Date Point: Christmas Eve, 8y 11m AV
New York City, USA, Earth
Rylee Jackson
“Presentable?”
“Well, we’d have preferred you wear a dress, but you ARE here in a military capacity…”
Rylee suppressed a sigh, and turned it into a smile. “Trust me, I wouldn’t be comfortable in a dress.”
The makeup artist grunted her acknowledgement and stood up. “Well, you look good!” she said.
“You’re on in three minutes, major!” one of the clipboarded production staff informed her.
“I’ll let you prepare yourself.” the makeup girl said, and excused herself.
Rylee had to fight not to fidget at her dress blues or adjust her ribbon bar. She HATED staff duty, but there were worse things in life than going on evening talk shows, she supposed. Public Relations was an easy gig, even if it did mean she was stuck at ground level for the duration.
The worst parts were always the personal questions. They were inevitable, if you were the woman who’d first officially travelled faster than light, but why should they be? Give her questions about the technology, about Modified Alcubierre Fields, about the dynamics of exoatmospheric navigation and piloting.
Too many newspapers wanted to know if she was dating somebody, or something like that, and even if the American public were ready to truly embrace an African-American woman being the modern answer to Neil Armstrong, they still probably weren’t ready for their cultural icon to be unabashedly and pansexually promiscuous.
Not that it would have been anybody’s business even if she’d been in a traditional marriage with two kids. She’d sooner do a nude photoshoot than talk about family in the presence of a microphone.
She forced aside those kinds of resentful thoughts as the one minute warning was called, and gritted her teeth against the urge to tend to some last-second grooming. She’d only undo all the hard work of the production crew.
The wait ended abruptly—she heard her name announced, rapturous cheering and applause, the band striking up a jazzed-up version of the theme from the old 1960s Star Trek, and she pretended to be delighted and amused by it as she stepped out onto the stage, waving and smiling and shaking hands with the host—David…somebody. She was solid on the David at least, but…oh, no, his full name was part of the show’s name, which filled the stage. David Royce.
Settling onto the couch as the applause finally began to fade was a solid relief.
“What a reception!” Royce declared over the hubbub, then repeated himself as it got quieter. “What a reception! Wow. So, Major Jackson – or can I call you Rylee?”
“Rylee’s fine.”
“Well, thank you so much for coming tonight, it’s a real pleasure to have you.”
“It’s a real change of pace!” Rylee said, having already planned ahead of time that this was an entirely truthful sentiment that would nevertheless sound misleadingly enthusiastic.
Royce was sharp though. “For the better, I hope!”
Rylee gave him her best sheepish smile. “Truthfully? I mean, I’m so in love with my job that they had to drag me down here.”
She was rewarded with a ripple of laughter that told her she’d kept her tone light enough.
“I can see why!” Royce agreed. “You did a tour in the Middle East-”
“I flew a handful of missions several thousand feet above the Middle East.” Rylee corrected him. She’d spent that entire conflict living comfortably in Germany, and was eager for there to be no confusion. ‘Did a tour’ made it sound like she’d been checking her boots in the desert every morning, and she didn’t want to overshadow the people who really had been putting up with the conditions down there.
Royce politely ignored the interruption. “-then you trained for and flew Pandora and now you’re a permanent fixture of the air force’s 946th Spaceflight wing. And I’m told you’re unusually devoted to your plane.”
“I think we all are in the 946th.” Rylee said. “Y’know, there’s an extra requirement there, that we might wind up adrift out in deep space or having to land on a station or planet a long way from Earth and have to maintain or repair our own plane in the field, so all of the pilots have got a habit of getting right in there with the ground staff and mechanics, and being part of the plane’s maintenance.”
“That’s unusual?”
“Well, I think it was that willingness to roll my sleeves up and get elbow-deep in the machinery that actually got me onto Pandora, because…y’know, she was a prototype, a testbed, there was always something on the verge of going wrong with her, you know?” Rylee said. “But nowadays it’s a point of pride in the wing, you look after your sled. You get to know her and love her and…”
“Love her?”
“Oh yeah!” Rylee enthused. “Firebird’s like a ten thousand pound metal kitten to me! Every pilot in the wing could tell you about their sled’s little personality quirks.”
“Okay, go on.” Royce challenged and humoured her. “What are Firebird’s?”
“Uh…nothing major. Just…little things like the way her Field-Assisted Landing System is always the first thing to need recalibrating, or the way the hum of the gyroscope changes as we fly…That kind of thing.”
Royce smiled, and Rylee knew that smile. It was the one that came before the questions started to get more personal.
“So…” he began. “is Firebird the only love in your life, or…?”
“I’m very career focused.” Rylee said, dismissively.
“Your career can’t take up ALL your time though.”
“Military careers are…they’re not fair on any partner you might have, so I’ve preferred to not get drawn into anything long-term like that.”
Royce raised an eyebrow. “Surely there are people you care about?”
“Of course there are!” Rylee said. “Some of them aren’t even human! I just don’t think it’s fair to devote years of your life to the service and force your partner to take second place. I’ve got nothing but respect for the guys and girls who can make it work but…Heck, the ‘Dear John’ letter is named for something that happens to soldiers all the time. And what about the kids? You ever see that picture of this little boy being handed his daddy’s folded flag? And he’s trying not to cry?”
She shrugged, and deflated. “I cried when I saw it.” she confessed, glancing nervously at the camera, even as the audience erupted into sympathetic applause.
Royce clearly decided that he couldn’t press the privacy issue any further without making himself look like the bad guy, so he moved on, introducing the scheduled commercial break.
“You’re doing well.” he confided, the moment the microphones were off. “Sorry if I hit a raw nerve there.”
“It’s okay.” Rylee assured him, surprised and pleased, and warming to him a bit. The makeup artists were rushing out, and she and Royce both endured a quick touch-up before the end of the ad break was called and it was back into interview mood.
“Welcome back to Tonight, Tonight and we’ve got Major Rylee Jackson here with us today, are you enjoying yourself so far, Rylee?”
“So far.” Rylee agreed, smiling.
“So, we’ve heard a few rumours coming out of defence circles lately about a few projects, SOR and JETS?”
“Oh, yeah, so these are both really exciting!” Rylee nodded, enthused to be back on professional subjects.
“Why don’t you tell us about them?”
“Okay, so, SOR and JETS stand for Space-borne Operations Regiment and Joint Extra Terrestrial Special operations, respectively.” Rylee said.
“Those sound like they’re more or less the same thing?” Royce inclined his head.
“Far from it!” Rylee shook her head. “The SOR are specifically going to be about missions in space, wearing an armoured spacesuit, boarding ships and stations, that kind of thing. Now, the thing about spacesuits is that they’re heavy, I can attest to that personally. An armoured one?! Doubly so.”
“So these guys have got to be strong.”
“That’s right. Real strong. Crazy strong, and fit. Now, the problem there is that if they’re fighting in a heavy suit and being all big and strong, that means they’re going to run out of gas pretty quick, so they’re all about getting one specific job done, fast and hard. Right?”
“And JETS?” Royce mis-spoke the acronym, saying the word ‘jets’.
“J-E-T-S.” Rylee corrected him. “So, the SOR are a permanent, dedicated unit, while JETS is a qualification that any serving operator can obtain that’ll qualify them to go offworld, and they’ll fill the opposite role – operations on the surface of alien planets, specifically Temperate-type worlds. Earthlike worlds, with life and rain and all that stuff, right?”
“Right.”
“So, JETS is this mixed, international and kinda large initiative where we’ll be able to drop these guys in and they’ll be able to do things like, uh, patrol in hostile territory for months undetected, or all the other stuff that special forces might do. No special spacesuits or anything, to all intents and purposes it’s the same as operations here on Earth, just with having to account for alien environments.”
“So the SOR are the really science-fiction ones.” Royce observed.
“I guess.” Rylee laughed. “But they’re as nice a bunch of guys as you could meet, they’ve…I mean, they’re committed to saving lives and serving other people in a BIG way, they’ve gone through hell to make it happen, and, I’ve met them, they’re all really humble, sweet guys. Y’know, they met me and they just wanted to take some selfies, and I was like ‘who’s taking the selfie with who here?’ because…yeah, I’m in awe of them, I really am.”
“Did you hear the content of that leaked advisory?” Royce asked, referring to a minor scandal of a few months previously where a memo doing the rounds in the Pentagon had somehow found its way onto the Internet. Rylee was onto him now, and knew that he was only asking because that was his job, so she just nodded, calmly.
“Obviously, I mean, that’s a serious breach of national security, but in any case the content of that memo’s no more classified than anything I just told you.” she replied. “Which is to say that it’s not.”
“Doesn’t it concern you that we’re still using alien-made shuttlecraft?”
“I’ve seen those shuttles in action,” Rylee said “And…yeah, okay, as a pilot, they suck. They’re idiot-proof, unarmed, unarmored civilian models, so they just don’t perform to the kind of high standard that the military demands…but they work. And, right now, we don’t have a human-made alternative that does.”
“Why not?”
“Well…okay, look, we got really lucky with Pandora and the TS/2, AND with some other projects like the V-class and the San Diego Class because people—real, qualified aerospace engineers—had already put serious thought into designing them as, like, a thought experiment right down to every rivet and solder. And then when all the alien technology came along, modifying those designs turned out to be pretty easy.”
“So nobody had designed an orbit-to-ground transport before now?” Royce asked, sounding sceptical.
“Transports aren’t like those other two.” Rylee pointed out. “You can make some assumptions about…how big and heavy the pilot of a strike craft is going to be, how many crew are going to fit onto a destroyer. But what about the transport? Until you know about how many people it’s going to need to carry and how much gear they’ve got with them and…”
She tailed off expressively, to indicate the long list of things that needed to be known before such a design could even be started. “Until you know all that, then you can’t progress beyond speculation. Then it comes down to compromises. A small ship’s harder to detect and intercept, but if it’s got enough engine and power on board to accelerate as hard as we’d like then there’s not much room for the cargo. ‘scuse me…”
She took a sip of water before continuing. “Anything capable of meeting our performance requirements is going to be huge, and then you can’t actually use the flight deck on any of the classes of ship we’ve got right now. Not even the big retrofitted alien ones. So, that means docking ports. Well, neither the V-class nor San Diego have got docking ports, because none of our existing docking port designs were meant to be used on an accelerating starship.”
She waved her hands expressively back and forth as she spoke, ending with a snapping motion to illustrate the problem.
Royce sat back. “So, do you have any idea when somebody will get it right?” he asked.
“I couldn’t say.” Rylee shook her head. “I’m not aware of any promising designs in the works, and if there were any I wouldn’t be at liberty to discuss them but…to be honest, I think we’re going to have to do without for a few years yet. It’s going to be a tough one to solve, I think.”
“But you’re confident it will be solved.” Royce observed.
“Oh yeah.” Rylee nodded. “Eventually. But designing any vehicle just doesn’t happen overnight, let alone something like a shuttle craft.”
“Rylee, it’s been great having you on the show…”
“It’s been great being here.”
“Well, I hope you’ll stick around for our next guest, Daniel Mayhew is here to talk about Sweet Dreams, and we’ve got South African comedian Raymond Mahlangu, coming up after the break, stay with us, we’ll be right back!”