And yet more, found on an old harddrive
With apologies to Brian Schul. A Roughrider gets an unwanted assignment.....
----
The Russians called the Foxhound the 'Air Battleship' in reference to the massive missile armament the original carried. In polite company, both of them would earn the nickname Grey Lady. But everyone knew them as the Bitch. Bitch to Fly. Bitch to Maintain. Bitch to Take-Off. Bitch to Land. Everyone's Bitch in a wargame. Ugly. Brutal. But Hard. She did two things well. The Bitch came with the first IDAR set fitted to a mobile platform, and could outrun bad news if given half a chance.
I was the first to fly one.
I signed up to fly the Sled. The worst moment in any Sled Driver's life is to be told it's time to move on to another jet. Those HABU - all caps - just have a way of getting their teeth into you, and you never want to fly another jet again. She slices through the sky, stretched forward, going a million miles an hour while sitting, leaking on the hangar. But all good things come to an end.
We'd ordered two Foxhounds from a small-time friend of Bens. Officially, the reason we were told it was because the Fox had a new type of interwave sensor that could detect drive fields. Unofficially, the scuttlebut said it was just a thing between friends - a little helping hand. So can imagine how I felt getting my orders to transfer. It felt like being asked to give up a limb.
But orders is orders. So, I hopped a ferry out to Frigga to be the first Roughrider to meet the Foxhound. My first inkling that this wasn't to be the usual assignment was meeting the mousy woman due to be my backseater on the flight out - Rico. I knew three things about her. She worked in intelligence. She had absolutely zero flight hours - not even a callsign. And even if she wasn't in command, she was the whole reason the jet existed in the first place.
I mean, I'd gone from Sled Driver, to Bus Driver. That's an insult! Okay, so maybe I hadn't met top marks for my flying skills but I still more than made the grade.
We met our jet on Frigga, and I must say, first impressions of the girl weren't good. She stood there, creaking, steaming and somehow managing to look twenty years old despite supposedly being brand new - my first thoughts were of all those old Eastern European cars rattling and banging and smoking their way around the Soviet Union. Most of all, however, she seemed Huge, more like something that battered the sky out of its way, rather than slice through it. Those big intakes reached up over my head.
Almost like she was reaching up after something.
I remember how the original MiG had been built to chase the Blackbird and think that I've been doomed to play second fiddle. I walked around her, taking stock of the welds on her steel skin, the rivets not ground down flush with the skin. She's crude, brutal and built to a budget.... I'm almost appalled at the idea of spending three times the cost of a new Sled on her. The smell of ammonia and jet fuel linger, making the eyes water. In every jet there's usually something you can bond over, something interesting or intriguing that makes you just that bit curious to get inside.
The Foxhound offered nothing. Even our markings looked just a little bit funny on the tail... more like a captured enemy jet than something built to wear them.
Jet - the builder - assured us they were both brand new, before handing me the flight manual. Twice the size of a Sled, and then some. In guest quarters I finally get an inkling of why I'd been paired up with the Foxhound. You've got a hundred pages on how to fly the jet, then another two hundred on properly managing the engines to maintain top speed without melting an inducer or shedding blades. And I'd always had an engineer's mind - it's what I did daneside before getting away from it all.
Rico earned her callsign - Chatterbox - by not shutting up about all the cool sensor gear she'd just been handed. Of course she objected - but that's the whole point of a first callsign, isn't it? You hate it, you moan about it, then your squadron thinks of something worse.
My first impressions of the Bitch. A finnicky, overstressed propulsion system inside a solid-steel spaceframe buldging with a sensor set from a starship four or five times it size.
The cockpit comes from 1984. Wireframe graphics on glass monitors packed into a sea of steam-gauges. It's tight, smaller than Piper-cub, with steel framing closing in around. Even the smell is decades old - a mixture of amine, engine oil, kerosene and ammonia. At least the flight suit's easy enough to lock into place. Just sit-and-latch and ready to go. But it's all solid, more like the cockpit was machined from a billet of steel than pressed and painted. Controls are tight. Switches 'thunk' and 'latch' positively. She likes to be touched, and rewards iumble and inquisitive fingers.
The flightsuit is light, tight and better suited to Chatterbox than your's truly but I can deal with that. We suit up for the ferry flight home while I grumble to myself outloud about why I couldn't have been given an F-37 ferry instead - those things are some sweet single-seaters.
The engines are given the traditional christening with the bottle of Jeremiah Weed before being fired up for the first time. Our relationship gets off to a great start when she kills her own batteries cranking, and they have to fetch a start-cart to crank the turbines. When they finally blast into life, it isn't the gutty roar of a J-58, but something sharper, shriller and harsher, more like the turbine blades aren't quite seated right and rattling loose. Ducts and bypass doors rattle and whisper.
Both engines cough and bang as they're pushed to take-off power, see-sawing between too-rich, too-lean and just right before finally settling down to something just a little rough and smokey.
Chatterbox is getting giddy as she works over the switches, while I'm trying to nudge it forward on brakes that have exactly two settings - on, and off.
I pilot it on out up to where the outer-marker should've been before Chatterbox locks in the autopilot and programs our course and speed for Atalante and I'm reduced to keeping the engines in tune.
I honestly begin to wonder who I pissed off to deserve the assignment.
---
HABU come with a mind - a personality. You have the Speeders, you have the Suicide Girls. You've got the mysterious Femme Fatales and the Blabbermouths. You get the odd grouch or gossip. It took a month of training sorties to really start to understand the Bitch. At first, I put her down as a bit of a hard bitch. Stern, abrupt and intolerant, above all, she was a cranky bird who didn't like being mishandled. Every flight had it's glitches and grumbles - stuck doors, engine surges or just plain taking too long to get into her stride and run.
I finally had my epiphany on a training exercise where we'd been tasked to run an intercept of two older Sled when she woke up and bared her teeth for the first time since I met her. She found her stride early and pushed harder and harder for the entire mission.
The original Foxhound had been built as a fighter, to chase the original blackbirds. Now, she'd been saddled with tons of reconnaissance equipment and asked to do a mission she'd never really be intended for, something that maybe lessened what she thought she was supposed to be.
Realising that became something of a bonding moment. Friendship through shared pain is something of a military tradition. The more I understood her, the more I could manage to keep ahead of her issues, to keep the whole machine in tune and running happy.
The cockpit dynamic in the Bitch is unlike anything we normally fly. Most of my time is spent working as a propulsion specialist, rather than pilot, managing the big Mig's big engines. The jet's driven from the back seat by the Information System Officer - who plots the route into the nav computer and let's the autopilot handle the directing..
Once takeoff and landing are done and she's locked into her autopilot, it's time to push her up to cruising speed, keeping the main engines in tune the entire way up balancing brute force against core inlet temperatures, all while juggling the neutron injectors, bypass doors and shock-ramps, then manually making the turn to keep the big jet on the black line because the star tracker got washed out by the sun again.
Holding it steady at .18 is constant, mind-numbing work. You're head's constantly inside the cockpit, hemmed in by four steel walls and tektite, with no time to look around because as soon as you do the Bitch turns around a bites. An engine unstarts, overheats, or a generator CSD goes out - anything to grab your attention. Hey, buddy, eyes down here please.
And then when you've mastered you realise that the reason it's been wandering around the sky so much is that the SAS failed on take-off and you didn't notice. You start to realise that you and the jet, you're getting along. Both of you need to work together the make shit happen. You find out what she likes and doesn't like, then run from there. It's a sort of mutual respect.
---
Chatterbox calls her the Grey Lady. Chatterbox still hates to be called Chatterbox. Chatterbox loves hacking things on the fly or haywiring up enemy air defenses, even on exercise. She doesn't shut up telling me exactly what she's doing either. So imagine my joy when we get called up to take on an actual combat mission with her the the Bitch. Normally, it's a specialist job, but we've had a maintenance failure so we're backup.
It's a real Wild Weasel run on a thionite waystation. She doesn't understand why the answer I gave Ben was 'You gotta be shitting me'
The Bitch doesn't carry a heavy combat load. It's not really supposed to be that kind of jet. You can get missiles on sure and Chatterbox spent the entire night rewritting the software with Red Rider to make it work with the anti-radiation missile we had in stock, but really, it just feels like an alround bad idea to intentionally take one of these things into a threat area. Meanwhile, I spent the day with the crew chief going through all the preparations such a comple and highly tuned machine needs to ake her go. Even the uprated engines get check-runs to make sure the heat rejection issue's been fixed.
Satisfied that all's well, I grab some shuteye before the big day.
Immediately on takeoff, it's clear she's a sick bird and not happy to be flying. Burning more fuel than she needs to, sluggish on the throttle and steering like a pig. Refuelling gets interrupted by a bounce off the tanker halfway thrugh and I'm holding her on a single afterburner and full right rudder just to take gas, then accelerate out to some godforsaken black rock that'd been kicked out of the solar system. I'm seriously questioning the spacecraft's ability to take the mission after an unstart sends me head-first into the canopy rail.
But we press on. The strike force is on its way and somebody needs to knock down the missiles before they knock down our friends.
She comes alive 2AU out from the target when the first probes reach us. We are not stealthy. At full burn, we can be seen clear across the solar system.
Chatterbox starts to sweat, calling out each and every new threat as it awakens to our presence. New drive signatures. New sensors. She battles each and every one of them, splitting us up first into an entire squadron, generating ghost craft circling wide, or braking missile longs by pulling their range gate. Missile after missile reaches up to say hello. They hit nothing but ghosts.
We've a good line on the enemy, but we're still an AU out of range of our own weapons.
The hardest thing in the world is not to just jam the throttles full forward. She'll blow her engines at this speed and temperature. Easing her up, I watch the speed and temperature indicators climb and I'm starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe, she wants to get us killed. I reach for the coolant injectors to accelerate her to maximum speed over the target, and something remarkable happens.
Immediately, she perks up. She finds her stride and she gains another percentage point of speed as she hikes her skirt up and the engines blast her forward. The first enemy fighters are coming to intercept but we're so goddamned fast we don't even see them. A few shots chase out wake but we're outrunning even missiles, chasing a little green spot on my HUD.
Chatterbox arms our missiles. She selects our target. 4 missiles. 4 SAM sites. Handy that. I push the trigger
The jet rocks as all four depart, immediately trailing behind us. We're faster than our our ammunition.
Chatterbox switches from ECM, to ECCM, guiding the missiles in even as the SAM sites try to jam. But they can't beat the Bitch's sensors - or Chatterbox pushing the buttons. She's been training with Red Rider.
We're long gone from the threat are by the time the missiles find their target. 100/100. Boom. Enemy fighters recede behind, unable to do nothing but watch. It's marvelous. Only then do I have the time to actually look down at my instruments.
Engine temperatures, hot but good. Door positions, full shut. Speed...... Holy shit.
I swear to the gods of speed the number I saw on that gauge started with a 2. Nobody fucking believes me, despite the track logs. Maybe it was just an error caused by our own information but I'm sticking to my story. And Chatterbox, bless her, she'll stick to it with me.
I'll be goddamned if she didn't go right back to being grumbly and sick as soon as we'd left the threat area, but she'd done exactly what she'd needed to do. Even the HABU were impressed.
The Grey Lady becomes her official nickname, and our practice missions change to line up with our new official role.
Suppression of Enemy Air Defences.
I think the Bitch likes that.
--
We're the unloved bastards. The dissapointment when we show up is palpable. Everyone wants to see the HABU. Sending us along to your local airshow is tantamoment to telling someone they aren't good enough to get a Blackbird. Whether it's intended or not, that's how it comes across to every small-holder out there in the belt. So, there's that subtle hostility ready to greet us, even behind the smile. Thanks for coming, but why no Blackbirds? We want the fast jets? Not that rustbucket.
But we do our best to put on a good show for the kids.
Never forget that when you're the one out there who has to inspire the next generation to take up the Roughrider Cause.
So you prep. You work. Chatterbox sits in the back with nothing to do but wave and take vide while I try to fly.
Now, the HABU show is perfectly choreographed and run to a tee. It's there to make you believe you can be the pilot of such a fantastic machine. It slices through the sky above your head, slow and elegant as a black lady, before roaring over fast and loud. Always graceful, always precise, like a razor cutting through the sky. Sleek. Elegant, graceful. The might do a quick flash on the cans, or occasionally a simulated engine-out takeoff, but rarely go full bore. Always like they're afraid to break the jet.
We tried doing the HABU flight once and nobody liked it. Even we hated it.
So, this next time up we came up behind the Valkyries - the Rockhounds one since this was a Greenwood station..
We promptly did the exact same run - the jet parts anyway.. In a craft that weighed three times as much.
Sure it lurched around the sky and we took a lot of the turns far-wider or faster, or on full flaps with the cans burning because we were so low on energy where the Valkyrie had been cruising. It was hot, sweaty and tough. You really feel how heavy she is when she gets slow. And when we'd shown up Greenwood, we just beat that airfield to shit blasting the crowd with the cans, backfiring and making high-speed passes before finishing with slow speed, low-altitude full burner pass.
Now, we came into the maneuver with far too much energy, so we have to spill it all while turning to slow it down, almost like a combat-landing and go-around. I've my head out of the cockpit watching the flightline to make sure we don't impinge on the crowd and she just starts to judder and drop. She's on the edge stalling off her wings without the power to keep herself aloft. She'll hold there at a high alpha thanks to the wing extensions and there's enough roll authority from both stabilators and ailerons to keep her level. Full-flaps, drop the nose, rock the wings - let people think we'd gotten it badly wrong. Bad things were about to happen.
Oh god, they're about to crash. Part of them wants to see it.
All according to the plan.
We're maybe a hundred feet away from the crowd and I jam the throttles from near idle into full burner, opening the coolant taps at the same time. Both turbines howl. She backfires on a surge as the bypass doors open, clears her throat and roars. You could feel the engines all the way on the other side of the asteroid. You'd never do it with a HABU - it's just not graceful. It doesn't fit the image, the brand, but we've no image to protect.
Flaps-up. She digs in and blasts off, roaring down the runway before escaping into a vertical climb.
They think you saved the plane. Maybe they never in believed you'd crash it - but part of them thought you would still makes them cheer. But goddamned does it make people cheer.
We head home, tanking gas. By the time we make it back to Atalante, the video footage as already outrun us. Chatterbox has been spreading her own cockpit video through the the Bitch's own interwave connection, while upvoting everything that came off that asteroid. The HABU are bubbling.
We land.
Crew chief walks up.
"The Commander wants to see you."
Ah shit.
Well, at least we'll never have to worry about being display pilots again.
Ben waits for us in his office, doing the Commander Ikari thing that warns you that you've really fucked up. The hands drop, revealing his true expression.
"You two...." he says with a smile. "That was one hell of a buzz-job."
Neither of us know what to say.
---
So yeah, I'm a bus driver. I fly the Bitch.
Maybe that makes me a son of a bitch.
But, in its own weird way she's started to grow on me. It's a jet that takes time to master, to get to know. It's a relationship built in moments, not all at once at first sight. Sure she's a bitch. But never once have either of them really dropped a crew in it. She'll have her breakdowns and keep flying. Her engines with bang and pop and rattle, then find their voice just when you need it. You start to think she'll always pull you through. People look down on us both, but we show them up nonetheless. Let her off the leash and she'll play with the best of them. blasting around like a dancing rhino.
Maybe its true what they say a bitching soldier is a happy soldier.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
With apologies to Brian Schul. A Roughrider gets an unwanted assignment.....
----
The Russians called the Foxhound the 'Air Battleship' in reference to the massive missile armament the original carried. In polite company, both of them would earn the nickname Grey Lady. But everyone knew them as the Bitch. Bitch to Fly. Bitch to Maintain. Bitch to Take-Off. Bitch to Land. Everyone's Bitch in a wargame. Ugly. Brutal. But Hard. She did two things well. The Bitch came with the first IDAR set fitted to a mobile platform, and could outrun bad news if given half a chance.
I was the first to fly one.
I signed up to fly the Sled. The worst moment in any Sled Driver's life is to be told it's time to move on to another jet. Those HABU - all caps - just have a way of getting their teeth into you, and you never want to fly another jet again. She slices through the sky, stretched forward, going a million miles an hour while sitting, leaking on the hangar. But all good things come to an end.
We'd ordered two Foxhounds from a small-time friend of Bens. Officially, the reason we were told it was because the Fox had a new type of interwave sensor that could detect drive fields. Unofficially, the scuttlebut said it was just a thing between friends - a little helping hand. So can imagine how I felt getting my orders to transfer. It felt like being asked to give up a limb.
But orders is orders. So, I hopped a ferry out to Frigga to be the first Roughrider to meet the Foxhound. My first inkling that this wasn't to be the usual assignment was meeting the mousy woman due to be my backseater on the flight out - Rico. I knew three things about her. She worked in intelligence. She had absolutely zero flight hours - not even a callsign. And even if she wasn't in command, she was the whole reason the jet existed in the first place.
I mean, I'd gone from Sled Driver, to Bus Driver. That's an insult! Okay, so maybe I hadn't met top marks for my flying skills but I still more than made the grade.
We met our jet on Frigga, and I must say, first impressions of the girl weren't good. She stood there, creaking, steaming and somehow managing to look twenty years old despite supposedly being brand new - my first thoughts were of all those old Eastern European cars rattling and banging and smoking their way around the Soviet Union. Most of all, however, she seemed Huge, more like something that battered the sky out of its way, rather than slice through it. Those big intakes reached up over my head.
Almost like she was reaching up after something.
I remember how the original MiG had been built to chase the Blackbird and think that I've been doomed to play second fiddle. I walked around her, taking stock of the welds on her steel skin, the rivets not ground down flush with the skin. She's crude, brutal and built to a budget.... I'm almost appalled at the idea of spending three times the cost of a new Sled on her. The smell of ammonia and jet fuel linger, making the eyes water. In every jet there's usually something you can bond over, something interesting or intriguing that makes you just that bit curious to get inside.
The Foxhound offered nothing. Even our markings looked just a little bit funny on the tail... more like a captured enemy jet than something built to wear them.
Jet - the builder - assured us they were both brand new, before handing me the flight manual. Twice the size of a Sled, and then some. In guest quarters I finally get an inkling of why I'd been paired up with the Foxhound. You've got a hundred pages on how to fly the jet, then another two hundred on properly managing the engines to maintain top speed without melting an inducer or shedding blades. And I'd always had an engineer's mind - it's what I did daneside before getting away from it all.
Rico earned her callsign - Chatterbox - by not shutting up about all the cool sensor gear she'd just been handed. Of course she objected - but that's the whole point of a first callsign, isn't it? You hate it, you moan about it, then your squadron thinks of something worse.
My first impressions of the Bitch. A finnicky, overstressed propulsion system inside a solid-steel spaceframe buldging with a sensor set from a starship four or five times it size.
The cockpit comes from 1984. Wireframe graphics on glass monitors packed into a sea of steam-gauges. It's tight, smaller than Piper-cub, with steel framing closing in around. Even the smell is decades old - a mixture of amine, engine oil, kerosene and ammonia. At least the flight suit's easy enough to lock into place. Just sit-and-latch and ready to go. But it's all solid, more like the cockpit was machined from a billet of steel than pressed and painted. Controls are tight. Switches 'thunk' and 'latch' positively. She likes to be touched, and rewards iumble and inquisitive fingers.
The flightsuit is light, tight and better suited to Chatterbox than your's truly but I can deal with that. We suit up for the ferry flight home while I grumble to myself outloud about why I couldn't have been given an F-37 ferry instead - those things are some sweet single-seaters.
The engines are given the traditional christening with the bottle of Jeremiah Weed before being fired up for the first time. Our relationship gets off to a great start when she kills her own batteries cranking, and they have to fetch a start-cart to crank the turbines. When they finally blast into life, it isn't the gutty roar of a J-58, but something sharper, shriller and harsher, more like the turbine blades aren't quite seated right and rattling loose. Ducts and bypass doors rattle and whisper.
Both engines cough and bang as they're pushed to take-off power, see-sawing between too-rich, too-lean and just right before finally settling down to something just a little rough and smokey.
Chatterbox is getting giddy as she works over the switches, while I'm trying to nudge it forward on brakes that have exactly two settings - on, and off.
I pilot it on out up to where the outer-marker should've been before Chatterbox locks in the autopilot and programs our course and speed for Atalante and I'm reduced to keeping the engines in tune.
I honestly begin to wonder who I pissed off to deserve the assignment.
---
HABU come with a mind - a personality. You have the Speeders, you have the Suicide Girls. You've got the mysterious Femme Fatales and the Blabbermouths. You get the odd grouch or gossip. It took a month of training sorties to really start to understand the Bitch. At first, I put her down as a bit of a hard bitch. Stern, abrupt and intolerant, above all, she was a cranky bird who didn't like being mishandled. Every flight had it's glitches and grumbles - stuck doors, engine surges or just plain taking too long to get into her stride and run.
I finally had my epiphany on a training exercise where we'd been tasked to run an intercept of two older Sled when she woke up and bared her teeth for the first time since I met her. She found her stride early and pushed harder and harder for the entire mission.
The original Foxhound had been built as a fighter, to chase the original blackbirds. Now, she'd been saddled with tons of reconnaissance equipment and asked to do a mission she'd never really be intended for, something that maybe lessened what she thought she was supposed to be.
Realising that became something of a bonding moment. Friendship through shared pain is something of a military tradition. The more I understood her, the more I could manage to keep ahead of her issues, to keep the whole machine in tune and running happy.
The cockpit dynamic in the Bitch is unlike anything we normally fly. Most of my time is spent working as a propulsion specialist, rather than pilot, managing the big Mig's big engines. The jet's driven from the back seat by the Information System Officer - who plots the route into the nav computer and let's the autopilot handle the directing..
Once takeoff and landing are done and she's locked into her autopilot, it's time to push her up to cruising speed, keeping the main engines in tune the entire way up balancing brute force against core inlet temperatures, all while juggling the neutron injectors, bypass doors and shock-ramps, then manually making the turn to keep the big jet on the black line because the star tracker got washed out by the sun again.
Holding it steady at .18 is constant, mind-numbing work. You're head's constantly inside the cockpit, hemmed in by four steel walls and tektite, with no time to look around because as soon as you do the Bitch turns around a bites. An engine unstarts, overheats, or a generator CSD goes out - anything to grab your attention. Hey, buddy, eyes down here please.
And then when you've mastered you realise that the reason it's been wandering around the sky so much is that the SAS failed on take-off and you didn't notice. You start to realise that you and the jet, you're getting along. Both of you need to work together the make shit happen. You find out what she likes and doesn't like, then run from there. It's a sort of mutual respect.
---
Chatterbox calls her the Grey Lady. Chatterbox still hates to be called Chatterbox. Chatterbox loves hacking things on the fly or haywiring up enemy air defenses, even on exercise. She doesn't shut up telling me exactly what she's doing either. So imagine my joy when we get called up to take on an actual combat mission with her the the Bitch. Normally, it's a specialist job, but we've had a maintenance failure so we're backup.
It's a real Wild Weasel run on a thionite waystation. She doesn't understand why the answer I gave Ben was 'You gotta be shitting me'
The Bitch doesn't carry a heavy combat load. It's not really supposed to be that kind of jet. You can get missiles on sure and Chatterbox spent the entire night rewritting the software with Red Rider to make it work with the anti-radiation missile we had in stock, but really, it just feels like an alround bad idea to intentionally take one of these things into a threat area. Meanwhile, I spent the day with the crew chief going through all the preparations such a comple and highly tuned machine needs to ake her go. Even the uprated engines get check-runs to make sure the heat rejection issue's been fixed.
Satisfied that all's well, I grab some shuteye before the big day.
Immediately on takeoff, it's clear she's a sick bird and not happy to be flying. Burning more fuel than she needs to, sluggish on the throttle and steering like a pig. Refuelling gets interrupted by a bounce off the tanker halfway thrugh and I'm holding her on a single afterburner and full right rudder just to take gas, then accelerate out to some godforsaken black rock that'd been kicked out of the solar system. I'm seriously questioning the spacecraft's ability to take the mission after an unstart sends me head-first into the canopy rail.
But we press on. The strike force is on its way and somebody needs to knock down the missiles before they knock down our friends.
She comes alive 2AU out from the target when the first probes reach us. We are not stealthy. At full burn, we can be seen clear across the solar system.
Chatterbox starts to sweat, calling out each and every new threat as it awakens to our presence. New drive signatures. New sensors. She battles each and every one of them, splitting us up first into an entire squadron, generating ghost craft circling wide, or braking missile longs by pulling their range gate. Missile after missile reaches up to say hello. They hit nothing but ghosts.
We've a good line on the enemy, but we're still an AU out of range of our own weapons.
The hardest thing in the world is not to just jam the throttles full forward. She'll blow her engines at this speed and temperature. Easing her up, I watch the speed and temperature indicators climb and I'm starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe, she wants to get us killed. I reach for the coolant injectors to accelerate her to maximum speed over the target, and something remarkable happens.
Immediately, she perks up. She finds her stride and she gains another percentage point of speed as she hikes her skirt up and the engines blast her forward. The first enemy fighters are coming to intercept but we're so goddamned fast we don't even see them. A few shots chase out wake but we're outrunning even missiles, chasing a little green spot on my HUD.
Chatterbox arms our missiles. She selects our target. 4 missiles. 4 SAM sites. Handy that. I push the trigger
The jet rocks as all four depart, immediately trailing behind us. We're faster than our our ammunition.
Chatterbox switches from ECM, to ECCM, guiding the missiles in even as the SAM sites try to jam. But they can't beat the Bitch's sensors - or Chatterbox pushing the buttons. She's been training with Red Rider.
We're long gone from the threat are by the time the missiles find their target. 100/100. Boom. Enemy fighters recede behind, unable to do nothing but watch. It's marvelous. Only then do I have the time to actually look down at my instruments.
Engine temperatures, hot but good. Door positions, full shut. Speed...... Holy shit.
I swear to the gods of speed the number I saw on that gauge started with a 2. Nobody fucking believes me, despite the track logs. Maybe it was just an error caused by our own information but I'm sticking to my story. And Chatterbox, bless her, she'll stick to it with me.
I'll be goddamned if she didn't go right back to being grumbly and sick as soon as we'd left the threat area, but she'd done exactly what she'd needed to do. Even the HABU were impressed.
The Grey Lady becomes her official nickname, and our practice missions change to line up with our new official role.
Suppression of Enemy Air Defences.
I think the Bitch likes that.
--
We're the unloved bastards. The dissapointment when we show up is palpable. Everyone wants to see the HABU. Sending us along to your local airshow is tantamoment to telling someone they aren't good enough to get a Blackbird. Whether it's intended or not, that's how it comes across to every small-holder out there in the belt. So, there's that subtle hostility ready to greet us, even behind the smile. Thanks for coming, but why no Blackbirds? We want the fast jets? Not that rustbucket.
But we do our best to put on a good show for the kids.
Never forget that when you're the one out there who has to inspire the next generation to take up the Roughrider Cause.
So you prep. You work. Chatterbox sits in the back with nothing to do but wave and take vide while I try to fly.
Now, the HABU show is perfectly choreographed and run to a tee. It's there to make you believe you can be the pilot of such a fantastic machine. It slices through the sky above your head, slow and elegant as a black lady, before roaring over fast and loud. Always graceful, always precise, like a razor cutting through the sky. Sleek. Elegant, graceful. The might do a quick flash on the cans, or occasionally a simulated engine-out takeoff, but rarely go full bore. Always like they're afraid to break the jet.
We tried doing the HABU flight once and nobody liked it. Even we hated it.
So, this next time up we came up behind the Valkyries - the Rockhounds one since this was a Greenwood station..
We promptly did the exact same run - the jet parts anyway.. In a craft that weighed three times as much.
Sure it lurched around the sky and we took a lot of the turns far-wider or faster, or on full flaps with the cans burning because we were so low on energy where the Valkyrie had been cruising. It was hot, sweaty and tough. You really feel how heavy she is when she gets slow. And when we'd shown up Greenwood, we just beat that airfield to shit blasting the crowd with the cans, backfiring and making high-speed passes before finishing with slow speed, low-altitude full burner pass.
Now, we came into the maneuver with far too much energy, so we have to spill it all while turning to slow it down, almost like a combat-landing and go-around. I've my head out of the cockpit watching the flightline to make sure we don't impinge on the crowd and she just starts to judder and drop. She's on the edge stalling off her wings without the power to keep herself aloft. She'll hold there at a high alpha thanks to the wing extensions and there's enough roll authority from both stabilators and ailerons to keep her level. Full-flaps, drop the nose, rock the wings - let people think we'd gotten it badly wrong. Bad things were about to happen.
Oh god, they're about to crash. Part of them wants to see it.
All according to the plan.
We're maybe a hundred feet away from the crowd and I jam the throttles from near idle into full burner, opening the coolant taps at the same time. Both turbines howl. She backfires on a surge as the bypass doors open, clears her throat and roars. You could feel the engines all the way on the other side of the asteroid. You'd never do it with a HABU - it's just not graceful. It doesn't fit the image, the brand, but we've no image to protect.
Flaps-up. She digs in and blasts off, roaring down the runway before escaping into a vertical climb.
They think you saved the plane. Maybe they never in believed you'd crash it - but part of them thought you would still makes them cheer. But goddamned does it make people cheer.
We head home, tanking gas. By the time we make it back to Atalante, the video footage as already outrun us. Chatterbox has been spreading her own cockpit video through the the Bitch's own interwave connection, while upvoting everything that came off that asteroid. The HABU are bubbling.
We land.
Crew chief walks up.
"The Commander wants to see you."
Ah shit.
Well, at least we'll never have to worry about being display pilots again.
Ben waits for us in his office, doing the Commander Ikari thing that warns you that you've really fucked up. The hands drop, revealing his true expression.
"You two...." he says with a smile. "That was one hell of a buzz-job."
Neither of us know what to say.
---
So yeah, I'm a bus driver. I fly the Bitch.
Maybe that makes me a son of a bitch.
But, in its own weird way she's started to grow on me. It's a jet that takes time to master, to get to know. It's a relationship built in moments, not all at once at first sight. Sure she's a bitch. But never once have either of them really dropped a crew in it. She'll have her breakdowns and keep flying. Her engines with bang and pop and rattle, then find their voice just when you need it. You start to think she'll always pull you through. People look down on us both, but we show them up nonetheless. Let her off the leash and she'll play with the best of them. blasting around like a dancing rhino.
Maybe its true what they say a bitching soldier is a happy soldier.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?