2952-08-21 – Tales from the Service: A Pilot’s Last Words 

There are plenty of stories from Operation HELLESPONT that are worth featuring, but the war marches on, and we cannot spend too much time on an event nearly a month past now. 

That being said, we could not pass this tale up, and will be devoting today’s entry and next week’s to it. 

Though this was hardly Livian Vega’s first brush with death, she reflected that perhaps the first time she hadn’t done it right. After all, maybe if she had, she might have had something more fitting prepared for her potential last words than an undignified squeak of terror on the squadron comms channel. 

Livian had plenty of time to consider for the next time. After the ejection booster separated from her back, she drifted free in zero-gee, watching seconds of her atmospheric reserve trickle away. There wasn’t much else to watch; the skirmish which had claimed her Puma interceptor was over before her booster had even finished its run, and the squadron had moved forward toward the objective planet far ahead. Any further fighting would be invisible to her without some serious magnification that her flight-suit helmet didn’t provide. 

Eventually, someone in one of the rescue tugs would come by and broadcast the signal that would activate her recovery transponder, and Livian would be hauled back to Frostbill for a good-natured ribbing about losing another interceptor. There was some talk in the ready room that Incarnation ships sometimes spoofed the transponder signal in order to scoop up stranded pilots, but with the action moving away and a friendly force of heavy ships coming up from behind, that didn’t seem much of a risk here. 

One of these times, the ejection system would fail, or the plasma lance that bit into her craft would catch the cockpit and cut her into two scorched pieces. She knew the risks; everyone did, and death was something she prepared for on every launch. Still, buying the plot with the last thing anyone heard from her being a terrified whimper was unacceptable. 

Among strike pilots, there was a canonical set of famous, effective last words that communicated that the doomed pilot was taking their fate with heroic aplomb, but none of these seemed to fit her situation. She had no lover or spouse to think of in her last moments, nor a relative in the service who she could pass the proverbial torch to. There was no directory of embarrassing files her compatriots would need to delete. 

Going out silently was respectable, but it was hardly memorable, and Livian wanted to be memorable enough that the squadron would tell stories about her for the rest of the war after she bought her plot. Normally, she was the queen of snappy one-liners, especially in combat, and they almost always came to her spontaneously; it would be a let-down to her compatriots if she went out in silence. 

There were referential options, of course. Nobody really remembered anymore which holo-drama first used the phrase “They came from behind-” as last words for a strike-jock but it was in enough of them that everyone knew it from somewhere. There were others in the same vein, but Livian didn’t like any of them. 

Going into this battle, she’d drilled herself on the phrase “See you on the other side” as her potential last words, but when the shot had drilled her Puma’s engine and all the indicators had gone red, the phrase had fled her mind. True, there had been precious little time before the ejection system kicked in, but there had been just enough. 

“Should have gone with something shorter.” Livian grumbled to herself. “Later, suckers? Pah, that’s terrible.” 

Normally, Livia kept a few audio dramas on her personal network for situations such as this, but this time, she preferred the silent company of the green orb which all this fighting contested. The glimmering crescent appeared in front of her for about two minutes out of every five, and when it vanished in the lower right corner of her faceplate, she knew the local star would soon rotate into view and the smart-glass panel would become almost totally opaque for two more minutes to keep its blinding light out of her eyes. Did Earth look half so pretty from space, she wondered? It hardly seemed possible that it could. 

“Looks like I’m going home.” Livian muttered. “Hey, that’s not bad...” 

The transponder emitted a bright chime that indicated that it was transmitting. Normally, this sound would recur every thirty seconds or so, but to Livian’s surprise, there was no second chime. 

“Damnation.” Livian switched on her comms transmitter. “Recovery tug, please respond. I think my transponder just shorted out.” 

Livia waited until the planet reappeared in front of her, but there was no response on any band. 

“Recovery tug, can you hear me?” Livia could hear the worry in her voice this time, and she didn’t like how it sounded. If her transponder was broken, how could anyone ever find her? The range of a suit transmitter was horribly small. 

As the planet crept out of view once more, and the faceplate dimmed in preparation for the direct assault of the local star, there was still no response.