Free Magnet (Lacuna Short Stories) by David Adams

Toralii Mining Colony
    Near the TFR Sydney
    During the events of Lacuna: The Sands of Karathi
     
     
    I heard the splintering of glass reverberate around the cockpit of my strike craft as the Toralii energy pulse I had somewhat unsuccessfully tried to dodge ended its journey through space and blew right through my ship. Instantly the inside of the canopy turned crimson, my blood splattering against my Heads-Up Display as the decompression alarm sounded. Air hissed out the hole, sucking the blood splatter towards it and out into the void like some bloody flower blooming right all over my cockpit.
    My wound didn’t hurt, but I knew this was bad . I hadn’t seen this much blood since the accident.
    It’s the year 2037. My name’s Mike Williams, but everyone calls me Magnet. I’m an Australian Air/Space Force pilot and I fly the SSF-01 Wasp . It’s a zippy little space fighter that looks something like a F-4 Phantom with stubby little wings, wings which really just serve as mounts for the reaction control system and as hardpoints to mount missiles. Wings in space don’t do anything much, although their weight does steady the craft a little bit, and the reaction control system that allows us to do fine maneuvering requires them.
    They call me Magnet because it’s short for Chick Magnet , which is good old-fashioned military humour at its finest. At age fifteen, my face picked a fight with the propeller of my family's boat, on a shoal near Broome, off Western Australia. The boat drifted onto a sandbar and I got out to push, but slipped and fell, cutting my face up real good.
    I don’t really remember much of what happened after that, but my dad said the coast guard flew out a helicopter to pick me up. He’d never seen so much blood before and he was certain I wouldn’t make it.
    Turns out not only did I pull through, I managed to keep both my eyes too. The same couldn’t really be said for most of the rest of my face, though, no matter how many times the plastic surgeons tried to repair it. I always looked like I had some kind of fake featureless mask over my “real” face, and even the extensive surgeries couldn’t eradicate the half-dozen or so slashes going right from my jawline to my temple.
    It was kind of ironic that Halloween was the only time I wasn’t scary. When I felt normal, when I felt like I fit in. I’d just grin and say it was a really good mask... imported from America, or something like that. Some people didn’t buy it but overall it worked pretty good.
    I got through high school with a mixture of dogged determination and the charity of my teachers, then enrolled in the Air Force. I’d always wanted to fly and – let’s face it – being model was now a little bit out of the realm of even extreme possibilities. I got to fly and life was good.
    In 2029 life got interesting. I’d been serving with the Australian Air Force for a number of years as a pilot, when an alien species called the Toralii showed up. It turns out that a few places on Earth – Sydney, Tehran, Beijing – were developing some kind of teleportation device... a jump drive that could transport a spaceship around. It was going to change everything.
    Well, it also turns out that the technology is inherently dangerous and the Toralii have some way of detecting it. They obliterated the three cities, transmitted a warning in Chinese, then vanished.
    Humanity had two choices. Be little bitches and give up all hope of having this technology, or build it anyway and fight for our right to use it.
    The major world powers formed a task force to deal with this problem... Task Force Resolution. They built three ships, naming them after the three cities that were destroyed. The Australians crewed the Sydney , the Iranians got the Tehran and the Chinese manned the Beijing .
    Although it was the second ship off the line, in the beginning the Beijing saw the majority of the action, including the first real confrontation with the Toralii. It