Story:Delta V

Delta V is the first story set in the Republic of Xelass. It details the beginnings of renewed hostilities between the Republic and the Coalition of People's Republics.

Prologue
Supporting his head with one hand, Irnos read through the latest paperwork with a growing sense of depression. He took the bottle of Kaevel cider that sat on the end of his desk and took a swig, savouring the warm rush down his throat. He didn't have much left in the mini-fridge at the end of his bed, but he had enough.

He stopped to look around the room, taking a break from the words to allow his acheing eyes to refocus. The room was quite dark- that was why his table lamp was on, after all- and far too crowded. The supply officer would have said 'cosy', but this wasn't cosy. Cosy wasn't metal and concrete.

His desk sat next to his bed- a simple bed, just a sheet over a matress over a steel frame. It creaked whenever you moved on it, just like all the others. A skworbug scurried around the legs, searching for crumbs or spills. It found none- when they had two spend two hours a day cleaning, scraps didn't commonly survive. He considered just how different military life was to that he believed it would be- cleaning. Drills. Inspections. More cleaning. Sure, he knew why it was done, but that didn't mean he had to like it.

The stereotype had been wrong in other ways too. The drill sergeants weren't bad people. They were just performing the same psychological tricks that had been done for decades in order to break down a soft city boy and rebuild him harder, stronger, a soldier. And sometimes it worked. But outside of inspections and exams, he'd sat down with them once and learned a lot. He once saw them like unstoppable, sadistic, uncompromising machines- but now he could see them as Zeth. People.

Apparently the army and marines had it harder, but Irnos was a spacer. He had wanted to be an astronaut, but he hadn't got anywhere near the grades or the scientific curiosity, so that dream had been quashed. Until the space fleet was established.

It was like a dream come true to the young Irnos Vess. Go to space. Live on board a nuclear rocket, fight, and give those commies what they deserved- a good thrashing. A nuclear rocket. His lip curled into a grin.

He sighed once more and looked back at the paperwork. Tomorrow he would graduate from the XSF cadet training course, and be a proper spacer, plying the stars and what have you, sent up on the next frigate. It still hadn't hit him yet- all those years of work, over? That couldn't be right. Without the routine of training life... how could things stay together?

He heard footsteps as someone walked in, and turned his head to look. It was Terrim- tall, handsome, always smiling, and always glad to talk.

"Hi, Terrim."

"Hey, Irnos! Still reading?"

"Yeah."

"What exactly?" He came over, looking far too interested than he should have been, and leaned over Irnos' shoulder. His eyes scanned the page, and then he drew back. "Nope, no idea."

"You know what I'm going to be doing, right?"

"Er... spacing. Of some kind."

"Assistant engineer." Irnos growled. "These are risk assessments. Forty pages of bloody risk assessments."

"Oh." Terrim's smile returned. "Heh."

"You've never seen a risk assessment before." It was a statement, not a question.

"Never. Looks boring."

"You've no idea."

"But graduation tomorrow! Proper spacers! Flying up into space and shooting commies!"

"I've heard it's more along the lines of getting shouted at for wasting propellant."

"For you, maybe."

"Yeah. For me. I have to stare at dials all day and get told how to work a nuclear reactor by some old guy with a control rod up his-"

"No fighting?"

"No fighting. Maths, maths, and maths. Delta vees, propellant masses, and orbit changes."

"Well, good luck with that." Terrim gave him one last- infuriating- smile, and wandered back out. Irnos admired the man's innocence, his mind uncorrupted by all those bloody numbers. At least he'd have a computer to do the calculations for him.

He looked back at the risk assessments, and allowed his head to fall down onto the desk.

Chapter One
The scaffolding itself was more than impressive enough. A 130m-tall mass of steel and plastic, it supported the frigate and its takeoff rockets, as well as allowing the internal lift to reach the entrance hatch. It glinted in the dawn light, the first beams of the rise of Aiston's sun making it shimmer like distant water.

Attached to it was the vessel itself- the XSS Unity, a Hanutun-class frigate. Like the rest of its class, it would be 50m long when it reached orbit, but with its blast-off stages it was twice that height. Solid-fuel rockets surrounded the cylinder of liquid fuel, white and blue, upon the launch pad. The vessel itself was a dull silver, not very reflective, and shaped like a rocket should be- an upright, tapering structure, with fins and attitude jets and a nosecone and retracted radiators and-

Irnos released the breath and readjusted his backpack to get it to stay on. The group of them were heading over for their first flight- ten recruits to join the fourteen veterans already in there. The proportion seemed too high to Irnos, but it was a young fleet. There weren't enough veterans.

Terrim was smiling away at the back of the group, with his girlfriend, Rena. There was around a six-to-four gender split in the recruits, but apparently this would even out the proportions on the craft itself. Irnos caught himself wondering what the point of that was when, after all, the women on board would be too old for them.

They reached the lift entrance, and were ushered in by annoyed-looking takeoff attendants. The lift was damp despite being steel, and very cramped. Pressed against the wall, Irnos watched the number on the screen above the doorframe increase- distance from the ground. About 70m up, the door opened, and they were in the access tube. This was a steel bridge spanning the gap, surrounded by a cylinder of flexible plastic even though it wasn't raining. They went in and closed the hatch, to be greeted by the captain.

The captain was a tall Zeth, wearing a comms helmet and a tight flight suit. He looked the ten of them up and down, and then began to speak.

"Welcome to the Unity. We're taking off in six minutes- go to your stations. If you have any questions, ask someone else. Put your flight suits on and remember to strap yourselves in properly before stage one begins to fire. Got it?"

They nodded together.

"Good. And when I say properly, I mean properly. Better too tight than slightly loose." He turned and walked off.

They headed off to where they had to go, taking a flightsuit from the pile as they passed, and putting it on as they walked. Irnos knew that the engine control room was the bottom deck, but his sense of direction had been more than a little confused by the fact that there were chairs on the ceiling. Still, it made sense; when they turned around to begin deceleration, the 'artificial gravity' would be going the other way. There would be beds, sinks, and other such things on the ceiling too.

There was a hatch in the floor, and once Irnos had his suit on, he made his way downwards along a runged ladder. He found himself in the engine room, and as predicted there were consoles on the ceiling. An old Zeth turned to look at him.

"You Irnos?"

"Aye, sir."

"Good. I'm Engineer Vake."

Irnos took a moment to study the man. He wasn't old, but he wasn't young either, and he had a back slightly too hunched to be normal. A pair of fragile-looking, round-rimmed glasses dangled on his snout. He seemed to be attempting to look as ancient as possible, even if it was just a facade.

The Engineer spoke again. "You know the routine? We take seats on opposite sides of the room. Mass has to be balanced- what's yours?"

"79 kilons."

"Alright. Move your chair three notches towards the wall when you get to it."

"Does anything need to be done first, sir?"

"Final checks. Don't worry about it- I'll just narrate each as I do it."

Vake moved from instrument to instrument, looking down his glasses at them.

"Reactor temperature is in the safe range. No fractures detected. The reaction chamber wall is reflecting correctly, so it's not fractured and won't break down during burn. Position is right. Attitude thrusters are fine- we're good to go." He tapped the comm switch.

"Yes, Vake?"

"All ready, sir."

"Good. Take-off in two." The comm bleeped as the conversation was ended.

Irnos sat down, moving the chair forward three notches, and then strapped himself in tight.

Vake was doing the same on the far side of the room, which admittedly wasn't very far away. Their flight suits were grey, with only the XSF logo on the chest and no other markings.

"We need all these rockets to lift us up because of our mass. We haven't fuelled, but we're still around 1200 megons. The thrust of the whole assembly is about five and a half million newtons, which is counting both the liquid and solid fuel rockets. Slightly more than enough to take us into orbit, where we can fuel ourselves up with ammonia and then set off to Kranas. On Kranas, escape velocity is about 2.2km/s, so we don't need anywhere near so much boosting."

Irnos remembered that Aiston's escape velocity was about 7.8km/s. The moon, which had about a hundredth of the planet's mass, would naturally have far less. The other moon was even smaller, so the CPR did have a little advantage when it came to Aiston-moon-system hops. They lost out in terms of fuel recovery, though.

Lots of people thought that escape velocity was the velocity that had to be reached to escape the planet's gravity. Not so- the Republic couldn't design anything that could even approach such a speed in the time taken to get from surface to exosphere. Any object capable of powered flight could get up there- it was just a matter of how long it could burn for. And it decreased with distance from the surface, too, so it wasn't as big of a challenge as subscribers to than misconception might have believed, though it was rocket science and Irnos wouldn't have been able to get a ship into orbit if he'd designed the system.

Getting to orbit was to get halfway to anywhere. It was the single most difficult part of spaceflight.

Due to environmental concerns, and the relatively primitive designs they had, nuclear rockets weren't allowed to be used on the ground. It was a pity, when they could achieve far higher thrust for far less mass. Everything would be made so much more efficient. He'd heard the terms 'closed-cycle gas core' and 'nuclear salt water rocket' tossed around in these regards, but no prototypes had been constructed.

"T-minus ten seconds."

Ah. Irnos braced himself for take-off.

Vake grinned from across the room. "It feels like a boulder on your chest, even with the suit."

"T-minus nine seconds."

Irnos remembered the centrifuge they had had to spin around in to simulate the acceleration. It had hurt, a lot. Several people had blacked out during the cycle. You got more used to it after a few cycles, but the attendants were only too happy to remind you that actual take-off would be even more powerful.

"T-minus six seconds."

He knew that his dad was watching the takeoff from a few miles away, and would be standing there now, ready to wave his son goodbye. Perhaps feeling as nervous as Irnos himself- no spacecraft had ever failed during launch in the Republic's space program, but they had in the CPR's. The Kassic Empire's first and only attempted launch had ended in a catastrophic explosion and the death of a prince- they hadn't tried that again.

"T-minus three seconds."

Crap. Crap crap crap crap. This would not be pleasant.

"T-minus one second."

There was a sudden push from underneath, as if something enormous had rammed the bottom of the rocket, powerful enough to lift all those thousands of tonnes into the air.

"And we have lift off." The PAs cut out.

The pain was intense. Irnos grimaced as the pressure built on his chest and his skull and his feet and then he blacked out.