trans_9 | Battle of Lobnas Sord [Open]

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Battle of Lobnas Sord [Open]

Spaurh had found the sensoriums. At first she'd merely been curious, recreating a few places from memory, trying out the zero-gravity simulation. She'd even dabbled in the piloting program (and found that she was almost as good as she had been out of training). And then she'd recreated her flagship. It had been perfect - almost too perfect. The crew acted like the real crew. Her Chief-of-Staff was so real that she'd almost thought he'd materialized next to her. Of course, that's when that worming little thought had burrowed into her head - what if? Could the battle at the Sord have gone differently? Could she have saved more of her men, her ships?

Despite her rather smug exterior, she honestly had cared for those under her command, even if in some abstract way. And even though she'd achieved a "victory" of sorts at Lobnas, the defeat had still stung. She was supposed to be rebuilding her squadron. Instead she was here. So, at a loss, she'd replayed the battle in the Sensoriums. And then again. And then again. She lost less ships, she lost more ships. But every time the losses had been crippling to her little fleet. And now she was doing it again. The ship rocked from a nearby explosion, "Looks like the enemy is stupid..."

She had made it this far into the fight - the retreat from the Sord, breaking enemy contact. But just as the first time, they were following her. Her crew, her wonderfully trained crew were giving it there all. Reports continued to stream in from the fleet. Another ship had exploded. and then-

"Mine! Incoming!"

"Evasive-"

The ship shuddered for a moment from an impact and a frantic bridge officer begin yelling as information scrolled across his screen, "Impact! Our engines are disabled! Another-"

The ship shuddered underneath her again and then the deck plating seemed to rise to meet her as the entire room turned into blinding white light. It faded out a few moments later, leaving Spaurh standing on an empty bridge. The words "Ship destroyed" burned across the viewscreen. Spaurh bit back a curse and stalked back to her command chair and slumped, sulking. There had to be some way to get a better result out of the fight....

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"We don't really have a full crew, so I think I'll have to skip the pull-start," Luly says. She barely remembers how to do that part, anyway. "Here, c'mon—you get the back seat," she says as she carefully climbs up onto the wing, offering a hand to help Spaurh up. Compared to an Abh—especially in this gravity field—she might seem almost disproportionately strong, especially given how well of a shape she keeps herself in.

"I'm probably going to regret this," she sighs as she takes the offered hand and clambers up. She eyes the cockpit with distaste, before finally slipping into the backseat, "What's the point of this primitive craft?"

"To fly," Luly says. "They got hopscotched pretty quick, but old rigs like this were still popular in the first World War, once they figured out how to put the guns in without shooting off the propellers." Leaning in to what may be an uncomfortable disturbance of personal space she makes sure the harness is securely buckled and tightened around Spaurh.

"All right, start up now," she says, and suddenly the prop spins into motion, the engine roaring. The vibration is enough to make it feel like the whole plane's going to shake itself to pieces for somebody accustomed to the smoothness of Abh ships. "Usually it's not that easy!" Luly shouts back over the noise. "Takes at least two people to coordinate, and three if you want to make sure you don't get hit when you're pulling the prop!"

"How delightful."

Give her a patrol ship any day of the week.

She doesn't flinch when Luly leans in rather close - Spaurh violates other people's personal space all the time. She can handle that sort of thing. She double-checks the harness herself and settles back, only to jolt upright when the engine roars to life. She yells, trying to be heard, "You're sure this thing isn't going to explode? Really?"

"Probably won't!" Luly shouts back. "A stall's more likely, but I'm getting better at not causing those!" Oh, that's... reassuring. "The set of controls you have is locked, but I'll let you steer some once we're up!" The controls... foot pedals, a throttle, a large and unwieldy-looking control stick. That can't be all, can it? The internal panel has a full set of primitive-looking flight instruments—all mechanical, of course—though they still seem almost hopelessly undercomprehensive and unintuitive.

Luly releases the brakes, and the biplane lurches forward down the tarmac, slowly accelerating.

Spaurh is not about to show fear, even in the face of this strange flying contraption that is probably going to explode. Or possibly crash on takeoff, one of the two. She simply sighs in resignation and gently grabs the stick in front of her, lining her feet up with the pedals. How did her ancestors survive?

They're very close to running out of runway by the time the plane smoothly tilts back, the wheels losing contact with the tarmac. "We have liftoff!" Luly shouts, and hurks the wings into a congratulatory--but, given how close they still are to the ground, probably somewhat disturbing--waggle. The breeze from the propeller and icreased airspeed is already buffeting the two of them. Maybe she was right about the silly outfits...

Spaurh clings to the cockpit for dear life. Taking fifteen gees of acceleration is one thing, but this is something else entirely. Sh'll grudgingly admit that Luly was right about the outfits, but she's still convinced that this primitive contraption is going to fall apart or just explode in midair (and if this weren't a simulation, scatter pieces of Abh across a couple square miles).

She's not airsick - she's spent most of her life in low or zero-gravity environments. No, she's just apprehensive about this vehicle. She glances over the edge, watching the ground slowly pull away beneath them. That's different....

Quite possibly entirely to further scare Spaurh, Luly makes the old plane 'bounce', spilling air and regaining altitude a few times before she finally pushes the throttle completely forward. Now that she's stopped the showboating, the acceleration forward and upward smooths out, at least as much as it can with the constant vibration of the combustion engine.

As they rise from the relatively pristine environs of the airfield (it might well be a standing museum or something, given its condition), the megastructure engineering here and there on the horizon becomes more obvious--principally an absolutely huge city-arcology, easily tall enough to swallow up full skyscrapers. And there are the stacked superroads, strectching future-urban sprawl, cities layered on parks layered on subcities... If this is Luly's world, engineering there must be a big business. The population count it seems like the infrastructure is built to support is ridiculously, massively high--maybe even literally insanely so, by the sort of standards an Abh is used to.

Spaurh's face doesn't betray fear. But inwardly, she's swearing that she's going to pay Luly back for this. Somehow. It's bad enough that the plane is practically falling out of the sky on its own, without Luly's help. She does her best to maintain her outward appearance of calm and slowly releases her death-grip on the frame to lean back as best she can in her seat, exuding an air of nonchalance.

She glances towards the city, taking it in. The Abh did build cities, at least not on the ground. The nearest she can recall seeing to that maze of metal and concrete is the Imperial Capital - a massive space station (or series of stations linked together, depending on who you ask) that houses the heart of the Empire. It's interesting to see how landers live. And honestly, she can't really tell how they stand it.

"Do all of you landers live in cities like that?"

"A lot of us do!" Luly shouts back to be heard over the engine. "The arco complexes are about the safest place you can be against the Migou. You can't really see it from the outside, but the core sections can take full military assaults without cracking for at least a few weeks."

She continues on, sliding the plane to only a few hundred feet above one of the elevated super-roadways, following it along. "And there's the refugees, too! We only control about half the planet and half the people from the other half have moved in with us."

"Hmm. I imagine."

Well, not really. But the thought is what counts, right?

She squints through the goggles, eying the city and the roadways as they pass over it, "...refugees? I am so glad that we don't often bother with the affairs of planets. The surface doesn't interest us. Far too much trouble to actually occupy it."

Luly tilts the plane back, slowly gaining altitude at the cost of an angle ungainly enough to seem rather dangerous. "Sounds like a nice way to handle things, not that I wish the Migou weren't taking the slow and dirty way."

She angles the aircraft up more, just on the very edge of stalling. Hopefully Spaurh remembered to pack her parachute, just in case.

"Well," Spaurh replies as dryly as she can when she's yelling overt he engine, "If they make too much trouble, we simply burn the atmosphere off."

Sparuh hopes so too, really. She doesn't want to splatter.

"But that's no fun," Luly shouts back. "You don't even get to roast any marshmallows."

They go up, and up, and up... The little plane isn't very fast, of course, but with the only plane of reference being the ground they're heading only a few steps from directly away from, it's kind of vertiginous.

"Marshmallows...?" She honestly has no idea what those are.

Once again, he's clinging to her harness, staring up into the clear blue sky as the plane climbs. She's almost one hundred per cent certain that the engine is going to cut out on them.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death...

"You know! Marshmallows!"

Luly dips the plane forward just a little—still angled well up, though—and starts pulling it through twists and waves.

And then it stalls. There's a long, long few seconds as the plane tilts backwards, losing air—the engine is still roaring but the wings aren't getting any lift, and now they're upside-down and still falling, and the biplane's very rapidly going into a wrenchingly disorienting spin stall—

"Oh, shit!" Luly very clearly audibly says.

Spaurh does her best to remain calm. Outwardly, she's succeeding remarkably well. Inwardly, she can't believe she's about to die in this horrible, inelegant craft. Still, the spinning and everything is disorienting. All she can do is cling to the airplane and hope that they come out of it.

Luly wrestles with the controls, spouting curses in a dozen languages.

After long, tense, gut-wrenching seconds, she finally manages to wrestle it into an even dive, and pulls sharply up, leveling up the biplane only a spare few inches above the roadway it was just about to plow into.

"Yes!" she shouts triumphantly—

—and they hit a building.

Fortunately, the Sensorium's safety features are on by default, as they normally are. As the plane roars into a burning fireball, Luly and Spaurh find themselves standing on the roadway several hundred feet away.

"...oops," the dark-skinned woman says.

Spaurh quickly looks down at herself to make sure that she's in one piece, then demurely brushes some dust off of herself. She's calm, composed. Certainly not terrified or mentally cheering the fact that she's not in the middle of that fireball over there. She arches one brow, watches the smoke rising into the blue sky, then turns to Luly, "...if I were you, I would stick to ground vehicles, Lieutenant."

"Usually I'm not such a daredevil with it," Luly admits, smiling very sheepishly. "And I've spent most of my training time on stuff that can't actually stall..." She looks rather embarrassed about what happened.

Spaurh smirks, her tone teasing, "...as I said then, stick with ground vehicles."

She pauses and then grins, "Well, since you've shown me yours... I could give you a little taste of an Abh communications shuttle."

"Oh, that'd be pretty good," Luly says, her eyes lighting up (not literally). "If we're going to do that I want to give you at least a look at what a modern fighter's like after, though," she adds.

"I hate to admit, but I'm bit out of practice - I haven't flown a shuttle since my junior officer days. Still, it will be good practice," she pauses and remarks dryly, "...as long as your modern fighters are sturdier than that contraption you just had me clamber into."

She glances up at the sky and mutters under her breath. The scene shifts around them and they're sitting in the two chairs of the communications shuttle. The canopy provides a sweeping, unbroken view of space. Stars, unblinking, sit in the inky blackness and just off of the starboard bow lies the Lashkau (http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/seikai/images/e/e4/Lashkau_and_1st_Fleet.jpg), Spaurh's flagship. It's painted a crimson red - the same color of her eyes, if Luly is observant enough to notice that.

"Ohhh..." Luly mumbles as she looks sharply around at the stars. "It's nice to get out here again," she says softly, leaning forward in her seat. "Is that the Lashkau?" she asks, looking over at the brightly-colored ship with her own red eyes.

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