Sailor Moon:
Into the Great Wide Open -by Jack Ryan
Author’s Note:
First, all characters belonging to the Sailor Moon universe are not mine. Sometimes I wish they were, but they belong to a much more creative mind than my own. (You think I’d be writing SM fan fics if I could come up with characters as good?)
Okay, okay. So the great disaster that was supposed to put the Earth asleep was supposed to have happened by now. I just thought this story might be an interesting twist to the future of my favorite Sailor Scout; Sailor Mercury. Maybe some of you think she should stay on course to being a doctor, but I think this one is a little more exciting (that and I’m terrible with medical terms).
Note that the Sailor Scouts are all American for this one save for Rei, who is still Japanese.
Also note that as I introduce aircraft carriers, there are two or three letters followed by a dash and two numbers exmp. (CVN-74). This is the proper way to write a US carrier’s designation, the affiliation (USS), name, and registry number.
I would also like to thank the Jane’s Military Reference company, Tom Clancy for his books Fighter Wing and Carrier, the History Channel’s Weapons at War program, and Marine 1st Lieutenant Isaiah “Hack” McDowell for providing valuable resource material for this story.
Chapter 1
Fantan
Somewhere in the southwest Pacific. . .
Static crackle. “Ready on the
cat.” an accented female voice said.
Another crackle of static.
“Throttle up.”
“Roger, throttle up.”
“Standby...”
“Standing by.”
“Throttledown, throttledown,
throttledown. Standby for adjustment.”
“Roger, standing by.”
“Okay...throttle up and standby.”
“Roger, throttling up.”
“Cat one!” and there was a rush
of steam.
“Gunslinger Two airborne.”
“Good luck.”
Twenty minutes later. . .
“Contact, bandit, two ship formation,
your ten high, heading one-six-two. Please advise.”
“Roger.” the male voice was quiet
for a moment. “Eagle Eye, this is Gunslinger 102. Contact fantans.”
“Roger that, Gunslinger. Targets
hot. See if you can’t warn ‘em away.”
“This is Gunslinger 102 to Chinese
aircraft, you are approaching the defensive zone of a US carrier group. Turn
back now or be engaged.” No answer. “I repeat, turn back now or I will be
forced to fire.” Still nothing. “Eagle Eye, Gunslinger 102. Targets are not
responding.”
“Copy, Gunslinger. You are weapons
free.”
“Hear that, Mercury?”
“I sure did, Dutch. Weapons
free.” the female voice answered.
“I got the north guy.”
“As always.” They were both quiet
for a while.
“Gunslinger 102, fox three!”
“Gunslinger 106, fox three!”
“Splash one fantan.”
“Shit, I missed. Engaged defensive
Archer. That yellow SOB is mine.”
“Okay, okay, Merc. I won’t touch
him.”
“Got him now. Gunslinger 106, fox
three.” she was quiet again for a moment before her next outburst.
“Sierra-Hotel! Splash two fantan.”
“Roger, Gunslinger 106.” Eagle
Eye came back, “I show blue skies. Good work.”
Ten minutes later. . .
“One mile, slower.”
“Roger, slowing.”
“Gunslinger 106, three-fourths
mile, call the ball.”
“Control, Super Hornet ball, fuel
state nineteen-point-one.”
“Roger ball.”
Thump, grind, squeal. “Gunslinger
106, good trap.”
Lieutenant Amy Elizabeth Anderson
unclipped the buckles of her restraints and popped the canopy of her F/A-18E
open. She let the breeze blow across her face as she rechecked that all of her
systems were shut down. They checked out and she clambered down the yellow
ladder to stand next to a waiting seaman in a yellow shirt and brown helmet.
“Mercury’s out.” he said into
his mike. He received orders as to how he would return her from her fighter to
the safety of the carrier’s island. A pilot was not allowed on the flight deck
without a handler to keep the pilot from being squashed or sucked up by deck
traffic.
He waved for her to follow and she
did so, walking behind him so close that she was just short of stepping on his
heels. The deck below her rolled and pitched. The noise of a dozen aircraft
filled her ears. To her right, an F-14 Tomcat was hurled from catapult number
two into the sky beyond. At the stern end, an EA-6B Prowler landed heavily on
the deck. Not twenty feet away from that, the E-2 Hawkeye she had been reporting
to was being lowered down to storage. This was the USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74),
a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.
Ahead of her, the yellow shirt
stopped in his tracks and Amy nearly bumped in to him. She found out why as
another F/A-18 in the markings of VFA-131 came rolling forward with the aid of
another yellow shirt with a pair of day-glo orange batons.
As it passed, she looked back at her
own plane. Right now, a crew of handlers was locking it down while the brown
shirted armers were removing the ordinance from it. The aircraft was painted low
visibility grey. On the outside of the twin tails was the black chess knight and
AG tailcode of VFA-105 (the Gunslingers). Her name and callsign were painted in
dark grey below the canopy and the sign of Mercury was painted blue infront of
the port intake.
“Lieutenant?” the young handler
called her attention, “C’mon.” She followed him to the forward bulkhead of
the superstructure and then around to the side. The door was open and he left
her there, going to get his next pair of charges.
She stepped inside and took off her
helmet, shaking the short blue hair loose. With her helmet tucked under her arm,
she glided gracefully down the stairs to the briefing room. Once inside, she
yanked her debrief from the printer and read it:
You and Dutch did a good job slapping down those Q-5s. From what the rec. guys said, it was a good thing. They had some Exocets on board. Good job.
It was short message from the Commander of the Air Group congratulating her and
Dutch on the job well done. It still bothered Amy that she had to fire twice,
but the other guy must have been pretty good.
She took a sortie report from the
stack on the table and filled it out before filing it in the CAG's “in” box.
As she headed for the pilot's
breakroom, she caught Dutch on the way. Lieutenant Commander Jason “Dutch”
Robinson was not a handsome man. Most pilots weren't in fact. Many were nerdy,
and several were bald from wearing helmets day in and out. Every one of them was
no taller than five-foot-ten, for they had to fit in the cockpit of the aircraft
they flew. Robinson barely made the mark for stature, and he had a tiny gap
between his two front teeth. The moustache on his face was scraggly and there
were bags beneath the black eyes.
“Wassup, Mercury?” he said,
giving her a high five.
“Not much, man.” She responded in
her silvery voice, “You?”
“Ah, just headed to a favorite part
of pilot country is all.” The two turned for the lounge. “You where hot on
the stick today.” Dutch finally said.
“Is that sarcasm?” Amy looked up
at him.
“Nah, kid. You did some pretty good
missile avoidance with that inbound AA-12.”
“Still, I had to make two fox
threes. I hate it when that happens.”
“So what? So you spent an extra
million to get a kill, big deal.”
“I don't know.” the blue-haired
pilot shrugged, “CAG might not like it. He already has a disliking for me.”
“Ah, Mercury!” Dutch waved her
off, “You're just paranoid. CAG just has a bug up his butt.”
“Yeah, me.” she said as they
entered the pilots lounge. As the door slid open, she could see a dozen
different faces look up. All of them were familiar.
“Hey, Mercury.” Lieutenant Ryan
“Wax” Burnan said from the pool table. Burnan was assigned to VF-143 and was
on his second cruise. He was about Amy’s age of twenty-four. With brown hair
and blue eyes he might actually be the only cute pilot onboard. “Heard about
that extra fox three you had today.” Amy rolled her eyes. On a ship of five
thousand tightly knit people, word gets around.
“Who'd you tell, Dutch?”
“Just Rotchinson.”
“Weezer?” Amy’s eyes went wide,
“You told Weezer? That guy can't keep his mouth shut for two seconds.”
“So tell me about it.” Wax
pocketed the next ball, “Here you made him spend some money.”
Somehow, pilots are always cocky. It
must be the cocktail of adrenaline and testosterone (or in Amy’s case, oestrogen)
that sometimes seems to float through the air. Or perhaps the cockiness is just
a way for pilots to hide their fears of an accident on the catapult or finding oneself
unable to manhandle a fifteen ton machine onto the pitching deck of an aircraft
carrier at night with the fog closing in like the hands of death. Yes, pilots
had to hide those fears or be controlled by them. Most chose to be cocky. Amy
was one of these.
“Well, seeing as how I’m still flying
and he’s in the water, guess I did just fine.” she said, taking a seat in
her favorite chair, “Besides, that guy will make a great tally mark on my
fighter’s nose. Yep. It sure will look great right next to the other one.”
There was a round of “oooohs” that was indistinguishable from the fight
circle in a playground. “Yeah, me and my two kills to your... what was it? Let
me think...oh yeah, zero!” The playground noise went up again as Mercury
smiled sweetly and held up a pair of fingers. “Besides, how many Phoenix
missiles have you spent on that Tomcat of yours? Four, and nothing to show? I'm
two for three so you and the rest of the Pukin' Dogs can keep your mouths
shut.”
Every one of the present VF-143 pilots and
radar intercept officers went into embarrassed sweat. Indeed, none of the ones
present could claim a higher kill tally than Mercury or Dutch, who had three.
“Okay, Anderson, you've had enough
fun.” Dutch patted her shoulder.
“Hey,” Mercury shrugged, getting up to
get a cola, “It's not my fault I fly the hottest fighter with the hottest
squadron.”
“Hey, now.” on of the VFA-131 aviators
piped up. “I'll agree with the plane, but not the squad. Wildcats can kick y'alls
asses any day.”
“Should I bend over for you?” Mercury
asked before popping the top on her coke. “Or just remember to save your sorry
tail from a nylon letdown next time you got a bandit on your six?” Once again,
the playground noise sounded. The real Amy knew that naval aviators were a close
bunch, yet like a pack of dogs in that they occasionally snapped at one another.
Rough play was just their way.
Later that evening, Amy managed to catch
the sunset from the Stennis' number three elevator. The lift was lowered and not
to far from her, some crewmen played basketball. Behind her, the angry noises of
aircraft maintenance echoed in the vast storage area. She had originally come
down to check her Hornet, making sure that her repairs on the Gripes List were
seen to. She had just inspected the jet and was pleased to find that the latest
kill was already represented by a black tally mark on the nose just above the
three formation lights.
There was a loud thump above her as
another jet, probably an A-6 Intruder, came down a little hard. Not too long
afterwards, the scream of turbojets told her someone was spooling up. The rush
of steam and the rumble of the catapult confirmed this and she looked fore to
see an F/A-18 with the growling panther of VFA-131 launched off catapult number
three.
She returned her attention to the sun as
it began to slip beneath the black ocean. Momentarily, she began to think about
how she had gotten here. Like some of the other pilots this was her third
deployment. It had been in high-school when she got her first taste of the Navy.
She had been aiming to be a doctor like her mother and so was doing joint
enrolment at a local college. Since she was to be a biology major, she had to
take a slew of related classes, including a marine biology course that placed
her and twelve classmates on the research vessel Atlantis III in the middle of
the Aegean Sea. No sooner had they arrived on board than Serbian leader Slobadan
Milosovik began making mischief in the Balkans. Again.
The next morning as her class piled out on
deck, they noticed Atlantis III was floating in formation with a number of US
Navy warships of the carrier group attached to the USS Enterprise (CVN-65). As
the days wore on, Amy would come out on deck at night to admire the big carrier
and watch the flight operations. She was instantly hooked on this as she watched
the fighters and attack jets launch into the fading light or come down in a
controlled crash on the deck.
One evening, she was watching the
operations when an F/A-18C streaked in over the deck of the research ship. She
noticed that the nose gear had not come down and a large section of the
starboard rudder was missing. As the aircraft came closer and closer to the
water, one of the engines sputtered and the pilot punched out. The ejection seat
threw him into the air and then tossed him away, yanking the parachute ripcord.
It slowed him down just enough so that splashdown wasn't fatal.
Without thinking, Amy was over the rail
and into the water, swimming for the downed pilot. She found him unconscious and
so he had not set off his smoke signal. With the ships moving too quickly for
her, she found a flare on him and lit it. Soon, a helicopter descended upon them
and two divers dropped into the water. No more than ten minutes later, Amy found
herself aboard the Enterprise, drying off and being simultaneously congratulated
and chewed out by one Admiral James Stark.
As it happened, the Atlantis had no pad on
which to land a chopper, and so Amy spent the next two weeks on board the
Enterprise. Much to the embarrassment of both Amy and the Navy Department, her
story broke on the national news. Shortly afterward, there was a public outcry
to “rescue” the seventeen-year-old from the warship. So to appease the
public, a very unhappy president ordered the entire battle group to port in
Italy after being relieved by another fleet attached to the John F. Kennedy.
Amy became a minor celebrity and the
instant her foot hit American soil again she was whisked to the White House for
a very public meeting with the president and a very private scolding in the Oval
Office.
“I had to turn around an entire carrier
group, Ms. Anderson.” he said as she stood before the decorative desk. “That
was a serious waste of military resources.” Afterwards, she was flown home to
Los Angeles on an Air Force VIP transport and once again made a big deal of in
her home town.
It was a positive experience in many ways,
as it helped Amy rid herself of shyness and helped build her character. She no
longer said stupid things in front of people and had become rather articulate,
an advantage when facing Barbara Walters on an edition of 20/20.
The experience had also shown her
something else. Something she really wanted to do with her life. On the
Enterprise, she had been exposed to that singular and fascinating institution
that an aircraft carrier is build around: naval aviation. She had more than once
been allowed to sit in pri-fly and watch the jets take off and land from the
non-skid decking. Her curiosity had been so piqued about the sensations of
flying that she was allowed to backseat an F-14 in the place of a reporter on a
Combat Air Patrol. Nothing had happened, of course, but it was still exciting.
Indeed, the adrenaline was still rushing through her that night as she struggled
to sleep.
The next semester, she dropped every
biology class she had and picked up math courses like there was no tomorrow. The
next year she applied and was accepted to the naval academy in Annapolis,
Maryland. She went there and graduated at the top of her class. Afterwards, she
spent the next eighteen months at the naval flight school in Pensacola. After
earning her golden wings in the F/A-18E Super Hornet multirole fighter, she was
assigned to VFA-34 (the Blue Blasters) with Carrier Wing Nine on CVN-69, the
Dwight D. Eisenhower. She still had her patch from the “Ike” hanging in her
apartment in San Diego. The commanding officer, one Captain Gregory Brown, had
been taken with the “blue-haired pilot chic” and made sure the press
didn’t harass her for being a female combat pilot. She had earned her first
kill on that cruise, a Sudanian MiG-21.
However, the Ike was forced to go in for
nuclear reactor refueling, a process that takes approximately three years, and
so Lieutenant Amy Anderson was bumped from her flightline.
It was a sort of disgrace, being a naval officer without a boat, and for a brief
time she worked at Barber’s Point Naval Air Station. It was then that she was
approached by Captain Brown about an opening onboard the USS John C. Stennis
with VFA-105.
Amy took it instantly.
Blessedly, the “Johnny Reb” as she was
nicknamed, had just recently been assigned from the Atlantic Fleet to the
Pacific Fleet, replacing the recently decommissioned USS Kitty Hawk (CVA-63).
She was greeted rather warmly by Captain Douglas Raulstone, a friend of
Brown’s, and less so by Captain Richard Muldoon, commanding officer of Carrier
Wing Seven.
As it turned out, Brown had done a lot of
string yanking for her. Raulstone rightfully believed it to be because she was a
hard worker. Muldoon believed otherwise.
She was now on her second cruise with the
Stennis, and even though the CAG still had it out for her, she was enjoying it.
Another loud thud brought her back to the
present. An S-3 had just hit the deck clean and was now grinding to a stop.
She looked up to find the sun now gone.
Even the basketball players had moved inside. Suddenly, a klaxon sounded with
the flash of yellow lights. Amy hurried from the elevator before it began its
rise to the flight deck.