the klaxon warning and returning the lights to normal. “I thought I’d get you with that one.”

“After you did it the first two times, I’ve been waiting for it to happen again,” Lila laughed right back, bringing the shuttle into a gentle climb back to neutral on its Y-axis in space. “That first one scared the crap out of me, but it’s not like I haven’t been that scared before in a Rift.”

“You adept-guards have an advantage there,” Zee said, the laughter bleeding out of her voice to be replaced with respect. “You’ve already faced down death a dozen times by the time you get out of training. Even with how advanced the VR setups can get, many pilots don’t learn if they can handle the stress of combat flight until it actually happens.”

“They definitely throw us into the deep end with training,” Lila agreed, her voice going somber as well. “I am surprised there isn’t a higher mortality rate amongst the guards.”

“Oh there is,” Zee countered with a shake of her head that made the myriad little bone earrings in her large ears clatter together. “But it depends heavily on the adept in charge of them. I actually was thinking about putting my name in for consideration the last time there was a slot open on Rowett’s team, but changed my mind.”

Desmond’s ears perked up at this. While he’d talked to the other adepts aboard the Fist of Defiance about a lot of things, the subject of guard’s injuries hadn’t come up often. For obvious reasons.

“What changed your mind? Didn’t want to get all sweaty in the armor? Or were you worried they’d take away all your shiny rocks with the uniform code?”

Zee snorted and shook her head, making the earrings clatter happily. The stout little Boghet woman raised both her hands in the air, shaking her wrists and making her stone bracelets click together as well.

“Never. I worked hard on these things. Every planet I’ve landed on, I grab one. I carry a part of the cosmos with me, and it protects me,” she said confidently. “No, it was the fact that I don’t want to live my life maimed. The last girl Rowett lost retired on medical discharge, lost her left leg at the hip and her right hand. She would have bled out and died with almost any other adept, but Rowett pulled the shuttle back to retrieve her.”

“Medical didn’t fix her up?” Lila asked as she guided the shuttle through several more lower-impact maneuvers that barely made the others in her squad sway in their seats.

“Oh Doc Hestia got her patched up, but a lost limb is still a lost limb. The psychological weight of that kind of injury broke the poor gal. She didn’t have the funds for a good vat-clone replacement limb or prosthetic, either. I heard Mia did a collection amongst her girls and they sent her off with a donation when she was released early on a medical discharge, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up drowning in stims instead of coping and moving on.”

Zee’s voice dropped into a reserved tone and she sighed, before continuing with a measure of forced cheer to try and resurrect the mood.

“Not everyone is as tough as your girl. Ain’t that right, Adept-Guard Nodako.”

“Tough isn’t the right word for it, but I’ll take the compliment,” Sasha called back with forced amusement. “I was just too ornery to give up until after I’d gotten even. By then, I already had my replacement arm and my foster-sisters to keep my head out of my ass.”

Foster-sisters she lost a few years later, Desmond thought with a grimace. He’d gotten pieces of the story from Sasha, but never pushed the Hyreh-Taari girl to tell him more. It was Sasha’s story to tell, but he had the highlights. Her adoptive sisters had been bounty hunters, and had lost their lives while on a contract when Sasha was sixteen, leaving behind a re-orphaned Sasha and a mountain of debt.

“Anyway,” Zee continued, bouncing in her seat and making it squeak. “I opted not to take the chance. If I fuck up, I’d rather go out in a ball of plasma and shrapnel rather than linger. That and I love the freedom my baby gives me.”

The grinning Boghet lovingly caressed the console in front of her with one large hand, the gesture making her handmade bracelets click sharply on the metal.

“Everyone has their preferences. Me, I wanted to pilot the capital ships, but didn’t want to risk the surgery,” Lila countered as she swung the shuttle back around and brought the Fist of Defiance back into view.

“You would hate it,” Zee said with a roll of her eyes. “You have all that power and fury at your command, and you have to take orders from the Transport adept. I got nothing against adepts, but the Transport ones are the worst. Act like they are captains themselves and you should worship the ground they walk on.”

“Wouldn’t know,” Lila said with a shrug. “Despite the fact Desmond is an adept himself, we still haven’t really met the Transport adept for the Fist yet.”

“And you probably won’t,” Zee replied while playing with her close-cut brown hair. “She’s a princess in mindset and reality, some duchess’s kid that is far from home and doesn’t realize she isn’t on the top of the pile anymore.”

“Doesn’t sound like the kind of person the Little Boss would get along with, anyway,” Raegan called forward.

Zee turned in her seat to shoot the Uth’ra a smile and point at her with one long finger. 

“You get it, Rae. Life’s too short to spend it around assholes, it’s why I volunteered when the lieutenant asked for someone to give your Lila a bit of wing-time.”

“I thought it was because Des was paying extra for the flight lessons?” Audra asked in confusion, wriggling about to get more comfortable with her bulk merging into two seats now.

“That too, cutie,” Zee replied with a laugh. “Okay, let’s not waste fuel jawing about.” The Boghet woman’s fingers flew over the keys on her console, and a moment later the transmission light lit up when a response came back. “Great! Lila, adjust course right by sixty degrees and down by seventeen.”

The Va’Aelfa complied without hesitation and the shuttle began to pull away from the Fist of Defiance, instead angling towards a thick band of asteroids that filled the sixth orbital of the system they were in currently.

“Uh…” Chloe said in protest, only for Zee to wave a hand dismissively.

“It’s fine, we are cleared to enter the belt. I want your girl to get a bit more dodging practice with real stakes. Besides, asteroids aren’t nearly as close together as they look from a distance. No, it’s the gravel you gotta worry about.”

“Gravel?” Lila asked, her voice notching up into a higher tone. “You mean the small stuff? That’s too small to see with the naked eye at the speeds you have me going?”

“That’s the stuff!” Zee cheered. “Now, if you scratch my wings then I’ll have you buffing it until it’s fixed. Put a hole in her, and I’ll patch it with your skinny ass—”

Zee’s casual threats were cut off by a sharp beep from the console and she tapped a button that caused text to scroll across the small screen before her. Desmond couldn’t read the text, but he caught the reflection of the grin that spread across her face as Zee read the words.

“What?” Lila asked, clearly having seen the smile as well.

Zee didn’t answer aloud at first, instead tapping several keys that caused the white lights in the crew bay to shift to amber in color and Desmond felt the pitch of the engines humming through his spine shift.

“That was fire clearance,” Zee explained with a laugh as the massive laser cannons mounted on the spine of the shuttle hummed and powered up. “Let’s get you a bit of target practice, too!”

<><><>

“I can’t tell who was trying to kill us more,” Raegan panted as she sat on the polished shuttle bay deck with her head between her knees. “Lila with those maneuvers or Zee egging her on.”

“Neither,” Zee said confidently, pulling the zipper on her flight suit down to reveal a sweat-stained white shirt underneath that encased a generous share of green-skinned breasts. “I didn’t have her do anything that we aren’t trained for in flight school. Obstacle runs through asteroid belts are second-month exercises after all.”

“At those speeds?” Lila asked, bouncing in excitement on her heels.

“Maybe a bit slower,” Zee replied with a grin, flapping her flight-suit with both hands before glancing at Desmond thoughtfully. “You mind if I break decorum a bit, Adept?”

“You do you, Lieutenant Raditz,” Desmond replied with a laugh as he stepped around the seated Raegan to let her lean into him, which the big Uth’ra did without hesitation.

“It’s ‘Zee,’ and you know it,” grumped Lieutenant Zarah Raditz, or ‘Zee’ as she’d insisted on being called.

“You broke out the title first,” Chloe snickered and got a stuck-out tongue from the much smaller woman

Zee pulled the top half of her flight suit off and knotted the arms around her waist. This left her in just the sweaty white top that was nearly see-through, something Desmond was immediately aware of from the dark green nipples he could see printing against the fabric.

“Much better,” Zee sighed happily, waving one hand at her face and making her bracelets rattle against each other. “Anyway, yeah. That wasn’t more than a basic refresher. It’s too bad we don’t have a proper SIM-setup here to do the VR training. That’d let you sharpen up your edge even faster.”

“I don’t need to be fully qualified,” Lila said with a wave of one hand. “I just want to maintain my credentials in case I’m needed to shuttle my adept around.”

“And for that you need flight hours, I get it,” Zee replied with a wave of her hand. “But those flight hours aren’t specified as regular flight lanes, in atmosphere, or commercial. They just want you to get hours behind the stick, and I’m not going to let you slack off.”

“We appreciate the dedication,” Chloe said in thanks. “Though some of us might need to get a bit of revenge for the bruises.”

“I’m not that beaten up,” Audra protested grumpily, though Desmond saw her wince when she slithered across the deck to take up her spot on his right.

Without hesitating, Desmond slipped a thread of mana out of his cache and attached it to Audra before pushing the Hydra spell to her to mend the bruises he knew were hiding under her scales.

Audra flinched and then relaxed with a relieved sigh when the pain from the bruises she’d gotten as her tail bounced about abated.

“Sorry about that, Audra,” Lila said sheepishly, toying with one of the thick braids she kept her red hair in.

“It’s fine, Lila. I just wasn’t expecting to fly about that much. I’ve never really dealt with that kind of maneuvering when the inertial dampeners are down. Whenever I had maneuvers with… well before I came here, I had a specialized crash-couch to strap into that I could get my tail into.”

Audra hesitated mid-sentence, and Desmond knew she was remembering her time on her mother’s flagship. But since she was basically a political refugee right now, she couldn’t really mention that she was a former princess with a pirate-queen for a mother.

Pulling one hand out of Raegan’s hair, Desmond gave Audra’s forearm a gentle squeeze and got a shy smile in return from the Nagat while Zee rattled off her own answer.

“Yeah, the shuttles do their best to handle every situation, but Nagat are one of the ones that we can’t always cover. I’ll add my apology to the pile, since I should have thought about it when I shut off the dampeners to make it more combat-like for Lila.”

“It is a lesson learned for the future,” Sasha interjected, waving her artificial right arm through the air dismissively. “Regardless, we appreciate you taking the time out of your own practice to give Lila a lesson.”

“Any time, and I appreciate the extra credits. Lila, how many flight hours do you need to maintain your license now?” Zee turned in a businesslike fashion to the Va’Aelfa, who produced her data tablet and began tapping away on the book-sized device.

“I’ve not really gotten any time in the last year and a half, so I need another… eighty-seven hours in the next six months to maintain it without an issue. I wish they would let you bank hours…” Lila said after a moment, flipping the tablet to show it to Zee.

“If they did that, it’d make the keyboard jockey’s at the administration branch grumpy,” Zee snorted before signing the tablet with a flourish. “There you go, certified the last four hours for you. We can get you the rest without an issue. Once a week for four hours will get it done easily.”

“The schedule might be a bit odd,” Lila hedged, though Desmond could see the excitement in her eyes at the prospect of getting to spend that much time flying again. “What with the increase in Rift deployments we are dealing with.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Zee said, her large ears wiggling happily. “If you are up for it, I can put in to be your pilot for deployments. Let you fly out at the very least to get some more easy stick time.”

“Don’t worry about that part,” Lila said firmly, her excitement fading and being replaced with determination. “For Rifts, I need to be focused on my adept and my job. I don’t want to go in with tired eyes from flying.”

“How about we test it once,” Desmond suggested, interrupting before Zee could agree. “You have so much energy, Lila, that it might help you to burn some off before we get started on Rifts? Better to know for sure that it’ll impair you than miss an opportunity out of fear it would, right?”

“And if we go in knowing you are a little worn out, then we can compensate,” Sasha added in, her tail flicking in amusement behind her. “Not that I expect it to really impact your energy levels.”

“Okay,” Lila said after only another minute of hesitation. “If Chloe says it’s fine.”

Desmond tilted his head back to look up at Chloe, as the mountain of a woman loomed at his back where she always stood. He didn’t mind at all that Lila was offering final say to Chloe, since the horned woman was his first and primary guard as well as the leader of his ladies.

“Testing is fine,” Chloe said after a moment of thought. “Better to know how it affects you. Besides, we don’t know when we might need you to step into those shoes again, right?”

All the women in Desmond’s team gave a sharp nod at that, obviously remembering the last time Lila had been pressed into piloting the shuttle for their special little mission for Faye. 

“Sounds like a plan then,” Zee said with a clap of her hands. “I’m going to get my baby tucked in for the night and go get a shower. I’ll be in touch once we know when our next stop for flight practice is.”

“Thanks again, Zee,” Lila said before bounding over to bounce by Desmond’s side. “And thank you for setting this up, Desmond!”

“You are welcome, Lila,” Desmond replied with a grin that Lila sealed with a kiss that wasn’t sneaky in the least from the laughter they heard from Zee.