Delta Vega Flyby

[Crash Calestorm 0]

Note: This Calestorm log takes place within the last hour of our three to four hour TBS; the captain will still be off ship and on her informal patrol at the start of next Sim; most of the crew will be prepping to launch out as well and making last minute mission arrangements ship side. Grab those parkas Folks!

 

A light wind buffeted the frame of the Goshawk class star fighter, with small pieces of ice pellets bouncing off and across the wings, while frost threatened to freeze over the forward intake manifold vents; the vehicles pilot compensated for the inclimate weather and then changed the fighters bearing by a few degrees, pulling up out of the minor ice storm that was pelting a section of the planet known more commonly as Delta Vega.

 

Calestorm had managed to wrangle one of the better, quote/unquote, Goshawks. CAG Lieutenant ‘BC’ Mrkath had a tendency to stick her in the so called ‘training wheeled” Goz’s that had been well used, usually having a few dings and scratches here and there from on the job use. She understood the practice to a certain point, since she wasn’t a full time pilot assigned to the ‘Creek; during her time as the commander of the aero group aboard the USS Regulator, she had usually assigned the dinged up fighters to non-combat patrol runs, greenie pilots, pilots in training, or the full time pilots that were putting in some cockpit course work time; the newer star fighters had always been primarily employed for the major flight missions, actual combat, or mission specific patrols.

 

A well placed conversation -- and collecting on a bet that she’d won hadn’t hurt her chances-- to the ‘Creeks senior deck chief had insured that she’d be sitting pretty for an informal flight patrol run over Delta Vega. The fighter still had that new cockpit smell, which was awesome. She could have taken her own courier shuttle Boyington for the run, but a swift and fast fighter with some metallic meat on its framework would do well for a run over the ice planet.

 

The captain was familiar with the general topography of Delta Vega, but with the new mission, she had wanted to get more of a visual eyeball on the lay of the land and had ejected in her Goz ahead of her Black Sheep officers who were heading down with the teams in the transports to the Vega outposts interior docks. Once she completed her flight run, she’d retire to the Vega outpost and touch base with her dispatched crew, as well as Keats and Talbot, the senior officers in temporary command of the outpost as the system upgrades continued to progress.

 

With Delta Vega, the land didn’t change much from snow covered to more snow covered across the grid sectors; it was completely desolate, with a smattering of ionization storms in the atmosphere, yet at the same time the geography showcased a certain beauty across the rough, snow blanketed terrains. Vega was a mostly flat planet, broken up in certain areas by cliffs, mountains, and networks of caves that varied from small and not very deep to enormous formations that traveled several kilometers down into the planet’s crust. The caves were something, and had never been fully mapped out. She was pretty sure that that would change, what with Starfleet Command intending to restore the formerly sleepy Vega listening outpost into a bona fide planetary base. Either way, the task was slightly daunting, as the only race who could truly call the planet home were the Andorians -- everyone else just had to grin and bear it.

 

In keeping with the terrain, Cale had chosen to wear a winter camo flight suit with a gray/white/black pattern, almost blending in and becoming an extension of the silver-white coloring of the Goshawk.

 

Calestorm nudged her fighter out of the way of an incoming low level ion storm, and boosted her sensor programs to compensate for the ionization. She noted a herd of two legged Taun Taun’s* moving easily through the snow covered ground, their stocky haunches well suited to the terrain, as she passed over them and went a bit lower in the atmo to get a closer look at the herd animals. Fleet R&D had started a program to domesticate the furred, kangaroo/ram-like Vega beasts, and there was serious talk of using them in conjunction with shuttles and ATV’s to travel over the surface of the planet. There had already been pens set up at the outpost, and about a half-dozen of the Tauns were being used on a probationary basis by the officers and crew currently assigned to the outpost. Temperament and intelligence wise, they were akin to the domesticated Earth horse, which meant that they were trainable.

 

She changed her patrol vector slightly, moving into the northeastern grid airspace. The Hengrauggi, active all over the planet, had been particularly active in this grid sector according to sensor scans. The red skinned vaguely reptilian buggers, usually called ‘Big Red’ by way of a nickname, were butt-ugly four legged predators that pretty much attacked anything that moved, including their own kind if territorial issues came into play. The squad commanders of Platoon 71 had been given advanced warning to steer clear of the northeastern areas during the winter survival training. As for the white furred Drakoulius, a mammal that looked like a manic cross between a polar bear and a gorilla, the captain hadn’t spotted any of them either on scanner or visual contact.**

 

Just because you couldn’t see ‘em though, didn’t mean they weren’t there.

 

Her personal iComanche communicator was docked in one of the spare, non specific mission USB console ports, and she had a direct uplink connected to the ship from the communicator in case she needed some extra GPS or systems help. As a result of her flight not being a combat or scheduled patrol mission, her preferred ‘Starfighter Pilot's Kick Azz’ playlist*** for informal flight runs was currently being played; the tunes helped her keep the flight tempo.

 

While it was true that the communicator was military issued Starfleet property, Calestorm was for the most part lenient with the items and programs that her officers and crew kept on the device, as long as it was used primarily for work and the applications and content were not illegal in nature or just plain disturbing such as Klingon porn and such. Her iComanche playlist could also be quickly discontinued if the flight run were to be interrupted by an off scenario, hostile situation, and general communications that were incoming from the ship or away teams.

 

On the bright side, she had gotten a couple of requests from the FOPS officers on duty, asking if they had her permission to download her play list. It had been slightly weird, the two whippersnappers asking her for her ‘Old Lady’ tunes, but the event was satisfying all the same. Hey, the current rumor going around the Fleet Captain ranks was that when Captain Kirk was a young teen, he drove a 1960’s Earth-era Corvette class automobile off of a rather steep cliff. If a car could make it to the 2200’s, then Cale saw no reason why old school Earth tunes couldn’t be shared with the younger set in order to improve their culture. Stranger things had happened.

 

The inset cockpit dashboard screen to her immediate right started pinging with an alert signal over the music, and an external body graphic of the forward section of the Goshawk appeared in orange grid outlines on a black background; the right intake manifold, shown in red, had gotten half-blocked by a large chunk of forming ice.

 

“Aw, Hellfire…” Grounding a Goz on Vega? Nope, not gonna work out real well. Captain’s rank or not, explaining non-combat and relatively preventable fighter damage to a protective CAG (and Caitian felinoid to boot) was something that never went well, in her experience(s).

 

Crash pivoted her control stick, bringing the fighter up and about in an arcing move, intending to put her bird in a controlled backwards free fall; with a few quickly entered commands into the engine programs, changing the intake direction, she sucked in cold air through the rear manifold vents and then shot the now superheated air out the front, punching it through the ice patch; the ice exploded outward, broken into several pieces. She then re-inverted through a tight left turn down and around, bringing the Goz back to its normal forward flight position. Her belly did a little flip flop despite the internal inertia compensators as the star fighter pulled out of the maneuver and finally righted itself. Crisis averted, the captain turned her attention back to her scanners and her own visual recon.

 

The on board sensors picked up heat signatures in the distance, transferring the digital readouts to her helmet sensors, and displayed the image on the main cockpit console tracking screen in front of her as well as the HUD display on her helmet blast shield, located in the upper left corner of the protective full face visor. She removed her gloved left hand from the control stick and tapped a couple of quick command functions into the flush mounted console keyboard located to the left of the main cockpit control console, using the tracking and targeting programs to pinpoint the readings more clearly, though she had a pretty good idea of who and what she was looking at -- Whiskey Squad, of Platoon 72.

 

Whiskey, per the mission orders that had been distributed to Cale and her officers by Fleet Command, had been scheduled to be out in the field upon the arrival of the USS Comanche Creek. If the platoon itinerary had been correct, CPO Kerr and SrCDT Stone were currently in command of the second year greenies that made up the bulk of the squad and were instructing them on traversing the general topography for the next four days or so.

 

On impulse, the captain suddenly changed course and entered into a straight downward run, leveling off when she got about sixty feet off the ground and stayed level and off to the right from the marching squad; she continued her forward momentum until the Goshawk came parallel to the cadets. With a fierce smile, she maintained her half speed and nudged the control stick, dipping the wings once in a friendly salute and kicking up some snow as her thrusters compensated for the lower altitude run; the silver toned coloring of the star fighter was a white bullet shooting past the cadets, and the markings that attached it to the ‘Creek 214 Black Sheep were visible as she screamed past.

 

Crash did a looping turn, climbing as she did so and flashed a quick look out the three quarters wrap around clear windshield that protected the cockpit; from what she could make out, the cadets had gotten a charge out of the flyby, judging by the hand waves directed at the Goshawk and the unknown pilot. The senior NCO attached to the squad was another matter; the officer was either the type to let the flyby go, or officially complain regarding the buzzing of the cadet squad to the ‘Creek command staff and their CAG.

 

Calestorm was of the mindset that she was merely passing on some good karma.

 

A good few years back, Senior Cadet Calestorm had been stuck smack dab in the middle of Godforsaken Andoria with her own cadet squad, trudging through winter survival, and trying to guide twenty eight greenie cadets through the course as she herself tried to complete her command officer training course within acceptable grade parameters. The hours had been cold, hard and brutal. She still remembered, during the last week of the exercises, the Andor Royal Guard pilot -- she had never found out his or her name though -- who had dipped his wings in greeting and performed a flyby buzzing of the cadets as they trudged across the last section of open expanse with nothing to look at but more and more white. The entire lot of them had cheered the unexpected ‘hello’, and personally, Cale had decided in that one moment to also seriously start thinking about star fighter training.

 

The Andor buzzing incident remained one of her fondest memories, and it felt damn good to pass that karma on to another cadet group, some thirty-odd years later.

[Crash Calestorm 0]

*I’m on ur Trek’s Delta Vega, introduzing Warzie stuff. Folks, I’m not usually a fan of ‘Colliding Sci Fi Mega Franchises’, but it is way too obvious to have an ice planet and not introduce the Taun Taun as a resident, and a friendly nod to Star Wars. And, yes, they do smell bad.

 

**Formal names and descriptions of the indigenous creatures of Delta Vega are courtesy of Star Trek: The Art of the Film (2009) hardcover book, by Mark Cotta Vaz.

 

*** CPT Calestorm's iComanche in Flight Playlist:

Animal I Have Become (Three Days Grace)

C’mon Feel the Noize (Quiet Riot)

Cherry Pie (Warrant)

Don’t Treat Me Bad (Firehouse)

Dragula (Rob Zombie)

Getting Away with Murder (Papa Roach)

Going Under (Evanescence)

Heart Shaped Box (Nirvana)

It’s My Life (Bon Jovi)

Last Resort (Papa Roach)

Machine Head (Bush)

No Sleep ‘til Brooklyn (Beastie Boys)

One Step Closer (Linkin Park)

Polyamorous (Breaking Benjamin)

Pork and Beans (Weezer)

Pour Some Sugar On Me (Def Leppard)

Riot (Three Days Grace)

Rollin Air Raid Vehicle (Limp Bizkit)

Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana)

Song 2 (Blur)

The Good Life (Three Days Grace)

Through the Fire and the Flames (Dragon Force)

Top Gun Anthem (Top Gun Soundtrack)

We’re Not Gonna Take It (Twisted Sister)

I'm Your Daddy (Weezer)

 

So basically, Cale is a 54 year old Maverick with a soft spot for Old Earth 1980’s Metal Head tunes, a dash of Vintage Beastie, and 1990’s/2000’s Alternative Rock/Rock. ::ponders:: This is appropriate; Rock on people!