Wings of the Magpie: Space Operettas Read Online Free Page A

Pax, the heavy gunner, fingered her beads and quietly chanted, the compound bow of her upper lip quivering slightly as she pronounced the ancient syllables “Om saha naavavatu… Saha viirya-m karavaavahai… Maa vidvishaavahai. May we be protected together… May we work together with great vigor… May no obstacle arise between us.” Our resident hacker, Poynter, as usual, read a musty old paperbook, this time something called Starship Troopers . Why bother reading, I wondered, when the text doesn’t even move? Why bother reading about something that you live every day?
    I sauntered over to the exercise-bar next to Gunny, and began pulling chin-ups as well, enjoying the endorphin rush that came as my muscles strained against the Tiptree’ s artificial gravity. Gunny grinned over at me, cigar clutched in her gleaming teeth, and began pulling faster, competitively. She always managed three for every two I pulled; still, it wasn’t the challenge that I relished, but the camaraderie.
    “Hey, Gunny,” shouted Mills from across the room as she cleaned her razorblade in a nearby bowl of water. “Any idea who or what we’re going up against?”
    “I hope it’s Lizards,” interrupted Emerald, then, affecting a cartoon voice, added “I hates Lizards.”
    “Unknown,” answered Gunny, turning her head towards me without missing a beat. “You pickin’ up anything from the Vat-Brains?”
    I dropped from the bar to the floor, then tuned my Comms implant to one of the Vat channels and listened to the chirps and hums of the ship’s cybernetic pilots. It took several minutes of negotiating my way through their coded electronic communications and weird humor, but eventually, I found an answer. “We’re headed out past Echelon IV towards the Buffer Zone,” I volunteered. “We’re going to rendezvous with the Russ and the Butler . Sounds like we’re intercepting an encroaching Badger worldship, so odds are they’re just bringing us along to mop up.”
    Gunny grinned. “Ooh-rah,” she interjected. “Another beautiful day in the Corps.”
    ***
    At 1100 hours, the ship’s bells chimed, alerting us that it was time to climb into our suspension couches for the jump to Slipspace. Until we reached our destination, the thousand swabs and Marines aboard the Tiptree would rest enveloped in the dreamless morphinic arms of hypersleep, trusting the Vat-Brains to do the flying. Each of us stripped down, then clambered into the private metal wombs that bore our names. As I mounted my own suspension couch, I touched the stenciled block letters of my name, Mary “Magpie” Mayr, for luck, then closed the glass hatch and connected the familiar umbilical cables to the ceramic ports implanted into the back of my neck. Finally, I stared at the vidigraph of my daughter that I’d taped to the glass, realizing that, thanks to the peculiarities of hypersleep and FTL travel, when I finally saw her again, she and I would be the same apparent age. For now she was safe on Terra with the rest of the girls in her nursery group, but by the time we returned, she would have already gone through her first breeding cycle and started her own term in the Corps. I kissed my fingertips, then pressed them against her infant face, and whispered a silent prayer that we would be friends. A scent like gin-soaked flowers swept over me, and then, the universe winked…
    ***
    The eternal whispered whiteness of Slipspace gave way to blackened starlit void as the Tiptree shimmered back into existence, its massive streamlined hull cautiously maneuvering between two equally hulking starships, the Butler and the Russ . In tandem, the three ships moved along, their Vat-Brains chirping digital greetings to one another along with ponderous electronic puns regarding the vast navigational numberstrings involved in post-Einsteinian physics. Cold blue fusion drives pushed the ships forward, screaming through lightseconds in nearly real time. Within moments, their quarry