Terms of Enlistment 01.1: Lucky Thirteen by Marko Kloos

 
     
     
    Lucky Thirteen
     
     
     
    The Fleet has a tradition: the rookie drop ship commander in the unit always gets the ship nobody else wants.
    My hand-me-down was Lucky Thirteen. There was nothing wrong with her, technically speaking. She was an older model Wasp, not one of the new Dragonflies, but most of our wing was still on Wasps back then. But pilots are a superstitious bunch, and it had been decided that Lucky Thirteen was an unlucky ship. Before they gave her to me, she had lost two crews with all hands, one of them with the entire troop compartment loaded to the last seat. Both times, they recovered the ship, hosed her out, and patched her up again. A ship surviving an all-hands loss without being destroyed is very unusual—surviving two of them is so rare that I’ve never heard of such a thing before or since.
    Her hull number wasn’t actually 13. She wore a dark red 5 on her olive drab flanks. But one of the grease monkeys had found her assembly number plate while swapping out some fried parts one day, and the news made the rounds that the unlucky ship’s serial number was 13-02313. Not only did it have a leading and trailing 13 in it, but all the digits of her serial number also added up to 13. So branded, she was named “Lucky Thirteen”, and put in storage as a cold spare until they needed an airframe for the new Second Lieutenant. Then they dusted her off, updated the computers, and handed me the keys.
    She came with a new crew chief--Staff Sergeant Fisher. I met him for the first time when I went down to the storage hangar to check out my new ride. He was already busy with her, plugging all kinds of diagnostics hardware into the data ports in her bowels. When I walked around Lucky Thirteen for the first time, I noticed that he had already painted my name onto the armor belt underneath the cockpit window: 2LT HALLEY “COMET”.
    “I took the liberty,” Sergeant Fisher said when I ran my fingers across the stenciled letters of my call sign. “Hope you don’t mind, ma’am.”
    “Not at all,” I told him. “She’s really yours anyway. I just get to take her out every once in a while.”
    He smiled, obviously pleased to be assigned to a pilot who knew the proper chain of ownership in a drop ship wing.
    “Don’t let the talk bother you. About her being unlucky, I mean. She’s a good ship. I checked her top to bottom, and she’s in better shape than some of the new crates.”
    “Talk doesn’t bother me, Sarge,” I told him. “I’m not the superstitious kind. It’s just a machine.”
    “No, ma’am,” Sergeant Fisher replied, and the smile on his face morphed into a bit of a smirk.
    “She ain’t just a machine. They all have personalities, same as you and I.”
     
    Lucky Thirteen did have a personality, all right. Fortunately, it meshed well with mine.
    I’ve flown dozens of Wasp drop ships, from the barebones A1 models they mostly use as trainers now to the newest Whiskey Wasps that are so crammed full of upgrades that they might as well give them their own class name. None of them had the same responsive controls as Lucky Thirteen. The Wasps have always been twitchy in any version--you have to fly them with your fingertips, because they’re so sensitive to control input. No Wasp likes a heavy hand on the stick. Lucky Thirteen was even twitchier than the average Wasp, but once you had her figured out, you could pull off maneuvers that most new pilots would consider physically impossible. Something about Lucky Thirteen was just right. Maybe it was the harmonics of the frame, maybe the way all her parts had worked themselves into synchronicity with each other--but flying her felt like you were an integral part of the ship, not just her driver.
    Thirteen and I had five weeks to get used to each other before we had our first combat drop together. We were the tail end of a four-ship flight, tasked to ferry a Spaceborne Infantry company down to Procyon Bc’s solitary moon. We had