<Alert! Alert! All Banshees to the ready room!>
Alex snapped awake instantly.
<Repeat, all Banshees report to the ready room!> called Lee Carter's voice over the intercom.
That meant her -- she was a Banshee now, she reminded herself proudly. Kicking off the covers, she leapt out of bed and dove into her crisp new uniform. Sparing a quick glance in the bathroom mirror, she combed through her long blonde hair with her fingers, and less than three minutes after waking up, she was dashing out the cabin door heading for the Banshee ready room.
Except for Commander Carter, who was already sitting at the head of the briefing table, she was the first to arrive. Carter looked up from the PADD she was studying as Alex burst in and gave her a quick once-over. "Just wake up?"
"Yes ma'am," answered Alex. "I'm still adjusting to ship's time," she explained, feeling suddenly nervous in her commander's presence.
"Well, take a little advice. Next time take a few extra minutes and comb your hair. And you forgot your combadge," said Carter, but not too sternly. She remembered how she herself had felt on her first day on the job ten long years ago.
Alex frantically searched the front of her uniform for the absent combadge with one hand and self-consciously tried to arrange her errant strands of hair with the other, all the while with a growing look of panic building on her face. She began stammering, "I... I... I don't know how I could've forgotten tha--"
"Relax, Ensign," said Carter. "You can fix yourself after the meeting. For now, just have a seat."
"Just don't let it happen again," she added a moment later.
"Yes, ma'am." Alex took at seat at the other end of the table from Carter. She was still trying to un-dishevel her hair, and was feeling very much the rookie. She had only a few minutes to wallow in her ineptitude though, before the doors slid open admitting the rest of the Banshees. Each went to her customary chair and sat down.
On seeing Alex, Max nodded a greeting, Sam waved timidly, while Jo smiled openly and said, "Hiya Alex! Your first mission briefing, eh?" As she took her seat though, she took a closer look at Alex's appearance, and said, "You just wake up or something?"
Alex would have answered, but Carter chose that moment to start the briefing. "All right everyone. Let's get down to business." Immediately all eyes turned to the head of the table. Carter continued. "The Niprons still have Commodore Wallace hostage. It turns out they've moved him, so extraction is going to be a little harder than expected. Meanwhile, the Mullurans are lurking out in this system's Oort cloud probably planning mischief of their own."
Carter tapped a few keys on her PADD and the holographic display in the table's center glowed to life, showing a three-dimensional representation of the Nipron system. The sun was a bright yellow sphere in the center, Nipron II and the orbiting Hornet were a pair of smaller dots fairly close in, while the Oort cloud was a roomy bubble far, far from the light of the central dot. Carter tapped another key and three red blips appeared way out at the fringes of the cloud.
"Commander Chee's impromptu reconnaissance of the system turned up three Mulluran light cruisers. Those were destroyed, but three more have replaced them, here." She indicated the three red blips. "Our mission is to slip out into the Oort cloud ourselves and 'keep them busy' while the rescue team springs the Commodore." She tapped her PADD again and the hologram faded, then she looked across the table at her crew and asked, "Any questions?"
Max spoke up. "What about that orbital spacedock we checked out before? There were enough materials there to build one heck of an arsenal...."
Carter nodded as if expecting that question. "Don't worry, it's not forgotten. The Hornet is more than capable of handling that on her own. A couple of well-placed torpedoes and the whole thing will go up like a Chintokan fireworks factory."
Max seemed satisfied by that answer. "Anything else?" said Carter. When no one spoke up after a few seconds, she stood and closed the meeting. "All right then. We launch in fifteen minutes."
The Banshees stood as one and bustled out of the briefing room single file with Alex bringing up the rear. Out in the corridor, Max, Sam and Jo followed Carter left toward the hangar deck, but Alex turned in the opposite direction. Jo caught her out of the corner of her eye and skidded to a halt. "Alex! This way!" she called, trying to be helpful to the newest member of the team.
"I'll catch up in a sec!" returned Alex, waving. "Couple of things I forgot to take care of."
"Okay. Gotcha," called Jo, understanding, then turned and continued on her way down the corridor.
Alex did the same. It took her only a couple of minutes to straighten out her appearance and find her combadge and pin it to her uniform, then she was back out in the ship's corridors bounding for the hangar deck. She burst into the enormous space to discover the others already climbing into their planes. She ran over to her own Number Five fighter, climbed the short ladder and dropped into the cockpit. She toggled the cockpit canopy closed with one hand and began yanking on her flight helmet with the other. No sooner was that done than the flight deck tractor beams were already nudging her plane toward the bay's exit.
The same exhilaration she always felt before a flight overcame her then. Her heart beat faster and pounded in her ears as adrenaline flooded her system. Her breath came in short gasps and the focus of her vision sharpened. Then her Banshee was in space, and everything was suddenly calm again. This was what she loved -- flying in open infinity....
Carter's voice crackled over the comm circuit. "Standard wedge formation. Rig for stealth mode. Dawson! Snap to it!"
Alex jolted upright with a start, realizing she was drifting slightly behind the others. She nudged her craft into perfect formation and prepared to activate the refractive shields as ordered.
As a single unit, the five Banshee fighters shot away from the Hornet at maximum burn, heading for the outermost fringes of the system, and the awaiting Mulluran warships.