Beyond the Blue
The roar above made Jilleen immediately look upward into the blue and cloudless sky of Aerilon, just as a pair of Mark VII vipers flew overhead. The aviator inside her could not resist the temptation to sight and watch flying aircraft for at least a moment. The two vipers split apart from each other as the lead one arched into a left turn to descend onto the runway, and then to be followed by the other a few beats later.
Captain Jilleen Simmons in an olive drab uniform today walked toward the entrance of the base hospital for her annual flight physical. Even though she was no longer an active aviator attached to any air wing she still had to update her fitness status for air service. A Colonial Forces regulation for all qualified pilots on reserve flight status to maintain at least a minimum the physical fitness qualification, a lesson from the last Cylon war when there had been a shortage of qualified pilots.
The Colonial officer ranks were full of qualified pilots, more than enough to fill the active air wings three times over if necessary. The Colonial Forces were in the middle of a draw down after forty years of no contact or sightings of the Cylons. Most could see this coming many years ago, the air wings and battlestar groups could not maintain a war footing so many decades after the last shots were fired in the last war. It put a strain on the economy of the Twelve Colonies.
Jilleen had been one of those officers who could see the writing on the wall and made the transition from a flight officer to a staff officer. Anyway she had lost interest in long and repeated deployments aboard battlestars. Her last assignment aboard the Battlestar Pegasus had caused her marriage to fall apart.
Her ambition to serve on one of the fleet’s choice assignment aboard the Pegasus with a tradition of boosting the careers of many officers had broke her as an aviator. No matter how much effort she put in trying to make the mark as one of the best pilots, she always over extended herself, and not made the top ten percent, as a matter of fact she only made it once into the top twenty five percent of Pegasus pilots. She had to work so hard at it while other pilots were simply naturally talented.
Ironically she had received her orders to report to the Battlestar Avalon in a week’s time as the Civil-Military affairs officer. A transfer that she had seek in the last couple of weeks when in was certain that her lover would be assigned to the battlestar’s air wing. One last deployment to repair what had been broken in her last battlestar assignment.